Social Justice Perspectives

I’d like to suggest that we won’t get far with social justice until we begin to judge ourselves. I believe that there are many spiritual widows and orphans within the church that become subject to abuse and torment from the enemy thru “defiling sexual sin.” According to the Word of God, this has a corporate effect and I believe God gave us the “keys of the kingdom” to close these “gates of hell” that are “prevailing against us. Did you know that “sleep paralysis” is called the “penalty for adultery” in Russia? This growing phenomena of demonic visitation is common in the church.

Sins against social justice are rampant in our society. No need to search out widows and orphans; victims of social injustice are as near as the clothes you wear and the food you eat. Chances are the clothes have been sewn in a sweatshop, maybe in the US, and the vegetables you eat have been picked by immigrant labor whose bosses sit in airconditioned luxury enjoying the fruits of their slave-wage laborers.

Is it just me, or did these kids who were interviewed seem a little bit patronizing towards the homeless people they met? I heard a lot of talk about how these upper-middle class white kids interpreted THEIR “missional” experience within the context of their personal growth, contrasted with their “Christian” culture. (Their, their , their, their.)

They also almost romanticized the plight of these poor homeless people. I invite them to sleep on concrete for just one night and then reconsider their half-hearted jab at the idea of living like the homeless as a way of actuating the communal nature of early church culture.

They talk the big talk of “social justice” and all the clichés that accompany it, but vexingly they talk about the homeless in such a way that you get the impression that they haven’t actually spent that much time interacting with the down-and-out -i.e. they seemed amazed at many of the logistics of homelessness, and they recounted a sense of bewilderment when learning what I would think would be some obvious facts about what it means to be homeless/mentally unstable/addicted to a substance.

You can’t try to help the poor and dispossessed if your root motivation is to increase your activist street cred, and to mine the tragedy of the hurting for poetic imagery and inspiration. Maybe I’m being too harsh, but I couldn’t even listen through the whole post on my first try cause the self-centeredness made me very sad and frustrated.

Dear Nathan,

Thank-you for you honest reflection and insight. I am very glad that EV provides a forum like this one for listeners to respond to the podcasts.

I am one of the “kids” you are talking about and I am the voice you could not listen to. And so I wanted to respond to your reflection and insight from a posture of continued growth. From our very first experiences in this project we now call Likewise, we have been growing. Your reflection and insight has prompted me to consider where we can continue to grow. But let me offer a few reflections of my own in response to your comments here.

First of all, we don’t know what we are doing. That’s why we are calling this project an “experiment”...because we think there is somethings that can only be learned by doing and by failing – even miserably failing. I am glad that you picked up on our focus on our own experience in the project. You see what we are learning is that we were too often told of what we could do “for” people on the margins that we were shocked to find out WE were being transformed more than our friends on the streets.

Secondly, I am not sure what gave you the vibe that we romanticize the experience of homelessness. I can assure you that we take serious their struggles and their hardships. Ironically, we’ve talk before about spending a night on the streets – we plan on doing it soon. Perhaps we could connect afterwards and share insights after we go. If you are interested in that, my contact info is below.

Concerning your reflection about how we “talk the big talk of ‘social justice’,” but that we haven’t spent much time with homeless people. I have a few thoughts here. One, is that this podcast was recorded some time ago and we’ve continued to invest time with the same camp of people because we are interested in knowing their stories and their lives and they’ve encouraged us to keep visiting. Secondly, the “obvious facts” of homelessness were not surprising in and of them selves, but it was the realization that our common experiences of addiction in our families was what became the basis for relationship. We were reflecting on how our brokeness connected us We do know of the logistics our friends face. The first time we visited the camp, we drove them to the camp because it takes three hours by bus or three hours too walk from where we met them.

Lastly, let me be clear about our motivation – I think you are right to focus on motivations in social justice ministry. Our motivation is to build relationships with those who our culture (and yes for us we are part of a Middle-class, white culture) says are the least of these. We do this because we think Jesus was serious about his commands to love the poor. What we noticed, however, is that many of the organizations that traditionally serve the poor, don’t always have a good reputation with them. In Austin, the Salvation Army is the last place a homeless person will go. This is true because they have friends who have died there, who have been robbed there and they have been mistreated there. That is what we didn’t want to be a part of. So when we say we were concerned about our “street cred,” this grew out of conversations and it grew out of a desire for them to know we were listening to them.

Thank-you again for your reflections, Nathan. Thanks to all of you who have written to us with gratitude and encouragement in this small way we are learning to live in the Kingdom.

If any one would like continued dialog, I invite you to email me at tim[at]netzerco-op[dot]org.

pax,

Tim Snyder
Curator for Community Formation
The Netzer Co-Op
South Central Texas