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Pivotal Leadership

Faithful, effective Christian congregations make a difference. They touch people’s lives, address profound questions with insight and wisdom, and offer places where the ingredients of a flourishing life can be discovered and nurtured in relationship to the God of Jesus Christ.

What do such congregations look like? In some ways, they are very different from one another -- different in size, in denominational tradition, and in their particular histories, opportunities and burdens. Yet effective congregations have much in common: They are able to articulate a theological vision that links people to God and God’s presence in and for the world. They offer the experience of vital worship, which draws people together into the praise of God. They have profound intergenerational ties, and draw on the past for the sake of the future. Effective churches have a passion for education and formation that is focused on Christian discipleship throughout life. They offer ministries of outreach and prophetic engagement and understand these activities not simply as "doing good," but as expressions of faithfulness to God. And these congregations connect people’s questions, judgments and struggles with their theological convictions and commitments.

Effective congregations share one other feature: wise pastoral leadership. They have had leaders who have helped to cultivate the passions and commitments of congregational life. In turn, such congregations appreciate, support and emphasize the importance of pastoral leaders, for they understand the crucial importance of articulating this theological vision and nourishing it through worship, education and ministries.

Over time, profound synergies develop between a vital congregation and its effective pastors, creating an upward spiral in which congregation, pastors and the wider community flourish. Strong congregations cultivate a life together that inspires and requires gifted pastoral leaders, who in turn take risks and pose questions that raise the standards for what is possible and needed for congregational life.

We have witnessed this kind of leadership, even in congregations that face daunting sociological challenges. A particularly gifted pastor was assigned to an urban congregation that thought its glory days were in the past. He challenged members to consider their surrounding neighborhoods and to reclaim a vision of ministry in the city. He asked them to think about all of the children of the city as their children. Remarkable things began to happen. Not only did he stir the congregation to thinking about the future instead of the past; he caused the city to take notice. A strong congregation and an imaginative pastor shaped a vital, effective congregational ministry.

So there is much at stake in recruiting, shaping and sup-porting excellent pastoral leaders. It is imperative that churches identify gifted persons, educate and form them well, and sustain their learning over the course of their ministry. Candidates for pastoral leadership must be persons of character who embody a passionate love of God, sustained learning habits and faithful practice in ministry. There is no substitute for a passionate, learned clergy.

Strong congregations can survive mediocre or poor pastoral leadership, at least for a while. But over time, ineffective pastoral leaders weaken congregations, and weak congregations often attract pastors who reflect and perpetuate mediocrity. The relationship between congregation and pastor then spirals downward into mutual weakness.

We live in a time of much downward spiraling. Yes, every generation thinks there has been a decline from the previous generation. And yes, there has always been a measure of pastoral mediocrity and even incompetence. But there seems to be an increasingly widespread sense that we do not have enough good pastors to sustain congregational ministries at high levels.

This sense emerges from data, admittedly controversial, about the kind of people who are now coming -- and not coming -- to seminary. Does a decline in the number of Phi Beta Kappas going into the ministry reflect a decline in quality? Does a decline in the social status of the ministry as a profession weaken recruitment? Such data do not tell us as much as we think they do. After all, a ministry shaped by following Jesus Christ ought always to involve some measure of downward mobility, and a high grade-point average does not automatically translate into pastoral wisdom and effective ministry.

But there are other signs that point to decline, or at least to a crisis of confidence, in the power of the ministry to make a difference. Some of it is anecdotal evidence, such as stories about call committees and bishops who cannot find enough talented clergy to replace retiring clergy. Some of it is cultural evidence, such as TV and film portrayals of clergy as moral reprobates or amiable buffoons. Some of the signs point to clergy’s role in the broader culture. Recent studies in several cities suggest a decline in people’s perception of the clergy’s willingness to offer leadership beyond the walls of the church.

The sense of decline is difficult to describe sociologically, but is experienced all too often in daily life. Our leaders seem to lack the pastoral imagination necessary for addressing the deep yearnings and challenging issues of the time. A poignant example of this failure is the prison chaplain described in Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. After an inmate on death row confesses details about murders, rapes and a lifetime of crime -- "You know, the heavy stuff" -- the chaplain responds: "Have any impure thoughts? Say any obscene words?"

Ironically, this sense of a downward spiral into pastoral mediocrity has been occurring at a time when laypeople are expressing interest in the spiritual life at a new level, and are searching for ways to connect their yearnings with a way of faithful living. This is a time when pastoral leaders have a tremendous opportunity to reclaim the significance of the gospel for daily life. Many of these laypeople are leaders in their own vocations. They are asking profound questions about how they as Christians might better address the challenges they face in their daily life. Yet they do not find enough ministers who are equipped to be, or even interested in being, vital participants in such conversations -- and in participating as deeply faithful, learned clergy.

What has gone wrong? At least part of the blame must be borne by theological education. Not that seminaries, and the professors and staff that constitute them, are insufficiently committed to the church and congregations. Most faculties and staff share a deep concern for the church and its ministry. Rather, theological educators have no coherent vision of the difference that clergy with pastoral wisdom and imagination can make in sustaining excellent congregational ministry.

We have too often settled for mediocrity in these ways: 1) We have adopted relatively passive patterns of recruitment, thus weakening the quality and quantity of persons entering ordained ministry; 2) we have watered down the curricula; 3) we have too often offered "convenience" and the transmission of information instead of stressing sacrifice and the importance of formation; and 4) we have retreated from engaging the deep questions and issues raised by people in diverse vocations.

Approximately 30 years ago, a profound shift began. Instead of encouraging their most gifted and talented young people to consider ordained ministry as a vocation, congregations began directing their young people toward business, law or medicine. This weakened the pool of people considering ordained ministry, as well as those who entered. Some extraordinary people have continued to enter ordained ministry -- but the overall quality has dropped over time.

Theological schools have not adequately identified or lifted up an exciting and compelling vision of ordained ministry as a vocation, and we have not connected with congregations to encourage them to invite gifted men and women to enter the ministry.

Theological schools have compounded the problem by providing those students who do enroll with a weakened education and formation. We have lowered expectations, and have done a poor job of connecting education in the classical disciplines with practical theological reflection focused on nurturing excellence in congregational life.

This problem is exacerbated by the tendency of many theological schools to emphasize educational convenience. Students can receive a theological education with less time spent on campus and in study, with less demand on their energy, and with fewer expectations. One advertisement for a seminary bragged that the school made it "easier" for the student to complete his or her education. It seemed an odd advertisement for a demanding vocation that is centered in a call to costly discipleship.

Too many theological schools seem to suggest that casual theological education is sufficient for casual ministry. This view fails to acknowledge the damage that poorly prepared clergy can do to congregations. Medical schools are demanding of their students, and include a provision for residencies, precisely because they (and we!) are acutely aware of the damage that incompetent physicians can do. So also with law schools. Yet churches and seminaries act as if our baseline expectation is an average minister. And we lower the bar of expectations, convincing ourselves that the stakes are not all that high.

In the not too distant past, clergy were seen as pivotal spiritual and intellectual leaders, and theological schools were seen as providing vital leadership for congregational ministry and for grappling with broader intellectual and social issues. In several universities, divinity schools were among the most vibrant sources of ideas and sustained engagement. Several decades ago, for example, Duke Divinity School led the way in racially integrating Duke University.

During this same period, gifted clergy ranked high among the influential leaders of communities. In recent years, however, the trend has been reversed. Clergy are often the source of embarrassment rather than of wisdom; theological schools are in danger of lagging behind other professional schools intellectually. This is occurring despite the fact that theological education has been increasingly shaped by academic standards and goals, and at times even academic self-sufficiency. Furthermore, theological schools have backed off from developing programs of continuing education that would provide sustained intellectual, spiritual and social engagement with the questions and issues being raised by people in diverse vocations.

In recent years, many theological schools have begun to recognize these new challenges. They have begun to link their curricula with excellent congregations, and to recruit people for seminary. Through the leadership of the Lilly Foundation, an attempt is being made to reclaim "the culture of the call." Several schools are undertaking innovative programs in continuing education, while others are offering new models for contextual education.

Theological educators are beginning to envision a different ecology and environment for theological education. For too long, the model of theological education was like a relay race. It was presumed that denominations would shape and form people for the ministry, and then send them off to seminary to receive the critical education necessary for ordained ministry. The seminary would provide those tools, and then send its graduates out into congregations to serve the denomination.

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of this "relay-race model," theological educators have rather belatedly discovered that the model has broken down. The formation of ministerial students in congregations and in the church is no longer taking place. Seminaries must develop new connections with congregations, and see the task of formation and education for ministry as a complex partnership between seminaries and congregations -- one that must draw clergy and laity, faculty and students, together on a more regular basis.

With this vision in mind, Duke Divinity School is undertaking a major project on reclaiming and nurturing the importance of pastoral wisdom and imagination. "A Program to Form a Learned Clergy" was developed through a yearlong strategic planning process, and has received $10 million in support from the Lilly Endowment.

Our effort emphasizes these strategies:

1) developing partnerships with 15 "teaching congregations" that will help make connections between excellent congregations, the formation of pastoral wisdom and imagination, and the challenges and opportunities of theological education

2) recruiting and supporting a new generation of gifted and talented students for Master of Divinity programs, and nurturing doctoral students who will strengthen teaching in seminaries and divinity schools, especially through stronger links with congregations

3) developing faculty leaders who serve as catalysts for reshaping conversations and courses, and who help to think through the institutional strategies necessary for us to address critically important issues across the curriculum

4) making the divinity school environment more conducive to conversation, community and worship

5) cultivating sustained learning among clergy, laity, faculty and students together

The final emphasis, the cultivation of sustained learning, aims to develop a comprehensive program that enables clergy, laity, faculty and students to think about how Christian faith helps shape congregational life and respond to the challenges that laity face in their vocations. We will do this through interrelated local, regional and national initiatives that aim to stir people’s imaginations and enable them to reshape their habits of practicing Christian faith.

These strategies are not unique to Duke Divinity School. We do hope to draw these strategies together into a coherent program. For example, the students selected through the scholarship program will serve as apprentices to the senior pastors of our teaching congregations, and will participate in the sustained learning programs. Faculty leaders and doctoral students will also work with congregations and participate in the programs. Faculty members will work with the divinity fellows and doctoral students, and members of the teaching congregations will be encouraged to participate.

We hope this effort will foster a major advance in our theological education, and also nurture important conversations about how best to raise up and sustain the kind of pastoral leadership that makes a difference. We want fewer clergy asking, in response to heartfelt confessions, "Have you had any impure thoughts?" and more clergy and congregations asking themselves what their ministry would look like if all the children in the community were their children. There is too much at stake to strive for anything less.

Barth and Beyond

With a new generation of theologians reevaluating the theology of Karl Barth, some are suggesting that this pivotal figure of the 20th century may enjoy his greatest influence in the 21st. Doubtless many readers will recoil at such a prospect, but that may be because their own assumptions about Barth do not correspond to the vitality of Barth’s own work. The purpose of Christian theology for Barth was not to pursue any sort of "ism" but to understand the gospel, to hear the Word of God afresh, and thereby to resolve at every turn "to begin again at the beginning."

From his ground-breaking reflections on the deity of God in the Epistle to the Romans (1919) to his uncompromising opposition to Adolf Hitler and National Socialism in "The Barmen Declaration" (1934), to his always painstaking, sometimes innovative doctrinal reflections in the Church Dogmatics (1932-1967), Barth changed the way an entire generation in Europe and America confronted the task of theology. By the time of his death in 1968, however, Barth’s theology had degenerated into the subject of caricatures and clichés. "Christocentrism," "dogmatism," "obscurantism" -- these were the dismissive terms by which Barth’s theology was characterized, and from which the perception emerged that his theology was more concerned with repristinating the past than with facing the present.

