Two of the mantras that my evangelicalism has taught me over the years are these:

1.      Be True to Scripture
2.      Avoid Politics

The heart for God's Word is not all that surprising, given the "Sola Scriptura" roots of Protestantism and the attempt to be faithful to the Bible that have been consistent earmarks of American Evangelicalism.

The second mantra might be a bit surprising, especially as Evangelicals have been branded as part of the Religious Right over the past several election cycles. Despite media portrayals, however, the vast majority of evangelical churches have not preached Republicanism. Rather, they have avoided politics altogether, leaving the partisan work to Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and the late Jerry Falwell.

The biggest reasons for avoiding politics? Well, some are justly concerned that the church can easily be co-opted by a political party and its witness stifled. Many are worried that engaging in politics will divert attention from the "simple Gospel." Others recognize that politics can be divisive and are concerned their churches might lose some valuable market share.

So instead of evangelical churches discussing political issues, we have in essence decided that our congregations would be better served getting their political bearings from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann or James Carville than be viewing political issues through the lens of scripture.

Unfortunately, the mantra of avoiding politics has trumped our commitment to be faithful to scripture!

In the model prayer that Jesus taught, he prayed that God's kingdom would come and God's will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Bottom line? Doing God's will on earth demands that Christians think about the big political issues of the day through the lens of scripture! As any reader of Sojourners knows, the Bible demonstrates God's deep and abiding love for the poor.

In 2008, poverty is out of control locally, nationally and globally. In my neck of the woods, in Cincinnati, more than one in four people live below the poverty line. If God's kingdom is to come in Cincinnati, something must be done about poverty.

So this fall, University Christian Church is hosting a Poverty Sunday as part of the Vote Out Poverty Campaign. On Poverty Sunday, we will encourage congregation members to personally get involved in working with and loving the poor in our community.

We will also encourage members of our congregation to evaluate political candidates based in part on their policies and plans for reducing poverty both nationally and globally.

We will not be partisan. We will not be asking Christ-followers to be single-issue voters. But, we will no longer give politics to Limbaugh, Hannity, Olbermann and Carville.

As Christians, we take up our crosses and follow Jesus, not political pundits. And where Jesus leads, we must follow, so we will be hosting a Poverty Sunday this fall. I pray your church will too.

For more information on Sojourners' Vote Out Poverty campaign and Poverty Sunday, visit www.voteoutpoverty.org

+ Listen to Troy Jackson & Chip Williamson: talk about organizing a Poverty Sunday:

Troy Jackson is senior pastor of University Christian Church in Cincinnati, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, and earned his Ph.D. in United States history from the University of Kentucky. He is author of Becoming King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of a National Leader and a participant in Sojourners' Windchangers grassroots organizing project in Ohio to work on the Vote Out Poverty Campaign.

Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones was a Cleveland original. Stephanie never cared about “style points.”  She only cared about passing public policy that served the common good.  No one matched her passion, energy, or voice for the poor and vulnerable. Everyone wanted her on their side. She was ever present in her 11th Congressional District and was tireless in her advocacy for victims of predatory lending, the uninsured, the unemployed, and children.  The news this week that 30 percent of Clevelanders are living in poverty would have caused her to redouble her efforts at the national level. One of her dreams was to become the first woman chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.  Most certainly, she would have used that pulpit to the benefit of her constituents and the nation.  

A woman of deep faith and a champion of the poor, one rarely encounters a person with the integrity, compassion, love for humanity, and political skills that Congresswoman Tubbs Jones possessed.  Catholic social action in Cleveland lost a key ally.  Our nation lost a marvelous public servant.

Tom Allio is director of the social action office of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, chair of the Ohio Coalition for Responsible Lending, and a Sojourners board member.

I've been on lots of roads trips, but none of them compare to The Walnut Hills Fellowship's weekend journey to Chicago.  Start to finish, it was a thing of rare beauty.   We had been talking about it for months, of course, but I think most of our neighborhood friends still didn't really believe it was going to happen.  After all, people around here are always talking about things they don't really intend to do.  As plans firmed up the week before we left, however, people got nervous in a big way.  All of a sudden, nearly everybody had a reason they couldn't go. 

At first I was shocked that people who had never been on a real vacation were ready to throw away such a golden opportunity because they couldn't afford new traveling clothes, or because there was no television or smoking in the dorm rooms were staying in, or because we decided against beer-drinking and spending money in the interest of group solidarity, or because they were less than thrilled with one or another activity on our itinerary.  It angered me that my friends were so inflexible, especially because most were contributing little or nothing at all to the trip.  Fortunately, just before I shot off my mouth at dinner the week before we left, Karen and Mark set me straight:  Our neighbors weren't ungrateful.  They were terrified. 

There I was, an educated and experienced world traveler, talking about familiar attractions like the Navy Pier and the Magnificent Mile, secure in the knowledge that I would be driving one of the vans, holding lots of cash and a handful of credit cards, along with my unlimited-use cell phone and a long list of Chicago friends in case of an emergency.  There they were, with no such knowledge and no control whatsoever, being asked almost casually to just relax, follow directions, and unquestioningly trust me and my more privileged buddies with their lives.  Really, it's a wonder we made it out of town at all. ... 

Read the full entry »

[... continued from part 1]

All I'm trying to say is that whether we wear the label of Christian conservative or Christian liberal, what matters most is that we are Christian. The Bible reminds us that there is no male or female, Jew or gentile, bond or free, but in Christ we are all the same, sinners saved by grace. 

What I've learned is that many of my liberal and conservative friends draw the line around issues of gay rights and abortion. But people in the church I attend disagree on these issues, and yet somehow are still able to worship God together on Sunday morning. To me that's evidence of the Holy Spirit -- that in spite of our disagreements, we all agree that God is worthy of our worship and deserving of our praise. Each of us is evidence that the gospel still works; if it didn't, we wouldn't gather together on Sunday mornings. 

The bottom line is that as I travel the country visiting churches, talking about issues of justice, and organizing congregations, I don't hear these terms very often. I'm not sure where these labels come from or what relevance they have in advancing the work of the church. But I do know that most of the time I hear them being used, it's by the media, politicians, and religious organizations that seek to separate Christians into clearly defined groups to meet an institutional agenda around a given issue. Shouldn't we be seeking unity in the body of Christ, rather than entrenching ourselves in positions that distance us from each other? It's hard enough trying to do the work of ministry, so why should we expend so much energy defending ourselves against other Christians? 

The harsh reality is that there are people outside the church waiting on us to show up. And when we don't show, many of them are giving up. My prayer is that we would be like Paul and say, "I press toward the mark of the high calling for which God has called me Heavenward through Christ Jesus."

Rev. Romal Tune is the CEO of Clergy Strategic Alliances, a graduate of Howard University and Duke University School of Divinity, and a member of the Red Letter Christians.

It wasn't until I started working in the world of religion and politics with advocacy organizations on Capitol Hill that I ever heard anyone define Christians as liberal or conservative. These terms were not used in my church experience. But when I recall different experiences working in the church, I can see how some members of the churches where I worshiped then, where I worship now, and in congregations across the country, fit into these categories. I've found it difficult to determine which of these categories I fit into as a Christian. Am I liberal or am I conservative? More importantly, can the two co-exist in the church?

When I think about my passion for social justice, starting with the days when I, along with a group of church members, would go out every Wednesday night, feed the homeless, pass out the Daily Bread, talk with them, and invite them to worship, and how once a month we would conduct a worship service at the neighborhood homeless shelter and extend the invitation to accept Jesus and join the church, I'm not sure if these actions make me a liberal or a conservative.  But I also remember the day I realized that surely there must be more to it than this. I began to ask, why are we always feeding and providing clothes to the same people month after month, and in some instances, year after year? Isn't there more we can do to change their situations? In general, I had assumed that something beyond their own control was keeping them in poverty and perhaps there were systems of oppression working against many of the people we came in contact with on the streets. I began to realize that just generosity, though necessary, wasn't going to bring about justice. When I look at it this way, I can hear colleagues of mine in the religious advocacy world saying, yep, you're a liberal all right. 

But not so fast -- maybe I'm a conservative? Just last week, I was teaching Sunday school and the text was "blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Surely this text did not suppose that every person who is poor shall inherit the kingdom. There are people who are not "saved" who are poor, and even some very bad people who are poor. 

As we discussed the possibility that Jesus meant something more spiritual than physical, that perhaps we are blessed and will inherit the kingdom when two things occur: First, we look at our spiritual condition without Christ and our inability to do anything to change it, and recognize our plight but realize that because of Christ's love for us, we are blessed because our sins will not be counted against us, and that's why we will inherit the kingdom of heaven.  Second, when we look at the condition of the world: communities overcome by crime, drugs, gun violence, and other social ills, we as Christians can recognize the sinful nature of people committing these acts, and through our spiritual lens understand that systemic change is not going to come at the hands of the government, police, or job opportunities alone. (All of these will help the social conditions, but do nothing to change the spiritual conditions.) Deep down, what people need most is a relationship with a God who looks beyond their faults and sees their deepest needs. True changes occur from the inside out. 

Maybe this perspective makes me a conservative. I'm not sure which label fits me best, but one thing I know beyond the shadow of a doubt: When we remove the layers of labels, like the grave clothes that confined Lazarus, we can look in the mirror and know in our hearts that we are Christians. 

[to be continued...]

Rev. Romal Tune is the CEO of Clergy Strategic Alliances, a graduate of Howard University and Duke University School of Divinity, and a member of the Red Letter Christians.

In January of 1964, President Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty in America." In response, the Census Bureau created a methodology for establishing an "official poverty line," determined the number of people whose incomes fell below the line, and calculated the poverty rate.  The formula for determining poverty was based on the assumption that food costs consume one-third of a family's after-tax income -- an assumption that is still used today, though food now constitutes closer to a seventh of family income. The resulting calculation means that a family of four is considered poor if total income is $21,200 or less. Except for adjustments to reflect inflation, this calculation has remained unchanged for more than 25 years.

At a recent hearing of the House Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, experts testified that the food measure fails to consider other necessities of contemporary life, such as housing, transportation, health care, child care, and other expenses that have become essentials of modern life. They called on Congress to modernize its method for calculating poverty. One expert at the hearing stated: "If we want to solve the poverty challenge, step one is to get our heads around the true scope, dimension, and dynamics of the problem."

Both political candidates for president have made poverty part of their political agenda. Sen. McCain promised to make the eradication of poverty a top administration priority in his April 2008 statement. Sen. Obama co-sponsored the Global Poverty Act, which calls on the president to develop a comprehensive agenda to cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015. He has also endorsed the need for a new poverty measure that more accurately reflects the costs of living and the economic pressures on American families.

Whatever your political point of view, a key issue to consider in any election is the issue of poverty. Sojourners is using the '08 election cycle to focus specifically on the issue of poverty.  Poor people play a central role in the parables told by Jesus. As people of faith, we must not forget the poor in our midst.

Rosemary Du Mont is a participant in Sojourners' Windchangers grassroots organizing pilot project in Ohio, which works on the Vote Out Poverty Campaign. She lives in Cleveland.  

[ ...continued from part one]

So how do we help people who have been hurt so much psychologically and emotionally that they don't believe in themselves and don't believe they deserve better? How do we help children who have never heard a parent say, "I love you, you are special, talented, and will do great things one day"? Or those who watched their parents harm themselves through substance abuse or alcoholism? Is there hope for these men, women, and children? If we believe in God and the power of God to give us beauty for ashes, then the answer is yes!

For many people living in poverty, their change will not come through programs and policies, but it will come through personal responsibility. What I mean is that it will come through our personal responsibility to walk alongside them and show them through our actions that we are not going to give up on them. It will require that those of us who no longer live in poverty or have never known poverty develop substantive relationships with people who are poor. We must go out and meet people where they are and show them how we got out, show them through our interaction with them that they are loved. Invite them into our homes so that they can be exposed to a better life, see what healthy relationships look like, and hear us talk to our children using words of empowerment. When people see living, breathing examples of what God can do, that's when they believe God can do it.

And yes, I understand that this notion of stepping out of our comfort zones to have deeper personal relationships with people whom we don't know and perhaps don't understand, is not very appealing or makes us uncomfortable.  But is this not what Jesus did?  Every person he encountered was a stranger before that moment. In fact, we were strangers when he found us.  But as it was when Jesus walked the earth, reaching out to those in need of change, touching people who had never felt a compassionate hand, so it is today.

Yes, in our own power and limited ability we cannot do this, and I would daresay that some may not want to do it, but with God all things are possible.  If we humble ourselves and say, "God, I cannot move this mountain, I need you to move it for me, increase my faith," then and only then can we truly eliminate poverty by liberating the poor from the psychological bondage of their circumstances.

I know this is possible because it is my story.  Had it not been for men and women who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself, people who refused to leave when I tried to force them out of my life, had it not been for them I  would either still be living in poverty, selling drugs, in a gang, or dead. But thanks be to God for those men and women who refused to give up on me simply because they realized that in their own lives, God refused to give up on them.  Yes, we need better policy, new programs, and personal responsibility, but perhaps what we need most is to stand alongside the people who need us most.

Rev. Romal Tune is the CEO of Clergy Strategic Alliances, a graduate of Howard University and Duke University School of Divinity, and a member of the Red Letter Christians.

During this election cycle, we have heard candidates talk about ways in which we can work to end poverty. John Edwards has a new initiative to cut poverty in half in 10 years.  These and other initiatives are certainly admirable ideas and much-needed programs that could help millions of men, women, and children.  

In additions to programs and needed policy changes from our elected officials, we are also hearing about personal responsibility.  And yes, inasmuch as we should look to our elected officials to address the needs of a growing “underclass,” those in need must also do something to change their circumstances.  However, as we work to address the needs of the poor through policy, programs, and personal responsibility, we must also take into account that something is missing from this dialogue. 

As someone who grew up poor in a single-parent household, I went without dinner more nights that I can even count. At times having to choose between using my bus fare for lunch and walking home, sometimes the decision to eat forced me to humble myself and stand on the corner asking strangers for change so that I could get home. I know from experience that there is more to the task of eliminating poverty than programs, policy, and personal responsibility. 

For those of us who either grew up poor or work in poor communities, you have likely come to realize that the psychological impact of poverty is just as damaging as the circumstance itself.  Perhaps the most difficult task, when trying to get people to engage in the work of their own liberation, is convincing them to believe that they are worthy of a better life.  Yes, there are those in poor communities who, given a fair chance, will rise above their circumstances and pursue a better life. But we cannot ignore the reality that there are others whose spirits have been broken and feel like the darkness of poverty is their destiny. There are those who have been told so many times that they will never amount to anything, will never achieve anything, and even deserve to be where they are, that they now believe it is true.  These are the men, women, and children for whom it will take more than good policy to get them out of poverty.  These are the men, women, and children who can no longer be inspired by words that seem foreign to them, because it has been words that have done them the most harm.

