Our Need of Economic Recovery

http://www.inwardoutward.org/?p=1006

Our Need of Recovery
For many people, economic recovery means getting back to where we were a few months or years ago. That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life. I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery, drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life—a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life—unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.Similarly, I’d like to suggest whenever we hear the word “recovery,” we as a nation see it not as a call to get back our old addictive high, but rather as a call to face our corporate and personal addictions, including the following:

1. Our addiction to carbon. Fossil fuels are an addictive substance. They give us speed, quick energy, serving as a kind of cultural amphetamine. Meanwhile, they toxify our environment and throw the ecosystem in which we live into dangerous imbalance.

2. Our addiction to weapons. Weapons give us a feeling of well-being and security, removing our feelings of fear and anxiety, much like a barbiturate. But like a drug, they make us lazy and slow in the much more important work of relationship-building, justice, and peace-making—lazy in seeking the common good. And they plunge us into an addictive cycle, because if everyone in the world is getting more and more weapons, we aren’t safer … especially when increasing numbers of those weapons are nuclear, biological, and chemical.

3. Our addiction to fear. Religious leaders, media leaders, and political leaders have all discovered that you can raise quick votes, dollars, and members through the hallucinogenic stimulant of fear. By making straights afraid of gays, conservatives afraid of progressives, Christians and Jews afraid of Muslims, citizens afraid of immigrants, and vice versa, these leaders get a quick organizational high—”crack” for their unity and morale. But the more fear you pump into your system, the more fear you have, and pretty soon, you go from being stimulated to paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and missing things that are. And soon after that, you move from paranoia to paralysis, leaving you in greater danger than ever.

4. Our addiction to stuff. Jesus said that a person’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of her possessions. An economy that measures growth by the number of durable goods (resources) extracted from the environment and turned into non-durable goods that are bought, used, and then thrown away into a landfill … that economy “succeeds” by turning goods into trash, and calling it success. That’s not success. We need to imagine moving beyond an extractive, consumptive economy to a sustainable economy, and beyond a sustainable economy to a regenerative economy. I believe that in God’s world, if billions can be made destroying the planet and exploiting people addictively, trillions can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.

5. Our addiction to a single bottom line. During the president’s town hall meeting, a man from Indiana told how he started a solar-powered attic fan company, and how he chose not to ship manufacturing overseas, but instead, to provide good employment for his neighbors. That meant, he said, that he had a little less cash in his pocket … but wouldn’t you agree that being a good neighbor has a value that can’t be measured in dollars? The single bottom line of financial profit is addictive, and like an addiction, it destroys families and communities. We need to rediscover a triple bottom line—financial sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. So we need a recovery of family values, and we also need a recovery of community values, and neighborly values, and ethical business values.

6. Our addiction to easy answers. “Government is the problem.” “Just throw money at the problem.” We can’t afford our addiction to these kinds of easy ideological slogans and facile reactive fantasies in a complex, real world. Ideology is, in many ways, a drug that substitutes the quick high of unthinking reaction for the hard work of acquiring wisdom. So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long. That’s my hope and prayer.

Brian McLaren is a speaker and author, most recently of Everything Must Change and Finding Our Way Again. This piece is taken from the God’s Politics blog at Sojourners.

Why Pledge? Why Ask Others to Pledge?

As spring fully blooms around us and many of us turn to making summer vacation plans, it may seem an odd time to devote my newsletter space to the subject of “fall stewardship campaigns” but alas, that’s what you’ll find in my space this month.

Specifically, I want to talk about “pledging”—a spiritual practice of many and a touchy subject for others. Why is pledging important? Let’s take a look from two distinct vantage points. First, and most importantly, pledging is important because it reflects a solid commitment to regular financial giving to and through the church. As such, it is a spiritual practice. As Christians, we are formed by our spiritual practices. I once spoke with a spiritual director who posited that anything we do for thirty days in a row becomes a ritual, a habit, a routine for us. Regular, disciplined giving to God through the church is one way---and a key way—to ensure that our hearts have a generous shape. Jesus describes this when he says in his Sermon on the Mount: ...’for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 6:21) One might expect him to say that when our commitment grows, our treasure will follow---but he turns that notion upside down. He says that where we decide to invest our treasure will determine the path of our heart. Making a “public” (as in “on a pledge card”) commitment to invest our treasure in God’s reign in our midst will deepen our longing for God’s reign on earth to fully come and our commitment to participate in making our prayer a reality. This is the first, and most important, reason for pledging---spiritual growth and deepening commitment to God.

There’s a second reason as well. And it’s a fundraising reason. Sometimes people ask: “What difference does pledging make?” And those who know the statistics might answer: “Anywhere from 100-300% in total giving.” Here’s what we know. In congregations where no annual campaign is held, and there is little or no focus on stewardship education, the average household contributes 1.5% of their income to God through the church. In congregations which invite people at least once yearly to pledge an amount of money, the average household contributes 2.9% of their income to God through the church. In congregations where people are invited to pledge a percentage of their income out of gratitude to God, the average household contributes 4.6% of their income to God through the church. (Wayne Barrett) Simply put, asking people to pledge a percentage of their income out of gratitude to God yields more resources for God’s work in the world.

If you regularly emphasize Christian stewardship in your congregation and an annual campaign is part of your regular practice, you are fulfilling an important aspect of our call to make disciples. If your congregation does not currently focus on stewardship or give people an opportunity to make a commitment to give back to God a portion of what God has given to them, please consider doing so this year. Within the next several weeks, pastors and other identified stewardship leaders in each local congregation in our district will receive a letter from the District Stewardship Team with a list of resources for Annual Stewardship campaigns. Please watch your mailbox for this helpful resource. Also, take time to check our district’s stewardship blog---www.generousineveryway.blogspot.org. And, if you’d like to post something, let me know.

In the meantime, may God bless you richly as you are about the work of “making disciples (stewards J) for the transformation of the world!”

On the Journey with You!

Jill

The Offering: A Meditation by Marie T. Cross

Offering plate, offering basket, offering box,
Made of silver, brass, willow, plastic or wood.
An empty place to be filled with our gifts.
An opportunity, a challenge, an expression of grace.
Touched by many hands.
Passed on. Passed by.
Passed back. Brought forward.
Offered and blessed.
Counted, accounted, and spent.

What was given? What was received?
What was intended that our gifts would do
For others? For the church? For ourselves?

Coins, dollar bills, handwritten checks,
noisy loose change or quietly sealed tight.
Spontaneously given or by a careful decision, a private
choice made public.
Earned interest, cash dividends, paychecks, our income--
Commissions, pensions, social security, welfare.

And with our money, we offer ourselves, our values, our hopes
and desires.
Vocation, leisure time---
Out of a sense of duty, generosity, conviction,
commitment?

With our money, we offer ourselves
What we choose to be.
What we could have brought. What we could have brought.

Offering plate, offering basket, offering box,
The regular, repeated call to discipleship and ministry.
Giving, in gratitude to God,
A part of what already, always belongs to God.