Such dismissals will not stand up to the cutting edge of Barth’s life itself. Take just one example from the historical work of Eberhard Busch, who was Barth’s last assistant in Basel and now holds the same chair Barth once occupied at the University of Göttingen. Busch’s work, soon to be translated from German into English, shows that, contrary to what critics claim, Barth perceived immediately how radical was the menace posed by Hitler against the European Jews and took ongoing measures to protest it.

In the way the story is usually told, the Confessing Church movement in Germany pursued a valiant opposition to Hitler in behalf of the church but did not yet see clearly how dire and unique was the threat against the synagogue. Not so, argues Busch. In a number of little-known addresses and letters, Barth had proclaimed as early as 1933 that one was not preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ in Germany if one was not also preaching specifically against the persecution and disappearance of the Jews. It was this advocacy in behalf of the Jews that led to Barth’s expulsion from Germany, insists Busch, and not just some general failure on Barth’s part to support Hitler. As a matter of fact, his pro-Jewish position brought him into mounting conflict with the Confessing Church leadership and led eventually to his being unwelcome at its meetings. To put it plainly, the reason Barth had to leave Germany was because the compromised leadership of the Confessing Church movement itself no longer supported him.

To reckon with Barth, then, is to encounter one whose theology later inspired liberation theologians in Latin America and antiapartheid theologians in South Africa -- a theologian who felt that what you pray for, you must also work for. To invoke the mantle of Barth for the cause of a narrow doctrinal confessionalism, in other words, simply defies the record of history, as is happening today when ultraconservative activists appeal to Barth and the Confessing Church movement to justify their stands against such things as the full inclusion of people who are homosexual or against any sort of new thinking in theology. Not only is the birthright of the Confessing Church movement more ambiguous than they suppose, but Barth himself is more complex and his pronouncements more determined by his social situation than some would care to admit.

The importance of context is emphasized by Timothy J. Gorringe, professor of theological studies at the University of Exeter, who interprets Barth’s central task as setting forth a theology of freedom. The aim of Christian theology is not to baptize the world as it is but to seek the world as it ought to be. The gospel has priority over politics, but one misses the gospel if one ignores its vision of a new society predicated on liberating grace. For example, Gorringe sees Barth’s declaration in the 1940s, "Humanity that is not co-humanity is inhumanity," as more than just the sentiment of an idealistic humanism; it is a ringing call to repentance and hope against the backdrop of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Understanding the contextual nature of Barth’s theology helps us see why he steadfastly refused to provide anything like the "summary" of his theology, a summary for which so much Barthianism seems to be striving. Gaining a stranglehold on the letter of Barth’s theology runs the risk of denying its spirit, argues Gary Dorrien, professor of religious studies and dean of Stetson Chapel at Kalamazoo College. Dorrien wants to learn from Barth, while harboring no desire to become a Barthian. He makes specific criticisms of such things as the overly dogmatic tenor of Barth’s theology, its patriarchal stance with respect to feminist issues, and its lack of interest in interreligious dialogue. He also thinks Barth is too much of a "biblicist," which I take to mean that despite Barth’s often fascinating and imaginative exegesis there are some issues that require much more of a theologian than exegesis alone.

The key to Barth’s theology for Dorrien is its confessional and nondefensive approach. Barth’s perspective, according to Dorrien, "was always more subversive, open, and dialectical than the school movement he inspired." This claim may seem a strange one given Barth’s relentless pursuit of theology as "dogmatics." Theology is dogmatic for Barth in that it embraces the classical dogmatic definitions of the ecumenical councils, and especially Chalcedon, as to the meaning and significance of Jesus Christ: in Jesus Christ we confront both what it means to be divine and what it means to be human.

Yet a dogmatic theology, Barth maintains, must also inquire into the truth of its message. This inquiry entails providing not merely a description of the past but something constructive for today. For Barth, God is revealed in Jesus Christ -- this much we know -- but, since revelation is a still-unfolding event, and since our apprehension of that event is thoroughly fallible and subject to revision, the theologian must inquire continually into what revelation really means.

A number of theologians of late, myself included, have been arguing that Barth inaugurates a theological movement that has some affinities with the intellectual currents running through postmodernity. With the revision and republication of the second edition of his Epistle to the Romans in 1922, Barth sounded with piercing clarity the theme that God is simply greater than all the attempts of theologians -- whether liberal or conservative, whether modern, premodern or postmodern -- to capture God within the confines of a single, self-contained framework of linguistic meaning.

In his fascinating study of Barth’s use of rhetoric, Stephen Webb presents a Barth for whom our language is quite incapable of containing or domesticating the power of the gospel. Similarly, Walter Lowe sees the early Barth calling all human complacency into question and insisting that the church’s historical reality is one of fundamental ambiguity. For Lowe, this situation sets the stage for a theology that cannot be merely a "correlation" between Christianity and culture à la Paul Tillich, but one that must move in both a constructive and a deconstructive direction. In the same way that Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism questions whether meaning and truth are simply "present" to us for the taking, Lowe sees Barth resisting all reductionistic approaches to the gospel and opening up the whole constructive task of theology from beginning to end.

The standard objection to this line of interpretation is that Romans did not represent Barth’s final position: the disruptiveness of the early Barth was displaced later on by the more placid, doctrinal tones of the Church Dogmatics. This objection has been seriously discredited, however, by the painstaking reconstruction of Barth’s development advanced by Bruce L. McCormack. Though he himself is skeptical of some of these recent readings of Barth, McCormack’s work clearly shows how the dialectical theology of Romans continues into the Church Dogmatics as well. At the heart of this dialectic is God’s revelation of who God is in Jesus Christ by the Spirit’s power, an "unveiling" that is always at the same time a "veiling" in human form. The Word became flesh, but because the Word comes to us in a mediated fashion, we receive it only as a gift and not as a license to triumphalism. Revelation is not simply a "given."

Whereas McCormack advances an historical study of Barth’s early writings that emphasizes its dialectical transformation of the modern theology that preceded it, my own study of Barth’s mature writings inquires into what his theology might contribute to a postmodern, nonfoundational theology that is yet to come. I have tried to show that Barth’s theology, in both its early and mature forms, is non-foundational in the sense that the grace made real in revelation cannot simply be read off of events, nor can it be reduced to something that is a straightforward "given," either within the human situation in general or within the situation of the church in particular. This is evidenced in such things as Barth’s eschatologically oriented framework of creation, reconciliation and redemption; his focus on promise and hope rather than the present possession of God’s reign; the reconfiguration of experience as a determination toward the future; the placing of the divine summons to action -- the ethical life -- at the summit of each volume of his doctrinal work; and, above all, his refusal to make his theology an apology for Christendom or to give priority to the established church. The church’s witness to the reign of God is crucial but also provisional, for the mystery of God is beyond all domestication, as evidenced in Barth’s radical rethinking of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as witness to something from on high rather than as the established "sacraments" of Christendom.

Nevertheless, there are some who want to read Barth’s nonfoundationalism in a more circumscribed way. John Webster of Oxford University, who is one of the finest interpreters of Barth, argues that Barth’s theology is nonfoundational only in the narrow sense that it does not appeal to non-Christian sources to make its claims. In a keynote essay published in Karl Barth: A Future for Postmodern Theology, Webster complains that so-called postmodern interpreters of Barth fail to appreciate the extent to which the revelatory action of God does in fact function as a "given" for the church. Webster is especially dismissive of the efforts not only of Lowe but of Isolde Andrews and Graham Ward to chart the affinities between Barth and the open-ended philosophy of language of Derrida.

The resolution of this dispute depends on what is meant by revelation as a "given." If by a ‘given" we mean that in Barth’s theology God’s grace is made real in Jesus Christ, then Webster is surely right: Barth sees Jesus Christ as God’s gracious gift to the world. Nevertheless, there is more that needs to be said. Revelation is not something that can be understood simply by learning to parse the cultural-linguistic system of Western Christendom. By the Spirit’s power, there are myriad ways of saying who God is in the human being Jesus of Nazareth, no one of which can exhaust the richness of who the human being Jesus of Nazareth is as God. Hence, for Barth the event of revelation in Jesus Christ is not simply a "given" to be possessed or described but an event that is still unfolding, a dramatic "giving" of God the Creator, Reconciler, Redeemer, which invites a dynamic, constructive response.

The scholarly comparisons between Barth and Derrida that bother Webster and others have focused on Derrida’s early work on language. The more interesting comparison, I believe, would be to confront Barth’s radical theology of grace with Derrida’s later work of the 1950s and 1990s, in which, on behalf of a skeptical culture, he raises the question whether there is any such thing as a gift, or grace at all (see the work by John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon). Rather than fighting over which side of Barth’s dialectic to emphasize -- the givenness or the nongivenness of the dynamic gift of grace -- we should be seeking to proclaim the gift itself to a world that finds it increasingly hard to believe in such things.

Barth reverses the emphasis on a static understanding of God and God’s grace and gives priority to revelation as a dramatic self-giving in history. Christian theology, in both its classical and modern forms, has had a difficult time freeing itself from pagan antiquity’s assumption that divinity is an abstract aseity, a fixed arche whose essence is to remain forever as it was in the beginning. Beguiled by this assumption, Western Christian theology has become an inadvertent effort to protect this "God" from the vagaries of finitude and surprise -- in short, from the very things we ordinarily associate with the ability to have meaningful relationships with others.

Barth understands God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ not as some static property inhering in Jesus of Nazareth but as a dramatic happening that encompasses the whole of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection by the Spirit’s power. The divine drama of graciousness, focused in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, is unintelligible apart from its background in Israel and its continual unfolding in the life of those gathered, built up and sent forth in God’s name. It has its nexus in the relationship between Israel and the church, yet only for the sake of something beyond that relationship. By embracing our full humanity in Jesus Christ, God shows us that nothing human can any more be seen as cast off from God’s love.

For Barth this drama is nothing less than the being-in-act of God. God is within the intimacy of God’s very own being as God is in the external human drama of revelation. It is in interpreting this word as that Barth’s theology becomes supremely interesting. For Barth there is no distinction between God and God’s revelation. God is identically the same in revelation as God is in self-being. The interesting question is whether what God is in revelation is also constitutive for who God is in self-being. Does revelation "reveal" in the sense of simply disclosing to us who God already is? Or when God says, "Behold, I am doing a new thing," does this "new thing" accomplish something not only for us but also for God? To put it another way, does God have anything personally at stake in what happens in revelation?

This is an issue that Barth’s theology raises but without giving us any final answer. In addressing this question, George Hunsinger emphasizes the prior actuality of God. In so doing, Hunsinger is being true to the letter of Barth’s theology. God already is in self-being "as" God is in revelation.

Yet Robert W. Jenson -- perhaps the most creative contemporary theologian with leanings toward Barth -- pushes things in a different direction. Jenson, a distinguished Lutheran theologian who is the senior scholar for research at the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton, wants to take with utter seriousness what Barth’s theology implies about the stakes for God in revelation. As Jenson sees it, God is not only identified by the biblical drama but with the drama as well. At no point is God somehow hovering "above" the story of Jesus Christ, but the story of Jesus Christ is God’s very own story.

Though Jenson is often thought of as an ecclesiastical conservative -- and with good reason -- this aspect of his appropriation of Barth’s theology is nothing less than radical. For Jenson, the drama of God’s own life, made real in revelation, is a genuine drama with harrowing crises and pivotal turning points, a drama whose outcome makes a real difference in God’s being God. Mind you, this is not the same as process theology in which God is somehow becoming something new as God lures us toward God’s goal. The claim here is that grace is something eternally real in the life of God, but that it is being played out on the stage of human history in a way that makes God all the greater for it. When Jesus wrestles with a decision in the Garden of Gethsemane, for example, it is a real decision with real consequences. The same is true with the resurrection. In so identifying with the executed Jesus of Nazareth as to raise him from the dead, God made it clear once and for all what sort of God our God is eternally determined to be.

