If you were serious about justice, what would you do? What would you not do?
This first piece is a quarrel with the subject, which is quarreling about the right things to do to make social change. Why do we talk about justice ministry in the first place, as though it was some object on a shelf somewhere?
I have always preferred the words public ministry to justice ministry. The former is inclusive; the second allows the people who think everything is just hunky dory or okay for them to think justice ministry is something they do for other people. The paternalism in many justice ministry and community organizers smells bad. It “Other-izes.” It assumes that justice is for them and those who have privilege. Or, it implies the cops who do protect us, instead of shooting us, are the hander-outers of justice. Quarrel ended.
When we seek beautiful language to describe justice or ministry (or when we try to teach it and make its reach larger and deeper), we don’t fight. We don’t say things like “we demand justice now” or “abolish ICE” or “defund the police” or even “Black Lives Matter.” We don’t yell. We firmly invite. We tell people there is a party somewhere and you are invited to it.
We say instead, “justice is right here waiting for us all to have it.” Or “the people who work for ICE want more human and blessed work.” Or “police have a terrible job and some of it do it right. How do they do it? How can they become the norm?” When you catch a child doing something right, you often prevail. When you catch a child doing something wrong, you often are ignored.
Remember the great slogan from the world of disabled people, fighting for their rights? “Nothing about us without us.” We can’t talk about ICE or police as though the individuals involved are crap. They are not crap, although refusing to define someone in such dehumanizing language must not blind us to the necessity of judging when someone is not doing the right things. But when we lead with judgment, nobody listens. Not to mention that we aren’t getting to the party, the kin-dom, the commonwealth, the new time of God, already here.
When we say Black Lives Matter, which we must as a sign of solidarity and because we have been told to let our signals show, we can say it with a hoarse whisper. We don’t have to shout. We don’t have to wag our fingers. We can just state the truth. The truth is that black lives matter. The sign in my front yard says that I believe that, know it, and am ready to defend my point of view, as beautifully and invitationally as I know how.
First, the language we use could be better than its opposition. It is language that is for something and someone and not against something or someone. It is language that joins Jesus in refusing to have an enemy. We, especially (but not only) those of us who are white, think we have to be better than somebody else to “matter.” That is not true. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t live that way.
It’s nearly impossible to find or do regularly. We all need an enemy to get up in the morning. We are all addicted to our sin. We are not rare birds but ordinary birds. We miss the mark of our true humanity regularly.
The second criteria, beyond pointing to the party, is that the language is less important than the tone in our voice. You know about muscle tone. Tone of voice is very important. You know the difference between a sneer and a smile. You know the difference between a judgement and an invitation. You know how desperate you are for a kind word for yourself. Give one to someone else. You might get one in return. Yell at people and sneer at people and they will sneer back. Activists who have not done enough therapy or enough swimming or enough yoga or enough inner work need not be in charge of meetings or protests. We have people who know how to be kind. They are our true leaders.
The third criterion for beauty is de-shoulding. Everyone may use whatever language they think is good and which suits them. The language is to de-should. Just abolish the word should. Substitute the word may.
Public ministry is the language we might use these days for what used to be called urban ministry. Urban ministry had an “Other-izing” tone — as though we were in the city to take care of “them.” Public ministry is something you can do in suburbs or in rural places. It makes a Jesus-like assumption that the outsider and the insider are of one another and with each other. Both have “insides” and “outsides,” and both are connected. There is nothing like this virus to alert you to just how connected we are. We breathe each other’s air.
People exist for their own spiritual nourishment AND the care and nurture of the other, including the other of nature and commonwealth. It sides with liberation theologians and the Dominic Crossans of the Jesus movement or the Red-Letter Bible: the Jesus way is simultaneously spiritual and political, simultaneously spiritual and economic. Jesus talks as much about the “outside world” of politics and economics and culture as he does about the “inside world” of the soul and the spirit and the psyche. He talks about them in “one breath.”
Public ministry is not about insiders or outsiders but outsiders and insiders. It is a both/and look at the world, not an either/or look at the world. It is not spiritual or political, personal or public but these yoked and joined. Public ministry sees all people, places, and nature WITHIN each other and sees most binaries as false projections of smallness on God’s great largeness.
The destination of ministry is to yank the coming time or formerly called Kingdom of God, now kin-dom of God, down from the sky onto the earth. (Remember saying things like master bedroom? Similar issues abide within the Kingdom of God language.)
Jesus and many others criticize most congregations for being country clubs, where the clergy are chaplains to those who sit in the pews and pay the bills. Jesus pushed hard on the question of who our neighbor is. He wanted as large an inclusion as the good Samaritan realized in his generosity of spirit and cash.
At Judson Memorial Church, long a bastion of public ministry, we conclude our liturgies with the words, “the real service starts now.” That was our benediction for a long time and some of us thought it made the worship seem small compared to the activism. Now we say “the real service continues now” (or some such phrase). We often always say that the people who matter are the ones not here. Or the people whom we exist to serve are outside these walls as well as inside these walls. We might more appropriately say that we nest and pod with strangers and with friends.
