Faith Works: Lessons from the Life of an Activist Preacher - Hardcover

Wallis, Jim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375501762 ISBN 13: 9780375501760

Verlag: Random House Inc, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

A charismatic preacher, activist, and the leader of Call to Renewal demonstrates how to put one's faith to work renewing communities and transforming society. By the author of Who Speaks for God? 30,000 first printing.

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Jim Wallis is a preacher, an activist, an author, the convener of Call to Renewal, and the editor in chief of Sojourners magazine. His previous books include Who Speaks for God?, The Soul of Politics, and The Call to Conversion. He has just completed a year as a fellow at the new Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School and now teaches at the university's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Wallis travels extensively, giving more than two hundred talks each year. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Joy, and son, Luke.

Aus dem Klappentext

han ever, many people are hungry for spirituality and community. But the most powerful and meaningful spirituality shows itself through action. Jim Wallis is the charismatic preacher, activist, and leader of Call to Renewal, a dynamic new movement that is uniting politics and spirituality to ignite social change and overcome poverty. In his timely, exciting new book, he shows us how we can enrich our own lives by serving our communities. Wallis believes that the making of the modern Christian, Muslim, or Jew is through action. A preacher who spends his time working for justice rather than just speaking from a pulpit, Wallis compellingly demonstrates how going out and putting your belief to work is what really counts. Faith shows itself in works faith works.

Named by Time magazine as one of the "50 Faces for America's Future," a regular contributor to NPR, MSNBC, and major newspapers, and editor in chief of Sojourners magazine, Jim Wallis is a well

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Lesson Two: Get Out of the House More Often

You are the salt of the earth....you are the light of the world.
(Matthew 5:13-14)

There is a story about a young priest who was very nervous about his new responsibilities. He was especially worried about leading the Eucharistic liturgy. The priest has to say the right words in the right order-for instance, "The Lord be with You," to which the congregation duly responds, "And also with you." The new cleric was concerned that he might foul up his parts of the liturgy, causing the congregation to get their parts wrong too. The whole thing might fall apart, and he would feel like a failure. So you can imagine the young man's panic when he got up before the gathered parish that first Sunday morning, only to realize that his microphone had gone dead. Frantically, the rattled priest began to tap his finger hard on the silent microphone and exclaimed, "Something is wrong with this microphone." The congregation replied, "And also with you!"

I sometimes start with that story when I'm on the road speaking because it's always fun to begin with a good laugh. But the story also helps me introduce my next point. After the laughter dies down, I suggest that something is wrong in our society, and that most people feel it-all across the political spectrum. At that point, the heads begin to nod in agreement.

Despite the constant claims by politicians, Wall Street's elite, and the media pundits about what "good times" these are, most people sense that some things have gone wrong at the moral core of our society. Something about our values just doesn't seem right, and sometimes, things really seem to be unraveling. But what is actually happening to us, and why, and what can we do about it? That
we're not quite so sure about. To figure it out, we are going to have to understand our problems at a deeper level. Raising questions is a good start, but we soon have to decide how far we're going to pursue the answers. To go farther, we need to get some new perspectives. We learn that we can't just take this journey in our heads. We have to reach out to broaden our experience, to move beyond familiar places, and even cross boundaries we never have before. So, our second lesson is "Get out of the house more often!"

The Journey Begins

To change our world, or our community, we first have to understand it. To understand it usually requires a change in our thinking. And for that to happen, we have to experience more of the world than we can know inside the comfortable confines of our lives. We have to cross the barriers that divide people and, indeed, that separate whole worlds from one another. Most of us are deeply programmed not to venture past those invisible but powerful signs that silently scream at us: No Trespassing! You shouldn't be here! You don't belong here! It's not safe! You won't be accepted! Stay where you are!

But I've found that those very powerful cultural messages are usually false, designed in part to keep us from seeing and experiencing people and parts of life that may change our perspective. Oh, it's not a big conspiracy; rather it's all ingrained cultural conditioning that keeps people in their own world and prevents them from experiencing another one.

Most of the people I've met who are deeply committed to social change will trace their own transformation to the time when they first went to a third world country, or even just across town to the inner city. There, in a world very different from their own, they had "conversion experiences" that would shape the rest of their lives. It wasn't so much reading a great book or hearing an inspiring lecture that changed them but rather their experience in a war zone, a refugee camp, a youth center, a women's shelter, or an urban church trying to hold a community together. Time studying at the university can, ultimately, be less educational for social change than time spent on a reservation, in a ghetto, in a barrio, or up a mountain holler. Lesson Two is that you've got to get out of the house more! Once you do, you'll discover a whole new perspective.

You'll see things, meet people, and experience worlds that you otherwise never would. And it will change you. When I talk to people about how change really happens, the first thing I try to impress upon them is that it is both possible and worth it to cross the normal boundaries of our lives, to escape our comfort zones and experience a different reality. That's always the first step. You can stay home and keep accepting the easy answers, or you can step out and make some new discoveries. If you don't get out, you'll never know what's really going on; if you do, a whole new world opens up.

And it's the more in-depth, longer-term experiences outside of your own world that can have the most lasting impact. My wife, Joy, is an example of that. At the age of eighteen, she spent a year working in the countryside of Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. Taking a year off before college, she plunged into a world very different from anything she had ever known. Joy had grown up in the working-class neighborhoods of South London, but she had never seen poverty like what she encountered in Haiti.

The actual work she did was in a project to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in a rural area. There is probably nothing more taken for granted in developed countries than clean water; yet the lack of safe water is a leading cause of disease and death all around the world. It is estimated that more than five million people, including two and a half million children, die each year from illnesses related to unsafe water and improper sanitation.

Living and working with some of the poorest people on earth for a year had a profound effect upon this English schoolgirl. Joy was forever sensitized to the plight of people at the bottom, those who are always shut out and left behind. Later, she became a priest in the Church of England. But she always stayed in the inner city, and paid special attention to people who are poor, homeless, mentally and emotionally disabled, aged, immigrant, or outcast. Something got into her blood in Haiti and it's never left her. Now she talks about starting a new church for the poor in Washington, D.C.

You also won't really know yourself if you stay inside the carefully constructed boxes of your life. Getting out of the house is actually the first step on a spiritual journey; take it and your life will begin to change. That is both the promise and the challenge. Only by the challenges encountered in stepping out do you learn what resources you have and what contribution you can make. What you gain is self-understanding as well as spiritual awareness. The path of self-discovery is critically linked to the process of social and political transformation. But the first step is to walk outside of the old, familiar places.

John Fife was a Presbyterian pastor in Tucson, Arizona. He was a preacher in cowboy boots, and his Southside Presbyterian Church was set in the beautiful landscape of the American Southwest. Pastors like John are expected to play it safe in regard to controversial social issues. But that would soon all change.

One day, in the early 1980s, an Immigration lawyer told John that a professional "coyote" (one who smuggled illegal immigrants across the border) had abandoned a group of Salvadorans in the desert. Half of them had died of dehydration, and the other half were picked up by the border patrol and hospitalized. As soon as they had recovered, the deportation process would begin.

The attorney said, "We've been talking to these people, and they're terrified of being sent back to El Salvador." At that time, most illegal immigrants from El...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375501762
• ISBN 13: 9780375501760
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien