Book Review:
Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. By Eric Schlosser. Houghton Mifflin, 310 pp.
What do migrant strawberry pickers, marijuana growers and Internet pornography users have in common? According to Eric Schlosser, they are all part of America’s black market economy, a massive system that contributes little to the tax base but keeps many Americans in business.
Schlosser, who skewered the meat industry in Fast Food Nation, takes a look at what Americans spend money on, and why or how they hide it. He begins by examining the growing of marijuana, a crop he believes is the nations second largest after soy beans. Americans smoke more marijuana and imprison more people for marijuana possession than any other nation in the industrialized West. Schlosser, in this his strongest and longest section, takes a point of view: the imprisonment of nonviolent drug dealers is not winning the drug war; and massive injustices are committed in sentencing.
In a system that rewards those arrestees who can turn in others, the ones at the bottom of the system are often the ones who get the most severe punishments, since they have few resources and little information to trade. Mandatory minimum sentences mean that the "mule," who acts as a delivery person, is punished with the same severity as the person financing the entire deal. And any goal of uniformity falls apart in the differences between state and federal practices. Schlosser describes a capricious system in which a Michigan resident caught with the amount of marijuana found in one large joint is prosecuted in federal court and receives a sentence of 14 months in jail, whereas the penalty from a state court would be only a $100 fine.
Furthermore, those with access to private lawyers are treated very differently from the poor. Strange laws allow the government to seize the property of those who deal in drugs -- with erratic enforcement and results. In one extraordinary story from Glastonbury, Connecticut, a federal prosecutor known as the Forfeiture Queen seized the home of grandparents in their 80s, who had owned their home for 40 years, after their 22-year-old resident grandson was caught selling marijuana. Prosecutor Leslie Ohta argued that the grandparents should have been aware of what was happening in their home. But when Ohta’s own 18-year-old son was caught selling drugs from his mother’s Chevrolet Blazer as well as from home, Ohta’s family lost neither the car nor the home.
The strict enforcement of increasingly tough drug laws has resulted in a massive federal prison population that grows by 10,000 a year; while prisons grow more dangerous, overcrowded and less likely to be places of rehabilitation. Schlosser’s stories of young men who go to jail for growing marijuana in between their rows of corn put a human face on the drug traders who, it turns out, look much less like the South American drug lords in the action movies and a lot more like struggling farmers.
Underground economies are nothing new in American history. Schlosser reminds us that the prohibition of alcohol from 1920 to 1933 led to the growth of organized crime and the rise of an underground economy that constituted about 5 percent of the gross national product. Later, during wartime rationing, 5 percent of the country’s gasoline and 20 percent of its meat were purchased through the black market, so that by the end of the war; he estimates, Americans were not reporting 15 percent of their incomes. Strict laws and government control, often encouraged by churches, have a history not of thwarting the use of forbidden products but of driving that use underground and pulling those profits out of the tax base.
When other countries copy us, the results seem similar. In the drug war; England has followed America into positions that put it at odds with the rest of Europe. So today, despite having the most punitive marijuana laws in Europe, England also records the highest use among young people -- higher than the Dutch, who can buy marijuana legally in a government-approved coffee house.
Americans seem to have two faces on the marijuana issue, We use privately, and we criticize publicly. But the tide maybe turning on the issue. Since 1998 Americans in eight states have voted to permit the medical use of marijuana. Decriminalization, long associated with the liberal left, now has its conservative supporters, including William F. Buckley and former Secretary of State George Shultz. A recent poll found that 67 percent of Americans oppose denying marijuana for medical use, and 81 oppose the arrest and imprisonment of nonviolent pot smokers.
"Drug abuse should be treated like alcoholism or nicotine addiction," Schlosser says, "These are health problems suffered by Americans of every race, creed and political affiliation, not grounds for imprisonment or the denial of property rights. A society that can punish a marijuana offender more severely than a murderer is caught in the grip of a deep psychosis."
While I wish that Schlosser had engaged the dangers of marijuana use more seriously, he acutely describes the dangers of the war on drugs. As a pastor; I have seen the effect of strict sentencing measures on families of young people who have made a bad mistake and been caught. For the most part I see the legal system ensnaring young users in a justice system more successful in hardening criminals than reforming them. Furthermore, the maze of drug testing may catch someone who got high on vacation three weeks ago, but not, someone who drives the school bus while drunk. The churches should have a voice in this debate, since they are often part of cleaning up the mess that "reefer madness" leaves behind.
Compared to marijuana, strawberries seem like a wholesome crop, but the strawberry fields have their own shadowy story. The strawberry is "risky and expensive to grow but it can yield more revenue per acre than virtually any other crop except marijuana," Schlosser says, reminding us that "nearly every fruit and vegetable found in the diet of health-conscious, often high-minded consumers is still picked by hand." In this case, the strawberry industry seems to bite the hand that feeds it.
Growers can most efficiently cut their costs by under-paying workers or simply keeping them off the books. The enormous numbers of illegal immigrants who do the picking are unlikely to report their bosses’ abuse to the IRS or the Labor Department. The fruits of immigrants’ labor go to the large growers, while the pickers’ economic life rots.
Is there no upward mobility for farm workers? Schlosser exposes the false promises of sharecropping, in which a middle-aged picker might be invited by the grower to become a "partner" or a "farmer." These sharecroppers end up as unfortunate middle men, who no longer receive wages but instead are promised a share of profits that may never materialize. They also assume debt and responsibility for the hiring and legal status of their workers, thus shielding the companies.
