Bart Campolo wrote:

Poverty, after all, is not so much the absence of money as it is the absence of choices.

I would urge Bart to think through the ramifications of this statement.

Wolverine

Posted by: Wolverine | December 3, 2007 2:47 PM

WWJD? Flee to the posh suburbs, Bart! Home of the multi-million $, big-box, evangelical seeker-center. Why, just this morning I had to make the faith-challenging and gut-wrenching decision as to which service station to buy petro at for my humungous SUV. Now I'm trying to decide whether to have lunch at Tony Roma's Ribs or Joe's Crab Shack. I'm relying on my faith to see me thru.

Bart, I pray the protection of Almighty God on you, your family, your congregation and your ministry as you face challenges most of us know nothing about. Peace, brother!

Posted by: canucklehead | December 3, 2007 2:59 PM

Sticking it out in the neighborhood in solidarity sounds great and such, but how does that really help SOLVE the problem? Solving the problem requires a multi-pronged approach. First, the gangsters need to be sent to jail. There is simply no excuse (well, maybe there is, but nevertheless it's wrong) for this kind of shoot-em-up mentality. Second, (which can only happen after #1), economic development needs to take place. When these two things happen, things will change for the better.

Posted by: Ngchen | December 3, 2007 3:25 PM

Hey Bart

I am a graduateof Houghton college, where you recently spoke in chapel, and unfortunately since i graduated this past spring i was not there to see you speak but i heard your sermons online. I just wanted to commend you on your work in the city and tell you that people like you and shane claiborne have been a great influence on my life and I pray that God will strengthen you to continue your work in those places. What you speak of in this post is exactly what I am most afraid of since I too and endeavoring to pursue urban ministry through the church and through intentional community with the people in those places. It is such a hard thing to balance as you say the desire to run and protect your family with loving your neighbor. It is hard that Jesus did not guarantee our personal safety when we work for his Kingdom, though many of us wish he did (and some indeed do think so). I commend you again on your work for the Kingdom and the inspiration that you are to others.

Thanks

Chris McKinstry

Posted by: Chris | December 3, 2007 3:47 PM

Cads,
It's not that simple. Sometimes, although those choices might physically be there, they might not mentally be there for a lot of those children.

You can't always see choices that aren't regularly pointed out to you. Only a small percentage of people are born with the natural inclination to thing outside the box.

If your whole experience in life is a mom that got pregnant at 15 and does drugs, and who gives you cosmetics to play with at 5 yrs old - because "people will like you more if you wear make-up" - and lets you wear low-cut jeans and revealing tops, and doesn't encourage you with your homework even though you are a very bright little girl, and doesn't see the your talent for artistic, creative things......then....where does it come from?

Oh yeah, there are some kids that are born pushing the edge of the envelope - and they make great, inspiring stories on the news! But they are rare kids, kids that either had some outside adult in their life to encourage them to dream and to refuse to accept their situation....or else they just were born original thinkers.

People get into a habit of "what's normal" and unless they get exposure to what is TRULY normal, they may always think their experience is the norm - and that's all they can reasonably expect.

Or even if they do come to dream, they may not know how to go about the necessary steps to start walking in the direction of their dreams. A lot of that learning comes from observing someone modeling that behavior.

Add to that the peer pressure that can come when one child starts to break out - and all their peers start snubbing them because "who do you think YOU are?"

Horizons don't expand in one jiffy of an instant.

Posted by: Amazon Creek | December 3, 2007 4:27 PM

Bart,

It is Advent; come Lord Jesus to Cincinnati's neighborhoods and to the life of Wu.

To you who claim the name of Christ, I submit that a focus on solving the problem is going to lead us astray. I encourage everyone to look back over the posts and find all the places where we are thinking in terms of the mighty dollar rather than discipleship. Then I encourage you to ask how God sees this. I don't think that God thinks of the suburbs as safer; the Advent Daily Office readings for this week start in Amos. Read it.

I can't even begin to address the complexity of living in an urban center and confronting the pressures that come up every day. I am sure we all feel the stress and the depression that comes from not being able to solve anything, but the pressures in our city (where we have lived for 20 years) are great. We cling to God's promise and we try to be obedient rather than effective. We see our sin and our corporate sin every day.