Barth’s Chalcedonian theology seems to be saying something like this: God has become human for our sakes in Jesus Christ, and precisely in becoming human is seen to be most fully divine. What happens in the drama of salvation is God determining to be God for us in a definite way. God is so much the God who is "for" us as to be also irreversibly "with" us. What happens in Jesus Christ, in other words, is constitutive for who God is. So committed is God to being with us that God has also determined not to be God without us. The stakes for God could not be higher. By embracing our humanity in Jesus Christ -- truly human, truly divine -- God determines to bring salvation to human beings in a thoroughly human way. Which means that our human response to what God has done on our behalf now makes a real difference to God. The God who is for us and with us in Jesus Christ wants us, by the Spirit’s power, to be for and with one another. For Barth the gospel is always precipitating something new out in front of us.

It should be clear by now that Barth’s theology is being read today in provocative new ways by a generation of interpreters who see well the contradiction in trying to recapture the doctrinal propositions of Barthianism without the dynamic movement of revelation in which Barth himself was caught up and in which he placed his hope. If there is to be any future for Barth’s theology, therefore, its lies in looking far beyond the theology itself and toward the grace to which Barth was seeking to bear witness.

Short-Term Mission Trips

After hurricane Mitch devastated Central America in 1998, hundreds of volunteer mission teams descended on Nicaragua and Honduras. Many came from churches in the United States. At times the region’s threadbare airports were filled with herds of North Americans wearing T-shirts with slogans like "Jesus for Honduras," "Mission to Nicaragua 2000" and "Christ Loves Central America." Ushered past beggars into waiting vans, these church people embarked on an adventure of solidarity that marks a shift in how we understand mission.

The concept of sending mission teams for short-term work has grown increasingly popular in U.S. congregations. People are not excited about sending their dollars off to faceless mission agencies; they want to become personally involved. Encouraged by the testimony of others who have had a life-changing experience in a Third World country, they want to "do mission" themselves.

Two other influences -- the spread of the Internet and the increasing popularity of direct covenant relationships between churches -- have diffused the role of denominational agencies. Plotting denominational mission strategies has become more difficult, in part because mainline mission executives first tried to ignore this paradigm shift, then tried in vain to shape it. Today, most accept the decentralizing trend as a legitimate movement that needs to be nudged in the right directions.

Latin Americans have had to take account of the changes too. Gone are the days of receiving block grants, and North American churches generally have less money to give. At the same time, denominations have more personnel to send, especially as short-term volunteers. Instead of filling out project applications and evaluations, Latin American churches and development groups have had to learn how to host North Americans and tolerate their often paternalistic behavior in order to shake loose money for programming.

The volunteers’ money is likely to be designated for projects that have caught their fancy. This isn’t necessarily all bad. It may foster greater accountability. And, as affluent volunteers and congregations back home get excited about seeing that their surplus wealth can make a difference, the new pattern of giving may yield more money.

Yet there is a downside. North Americans often come seeking the emotional rewards of hands-on involvement rather than a way to make an investment in long-term empowerment. A United Methodist mission team from South Carolina came to El Estribo, a poor village in southern Honduras, and insisted on handing out $50 in U.S. money to each family (single mothers excluded) despite objections by local church workers. In view of such insensitivity, some local churches refuse to cooperate with mission teams, and insist on working only with those development and evangelistic practices that empower the poor without exposing them to the embarrassing rich.

Other groups accept the fact that the short-term volunteer mission trips are likely to remain popular, and aim to reach the volunteers with a deeper form of the gospel. "They come here thinking they’re going to give something to us, but many discover that instead they receive, from people who have almost nothing, a new experience of hope, faith and love," says Dámaris Albuquerque, executive director of the Nicaraguan Council of Churches. Many team members are changed by the experience. Although they’ve volunteered in order to do something for the poor, their paternalism comes apart when they meet articulate poor people who often believe in God more than they do and who want a world where North-South relations are characterized by justice rather than charity.

A central task of program coordinators is to facilitate that encounter. A good start is to help volunteers overcome the "edifice complex" by downplaying the notion that what’s most important for the group is the classroom or clinic or house that they’re going to build, and emphasizing that the real purpose is pastoral accompaniment.

In the past two or three years, 2,000 volunteers came to Honduras as part of a Church World Service reconstruction program designed to break the bad habits of other volunteer programs. A few participants were veterans of as many as two dozen volunteer trips. They’d paved parish driveways in Costa Rica and repaired clinic roofs in Jamaica. But Honduras was the first place where they worked alongside local folks.

Why has it taken so long? Why do we send volunteers out into the world to work for the poor when they could be working with the poor? Fault lies with both North and South, yet it’s time to change. It’s time to quit treating volunteers as spoiled children, and get them out of fancy hotels and into tents and dirt-floored chapels in the countryside and urban barrios.

Some work team chaperones will argue they can’t push people that far out of their comfort zones. I believe we’ve got to stop protecting volunteers from interacting with the poor. Taking two dozen volunteer trips without working side-by-side with the poor is not mission. As long as the poor remain objects of volunteer trips rather than joint subjects in a common enterprise of faith, it’s never going to be mission.

It may be hard for some Latin American hosts to change the pattern. They’ve practiced their smiles and learned not to take offense at insensitivity. In exchange they receive personal rewards. They are invited to speak in North America, their kids obtain scholarships in the North, and they live well while the North Americans are in town. Volunteer groups should not provide employment to local gringo wannabe elites -- or northern missionaries living in the South -- who act in the name of the poor but actually erect barriers to true encounters because such encounters would threaten their privileged role as interlocutors.

People who live in villages affected by Hurricane Mitch have had a great experience hosting church teams that helped them rebuild. When they talk about the visitors, they do not begin by describing the buildings that were built, but emphasize that they felt accompanied and sustained by the volunteers. At a time of great trauma, the poor felt important and loved when the over-loaded church van pulled in among the shacks.

"They didn’t come to tell us how to do things, which is what the gringos have always done in the past," said Toribio Dubón, a peasant leader in Nueva Victoria, a rebuilt village in the Honduran province of Santa Barbara. "These people came to sweat in the sun with us, to listen, to treat us as equals. We felt blessed by their presence beside us."

According to Don Tatlock, coordinator of the CWS program in Honduras, if housing was the sole priority, church leaders "could ask folks to stay home and just send us the money they were going to spend on airplane tickets. . . . What’s more important are the relationships they build with the poor and what they learn about why people are poor. And by giving up their time and money to come so far, they’re conveying a sense of love that pays off in increased self-esteem and encouragement among villagers."

Nurturing healthy encounters requires work at both ends of the journey. Church workers in the South face the complex challenge of empowering peasants in the countryside or urban barrio dwellers to host an encounter in a way that allows them to feel equal to the northerners. Bridging the gap by spiritualizing poverty doesn’t work; that’s only a cheap trick to romanticize the misery of others. What then do the poor in the South really have to offer to affluent northerners? Southerners need to reflect together on this question; otherwise reciprocity will remain elusive.

The theologies of liberation that emerged from this region in the ‘70s and ‘80s evolved from the organized poor, who suffered repression at the hands of economic elites and their U.S.-financed military forces. Today the relevant theologies are those that emerge from the excluded -- the poor who have no place in a globalized economy. They are not repressed so much as simply treated as nonpersons. Who is God for them? If we from the North are to open up our own spiritual and theological lives to refreshment from the South, we must get close to the people who ask this question.

As part of their experience, volunteers must wrestle with the questions of today’s poor. One of the major tasks facing the U.S. church today is giving folks the tools with which to process and interpret their firsthand encounters with economic and racial disparities that characterize our hemisphere. We need curriculum that will prepare work teams for their trip theologically and culturally, and guide them through a process of discerning changes in their lives after they return.

Early in 2002 the Mennonite Central Committee will release "Connecting Peoples," a guide for pastors and local church leaders who want to lead groups or establish sistering relationships. According to Daryl Yoder-Bontrager, co-director of the MCC’s Latin America -- Caribbean Department, the guide will include suggestions for converting the trip into concrete solidarity at home.

We need to help returning volunteers convert their emotional experience into action: promoting the purchase of fair-trade coffee, working to close the School of the Americas or educating others about the complex realities of hemispheric relations. Otherwise, participants who feel a need to "do something" will return to paternalistic models, send money once or twice to particular families or congregations in the community they visited, and then forget them.

This integration of political responses will be easier if the entire church family becomes involved in the volunteer movement. Many volunteer programs around the U.S. have been scorned by progressives, who see such work trips as paternalistic and politically unsophisticated. Yet charity and justice need each other. If people of varied ideological backgrounds participate, the volunteers’ experiences will be enhanced. Despite what some consider the deficiencies of the movement, it is here to stay, and the responsibility for making it a force for long-lasting change in both the South and the North falls on the entire church community.

Spiritual Counsel

In 1993 John Patton coined the phrase "paradigm shift" to describe a dramatic turn in the practice of pastoral care. Patton pointed out that pastoral care was focusing more and more on social and cultural concerns, moving from a "clinical pastoral paradigm" to one that Patton named "communal-contextual."

Both models evolved during the second half of the 20th century. Before that, another paradigm had prevailed throughout most of the church’s history. Pastoral care concentrated primarily and often exclusively on the gospel message. It disregarded the concrete particularities and individuality of persons and contexts and tended, as Patton said, to "universalize its understanding of human problems and express them in exclusively religious terms."

In the 1950s, churches and clergy left the classical paradigm behind and became caught up in the excitement over pastoral care as a healing art, a kind of therapy shaped by a new psychological consciousness. By the ‘60s, the pastoral care movement had morphed into an ecclesial and academic establishment. Mainline seminaries employed clinically trained professors of the therapy, and theological students flocked to their courses. A new ministerial profession -- professional counseling -- appeared, and psychotherapeutic modes of thought pervaded theological reflection and congregational life.

Derived largely from psychotherapy, the clinical paradigm was concerned with the individual’s personality and psychopathology. In the late ‘70s, the therapy appropriated family systems theory and a more social approach that focused on the dynamics of relationships. By the ‘90s, some version of this approach was included in most seminary instruction, usually in combination with elements of the older, individualistic model.

Narrative theory and theology also made an impact when Charles Gerkin and Donald Capps urged pastoral counselors to have their "clients" (an unfortunate term) create and articulate a narrative of their experiences -- to "tell their stories." Pastors were taught the skill of eliciting these stories, as well as the skill of listening to them.

While it did not abandon psychology or systems theory, the narrative approach emphasized meaning-making as fundamental to human life and to the pastoral role. In this context, pastoral caretakers could reintroduce theological concerns, and identify social and cultural differences.

The most comprehensive change, however, has come in the past decade with the communal-contextual paradigm. In today’s liberal seminaries, the pastoral themes are social and cultural: gender, race, ethnicity, aging, together with their associated forms of oppression, abuse and violence. Closely related is a strong emphasis on fostering community that is inclusive, just and caring. Today we aim to "hear all voices." The influx of women into seminary teaching has been key to this shift.

As valuable as the latest developments have been, it would be a mistake to sweep away what was gained in the past, and what was generally good in the earlier paradigms, including the classic one -- in which theology was central. Telling and hearing stories, for example, can lapse into uncritical exhibitionism or romanticism if one does not apply the clinical paradigm, with its critical edge of analytic psychologies and empirical assessments. The "communal-contextual" approach requires reflection too. This term has acquired strong interpersonal connotations that tend to idealize and romanticize the often unglamorous task of living together in family, church or civil society.

Missing in much contemporary discussion of pastoral care is the structural element that makes community dependable and trustworthy overtime. Terms like institution and organization suggest what’s missing, for these are vitally important for providing the secure boundaries and resources necessary for trustworthy, deep, enduring relationships and for a stable community that encourages healthy and meaningful personal living. By this logic, pastoral care ought to be concerned about fostering personal commitment to religious institutions and organizations, and about shaping personal lifestyle in relation to traditions of moral and spiritual practice. But it is not clear whether the teachers of pastoral care acknowledge this fact or its implications for pastoral care and counseling, even though the "communal-contextual paradigm" is a priority, and creating community is often invoked as a fundamental aim of ministry.

Clinical pastoral education (CPE) remains a central component of training in pastoral care. It complements classroom instruction with pastoral experience in situations of intense need and suffering.