There is a saying that "hurt people, hurt people." In other words, many living in poverty are simply doing what they were taught by their parents. They are using the skills and words handed down to them by people who were hurting, and they are now instilling the same beliefs in their children.  They have not seen examples of how to do things in a different way, they do not know how to encourage their children because they were not encouraged as a child, and they do not know how to live as a community or family where people meet the needs of others so that everyone can succeed, because from early in their lives they have been left alone and had to fend for themselves.

[to be continued...]

Rev. Romal Tune is the CEO of Clergy Strategic Alliances, a graduate of Howard University and Duke University School of Divinity, and a member of the Red Letter Christians.

My great-grandfather was one of the first Christians in a village near Pyongyang.  God's grace was poured over his entire family, but they experienced intense persecution because of their faith. As a result, he "escaped" one night with his entire family from what is now known as North Korea.  My father was 5. Not everyone in his family survived the journey south that one chaotic night.

North Korea, as some may know, is one of the most isolated nations. Subsequently, some of the gravest human rights violations and suffering go unnoticed -- including approximately 200,000 Christians who are in prison labor camps simply because of their faith in Christ. This past weekend, Minhee and I had the privilege of spending some time with friends who left Seattle three years ago to go to Yanbian, China (via Singapore). With their three children, they left the comforts of home, family, and friends to act upon their convictions. The father recently relinquished his well-paying job with full benefits to serve the people of North Korea -- initially at the border of China -- and in a few months, he'll hopefully receive his "resident card," which would allow him to travel to and from North Korea to do community development work. There is no salary to his work as a "tentmaker."

Who in their right mind wants to become a "resident" of North Korea?

It was humbling and inspiring.

When people ask us why we feel so compelled about starting and building the new global poverty organization, it's because of these people and thousands more who are on the ground fighting poverty by serving people, enabling education, building community development projects, digging water wells, distributing medicine, writing letters to governments, giving hope by restoring human dignity -- and so many who do these and so much more -- many who do so in the love of Christ.

Someday, I will return to North Korea.

Someday, I will return to the birthplace of my ancestors, the birthplace of my father and mother. We still have family in North Korea, that is if they are still alive. We do not know. Someday, I will return with my wife and children to not only proclaim and demonstrate the gospel of Jesus Christ but the good news of human dignity that must be afforded to all people because that is the will of God. Thirteen years ago, I climbed Mt. Baekdusan at the border of China and North Korea and prayed for an opportunity someday to return home. I echo that prayer again. Someday, I will return to Korea.

But until then, I hope to be an advocate and activist for many around the world who have no voice. Did you know that about 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific?

Before I submit another entry in the coming days about some of my views about policies with North Korea, I want to draw your attention to an overview of the situation in North Korea via the organization Liberty in North Korea. Would you take three minutes to read this link to hear the story and suffering of my people?

Eugene Cho, a second-generation Korean-American, is the founder and lead pastor of Quest Church in Seattle, and the executive director of Q Cafe, an innovative nonprofit neighborhood café and music venue. He and his wife are also launching a grassroots humanitarian organization to fight global poverty. You can stalk him at his blog eugenecho.wordpress.com.

It's clear that one cause of the current food crisis is that poorer countries have been pressured into dismantling their food policies, leaving peasant farmers and eaters alike to bear all the risks of the extremely volatile world market. This has left corporations free to ship factory-farmed food to those countries, peasants free to migrate to urban slums, and corporately-dominated economic markets free to ignore those starving.

And we should blame ourselves, not the corporations. Expecting a corporation to give affordable loans to farmers, look out for the urban poor, and cut carbon emissions - unless those are the most profitable things it can do, which they aren't - is like expecting your kitchen stove to go out and join the Missionaries of Charity. (The difference is that, if your stove were a corporation, it would hire lobbyists to make sure that federal policies heavily favored stoves over toasters and George Foreman grills).

But many of the powers that be refuse to admit that our current trade model is a problem; so some are demanding that we respond to the crisis by drinking more corporate-trade Kool-Aid (by extending reach of the WTO, for example). In a move that clearly shows they are lost to common sense, such arguments often blame the food crisis on the only significant farm policy left on the planet: rich-country subsidies for food crops. For example, a story last week announced that U.N. head Ban Ki-moon had asked the world to respond to the crisis by "cut[ting] agricultural subsidies, particularly in developed countries."

Now, there are lots of reasons why U.S. farm subsidies, which push the export-driven factory-farming model, are broken and need to be radically reworked. (And, of course, subsidies for ethanol production, which converts food to fuel, really do drive up the price of food and are a huge problem).

But the crisis is that food prices have become way too high. Subsidies to food crops inherently lower food prices. You do the math.

I believe the underlying argument is that subsidies have dampened "market signals"--i.e., rising prices--that would otherwise have caused farmers to gradually increase production. But, as you may have noticed at the gas pump, some key farm inputs, like fuel and fossil-fuel-based fertilizer, have been anything but gradual in their price rise. On top of genuine supply and demand spikes, there's the still-more-volatile behavior of financial speculators.

And, on a more basic level, farmers often are unable to respond to price increases. In particular, small farmers in the global South don't have access to affordable loans, supplies, or marketing they would need to grow more.

Why? Because poor countries have dismantled most of their food policies as trade agreements decimated the government policy toolbox, and IMF pressure forced many governments to slash their farm investment. Now, there are belated calls for governments in the Global South to invest in farming once again. Amen to that.

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners.

I grew up in a working-class, African-American neighborhood in Detroit. I was fortunate to have two college-educated parents who knew how to set my brother and me up for success in school. They also knew how to navigate the public school system to ensure we got the best education possible. That support helped me gain entry into a competitive college prep public high school. My path to college was clear: 99 percent of the graduates at my high school went on to four-year colleges and universities.

Unfortunately, my best friend, Amanda, did not have the same opportunities. She attended our neighborhood high school, which was notorious for violence, drop-out rates of more than 50 percent, and a substandard curriculum. During the fall of our senior year, I was anxious about the results of my college entrance exam, the SAT. Amanda asked me, "What's an SAT?" I was floored and angry. How could my talented, witty, brilliant friend have never even heard of the SATs until her senior year? How could Amanda's high school not provide her with the same high expectations that I was getting in my high school? I was also painfully aware that my high school was integrated, with a large percentage of white students, and it was a haven for the children of Detroit's wealthy and elite. Amanda's school was 100 percent African American and made up of predominately working-class families and families dangling at, or in most cases below, the poverty line.

That moment with Amanda set me on a path to determine what I could do to eliminate educational inequity. I was motivated by a strong desire for equity and my personal Christian faith to live out Micah 6:8 in my life: "To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

After college I chose to join Teach For America, which is a national corps of outstanding recent college graduates and professionals, of all academic backgrounds and career interests, who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become lifelong leaders in expanding educational opportunity. I moved to Los Angeles and taught fifth grade in an under-resourced urban community. I encountered many challenges in my two years, but ultimately I encountered children with incredible academic potential. My job was to give my students the tools to tap into that potential. Through a lot of hard work, my students improved tremendously during the year. I had students who could barely read at the beginning of the year tackling introductory chapter books at the end of the year. Students who could not do basic two-digit addition problems in September were tackling long-division problems by June. But most importantly, I walked away with the knowledge that it is possible to eliminate educational inequity because I saw it happen in my own classroom.

Teach For America is entering its 19th year, and thousands of teachers have joined the movement to eliminate educational inequity. This fall, more than 6,000 corps members will teach in 29 urban and rural regions in more than 100 school districts in 23 states and the District of Columbia. More than 14,000 Teach For America alumni continue working from inside and outside the field of education for the fundamental changes necessary to ensure educational excellence and equity. Teach For America alumni become lifelong advocates for education and justice -- many of them stay in teaching, but they've also gone on to start charter schools, run urban school districts, fight for educational and economic equity through law and public policy, and start health care clinics to provide better health care options to people in low-income communities. While Teach For America is a secular organization, people of faith have been critical in the Teach For America movement. In fact, nearly 50 percent of our current teachers self-identify as people of faith -- and more than 80 percent say their faith was a primary reason they chose to join Teach For America.

I recently attended Sojourners' Pentecost 2008 conference in Washington, D.C., along with almost 300 action-oriented individuals. The three-day training focused on practical ways to mobilize our faith communities around issues of poverty and social justice. The conference provided me with additional tools to fight injustice and reminded me, once again, that people of faith have an obligation and responsibility to be on the front lines to bring about equity. The conference also reminded me that so many people of faith are looking for ways to put their faith into action -- and working to provide all children with a high quality education is one of the most powerful ways we can do that.

To apply to Teach For America or to learn how you can be a part of the movement to eliminate educational inequity, visit www.teachforamerica.org/jointhemovement.

Dr. Nicole Baker Fulgham (nicole.baker@teachforamerica.org) is the national director of Faith Community Relations for Teach for America.

As you were singing carols, placing the last presents under the tree, and worshiping at a Christmas Eve service this past year, Indian Christians halfway across the world were being victimized by the largest attack on the Christian community in India's democratic history. The complex and combustible layers of caste-based oppression and religious persecution came to a head on Dec. 24, 2007, through a spate of violence in the Kandhamal District of Orissa state. During the course of a four-day campaign of terror, more than 100 churches were damaged, at least 700 homes were destroyed, and thousands of Dalit and tribal Christians were forced from their homes.

As preparations were being made to celebrate Christmas, Christian leaders approached the police ...

Read the full entry »

In the wake of Sen. Obama's proposals on faith-based initiatives, I listened to political pundits characterize this as simply another shift by Obama toward the political "center." All this knee-jerk analysis totally misses the point.

I've followed the development of this idea for years. In September 2000 I was at a breakfast for religious leaders at the White House when President Clinton said that regardless of who was elected that fall (Bush vs. Gore), faith-based initiatives would be one of the new challenges to be worked on by any president. And the best speech on the subject was given by Al Gore during that campaign. So this never was seen as a "Republican" idea until Bush was elected, and then many more Democrats began to distance themselves from the initiative.

President Bush first appointed John Dilulio to head the Office of Faith-based Initiatives. After he left, Jim Towey was selected by the president to lead this effort. I know Jim fairly well; he worked for Mark Hatfield in the U.S. Senate after I did, and he's an outstanding public servant who worked hard to guide and fashion this program. Faith-based offices were established in several states as well, including in my own state of Michigan by Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm. But the idea eventually fell victim to the highly partisan and politicized dynamics dominating Washington.

It will take creative partnerships between private, religious-based efforts, and public governmental programs (and not an either/or) to have a substantial impact on domestic poverty. That's what the whole discussion around "faith-based initiatives" has been about in ways originally seen as nonpartisan. If that spirit can be recovered, I think I lot of church leaders and religious activists -- despite their partisan preferences -- will be encouraged. The pundits have it wrong. This isn't a right-wing or a left-wing idea; it isn't a Republican or a Democratic idea. It's simply a good idea.

Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson served as legislative assistant to Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-OR) from 1968 to 1976. Today he serves as general secretary of the Reformed Church in America.

As our motorcade approached the Dalit village of Nayagarh, we could see the bright and brilliant image of 500 Dalit women gathered to welcome us, their saris forming a kaleidoscope of color. Cheers and whistles erupted from the crowd of women as we approached. I felt like a presidential candidate as I passed through the crowd, shaking as many hands as I could reach, wanting to make human contact with women whose dignity is so often demeaned and whose worth too often dismissed. These women had formed 130 self-help groups composed of 10 other women in villages across the region to invest in entrepreneurial projects that generate income and create a better life for their families and villages. They had come to show off their products and seek additional assistance from Operation Mercy Charitable Company (OMCC), an initiative supported by Operation Mobilization India (OM) and the All India Christian Council (AICC) that provides training and micro-loans. The women proudly showed off their products, ranging from beautiful saris to rice and roti. Access to loans are providing the keys to emancipation from bonded labor and careers of doing the most degrading work, such as cleaning latrines.

Many of these women also send their children to an English instruction school that has been set up by OMCC, funded in part through the Dalit Freedom Network. The majority of Dalit children are either denied access to primary education or only receive instruction in Hindi or other native languages. The public school system has become a dismal refuge for the children of the lower and middle castes, where Dalit students face daily abuse by teachers and students. According to a government report, 73 percent of Dalit students drop out in secondary school. Instruction in English represents a passport to higher education and India's service- and high-tech economy. Already OMCC has set up 81 schools in rural villages across the country. The combination of educational opportunity and asset creation are planting seeds of social and economic empowerment.

Educational opportunities provided by the missions and churches have built a new generation of Dalit Christian leaders ... Read the full entry »

"Grain Markets Panic Buying, Export Controls, and Food Riots," trumpets the headline of one Web site I read while researching the world food price crisis for Sojourners' July issue. Was the site a moral critique of how our corporation-driven, anything-goes global economy has caused the cost of food to skyrocket, driving 100 million people into poverty?

Actually, the "food riots" headline is geared to telling people how to profit from others' suffering. The next sentence reads: "Long-term global demand and supply trends in the agricultural sector remain very favorable for investors." Morally repugnant as that segue is, the real problem is that speculation probably helped cause the food price crisis (in concert with other factors such as agrofuel production, rising meat-eating, and the gutting of poor-country farm policy).

Speculative markets are innately prone to stampedes, as we can see from the mortgage bubble, the dot.com bubble, etc., etc. Wild price swings are built into the system: It's the job of a money manager to buy commodities that will go up (helping to inflate bubbles) and sell them when they start to go down (helping deflate them).

Turning up the speculative heat is the fact that there's a LOT of money out there chasing investments -- double what there was in the year 2000. A recent NPR program, The Giant Pool of Money, spells out, in human terms, how the pressure that speculative money exerts was a recipe for disaster during the housing bubble.

While that bubble hurt homeowners and investors when prices deflated, food-market speculation hurts the world's poor as prices go up -- way, way up. Incredibly, many voices in the press fly in the face of reality by arguing that speculation somehow decreases the wild swings and bubble pricing of markets. For example, The New York Times recently argued that

... the more money that speculators are willing to put to work in the market, the more liquid it is and the easier it is to buy and sell without causing big ripples in prices.

If you believe that stampedes calm vibrations, I've got some subprime mortgage-backed securities to sell you. A more accurate description of how speculators act can be found in Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten's interview several years ago with Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow:

[Weingarten]: ... would it be your professional judgment that Wall Street, the principal bulwark of the American financial system, is at the mercy of persons with the maturity of kindergarteners -- or of preschoolers?

Solow: It's at the mercy of very, very nervous people.

