intersections

Sojourners on Faith-Based Community Organizing

I was interviewed back in June for this Sojourners article by Daniel Duncan Collum, "Why Does Glenn Beck Hate Community Organizers?" (a question that the article never attempts to answer, except in the tagline.).

I appreciated the opportunity to share how community organizing has invigorated our ministry in Hollywood. Hope you enjoy it!

Why Does Glenn Beck Hate Community Organizers?

The Main Reason: They upend the power structure to give people at the bottom a better chance.

By Danny Duncan Collum

When Ryan Bell took over as pastor of Hollywood Adventist Church in California, it was a withering congregation with only about 50 active members. And, he says, “We had a homeless ministry we couldn’t afford and a debt that was about to kill the church.” Bell reluctantly closed the feeding program for the homeless but resolved to find a more practical way to address the issue.

Soon he discovered LA Voice, a congregation-based community organizing federation affiliated with the PICO (People Improving Communities through Organizing) National Network that was working to have the city create permanent supportive housing for the homeless in Hollywood.

The Adventist congregation threw itself into that effort, which succeeded against intense local opposition. After that experience, Bell told Sojourners, he went to the Voice organizer and said, ‘Where do we sign up to join?’” But the organizer told him that there had to be a committee of lay leaders involved. “I just groaned,” Bell remembers. “I thought, ‘That’ll never happen.’” But Hollywood Adventist is now an integral part of the LA Voice federation working for affordable housing.

Read the rest here

Video: Prayer Rally for Healthcare Reform

This is a video of our health care rally, held on Tuesday, August 11, in Hollywood. Congresswoman Diane Watson and Congressman Xavier Becerra were in attendance and spoke eloquently and powerfully of their support for comprehensive reform that would put health care within reach for our families.

This rally was led by LA Voice clergy, Father Mike Mandala, Father Jaime Edwards-Acton, Rev. Liz Munoz, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Rev. Byron Smith, Sr. and myself.

Jean Vanier: The lonely task of leadership

I'm quickly reading through Becoming Human, by Jean Vanier's founder of the L'Arche communities around the world. In the first chapter entitled "Loneliness." I ran across this amazing statement. He is talking about the movement of our lives from order to chaos and back to order again as a necessary and inevitably movement of human evolution or maturity. He is describing the unhealthy tendency to resist this movement and preserve order because we don't want to go to that uncertain place. This change always engenders loneliness but we try to stop this process at our peril.
This statement contains vital lessons for anyone who leads or aspires to be a leader.

To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder. In this way, we discover the new.

Those who have the eyes to see this new order, as it arises, will often be considered too revolutionary, too modern, too liberal. Dictators everywhere have clamped down on movements for liberation; those who lead are always so certain that anarchy will arise if they do not govern with a firm hand. In reality, leaders are frightened of sharing or losing power. They too are frightened of change. They want to control everything. Those who see the coming of a new order will frequently be alone, persecuted (13-14).

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For more about Jean Vanier and the L'Arche communities check out these resources:

L'Arche: A Community of Brokenness and Beauty (Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett, August 2, 2007)
The Wisdom of Tenderness (Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett, December 20, 2007)
Adam, by Henri Nouwen

We FINALLY get S-CHIP passed

I don't have time to create links to all the posts I've written about S-CHIP over the last two years, but I traveled to Washington, D.C. with people from the PICO Network three times to fight for this bill, which expands health insurance coverage to millions of children who are currently without it.

Today, the Senate passed a strong bill with bi-partisan support. The change just keeps coming! This victory was a bit belated (with two vetos by former President George W. Bush), but, as they say, it's better late than never.

Read more here.

In the News

The Pacific Union Recorder this month has a piece about our CREDO Art Show. If you get the print edition delivered to your home be sure to watch for it, or check it out online.

Read more about the CREDO Art Show here and here.

Celebrating Faith and the Arts

This past Saturday my church did something amazing! It is really impossible to translate into words. This is the opening few paragraphs of my reflections on the CREDO Art Show. To read the whole thing, click here.

On Saturday night, November 15, between 100 and 150 people visited the CREDO Art Show, held at the Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church. The CREDO Art show was an artistic exploration of The Apostles’ Creed and the culmination of nearly a year of thinking and planning and nearly three months of worship services and sermons.

The evening began at 7:00 pm when the doors to the church opened. Behind the scenes, a team of about a dozen people were scurrying to put the finishing touches on the main gallery. By 7:30 pm there were 70–80 people in the foyer of the church, eating refreshments that were also artfully created by another team of church members and friends. At 7:30 we gave a very brief introduction and opened the door to the main gallery. For the next two and a half hours people came and went, enjoying some incredible art and having conversation.