A picker named Felipe who turned sharecropper ended up after 16 years $50,000 in debt to the grower and $5,000 in debt to the IRS. He told Schlosser he is ready to return to picking, saying. "They use us all as slaves." While some sharecroppers earn enough to become growers themselves, others end up making less than they would as farm workers paid minimum wage.
For those who want to eat strawberries in good conscience, Schlosser commends the working conditions at Driscoll, Naturipe, Sweet Darling, CalBeri and Coastal Berry. Returning to his old chomping ground of Fast Food Nation, he reminds us that healthy choices in eating for individuals should be healthy for the community as well. Not all growers treat their workers poorly, but as long as some do, as long as immigrants are exploited. underpaid and kept off the books, we should all be watching what we eat.
In the book’s final section, Schlosser turns from watching what we eat to watching what we watch. Again he focuses on the American heartland. He tells the story of Reuben Sturman, a Cleveland comic book salesman and son of Russian immigrant grocers, who built such a fortune through discreetly wrapped mail-order products that at one point he controlled the pornography industry.
In the 1970s Sturman lived in a mansion in Shaker Heights, dressed like a banker and was honored by the YMCA. In the end, it was not obscenity laws that got him into trouble but the black market. The IRS discovered a host of hidden Swiss bank accounts. After decades of investigation and trials, in 1992 Sturman finally went to jail where he died alone, having recognized decades earlier with his mail order business what today’s Internet pornographers have grasped so well: In a society that publicly punishes obscenity, as pornography becomes easier and more anonymously attainable, people’s appetite for it will grow as will the profits.
Referring to another famous porn entrepreneur, Schlosser writes, "Larry Flynt imagines a future in which the television set and the computer will have merged. Americans will still lie in bed, he told me, cruising the Internet with their remote controls and ordering hard-core films at the push of a button. . . . In Flynt’s view the Internet would combine the video store’s diversity of choice with the privacy of buying through the mail."
Though Schlosser usually writes out of a deep sense of right and wrong, even as he uses humor and subtlety to make his points, he steps back from any kind of moral judgment on pornography. Instead he takes us into the lives of purveyors, as if to show that they are just like us, When he considers the critics of pornography, it is generally to show that they are hypocrites like Father Bruce Bitter; whose campaign against homosexuality fell apart when his own penchant for male prostitutes was exposed. While Schlosser’s footnotes refer to a number of feminist critiques of the sex industry, his text does not. For someone who writes so energetically about the exploitation of strawberry pickers, his account of work in the sex industry is surprisingly tepid.
Missing from this book is the story of a compassionate character who questions the morality of pornography, or of a consumer whose life has suffered as a result of pornography use, not just its prosecution. Schlosser treats pornography as he does marijuana: he doesn’t investigate the long-term health effects. (Many people can do that for themselves in the plethora of personal stories about crushing dependencies and secret obsessions.)
While Schlosser may shy away from a moral stand on pornography, he does a good job of pointing out the enormous growth of this black market. A 2000 survey found that 31.9 percent of American men and 10.5 percent of women had visited a sexually oriented Web site. A Christianity Today poll that same year revealed that 27 percent of U.S. pastors sought out Internet porn from "a few times a year" to "a couple of times a month or more."
"The current demand for marijuana and pornography is deeply revealing," Schlosser opines. "Here are two commodities that Americans publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing amounts." While the Bush administration has moved toward stronger enforcement of obscenity laws, in many cases led by conservative Christians, Flynt, the contrarian Penthouse publisher; delights in the obscenity laws. According to Schlosser, Flynt predicts that if obscenity laws were ever overturned, "the amount of hardcore material would skyrocket but not for long. Once the taboo is lifted, once porn loses the aura of a forbidden vice, people will gradually lose interest in it. After a huge rise in popularity, Flynt argues, ‘the whole bottom would drop out of the porn market."'
Flynt’s prediction seems to have some historical precedent. When Denmark rescinded obscenity laws in 1969, consumption rose at first but a steady decline has occurred ever since. Porn sales have remained high in the capital city, Copenhagen, but those sales are attributed mostly to foreigners. When Danes were surveyed after the rescinding of obscenity laws and after the wave of purchasing had peaked, a study found that most citizens thought of porn as either "repulsive" or "uninteresting." "The most common immediate reaction to a one-hour pornography simulation," a Danish researcher reported, "was boredom."
Schlosser ends this section by noting that early Christianity challenged the Roman world’s obsession with both sex and violence. For 2,000 years, he claims, the West has wrestled with two rival views of the body, a tension between pagan and Christian traditions. "But the old systems of moral authority have been replaced by a new one. The rules that govern sexual behavior are no longer determined by the pronouncements of Stoic philosophers, high priests, martyrs and saints. Democracy has increasingly granted freedom of choice in matters of sexuality, while the free market ministers to consumer taste."
The saints and martyrs may not dictate behaviors today, but the tradition that shaped them can still shape us. Regarding the morality of the pornography industry, a topic on which Schlosser takes a pass, the church has plenty of ground upon which to step up and offer a different vision of sexuality. The Christian tradition of seeking Justice for the oppressed surely includes those who are vulnerable and exploited in the sex trade as well as those in the strawberry fields. And while some pastors may be logging on to Internet porn, pastors also hear the sad stories of relationships wrenched out of their roots when one partner lusts after those images that are so slickly marketed as harmless fun.
Each Sunday when we gather; we hear texts and find rich sources with which to address these black market economies. If Christians are to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves, some of that wise innocence may be used to critique what the market is selling, to expose its false promises and to return to practices of faith that offer more.
The 5 to 20 percent of our economy that cannot be officially accounted for is indeed worth examining for what it says about Americans. "If you truly want to know a person, you need to look beyond the public face, the jobs on the resume, the books on the shelves, the family pictures on the desk." Schlosser says. "You may learn more from what’s hidden in the drawer. There is always more to us than we will admit."
