Deadly Viper Controversy

In recent days a controversy has arisen around the reckless co-opting of Asian culture within the curriculum, videos and books published by Zondervan publishing house in a series called Deadly Viper.

A guy I consider a friend and mentor by the name of Dr. Soong-Chan Rah has been in contact with the authors of the material as well as the publisher. The event is yet another opportunity to grow as a body. I have written a letter to the authors (posted within the comments of Soong-Chan's blog) and directly to Zondervan. I am positng my letter below.

___________________

I am writing to express my concern for the published materials within the Deadly Viper books, videos, website etc..

As an Christian of Caucasian decent, living in an African American context, I have spent the past decade or so trying to navigate the complexities of how we as Christians ought to understand and approach the issues of race and culture. I have listened, reflected, read, learned and taught extensively around these issues during most of these years.

I have learned much about white privilege over these years and have anguished about the way that this is often entrenched within our evangelical institutions. Ours is a faith of great diversity and, in the words on 1 Cor 12, one part of the body must not say to the other: “I have no need of you”. When editorial board, writers, leaders, reviewers, and decision makers within an institution do not accurately reflect the diversity of the church, they not infer their lack of need for others, but they inevitably make bad mistakes, as is clearly the case with the manner in which Asian culture (mixed up, and randomly co-opted) was done in the case of Deadly Viper.

As has been said by everyone in the conversation among the blogs, the content is not the issue. The packaging and offensive use of another culture is.

I will express my concerns along two lines: Incidental and Institutional.

As to the DV incident, I urge you to take seriously the recommendations made to you by our Asian American brothers as reflected in the open letter written to you by Dr. Soong Chan Rah.

As to the Institution: I cannot say strongly enough that institutional changes must be made at Zondervon (as with most of our Evangelical institutions). I have had the opportunity to express my concerns with leadership at a number of Christian colleges and universities, let me share with you my own reflections for change:

1. Institutional Leadership. The Zondervan leadership, reviewers, editors and others must reflect the broader church (not just your readership).
2. Institutional Knowledge. You must think about how Zondervan learns as an institution, and communicates that knowledge to all the divisions, partners, staff and other aspects of the organization. Specifically to this point, you must think about how you learn and transmit this information about race and ethnicity (this is different that individual learning). This will require ongoing learning and that ongoing pattern needs to be a part of the fabric of the organization.
3. A posture of humility and learning. Please, I urge you, that you communicate to the church, readers, Asian American community, authors and others a posture a humility and learning.
4. Cultural Interpreters. This process of learning about and understanding what has happened with the DV books will require internal and external cultural interpreters. This means that some of your staff will need to be “white people who get it” and others will need to be non-whites who can articulate (as Dr. Rah and others have done) what you need to hear in an ongoing ways. These voices must be invited to the table, with patience, both INSIDE and OUTSIDE the institution. Those inside will often, if not always be more reticent to speak clearly on these topics (its human nature, their ability to feed their families may be on the line). Those outside may sometimes overstate the case because they don’t have “skin in the game”. So this balance of cultural interpreters for you is critical.
   

I will tell you that if you learn well from this episode, it could be among the most amazing ways in which God is at work through and in you in a long time. Don’t learn from it and it could easily be your undoing. Please. . . Learn well, listen well.

The church caused (and could undo) big government.

This is a developing thought process for me. It does seem inevitable to me that the government will continue to grow. I don't think there is an example of a democracy that has un-done growth. The conservatives say it as "doomsday coming" and proof of societal decline, the liberals as "it ought to be". Here is another take:

The unabated growth of the United States government has corresponded directly to the disengagement from society of the American church. The removal of the active role of the church among the poor, the broken, the illiterate, the oppressed has also paralleled the astronomical increase of wealth among middle class Christians in America. This increase in accumulated personal and institutional wealth, along with the absence of engagement with the poor in our country, has been a critical factor in the growth of the government.