Some days we also see joy, but it is always a gift, never the result of our accomplishment. It is always God overcoming things bigger than us. I hope your kids will learn to see that and realize what a mighty and awesome God we really do serve. This is the gift of urban ministry -- to be on God's team in place where only God can make a difference.

g

Posted by: Graphical | December 3, 2007 5:06 PM

God bless Bart. Chuck says hi. I remember how difficult innercity ministry is. My prayers are out for you and the neighborhood. Stay safe.

p

Posted by: payshun | December 3, 2007 6:00 PM

Ha. This looks like one of those issues, where, unlike Iraq, the conservatives, in face of conflict, are the ones urging "cut and run." Home of the brave (and certainly not in this neighborhood of the free) indeed.

Now that's interesting, because the best way to get our boys "over there" out of harm's way really is to pull them out of Iraq, if that's the only consideration.

[It's worth noting that the vast majority of legislators who plump for war don't have their own children serving. I guess they're taking the same advice offered here to take their responsibility as parents seriously and keep their own kids out of harm's way while ignoring the plight of the other people's kids they've put there. Meanwhile war opponents on either side of the politcl divide have had their own serving kids killed and yet are reviled. Not just Cindy Sheehan but former Col. and conservative military historian Andrew Bacevich, whose son was killed earlier this year in Iraq.]

What's remarkable too, is the same belief in the redemptive power of violence and vengeance through weaponry that pervades our society, regardless of what side of the tracks we're from. Perhaps, given our proclivities, it's not an anomaly at all what Iraq has devolved into under our occupation. It's the inner city writ large and driven to its ultimate consequences, through that same psychology unleashed and underwritten by government and corporate power and weath, instead of that of gangs alone.

We are all the same, after all, and in need of just the same Redeemer.

What war zone should we cut and run from? The spiritual one? Or should we sacrifice by taking as Presidential the command to "just keep shopping"?

Posted by: N.M. Rod | December 3, 2007 6:36 PM

Blessed Lord Jesus,

We pray for a miracle tonight, Lord. We pray that there would be oil found beneath the neighborhood where Wu and Miss Helen live. We pray this so that the conservatives in our country will find a reason to give a rats patoot about what is happening to these people, and so that some of the billions being thrown at the battle for oil in the Middle East might return to our shores and help these folks who hang on the edge in our own streets.

In Jesus' name, Amen

Posted by: ds0490 | December 3, 2007 7:46 PM

I bless Bart for living where he does. There was a time that I thought about doing the same. I came to the conclusion that if I were to live in my city I would have to send my children to private school and that was not an option. I worked for a not-for-profit at the time and a mortage and tuition were not in the pay-check. I opted instead to work with a few organizations that dealt with inner city issues.

Then again maybe Bart is sending his children to a private school.

Blessings -
.

Posted by: Moderatelad | December 3, 2007 10:32 PM

Bart,
You and your wife are living out the most basic calling of Christ, you are caring for the least of these. For all those who commenting, we can all find our excuses for why we are not living as the Campolo's are, but the proof is evident in Matthew 25.
I used to teach in a private Christian school and my son attended there, now we are both in public schools. There comes a time when we have to put down the lie of "safety" and accept that if we are not using our gifts to ring in the Kingdom of God, we are complicit in the evil we deplore, which is as far from spiritual safety as it gets. (If I gain the whole world, but forfeit my soul...)
I pray for the day when we all have the courage to step even further into the idea of true 1st Century Christian Fellowship.
I will also pray for Wu and the Campolo's and their entire neighborhood.

Posted by: Lisa LeDonne-Stan | December 3, 2007 11:47 PM

There was a professor of Education in one of our Australian universities who spoke about the 'residualisation' of public schooling. The idea that what public schools have is the residue that's left over when all the middle class and promising students are removed.
By removing our kids, be it to private schools or home schooling we help to create these 'residual' schools.
In many ways the 'issue' of education is about the better off and better educated parents abandoning the public system. In these pages we often hear about complicity in sin, be it through our shopping, our coffee, our voting. But we are more immediately complicit in the residualising of our local schools when well meaning parents cannot send their own children to those places. Here is where the class divide begins and ends.