People of faith might respond that there is always more to us than what is hidden in the drawer as well. As people who believe in repentance and grace, knowledge of the black market doesn’t have to leave us only discouraged. For Christians, a frank look at the world’s wounds is always a shot at new life.
Book Review:
The Good of Affluence: Seeking God in a Culture of Wealth.
By John R. Schneider Eerdmans, 233 pp.
The Consuming Passion: Christianity and the Consumer Culture.
Edited by Rodney Clapp. InterVarsity, 223 pp.
Ministry and Money: A Guide for Clergy and their Friends.
By Dan Hotchkiss. Alban Institute, 134 pp.
In my congregation the choir saves its biggest anthem for the collection of the weekly offering, and I sometimes suspect that the anthem is there not to draw attention to the offering but to distract us from it. The offering plates are passed apologetically, as people try not to see what others have put in. When the plates are brought to the altar, the prayers of thanksgiving praise God for many things but seldom for the dollars and cents in the plates, which are then carried to a tiny shelf behind the organ, out of sight.
That shelf was actually part of the architectural plans for the church, and the congregation prided itself on the theological view behind it: the money must be whisked away because it would soil or sully the communion table. Maybe someday we’ll install a dumbwaiter next to the altar to get that money out of sight even faster.
When I arrived at the church, the memory of church splits made me wary of speaking about money for fear of appearing to sing for my supper to a crowd that wasn’t much interested in cooking. Yet that fear was overcome by my conviction that unease about money lies at the heart of many congregations’ paralysis when it comes to proclaiming the gospel. Money mattered to Jesus, to Paul and to the prophets, and it ought to matter to the church. It is in its attitude toward money that the church is most likely to conform to the ways of the world rather than to transcend them.
John Schneider, a professor of religion and theology at Calvin College, wants to take money not only off the shelf but out of the doghouse as well. Schneider contends that Christians too long have been critical of wealth. "I strongly challenge the widely held belief that the world-shrinking effects of globalism generate strong obligations for any wealthy person in an advanced society to any poor person in an undeveloped one." Modern capitalism, Schneider maintains, has not been treated fairly by Christians. Schneider considers capitalism a very recent phenomenon that until World War I existed only in England and the U.S. Since then, "twenty-five nations have successfully re-ordered their economies on the lines of modern capitalism. . . . They have done nothing less than eliminate material poverty as a significant problem in their societies."
For those who live in cities like my own New Haven, which has the highest public school class size and infant mortality rate in the state, Schneider’s snapshot of the world is out of focus. His focus is intentionally on the affluent, who, he believes, are too quickly dismissed by Christian thinkers. He turns to secular works like Dinesh D’Souza’s Virtue of Prosperity to support his view that, since poor Americans have access to such things as televisions, microwaves and super-sized fast food, inequalities between the rich and the poor are no longer a problem. Though the rich may be getting richer, the poor aren’t starving. But those who follow secular economic debates know that quoting D’Souza on poverty is like quoting Phyllis Schlafly on women’s rights.
Schneider’s book is actually a revised edition of his previous Godly Materialism: Rethinking Money and Possessions, a book that he hopes will continue to be read as an antidote to Ronald J. Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and similar books that have called capitalism to account. Since "ours is not a culture that contains affluence, but is a culture of affluence," how do we help rich Christians deal with those hurtful slights against the rich that dot scripture and Christian history?
Schneider offers hope to the unappreciated affluent by presenting them with a savvy, networking, middle-class Jesus who "did not adopt a life of poverty, but rather called his disciples out of the ordinary world and into a community of celebration." As for all those parables about money and things, they "call Christians not to become poor (as is commonly thought) but to be wealthy in the right way."
While Schneider argues that many of the Bible’s words about the poor do not apply to us directly, since modern capitalism is a new phenomenon, his investigations into New Testament culture reveal that the poor didn’t have it so bad then either. "The peasantry was not always on the losing end of things," he explains. "Manipulated inflation (price fixing) by the rich actually created better prices for poorer landowners simply by artificially raising the prices for their commodities." This is biblical times? Sounds like a conversation at the country club. Schneider also points out that by spending time with publicans and tax collectors, Jesus indicates an acceptance not just of them as people, but of their money-making lifestyles as well. (He does not venture a similar argument about prostitutes.)
Schneider explains that "the condition of affluence in advanced societies is good in the same way that conditions in Eden, the Promised Land and the Messianic Banquet are said to be good . . . in the potential they have for human flourishing." Last time I checked, we got thrown out of the Garden of Eden for this sort of arrogance.
Schneider seeks to address real people -- people like Janet Wills, CEO of an investment firm whose Christian clients "have become wealthy beyond their imaginings during the past decade of growth in the stock market" and then wondered "what it all means." Lacking in Schneider’s project is a thoughtful theological response to the worker whose layoff contributed to those extraordinary stock market returns, and who now stands in the unemployment line wondering what that means.
Positioning himself between the "wealth-negative premise of radical Christianity" and the simple equating of faith and money of the "Prosperity Gospel," Schneider points to God’s providence. He quotes Michael Novak; "We are going to see a spiritual revival in this country and it’s going to be led by rich people." Just what the American church needs -- another fearless defender of the overdog.
Rodney Clapp’s volume offers a much wider sense of the spectrum of Christian debate and places Schneider in context. Editor Clapp minds us that "consumerism . . . is not a force of nature. . . . People can respond to it and potentially change its course.