And the only way back, that I can see, from immense and inevitably larger government, is for the Church in America to change. The average Christian tithes about 3%, and has no sense of “cap” on one’s personal wealth or lifestyle. I have only met one Christian who has made it clear that they tithe on all income: capital gains, salaries, even student loans/grants.

Before you assume I am a communist, let me be clear. I believe that limited regulation within free-market economies is the best way for individuals created in the image of God to appropriately live out what they were designed to be. Regulation is always necessary in some forms because of the fallenness of man. Yet all regulation has unintended consequences and always impinges on human freedoms.

But markets allow people to work, and working is clearly the fastest way out of poverty. A massive number of people in so-called 3^rd world countries have risen out of the depths of poverty, largely due to a growth in the economies of India and China. People have been put to work productively and poverty has decreased.

Entrepreneurialism, allows individuals to work, freely and creatively. These are each key parts of the imago dei.

I also assume that there are, as the Dutch theologians would like to say, appropriate spheres of sovereignty. . . family, church/local organizations, markets, governments. Each has appropriate roles to play. When one abdicates its appropriate role, we should expect to see others (a) pick it up and (b) not do as good of a job as the appropriate entity/sphere would have done.

“If you talk and act as a Christian should, the world will love you for what you do, and hate you for what your say”. Tim Keller (my paraphrase).

In the early 1900s the conservative, largely white church in America stopped doing what Christians should do. She removed herself from engaging with society and being an active part of addressing issues such as caring for the sick, the illiterate, the destitute, and those experiencing injustice.

During a period known as the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, virtually all of the fundamentalist churches and leaders, the heritage to what is now called the evangelical church, engaged in a theological battle over the meaning of the gospel. Out of a fear in what had become known as the social gospel, the church removed itself from actively engaging with society and took on a separatist, individualistic, and culture-war posture.
The church created her own schools, magazines, radio stations, art (sort of), literature (sort of) and more. She continued to proclaim a gospel of Jesus and Him crucified, (saying the things she should say) but became virtually irrelevant to the larger society in terms of mercy, justice and cultural engagement (thus not doing the things she is called to do).

This removal from society and the active disengagement with those on the margins of society coincided with the years leading up to the great depression, during which the government grew by leaps and bounds. Who would feed the hungry, retrain workers, fill them with dignity and purpose, educate them, speak up for those unjustly kept out of the economy? The answer became the government.

We have continued on this path for a century. The government continues to fill in roles that ought to be cared for, in my estimation, by small local organizations who are able to work with much greater accountability, efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability.

But, I hear the objections now, “the government is taxing us to death!” “We can’t afford to do this until the government stops competing with the church.” “We can’t stand it when the government wades into issues like unemployment, education, health care and more. Stop the socialism!”

But I am increasingly convinced this is backwards. The church has the moral responsibility, through its manifold small organizational representations, to be the hands and feet of Jesus. To love the unlovable, heal the sick, visit the imprisoned, speak up against injustice and of course, preach the gospel. Yet the church has ceded this responsibility away. . . and the federal government will inevitably continue to grow until we “do the things we should do”.

“But we can’t. we don’t have the money” . . . we say. What if every Christian in American gave 20% of our income? What if Christians who are well off capped their net worth at say $2,000,000? What sort of revolution would unfold? We would not only have enough to pay for our (ridiculously) large church buildings, we could fund (Christian) schools that would revolutionize our inner-cities.

We could transform our health care system. We could easily address our homelessness and housing issues. It would allow us to do approach the development of economic systems in urban communities through micro-enterprise, entrepreneurialism, job training and more. All of this would allow us to do it with the kind of close to home accountability, efficiency and effectiveness that cannot be accomplished through large bureaucracies.

I am not suggesting that this would replace the federal government, but I propose that this is what it will take to undo the growth of the federal government in America. I believe that if we did this, that is if we lived sacrificially and loved our neighbor as ourselves, along with proclaiming an unapologetic gospel, we would have immense credibility. In other words we could more effectively “say what we should say while we do what we should do”.