Be Blessed,

Posted by: Trent | December 4, 2007 7:47 AM

I think the other message that is implicit in this is the breakdown of (brace yourselves) law and order in this community. Campolo says that the witnesses to Turtle's murder refused to testify because they wanted to settle scores themselves.

Why they would think this way is anybody's guess, but the bottom line is: their lack of faith in the criminal justice system -- justified or unjustified -- is liable to lead to more, not less, bloodshed.

Wolverine

Posted by: Wolverine | December 4, 2007 8:54 AM

I find a wonderful blessing of seeking God (to the extent I do so) is how the Spirit fits all things together. Even when they do not seem to fit. Decisions where to live and how to serve. Do I have children in public school or different alternative? How do I shape my life in response to world so beautiful and so depraved; and walk out the salvation of my own broken and divided heart?

Persons seeking first the Kingdom are going to make different decisions for reasons God knows; and the diversity of these paths grow us to greater maturity together.

Thank-you Bart, and each person commenting,for working at it!

On occasion I find my questions answered by taking them off the table. I struggled much with where to enroll my children in school. Do I choose A, B, or C. Finally, I believe the Lord said to me, "You are their most important curriculum. Why don't you pay attention to the content of your own being and how I use that in their lives; including how you embrace and frame whatever school they are in?"

I guess any answers to our questions are wrong if we are asking the wrong questions; or not living them out in the context of "Seek ...first the Kingdom..."

Posted by: letjusticerolldown | December 4, 2007 10:17 AM

"The idea that what public schools have is the residue that's left over when all the middle class and promising students are removed. "

So my child is responsible for educating other children? If that is the case, we need a new system entirely. This is the typical canard disseminated by the teachers unions here in America to explain the abject failure of our public school system to educate students in poorer areas.

There is no merit to this case. It is merely assertion that middle class students somehow have some intangible benefit on the education of others.

The notion that we owe some sort of loyalty to this failed governmental enterprise is backwards on its face. Rather, we should be asking what the system owes us, given that we fund it (and rather extravagantly at that). The idea that I am in SIN for abandoning it (should I choose to do so) is downright absurd. There is nothing in scripture that compels my allegiance to the public school system.

Posted by: kevin s. | December 4, 2007 10:55 AM

Look, you can't in good faith send your children to public school if you really don't believe that what they are doing in those schools is the correct way to bring up children. It isn't even the violence per se. It's the whole approach.

Do I as a parent have any input into curricula or what is taught to children? What if I disagree and think that it's socialization and societal indoctrination and that the essential worldview I believe to be true is denied? Why would I subject my children to that at a tender age? I want them to be educated, not propagandized. I'm not simply a breeder for the state. The state and its ideas are a world of trouble and I don't want to catapult the propaganda.

I support a good system. I think it's absolutely racist to call the children who go to those schools "residue." How dare you! The achdiocese of New York put that one to rest when they took on, for free, the worst of the worst of the students in the New York public school system. Those kids ended up as high achievers. This "blame the victim" or "toss them all in prison" mentality has to end.

You have to realize that public institutions in this country are in a rapidly falling state, That's not the fault of the children and it is mostly the fault of the bureaucracy and behind them the political and legal class which is producing at all levels of government institutional incompetencies. As for parents, even if they do get involved, they are just supposed to be the hands of the administration with no decision-making input whatsoever.

We have too much centralized and incompetently paternalistic government.

Posted by: N.M. Rod | December 4, 2007 1:31 PM

Bart,

All I can offer in response is to pray for you, your wife and children, and your friends (I assume they have children also?).

We are told, and we must have faith in this promise, that your reward will great.

Aside from prayer, do you have other suggestions for things we readers might do?

Posted by: carl copas | December 4, 2007 2:38 PM

Kevin S.--I couldn't agree more with your comment about (loud) neighborhood groups dominated by change-averse retirees. It may be peripheral to the Campolo topic, but the same problem exists in Washington, D.C., although it affects residential development at least as much as commercial.

Posted by: DC Native | December 4, 2007 4:09 PM

Why they would think this way is anybody's guess, but the bottom line is: their lack of faith in the criminal justice system -- justified or unjustified -- is liable to lead to more, not less, bloodshed.