Bill McKibben comments on the joys of promoting a $100 Christmas among United Methodists. He worries about the spread of the American way of shopping. "We need to put God at the center. Then we need to realize that this involves more than the smug announcement that we have done so. . . . . We must share our bounty with the rest of the world, finding somewhere a middle ground so they do not follow our path to consumer development."
McKibben’s caution is backed up by David Myers, a professor of psychology at Hope College, who states that while "wealth, like income, has been flooding upward, not trickling down," we as a nation are growing more unhappy and depressed. Myers writes about the bad side of affluence. Apparently too much money may buy a supersized case of the blues. "Today’s youth and young adults have grown up with much more affluence, slightly less overall happiness, much greater risk of depression, and a tripled teen suicide rate. Never has a culture experienced such physical comfort combined with such psychological misery. Never have we felt so free or had our prisons so overstuffed. Never have we been so sophisticated about pleasure or so likely to suffer broken relationships."
As Clapp sees it, consumption "provides an abundantly stocked pantry but a lousy way of life." Clapp lays some of the blame on 19th-century Protestants and the explosion of Christian publishing. People stopped savoring one book and instead longed for more quick reads, thus feeding the habit of addictive buying and consumption.
Some are uneasy with the notion of a networking Jesus who justifies capitalism, yet are also unconvinced that Jesus sits in an egalitarian heaven plotting the communist revolution. The Alban Institute has produced a solid volume aimed at Christians who walk this middle way. Dan Hotchkiss addresses a common fruit of the American Christian’s engagement with money: ambivalence. A Unitarian Universalist pastor who consults with churches and synagogues on fund raising, Hotchkiss would agree with Schneider on one point: that the church is confused about money, and that clergy give mixed or muted messages about it. Hotchkiss gets the money off the shelf, counts it, rolls up the pennies and tells church folk to get real. He talks straight to ordinary Christians who look for Jesus in a materialistic world where paychecks run out before payday.
According to Hotchkiss, some of the greatest confusion about money lies in the hearts of clergy. They ought to be guiding, but tend instead to follow a culture that holds them in thrall or in disabling debt. Hotchkiss writes like a beloved uncle giving advice from his comfortable old recliner. Make yourselves a budget, he tells clergy, who tell newlyweds to do it but don’t do it themselves. Understand money as a spiritual challenge in your own life, and then don’t be afraid to preach on it.
As one who gets called into congregations when people are at the height of their money confusion, Hotchkiss understands the lives of worshipers rich, poor and mostly in between. Covering everything from how to produce a treasurers report that church members can actually understand, to advocating lust salaries for support staff, to explaining how market theory affects clergy salaries, he is not afraid to name the inequalities.
"When my mother started as a church musician in 1953, no one doubted that hers was a ‘second income.’ As I write, she is preparing the church for the ‘sticker shock’ they will experience when she retires and they try to hire someone with comparable skills. It is a transition many congregations will need to face if they are going to succeed in a new century." This may not be the voice of radical Christianity, but it is a voice that reminds us that how we use our money; in affluence or poverty, matters to God and shapes God’s church.
As different as these books are in scope and style, they remind us that wrestling with money theologically is a mark of excellent ministry. Each week in worship we engage the words of scripture as they engage money through the eyes of the One who provides for us in more ultimate ways. Scripture also reminds us of the biblical tensions: while we may all wrestle with questions of economic justice, we don’t all do so in the same way.
Many of Jesus’ words were directed to those at the bottom of the economic ladder, but comparatively few of the average preacher’s words move in that direction. How many of us have heard pastors speak about helping people "cope with the problem" of materialism in those upper-class churches that invariably describe themselves as middle class? Even the language of "coping" implies that materialism is better addressed by therapy and understanding than by repentance and redemption.
Similarly, imagine how the great prophets of the Old Testament would react to the trendy adult education topic: "affluenza." This use of a euphemism for the sin of greed would make Amos sick. Here’s a modern cure for affluenza: try working at Wal-Mart. While reflections on the disease of affluenza might compel the wealthy to live more simply, how much do the poor actually benefit when the wealthy clean out their closets?
Yet in poorer congregations, where affluenza is a disease impoverished members might love to catch, is money addressed any more responsibly? Preachers who promise financial prosperity to the faithful still attract members who have been beaten down by an unjust economy. The best-selling book The Prayer of Jabez and its ubiquitous spawn (what’s next? The Prayer of Jabez for Middle Managers with Migraines?), while encouraging prayer, mostly encourage enlarging one’s territory.
A home built in Honduras is certainly a blessing to those who will live in it and to those who go there and build it. But do these blessings distract or absolve us from a clear analysis of injustice in our backyards? In my own church, we raise money to send our youth away to do mission work, while the homeless are living in a tent city on the New Haven green. Are our mission trips another version of that little offertory shelf behind our organ?
In the end, engaging money theologically should inevitably lead to practicing one’s faith differently. If a mission trip abroad is thoughtfully and theologically interpreted, it can open our hearts to more than sentiment and can transform our practices. We may return to our churches with a different vision of hospitality, in the same way that serving a meal at a soup kitchen can bring us back to our own kitchen tables with deeper insight. But thus far, the current trend of taking mission trips to poor areas of the world does not appear to be radically shifting the balance of power back home, any more than considering the ‘poor children in China" while cleaning one’s plate actually feeds them.
The mark of excellence in engaging money theologically is that we are transformed not just individually, not just as churches, but as communities. As helpful (and comforting) as it is to send school backpacks and medical supplies to Afghan children, we are not excused from pointing out that the end of war would help these children more.
There are dangers in engaging the subject of how money works in the world. In our enthusiasm, we might put our faith in systems rather than in God and leave the power of our prophetic tradition behind. Or we might succumb to world-weary cynicism and the hopelessness which turns us inward. But God in Christ predicted these struggles through his life and death.