Now, the world's poor are more than nervous. They're hungry. Very hungry.

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners.

In the shadow of India's economic miracle lies a people often deemed untouchable, largely impoverished, and seemingly invisible. Bubbling beneath the shimmering image of a new India is a cauldron of inequality, caste-based subordination, and religious tension that could boil over into even greater civil strife and violence. At the center of these forces lies the Dalit struggle. While Dalit rights are often denied and hopes are crushed, growing political, economic, and spiritual empowerment is fueling a movement for liberation. The emancipation of the Dalits could serve as the key to securing India's nonsectarian, democratic future. However, this future collides with the ancient system of castes, which still confers profound benefits or burdens upon Indians simply because of their birth names.

For more than 3,000 years, the caste system has divided Indian society into four distinct classes, or varnas. Outside this system are the Dalits, who according to caste are not considered part of human society and are therefore less than fully human. While untouchability was outlawed in the 1950 Constitution and atrocities against Dalits are prohibited through the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act, a lack of political will and widespread corruption at all levels makes the law all but obsolete. Untouchability remains particularly acute in the rural areas of India, where 70 percent of the population still resides. While a great deal has changed in the sprawling and more tolerant cities, in rural areas people's entire lives are circumscribed by a caste identity that suffocates their dignity and segregates their lives.

The Dalit population approximates that of the entire United States. Imagine the U.S. population living in a perpetual state of discrimination and marginalization. This should strike a familiar chord with our own recent history with Jim Crow segregation. According to Joseph D'souza, president of the Dalit Freedom Network and All India Christian Council, the government has outlawed the symptoms of untouchability but ignores the actual disease of caste that still relegates nearly 250 million people to an apartheid-like existence. Comparing the Dalit struggle to a system of apartheid may seem like hyperbole. However, the entrenched system of caste systematically subordinates a large segment of Indian society.

The name "Dalit" means "broken" or "ground down." Approximately 25 percent of India's vast population is Dalit. To this day, people from higher castes refuse to marry Dalits; they are relegated to occupations that are considered degrading; most caste Hindus will not eat or drink with Dalits; and the majority of bonded laborers and sexual slaves in India are Dalit. Caste is part of a Hindu belief that people inherit their stations in life based on the sins and good deeds of past lives. Despite signs of economic mobility, Dalits are often the victims of dehumanizing acts of violence and humiliation designed to keep them in their place. As I learned more about the mounting crisis of AIDS in India, it is the Dalits who are most prone to be living with HIV and most likely to die a painful death from the disease.

I first heard about the Dalit struggle at the World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Discrimination in 2001. A large contingent of Dalit activists were present in full force. Their message was that the entrenched caste system in Southeast Asia was equivalent to racism and that their voices could no longer be silenced. Unfortunately, their voices were drowned by so many other oppressed voices vying for global attention, and by the controversy around the pulling out of the U.S. delegation.

It took another six years for the Dalit struggle to capture my conscience. In a presentation about the modern-day system of slavery, Gary Haugen, director of the International Justice Mission, based in Washington, D.C., described India as the worst abuser of human trafficking in the world. During a series of meetings over the past year, Rev. Sam Paul, national secretary of public affairs for the All India Christian Council, and Dr. Joseph D'souza have brought the Dalit struggle even closer to home, asking Sojourners to become engaged in the international Dalit freedom movement.

A year later I find myself in the crucible of the Dalit struggle, spending a week with the Dalit Freedom Network and the All India Christian Council, visiting one of the provinces in India that is hardest hit by Christian persecution and Dalit oppression. In many parts of India, the Dalit struggle intersects directly with the issue of religious freedom, as nearly 70 percent of Christians in India are Dalit. While Christians constitute a small minority in India, 2 to 3 percent of the population still translates into roughly 30 million people. Many Dalits and tribal caste people converted to Christianity in order to escape religiously sanctioned inferiority within Hinduism, drawn to a new identity and equality in Christ. However, many in India cling to the notion that India is a Hindu nation and that to be Indian is to be Hindu. Dalit Christians are thus twice-oppressed, once as the outcasts, and then again as members of an often-despised faith. This series will explore the Dalit struggle based on my experiences over the past week through what has felt like a baptism by fire. I hope and pray that you will join me in learning more about this modern system of apartheid.

Adam Taylor is the senior political director for Sojourners. To learn more, read Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India's "Untouchables." Feb. 2007

Beliefnet invited Jim Wallis to participate in a "blogalogue" with David Klinghoffer, author of How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. Here's Jim's response to David's final post, "The Bible Says Poverty and Morality are Connected"

The problem with using the Bible as the basis for running a society is that it would always be somebody's interpretation of the Bible, and a worst-case scenario is that it might be your interpretation, Mr. Klinghoffer.

I too have read and studied the Bible all of my life, and I just can't recognize the Bible in so much of what you have said in our "dialogue." I really work at finding common ground with people across the political spectrum on moral issues that transcend ideology and politics. But we have been unable to find much common ground in this dialogue. I still find many of the things you have said absolutely astonishing.

I still can't get over your contention that most of what the Bible says about the poor doesn't apply to America because our poor people are so well-off here. I replied that most Christian clergy and Jewish rabbis that I know would find that statement incredulous, but got no direct reply from you. In your latest post you say, in an equally unbelievable way, that wealth is the most consistent test of whether a society is righteous in God's eyes. I read the Hebrew prophets in a totally different way -- that the best test of a nation's righteousness is how it treats the poorest and most vulnerable. That is always how God judges a society. Read Isaiah, Amos, and Micah.

Then you say that war is just a "tool of statecraft." Really? The Hebrew scriptures warn against militarism -- "not trusting in horses and chariots" -- and Jesus calls we Christians to be peacemakers and love our enemies. In fact, you note in your book Christians who believe that:

Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites, among others, can point to the teachings not only of Jesus himself but of ancient and medieval sages -- Tertullian, Origen, Francis of Assisi, Menno Simons, down to a twentieth-century figure like Thomas Merton.

It's interesting that "Jesus himself" and the earliest church fathers were all opposed to war. So, what happened? You say, quite correctly, "With the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (324 C.E.), all that changed." Indeed, it did. And you then cite such esteemed theologians as Oliver Cromwell and Gen. George S. Patton. When you say in your latest post that war is merely the normal tool of statecraft, does that mean all wars? Every time a nation decides to go to war as an expression of its statecraft is justifiable? What about when one nation with Christians and Jews decides to go to war with another nation with Christians and Jews? Are both nations justified? Is there any religious critique or discrimination possible here? Let me guess: You support all the wars America has fought. I could never get you to tell me what you think about the war in Iraq.

I could go on, issue after issue, but I don't think that would be productive. We just disagree, profoundly, on what biblical imperatives suggest about society and politics. I am very glad that America has a separation of church and state and that people who would prefer a more theocratic vision of society (as I interpret you to prefer) don't get to run things they way they would like. We both have to convince our fellow citizens that what we believe is best for the common good. That's a good thing, and I welcome that debate. Thanks for this one.

Beliefnet invited Jim Wallis to participate in a "blogalogue" with David Klinghoffer, author of How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. Here's Jim's response to David's latest post, "What Are God's Real Politics?"

You asked for specific issues from a Biblical perspective.

Let's start with idolatry. I agree with your definition that it is "setting up moral authorities in competition with, or to the negation, of God." But you then turn it into a partisan polemic against the Democratic Party, and what you call its "aggressive secularism" and "classic pagan hallmarks." I do not agree that the "chief crisis that any would-be political leader today needs to address" is the idolatry of secularism. The far greater crisis is those who call themselves Christians (or Jews), but put other loyalties ahead of their loyalty to God

The reality is that the idolatries that rule in the U.S. include nationalism, materialism, racism - ideologies that compete with the rule of God and for the loyalties of people of faith.

I've told the story many times about when I was in seminary, and our group of students did a thorough study to find every verse in the Bible that dealt with the poor. We looked for every reference to poor people, to wealth and poverty, to injustice and oppression, and to what the response to all those subjects was to be for the people of God We found several thousand verses in the Bible on the poor and God's response to injustice. We found it to be the second most prominent theme in the Hebrew Scriptures--the first was idolatry, and the two often were related.

On Bush's "idolatries." I recount in God's Politics how often George W. Bush has confused the American nation with the people and the purposes of God in his use of Scripture, hymns, and his calls to arms in his war against terrorism. I do believe that Bush's theology has led to disastrous consequences and has embarrassed American Christianity and damaged our image around the world.

On same-sex marriage. I believe in equal protection under the law in a democratic, pluralistic society for gay people and everybody else. Some would debate whether civil unions are necessary for that, or whether other legal protections are adequate. And that's a fair discussion. But, I have consistently said that I don't think the sacrament of marriage between a man and a woman should be changed.

On abortion. I have repeatedly said that I believe abortion is wrong and always a moral tragedy. The number of unborn lives that are lost every year is alarming. But I also do not believe that the best way to change that is to criminalize abortions and just force them underground. The question is how can we actually prevent unwanted pregnancies, protect unborn lives, support low-income women, offer compassionate alternatives to abortion, make adoption much more accessible and affordable, carefully fashion reasonable restrictions, and thus dramatically reduce the shamefully high abortion rate in America? You say you want to respect the will of the people. Well, every opinion poll shows the same thing - substantial majorities think that there are too many abortions and that we should pursue measures to reduce and restrict the number, but they do not support overturning Roe v. Wade.

Finally, on poverty. You say that we can agree that some needs should be addressed by government. But in your book, you say that "I can find nowhere in the Scripture where the state is commanded to extend generosity to the impoverished." I suppose it depends on how you define "the state." It was very different in ancient Israel before the monarchy, but the Bible is full of laws that govern leaving the corners of fields unharvested, not shaking olive trees and grapevines a second time, the Jubilee year of redistribution - all aimed at compelling those who "had" to hand over some of their plenty to those who did not. And there are laws governing fair wages (think minimum wage), unfair interest rates (think outlawing payday lending), and other ways of ensuring some degree of economic justice. It's the gap between the rich and the poor which seems to most concern the prophets and reducing the economic chasm is a priority for them.

Then, in perhaps the most outrageous statement in your book, you say that "It is debatable whether the Bible's many admonitions to care for the poor really apply today, in the United States, other than to a relatively small group of people." Do you really believe that trying to support a family of four on $20,000 a year (the official poverty measure) isn't really poverty? Thirty-seven million people living below the poverty line is not a small group. I couldn't believe your statement when I read it this week. And it tells me that you have never lived in a poor neighborhood or had any poor people as your friends. Do you see the news these days, with stories of families having to choose between paying the rent or buying food, between keeping the electricity on or buying needed medications? And what about all the children who are poor, and even hungry, in America. Do you think that it is all just their fault? Do I need to tell you the heartbreaking stories of what happens to families in the poorest neighborhoods in Washington DC where I have lived for three decades? There is real and painful poverty in the U.S. today, David, and the Bible's admonitions certainly do apply. And frankly, most all the rabbis that I have been blessed to know over many years would completely disagree with you on this. Your incredible statement about the biblical imperatives not applying to the poor in your country makes me think that we will never agree on very much about what the Bible says about politics.

Finally, who I personally vote for is not the issue. In our work, we have successfully worked across the aisle on a number of issues. On TANF (welfare reform) reauthorization, we convened a group of senior Republican and Democratic staff to work on a bipartisan approach. We worked with former Republican Senator Rick Santorum on the CARE Act, supported the direction of his Republican anti-poverty platform, and several other measures. My closest friend in the U.S. Senate for many years was former Senator Mark Hatfield, Republican from Oregon. Sadly, I have not been very enthusiastic about the voting choices we have had in many recent elections. But what says more about my politics are the causes and movements which have compelled my time and energy. It's not who I may vote for, but who I work with as allies toward common ground and common goals.

I won't even try to describe all of the maddening details of finding a HUD apartment for a homeless, no-income family that consists of a mother, five kids under the age of nine, and a nurturing father. It suffices to say that after three weeks of slogging through that kind of absurdity and ugliness, I began to understand why the mother, our friend Jaleena, tried to kill herself when her original building got condemned. Even with all that, we barely managed an awful apartment, and by the time we did, most of the furniture Jaleena had left in the old place had been stolen by her former landlord.

So there I was last Saturday, along with our friend Kwami (the nurturing boyfriend), loading and unloading a truckload of secondhand bunk beds and bureaus, wondering how long my surgically-repaired ankles and arthritic hands would hold up. I could have found somebody else to do it, of course, but no one I trust enough to do it right. Strange as it sounds, moving donated furniture into a family's worn-out HUD apartment is a delicate job.

It wasn't about the furniture, after all. It wasn't about all the phone calls, waiting in line, sidewalk hot dogs, application fees, and driving all over town. That stuff is valuable sometimes, but it sure isn't enough to keep us here in this neighborhood on a bad day. No, the real job - the job that keeps us here - is about communicating genuine, garden-variety love to vulnerable, poor people who may feel that they aren't worthy of your interest, let alone your friendship.

To do that well, you can't act too cheerful about giving up your Saturday. On the contrary, you have to whine about the heat and swear out loud when your thumb gets crushed between the couch and the doorjamb, like you would if you were moving your sister's stuff. You take the beer if they offer it, and hint around if they don't. Either way, you let the guy know he'll be helping you move some of your stuff soon enough. There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but I can't really explain it to you. Nobody can. That's the problem.

These days I encounter lots of people who want to love poor people, just like Shane Claiborne or John Perkins or Dorothy Day or some other radical Jesus-follower they've heard of or read about. Some of them want to move to the inner-city, or to an African slum, or an Indian orphanage, or a Native American reservation. Others want to reach out right where they are. Either way, their enthusiasm for serving God's people in need is positively thrilling to me. And yet...my first instinct is to keep them away from Jaleena and Kwami.

Perhaps it would be easier for us to welcome these people if we were running a soup kitchen or a shelter, but we have no program standing between us and our neighbors here. We have no clients, after all, only friends, and given all the differences and fears and brokenness among us, keeping those friendships genuine is a tricky business indeed. I am often amazed at the beauty of our little fellowship, but I am always aware that it must be protected.

So then, forgive me if I complain about my sore ankles and aching hands, but then won't let anybody but Kwami help me with the furniture. It's my job after all, and I'm glad to have it.

P.S. For those of you looking for an update, Bobbie hasn't yet passed her truck driver's license test, but she hasn't given up on it either. It turns out she has four tries before she has to start all over again. Her school will keep working with her for as long that takes, but I still fear Bobbie's opportunity may be slipping away. Honestly, she's going to need more grace than I'm used to counting on. Pray for us.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs (www.bartcampolo.com) about grace, faith, loving relationships, and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship (www.thewalnuthillsfellowship.org) in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year (www.missionyear.org), which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the U.S., and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

This Training for Change conference was a good experience, one that I did not expect and that challenged me deeply. One of the tools we practiced was learning to tell our personal stories to build relationships with each other. I'm not very good at that, and I have a hard time finding the desire to open up to strangers.