CPE courses continue to increase, apparently driven by an influx of laity -- a trend which may suggest a softening, broadening and secularizing of the "pastoral" part of CPE. Minority participation, mainly from African-American and Pacific Rim students, has also increased;

CPE is based, however, on the secular-medical model of professionalism. It does not fit easily with the diverse shaping pastoral identity and formation? Even those who support an emphasis on a medical context can agree that we need to develop more pastoral care supervision in congregational settings.

Nevertheless, CPE programs have been revised in ways that parallel seminary teaching -- a greater emphasis on context, narrative and themes of cultural diversity and gender. I am told that these concerns often overshadow the attention formerly given to psychological analysis. The increasing number of women (they account for half of all CPE units taken) has no doubt contributed to many of the changes. Once known as a confrontational, crisis-inducing mode of learning susceptible to abuses of power, clinical supervision today has a different spirit -- more collegial, less authority-centered and more socially, culturally and theologically oriented. In 1990, a dispute over the direction of these changes led to the formation of an alternative clinical pastoral organization, the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy.

Beneath all these differences and developments lie fundamental religious questions. What is pastoral caregiving? What makes it religious? How should it relate to the dominant models of care in our culture ? How should it relate to worshiping communities?

Fundamental social and political issues face CPE as well. Who is to be included and considered authoritative in the teaching and learning of the pastoral art? Whose pastoral care practices and traditions should be considered authoritative for pastoral education and why? Responses to these and other questions will determine the shape of CPE’s future, its educational relevance and its spiritual integrity.

Seward Hiltner, one of the patriarchs of the pastoral care movement, worried years ago that pastoral caregiving was losing its religious component. Pastoral counseling was established as a profession in 1963 with the founding of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC). Hiltner opposed the move. He feared that creating a separate profession would split the ministry, create distance between pastoral counseling and the church, and secularize the field. Although Hiltner eventually reconciled with AAPC, his concerns have been realized. Specialized pastoral counseling has become, by AAPC’s own definitions, a mental health field, a form of psychotherapy. Although it includes theological and spiritual perspectives in its self-understanding, it is only loosely related to the churches.

On one hand, there is no question that specialized pastoral counseling is valuable to people who are trying to sort out their lives and gives them a measure of depth, dignity and integrity. Pastoral counseling is an enormous asset to the churches and deserves more support from them, including financial support. In addition, pastoral counseling reaches persons who might otherwise not venture near a church or pastor. Such "seekers" can begin to take the measure of their lives without fear of being subjected to proselytizing or moralistic judgment. They can work in an intimate, trusting relationship with a psychological healer who by dint of long, challenging training and commitment is able to "enter their pain" and help them toward constructive solutions. At its best, pastoral counseling represents a profoundly important expression of the liberal churches’ social mission. Given recent developments in secular psychotherapy and psychiatry, the influence of managed care, and the psychotropic drug revolution, the need for this social service and witness has never been greater.

But who will pay for it? Pastoral counseling is often long-term therapy, but even in the short term it is labor-intensive and costly. To qualify for insurance reimbursement, pastoral counselors need to be licensed and certified through a professional organization such as the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (AAMFT). In most states, meeting state qualifications involves accountability to a non-pastoral training and credentialing process. In other words, to earn a living as a pastoral counselor it is necessary to become a certified secular psychotherapist. There is little economic incentive for becoming a pastoral counselor.

This setup spells disaster for the pastoral identity of the profession, as evidenced by a 25-percent erosion of AAPC’s core clinical membership (full-time practicing pastoral psychotherapists) in the last ten years. There has also been a precipitous decline in the number of AAPC training centers, and an increase in the number of therapists who meet AAPC theological standards but have not been trained in its centers. A generation of pastoral counselors has been theologically educated but not clinically formed in theologically based, pastorally defined programs. Economic pressures, moreover, continue to make it difficult for pastoral counselors to make their services available to low-in-come persons (hence the need for church- or community-based subsidies).

It is hard to predict how this will shake out. Perhaps pastoral counseling will reaffirm its pastoral identity through a closer institutional tie to the churches and community organizations, and will develop forms of economic support that are relatively independent of managed care and insurance reimbursement. Studies and experience repeatedly show that there is a large pool of people who specifically seek a theologically based form of psychological help and who are willing to pay for it without insurance -- if they can. If they cannot, support from churches and community sources is sometimes available. Perhaps developing such support should be a priority of churches as well as pastoral counseling centers, for without these changes, pastoral counseling could disappear as a profession, and its members could become absorbed into secular professions. This can be averted only by clarifying and reinforcing pastoral identity, connecting more closely with sponsoring churches and developing new funding sources and marketing strategies.

A closely related issue is the proper role of religion in the practice of pastoral counseling. Counselors typically keep a low profile here, avoiding heavy-handed proselytizing and moralizing in order to encourage a wide-ranging, deeply personal and honest soul-searching. Many pastoral counselors do, on occasion and when it seems appropriate, discuss matters of faith and ethics. But the therapeutic or "health" model has so defined the aims and methods of the profession that little room is left for questions of faith and ethics in their own right, questions that cannot be completely subordinated to the psychological healing process and may be in tension with it at points. We need "theologically informed psychotherapy." But we also need a distinctly pastoral, therapeutically informed art of spiritual and moral counsel. The theoretical and practical problems in all of this are complex and vexing, but basic to the struggles of the field.

Clinically oriented pastoral theology took shape as a discipline in 1985 with the organization of the Society for Pastoral Theology. The society has defined the field and created a viable, socially inclusive institutional context for supporting pastoral theology as a discipline. Members such as Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Brita Gill-Austern have produced sophisticated publications (see Feminists and Womanist Pastoral Theology). Feminism has shaped both the society and the discipline’s self-understanding, and has contributed to its inclination toward liberation and narrative forms of theology and pastoral theory.

At the same time, pastoral theology struggles to achieve recognition in the academy, especially in the university-related divinity schools that pride themselves on achieving excellence in traditional forms of research and scholarship. Defining the field is absolutely crucial here, where pastoral theology’s theory-practice mix and its interdisciplinary character are not easily understood and appreciated. Sad tales are told of faculty arguments over its legitimacy, and of promotion and tenure reviews that come to grief over the issue. Some believe that the field of pastoral care is in decline and will be replaced by courses and faculty appointments in "spirituality" and other fields.

Is the larger academic field of theology and related traditional disciplines prepared to include, learn from and support the kind of contextualized theological reflection that pastoral theology represents? Will the church and its leaders value and support pastoral theology’s integrative, contextual, praxis-oriented theological form of inquiry? The questions have public importance. American society is driven by competitive economic forces that cheapen and exploit the personal dimensions of human relations and community life. Our major academic and religious institutions must support disciplines of inquiry into the nature and practice of care-giving, and into the human needs and problems that prompt this care.

Pastoral caregiving is an important and essential variation on this theme, with its concern for plumbing the depths of meaning involved in caring, in the humanity thus disclosed, and in the divinity. As a hybrid discipline of academy, church and clinic, pastoral theology -- and its counterparts of pastoral care and counseling -- are of profound importance, however far we are from a full recognition -- or even a vision -- of its character.

The Limits of Celebrity Activism

In naming Bono Person of the Year, Time labeled him a good Samaritan. But this powerful biblical image misses the point of Bono’s significance as a celebrity leader. He goes beyond being a high-profile good Samaritan -- he stretches the moral imagination of his musical audience so that they, too, see the need to reach out to their global neighbors. In their own way, Bono and his band U2 deliver the message that we are, or at least can be, one world.

Bono has used his global celebrity to become an organizer and strategizer of Samaritans. He played a significant role in the Jubilee Campaign, which made unprecedented progress in gaining debt relief for highly indebted nations. He founded the organization DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) to work with governments and the international financial organizations to structure development assistance in effective ways. He has led the One Campaign, which seeks additional spending to alleviate global poverty, and worked with Bob Geldof to arrange Live 8, the concurrent benefit concerts in all of the countries of the Group of Eight, or G8 (the world’s eight largest economies). At the July 2005 G8 summit, the world’s most powerful leaders committed to an additional $50 billion in annual debt relief. A number of those leaders met with Bono before and during the summit and have credited him with making this agreement happen.

It is these efforts in public education, communication and mobilization that make Bono’s work an intriguing case of celebrity leadership. The One Campaign -- like the Live 8 concerts -- asks fans for no money but "only" a personal commitment to take a stand against poverty. During U2’s sold-out concert tours, Bono declares nightly that the One Campaign, which already claims over 2 million members in the U.S., will surpass the membership of the National Rifle Association by 2008.

Like that of the NRA, the One Campaign’s goal is to communicate to political leaders that there is a large bloc of citizens behind it -- in this case, citizens committed to addressing global poverty. Politicians, it is said, must be concerned in their public role not about citizens of other countries, however impoverished; rather, they must focus on the wants and needs of their own country’s citizens. By making global poverty a concern of U.S. citizens, the One Campaign makes it a concern of U.S. leaders. Even politicians who want to fight global poverty need this public pressure so they can claim that it is in their own interest to act. "Bono made me do it," they can say.

Signing the pledge of the One Campaign requires very little. It is possible that Bono et al. will not be able to sustain the momentum to make a political difference. This is the point at which celebrity leadership can become a vice. At some point, the celebrity leader must motivate citizens to the point that they, in turn, motivate their political leaders.

This raises the question of how much motivation and how much commitment are needed to eradicate extreme poverty. In the grand scheme of things, the relative amount of money needed is small. The United Nations has asked industrialized countries to give 0.7 percent of their gross national product to fight poverty. This money, some $200 billion, would be far more than what is required to meet the basic human needs of the world’s poor. The point: the level of commitment needed to address extreme poverty is not itself extreme. This stance is in sharp contrast to many past moral arguments, such as those of Peter Singer, which imply that the affluent must make drastic lifestyle changes in order to meet the needs of the poor.

Some observers have asserted that a bigger change is needed. The affluence of the industrialized world, in which Bono is part of the wealthiest class, is a scandal to theological and moral understandings of global justice. In international terms, everyone reading this magazine is not just middle class, but rich. In Christian terms (or utilitarian, Aristotelian or Kantian terms, for that matter), we all have the resources with which to address extreme poverty.

This fact suggests another shortcoming of celebrity leadership. It takes for granted the culture of celebrity and affluence and overlooks the question of whether it is morally possible to live with integrity at any level of material comfort in our industrialized society.

Does staging a benefit, such as the Live 8 shows last summer, send not one but two lessons to concert goers? Although fans may learn to show concern about extreme poverty and sign up for the One Campaign, they may also receive the message that an economically privileged lifestyle, in which they buy CDs (promoted shamelessly by some of the performers) and enjoy expensive iPods, is morally acceptable. What if material excess is as harmful to us spiritually as absolute material poverty can be for the poor? Bono cannot lead that fight.

On this point, Bono would reply that his goal is actually more modest than a broad critique of Western affluence and entertainment. The sheer economics of the situation suggests that drastic improvement in the lives of the world’s poor can be made by using resources that amount to little more than the crumbs on our tables. And, God knows, this would indeed be moral and theological progress.

It is a sign of the times that a celebrity is one of the most visible persons attacking global poverty. Where are our political and religious leaders? Why have they not already headed a more successful effort of their own? The answer is simply that even if we are not, in Neil Postman’s words, "amusing ourselves to death," our society is shaped more by entertainment than by politics and is more enamored with celebrities than moved by leaders.

Bono may well prove to be the most successful celebrity leader of our time. He is politically savvy and has used his visibility to leverage a movement that now has prominent international leaders talking about making poverty history.

But what happens when the celebrity fades? Bono’s success hinges on the extent to which he can create an enduring institutional effort to reduce poverty -- through organizations like DATA and the One Campaign and through lasting political changes in foreign-development assistance. The true measure of Bono’s success as a leader is whether his movement can create and maintain an international structure that delivers political and economic change.