Countless saints before us have striven for justice in the world of money and called the church to account, whether for selling indulgences in Italy, selling pews in New England or selling salvation on cable TV. While those brave Christians have not transformed our unkind world into the kingdom of God, they have trusted that they were part of a long and powerful divine history and of a victory won for us on the cross.
The church I served in New Haven had a moment at the beginning of worship when anyone could come forward to make an announcement. People had a love-hate relationship with this time. On the one hand, it was a chance to see the diverse vitality of the congregation and to match a face and a name. For newcomers, it was a wonderful introduction to the strong lay leaders of our church. On the other hand, announcements could become long and tedious and interrupt worship. Some announcements overwhelmed the listener with details or referred to events only one or two people might be interested in.
Apart from noticing this ongoing struggle with the announcements, I noticed something else. People who could have taken 30 seconds to say where and when a meeting was going to be held were getting up and sharing anecdotes. People were using the announcements to tell stories, to tell one another something about themselves and their faith.
In talking about the next community organizing event, a person might testify to the power of the previous one and the beauty of seeing people of faith together. In announcing an adult education opportunity, someone might speak first about how it was adult education that drew him into deeper community. In general, few people minded these announcements; in fact, they generated conversation and strengthened community. But as the announcements grew more creative, they introduced an unpredictability to worship, especially regarding the length of the service.
I began noticing how other opportunities for unplanned congregational input were being used. Prayer requests were turning into small testimonies. We were hearing more background information about the prayer requests, and stories about prayers that were answered.
People offered their prayer requests from the pews, and the ministers would report back to the congregation the gist of what had been said, using the pulpit microphone. Much was lost in the summary. People complained that they wished they could hear the stories from the speaker, but the layout and acoustics of the church made this impossible.
We could have encouraged people to come forward to the lectern so they could be heard, but there were too many prayer requests each week to make this feasible. I wondered if we could occasionally single people out and ask them to prepare a few remarks.
During this time, there was one member who had a tradition of giving a lengthy and beautifully crafted testimony each year on his mother’s birthday. The anniversary of his mother’s death would lead him to talk about lessons she had taught him about faith and life. I came to expect that he would speak on such occasions, and I allowed time for it. Since his remarks were well prepared, like a mini-sermon, I asked him to speak from the lectern rather than the floor.
Meanwhile, I heard people saying that they looked forward to stewardship season because at that time members offered short reflections, called "giving moments," about their walk with God in the life of our church. Sometimes the remarks were funny. Sometimes people cried. "I love stewardship season because I get so excited about what people will say," one member said.
While probably no one would use the word testimony for these kinds of speeches, I sensed that our congregation was in fact hungry for the practice of testimony. I presented the idea to the deacons, who agreed.
We wanted to introduce the practice in a way that honored our church’s culture. The deacons came up with the phrase "Lenten Reflections," sensing that these were words the congregation would understand. We invited five people we had not heard from before to prepare something for a Sunday service during Lent.
As pastor, I laid down just one rule: Lenten reflections must not be godless. If this was to be a Christian practice, our testimony was accountable to the tradition of Christian testimony itself. What could we testify to on Sunday morning that we could not just as easily testify to on National Public Radio? I didn’t want Lenten reflections on "all the good that civic-minded people can accomplish when they work together,’ or "why New Haven needs a stronger living wage ordinance," or ‘what I have learned about myself in psychotherapy." But as long as God was part of the reflection, those things could be too.
Trusting that God would be in this, I tried to keep myself, as pastor, out of it. When members offered to show me their reflections beforehand, I told them that I trusted them and would prefer to hear them with the rest of the congregation.
But what if someone were to stand up and offer a cruel or crazy vision? What if someone were to use the moment to air a grudge or propose an agenda that reflected poorly on the church?
Testimony is a risky practice, but if it is a regular one, you can rest assured that the following Sunday someone will set forth a different vision. It takes a confident church to introduce testimony, I suspect -- one willing to face the unpredictable and to release some control. But it is in the very release of control that the blessings come.
Churches can easily become places where control and order shut out spontaneity. Worship that seeks to be comforting in its ritual can become boring, especially when the only creative voice comes from the pastoral staff week after week. At our church, testimony opened worship up. Used to being in control, I longed to be surprised myself.
Just as hearing testimony is risky, giving testimony is risky. We open ourselves up to be known by our community of faith in deeper ways. What if someone does not care for your words? What if people end up feeling distant from you rather than closer? Not everyone will want to take this risk, nor should everyone be expected to. I would resist a practice in which people are forced to give testimony as a requirement for joining the church or to serve in leadership. Testimony should be offered as a gift. It should be freely given, albeit with an occasional bit of begging or prodding.
People seem to understand that even when the words of a testimony do not connect to them, they are still a precious gift to be handled with care. With testimony, the listener plays as important a role as the speaker.
Over and over people told me that testimony was opening up our church, creating excitement not only in worship but in the coffee-hour discussions as well. We were making new friends, hearing new stories of faith, being awakened by the Word.
A member named David commented: "I think the practice of testimony has been an important part of the revitalization of our congregation." Many church members echoed this theme. Newcomers often commented on what they learned from the testimonies about our history and about where the church was headed. This feature added an element of anticipation to worship and helped us to grow deeper in our relationships with one another. David continued:
For each of us who have participated, the reflection and clarification has been a transforming experience in itself. For the worship service, it creates an atmosphere of openness and trust, and a sense of personal connection. It also reflects the diversity of our congregation: although we are inspired by those who have gone before, there is no pattern to the nature of testimony, no sense that there is an expectation of a right way to do it, just a recognition that each story is part of the fabric.