It is our materialism and individualism that has caused the government to grow. Rather than rail against our government, which will inevitably continue to grow unless something radical is done, we would do something radical. Should we wait for the government that most of us don’t trust to somehow do the right thing? No, we should stop it by doing what we ought to do.

Looking for Glory

Check this out. . .

When Helping Hurts, a review

Of the few books I've read recently, one of the most important ones is "When Helping Hurts, How to alleviate poverty without hurting the poor . . . and yourself" by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.

Corbett and Fikkert are scholars based at the Chalmers Insitute at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, GA. These guys know their stuff about international economic development and have been at it a while. I was interested to see that the book was published by Moody Press.

The premise of the book is that much of what Christians do in the way of ministry among the poor (they call it poverty alleviation) is actually harmful to both parties (those "reached", those "reaching"). I agree.

As a practitioner myself, and a teacher, this book resonated strongly with me. The challenges that we have in our desire to "serve" others, purportedly under the desire to be like Jesus (who came to serve) is too often done out of an unrecognized desire to keep ourselves in the superior place. The sensibility that develops is a truth that ultimately wounds us: It is better to give than to receive, so we (only) want to give. But we are not Jesus. . . we need to receive too.

Out of this sensibility (appropriately called paternalism by Corbett and Fikkert) we think it's not only best for us always to give/serve, but we think we are the only ones who have something to offer. Acting on this (even when well intended) injures both us by adding to our pride, and others, by affirming them as fundamentally "lacking".

Here are some other highlights for the book:

As westerners we generally understand poverty in material terms. Logically, we then assume that work among the poor is primarily about leveraging resources or skills. Yet they demonstrate that poverty as defined by those in poverty is often primarily understood in fundamentally psychological terms. Terms like "powerless", "shameful", worthless" and others are self-applied.

Poverty must be understood in Creation-Fall-Redemption terms. Poverty is fundamentally the absence of Shalom. Shalom is all about relationships, therefore poverty is fundamentally about the broken relationships (with God, self, others, the creation) and NOT fundamentally about lack of something. Addressing poverty then MUST be part of our understanding of the work of Christ, the gospel, the calling of the church and the Kingdom of God.

All poverty is NOT created equal. Differing levels of distress and poverty require differing levels of response. The 3 levels of response are: relief, rehabilitation, development. Most of the work of the church is in the area of relief, whereas most of the need is for development. As Abraham Kuyper said 100+ years ago, Christians just don't understand economics and so our work and $ is put in the wrong place.

The section detailing a definition of multiple kinds of paternalism was great! It was bold to publish this on Moody Press since MBI is one of the leading senders of missionaries around the world. Yet it is clearly a topic that is important and generally unspoken about (same thing with the STM discussion below).

1/3 of all missionary giving is towards Short Term Missions (STM). Most STMs do more harm than good. I was both challenged and affirmed in reading this (we run a STM program). We have thought very carefully about this and have sought to do things very differently than most STM programs. I was about 90% affirmed in reading this chapter but was still challenged to think about sharpening some aspects of what we do.

My critique of the book is that it is too short and too wide to be a helpful tool practically. The reality is that this is an entry level book that is critical to get people started. I just wish it had more follow up tools.

The section on relief-rehabilitation-development was also so introductory that it lacked any real meat about what each of these three things are. Relief is only appropriate where there is such a crisis that "the bleeding needs to be stopped". I don't know what "bleeding" is in contexts of entrenched poverty. I also came away with NO idea what rehabilitation is in thier model. People around my church aren't getting quality food, are dealing with high rates of violence, are in schools that are a catastrophe. I assume that since it is generational poverty and crime that is at issue that the most appropriate connection is development, yet using this book I didn't know how to actually draw those lines or really define the 3 categories well (especially the first 2).