For years I have wanted to do a sermon series on The Apostles’ Creed, exploring the ancient statement of faith phrase by phrase. While many Christians repeat the creed weekly in worship it is quite foreign to most Seventh-day Adventists, so I felt it would be an ironically fresh and almost edgy way to approach the subject of “belief” and “beliefs.” Our congregation is also pretty action oriented. It’s unusual for us to spend several months talking about our beliefs, so I felt it would be a good change of pace.

Read the rest at the church website.

Explaining Community Organizing

My friend, and PICO National Staff member, Gordon Whitman, sent this statement to the network this morning. I found it so powerful and compelling I wanted to share it here. Here are a couple of excerpts. Read the entire statement after the jump.

Americans have been organizing to build community and hold government accountable since our nation was formed, but last week there was more talk in the national media about modern community organizing than at any time in recent history.

When speakers at the Republican National Convention repeatedly mocked Senator Obama's work as a community organizer many of us witnessed not just another political attack, but mean-spirited disrespect for people who give of themselves to improve communities and expand opportunities for families.

As Bishop Roy Dixon, former president of the PICO board of directors, said, "As a life-long Republican, the comments I heard last night about community organizing crossed the line. It is one thing to question someone's experience, another to demean the work of millions of hard working Americans who take time to get involved in their communities. When people come together in my church hall to improve our community, they're building the Kingdom of God in San Diego. We see the fruits of community organizing in safer streets, new parks, and new affordable housing. It's the spirit of democracy for people to have a say and we need more of it."

Fr. John Baumann, who founded PICO 35 years ago, said in an Associated Press story that ran in papers across the country that "If people in office were doing their jobs, perhaps we wouldn't need community organizers."

<snip>

For PICO, every aspect about the work of community organizing – from taking the time to listen to people, to researching solutions to problems, to bringing people together across race, religion and party affiliation – is engineered to develop the skills and leadership of ordinary people.  PICO teaches that devoting yourself to developing the leadership skills of others is what a true leader does.

In PICO we don't ask whether someone is a Republican or Democrat, but whether they are doing their job.  We reject any suggestion on the right or the left that community organizing belongs to any one political party.  All across the United States both Republican and Democratic elected officials have worked with PICO organizations and other organizing groups to reduce crime through community policing, build public will for schools reform, revitalize neighborhoods and create affordable housing.

There are always those in power who dismiss people who want to get involved. That arrogance is folly.  Those who understand the history of the United States, those who hear the call to witness God's love in the world, realize that mayors and governors and presidents alone cannot solve the problems we face as a nation.  Only when people get involved, only when people have the power to hold the powers that be accountable can we create a world that respects each of us in God's image.

Looking in the Mirror

Cross-posted at the Spectrum Blog

It was while getting my hair cut last week that I was reminded again of how we Christians sometimes come across to our non-Christian counterparts.

I was there to get my hair cut. That’s it. Sometimes the conversation is great, sometimes not. My “salon” of choice is called Rudy’s Barbershop. Rudy’s is a unique place, even though there are more than a dozen locations around Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland. The one I go to is in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, very near to my apartment. There are more stickers and images cut from magazines pasted to the walls than I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s one huge collage of humanity. The whole place has an air of hipster coolness that some people despise and some people love. Either way, it’s, as we like to say, “So L.A.!” It seems every hair stylist has tattoos. I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s part of the job description. I’ve never really had a bad haircut there. But truth be told, I go there for the people.

On this particular occasion my stylist was a young girl in her mid-20s with, you guessed it, tattoos. Though in this case I could still see most of the natural pigment of the skin on her arms. We began to talk about the weather, how the summer is going, how it’s been unseasonably mild this summer. The conversation always seems to turn to how much we love L.A. Most of these stylists, like most people in L.A., are from somewhere else. So, we got to talking about where we’re from.

“I’m from the Midwest,” I offered. “Cleveland, Ohio. But I mostly grew up in the IE (Inland Empire). What about you?”

“I’m from Santa Clarita,” she said.

“Oh, wow, my dad and brother live in Santa Clarita. Canyon Country, actually.”

“Yeah, me too! Canyon Country is so different from the rest of Santa Clarita, isn’t it?”