But the more the ideas of "relationships" and "stories" were drilled in, the more they became real to me. I began to see the passion and the honesty in all of the other conference goers, which surprised me because I didn't know that there were people so willing and determined to create change in this society. It was very inspiring, and I was happy to get to know a great bunch of people. And the people who work for Sojo are crazy...about justice.

Donna Almendrala just graduated from UC Berkeley in May 2008 with a degree in Chemical Biology. She is currently looking for an outlet that will blend her science background and desire for social justice.

I, like most, have multiple tribes of which I consider myself a part. This weekend I ate with, spoke with, worshiped with, learned from, and was amazed by a new tribe of people. There was kinship, and a sense of shared experience, struggle, fear, and hope among this new tribe.

I was glad to hear something in Brian McLaren's session on "scared to talk politics in church?" It wasn't something Brian said but rather something from someone who doesn't look like me, and who had on a shirt I probably wouldn't wear. He spoke up in the Q&A at the beginning of the session (which was a fantastic idea, thanks Brian). This man had noticed in many conversations in the working groups and among conference attendees that while no one was out and out bashing either political party he noticed that more often people would speak favorably about the "more progressive" political party and "jabingly" about the "more conservative" political party. Now as one who is coming from a more conservative background and who is now very much wanting to find a political third way to let my faith fully inform my public policy, I noticed this underlying level in conversations happening here.

I understand that for many Americans who grew up democrat, progressive and Christian, or came to faith later in life, the current dominance of hyper-conservatives in the national faith conversation, namely the "religious right," has left them hurt, angry and wanting the balance to change. They have fought for justice and felt other Christians fighting against them.

This issue is real. The hurt is real and the pain is real. The polarization this country has experienced divides Christian who share the same Christ, just as it has divided the rest of the country. Theology may differ some or a lot, political agendas may be wildly different, and we may come from different sides of town, but we share a common God and ought to behave like it.

McLaren already planned to deal with this issue in his PowerPoint presentation. The conversation was wonderful when we came to that slide. He pointed to many places where conservatives are right and where they are wrong, and where democrats are right and where they are wrong.

All this being said- these people are my tribe. We share a faith in Jesus. I now share a budding passion for justice, ending poverty and for ending human trafficking with people who I have stayed separate from in my public and faith life. This conference is not the beginning of the process of reconciliation for me, but it is a major stepping stone in the continuing process. I am called to love my brother and the stranger.

God cares for the poor, so should I. God cares for the stranger, so should I. God cares for creation, so should I. God cares for the orphan, so should I. God cares for people who don't vote like me, so should I. God cares...so should I.

It sounds so simple to seek first the Kingdom of God. I make it very complicated.

Shelton Green works as a government affairs consultant in Texas and blogs at www.inreformation.com.

Yesterday I was in a class where we were trying to frame up the story of ourselves--not just an idealistic fluffy tale--but one that when you told it, others would understand in their gut why you felt the way you feel and maybe even get a glimpse of the "real" you and move a little bit closer to you as a person. A gentleman shared with me his negative feeling of experiencing that vulnerability. I do believe that most people feel this way...scared to go deeper....scared to really talk about raw happenings and going beyond the issues to a place that is personal. I think that may be very natural, especially surrounded by strangers whom you are meeting for the first time. In reality, being vulnerable to strangers has always been easier for me, than being vulnerable with those I am close to in many ways. I realized that I may be different than others in that respect, and I'm okay with that. Thinking about what this man said took me back to a page in The One Year Daily Grind by Sarah Arthur, a devotional I have been reading for the last year, that addresses what she calls "The Secret of Weakness".

"..the secret of weakness is not primarily about that God is trying to teach us in the midst of our struggles but how God wants to bless others in the midst of our struggles. People seek out the church, not necessarily because Christians are strong and vibrant and healthy, but because honest Christians have known what it is like to be weak. They have known suffering. They have felt the stab of pain and loss. They have held each other in their sorrow- they have knelt at the beds of dying people, prayed in the ER, handed tissues to someone at the end of a rough day. And the reason people come through the sanctuary doors week after week is not because Christians have it all together or have eliminated suffering from their schedules but because they are still able to say, after all this, 'We know that our Redeemer lives.'

The world is looking for saints to pray with who have known the depths of weakness, because that's where this world is. It doesn't want light, fluffy spirituality. It wants to kneel next to the Jobs who have seen the face of God. And that's what we as a Christian community can be for the hurting. Out pain and suffering are not some kind of spiritual liability. They're how God positions us to bless others."

This speaks to me in that I don't have to be ashamed of my weakness--that God can use it to help others that are hurting. Yesterday in the panel discussion: What about our faith calls us into this work? Embodying the Kingdom of God, Alexia Salvatierra and Alexie Torres-Fleming talked about how we need to work alongside the hurting. We can be so much more effective when we can pull from the depths of our souls the pains and trials we have suffered, and at the same time extend the hope that everyone deserves. We have a Savior to back us up.

Jessica Culp is a wife and mother, as well as a fundraiser for Cunningham Children's Home in Urbana, Illinois.

A few years back 50 Cent starred in the movie "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" about a young drug dealer who leaves his dealing to pursue a career as a rap star. The contrast is stark: utter poverty or incredible wealth. No matter the level of material poverty or wealth, believing that more "toys" is the goal will never overcome widespread poverty.

I ran into an acquaintance here at Pentecost 2008 who reminded me of how this "get rich or die trying" message is ingrained in our psychology at every economic level. As we caught up, he filled me in on how he's excited to be here because he just took a job in his hometown of Philadelphia as a community and church organizer. He's most interested in addressing the issue of the streets in Philly where poverty invades every inch of life, but "get rich or die trying," as 50 Cent likes to promote, is the ruling philosophy. Coming from a similar background, he has emerged with a different philosophy that drives him to bring change to the youth who are living in the same situation that he once found himself in. How does he empower his community to not fall into the trap of having getting super-rich as their only aspiration?

I have the same questions, but I come from a different economic background, solidly middle-class and college-educated for generations. I too work with youth struggling against socially imposed boundaries of class, race, poverty, and lack of education. At the same time, I am trying to work on my own struggle to overcome my culturally acceptable addiction to wealth (often glossed over as "practicality" or "security") with a theology of enough.

Conversations with others who come from different backgrounds are key to understanding how to answer these questions and lead the next generation. Although our lives have different backdrops, we agree that the get-rich gospel is not fulfilling. Together we're claiming similar values, asking similar questions, and reaching out to one another for answers.

Sarah Campbell is finishing her time as a volunteer in the Discipleship Year service corps in Washington, D.C., where she has been learning to break her cultural addictions through simplicity and intentional community. She is planning to study in a dual-degree program for a Masters of Divinity and a Masters of Social Work.

As I attended Pentecost 2008 I was reminded that Dr. King's Poor People's Campaign is celebrating its 40th anniversary. On Friday, Mary Nelson (Board Member of CCDA) and I facilitated a workshop on "Building the Beloved Community." Building the Beloved Community was one of the central messages of Dr. King's ministry. The Poor People's Campaign of 1968 serves as a tangible example of what the Beloved Community looks like when lived out. In November of 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr. and SCLC met to discuss what direction the movement should go in after the passage of civil rights legislation and the urban riots of the previous summer. SCLC decided to launch the Poor People's Campaign in response to the economic injustice that plagued many Americans of all races. The Poor People's Campaign was to be a widespread campaign of civil disobedience. The poor from across America would come to Washington, D.C. to challenge the government to pass an anti-poverty package that would include a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income and increased construction of low-income housing.

The Poor People's Campaign included poor whites from Appalachia, poor African-Americans from rural and urban areas, poor Hispanics and Native Americans. This group all came together to build Resurrection City which became the headquarters of the campaign. This "city" consisted of shacks built by conference participants and included a school, an arts and cultural program, and a medical clinic staffed by volunteer doctors. In this community African-Americans shared gospel music with Appalachian whites who in turn shared their bluegrass music. This Resurrection City was a place of Beloved Community. Sadly, the goals of the Poor People's Campaign were not accomplished due to the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy, bad press, and days of constant rain.

The unfinished work of the Poor People's Campaign is now our responsibility. For forty years we have been wandering in the wilderness of economic injustice but if we can unite regardless of our differences to create the Beloved Community we can get to the promised land of economic equality.

One tangible way you can honor the legacy of the Poor People's Campaign is by joining Sojourners in its Vote out Poverty campaign. Participants of Pentecost 2008 are being trained to return home to mobilize their churches, campuses and communities to "Vote out Poverty." Building the Beloved Community is necessary to doing this work.

Onleilove Alston is a native of Brooklyn, New York, and serves Sojourners in the Policy and Organizing department as a Beatitudes Fellow. She is a student in the dual M.Div/MSW program at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. In NYC she organizes with the Poverty Initiative and New York Faith & Justice.

Beliefnet invited Jim Wallis for a "blogalogue" with David Klinghoffer, author of How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. Here's Jim's response to David's first post, "Let's Clarify the Politics of the Bible."

Thanks for your post, David. I'm looking forward to this discussion with you.

You claim that the Bible has a conservative rather than liberal worldview. I would suggest that the Bible is neither "conservative" nor "liberal" as we understand those terms in a political context today. I have written about what I call "prophetic" politics that leads to a fourth option -- neither liberal, conservative, or libertarian. It is traditional or conservative on issues of family values, sexual integrity, and personal responsibility, while being progressive, populist, or even radical on issues like poverty and racial justice. It affirms good stewardship of the earth and its resources, supports gender equality, and is more internationally minded than nationalist -- looking first to peacemaking and conflict resolution when it comes to foreign policy questions, instead of bowing to the habit of war.

Yet in all those areas, the Bible does not prescribe specific policies on the issues facing us today. While we can use scripture as a normative vision, we must, as the National Association of Evangelicals puts it, "do detailed social, economic, historical, jurisprudential, and political analysis. Only if we deepen our Christian vision and also study our contemporary world can we engage in politics faithfully and wisely."

Let's take the issue of taxes that you raise. We cannot simply use historical texts from the Egyptian or Hebrew monarchies of 3,000 years ago as a policy prescription for the 21st-century United States. But, as a preacher, I couldn't resist looking at the texts. Genesis 47 is after a famine, when the people had lost all their land. Joseph proposes that they return to farming the land and give one-fifth to Pharaoh. Their response was "You have saved our lives! We are grateful to my lord and we shall be serfs to Pharaoh." The condition of serfdom was certainly better than starvation. In 1 Samuel 8, the point of the story is not the 10 percent rate that the king will take, but that the king will give it to his "eunuchs and courtiers" rather than benefiting the society. And in 1 Kings 12, the complaint of the Israelites is about forced labor, not taxation. In the dialogue, they ask Rehoboam to "lighten the harsh labor," to which he replied, "My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke." It wasn't taxes at issue.

But deeper than that, you say that people should be responsible for how they spend their money. The ideal of democracy is the collective will of the people speaking through their elected representatives. Our polity is certainly flawed. But I'd be willing to do a test. Let's ask the people if they'd rather have spent more than $500 billion over the last five years on jobs, education, health care, and housing, or on the war in Iraq. I'd be willing to accept the result, would you?

The problem is that our taxes are dreadfully misused, not that they exist. In the 2008 discretionary budget (excluding Social Security and Medicare), the Defense Department plus the additional spending specifically for the Iraq war is 60 percent of the budget. Every other function of the federal government receives 40 percent. The problem, David, is priorities, not taxes. In the 1 Samuel passage you cited, the first warning about a king is about his warmaking: "He will take your sons and appoint them as his charioteers and horsemen."

Let's move to a specific issue -- overcoming poverty. There are now 36.5 million people below the official poverty line ($20,614 for a family of four). In looking for the appropriate policies to deal with that problem, I apply two fundamental principles of Catholic social teaching. First, the common good -- what benefits the society as a whole, particularly the weakest and most vulnerable; and subsidiarity -- every problem should be dealt with at the lowest possible level.

There are three sectors of society that have a role in overcoming poverty to which we can apply the principle of subsidiarity. Faith-based and community organizations have a role -- local congregations and organizations, and national denominations and organizations. Government at all levels has a role -- local, state, and national. The private sector has a role -- small businesses and large national corporations, along with labor unions.

The challenge in overcoming poverty is to find the appropriate role for each level of each sector with a unified strategy. It is true that local congregations can provide mentoring and support networks for people in ways that government never could. But congregations cannot provide health insurance for 47 million people, jobs for the 8.5 million who are unemployed, and housing for the millions who have lost their homes through foreclosure. That requires efforts from government and the private sector.

Charity, as you propose in your book, is important, David. But good public policy for government and a committed private sector are also important. Wouldn't you agree?

I'll be attending Sojourners' Pentecost conference this weekend. Why am I excited? What am I expecting? I'm looking forward to honesty about the challenges we face when we are serious about overcoming poverty.

One of my greatest struggles around large issues like poverty is that I either feel like I'm not informed well enough or that I'm not doing enough. On one hand, I talk in circles about an issue without creating change. Or, I find myself working so hard for an issue that I lose my ability to engage in meaningful conversation with others who are not so gung-ho. Both understanding and action are important.

So I'm looking forward to learning concrete ways that I can live out a radical, inclusive economy of God's kingdom. I'm looking forward to the joyful accountability that comes from an earnest, Spirit-led desire to be in communion with God, God's people, and God's creation.
I hope that this weekend I will engage in meaningful dialogue with others who can help me grow through reflection and can challenge me to deepen my commitments to creating justice.

Sarah Campbell is finishing her time as a volunteer in the Discipleship Year service corps in Washington, D.C., where she has been learning to break her cultural addictions through simplicity and intentional community. She is planning to study in a dual-degree program for a Masters of Divinity and a Masters of Social Work.

I feel like I try so hard and I'm not sure what I'm actually doing. That is one reason why I wanted to go to Pentecost 2008: Training for Change. I want to be part of something bigger and know that we as a larger group have the passion to really do something. I've been sick of the way things are going and how, it seems, the church is growing cold in many ways. It makes my stomach sick to think that I would leave my children this world the way it is. How can I make a difference?

I've grown this conscience that is unrelenting. I can't just throw that piece of paper away, I have to wonder what would happen if everyone threw away that piece of paper. I can't just fill my styrofoam cup with coffee, I have to wonder how many times I can use it before throwing it away. I can't stand that a television is plugged in all day, but that I didn't use it once. I've got to unplug it. I can't just walk by a homeless person and not give them something. I can't hear a baby cry without feeling an aching, wondering if they are being loved. I can't just assume people will do what the Bible says. I feel pressure to yell at people who don't care, and I feel like I don't know where to start doing something that will turn things around. I want to scream: "Move, people, move! Do something! Quit being so comfortable."

