Rachel Hope Anderson

Panel Presentation to Massachusetts Council of Churches, Annual Meeting

January 24, 2009.

Question: What is the important issue that you believe that we as Christians need to address in this most historic moment?

My name is Rachel Hope Anderson, I’m the director of the Boston Faith & Justice Network, an ecumenical network of liberal and evangelical Christians seeking justice as an expression of our faith. This network sprang from a conversation that I and several other people had with Jim Wallis in the winter of 2004, grew through a series of church forums and house meetings, and now has organized over 15 justice-oriented small group Bible studies and an emerging Fair Trade initiative in Greater Boston.  The Network began by organizing small group Bible studies wherein participants dedicated money to alleviate global poverty by making simplicity shifts in their lifestyle. To date, over $100,000 has been pledged through these groups.

Marshall Ganz, an organizing professor and mentor of mine, often warns me to think beyond issues. It’s not, he says, as if people are only “health care people” or “environment people.” Certainly, it’s helpful to narrow and focus on particular issues in order to set and measure program goals. But, so often we realize the interconnection between issues and have to schedule a whole round of meetings to find interconnection and overlap between the issues. Pretty soon, we’ve spent so much time parsing and connecting the issues that we never go out and actually work to solve them.

So, I’d like to address this question as one about challenges – to which we have the choice respond or not.

The key challenge that comes to mind – largely because of the house meetings that the Boston Faith & Justice Network held at its founding, two more years of working with and listening to young Christians grapple with their calling to Biblical justice, and personal experience is this.

We, Americans, are consuming more than is our just share and what the planet will sustain.

I was raised in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod in a very religious household. When I was a child, my parents took me with them to their weekly small group Bible study. I was eight years old when they studied the book of Acts and I learned that the first Christian church shared everything they had so that no one had any need.

Today, nearly 30,000 children die for lack of food and from preventable diseases. Each day. Meanwhile, were every person on earth to consume at the rate that most Americans do, scientists say that we’d need at least five more planets.. As Bill McKibbon told many of us who were gathered for the Religious Leader’s Environmental Summit in November,  we have already surpassed the level of atmospheric carbon that the earth can sustain. As we all know, carbon traps heat and promotes global warming.

There’s an optimistic and pessimistic side to this situation. On the optimistic side: technological progress can reduce the impact of our consumption and maybe even reverse the impacts of global warming. On the pessimistic side, developing nations are quickly increasing their consumption rate as they race to modernize and industrialize – a move that could erase many conservation goals in the developed world. No matter how this equation balances out, in the end we have a sinking feeling that the math is off. And if the acceleration of global warming occurs, as scientists predict, that sinking will be more than metaphorical. The earth’s water level will rise, radically changing life on this planet.

But, our consumption is not just a scientific crisis.. It is also a deeply moral crisis. Global warming and resource insecurity is likely to affect those who are poorest and most vulnerable first. Not only have we been consuming more of our share, but others will bear the cost of our excess. In my understanding of the Christian faith, this is sin.

It is also a spiritual crisis because it stems from our forgetfulness of our Biblical values: of God as creator and provider, of gratitude that we have enough, of the God who has  knitted us together in community where we are to care for each other.

In light of these challenges, there is a tremendous opportunity. As a younger American who came of age after the civil rights, peace, and women’s movements, the election of Barack Obama represents the most significant civic movement of my lifetime. The campaign to elect this nation’s first African American president was a three to four million volunteer operation.

I got my first taste of this movement when I traveled to California last summer to help lead one of the first “Camp Obamas” – a training session that enabled volunteers to form precinct-by-precinct get out the vote teams for the primary. That training was the most diverse setting– in terms of race, generation, and socio-economic background - I’ve been in in my lifetime. I ended my experience with the campaign canvassing in New Hampshire with family members who have never been that engaged in politics before and who had previously voted red, blue, green, and purple.

Perhaps I’m biased by my personal experiences, but I truly believe that the playing field just got re-configured. Typical conservatives and liberals are not lining up in the same formations that they used to.