Can such an organized effort convince political leaders, not just once but over time, to act for debt relief and for human development in Africa and beyond? As Bono himself has acknowledged, the One Campaign and others like it should be considered successful if political leaders reshape their understanding of their own responsibilities. And in the end, holding political leaders accountable is the responsibility of citizens, not rock stars.

Taming the Beast

Book Review:

The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy. By William Greider: Simon & Schuster 384 pp.

Saving Adam Smith: A Tale of Wealth, Transformation, and Virtue. By Jonathon B. Wight. Financial Times/ Prentice Hall. 352 pp.

In the compelling story of capitalism the protagonist is the free individual who willingly exchanges his or her stuff for other people’s stuff. The land of capitalism is a kind of peaceable kingdom in which the wolf and the lamb meet voluntarily in the marketplace to engage in fair competition. Even this whimsical image suggests, however that capitalism depends upon prior rules of what is acceptable and what is not. Without some prohibition against violence, the wolf could simply eat the lamb for lunch. Adam Smith, the great moral philosopher and founder of classical economics, tells us that the market requires a moral-legal foundation. "Justice," he writes, "is the main pillar that up-holds the whole edifice" of society including the economy.

Part of capitalism’s story is the claim that it provides the maximum in freedom. It allows individuals to choose how they allocate their time, where (and if) they work, and what they do with the money they earn. How could any freedom-loving person object to such a scenario. But many people do not experience freedom in the current economy, as William Greider and Jon Wight point out. Indeed, Greider and Wight share the profound conviction that we are constrained by economic forces in ways that negate our personal agency. Economics should be just one part of the good life; instead, powerful economic forces now create pressures on individuals and families to pursue material gain at the expense of other important human ends.

Greider, a senior journalist at the Nation, and Wight, an economist at the University of Richmond, understand that capitalism is more than a technical economic system and that it is supported by more than rational argument. In its current form, a complex set of narratives undergirds capitalism. These range from the ways in which Economics 101 is taught on university campuses to the commercials and ads that pervade every aspect of contemporary life.

Greider and Wight’s strategy is to fight narrative with narrative. Greider has collected a series of stories of people and organizations that have begun to reform and humanize parts of our economic system. In an even more explicitly integrated narrative, Wight has written a novel about the economy, in which an economics graduate student gains his education from a resurrected Adam Smith. Both Greider and Wight provide interesting accounts, but Wight is the more morally and analytically coherent of the two.

Greider’s The Soul of Capitalism follows on his best-selling Who Will Tell the People? The of American Democracy (1992). Unlike his book on global capitalism, One World, Ready or Not (1997), his latest analysis of the economy is limited to an American perspective. Greider confronts the ways in which our democratic, entrepreneurial and altruistic impulses conflict with our self-interested, consumerist and competitive urges. "Here is my notion of patriotic obligation," he writes, "Americans will not become fully realized as a people -- as a society that fulfills its potential – until we learn in the spirit of Walt Whitman, to embrace our contradictions, all of them."

This American-centered view is peculiar, given Greider’s fundamental argument about the daunting, impersonal and, now transnational nature of economic forces. But whether national or international, the economic system Greider presents lacks responsibility and accountability. One beast that must be domesticated is the publicly held corporation. Greider helpfully reviews corporations’ status as persons in the U.S. legal system and the ways in which corporate and political power are intertwined.

The recent CEO scandals are merely a symptom of wider problems with the role of corporations, Greider notes. While limited liability allows corporations to take significant risks for the sake of innovation, it also encourages corporate recklessness. Weak antitrust laws enable large corporations to have the power of monopolies oligopolies, though such power actually tends to discourage innovation. Many economists agree, Greider points out, that the current capitalist system doesn’t live up to its own free-market justification.

Corporations are not sufficiently accountable to their shareholders, he asserts. One important dimension of the problem -- and here those in churches and the academy should take self-interested notice -- is that managers of mutual funds, largely comprised of 401(k) accounts, often have little voice in corporate governance. Fund managers have strong incentives to acquiesce to corporate executives, since they fear that if they express dissent the executives will take their companies’ retirement funds elsewhere.

The current economic system as a whole, like corporations in particular, fails to take a long-term perspective on economic life. The stock market encourages short-term speculation, pressuring corporate leaders to focus on quarterly earnings statements in lieu of taking more prudent steps to assure long-term strength. Greider also explores the strain on the environment that current modes of production and consumption create. The environmentally informed view requires attention to reusable inputs and final products. In his chapter on "consuming the fixture," Greider cites intriguing examples of firms and individuals who have put the concept of reusability to creative use.

Greider portrays the economy as a system in which individual people have very little voice or decision-making power over their own lives. He tells the stories of workers who would love to improve their working conditions (or even make their companies more efficient), but who work for corporations, too large to care about their views. Would-be socially responsible investors find it difficult to invest in ways consistent with their values -- though things are looking better on this front. Citizens who try to promote public-works projects through their local or federal governments find that their efforts are crowded out by pork-barrel projects benefiting powerful corporations.

Most at home in exposing and criticizing institutional systems for their shortcomings, Greider is less convincing in his attempts to construct a hopeful economic future. His assertions that stockholders in 401(k) plans can have a voice in corporate governance or that small-scale, employee-owned firms can come successfully with corporate giants lack specificity and support.

The book highlights steps that individuals and groups can take to become economically empowered. Not wanting his strategies to be labeled "tired liberalism," Greider is reluctant to specify what role the government should play in "opening paths to a moral economy." For example, his chapter on public works is effective in denouncing pork-barrel spending dressed up as something beneficial fur the public, but his constructive agenda is thin on what the government should do to provide a sound infrastructure and even a safety net for its citizens.

Greider does his best to highlight hopeful, albeit mostly small-scale, efforts by ‘pioneers" who are attempting to reform the economy, people in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations as well as academics. These stories constitute both the strength and the weakness of his book. While he is able to present many perspectives that play a part in a more humane economic narrative, these voices are not always fully integrated. While Greider’s main points are admirable and on target, his book needs to be supplemented by the more thorough economic analyses of contemporary economists he cites, including Herman Daly, Amartya Sen and Edward Wolff and historical giants such as Smith, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter.

Wight’s seems an unlikely book to have been written by an economist. Economists are often criticized for their fictional assumptions about human nature, but Saving Adam Smith is intentionally fictional. Wight brings Adam Smith back to life in the form of a Romanian-born auto mechanic. This ploy highlights the fact that Smith’s advice runs counter to conventional thinking about the economy and society it is also a reminder that anyone can have a valuable perspective on economic problems.

Wight sets out to recover Smith’s complex moral understanding of the modern economy. If Greider’s key institution for reform is the corporation, then Wight’s is the guild of economists. Economists have lost sight of the humane foundations of their discipline, Wight suggests, and they should -- figuratively, at least -- bring Smith back to life.

Wight is not the only current thinker to emphasize Smith’s importance. Indeed, scholarship on Smith is enjoying a sort of rebirth in an age when it seems that economics has lost its philosophical and moral bearings. Reading at least portions of Smith’s two master works, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, should be a part of liberal arts education. Wight goes further than other authors in bringing Smith into the present. I can only imagine that Smith himself, an advocate of putting the "moral imagination" to good use, would find this amusing.

The protagonist in Saving Adam Smith is Richard Burns, an assistant professor of economics at a fictional liberal arts college who is struggling to finish his dissertation. Burns is the promising young star who is to carry on the great economic tradition that touts the virtues of the free market. He is even nominated for the Adam Smith award in economics. The problem is that neither Burns nor the discipline of economics understands Smith’s legacy.

Burns is writing a dissertation that bears on many of the problems of a complex and globalizing economy -- the kinds of issues that Greider addresses in a more straightforward way Are the massive forces of the global economy dehumanizing the workplace? Have corporations lost their sense of moral purpose? Does the pursuit of material happiness create envy and destroy community? Are people motivated only by self-interest?

Wight’s setup enables him to appeal to the father of classical economics to address these questions. We learn that Smith’s approach to economics fits within his wider framework of a good and just society. Smith’s famous "invisible hand" metaphor for how the pursuit of self-interest can lead to overall social benefit takes for granted the conditions of justice, trust and community that allow for mutual exchange. If people are not first virtuous, they cannot be trusted in the economic sphere.

Wight doesn’t stop with bringing Smith to life. in a humorous scene Smith debates the meaning of justice around a poker table with his interlocutors Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume and Quesnay. Almost without realizing it, the reader receives a primer in Enlightenment approaches to justice in times of social and economic transformation. Smith’s voice comes through the clearest.

Wight asserts that Smith’s framework can help modern readers fit economic life into the moral foundations of society. Greed and the pursuit of material things usually corrupt the moral sentiments. The father of economics believed that "the great source of both the misery and disorder of human life seems to arise from over-rating the differences between poverty and riches." Happiness does not come from wealth alone: "The pleasures of the rich, consisting of vanity and superiority, are seldom consistent with perfect tranquility"

The complexity of Smith’s thought emerges in the novel Smith believes that although the pursuit of wealth does not do much to produce happiness, the effort to enable people to escape abject poverty is both a legal and a moral requirement. For example, Smith’s concern about the numbing effects of factory work led him to be an early and vocal advocate of universal public education.

While some of the literary devices Wight employs can seem a little heavy-handed, his narrative holds together. Students of economics will learn a great deal in this book about the thought of Adam Smith and the moral foundations of the economy. The plotline itself makes for a good read. As he explains in his notes, Wight frequently adapts direct quotations from Smith’s works into the story. Appendices point interested readers to fuller examination of Smith’s own texts and further reading on Smith.

Saving Adam Smith can help save us from both the folly of vain materiel pursuit and the heartless neglect of people in need. One should not look to a historical figure, even a brilliant one, for answers to all of the questions of the current age. Still, one wishes that Wight had considered in more detail the question of what Smith, an advocate of limited government in his own day, would consider the appropriate involvement of government in guaranteeing equality of opportunity for citizens.

Greider and Wight both affirm the virtues of capitalism by denouncing unjust practices perpetuated in its name. In this sense they are prophets calling us to a more humane society that embraces only the best of capitalism.

Taking Greider’s and Wight’s insights to heart, we realize that there is, in fact, no single story of capitalism. There is and should be room for individuals, like the "pioneers" in Greider’s tale and the Romanian-born auto mechanic in Wight’s, to find their own voices in economic and political life. Even in tough economic times and when citizen voices seem little heeded in politics. there are ways to shift the story away from material pursuit for its own sake. Wight reminds us that the narrative which places the economy inside the bounds of morality is as old as capitalism itself

Christian readers should realize that the moral roots of economic life are even older than that. But so, too, is the misappropriation of Christian concepts for capitalist ends. The church needs to have a more nuanced and critical conversation about which parts of economic life contribute to freedom and which do not. In that endeavor Smith is an excellent conversation partner.

Making Moral Sense of the Market

Book Review:

The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It

By Charles E. Lindblom. (Yale University Press, 304 pp.)

Development as Freedom

By Amartya Sen. (Knopf, 382 pp., paper-back.)

Cities sell the names of their sports stadiums to the highest corporate bidder. Coke and Pepsi compete for vending machines in schools in order to "brand" young people with their product. Will it be shocking to learn soon that the First Baptist Church has changed its name to the Energizer Baptist Church? (Think of the possible marketing campaigns with the Energizer bunny at Easter.) Perhaps we will first see corporate sponsorship of mission trips. Then corporate-endowed positions for specialized ministries. These possibilities may seem outrageous, but they are surely more thinkable today than they were just ten years ago.

Concerns about the increasing role of the market are widespread. But at the same time the virtues of the market are widely touted and hard to deny. A growing number of people of faith have examined how we spend our money, where and how much we work, whether the economy is just, and how much income is enough. Are there ways to enjoy the benefits of a market system without allowing it to dominate our lives?