That recognition, "that each story is part of the fabric" of the larger story of faith, is what pastors are forever trying to put across in their preaching. We hope that when we tell Bible stories, we are calling people into the larger story of God. In an individualistic culture, preachers struggle to remind people that we are part of a salvation history that is much larger than any one individual experience. Testimony showed us that all the time.
In hearing the variety of testimonies, we began to see the connections among them. We saw that while the person might talk about her grandfather’s love of the Bible and another person might talk about ugly neckties, in the end they were pointing to the one true God. If all these stories in their variety could be connected to one church and one God, surely we were all connected to the God of history and to one another.
I wonder if people make these connections more easily when they hear from another layperson, one whom they cannot presume to be some sort of super-Christian. People expect the pastor to speak of faith and make a connection to the larger story. They get used to the pastor’s ideas and ways of speaking. When laypeople speak, those in the pews hear the same story told in many ways, and can imagine where their own story might fit in God’s history.
When we are exposed to a variety of faith stories, we may more readily accept the wideness of God’s mercy, or as David put it, realize that there is no one "right way to do it, just a recognition that each story is part of the fabric." Listening to testimony helps us to find our thread in God’s fabric and to know that we are never alone in our journey. We are called to live as disciples, calling one another into the walk with Christ in the world. Testimonies call us into new ways of living.
Many of those who spoke in church were already leaders in the congregation, but it seemed that after giving testimony, they stepped up their leadership. Sometimes they volunteered for a new ministry or showed new enthusiasm for a church project. They became more likely to speak up at meetings and to offer their voice on issues facing the congregation. By making themselves known through their testimonies, they found they suddenly had more relationships in the congregation. Leaders who were already relational became more so, and people with few relationships built more. We also saw people beginning to wonder if they were called to serve the church as pastors. As people heard others’ calls to ministry, they started to examine their own calls more seriously.
At the opening gathering during my first year at Yale Divinity School, the new students met in the beautiful chapel, with its tall ceilings and clear congregational-style windows. Someone smartly bearded told us how lucky we were to be there. Meanwhile, in the old refectory with its paintings of various dignitaries on the walls, the university’s unionized workers were gearing up for yet another contract fight.
The students had to prepare for the impact of a workers’ strike. There were grumblings about the dirt in the bathrooms. "Did you hear," a common complaint began, "that because of the union regulations, it takes three weeks to have an order processed to change a light bulb?" Some argued that the unions protected incompetent workers and thereby led to inefficiencies in the system. Those people didn’t seem bothered by inefficiencies created by the university’s tenure system.
In talking to the members of the union, another story came out: about how in the 1980s a group of secretaries, many of them single mothers -- an identity that challenged the notion that the secretaries were working at Yale for pin money -- had stood alongside the grounds and maintenance workers, the dining hall workers, the cooks and the plumbers, who went on strike so that the clerical workers union might be formed.
At Yale, the struggles between management and workers looked like an allegory of what was happening across the American economy, as towns like New Haven which had lost their manufacturing base found themselves tossing upon the erratic waves of a service economy. Yale was the company in this company town.
Most of us had come to the divinity school not with the idea that we would rule the world, but out of desire to serve. As we struggled with our vocations, whether to enter parish ministry of the world of social work, whether to continue on for a Ph.D. or to pursue a pastoral life that fed and built the intellect, we also wrestled with personal struggles, like whether a marriage could be saved, or whether the denomination we had been raised in was the one we were called to stay in.
Amidst these vocational dilemmas,, the Yale workers also asked questions about a calling. Were they called to go out on strike, to sacrifice pay, to picket and march in front of their workplace while their bosses, or even co-workers, went inside to work? Among the workers, as among the students, individual stories ran up against one another and sometimes clashed.
Whose hardship could justify stepping away from the strike, a strike that would, if history proved right, end up providing all the workers, including those who had crossed the picket line, with a better standard of living? It was often the workers whose stories seemed the hardest who were most willing to strike. They spoke of future generations, perhaps their children, who would work at Yale and of how they saw themselves as part of something larger than themselves. Questions of calling were being played out among people who in some cases pieced together two or three part-time jobs, and who, with less time for leisure and contemplation, were making ethical and moral decisions that rendered absurd our late-night conversations at the student coffee shop.
Still, we had our moral decisions too. For teachers and students, and for the graduate student teaching assistants who were organizing as well, the issue was whether, in the event of a strike, classes should be moved off campus, so that no one would be crossing a picket line.
The responses of classmates and teachers varied. Some argued that the work we were doing was of such importance that holding classes at a convenient time and place, the regular time and place on campus, trumped a struggle between workers and the university that would far outlast our time on campus. Yet in those very halls we were being taught that to be part of a story larger than our own should call forth vocation and prophecy, not cynicism.
Some argued that moving the classes would actually hurt the workers, since the classes would still be taking place. The union itself explicitly encouraged moving classes, so the students making that argument were standing in a long tradition of Yalies ready to speak on behalf of those who had not requested their advice. Another common theme was that the union was manipulating the workers, leading them to strike when it was not in their best interest. Stories of the hardship that striking workers would face were often told by those who had a vested interest in their not striking.
Yet over all, the divinity school was known as a place sympathetic to the workers, as well as to a variety of points of view. Some teachers and administrators simply made the decision to move classes. Often they leaned upon local churches -- or even a movie theater -- for classroom space, bringing about a lively town-gown partnership that ought to have been that strong in ordinary times.