Moreover, the person the country elected is someone who said, this Tuesday: “ we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

This leads to what I think is the real challenge: what will the church do in the face of tremendous challenge and  opportunity. My sense is that those of us who have been concerned about issues of poverty, consumption, the environment have – for a long time – seen ourselves as respectful dissenters, opponents of status quo widely out of line with our view of the Kingdom. Now the kind of generosity and open-handedness that we might have asked for in a hypothetical government is being spoken from inside the halls and balconies of power.

From the social advocacy perspective, the task is less about placing the right issues on the agenda, than finding creative solutions to our challenges and putting all our weight into the effort. Civic engagement on poverty, consumption, and environment needs to move from respectful dissent to principled collaboration.

Principled collaboration. Principled, because we cannot let go of the Kingdom vision of peace and wholeness that transcends any human system. Collaboration because it’s time to figure out how to fight poverty and environmental threat in practical and persistent ways – within the political sphere and outside of it. Just as millions of volunteers signed up to make their phone calls for candidates or join neighborhood teams or knock on doors, can we break down a huge goal: cutting atmospheric carbon  to a liveable 350 and achieving poverty-fighting goals, into personal, communal and neighborhood goals that everyone can be a part of.

I’m thinking, for example, of a Dutch island that switched from dependence on external electricity to becoming an exporter of renewable energy. It began eight years ago when one of the island’s residences started persuading his neighbors to switch to solar water heaters for their homes and convert their cars to canola oil. Social pressure kicked in and – just to keep up with the Jones’ –homes and businesses were competing to install bio-fuel furnaces and small scale wind turbines.

I’m thinking of the colleges who are competing with one another to see who can most significantly reduce their energy use.

I’m thinking of the Sierra Club chapters in Michigan who are fighting in courts,  and administrative processes to halt the construction of new coal-burning plants and build sustainable wind farms..

The challenge for the church, I think, is figuring out how to and deciding to be part of the collaborative spirit and movement that is with us today. This our time. The challenges have never been bigger. If we miss this moment of history – if we get stuck in small or symbolic programs – the energy behind ‘hope’ and ‘change’ will take its own direction. It will move on without the church. And, the church’s relevance in American culture could be irretrievably  lost.  

Or we could choose to engage this challenge in a stunningly creative and collaborative way. We could craft a meaningful, shared goal for a green and just Massachusetts. Then we could pledge, as Christians, to work together toward that goal – each greening our own church and neighborhood and lobbying to hold business and government accountable to a more just and sustainable economy. We could make churches the hub of inspiring and welcoming, efforts to preserve people and the planet – that everyone can be part of.

I do think we need to do this as Christians first and as members of denominations second. I am not an ecumenical scholar, but I’ve traveled a particular path from the Missouri Synod to InterVarsity and the Evangelical Lutheran Church. I know that in the Boston Faith & Justice Network, there are evangelical Christians who love liturgy. Mainline Christians who love praise music.  Baptists who admire Catholic social teaching. On facebook, where many BFJN members keep a personal profile, church-goers list their religious affiliation as: “Ecumenical evangelical postmodern Christian” or “follower of Jesus” or “Presbytanglican” or “love mercy, do justice”

For young Christians and many people we’d like to invite into mission with us, form is less important than function. What we call ourselves is less important than what we do.

I know that many denominations, including my own, are worried about shoring up their denominational identity. I realize the value of this act of remembrance and reclamation. But, in the face of this critical challenge, if each us go back to our synod or parish or denomination and come up with a separate plan, we will not succeed. Frankly, no one will notice. On the other hand, the chances for success – the number of good minds around the table, the number of people we can engage, the chances for visibility and comradery  – all increase if churches work together. So, let’s pledge to have a common plan and commitment to shared strategizing and growth. Then we could have Baptist and Lutheran and Methodist churches all competing against one another to meet their greening goals.

We have a black President. His middle name is Hussein. In a time when our nation is constructing a new story out of previously insurmountable divisions, let’s take this opportunity to build the story of a new, collaborative and vital church.

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