The connection between Shalom and Poverty was the richest contribution for me personally. I teach on these topics in depth every time we have an STM team here and so think about them alot. Clearly the book is a great help on the whole!

Virtual Dinner, Real Benefit. Sept 14-16.

Why we need one more rule.

Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, 2 guys from the Chalmers Center at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain GA have really got me thinking.

At Sunshine we have 3 rules for the kids:

Respect God

Respect Others

Respect the Building

We try to keep it simple and build discernment with the kids rather than a long list of do's and dont's. I was listening to Pastor Pete (or is that "The Father"?) explain our rules for Summer Blast (50 kids in the building for summer VBS type programming all summer). The BB students help run the program. . . anyway, he was explaining this and other concepts for our working with the youth and doing a great job talking about how we share the gospel, love the kids, encourage/challenge them in these 3 areas.

The ironic thing was that I had just finished teaching about "Shalom" and on a dry erase board near the sign with the 3 R's listed above, I had written out that Shalom entails 3 things:

Joy in Relationship to:

God

Self/others

our Environment.

As I sat back listening to Pete I realized that these rules are anchored in a much deeper set of truths than "tell 'em about Jesus and keep 'em in line". Of course I already knew this but sitting back with fresh review of "Shalom" and then hearing The Father speak, it just clicked: even our rules with our kids are anchored in this pursuit of what we as Image Bearers were designed for, the Shalom of God.

Back to Steve and Brian: I am reading their new book "When Helping Hurts" which is a serious critique and overall very insightful book about "alleviating poverty" aka. ministry among the poor.

They made this connection between what poverty is and what Shalom is that got me thinking. As westerners we tend to define poverty in material and financial terms, whereas most of those who are actually poor tend to define poverty in relational and psychological terms of brokkeness.

"Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings." p15, quoting B Myers.

This is a rich and complicated statement but goes to the heart of alleviating poverty that we all suffer under, just in differing ways. The narrative of scripture is Creation, Fall, Redemption. Everything is broken. . . all relationships. . . for poverty to be addressed and shalom to be attained, we need healing in all areas and to add to our list above. When it says Jesus was about restoring "All things" (Col 1) is is consistent with his announcement of his public ministry that was equally all encompassing (Luke 4).

To consider our "rules" we have to recognized that part of our poverty is about the broken relationship we have with ourselves. We tend either toward "God complexes" (the rich) or toward "shame" (the poor).

So let's add one important aspect of shalom ruling:

Respect yourself (its part of shalom!)

Friday Night Lights. . . do it on the corner!

Pastor Meeks had a prayer ministry some time ago called "Do it on the corner".  At Sunshine we have been motivated to take specific active steps into areas in which violence, commotion and chaos have ruled the day.  

Together, as a part of The Chicago Peace Campaign (look it up on facebook) we are working for peace in our community.  We've integrated this into our normal youth work and Bridge Builders programs, along with just life in community. 

After going to other "Friday Night Lights" events, we launched ours last week.  We take a corner that normally has a lot of unhealthy interaction, sometimes shooting, usually drug dealing, and we set up shop!  BBQ, Bright Lights, Gospel and Holy Hip Hop on the sound system, kids playing. . . all on the corner from 9pm to 1am.  We gather together for prayer on the hour.  

Mrs. Woods, a neighbor who has rarely made it out of the house this year due to health reasons was the first to arrive.  She set up her lawn chair and talked with me about what "usually" happens outside her window.   She was the first to say, "It is time to pray yet?! I'm not missing that prayer out here!".  The kids played. . . . CW got on the mic and  shared the gospel in song. . . the hot dogs and drinks were a hit.  Dozens of people hung out, heard the gospel, laughed together, tossed the frisbee.  

On one night, on one corner, it was peaceful.  We didn't have to confront anyone selling drugs or fend off anyone carrying guns.  We just "showed up, showed out, and shared Jesus".