Other teachers claimed to be sympathetic to the workers but waited for students to raise the issue. The power relationship between students and teachers was not as stark as that between workers and management, and so some students did raise their hands in class to argue that no one should cross the picket line. In these moments, it was as though the workers who cleaned the toilets, typed the syllabi and served the food suddenly burst into our curriculum.
After some decision had been made, often to meet on campus but to "respect the rights" of some students to miss the class, we were back to theological ethics, pastoral care or preaching. But it felt as though the Holy Spirit had suddenly turned up the volume knob on our sound systems; not only would the music be louder, but the static would be louder as well.
When I consider my experience of theological education, my mind and heart drift back to the moral and economic struggle between the workers and the management at Yale, a struggle that began long before I was a student there and continues to this day.
In the academy, where argument can so easily turn into a competitive sport, we momentarily bucked that trend with real conversations about real people. It prepared me for moments of chaotic conflict, prepared me for the beating heart of the ministry where there are no dispassionate analyses, only the passion of real life in God’s messy salvation story.
If the struggle were to be judged on the amount of air our lungs exhaled propelling our arguments, then the struggle was successful. But if it were to be judged by the percentage of classes moved, perhaps it was not.
Looking back, some numbers did matter. These were numbers that raised wages and increased pensions, so that perhaps more of New Haven’s children might grow up to attend schools like Yale. The results did matter, and only one whose life has never risen and fallen with the wage scale could think otherwise. But I like to believe that the air time mattered too, that even in those circular conversations we were being schooled and witnessed to in the faith.
One zinger thrown out every now and then in the heat of argument was this: "If you care so much about labor issues at Yale, you had better make sure that, when you are working in a small parish or a struggling nonprofit organization, you pay your workers what these workers are getting." This comparison of a small institution like the church down the street with the multibillion-dollar institution run by the Yale Corporation was followed by the exhortation, "I’d like to see you try!"
I suspect that the intended instruction was: "Stop trying here. Stop having the big fights so that when you face the little ones, they will feel so complicated that inaction will feel easier."
In any case, I have carried the Yale struggle with me. I always remember that our imperfect institutions, from the church to the academy, will be remembered not only by the lofty ideas of the luminaries at the top, but also by the dreams and visions of those at every rung of the economic ladder.
All of us are created in the image of God, but when we seek to move upwards together, that ladder may shake so much it threatens to toss us off, or break under the weight of our climbing. Christians follow a ladder shaker of the highest order, whose word reaches us not just from the yellowed notes that become sound in a lecture hall they have graced before, but from the anger of the picket lines where struggle is no stranger; nor should it be, in a world that has not yet been fully redeemed.
Now concerning the love of brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anyone write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another . . .
1 Thessalonians 4:9
I remember the quiet summer night when things changed between my neighbor John and me. We were sitting on his front steps, having a beer, watching our children run up and down the sidewalk, which was our usual routine as we waited for our spouses to come home. We were sitting there talking about nothing, when he ventured into new territory.
"I’m thinking I want my kids to go to church," he mumbled." I wondered if you knew anything about that Methodist church up the street from us."
The words came out of my mouth before I had thought them through. "What on earth are you talking about? Here you are in Congregationalist New England living across the street from a Congregationalist minister. Suddenly you wake up one morning, finally feeling religious, and you want to go visit the Methodists? Why wouldn’t you come to our church?"
"I don’t know," he said, staring out at the kids. "I guess I do want to try your church." I wondered if he had just made a nice save. "But I didn’t know how you’d feel about that."
But by then I was in work mode, not feeling mode. I saw a potential member for my church and zoomed in like a telemarketer on speed. Before John knew what had happened, he had agreed to come to church the next Sunday and was saved from his near brush with Methodism.
John and his kids stayed in our church. He became a leader in our community-organizing program and later a deacon. He has told me that his life is richer now. We’ve discussed tithing, salvation, communion rituals and politics, and now, as his minister, I know something about his nine-to-five work as well as his inner life.
But as for drinking a beer together on the front steps -- that passed away As pastor and parishioner we now had a relationship centered in a community. And we became items on one another’s to-do lists.
I wouldn’t trade the new relationship, but I do miss having someone to sit on the steps with. Looking back, I think I understand why John wanted to visit a church other than mine. Perhaps he saw what I did not see: that after we became pastor and parishioner, we would no longer just sit on the steps and talk about nothing.
Being in the ministry, where so much of my work is devoted to the building of relationships, I worry about losing the ability to just sit next to someone and talk about nothing. Evangelism has become a tart of my personality. Even when I try not to draw people to my church, they must see an invisible sign on my back, like the ones we stuck on unsuspecting victims in grade school saying, "Kick me here."
Ask me a question about religion, tell me about the nun who rapped your knuckles or the pastor who ran off with the music director, or the fact that you’re a vely spiritual person but you just don’t believe in organized religion, and I’ll start telling you about my church. I can’t help myself. So as I establish friendships outside the church, my friends join the church.
It is not happenstance that my family has had a membership at the Jewish Community Center. Proselytizing there would be rather bad form. I found that I could go to the gym there, eat at the snack bar, watch my kids run around and talk about nothing. Few people there knew that I was a minister, and I liked it that way. But I wonder if, in hiding out at the Jewish Community Center, I was ducking the hard questions.
I remember the debate in divinity school as to whether or not a minister could have real friendships within the congregation. Back then it seemed as though it would be simple. But the end of 2 Thessalonians 5:12 reads like a mass of contradictions that comes closer to the reality of Christian leadership. "But we appeal to you, brothers and sisters, to respect those who labor among you, and have charge of you in the Lord and admonish you; esteem them very highly in love because of their work."