I heard a Christian say to me a few years ago, "Who cares? This is why God gave us the planet -- [God] is going to come back soon anyway." I can't stand that kind of thinking anymore, and I've got to be a part of the change I want to see. I'm starting with this conference.

Jessica Culp is a wife and mother, as well as a fundraiser for Cunningham Children's Home in Urbana, Illinois.

Unconscionable: adjective

1. not guided by conscience; unscrupulous.

2. not in accordance with what is just or reasonable: unconscionable behavior.

3. excessive; extortionate: an unconscionable profit.

I have had some "unconscionable" things on my mind a lot lately as I have been working with the 20-somethings who make up Orlando Food Not Bombs and University of Central Florida’s Rock For Hunger. All three of these definitions of the word apply to the actions of the city of Orlando, in enacting an ordinance to try and stop these groups from sharing food with the poor and homeless in downtown Orlando.

Orlando Food Not Bombs (FNB) has been sharing food with the poor and homeless in Lake Eola Park since the summer of 2004. Some local business owners and residents, who were upset with seeing the poor fed in the park, complained to city government leaders. The mayor and city council reacted by passing an ordinance specifically designed to stop FNB from sharing food. The ordinance limits a group that is going to feed 25 or more people to no more than two such feedings in a park per year, and requires that a permit be obtained.

When the ordinance was first passed, the groups moved to the sidewalk and streets a block or so away from the park, but after continued city harassment moved back to the park. FNB, acting with churches and groups such as Code Pink and the ACLU, began sharing food in a manner that strictly complied with the ordinance. Each group would serve no more than 24 people, had a table clearly labeled with its name, and the dishes (which are collected and washed) were counted to make sure there were no more than 24.

Despite all of this, on April 4, 2007, at the conclusion of an Orlando police undercover investigation that, according to the Orlando Weekly, cost taxpayers $65,000, FNB member Eric Montanez was arrested. His alleged crime: feeding more than 24 people. His weapon: a ladle.

The result was twofold. One: A jury who understood the concept of "unconscionability” found Eric “not guilty.” Two: The arrest scared away groups and people who were participating, especially some of the church groups, who were afraid of being labeled "law-breakers."

Yes, it is unconscionable to let people go hungry, in a city of plenty in a nation of plenty. It is a higher magnitude of unconscionability to persecute those who feel called to serve the poor and subject them to arrest and prosecution.

A month later, six more FNB members were arrested for violating another city ordinance, “disturbing … (the) repose of any individual ....” The specifics of their offense: protesting the anti-feeding ordinance outside a restaurant venue where the mayor was holding a campaign fundraiser. Again, even in a country with a president who confines dissenters to fenced-in “free-speech zones” out of the line of sight of where he is appearing, last month an Orlando jury who understood the concept of “unconscionability” found them all “not guilty.”

Orlando Food Not Bombs and Vagabond Church of God have filed suit in federal court in Orlando to overturn this unconscionable ordinance. This matter has been working its way through the courts for more than a year and has survived all of the city's legal challenges to stop it. The federal court trial begins in Orlando this week. Let us pray for a court that understands “unconscionability.”

Rev. Alan Clapsaddle is a Social Justice Advocate/Blogger in Orlando, working with the National Homeless Coalition and LA2W.org. Alan serves at First UCC Church of Orlando.

Sojourners’ June issue features a cover story by Amy Green and a column by Jim Wallis about the new paths of Christians in their 20s and 30s, plus a set of mini-interviews with 10 next-gen Christian leaders. Here’s a taste: part of Sojourners’ interview with Jena Nardella, the 26-year-old executive director of Blood:Water Mission. Started by the band Jars of Clay, this ministry works for clean water and against AIDS in Africa.

What motivated you to get involved?

A billion people in the world lack access to clean water, and women and children are the ones who suffer the most from this reality. I think people can be paralyzed by the social injustices of the world and feel the need to shut it out or feel as though there is nothing that they can do to respond to the injustices. I have always been motivated by the truth that ordinary people can do something extraordinary, if it is done with love, humility, and large doses of hope.

I had no professional training, but I had a load of passion and a willingness to learn quickly on my feet. I got involved because I believed that there was a huge potential to engage young Americans in creatively raising awareness and funds for water and HIV/AIDS support in Africa, and I believed in supporting local organizations in Africa that knew their communities better than we ever could.

What one thing would you most like to tell Christians?

God is author and creator of the world in which we live. God hates injustice and loves mercy. We are free to live for ourselves, but living for something greater than ourselves brings joy deeper than understanding. We live in a deeply broken world, and it needs your love—whether in your family, neighborhood, or halfway across the globe. Just don't miss out.

What’s your biggest challenge personally?

Balancing hope with reality, and staying on the side of hope. After countless visits to African communities in the last four years, I have been on a roller coaster of extreme optimism and utter disillusionment. Poverty cannot be alleviated by charity. Charity cannot just be handouts of leftovers. And leftovers aren't what the world needs.

But even if you give it your all, the challenges that accompany community development, politics, scarce resources, empty leadership, and histories of oppression make hope feel weak sometimes. But I celebrate the seemingly small and yet significant changes that come as a result of hardworking African communities and generous Americans. A simple cup of cool water is something that bears greater hope than I could have ever imagined—because it represents so much more. I have seen more than 250,000 people work toward access to clean water in their communities as a result of a resilient hope. The structures of poverty and brokenness compel us toward defeat. And I choose hope.

+ Read the full interview

I don’t want to assume that readers automatically know who Steven Curtis Chapman is, but if you’ve been surfing the Web recently, it’s very likely you may have seen the name. Chapman is one of the most visible and influential figures of the Christian music genre. As of 2007, he has sold more than 10 million albums, has nine gold and platinum albums, and won five Grammy awards.

Chapman and his wife, Mary Beth, have six children – three biological and three adopted young girls from China. On Wednesday, May 21, the Chapman family received the worst of news.  In what was meant to be a celebratory week for the Chapman family, their youngest daughter – 5-year-old Maria Sue Chapman – was killed in a tragic car accident. 

“Just hours before, this close-knit family was celebrating the engagement of the oldest daughter, Emily Chapman, and [was] just hours away from a graduation party marking Caleb Chapman’s completion of high school. Now, they are preparing to bury a child who blew out five candles on a birthday cake less than 10 days ago ..." said Jim Houser, Chapman's manager.

As a parent of three myself, my heart absolutely aches and mourns for Steven and Mary Beth and their entire family.  What makes this story more gut-wrenching was that their daughter was accidentally struck and killed in their driveway by an SUV driven by their younger teenage son. Tragic.

I’ve been surprised at how Maria Sue’s death has impacted so many. I figured a handful of Christian news sources would cover the story, but it’s been very widespread and still remains one of the top items on search engines. The last time I checked, 18,301 well wishes, blessings, condolences, and prayers were left on a tribute blog titled, “In Memory of Maria.”  Perhaps it speaks to the many ways Chapman has ministered to so many people through his music.  Or perhaps it speaks to how Steven and Mary Beth have demonstrated the beauty of the gospel through their lives – not just through his music but their advocacy for adoption through Shaohannah's Hope, “a charity organization which offers grants to qualifying families to help defray the cost of adopting, at home and abroad,” along with numerous other expressions of justice and compassion.

No parent ever wants to be in the news because of a tragedy, but nevertheless, it is good that so many have been drawn to the Chapman family story and the loss of their child.  While we lift them in prayer and celebrate Maria’s life and the hope that is found in the gospel of Christ, let’s not stop there. 

Be mindful of the millions -- especially children -- whose lives are as precious in the eyes of God.  As a result of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar and an idiotic military junta government, at least 80,000 have perished with about 56,000 still missing.  About 2 to 3 million people are homeless.  Relief groups estimate that at least one-third of the perished are children.  Do not forget them.

Be mindful of millions impacted by the earthquake in Sichuan, China, where, as of this morning, these were the “statistics:" 67,183 confirmed dead, 361,722 injured, 20,790 missing, and approximately 5 million people homeless.  About 5,000 children have been orphaned. Do not forget them.

According to UNICEF, 27,000 to 30,000 children die each day due to the complexities of global poverty.  It is true that last year UNICEF reported worldwide child deaths at a record low: 9.7 million per year.  For the first time in modern history, the number of children dying before age 5 fell below 10 million per year.  But that’s still 9.7 million children. 

Let that sink in … deep.  And do not forget them.

I grieve, mourn, and hope with the Chapman family. I’ve found myself randomly crying for their family -- even while I am convicted of the great hope of the gospel of Christ.  But it’s also my hope that the outpouring of care and compassion for the loss of their child also compels each of us to be more HUMAN.  By this, I am simply suggesting that we live as God intended -- to care not only for ourselves [our kind, our nations, our families, and our children] but for the many -- locally and globally -- that need the compassion and kindness of fellow humans.

Let’s not just be in love with the idea of compassion and justice.  Let’s do our part to change the world.

Eugene Cho, a second generation Korean-American, is the founder and lead pastor of Quest Church in Seattle, Washington, and the executive director of Q Cafe, an innovative nonprofit neighborhood café in the city with only a handful of cafés. You can stalk him at his blog at: eugenecho.wordpress.com.

Four years ago, Call to Renewal conducted a 12-day "Rolling to Overcome Poverty" bus tour to say that poverty was a religious and electoral issue. Despite our best efforts, the word was rarely spoken in either campaign, or in the presidential debates. This year, it's already different.

On Wednesday, John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama, which, of course, made headlines across the country. But at the Grand Rapids, Michigan, rally where the two men spoke, something even more important happened. Both spoke eloquently about the reality of poverty in the United States, and both reiterated their commitment to cut poverty in half in 10 years in the U.S. Obama pledged again to make that a central feature of his administration if he is elected.

Edwards said:

There is another wall that divides us. It's the moral shame of 37 million of our own people who wake up in poverty every single day. In a nation of our wealth, to have millions of Americans who work every single day and still can't pay their electric bill and pay for their food at the same time. There are mothers out there working two jobs every day to try to keep their kids from going to bed hungry. There are men and women who have worked hard all their lives, so that they can try to buy a home. And they're living in a tent city, because they got nowhere to go. This is not OK.

Obama responded:

Poverty isn't an issue that's talked about on the news or in Washington. It's not always the kind of issue that polls well. But John Edwards decided to talk about it anyway. He decided to center his campaign around it. He came up with new ideas to solve it. He pushed the rest of us to talk about it and debate it. And he did it, not because it was popular, but because it was right. Well, it is still right. It is still worth debating. It is still worth talking about. ... We're going to have to change things around, because we need to lift up every American out of poverty.

The other candidates have also spoken strongly about poverty.

Hillary Clinton, in the recent Compassion Forum, said:

… in my Judeo-Christian faith tradition, in both the Old and the New Testament, the incredible demands that God places on us and that the prophets ask of us, and that Christ called us to respond to on behalf of the poor are unavoidable. And it's always been curious to me how our debate about religion in America too often misses that. You know, his holiness, the pope, is going to be coming to America next week, and he's been a strong voice on behalf of what we must do to deal with poverty, and deal with injustice, and deal with what is truly our obligations toward those who are the least among us.

And John McCain, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's death:

Some people lament privately, others are brave enough to take their call for change to the public arena. Martin Luther King III has done his father's legacy proud this week by courageously insisting that our nation's next leader do something about the poverty that ensnares over 36 million of our citizens. I will answer his call, and tell him and the American people today that I will make the eradication of poverty a top priority of the McCain Administration.

The media still sees everything in terms of the political horse race, of course, but the issue of poverty has now become a central one in the ongoing campaign. And for us, as people of faith, it's raising the moral issues that will be our focus during this election season, and poverty will be a key one.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has a good summary of The Candidates on Poverty.

Last evening, I was privileged to be one of the religious leaders asked to participate in the Compassion Forum, sponsored by Faith in Public Life and broadcast by CNN from Messiah College. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama participated; Sen. John McCain declined.

The religious leaders asked questions of real substance, focusing on difficult and important policy choices. We are not so much interested in the personal testimonies of candidates - important as those are - but rather how their faith beliefs would shape their leadership and decisions. It is also worth noting that the majority of the questions of substance and depth about critical policy issues came from the religious leaders last night, and the more personal questions about the religion came from the stage moderators for CNN—just as was the case at the Sojourners/CNN Forum on "Faith, Values, and Poverty" last June.

Here are a few examples:

Lisa Sharon Harper of New York Faith and Justice asked Sen. Clinton:

Senator Clinton, underdeveloped nations and regions lack widespread access to education and basic resources like water, and they tend to be some of the most unstable and dangerous regions of the world. Places like Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan. Our national security is at stake, but our military is stretched. As president, would you consider committing U.S. troops to a purely humanitarian mission under the leadership of a foreign flag?

Clinton responded:

I believe we should demonstrate our commitment to people who are poor, disenfranchised, disempowered before we talk about putting troops anywhere. The United States has to be seen again as a peacekeeper, and we have lost that standing in these last seven years. Therefore, I want us to have a partnership, government to government, government with the private sector, government with our NGOS and our faith community to show the best of what America has to offer. … Before we get to what we might do hypothetically, let's see what we will do realistically to rebuild America's moral authority and demonstrate our commitment to compassionate humanitarianism.

The moderator called on me to ask a question of Sen. Obama:

As you reminded us a week or two ago, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed 40 years ago, he wasn't just speaking about civil rights. He was fighting for economic justice, was about to launch a poor people's campaign. Yet, four decades after the anniversary of his death, the poverty rate in America is virtually unchanged, and one in six of our children are poor in the richest nation in the world. So in the faith community, we are wanting a new commitment around a measurable goal, something like cutting poverty in half in 10 years. Would you commit - would you at this historic compassion forum, commit to such a goal tonight, and, if elected, tell us how you'd mobilize the nation, mobilize us, to achieve that goal?

Obama's response:

I absolutely will make that commitment. Understand that when I make that commitment, I do so with great humility because it is a very ambitious goal. And we're going to have to mobilize our society, not just to cut poverty, but to prevent more people from slipping into poverty. … [After a series of specific policy proposals] And many of these, by the way, can be part of a faith community. And so, you know, just to go back to our theme here tonight, people sometimes ask me, what do I think about faith-based initiatives? I want to keep the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives open, but I want to make sure that its mission is clear … the faith-based initiatives should be targeted specifically at the issue of poverty and how to lift people up.