Economists are often of limited help on this question, since they hesitate to discuss values. When asked whether they have a theory of the human person, economists usually say that their goal is more limited: they seek only to explain and predict human behavior on the assumption that people strive to maximize their welfare through exchanges in the market. Some economists, of course, see every activity as a marketplace transaction -- dating and marriage, political behavior and even religious commitment can be viewed as the pursuing of maximal self-interest.

Charles E. Lindblom and Amartya Sen are refreshing figures in the field, because they are willing to point out the flaws and limits of the market as well as its virtues. Lindblom and Sen extend the tradition of political economists running from Adam Smith to John Kenneth Galbraith. Lindblom’s The Market System reads something like a primer in economics -- without the supply and demand curves or references to production of "widgets." He stresses that when encountering the term market, the reader should "think society, not economy." It refers to more than a geographic place where persons go to buy and sell products. (Even the Soviet Union had its fair share of these.) Rather, the market system is an institution by which much of society is coordinated according to the interaction of buyers and sellers who exchange scarce goods and services at nonfixed prices.

Lindblom, professor emeritus at Yale, notes that persons who construct a church "with paid labor and bought materials" are engaged in market activity, even if their reason for doing so is to have a place for the expression of religion. In this instance and in others, Lindblom insists we look to the ends or purposes for which the market mechanism is employed. Such questions, of course, make it more urgent for people of faith to engage in moral and theological reflection.

As Lindblom shows, there is a difference between how much of society the market can coordinate and how much it should coordinate. For instance, most societies have decided that slavery -- the buying and selling of human beings -- is not acceptable, even though the market mechanism could be employed to such an end. (A tragic exception is the current situation in Sudan. Interestingly, an economic study of the slave trade there would consider whether the effort by some Christians to buy slaves in order to set them free has had the effect of increasing the market price for slaves.) Another potential market is in human organs. Whether organs should be bought and sold in the open market is a moral question; the market mechanism certainly can, and to some extent already does, function to regulate supply and demand of hearts, lungs and kidneys.

A leading Catholic ethicist and economist, Daniel Rush Finn, has pointed out that the boundaries placed on the market are a critical element in "the moral ecology of markets." Working along similar lines, Lindblom contrasts the "maximum domain" of the market system and the "chosen domain" that a society gives to the market. It reminds us that we as citizens should not take the market as given and immutable, but rather that it is our responsibility to shape how it functions and shall not function. Lindblom argues that terms such as "government intervention" or "government interference" miss the point. A system of laws provides the foundations for a market system to work at all.

Further, the government is the largest market participant, buying and selling many important goods and services. It has an important regulative role in guaranteeing workers’ and consumers’ protection and in guarding against monopolies and collusion. No serious citizen could truly want unregulated markets -- we only need to review the recent history of the former Soviet Union to see the chaos that results when a market economy is unconnected to other institutions of a well-ordered democracy.

Lindblom claims that no democracy (at least in a form we would recognize in the West) has existed outside of a market system. This is mostly due, he thinks, to the fact that market elites have managed to convince their fellow citizens, or at least the political elites, that the market system is necessary for maintaining a well-ordered society. Some of his harshest words are saved for proponents of the so-called free market who protect their elite status and who oppose efforts to create a level playing field for all people. He’s even more scathing about the "sales promotion" and "public relations" aspects of the market, and he shows that governments need to protect consumers from false advertising and to constrain the massive campaigns to "create needs" -- the pursuit of which takes away energy and time from other important activities.

The great virtue of the market is that it provides extensive freedom of choice in terms of occupation and products. At its best, the market system coordinates large numbers of people even to make possible a transaction as simple as buying a cup of coffee. Billions of these expressions of choice take place every day Yet the market also entails forms of "unfreedom" that we seldom discuss. Workers sacrifice much of their privacy to the workplace, not to mention their time, which could be spent on other activities, whether that be family life, civic engagement or just sleeping. Lindblom suggests that it is potentially beneficial to regulate advertising if we as citizens are willing to confront the ways in which it can adversely affect our wellbeing.

Lindblom’s most important discussion of freedom is related to the question of property rights. He notes that the market does not determine the initial allocation of property rights, and it is not a mechanism that guarantees even rough equality in distribution of income or wealth. He also points out, however, that the market system removes some kinds of inequality, such as those in feudal and authoritarian systems in which the people holding political power dictate the economic distribution as well. Lindblom pushes us to ask how the market can work alongside other institutions to achieve social conditions that guarantee each person’s human dignity.

Lindblom enjoys using terms provocatively to jolt us out of intellectual ruts. In one of his more creative uses of language, he argues that efficiency is always determined in relation to some other value. The real question is not "is the market efficient?" but "efficient toward what purpose?" When a system leaves many people in poverty, it is hard to call it efficient.

Are there any alternatives to the market? Lindblom shows that any viable alternative would have a lot of features that resemble the market system itself. The former Soviet bloc granted some occupational choice, and allowed consumers to use their money to purchase what they wanted among the limited items available. Conversely, market economies involve a fair amount of central planning. That is, market institutions work directly or indirectly with the government and public opinion to shape industrial policy, environmental policy, educational policy and so on, through taxes and subsidies. When it comes to determining how a society should organize and reform its market system, ideological talk only goes so far. Decisions finally become a matter of pragmatic choice about the impact of specific policies. Corporations, the state and civil society -- including churches -- have a role to play in this process of creative, pragmatic reflection on the appropriate role of the market.

Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998, is best known for his studies of poverty and famine. He has argued that no democracy has ever suffered a famine -- a striking instance of his larger point that many issues of distribution cannot be analyzed in economic terms alone. Development as Freedom is an important overview of his thought, and one of his most accessible works, though still not an easy read.

If Lindblom wants his readers to "think society, not economy," Sen wants us to "think capabilities, not commodities." Like Lindblom, Sen places economic life within the wider context of personal and societal wellbeing. He thinks a central task of a good society is to "convert," as efficiently as possible, economic wealth into human capabilities. Some societies are better at this than others. Sen gives examples of countries with relatively high income per capita but low quality of life (South Africa, Singapore) and others with relatively low income per capita but high quality of life (Sri Lanka, Costa Rica). The purpose of economic development, then, should be not the production of more and more goods, or the creation of more and more wealth, but rather the expansion of people’s capabilities to function and thrive in their communities. It is relevant to ask: Are people well nourished? Are they able to obtain a good education? Can they appear in public without shame?

This shift of framework can seem rather abstract until Sen applies it to matters, literally, of life and death. Take famines. Conventional wisdom long held that famines are caused by the lack of food. According to this view, the answer to famine is to provide emergency food relief and then increase or repair a country’s total food production. Sen has shown that while food supply is relevant, the ability of people to control their access to that food is most crucial. A country in which people can share the available food supply can almost always avoid famine. Democracies are more successful at avoiding famine because starving people and their advocates are able to make their demand for help more politically compelling. Democratic India, for example, has managed to warn its politicians about impending famines, and thereby has avoided them, while authoritarian China in the late 1950s did not get that message to its leaders, and starvation followed.

The capability framework also sheds light on the household. Sen shows that income earned in the market by a male breadwinner is often not evenly distributed within the household, due to cultural as well as legal factors that discriminate against women. Standard economic analysis (if it doesn’t peer inside the institution of the family) overlooks the resulting inequality. Households in which mothers have adequate education and access to outside employment achieve better health, not just for mothers but for their girls and boys alike.

The market system is often touted for the instrumental freedoms it provides for people -- that is, the market helps people to meet basic needs like having adequate nutrition and shelter. But like Lindblom, Sen argues that the market system also produces the intrinsic good of participation -- participation in social life through "freely" chosen work and though buying and selling products of one’s own choosing. Even staunch supporters if the market often miss the significance of participation.

Both Sen and Lindblom aptly state that no market choices are fully free (they are constrained both by the talents and background of the individual and by the nature of society itself). This acknowledgment leads each author to note the potential value of redistribution to alleviate those severe inequalities that prohibit full participation in society. In addition, Sen points out that political and civic participation can help citizens to deliberate together about "what they really need" and what individual and societal ends are trnly worth valuing. This point becomes pafficularly crncial when it is juxtaposed with Lindblom’s critique of the advertising and public relations dimensions of the market system. A vital, strong, flourishing democratic system can help us distinguish the valuable dimensions of the market system from its more outrageous temptations to pursue well-being in products that do not satisfy.

Moral and theological commentary on the market is often of dubious value, and there is a good reason for this -- reflection on these topics requires hard work. These texts challenge any simplistic mantras about free enterprise or human dignity for all. They show us that the real debate is not about whether the market economy is desirable or not, but about how citizens should harness the market system to serve ends that they consider fundamental. What goods and services are necessary for genuine well-being and quality of life? The Christian story should contribute some good ideas.

Thinking Globally

Book Reviews:

Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order

By Robert Gilpin with Jean M. Gilpin. Princeton University Press, 435 pp. also in paperback.

God and Globalization, Volume I: Religion and the Powers of the Common Life

Edited by Max L. Stackhouse with Peter J. Paris. Trinity Press International, 301 pp.

God and Globalization, Volume II: The Spirit and the Modem Authorities

Edited by Max L. Stackhouse with Don S. Browning. Trinity Press International, 254 pp.

As the automobile has been the vehicle and symbol of American mobility, the airplane has been the vehicle and symbol of global mobility. If a person can afford the airfare, he or she can fly from one world capital to any other in even less time than it takes to drive from New York to Los Angeles.

On September 11, terrorists turned that symbol into a weapon against globalization itself. Although Americans continue to see the catastrophic events as an attack on the U.S. -- and, of course, it was -- as many as a fourth of the victims were citizens of other countries. They hailed from over 80 countries, and most worked together peaceably and efficiently in the center of world trade. And, according to a chaplain at "ground zero," the victims’ families communicate their grief in over 150 languages.

Yet the recent terrorism was not only an attack on globalization; it was also an expression of it. That is, the cells of the al Qaeda network depend on the same international technological, economic and travel infrastructure that has fueled globalization’s more positive features. The devastating events and their aftermath highlight this reality: globalization has many faces, many dimensions. Some are good. Others are bad. And what’s good for some people may well be bad for others.

Given the multipronged nature of the phenomenon, it should be no surprise that books on globalization often sound more like a Tower of Babel than a coherent conversation. Is globalization chiefly about the economy? Trade? Technology? Telecommunications and the Internet? Human rights? Culture? A new consciousness of being a world citizen?

Depending on whom you ask, the agents of globalization vary widely: multinational corporations like General Motors, Nike and Coca-Cola (the largest employer in sub-Saharan Africa); the United Nations and the thousands of nongovernmental organizations; the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization; or CNN and Disney. Some commentators have also cited international crime networks. Now we must include al-Qaeda.

For most social scientists, the debate over the meaning of globalization focuses on whether it is centrally and fundamentally an economic process. This predominant view sees advances in computing, telecommunications and travel largely in terms of economic transformation. It regards globalization as the liberalization of markets that enable free trade. An accompanying, often-unquestioned assumption is that democratic reforms go hand in hand with "marketization." Other social scientists have resisted the exclusive focus on the economic process as well as the overly benign interpretation of its effects.

Robert Gilpin’s ambitious and thorough treatise fits within this debate. Gilpin, emeritus professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, acknowledges that his own sympathies lie with free trade, but he differs with those who would explain the world in wholly economic terms.

Global Political Economy acknowledges the potential of multinationals to influence political as well as economic life. According to Forbes magazine, the largest multinational corporations, such as General Motors, Ford and Mitsubishi, enjoy total sales that exceed the gross domestic product of all but the most productive nations in the world. Other economic dimensions, notably the staggering levels of global finance (e.g., foreign currency exchange totaling $1.5 trillion per day), dwarf even global trade of products.

Combining political and economic analysis, Gilpin’s own "state-centric" realism is a welcome expansion of narrower economic interpretations. He argues that the state, like the market, remains a principal institution. He also cautions against overestimating the power of multinational corporations; most economic transactions still occur within nations and not across nations.

Gilpin poses a fundamental question: "Is the purpose of economic activity to benefit individual consumers, to promote certain social welfare goals, or to maximize national power?" He rejects the standard economic view (benefit individual consumers) by emphasizing the political goal of maximizing national power.