Bart didn't say this, but I assume the people involved were black. Well, for some very good historical reasons, blacks in the 'hood don't trust the police for their safety, in part because they don't think they'll be there when someone goes gunning for them but also in part because they fear abuse from the cops. Remember the furor that came about in the early 1990s when Ice-T did that song about killing cops? What wasn't said was that he had the attitude, "I'll get you before you get me."

Posted by: Rick Nowlin | December 4, 2007 7:21 PM

My experience with the public schools is precisely that educators welcome parental involvement - as determined by them - but it doesn't work at all if one isn't in complete agreement with the professionals. In other words, it's their way or the highway. For those who aren't of the same mind as, there isn't much scope. This is a problem even for iconoclastic people working within the system. Increasing federal control and one-size-fits-all mandates mean less and less scope to innovate locally or to use discerning responsibility.

I don't think it's very helpful to insist that in the meantime you sacrifice your own children and yourselves to what you believe is a wrongheaded approach. That approach would lead to more heat than light if that is your situation.

Personally, I think there's a fundamental flaw with a system whose paradigm derives from 19th century industrial factory models of producing education as if it were a commodity to be mass-manufactured. At the time, child labor was a huge problem to be overcome, but industrialists were aghast that the child labor force would become idle and unemployable, so they plumped for a system that would get the children used to sitting for hours, just as they would have to at machines in factories. And to be fair, the strides made under indutrialization were so dramatic (if cruel) that it was seen as applicable to just about every problem. To the man in love with his hammer, everything looks like a nail. And how many heads have been pushed in by the heavy anti-intellectual hammer of what's now largely a socializing and baby-sitting service so that parents can both be out generating taxes.

Hey - my father was a public school teacher and administrator, too! So, as his offspring, I take exception to your taking exception!

Posted by: N.M. Rod | December 5, 2007 1:06 PM

We educated our three minority children through homeschooling and now two of three are in public univerities, while one continues in the euqivalent of high school. Because of the discrimination by the educational establishment against homeschooling, entry to college had to be by scores much, much higher on SAT and ACT tests than those required by public school students.

Although that's discriminatory, it also proves something about the efficacy of the practice - contrary to the claims by Mrs. Clinton back in 1992 that it was tantamount to child abuse.

We couldn't afford private school tuition, so homeschooling was our alternative.

We didn't want to spend hours spending time counteracting what we believe to be the wrongheaded indoctrination of our children and make them have to choose between submitting intellectually to authorities or the more iconoclastic views held within our family.

It involved sacrifice. We don't have cable TV, our vehicle is twenty years old and we have never gone into debt to fuel a typically materialistic lifestyle. We shop at places like Goodwill.

I might add that our children were leaders among their peers in after school activities that comprised our whole community's children, regardless of where they went to school during the day.

BTW, I have always loathed the suburbs, though I myself was raised there. In contrast, my wife was raised on an Indian reservation.

Posted by: N.M. Rod | December 5, 2007 2:35 PM

The education (indoctrination?) that the state gives to children embeds in them a tendency to conformism and acceptance of submission, in addition to false myths about history. [Think of invasive personal searches and mandatory testing of bosily fluids. Such people will hardly object to ever more invasive and authoritarian government as adults, a fact which we are already experiencing over the past 7 years.] But what would you expect? He who pays the piper - government - calls the tune. That puts people, after 12 or so years of it, in a remarkable state of denial - now that's what I call cocooning.

Its main appeal to most people is that it is without additional direct cost, effectively free. Perhaps if alternatives were free, there would remain even fewer partakers. It can also appeal to the busy, the irresponsible or even the lazy - someone else takes the responsibility for most of the day. As some in the gay community say, the parents are reduced to the pejorative of "breeders."

Personally, I don't consider what we have done as limiting, but expanding, far beyond the limited paramters of most of the coffee and donut fast food education system. And our kids saw more of what's real and R-rated in our world instead of living a Disneyfied suburban existence that many of their peers did.

However, this doesn't mean that public education ought not to be administrated and funded properly, for it is a given that it will be the system utilized by the majority and we do have a responsibility to others, too - while demanding the freedom of choice to opt out and to innovate. So many of our creative and innovative people have been the product of non-traditional education that didn't crush or stifle them the way that public education often treats non-conformists or those with special needs.