Getting such a commitment on the public record is important - both for changing the political conversation and helping to put an issue like poverty on the agenda, and also to hold whoever wins an election accountable. So I was pleased with Barack Obama's response and also that Hillary Clinton has made a similar commitment to lead to cut domestic poverty in half in the next ten years. Those commitments should further encourage the emerging faith-inspired movement to overcome poverty and give us some concrete benchmarks to work for.

Read the transcript for the rest of the excellent questions posed by the religious leaders last night, and the candidates' responses.

Kudos go to Katie Barge, the primary organizer of the Compassion Forum for Faith and Public Life, for helping to continue the national conversation on the critical relationship between faith and politics.

For as long as I can remember, I've ended my letters and e-mails with the encouragement "Keep the faith." I must have picked that up from my father, since he's the only person I know who signs off the same way. It might have been more lucrative for me to have picked up "It's Friday, but Sunday's coming!" instead, but I've always preferred the flexibility of the simpler phrase. Not everyone who hopes for God's grace is a Christian, after all, and we who are surely hope for more than that. We hope to be happy and successful, for example, however we measure those things. We hope that our parents love us and that our marriages work out and, more than anything, that our kids will always be safe and sound. We hope for such things, at least, unless we have learned to know better.

On the Monday morning after my last letter, a mother and daughter from our fellowship showed up at our side door. Terry is mentally handicapped and deeply damaged. Her daughter has her own set of issues. For months we'd been planning a summer move from their dangerous, filthy, heatless apartment building into a cute little duplex we've been fixing up around the corner, but all of a sudden we were too late. "Tanya got raped in the hall last night," her mother said, and from then until now we've been walking on the dark side of love.

The sequence of what followed doesn't matter, and I couldn't remember it even if it did. The hospital, the detectives, the rape crisis center. Getting that evil building condemned, relocating them in our duplex, finding bedbug-free furniture for Terry and Tanya, finding helpers for the move itself. The girl's bad behavior as our houseguest, her mother's worse behavior as a parent. The questions, the doubts -- the guilt for questioning and doubting. And then, as if piling on, the quick meltdown of a promising young man we've lavished with attention and opportunity for the past seven months, and the crude suicide attempt of a troubled young woman whose phone call for help I failed to return the day before.

What does matter, I think, is the way all those things have been eating away at expectations of goodness and order I didn't even know I had. It's been awhile since I believed everything happens for a reason, according to some grand plan, but evidently I've hung onto the notion that love always makes some kind of difference, even in the midst of chaos. Even that somewhat less-ambitious worldview, however, seems to be no match for just this one little neighborhood, let alone the world itself.

It isn't the suffering here that's getting to me, but rather my neighbors' dull, matter-of-fact attitude about it. Tanya hasn't been fazed much by her rape, her counselor tells me, because she always expected to be hurt that way sooner or later. After all, her mom was raped three times as a girl, receiving no follow-up care or counsel, which may explain why she can offer so little now in terms of emotional support. The meltdown guy? He walked away because we called him on a lie and it never occurred to him that we might just forgive him. The girl who tried to kill herself? She lives in Terry's condemned building and has nowhere to go with five children under the age of 10. One missed call was all it took to convince her nobody cares enough to help.

It seems to me that these are the poorest of the poor in spirit, the ones who hope for next to nothing. To survive in a place like this, some people learn to live almost completely in the moment. They know better than to expect any ongoing goodness or order. They keep no faith. We have come to love them, but the longer we're at it the more I am haunted by the fear that nothing – not even love – may be strong enough. I can celebrate the ways our intentional generosity touches some of our neighbors, but I can't ignore the fact that both their natural hopelessness and the dysfunctions that inspire it are quite capable of breaking us. Or at least of breaking me.

If that happens, however, it won't mean I was wrong about Grace, but only that I overreached my limits. And if it doesn't happen, it won't mean that love always makes a difference, even in the midst of chaos, but only that I managed to keep the faith.

That's all I'm hoping for now, for starters at least.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs (www.bartcampolo.com) about grace, faith, loving relationships, and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship (www.thewalnuthillsfellowship.org) in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year (www.missionyear.org), which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the USA, and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he was trying to move the country to take on the moral issue of economic injustice. And, for the first time in many years, the remembrances of King's death (this one the 40th anniversary) urged the nation to do the same. Usually the nation's anniversary celebrations freeze-frame King as the nation's greatest civil rights leader whose famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was the extent of his message. Later calls for economic justice and the beginnings of a Poor People's Campaign are often ignored, not to mention the controversial connection King made between poverty and war in his opposition to the Vietnam War and his confrontation of the "triplets" of "poverty, racism, and militarism."

But last Friday was different and much more hopeful to our mission here at Sojourners of putting poverty on the agenda of this election year.

Barack Obama, speaking in Fort Wayne, Indiana, made the direct connection between memorializing King and taking up the mantle of his Poor People's campaign, and fighting for the cause of economic justice for those who have been left behind. The New York Times reported that Obama focused on King's presence in Memphis in support of striking sanitation workers and the continuing need for economic justice:

The reason Dr. King was in Memphis the day he was shot, Mr. Obama told the crowd of about 2,000 people, had to do as much with economics, in the form of wages and income, as with race. "It was a struggle for economic justice, for the opportunity that should be available to people of all races and all walks of life," he said. "Because Dr. King understood that the struggle for economic justice and the struggle for racial justice were really one, that each was part of a larger struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity."

King's son, Martin Luther King III, has called for a cabinet-level "poverty czar," and, to her credit, Hillary Clinton supported that goal in her speech in Memphis, according to the New York Times:

Mrs. Clinton gave her support to an idea long advocated by the King family, a cabinet position that she said would be "solely and fully devoted to ending poverty as we know it, that will focus the attention of our nation on this issue and never let it go." Mrs. Clinton added: "No more excuses, no more whining, but instead a concerted effort."

John McCain was also in Memphis, speaking at the National Civil Rights Museum (in what was the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was shot.) McCain linked the anniversary to human rights, reports the Associated Press:

McCain said King "was called an agitator, a troublemaker, a malcontent, and a disturber of the peace. These are often the terms applied to men and women of conscience who will not endure cruelty, nor abide injustice. We hear them to this day -- in Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, Tibet, Iran and other lands -- directed at every brave soul who dares to disturb the peace of tyrants."

Human rights does continue to be a major issue, and the nation's poverty rate has not significantly improved in the 40 years since King's death. The national minimum wage has actually lost ground, with the 1968 rate worth $9.71 in 2008 dollars compared to $5.85 today. Many voices seem ready now to make that an urgent moral concern and commitment. Let us hope, pray, and work that it may be so.

Read Taylor Branch's op-ed in yesterday's NYT Week in Review if you haven't already:

Civil rights, Vietnam, Dr. King, Memphis — these are historic landmarks. Even so, this year is a watershed. Because Dr. King lived only 39 years, from now on, he will be gone longer than he lived among us. Two generations have come of age since Memphis.

This does not mean that our understanding is accurate or complete. A certain amount of gloss and mythology is inevitable for great figures, whether they be George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, Honest Abe splitting a rail or Dr. King preaching a dream of equal citizenship in 1963. Far beyond that, however, we have encased Dr. King and his era in pervasive myth, false to our heritage and dangerous to our future. We have distorted our entire political culture to avoid the lessons of Martin Luther King's era.

He warned us himself. When he came to the pulpit that Sunday 40 years ago, Dr. King adapted one of his standard sermons, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution." From the allegory of Rip Van Winkle, he told of a man who fell asleep before 1776 and awoke 20 years later in a world filled with strange customs and clothes, a whole new vocabulary, and a mystifying preoccupation with the commoner George Washington rather than King George III.

Dr. King pleaded for his audience not to sleep through the world's continuing cries for freedom. When the ancient Hebrews achieved miraculous liberation from Egypt, many yearned to go back. Pharaoh's familiar lash seemed better than the covenant delivered by Moses, and so the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness. It took 40 years to recover their bearings. Dr. King has been gone 40 years now, but we still sleep under Pharaoh. It is time to wake up.

You can also watch video of the speech from which this op-ed was adapted. (Or download the audio.)

I want to personally invite you to Washington, D.C., on June 13 through 16 to participate in Pentecost 2008: Training for Change. For more than a decade, we have held an annual mobilization around the time of Pentecost to lift up a vision of overcoming poverty to the nation. I believe that with your help we can make this a pivotal year of elevating poverty to the top of the national agenda, the goal of our Vote Out Poverty campaign.

We've heard from many of you that rather than a conventional conference, you want to go deeper in learning real skills to take back to your local communities and congregations as advocates for social and economic justice. So, we are offering in-depth, practical training from Sojourners' staff and other experienced organizers (including Jennifer Kottler of Let Justice Roll, Rachel Anderson of the Boston Faith and Justice Network, Peggy Flanagan of Wellstone Action, and Lisa Sharon Harper of New York Faith and Justice, among others) who will facilitate small group workshops that teach practical skills. Following each group learning experience, participants will engage in facilitated small group discussions to take the learning to the next level.

Of course, we'll still have some of our traditional things. We'll have worship services (I will preach on Friday evening) with great music – Derek Webb will join us both Friday and Saturday evenings.

We will also be hearing from our seventh annual Amos and Joseph Award recipients. This year's "Joseph" - a person who faithfully uses a position of influence to benefit those in poverty - is one of our nation's great civil rights and economic justice leaders, Rev. James Lawson. Our "Amos" - a person who comes from a humble background to serve God and community - is Rev. Alexia Salvatierra, from Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice in Los Angeles.

And, for the fifth year, our Emerging Leaders program (for faith-inspired activists younger than 30) will include Brian McLaren, author of Everything Must Change, musician Derek Webb, and myself. A special campus organizing workshop will help you be an effective advocate and faithful leader on your campus, and there will be networking opportunities to build and strengthen the growing numbers of emerging leaders across the country.

Click here to learn more about Pentecost 2008, June 13 through 16 in Washington, D.C.!

Pentecost 2008 is the next step in a movement to really make a difference in overcoming poverty in our nation. It's an occasion to learn new skills and strengthen ones you already have to show that the faith community cares about our neighbors in poverty. The election campaign this year, in combination with our Vote Out Poverty campaign, offers us the opportunity to change the political wind on poverty.

I hope to see you in Washington in June.

Click here to register for Pentecost 2008.

Friday, April 4, 2008, marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was 39-years-old, yet had already spent 15 years in a grassroots movement that radically reshaped the racial landscape in the U.S. He was not only a great preacher and civil rights leader, a Nobel Peace prize winner, and a courageous voice for peace and justice - King was also a "windchanger."

Rev. Jim Wallis often notes that politicians determine how to vote by placing their fingers in the air to gauge which way the wind is blowing. As part of the civil rights movement, King helped change the wind in the U.S.! Because of the sacrifice and tireless struggle by thousands of civil rights wind changers in the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. became a more just nation.

In his late 20s, King joined grassroots activists in Montgomery to lead a year-long boycott of city buses. He helped launch the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and provided inspirational leadership in Birmingham, Albany, and Selma. He was a windchanger for civil rights.

But King did not stop there. When President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared war on poverty, King was on the front lines of the battle, fighting for fair housing in Chicago in 1966 and mobilizing thousands for the multi-racial Poor People's Campaign (led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy after King's death).

As President Johnson's attention turned to Vietnam, King courageously spoke out against the war. He challenged the war not only because of his commitment to nonviolence, however. As King explained to an audience exactly one year before his death:

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.

Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. –Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967, Riverside Church

King did not stop with criticizing a war he could not support. He continued to invest his time, talents, and energy with and on behalf of the poor. King's famous last speech was delivered in the midst of a sanitation worker's strike in Memphis, as King tried to change the wind for the working class.

Forty years after King's assassination, our challenges are eerily similar. Like King, many have expressed frustration with an unpopular war. But King did not stop with criticism. King kept trying to change the wind, working tirelessly to bring new hope to the poor of the richest nation on the face of the earth.

A few months ago, Sojourners invited me to be part of a groundbreaking local organizing effort in the state of Ohio called Windchangers. We are calling on Christians to evaluate candidates based in part on their plans to combat poverty. We are letting politicians know they must make poverty a priority if they want us to cast votes for their candidacies, and that we will be watching to hold them accountable after they take office next January.

I have helped edit the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and have a book about King coming out in the fall. But my participation in Sojourners Windchangers program provides a great opportunity for me to move from ideas and thoughts about King to significant action that honors King's great legacy.

And you can join this movement as well! There is plenty of room on the bus in the effort to change the wind regarding poverty. Sojourners' Pentecost Conference in Washington, D.C., (June 13-15, 2008) will focus on how to organize your local community to confront poverty. On the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's death, let us honor his legacy by changing the wind together!

Troy Jackson is senior pastor of University Christian Church in Cincinnati, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, and earned his Ph.D. in United States history from the University of Kentucky. His book Becoming King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of a National Leader (The University Press of Kentucky, 2008) will be available in the fall. Troy is a participant in Sojourners' Windchangers grassroots organizing pilot project in Ohio to work on the Vote Out Poverty Campaign.

I have become increasingly convinced that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has become the victim of identity theft. Too often we domesticate King, sanitizing his radical message and selectively choosing his words. Our nation embraces the King of Montgomery and Selma but suffers amnesia about the King of Memphis who called for a living wage, or the King of Riverside who spoke out boldly against the war in Vietnam. Dr. King would be deeply disturbed by the crass materialism and naked narcissism of American society today, and he would resist the prosperity gospel that has infiltrated our churches - a message that pimps the gospel and places the crown before the cross.

Forty years ago Friday, Dr. King's life was cut short while supporting sanitation workers in Memphis. Dr. King said then, "Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working everyday? They are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation." Forty years later, Dr. King could still be saying the same words to the people of Memphis.

The year 2008 also marks the 40th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination while campaigning to be president with an economic justice platform in the South and Appalachia. It has also been 40 years since the poor people's campaign was derailed by the rage of riots that fanned across the nation, burning down cities and neighborhoods, including the Columbia Heights neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where Sojourners still resides. In the 40 years since, we have been wandering in the wilderness when it comes to economic justice. While there have been some modest gains, 36 million Americans are still living in the quicksand of poverty, only 4 million less than in 1968. In 1968, an unjust and unnecessary war called Vietnam diverted massive resources from social programs to a military machine that King described in speech at Riverside as a demonic suction tube! Today that same machine in Iraq drains $3 billion from our budget every week, crippling our capacity to invest in social levies across this nation.

Many of us had hoped that Hurricane Katrina would remove the scales from our eyes to the persistence and pervasiveness of poverty in the U.S. But the lessons learned seem fleeting and almost forgotten. While we are the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, 1-in-8 children still grow up in poverty, giving us the shameful distinction of having the highest proportion of children living in poverty out of all industrialized nations. The U.S. also has the highest incarceration rate, with a black child facing a 1-in-3 chance of serving time in behind bars. More people die each year of poverty related causes than from the combined casualties of war, natural disasters, and homicide. But the problem is that, unlike high-visibility crises, these are silent tragedies that almost never make headlines.