We spent the better part of the next 10 minutes parsing the uniqueness of the different communities around the Santa Clarita Valley, all incorporated into the City of Santa Clarita in the late-1980s. My stylist expressed disdain for Santa Clarita and a sense of freedom being in Los Angeles. If you don’t live in the Los Angeles area, you need to know that the Santa Clarita Valley is only 35 miles north of Los Angeles and still a part of Los Angeles County. We’re not talking about massive distances here. But that’s how Los Angeles is. Each community, even within the city limits, has a unique character. It’s all part of the wonder of Los Angeles.

Anyway, she has been cutting hair since she graduated from high school eight years ago, she tells me. For a while she cut hair in Santa Clarita. It was at this point that the conversation took a very interesting turn.

“You know what I hated about Santa Clarita?” she said. I was pretty sure she was going to tell me. “It’s so Christian!”

“Really?”

President Paulsen: "Silence in the face of evil is complicity in what is wrong"

Yeah, he said that! But that's not all he said. Go and read it for yourself at Adventist News Network. Thanks to Bonnie Dwyer who pointed this out to me.

For the first time in my ministry I wish I was at the General Conference to be a part of the conversation that happened there yesterday. It was a meeting of the Council on Evangelism and Witness. Here are a few choice quotes from the article...

The conduct of church members within the community is either a "confirmation or a denial of our faith," Paulsen said, adding that "silence can be as much a failure as speaking the wrong words."

"The faith we have is not best explained by academics or theologians. Our faith finds its most compelling expression in the everyday words and actions of Christians in their communities."

People should see Adventists as peacemakers, but not people who dodge defending the rights of others, Paulsen said, noting the church's failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide. "Silence in the face of evil is complicity in what is wrong," he said. "Let us speak from the pulpit and show from our actions that we oppose anything that instills hatred or inflames violence."

This is the kind of leadership many of us are waiting for. When you are the the primary leader of the church, to a certain degree you get to set the agenda. If Elder Paulsen hadn't brought these issues to the Council in his remarks, my guess is that they would not have been discussed. It so refreshing to have our world president say, "Here is what we're going to talk about..." and have it be something that connects with the real world outside the stained glass windows.

This is not the only "prophetic speech" we've heard from Elder Paulsen in recent days. In a recent article in Adventist World entitled, "Clear Thinking About Military Service," Paulsen reaffirmed the church's stand on non-noncombatantcy. Those of us that have been trying to rekindle a conversation about nonviolence have observed that it has been a long time since we've had a statement like this.

You can read the whole article here. It's not too earth shattering, but I'm sure a few people found it offensive. This piece was much blogged about a week or so ago. In connection with today's story at ANN, there is new reason for hope!

Listening to Our Community

This Saturday afternoon our church is doing something truly wonderful. As I previously reported, we received a $10,000 grant from the Office of Community Beautification (part of the City of Los Angeles Board of Public Works). This grant is to produce an art mural on the enormous and unattractive wall of our church that faces the freeway (and attracts taggers).

So, this Saturday afternoon we are hosting a Community Input Workshop which will bring together various parts of our neighborhood. After gathering around tables and discussing the nature and character of our neighborhood with the artist, we will gather around tables for food. After the food, one of our church members, Melinda Rice, is putting on a concert of classical and modern music (she is a professional violinist and my daughter's violin teacher).

You can read the press release we sent out last week, here.

One of the interesting things to come out of this is a conversation about what our role is, as a church, in the neighborhood. Some cannot get over the fact that our mural will not be explicitly religious. Some are curious whether the artist is Christian. Here's what I wrote in the church bulletin this past week.

One of the questions you'll hear people around the Hollywood Church ask a lot is some version of, “"What is God up to in our neighborhood and how can we join Him?”" It a basic recognition that God is present in our neighborhoods. It is a question that changes our vision - the way we look at our community – and how we think about engaging with our community.

One of the goals at our church is to always be imagining ways in which we, as God's people, are sent. Too often the church default mode of operation is to think about how we can get people to come to us. This is the principle behind much of what is called “church growth.” What we are concerned with in Hollywood is how God is calling and sending us to be present in the neighborhoods “where he intends to go”.

One funny side story is that someone in my denominational office wanted to feature what we're doing and gleaned some info off our website. Here's part of what they published

The project's purpose is to add value to the community, foster conversations in the community about Adventist values and vision for the neighborhood.

We never said anything about fostering conversations about Adventist values and vision. He added that. It's just so far outside the norm for churches to foster conversations about the community's values that the only thing we can possibly imagine is fostering conversations about what we want to talk about.

Our real goal is to see if we can discern what God is doing among the people of our neighborhood.