The words respect, have charge of, esteem and work seem to imply a sense of being set apart. That distance is then unraveled by the intimacy of words like brothers and sisters, among you and in love.
I know that I have friends in my church. I am also aware that there are limits to those friendships, ways in which we are set apart from one another. The major focus of my life, my ministry, is a topic that is, for the most part, off limits. I must find other friends with whom to vent about the frustrations of work, from staff conflicts to the occasional vocational vacuums.
So for that reason, I have learned the value of friendships with other ministers: collegial friendships. Two months into my first ministry, at a lobotomizingly dull denominational gathering for new clergy, I caught the rolling eyes of two other women about my age. Since that day, every month we have met for lunch for the past eight years.
Together we have been through two ordinations, three births, two job changes, one wedding and a coming-out story. We have prayed for one another in hospitals and gone shopping together for interview suits. We disagree politically and theologically. We have radically different understandings of our calls. Yet nothing could have prepared me eight years and 96 lunches ago for the way in which God has used our friendship for both holy encouragement and prophetic correction.
When I served on my denomination’s subcommittee dealing with pastoral misconduct, I scrawled on one thick folder the title "Bad Boys." That was too cynical. But as we heard case after case of sexual misconduct, a common theme came through: the cases involved men who tended to be lone rangers. They generally told stories of loneliness and isolation from their peers.
Later, when I learned that it wasn’t just the boys who were straying and that the girls lapsed too, I realized that I had a covenantal group of women to hold me accountable. As we had been honest with one another, this had become a place where we had shined God’s light on our own shadows.
I am haunted by the end of the letter of James, where he tells Christians of their need for one another. "My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another Ministers without collegial friendships have no one to bring them back.
I’m struck by how often the epistles begin with words about friendship. The early church must have valued it greatly, with all those loving blessings and holy kisses between brothers and sisters of the faith. Sometimes it seems to be lifted up as a practice of the faith, even a discipline that Christians are obligated to enter for their own mutual formation.
Yet at the beginning of Paul’s letter to Titus, a friendship is described differently: "To Titus my loyal child in the faith we share, grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our savior" (1:4), The letter goes on to encourage Titus to seek out elders in every town. And so we are reminded that not every friendship is between peers in age or cohort group. We cross boundaries in our friendships, and so we grow in the faith.
Some collegial friendships are teaching friendships. In a male-dominated field, my mentors tend to be men. There have been times when I have found myself invited into a room of men whose experience of the ministry and the world is radically different from mine. Sometimes I sit like a country cousin in the old-boys club, waiting for the subtitles to appear or the translator to arrive.
But more common are their quick responses to my urgent telephone calls, patiently nurturing me through some crisis in the ministry. It seems there is no crisis that one of them has not seen. These friendships between older men and younger women in the ministry are breaking new ground. Together we have struggled across the differences in age and gender to find a way to make disciples of one another. But the crossing of boundaries for the sake of Christian friendship is nothing new. Like Titus, I need my elders in every town.
I have examined the boundaries within lay and clergy friendships and found that perhaps my vision of friendship was too limited. I know that I should not gripe to church friends about a member of the church staff, for instance. But I have come to realize that withholding such information does not necessarily create distance. In a secular world that defines people too much in terms of their work, perhaps there is something helpfully countercultural about having friendships in which work, and workplace gossip, cannot be the center.
When my mother died, a quartet of church members flew down from New Haven to sing at her funeral in Washington, D.C. When our senior deacon spoke at her service, he explained that he represented the church. It occurs to me that that is what we do in all Christian friendship; we transcend the needs of the individual to point to something larger than ourselves, I had my little rules about not discussing work with my members, but here they were proclaiming the gospel in song at the saddest moment of my life. What greater intimacy could there be?
After the funeral, I looked around my mother’s house, full of people gathered for the reception. A table full of canapés had replaced the hospital bed in the living room, where she had died just days before. The smell of my stepfather’s Greek food had mixed with the sick scent of a weeklong coma. My ability to make small talk was wearing thin.
At that point, I needed my collegial friendships -- not the neighbors or even the family, but the Christian ministers who had accompanied me in the walk of loss along the way, who understood what it meant to visit the sick of your church while your mother was dying somewhere else. I thought of Paul’s greeting in Philemon 1:2 to Achippus, whom he describes as a "fellow soldier."
And there, showing up at my mother’s home, was the minister from another Congregational church in New Haven, a church that in the language of the world should be my church’s "competition." Upon hearing the news of my mother’s death, Shep had quietly booked a flight down to Washington and simply appeared at the service.
Shep had been many things to me over the past ten years, first my pastor, then my mentor and then a colleague down the street. I’m not sure what role he was playing in my life at that moment after the funeral -- perhaps all of them at once. Simply seeing him standing among the mourners, amidst the small talk, gave me the witness that I had a life waiting for me at home. This death would not be the last word.
The members of my church who had come to sing at the service approached me to say goodbye. "We’re heading back to the airport. We’re not going to stay for the reception," they said. "If we do, you will worry about us. You’ll feel like you have to introduce us to all these people."
They were right, of course, that I would fuss over them. But how greatly they underestimated the power of their presence. I didn’t know how to put it into words, but perhaps they saw it in my silence. They did not leave.
"OK, we’ll stay for the reception," they said, "but only if you promise not to act like the minister. Because right now you should just be the grieving daughter." Their understanding of those boundaries made me realize how permeable they could be.
"Please stay," I said. "And I promise to ignore you." It was the first time I had laughed all day.
I thought back to when I used to sit on the steps with my neighbor John. As I watched the church members mingle into the crowd, I realized that these church members and I had finally come to the point where we could simply be near one another and talk about nothing. We were friends.
