A New Culture

This past Saturday, I had the opportunity to help with a training session for our local IAF group, CHANGE - Communities Helping All Neighbors Gain Empowerment. Every time I participate in any kind of CHANGE training, I am reminded afresh of how counter-cultural IAF is, and why the media - whether local or national - has a hard time understanding IAF.

Anyone who is remotely awake to local, state and national events should recognize that we are an increasingly polarized culture. At every turn, we are being told by pundits and politicians - and some clergy, too - the equivalent of "if you aren't for us, you're against us." People are being trained to out-yell each other rather than to reason together, to demonize anyone who disagrees rather than listening to that person's story and experience.

As I looked out over the several dozen folks who had given up their weekend for CHANGE training, I was - as always - pleased to recognize that we had folks from different ethnic backgrounds, different faith traditions (or none at all), and varying political views. Our culture doesn't know what to do with a group like this that comes together to work for solutions that make life better for the entire community.

I have to wonder if the politically powerful people who lived in Jesus' day were equally as confused. Here was this laborer leading a group of people who were historically marginalized to recognize that if they took care of each other, treated each other as they would want to be treated, that the "world as it was" would be transformed in the ways Jesus referenced in the Sermon on the Mount. For those who were used to wielding power over the populace, how frightening it must have been to see people coming together, by the thousands, to hear what Jesus had to say.

But I imagine the most frightening part of all came after Jesus' crucifixion, after those who wanted to stop this movement believed it took killing only one man to accomplish the task. Instead, the twelve Jesus initially trained became 70, and they taught and trained more who became the hundreds if not thousands as described in Acts 2.

I hope the larger American culture can catch a vision of the world as it could be by looking at the work done by local IAF organizations. Rather than throw stones or hurl invectives, I'd invite them to actually join in the work, building relationships with people from other parts of the city/county.