Another example. I attended an outdoor service at another church in August, while on vacation on Long Island. The area is bucolic, kind of like Greenwich Village’s rural or country place. The people are hippies, farmers, artists, and retirees. The island is narrow and has the ocean on one side and the Long Island Sound on the other side. In the summer, in particular, there are plenty of tourists.
The service was socially distanced and all the insiders (40 or so) brought their own chairs. No one told a guest they had to bring their own chairs, nor did anyone have “extras” just in case a newcomer came. There were no bulletins. Everybody knew the service by heart. There were no name tags. There was no chance for a newcomer to announce him or herself.
The service in its form and format showed who was important to the people of that congregation. This kind of ministry is parochial. It is private. It does not include the public, the way the public tries to include the particular parochiality and the private.
In public ministry, we disciple. We make disciples. Disciples are the ones who discipline thought and make it good action. We offer spiritual nurture for public capacity. We keep people full so that they can do their work in the world. Work well done is true worship.
The fourth criterion for beautiful language is here. It includes a constant cycle of action and reflection. They keep pivoting. We pivot our pivots. When we are tired of acting, we think and pray. When we are tired of thinking and praying, we act. Our actions are never complete or perfect or just right, except for every now and then.
One night at the beginning of the OCCUPY movement, some Catholic Workers from Baltimore made a papier-mâché bull in the image of the Wall Street sculpture’s bull. They finished it while driving it up in the back of a U-Haul truck. It became the Wall Street Bull in the shape of a golden calf. They carried it into our sanctuary, and insisted we open up on a Saturday night. We were so amazed at how beautiful it was that we carried it back and forth on a handmade platform which required four strong people to manage it. People would stop and stare that September from their brunchy-brunches. Then they would clap. Then they would say, “That is the golden calf.” It got a little bent out of shape over time, but it’s still around somewhere in the Judson Catacombs.
When the people from Baltimore brought the calf into the sanctuary that Saturday night, all we could do was find a Bible and read the story about the golden calf. And weep. Beauty had found us. We didn’t find it.
The virus and our space use policy’s threats come together to create an extraordinary context for this kind of ministry. There have to be as many opportunities as threats. Our community ministry will be challenged this year. How are we going to do field work without a field? How are we going to find the opportunities in this difficulty – and not just for public ministry but also for our everyday lives?
Finally, a fifth criteria is shaping our invitational kindness which points to the party in a careful and normal cycle of action and reflection. We refuse the exhaustion.
We invite more than we condemn.
We point to beautiful possibilities more than we talk about the latest killing of a black man, or shooting in a school, or rape in a “master bedroom.”
We stop shoulding ourselves and others and give each other permission to enter possibility.
We act and reflect in an ordinary rhythm that becomes like exhaling to inhale and inhaling to exhale.
The Fifth point is putting this all together in a sustainable life pattern that invites others to imitate. We get specific. We do a little. We do not do a lot. We are actually afraid of a lot because it means we are not making room for new folk.
Note there may be three points or one point or two points. They graduate, gradually into actual ministry. They are episodes within a theme. Pearls on a string. They gather into something coherent over time. Public ministry is not a theory. It is a practice.
PRACTICALLY
What follows are examples of actions that spiritually clear, beauty seeking activists might consider in the October moment of the pandemic. They’re offered as examples that have a right size to them. They are small and ongoing and part of real life, not just life in the streets. (Life in the streets is also gorgeous.)
Sanctuary for Protesters: Open space for worship when it is safe and for protesters even before. Let little gatherings happen.
Zoombaya: A New Way of learning in a New Time.
Learning cultural competency for the new time, when we grieve the so called “good old days” and find new paths forward. Getting really good at Zoom meetings so that we actually look forward to them rather than dread them. They may just have to be shorter. How do we include folk who don’t “do” technology?
Place Based Leadership during a Global Pandemic: Virtual worship, virtual board meetings, virtual galas? Really?
Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Spiritual makers or just makers? For believers, atheists, agnostics and none or all of the above. If you create a good zoom, or project, or webinar, invite a few cops. Or nurses. Or somebody you don’t know.
Women at the Graves of Institutions. Not for women only. Many women feel like we just got started and now everything is blowing up. What do we need to learn? What do we have to teach? What is the place for ambiguous grief in all this? How do we ritualize grief? How do we not guilt trip each other for grieving and lamenting even the smallest things, like shopping, or singing, or clapping?
Spiritual Nurture for Leaders: Beyond self-care and family/work balance into a oneness of being. How has our work in the world changed? How has work changed for our members? What about those trying to parent, with kids at home? How do we help those who teach or who are on the front line of service? What help do they need?
Learn a new Language, like Narfle the Garfax from Coneheads. Find your sense of humor wherever you misplaced it.
Turn over every stone. Criticize everything. And then start to build.
Donna Schaper is a spiritual handyperson, a soul mechanic, a repairer of broken appliances. By day, she works as an ordained United Church of Christ and American Baptist pastor of a regular, if edgy, congregation.