Gilpin pays less direct attention to the "social welfare goals" of nations or the world. For instance, problems of inequality and poverty are almost invisible in the text. He mentions briefly the recent "antiglobalization" protesters, but he does not take them seriously. Since he takes a realist position in analyzing how powerful institutions compete, negotiate and cooperate, people with neither political nor economic access are not actors in his account. While his analysis is not nearly as narrow or dogmatic as those of unbridled proponents of the free market, he is open to the same criticism: he leaves it to fate -- or at least to the market and the state -- to resolve problems like poverty.

Given that his topic is global political economy, it is perhaps less noteworthy that Gilpin also neglects religion and religious institutions in his text. His own position of seeing the economy as "embedded" in sociopolitical contexts and social values opens the door for dialogue about the cultural-religious ethos and ethical, even explicitly theological, assessment of global processes. That is a principal aim of the God and Globalization volumes, edited by Max Stackhouse and colleagues.

In Volume I of God and Globalization, Roland Robertson criticizes the market-centered ("economistic") view of globalization, and contends that even broader views of political economy miss the role of religion. Gilpin, for instance, asserts that the term "globalization" became popular in the late 1980s in reference to multinational firms and foreign investment. Robertson, however, emphasizes that the concept caught the attention of scholars of religion in the 1970s. He and many other authors in God and Globalization also note that the ecumenical and interfaith movements constitute a religious dimension of globalization.

Indeed, one of the most significant contributions of the volumes by Stackhouse et al. is the inquiry into how religion in various forms is -- and should be -- an actor in globalization. Stackhouse, an ethicist at Princeton Theological Seminary, posits that theological ethics should help us to understand and assess the ethos surrounding globalization and then help us to shape it. A faith-based evaluation of globalization will lead us to affirm some of its aspects but will require us to reject others.

Essays by William Schweiker and Donald Shriver specify to Christians, congregations and wider institutions their call to take a critical, prophetic stance toward the economic and political powers of our global age. Schweiker and Shriver introduce frameworks, each based on the respect due to all people as created in the image of God, to judge global realities in terms of Christian ethics.

Shriver’s words are sadly fitting and challenging. He asks, "Can children of God use violence to kill some and to protect other children of God?" He confesses that during World War II, Americans grieved little over the killing of German or Japanese civilians by Allied firebombs and nuclear detonations. In the post-September 11 world, it remains hard for U.S. Christians to reflect upon or weep about the killing of Afghan civilians. We fear undermining a would-be united front against terrorism. Is it possible for U.S. Christians to evaluate their own (and their society’s) nationalism from a constructive and critical perspective of faith? At a minimum, Shriver calls us to such reflection before either joining or resisting the contemporary war effort. More substantively, his arguments would call Christians to find ways to be peacemakers even -- especially -- at this troubled moment.

Yersu Kim catalogues the humanitarian dimension of globalization, and John Witte, in volume 2, shows the interrelationships between the global human rights discourse and Christian theology. Beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the postwar period has hosted world conferences on every conceivable problem and issue, ranging from the rights of children, women and refugees to the preservation of the environment. Kim seeks to foster interfaith coalitions for global humanitarianism, while Witte argues that Christian conceptions of the human being influenced the language of secular human rights discourse. Kim and Witte would agree, from different viewpoints, that the international discussion needs the resources and insights of religious traditions. They also argue that religious traditions should incorporate human rights in their communal life and witness.

This humanitarian face of globalization has a different set of advocates (and opponents) than economic globalization has, and the subject leads to a different conversation than Gilpin’s analysis of globalization’s economic and political aspects. The challenge for the readers of these books -- and for anyone trying to understand globalization -- is to see the interrelationships between the various realities and perspectives.

Like it or not, economists have come to dominate the public discussion, and even broadminded public critics have taken on the debate in their terms. Stackhouse and colleagues help widen the conversation by focusing on the religious dimensions of globalization. They also provide analyses of the many sectors and spheres of society that are affected by global changes.

At the same time, some of the lack of connection has to do with the immense variety of the topics addressed in the multiple volumes of God and Globalization. (Volumes III and IV are forthcoming.) Despite Stackhouse’s creativity, the structure of the first three volumes along the lines of "principalities," "authorities" and "dominions" is somewhat arbitrary. For instance, the section of volume II on "authorities" (or authorities and regencies) contains chapters on education, law, medicine, technology, nature and exemplary moral leaders. In distinctive ways, each essay demonstrates how a topic is influenced by, and in turn affects, global changes. Yet the authors’ topics are not analogous, and their approaches are not parallel. I do not envy the task of making some order out of the diverse questions surrounding God, Christian faith and globalization. But it may be best not to insist on a neat structure to such a complex set of problems.

Many of these authors emphasize that globalization is not necessarily a phenomenon to be celebrated. We need less convincing of that than we did prior to September 11. But in addition to terrorism and military conflict, Americans still need to confront the growing reality -- and awareness -- that the global economy remains highly unequal, including over 2.8 billion people who survive on less than two U.S. dollars per day.

Income inequality in the world as a whole is greater than the inequality in any particular nation. If people were to understand themselves as part of a world economy and a global income distribution, they would realize that the global village has more disparity than even countries like South Africa or Brazil. We need hardly remind ourselves of the social disorder and violence that prevails in these unequal nations.

Whether or not the economic dimension of globalization is helping to lessen or increase inequality (and it depends on whom you ask), the consciousness-raising dimension of globalization is surely making people more aware of the disparities. Will citizens and leaders address that potentially explosive problem, or will they build higher walls to keep rich and poor apart? From the standpoint of Christian ethics, the "separate and unequal" solution is morally unacceptable. Schweiker, Witte and other authors help build that case. How to address global inequality more directly is one of globalization’s most pressing challenges.

In the end, the faces of globalization that matter are not technology, economics, politics or rapid social changes. They are the 6 billion people who are affected by those factors. Globalization should neither be welcomed uncritically nor dismissed as wholly deleterious. We need better conceptions of global justice and criteria for evaluating social changes. On this point the essays by philosophically and theologically informed scholars can guide us. Social scientists like Gilpin are invaluable conversation partners. A principal ethical criterion must be the effects of globalization on the people who do not currently have the economic or political power to be part of our conversation. Those many faces of globalization are also created in the image of God.

Getting Organized

Aurora Solis is typical of the people involved in faith-based organizing. Solis, a Mexican immigrant who grew up in a low-income home, works in a staff position at a high school in San Jose, California. She has been a U.S. citizen for only four years. But she was recruited by her pastor to serve on the parish "local organizing committee" and bring together parishioners and others living in the church’s neighborhood. She became a leader in neighborhood struggles and by 1997 was president of People Acting in Community Together (PACT). Today she speaks with poise and humor to large audiences, and negotiates with the mayor of San Jose.

Across the country faith-based community organizing is enabling people to confront issues of economic justice. A recent survey by Interfaith Funders shows how large and diverse this movement has become. Unlike almost every other justice movement, it is strongly multiethnic, injecting moral passion and religious tradition into public debate, but in a way that respects the nation’s cultural diversity. It allows congregations to become active on political issues without the divisions sometimes engendered by church social action in the 1960s and ‘70s.

In its current form this is a relatively young movement. It was pioneered in the 1970s by the Industrial Areas Foundation, after IAF founder Saul Alinsky died and Ed Chambers took over. Ernie Cortes’s work in Texas was the first practical expression of the new approach, which departed significantly from Alinsky’s style, not least in taking seriously religious issues and the well-being of congregations. By now the movement has grown far beyond the bounds of the JAF, with which only about one-third of the local projects are affiliated. The rest work with one of three other organizing "networks": the Pacific Institute for Community Organization (PICO), the Gamaliel Foundation, and Direct Action and Research Training (DART). Nonetheless, the movement remains coherent, following a common philosophy and organizational strategy.

Organizing is a form of politics, broadly understood. Faith-based community organizations do not usually provide direct services. Rather, they address issues, pressuring governments or corporations to bring more resources into modest-income neighborhoods or to adopt policies that better meet their needs. Organizing also distinguishes itself from "advocacy," the kind of work done by church lobbying offices in Washington and state capitals. Advocacy is typically carried on by privileged people on behalf of those less privileged. The idea behind faith-based organizing is that the agents and beneficiaries of change should be the same people -- ordinary people empowered to become effective and articulate actors on the public stage.

The campaigns undertaken by local projects address issues important to the congregations. An example is the work of VOICE, a Gamaliel affiliate in Buffalo. The city’s West Side is an ethnically diverse neighborhood plagued by falling property values and drugs, often dealt from abandoned houses. In 1997 Our Lady of Loretto Catholic Church, a VOICE congregation in this part of the city, identified a "dirty dozen" drug houses near the church and started efforts to persuade the city to demolish them. At first city officials were not very responsive. When a police representative failed to show up for a meeting, VOICE people descended on the police station, getting pepper-sprayed for their trouble. In 1998, after this event had generated publicity as well as meetings with the mayor and other officials, the houses were demolished.

Then the question became, "Where do we go from here?" Parish members decided on a "community walk" in which they interviewed people living near the church about their concerns and needs. They found that people were especially concerned about the rats infesting the neighborhood, and formed a VOICE issue committee (commonly dubbed the "rat pack"). When the committee realized that Buffalo had no real plan for dealing with rodents, it researched what was being done in cities such as Rochester and New York. Buffalo was experimenting on a small scale with "tipper totes" -- large, rat-proof garbage containers designed for easy loading by trucks -- but only in one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods and with no plan for wider use. Confronted by VOICE activists, the city agreed to try the containers on the West Side and later offered a four-year citywide phase-in. VOICE persuaded the city to do it in two years.

The rat pack has gotten good press coverage, plus strong support from people in West Side neighborhoods who are not members of VOICE congregations. The victories won by this campaign -- increased public responsiveness to the needs of one of its poorer neighborhoods -- are important practically. While rats may not seem like a huge menace, they have a terrible effect on neighborhood morale and the quality of everyday life. Furthermore, the experience of being able to exercise power and hold city officials accountable is important for the development of future local politics. VOICE congregations on the West Side have conducted another round of neighborhood interviewing and are now working on issues such as housing, economic development and recreational facilities for youth and seniors. Other VOICE campaigns, such as efforts to improve the schools, deal with the city as a whole.

Approximately 3,500 congregations nationwide are actively involved in organizations like PACT and VOICE. These congregations have a combined membership of about 3 million. Parishioners hear regularly about current projects, and many attend events related to those projects. Some parishioners deepen their involvement. The organizations report an average of 179 active volunteer leaders. This means that nearly 24,000 Americans from these congregations are organizing activists.

Clearly, this isn’t a movement ready to elect the next president, since these numbers amount to only 1 percent of Americans. But if we compare it with other movements, the numbers are impressive. Socialist activists in the U.S., for instance, number fewer than 1,000. Religious activist groups such as the Sojourners Community are tiny, as are the denominational peace fellowships. Even the Religious Right may not have more people actively and personally involved in political work. Mail-order advocacy groups with professional staff have huge mailing lists, but their adherents have no voice in setting the direction of the organizations they support and do little beyond sending in money. Faith-based organizing does much more to encourage active citizenship and enrich civil society.

There are 133 congregation-based projects located in 112 cities spread across 33 states and the District of Columbia. All but one of the 25 largest cities in the U.S., and two-thirds of the next 25, host these projects. While weak in rural areas, the movement is not confined to inner-city neighborhoods. Many of the projects are suburban and others span cities or regions. The number of local projects has increased by 48 percent since 1994, and the number of congregations involved has almost doubled.

Local groups generally tackle local economic problems and pursue local solutions. But the movement is beginning to develop broader strategies. In states where there are numerous local organizations, statewide work is under way. For example, PICO’s California Project has brought together about 20 local groups for joint action on state-policy issues. The work is directed by a statewide steering committee consisting of representatives from local organizations.

