Social justice in practice

In our last class discussion, one of the questions raised by our guest lecturer, Tim Ahrens, pastor of First Congregational Church (UCC) in Columbus, OH, (http://www.first-church.org/) was whether it is possible to do social justice work as a preacher and pastor of a local church. In re-reading our class logs, it appears that every student agreed this not only can happen, but should happen. Most of us cannot imagine a pastoral ministry that would not have feet planted firmly in both the local congregation and the larger community.

In my work with our local community organizing group, CHANGE, our lead organizers teach us about thinking of the world the way it is, and the world the way it should be. Our goal as a community organization, then, is to do the work we think is necessary to make our city what we think it should be for the betterment of all. This is an inherently biblical way of thinking about the world, in my view, because it calls us to doing what we pray for in the model prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

This model of community organizing also recognizes another important biblical principle, that of bringing people together across what had previously been unfathomable divides of gender, ethnicity and class, a strategy that refuses to scapegoat “them” in order to serve “us.” This principle can be hard in our culture when the presumed leader of the country proclaims that “you’re either for us or against us.”

Today I was in a situation where it would have been easy for those seated around the table to drop into the us/them mode, ultimately leading to a shouting match. An African American male was convicted of the beating of a Caucasian woman, even though there is no physical evidence linking him to the crime. He did, after a time, confess to being on the scene, but his eventual polygraph results were inconclusive. Our community is on alert because it has already been the scene of a highly publicized wrongful conviction, that of Darryl Hunt, (http://www.darrylhuntproject.org/about.html) so the African American community and its Caucasian supporters are understandably worried that another injustice has occurred. But we – mostly clergy - gathered around a table with the district attorney and had a civil conversation, learning many things about how hard it is for the DA’s office to be successful because of lack of staffing, training, pay scales, etc., not to mention the inherent racism we all know is endemic to the criminal justice system. The end of the conversation concerned how we, as citizens, can find ways to rectify these problems – in conjunction with the DA’s office – so that further injustices will be unlikely.

Democracy is messy, but done well it should bring us together rather than pushing us further apart. That sounds like something with which Jesus could agree.