If "progressive" initiatives end up demanding a command economy with all the attendant bureacratic lacks of freedom and efficiency, then they are simply the rehashed failed liberalisms that fomented deep dissatisfaction with results and created the environment for a reaction.

I don't think Katrina style responses to the crisis in public education have done anything to raise test scores - even though they certainly don't tell the whole story.

Again, I ask that people not be so ideologically blinded that they see everything in the either/or Manichean terms of liberal vs. conservative.

Posted by: N.M. Rod | December 5, 2007 6:43 PM

Things aren't what they were in public education thirty years ago.

Since the Department of Education was established in the eighties, the schoolroom has increasingly become much more of a federal fiefdom, more so as there was a justified perception that public education was failing - a trend that began in the Great Society's collapse under the weight of the war in Viet Nam.

Since it was used to justify Jim Crow and thereby became discredited, "states' rights" hasn't been much use in defending the right to substantative and meaningful local control. Increasingly, federal mandates and tests have resulted in less leeway to innovate, especially if it means federal funding is lost.

Ted Kennedy himself has been troubled by some of the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind.

It's not my idea of teaching freedom - which is after all important, and can't be equivalent to an egalitarian misery masquerading as justice - to have children have to walk through metal detectors, be frisked, have their lockers searched, have an aspirin result in expulsion due to "zero tolerance" and be subjected to random drug tests. Or to be required to wear uniforms. All while a teacher struggles to keep control in a classroom, let alone teach. Having kids who aren't addled by the societal trivialities forced to be in that classroom does damage to their motivation to learn and helps no one, except the administration that gets the fedral funding of about $7000 to have them there in body if not in spirit.

Granted, those are all the results of federal mandates and mostly "conservative" legislation. I'm afraid my libertarian streak, while definitely communitarian, eschews such controls by people who don't know us as individuals or locak communities and whom we can't influence at all from where we are, ensconced as they are behind layers of bureaucracy in faraway Washington.

And though I support unions, it's impossible to get rid of incompetent teachers. In many ways the system exists to serve and maintain itself and the children are merely the props - we have heard too much the heartstring-tugging banality of it all being "for the children."

Posted by: N.M. Rod | December 6, 2007 1:19 AM

Thanksgiving afternoon as I was speaking to my mother in law (my husband and I were hosting Thanksgiving meal) I looked out my front window and saw several young men walking across the street towards my front yard. The young men have been hanging out just at the corner of my house for a couple of weeks. Not the same ones every time. I haven't been able to figure out what they are doing as they stand and face out towards the street. However, some are of a family a few houses away that have been the target of 3 shootings in the last year. In anger I walked out to show my presence. I am a white, middle class, stay at home mom. They immediately let me know that I was not welcomed as they stated nothing was going on. I was able to share my fears - although with no proof. My husband joined me moments later. They told him to take his lady in the house. He didn't. I stated my fears again. Then went back into my house to my concerned family. They haven't stood outside my house since then. It's been almost two weeks. I've had many talks with God regarding why we chose to join many other Christian families who have moved into this neighborhood. Why are we exposing our children to this danger. God has given our hearts this desire. To be here as His presence.

Posted by: Barb | December 7, 2007 1:32 AM

Bart,
I want to commend you for your obedience to Christ. Our example in scripture, trumps the wisdom of this world! Many people have commented that you are putting your children's life on the line by staying in this neighborhood. They are kinda correct but if God is our protector then are you really putting your kids life on the line?
You cannot cause change from a distance. Jesus as well as his disciples intentionally lived in community with people who were in enviroments that were considered destitute. The level of violence paul and the other christians endured were extreme and probably worse than any urban minister or missionary could imagine. I live in the city of Cleveland, the hood, our ministry is located in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. I have a wife and three children, and my life is always in danger. So is a surburban christian who goes to the mall on the wrong day, gors to church and there is an assasin in the parking lot, or at a missions school! We can't hide in our comfortable settings. We are the light, we are the salt, we are his body!! I am educated, I have several degrees, I am intelligent. I am also a christian, only in america and western countries do we hear christians whining about violence and trouble and actually running from it. We have the person who can remedy the sin disease. Be encourage bart, stay the course, keep the faith and engage and disciple the troubled souls of your community.

Grace and peace
BigCleve

Posted by: BigCleve | December 11, 2007 9:30 AM