Recently PICO’s focus has been on health insurance. In many congregations belonging to PICO affiliates, more than half the families have no health insurance. The statewide campaign has had two main goals. The first, accomplished last year, was to convince the state to use $50 million out of $1 billion in annual tobacco settlement receipts for augmenting community health clinics. Such clinics are central to the health of the uninsured, since they are the only places other than emergency rooms where care does not depend on ability to pay.

The second goal was to improve the federally funded program that provides insurance for children in families with modest incomes that nevertheless exceed the limits for Medicaid. The California project seeks to extend this coverage to the entire family, to include undocumented people and to help with the sometimes unaffordable premiums that the program charges. During the campaign to implement these proposals, local organizations lobbied state legislators, in one case holding 11 press conferences on the same day. Since there are member congregations in more than half of the state legislative districts, they can have a considerable impact.

Meanwhile, the statewide project office in Sacramento worked with advocacy groups to pressure legislators. The proposal seemed sure to pass, but on the hectic final day of the legislative session it never came up for a vote. Fortunately, media attention to the issue revived the campaign, and the proposed new state budget funds the proposal.

The ethnic and racial diversity achieved by faith-based organizing is striking. Somewhat more than a third of the congregations involved are African-American, a similar proportion European-American and one fifth are Hispanic. Two percent are Asian or Native American, and 6 percent are interracial. Though local organizing projects vary in their ethnic makeup, only 15 percent of them are monocultural. In the rest, there is significant representation of at least two ethnic groups, and over a quarter are highly diverse, with no single group in the majority.

Therefore participants work together across racial or ethnic lines. In the projects I have observed, racial differences do not cause much tension. This achievement comes from the strong racial universalism of most religions and from the tactic of framing issues in ways that are independent of race.

For example, Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH), part of the Gamaliel network, pushed in the early ‘90s for an ordinance establishing hiring guidelines for city and country contracts. The proposal, which was eventually adopted in a weakened form, spoke not of jobs allocated to minority groups but of the percentage of workers to be drawn from unemployed residents of Milwaukee’s inner city. Most of these, to be sure, are African-American. But the race-neutral approach was not a smokescreen, since all of Milwaukee’s inner-city churches and their members, regardless of race, have a practical stake in the economic condition of the core city.

Organizing is also religiously diverse. The overwhelming majority of participants are Christians of various denominations, but 2 percent are Jewish, 2 percent Unitarian-Universalist, a number are Muslim and a scattering belong to other groups -- Baha’i, Buddhist and so on. This is fairly representative of America’s religious mosaic, although Muslims are underrepresented and Unitarian-Universalists are dramatically overrepresented.

There is, however, a major difference between Christians involved in organizing and Christianity at large: white, theologically traditionalist denominations, to which about 30 percent of American Christians belong, make up only about 3 percent of the congregations involved in organizing. Several projects are under way to try to involve evangelical churches in the movement, but so far these efforts have not been very successful.

The obstacle is not theology. Many black churches are religiously traditional, but the theological disagreements they have with mainline denominations rarely cause problems within community organizations. Nor is the absence of white evangelicals and fundamentalists due to the political views of the members of these churches on the issues that organizing addresses. Opinion polls show that these members are as liberal on economic issues as members of mainline denominations, even when social class and race are taken into account.

Organizing is mostly but not exclusively rooted in congregations. Some 400 school groups, labor unions and neighborhood associations also take part in local projects. Some organizers have gone further in creating more enduring and integral connections. A prime example is the "living wage" approach pioneered by Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), an JAF affiliate. Leaders Arnie Graff and Jonathan Lange were convinced that though the organization had achieved important victories during the ‘80s, it had not confronted "fundamental economic questions." Baltimore’s inner harbor and downtown development projects were prospering, but they did not benefit most of the city’s people.

BUILD congregations found that 40 percent of the people using their soup kitchens were employed at least part-time. Many of their own members were steadily employed but making only poverty wages. From this experience came the idea of addressing the issue of low wages. For a project of this kind to make sense, however, it needed to involve labor unions. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) entered into a long-term relationship with BUILD and assigned an organizer, Kim Keller, to work on the project. Graff, Lange and Keller decided to center their effort on the idea of the living wage: any person who works full-time, year-round should make enough money to live decently, if modestly. After pressure from BUILD congregations and AFSCME, several members of the city council and then-Mayor Kurt Schmoke supported the campaign.

In December 1994 Baltimore’s living-wage ordinance became law. Companies with significant city contracts would have to pay wages starting (in fiscal year 1996) at $6.10 per hour, increasing to $7.70 by 1999 and keeping pace with inflation thereafter. Gradually schools and other public agencies were included. Businesses receiving subsidies such as tax abatements from the city may eventually be covered.

These developments ignited parallel initiatives in other cities. A conservative thinktank, the Employment Policy Institute (EPI), keeps close tabs on living-wage initiatives around the country. By January 2001 -- only six years after the Baltimore campaign succeeded -- 155 living-wage initiatives had been put forward; 59 of these had been enacted and 12 defeated, 17 were actively pending and 67 were dormant. Only seven states did not have at least some city or county proposals, and at least two were considering statewide living-wage plans.

These victories have had an important impact on low-wage workers in dozens of cities around the country. A woman working for a janitorial firm servicing the Baltimore World Trade Center says she now can buy clothes from a regular store instead of Goodwill and pay for the basic repairs on her house rather than watch it deteriorate. Equally important, living-wage work has shifted the terms of public debate. In Baltimore even conservative politicians and advocates have adopted the living-wage framework. Developers pitch their plans partly in terms of the number of "living wage" jobs that they will create. The beginnings of statewide initiatives are a sign of the political impact this model is having, and there is talk of launching federal initiatives.

Some social critics fear that any connection between faith and politics is liable to undermine democracy. The projects I have observed, however, are no more likely than secular groups to be strident, intolerant or sectarian. Organizing activists are deeply committed to democratic values. They want to give all Americans the chance to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. They have no interest in using politics to impose a narrow religious or moral agenda on others. Furthermore, organizers generally take care to translate their proposals into the secular political language of American democracy or of human rights.

The strong Catholic influence on organizing probably helps. Catholic social thought’s conception of human rights is similar to the secular world’s. Contemporary church teachings on economic issues are close to those of European social democrats -- most of whom are ardent secularists. The tradition of natural theology so central to Catholicism means that conclusions based on revelation and those stemming from secular reason and empirical evidence are expected to converge.

Organizing activism also responds to and even enhances religious commitments. The church-people who work in local organizing projects are more committed to their faith and congregations than to organizing. If they found that organizing "used" the churches or put a religious fig leaf over a secular political agenda, they would desert the organizing projects. Instead, the stories they tell about their experiences in organizing emphasize that their spiritual lives deepen as they become more politically engaged.

One of the key leaders of PACT told me that she chose to work in the organization as a form of prayer, a thanksgiving to God for the return to wholeness of her daughter after a three-year crisis. She reports that she has learned how to fight constructively, and become an effective actor in public life. But she adds, "I got responded to because of my praying. Whereas I was doing religion before, to me it’s now faith, it’s a more personal thing with God."

Within the religious community, contemporary organizing has seldom been divisive. Issues that would set denominations against each other, such as abortion, are studiously avoided. The issues that local groups tackle and the positions they take are determined by a deliberate, participatory process. Even those who disagree with the outcome respect it. The experience of MICAH shows the result: even though the organization has adopted controversial positions, not a single congregation has dropped out.

Although one sometimes hears shrill rhetoric, organizing leaders work to avoid polarization and to build community. "No permanent allies, no permanent enemies" is a basic organizing precept. Some organizers even banish the term "enemy," speaking only of "targets." Organizing activism aspires to strengthen the web of voluntary associations that support families and communities. It emphasizes building public relationships that broaden the possibilities for cooperation even in the face of political disagreements, cultural differences and divergent interests.

At a time when political developments in Washington are generally discouraging to advocates for economic justice, faith-based organizing shows the enormous potentials found in grass-roots America and particularly in the rich web of religious communities. Organizing contributes to the formation of public policy and the development of an engaged citizenry. When done well which it is most of the time -- it links religious and political commitments in a way that enhances democracy, social justice and American religious life.

No Way Out (Luke 16:19-31)

In Jesus’ story of the rich man and Lazarus there is no wiggle room. Deeds are done and lives led, and there are consequences for each of the three characters -- the rich man, Lazarus and Father Abraham. No matter what each of them wishes, desires or hopes, the matter is finished. It turns out that the rich man, not having shared with Lazarus while he begged at the gate of the house, is stuck in hell, thirsty. Lazarus cannot reach over to him and share even a drop of water. And Father Abraham, not very impressed by the rich man in the first place, seems to relish telling him off at the end. No, there is no wiggle room here. Such is life; or in this case, such is death.

We are told that we reap what we sow, and that what goes round comes round, and this is not easy news to hear. Sometimes it is painful news, at other times it seems so much a forgone conclusion as to be only a cliché If the story had ended with Abraham telling the rich man that Lazarus wasn’t fetching water because things were working out the way they were supposed to -- and besides, it couldn’t be done even if they wished to -- we would yawn and move on.

Jesus, however, has not given us a morality play in which things work out in a tidy way, with justice for the good and punishment for the bad. He is up to something more important. In this story we have the making of a tragedy, and tragedy is closer to the truth of the gospel than any morality play. What is deeply troubling about tragedy is that it involves more than our individual will to action, or our intellects; it involves character flaws so grave that they permeate the actions of complete families and whole communities.

The rich man doesn’t get it: it is not that he screwed up by not helping Lazarus while they were both alive; rather it is that he could not hear, or did not listen to, Moses and the prophets, who had a lot to say about justice, the poor and those in need. He had what Jesus in other contexts calls "hardness of heart," echoing the Hebrew sense that one’s ability to have empathy for the poor and a preference for justice could be "locked up." Locking up mercy and justice affects not just the rich man, but everyone in the story. Father Abraham is put out with the rich man. Lazarus is powerless to act, even in heaven. Hardness of heart has wounded everyone in sight.

Sometimes the biblical witness is not pretty. In this case, one person is rotting in hell, the second is living it up in the heavenly city, and the third is telling it like it is. But nothing changes, even after death. The rich man seems not to have practiced mercy in his relationships while he was alive, so why should we expect that he should suddenly catch on and be saved? Indeed, Jesus makes it clear that the rich man does not understand, even in Hades. There he asks for mercy, but not forgiveness. He asks for water, but not life.

To his credit, the rich man seems to care for his kin. He believes his brothers share his diminished abilities and he thinks a sound knock on the side of the head from someone reporting in from beyond death might bring them all around. He is wrong. In a succinct and blunt way, Father Abraham dismisses such hope. "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."

The tragic flaw in all this is that the rich man suffers from a deep spiritual deafness, an inability to hear and listen to the call for mercy and justice, or even the practical plea for just plain bread and some salve for the sores the dogs lick. His heart is hardened. Everything else in this drama is the unwinding of that fact.

As with any good tragedy the effect transfers to us, the audience. We see the tragic flaw in the rich man and recognize our own inability or unwillingness to hear and listen to God’s word as it finds its way to us. We see our own hardness of heart in the behavior of the rich man and in Abraham and Lazarus as well, who seem disinterested in the plight of the five brothers and of the rich man. (Perhaps they are disinterested because they know they can do nothing.)

About this business of being convinced if someone should rise from the dead: We Christians do have someone who has risen from the dead, Jesus Christ. So it would appear that this small tragedy is not so small after all, for it suggests that if we are too hard of heart to hear Moses and the prophets, then the resurrection is not going to make things better. For those whose hearts are open, the resurrection is a wonderful gift; for those whose hearts are closed, the resurrection is a millstone.

This is one of those times when the sin of pride hits the church and the faithful with particular force. Too often we think the resurrection is proof that we Christians are on the right track -- that believing in the resurrection is going to make everything come out all right. But don’t be too sure. If our hearts are closed to hearing the cry for justice, mercy and bread, the words of the resurrected One will not be convincing, but convicting.