Passing a living wage represents ground zero in King’s effort to fight poverty. Tragically, our nation has lost ground since 1968, when the minimum wage was worth $9.70 in 2008 dollars compared to the woeful $5.85 today. While a living wage will not be a silver bullet or a panacea to ending poverty, it represents a critical first step! A poverty wage shatters the conservative myth that if you work full time you will not be poor. Stagnant wages make a mockery out of the Horatio Alger myth that people can simply lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Low wages force too many parents to work two or three jobs, denying them precious time to raise and love their children. Low wages exacerbate the financial stresses that have become the single greatest cause of divorce in this nation. Recent studies show that poverty even harms a child's brain and social development, dooming many children to misfortune.

But there is hope. In the year 2000, 189 heads of state agreed to the Millennium Development Goals, a set of time-bound, measurable goals which include a commitment to cut in half the 1.2 billion people living on less than a dollar a day by the year 2015. The other goals deal with education, gender equality, health, and the environment. What is striking is that our president and Congress have yet to agree to an equivalent set of goals for our own nation. In 1999, the government of the United Kingdom agreed to a goal of cutting child poverty in half over 10 years. In the first five years the country managed to reduce child poverty by 17 percent.

We have ample evidence of what works. What is missing is the political will. Through the Vote out Poverty campaign Sojourners is mobilizing people of faith to put overcoming poverty at the top of the national political and electoral agenda. We are pressuring presidential and congressional candidates to endorse the goal of cutting domestic poverty in half over the next 10 years and eradicating poverty within a generation.

Join us in holding our political leaders accountable to the measurable goal of cutting poverty in half over 10 years, and help us move a step closer to realizing King's vision of the beloved community. Let's work together, sacrifice together, march together, lobby together, and organize together so that we ensure that all people made in God's image have life and have it more abundantly.

Adam Taylor is director of campaigns and organizing for Sojourners.

No words can really communicate the essence of what we are doing here. For that, you'd need Smell-O-Vision.

In case you didn't know, Smell-O-Vision was a system developed in the 1950s that released odors during the projection of a movie so that the viewer could actually smell what was happening onscreen. Thirty years later, cult filmmaker John Waters tried the same thing with scratch and sniff cards. In both cases, the idea was to take advantage of the scientific fact that smell is easily the strongest and most vivid of our senses when it comes to processing emotional experiences. If you've ever smelled something and had memories you hadn't thought of in years come flooding back, you know what I'm talking about.

What you may not know, however, is what the scent of urine in a hallway tells you about a low-rent apartment building, or what the combination of cigarette smoke and baby formula on an infant's blanket tells you about a family, or what cheap liquor on an addict's early morning breath tells you about the rest of their day, or maybe the rest of their life. These are some of the smells I'm learning these days.

I know a few already. At the grocery store the other day, I didn't even need to turn around, let alone ask any questions to be sure the man behind me had no house, no car, no job, and nobody looking after him. What I needed instead was the intestinal fortitude to talk with him like a friend even though he was mentally unstable, and to offer him a ride to the soup kitchen even though it would take half a day to get his stench out of my van.

I know marijuana in the afternoon air means I'm going to have to answer a lot of bizarre theological questions from my street corner buddies Richie and Big Mike. I know the smell of mold and too many cats means helping a friend pass her Section Eight housing inspection is going to take more than a morning, and the smell of an open electric oven means we might as well not bother because her lousy slumlord still hasn't fixed the furnace. And, unfortunately, I know the smell of fecal matter coming out from under a dirty set of clothes means it doesn't much matter how skillful I am as an after-school tutor.

There are wonderful smells here too, of course – ammonia in the spotless kitchen of a single mother with two jobs, soul food in a neighborhood restaurant, talcum powder on the older church ladies, my warm house at the end of a long day – but not nearly enough to cover the others. If you are highly sensitive in that way, like my wife Marty, how much you can love poor people sometimes boils down to how long you can hold your breath.

There is more to it than that, though. As I said earlier, smelling things is probably the most powerful way that we feel where we are and what we're doing at a particular moment in time. No wonder a hospital administrator recently told me that his boss devoted an entire staff meeting to making sure their hospital smells as clean as it is, in order to subconsciously instill confidence in their patients' families. For better and for worse, smells communicate things that words just can't.

The bad smells here do not instill confidence at all. On the contrary, what they communicate is a deep, visceral sense of neglect and decay and futility that threatens to overwhelm this whole neighborhood and our hope along with it. So then, when I tell you that my dream is to motivate and organize folks to clean things up around here, you can rest assured I mean that quite literally. We have plenty of souls to soothe, to be sure, but we also have bodies to bathe and clothes to wash, basements to clean out and houses to renovate.

I know we can't change everything in our poor little neighborhood. Honestly, my best guess is that we can't even change very much. But even on my most dismal days, when the odors of brokenness around me are more than I can stand, I believe we can, at the very least, leave some places and some people around here perfumed with the sweet smells of care, healing, and hope. After all, most of those smells are simply a matter of soap and water, hammers and nails, and meat and potatoes.

In the meantime, since you don't have Smell-O-Vision, or Odorama, or probably even a good aroma therapy kit, I guess you'll have to take my word for it that loving poor people can be an awfully smelly business. Then again, maybe not. Maybe you just know a different set of smells than I do, because you are trying to love a different kind of poor people. I hope so, because I suspect that at least part of the reason God calls us to all this smelly loving in the first place is so we aren't completely knocked out when we're the ones who stink.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs www.bartcampolo.com about grace, faith, loving relationships and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship www.thewalnuthillsfellowship.org in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year www.missionyear.org, which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the USA, and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

Lately I keep wishing I was somebody else. Somebody different. Somebody better than me.

Don't worry. I'm not depressed. I am well aware that I have many good qualities and many more good friends. My marriage is strong. My kids are fine. Moreover, I am ever increasingly convinced that the God of love loves me, no matter what I do or don't do.

Unfortunately, none of those things changes the fact that, after nearly 45 years of countless growth opportunities, I remain essentially the same careless, undisciplined fool I've always been. Everybody makes mistakes, of course, but mine are almost always the kind a more thoughtful, more focused person could easily avoid.

On Christmas Eve, on my way to the YMCA with my son Roman, I ran a stop sign and hit a car just a block from my house. The other driver was young and furious and both Roman and I thought we were in real trouble. We might have been, too, if he hadn't recognized me as a friend of his nephews. Even so, I cost my family our $1000 insurance deductible, not to mention the rate hike sure to come when this claim gets added to the massive speeding ticket I got a few months earlier, while Miranda and I were visiting colleges in North Carolina. Because we were late for an appointment. Because I didn't read over the directions the night before. Because I'm an idiot.

I'm not kidding, either. Believe me, there's nothing funny about missing a plane and paying the change fee and getting stranded alone in Honolulu for two days at the end of a 10-day speaking trip, all because you didn't bother to double-check your departure time. Nobody laughs when you leave your son waiting in the rain outside his school because you lost track of time at the office, or blow a valuable new friendship because you didn't even call after you forgot a lunch appointment, or let your wife down for the millionth time because you got so wrapped up in a conversation with somebody else.

If you're wondering why I'm beating myself up this way, well, it's because a few days ago I wasted a bunch of money, too. I got hustled out of it, actually, but only after I carelessly violated just about every urban ministry principle I've taught for the past 20 years. Honestly, the guy who hustled me wasn't half as slick as I was stupid.

It all started when our friend Mark and I, along with a bunch of college kids, rebuilt the porch and cleared out the basement of this old twin house he bought in our neighborhood, where we have our offices, board a few interns, and rent an apartment to a really cool woman we're trying to draw into our fellowship. Anyway, we ended up with a ton of junk in the front yard -- including about 50 old cans of paint -- that needed to go to the local landfill. The next day, as we were sorting it out, a friendly man came by and offered to load it all up and haul it away for a mere $50.

"I'm a strong, Christian man and I need the work," he told me. "I'm not one of these other black guys out here stealing to buy drugs. My cousin owns that truck over there and a buddy of ours has a junkyard on the other side of town. We can do the job right now. It sure would be a blessing if you could trust me to help you out."

I should have said no, of course. In the first place, Mark and I were perfectly capable of hauling the stuff in his truck the next day, as planned. It was going to cost us a lot more than $50 to dispose of it properly, of course, not to mention our time, but we didn't need any help. Moreover, even if we had, we had 10 friends within three blocks who needed the work as much, or more, than this guy. Even so, I hesitated. Looking back, I can see I was afraid.

I didn't want to seem like an untrusting racist. I felt guilty for being so much better off. I didn't want to disappoint this guy - even though I barely knew him. And besides, the deal itself was too good to be true.

So then, before you could say "there's a sucker born every minute," I was off to the ATM for $80 in cash, which I promptly deposited in my new friend's hand, so that he and his cousin could gas up their truck and get some dinner before commencing to work that evening. He pumped my hand and hugged me in gratitude. The job would be finished by the time I got back in the morning, he assured me, but we exchanged cell phone numbers just in case.

You already know the rest of the story.

Why didn't I just tell that guy to come back and work with us the next day? Why didn't I insist on paying with a check, and even then only when the job was done? Why didn't I call to ask my wife what she thought I should do? Why didn't I worry about the probability that our toxic waste would be illegally dumped? Why didn't I recognize the red flags of race talk and Christian talk and trust talk that indicate an urban con job?

The short answer, of course, is that I am a careless, undisciplined fool. But in this case, there's more to it than that. In this case, even after more than 20 years of urban ministry, racial reconsideration, and earnest soul-searching, it is painfully evident that I still have enough unfocused white guilt to make me vulnerable to just about anyone shrewd or desperate enough to work that angle. Living where and how I do these days that could be quite a problem.

I really do want to be better, not only for my neighbors here in Walnut Hills, but even more so for my family and friends. It is perhaps to my credit that I am so adept at confessing and apologizing and winning back people's trust, but it embarrasses me that I've had so many opportunities to practice those skills. I'm tired of saying I'm sorry for the same things - over and over again.

God knows I've changed before. Now God knows I want to change again. And now you know too.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs www.bartcampolo.com about grace, faith, loving relationships and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship www.thewalnuthillsfellowship.org in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year www.missionyear.org, which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the USA, and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

Martin Luther King's sermon at Riverside Church linked the devastating Vietnam war to the struggle over poverty. I began working that year in an under-resourced community and wore a "Bread not Bombs" sweatshirt to anti-war demonstrations. Sadly, not much has changed. The amount spent on the Iraq war (CBO estimate $9 billion a month, up to $1 trillion total), if directed elsewhere, would virtually ensure universal education, universal health care, and affordable housing.

King called for a revolution of values from racism, materialism, and militarism. Little has changed in 40 years for people in my low-income community. Racism still dominates. It is less overt now, but has expanded from divisions of black—white to Latino, Asian, Arab Muslim, and immigrants. Katrina pictures reminded us of how little progress we've made on economic disparity. Economic progress is measured by consumer spending. Environmental issues threaten our future. King ended his speech saying, " Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world."

My Sojourners Sweatshirt says, "HOPE is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change." Despite the evidence, I am strangely hopeful. I see young people wanting a better world, working for candidates, working in community and on environmental issues. I know generous people who share resources and skills to forge new opportunities for jobs. Economist Jeffrey Sachs (The End of Poverty) and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus (Creating a World without Poverty) outline specific ways to change the disparities. Now let us dedicate ourselves to the long yet beautiful struggle for a new world.

Mary Nelson is president emeritus of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation on the west side of Chicago. She is also a board member of Sojourners.

Until very recently, I had no idea how hard it is for some of our friends just to find somewhere to lay themselves down to sleep at night. I knew that inner-city families moved around a lot, but I didn't realize how much heartache and humiliation goes before and after most of those moves, both for the families and for the neighborhoods they come and go from in search of better space.

Part of the problem is low incomes, of course, which leave almost everyone around here one minor setback way from missing rent. But beyond that, there are often rats and roaches and bedbugs to contend with, along with those normal, everyday conflicts with neighbors that, in this environment, can quickly become unacceptably dangerous. There are broken pipes and broken heaters and, as often as not, broken promises from landlords who live in a very different world.

Of course, the broken promises go both ways. Every day we see neighbors say and do things that would rattle almost any property owner; and we have learned the hard way not to immediately take any story of mistreatment at face value. Still, there is no denying that lots of money – much of it taxpayers' money – flows through neighborhoods like ours into the pockets of people who care too little about those they are supposed to shelter.

Last week our friend Helen and I spent the better part of three days driving all over town tracking down birth certificates, proofs of custody, income statements, and police background checks, hoping to qualify her for a HUD-subsidized apartment near enough that her grandson David could stay at his school and that both of them could stay in our fellowship. Helen's recently deceased mother had been paying the rent for all of them with her Social Security, but all they have now is the paycheck from Helen's part-time home health care job and David's food stamps.

Without my car, my computer, my money at certain offices, and my white male privilege at others, the whole endeavor would have been utterly impossible for Helen - who is herself in need of some home health care. Even with my help, we needed a few kind folks to bend a few silly rules in our favor. By the time we got everything squared away, I was worn out and cranky. Being poor is an awful lot of work.

Thank God there is a whole bunch of us here, living together and loving our neighbors as a team. While Helen and I were jumping through HUD hoops, Karen and Donna were tracking down furniture for her and three other families in the fellowship whose living spaces are nearly empty, and our newest partner, Mark Leeman, was tracking down donors who want to invest in some rental properties we can fix up and manage right, right here in the neighborhood.

We know we can't house everyone, but the more we see what's going on around us, the more bound and determined we are to take care of the handful of neighbors we feel God has given to be our closest friends. After all, there is no way to build the kind of close-knit community we keep dreaming of without first making sure that all of us are safe and sound.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs www.bartcampolo.com about grace, faith, loving relationships and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship www.thewalnuthillsfellowship.org in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year www.missionyear.org, which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the USA, and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

"We have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly", said Al Gore in is Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. He called on the U.S. and China, the worst polluters, to stop blaming others and take action "or stand accountable before history for their failure to act." God calls us to care for creation and the generations to come; we, too, will stand judged if we do not rouse from our doze and not only call for action on the national scene, but set an example with our own actions.

I was recently in Germany at a gathering of Catholics and Protestants discussing what kind of Europe they wanted, especially around the issues of peace, environment, and human suffering. I was heartened by the signs of making a difference of the long time efforts at the issues of peace and environment. One of the outcomes of the meeting was to call on the Church to set an example of care for the environment in every new building project they do, making sure they were energy efficient, used solar or thermal technology, etc. I hope we challenge the Church here in the U.S. to set an example, not only in new construction efforts, but in retrofitting our buildings, in encouraging parishioners to walk more, (drive less), to re-use, etc.

Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation on Chicago's west side, built a "smart, green building" at a major transit stop in the community, cutting energy usage in half with a green roof, solar panels, super insulation, etc. Bethel recently received the GOLD LEED rating for environmental excellence, a first in a low-income community. The building, connected to the transit platform, houses a day care center, employment services, a community-focused bank, and community owned businesses - a coffee shop and sandwich shop, among others. This development had been a long and tortuous effort - in assembling the funds, acquiring building permits, and finding contractors who could do things differently. It is a great example of intentional development that creates multiplying impact on community and environment.

Mary Nelson is president emeritus of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation on the west side of Chicago. She is also a board member of Sojourners.

The new 2007-2008 UN Human Development report is focused on "Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world." According to news stories, the report clearly links overcoming climate change with global poverty:

"The poorest countries and most vulnerable citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even though they have contributed least to the problem," the report says.
…

As the world's richest countries bear the greatest responsibility, the UN Development Programme called on them to bear the largest burden in cutting emissions and in providing financial aid to the poor.

And, as is true with so many of the big issues facing us,

"The world lacks neither the financial resources nor the technological capabilities to act," the UN report said. "What is missing is a sense of urgency, human solidarity, and collective interest."

Suddenly it seems there's a full-scale war going on in our neighborhood, and we and our neighbors here are in a new kind of danger.

On their way back to college after helping out at our weekly dinner party, our friends Jenny and Alyssa stopped at an intersection and noticed a group of guys milling around in the early evening, less than a block from our church. A moment later, guns started firing on both sides of them, and, before they could pull away, four bullets entered their car. They weren't hurt, but they could have been killed.

The next night, a few blocks away, four men carrying automatic weapons walked by our friend Helen as she was sitting on her front steps watching her grandchildren play. As she hustled the kids inside, those men shot up her block.

Two days later, back on our church's corner, an older kid I know named Wu took a bullet in the foot just after midnight. When I asked him about it yesterday he brushed me off, but I know he's scared, and well he should be. You see, unlike our college girls or Miss Helen, Wu knows exactly what's going on around here. He's part of it.

The bottom line is that earlier this year a local guy named Turtle was murdered in a bar. There were plenty of witnesses, but none of them would testify against the killer. Evidently, as friends of the victim, they wanted him to be released so they could take care of him in their own way. Of course, the killer has friends too. However, nobody on either side seems to be able to shoot straight—or is willing to hold their fire until after the rest of us are safely tucked in.

Marty and I are genuinely afraid - for our neighbors, for the folks in our little community, and especially for our precious Miranda and Roman. And, of course, we are doing all we can to keep them safe in the midst of this trouble.

Then again, we are not doing the one thing that would keep them safest of all right now: We are not putting them out of harm's way. We are not moving. On the contrary, every day we are quite intentionally rooting ourselves more deeply in this neighborhood, in spite of our frequent inclinations to cut and run.

Miss Helen has no choice in the matter. She must live here, or someplace like here. Likewise with Wu (though he could at least choose to be part of the solution from now on, instead of part of the problem). But Marty and I, Ric and Karen, Donna and Jeff - we all could go if we chose to, which is probably the most important thing that sets us apart in this neighborhood, for better and for worse. We're educated and connected in ways that mean we can never really be poor, no matter how little we may make or live on. Poverty, after all, is not so much the absence of money as it is the absence of choices.

Right now, though, it is those choices that keep Marty and I up at night, even more than the gunfire. We wonder what it means to say we love our neighbors if we aren't willing to stay with them here. We wonder what it means to say we love our children if we aren't willing to take them away. And we wonder what it means to say we love God if we still can't always tell the difference between God's will and our own desires and insecurities.

Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs www.bartcampolo.com about grace, faith, loving relationships and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship www.thewalnuthillsfellowship.org in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year www.missionyear.org, which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the USA, and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.

Two months ago, for the first time in my eight years living in Washington, D.C., I was mugged. Two young men rolled up in a pickup truck while I was unloading groceries from my car in the alley next to my condo building. They made me lie on the ground, held a gun to my neck as they took my money, and then locked me in the trunk of my car as they made their getaway. Fortunately I still had my cell phone in my pocket and was able to call 911 from the trunk. The police were able to free me, as well as pursue and arrest two suspects who are now in the District court system.

I was not hurt, they took little of real value, and I feel like I've done a pretty good job of refusing to let fear change the way I live. Fairly or unfairly, with my privileged status, I'm not worried about my future or my survival. I am worried about those two young men, and many others like them. What influences, role models, or lack of positive options allowed them to make such stupid and destructive choices?

In reflecting on my mugging, I've only recently begun to connect a few dots. For the past six years, I've been on the board of Urban Family Development (UFD), a nonprofit organization that currently runs programs for after school enrichment, tutoring, and mentoring - and we have lots of big dreams for expansion. However, it's always been a struggle to find funding and volunteers for this kind of work with such a great need, many worthy ministries, and a limited pool people willing to sacrifice their time or money.

I don't know what the government of D.C. is going to spend to prosecute and potentially imprison those muggers, but I'm pretty sure it would be enough to give UFD a solid financial boost - and then some. The most visible anti-crime measures in my neighborhood consist of portable floodlights rotated around sketchy street corners. A church friend who once interned at UFD and is now a D.C. policeman confirms what a band-aid these strategies are, even as he tries to do his job with integrity. Instead of high-visibility, low-impact band-aids, I want UFD to provide better options for as many youth as possible, so that fewer young men and women grow up to make stupid choices like wrecking their lives to steal my $20. I want to execute a preemptive strike on this kind of stupidity by supporting a program that provides a safe place for children, gives them mentors through the difficult years of adolescence, and then celebrates their success - all of which UFD does.

Why can't we - both as a society and as a church - do better at providing positive choices for our youth? And for me it is a both/and. I've seen more small-government conservatives willing roll up their sleeves and volunteer as tutors. Meanwhile, it's mostly the justice-minded liberals who march and lobby to end poverty and violence. How can we get more liberals to show up at UFD and more conservatives to advocate? (I know these categories are unfair and far from universal, but I've seen this dynamic over and over in my own church experience.)

Government at every level must do better at making the needed resources available, if for no other reason that the churches simply don't have the resources to do it all on their own. But the church must also be the conscience of the state - challenging not only with words, but by example in serving and caring for those at the margins of society. Conversely, the words of the prophet Jeremiah may inspire the church, but they were originally spoken to a king: "Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is not this to know me? says the Lord." (Jeremiah 22:15b-16)

Consider this as the onslaught of opportunities for "Canned Compassion" wash over us with the holiday season, and look for opportunities to do both justice and mercy, not with band-aids of a march here or a meal there, but with sustained service and activism that seeks real healing for our communities.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is web editor for Sojourners.

Thanksgiving is the time of year when American generosity is clearly visible. We make donations to our local food banks and homeless shelters and volunteer in soup kitchens. But do we really believe that is the solution to hunger?

Mark Winne, former director of Connecticut's Hartford Food System, answered the question in yesterday's Washington Post. In a piece titled "Canned Compassion," he describes how what was originally intended as a temporary way of dealing with emergencies has become a multi-billion dollar industry, and how that shows the limits of charity and the importance of justice.

Winne writes:

Food banks are a dominant institution in this country, and they assert their power at the local and state levels by commanding the attention of people of good will who want to address hunger. Their ability to attract volunteers and to raise money approaches that of major hospitals and universities. While none of this is inherently wrong, it does distract the public and policymakers from the task of harnessing the political will needed to end hunger in the United States.

The risk is that the multibillion-dollar system of food banking has become such a pervasive force in the anti-hunger world, and so tied to its donors and its volunteers, that it cannot step back and ask if this is the best way to end hunger, food insecurity, and their root cause, poverty.

During my tenure in Hartford, I often wondered what would happen if the collective energy that went into soliciting and distributing food were put into ending hunger and poverty instead. Surely it would have a sizable impact if 3,000 Hartford-area volunteers, led by some of Connecticut's most privileged and respected citizens, showed up one day at the state legislature, demanding enough resources to end hunger and poverty. Multiply those volunteers by three or four - the number of volunteers in the state's other food banks and hundreds of emergency food sites - and you would have enough people to dismantle the Connecticut state capitol brick by brick. Put all the emergency food volunteers and staff and board members from across the country on buses to Washington to tell Congress to mandate a living wage, health care for all, and adequate employment and child-care programs, and you would have a convoy that might stretch from New York City to our nation's capital.

This Thanksgiving, by all means make a donation to a food bank or volunteer in a soup kitchen. And then resolve to become an advocate for policy changes that can alleviate the need for them. Wouldn't it be better if low-income families had a living wage so they could buy their food in a supermarket like the rest of us? As Winne concludes

We know hunger's cause - poverty. We know its solution - end poverty. Let this Thanksgiving remind us of that task.

New studies managed by the Pew Charitable Trusts show us how far the country still needs to go in achieving economic equality. A major finding is that the while overall incomes are rising, the income gap between African American and white families is also rising.

Incomes have increased among both black and white families in the past three decades - mainly because more women are in the work force. But the increase was greater among whites, according to the study being released Tuesday.

One reason for the growing disparity: Incomes among black men have actually declined in the past three decades, when adjusted for inflation. They were offset only by gains among black women.

And, the studies showed that African Americans have more difficulty passing on their economic accomplishments to their children.

Nearly half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults, according to a new study - a perplexing finding that analysts say highlights the fragile nature of middle-class life for many African Americans.

Overall, family incomes have risen for both blacks and whites over the past three decades. But in a society where the privileges of class and income most often perpetuate themselves from generation to generation, black Americans have had more difficulty than whites in transmitting those benefits to their children.

Along with the income gap, there is a wealth gap.

Another reason so many middle-class blacks appear to be downwardly mobile is likely the huge wealth gap separating white and black families of similar incomes. For every $10 of wealth a white person has, blacks have $1, studies have found.

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. next turned his attention to issues of economic justice. Forty years after his death, we still have a long way to go.

Part seven in a series of posts by Bob Massey, a Los Angeles screenwriter who is currently traveling to India with a team from Ecclesia Hollywood hosted by a faith-based human rights organization whose work in Mumbai concentrates on rescuing girls from sexual slavery. + Click here to read previous posts

You haven't lived until you've scudded through Dehradun traffic in an autorickshaw. You haven't died either - but you probably haven't come so close before. The autorickshaw is a tiny three-wheeled gumdrop taxi powered by a hair dryer, feels like. No doors or seatbelts. I joined Dr. Reeta, the co-founder of the SNEHA school, for an autorickshaw ride to her facility. The ensuing dozen mini-brushes with mortality set just the right tone for meeting schoolkids recruited from Dehradun's grim slums.

SNEHA schools unschooled kids, offers cheap health care to slum dwellers, and trains impoverished women in fancy sewing and such - dazzling embroidery being a better living than collecting plastic from the dump.

There are two kinds of kids who attend SNEHA, though both live in the slums nearby. The first kind are unwashed, underfed, and as one staffer quite seriously said, they have to be "civilized" for weeks or months before they can enter the school. So that's what happens. We brought sidewalk chalk, those twisty balloons that you make animals from, and colorful beads for bracelets. I drew big shapes - flowers, stars, airplanes, cars - on the courtyard pavement to be colored in by the kids. It never occurred to any of us that there were kids in the world who don't know how to color. I guess if you can't afford coloring books, that's the deal. Happily, they took to it with gusto once their teachers demonstrated the concept. But on the whole, these kids seemed kind of shellshocked in comparison to...

...the kids who've been in school for a while. These kids have been taught hygiene, they wear uniforms, they're super happy and polite. Basically they're kids who've benefitted from a lot of extra love. Dr. Reeta and her husband Hari have built this gorgeous facility up from swampland over about nine years (I think). Basically, they felt called to it. And what might happen is that about 800 kids per year might graduate from living conditions that do dishonor to the word "slum."

We brought jump ropes and kind of massacred the notion of double-dutching in front of them. Hopscotch was the surprise hit of the day. And their version of Duck Duck Goose. There was a lot of English practice ("Hello, my name is Shiva. How are you? I am fine.") Also about a hundred of them made us autograph their balloon animals. It was hilarious. Usually they leave at 2 p.m. The staff had to kick them out at 4 p.m., and us as well. We didn't want to leave.

We visited the neighborhood these kids live in. Over time you start to mentally filter out the ankle-deep trash everywhere, the pigs, mange-scarred dogs, mud, excretions of all flavors, even the smell. You focus on the positives: the families who manage to carve out a relatively clean corner for their family photos, sleeping mats, and shrines to Ganesh. Then you see a little girl with open sores on her head. And not to get too reductivist, but Ganesh, Vishnu, Shiva, and the whole lot are part of a system that tells these slum dwellers (along with like 700 million other Hindus) that some unknown past-life choice has caused them to deserve these living conditions. And there is no remedy within their grasp. Certainly no one bears any obligation to help them out. One can infer this is the semiofficial stance of the Hindu-flavored government as well.

(One might also observe that this is the semiofficial stance of the Christian-flavored government in the U.S., but then one might have to contend with Christian-flavored performance artists like Anne Coulter, etc., who conveniently gloss over the whole feeding the hungry / clothing the naked part of the not-so-New-anymore Testament, and, really, one doesn't want to contribute to the divisiveness industry any more than one can help. But it's SO TEMPTING.)

And then we visited a big fancy gold Buddhist temple hand painted in gorgeously rendered murals of mutilation and disembowelment because, um, life is suffering? Like we needed a reminder.

Insert some joke here about needing a drink...

Tuesday marked the beginning of what is likely to be a long and controversial Senate debate on the 2007 Farm Bill. People of faith around the country are waking up to realize how critical this legislation is to our goals of ending hunger and poverty in America and abroad. Unfortunately, Congress has yet to show the leadership to make this goal a reality.

The Farm Bill is a vast piece of legislation - authorizing everything from food stamps to conservation programs, from rural development to our infamous farm subsidy program. This summer the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill, with little reform to the commodity title that governs farm subsidies. Now it is the Senate's turn, and the bill they are starting with has every indication of ignoring the reform agenda yet again.

Today, I stood with African and U.S. religious leaders at a press conference to call on our senators to be true to their commitments to fighting poverty in Africa by cutting unfair and outdated subsidies in the Farm Bill. The following are my remarks from the event:

An evangelical always has a text so I'll begin with a text this morning. Proverbs 13:23: "A poor person's field may produce abundant food, but injustice sweeps it away."

The question this morning for members of the U.S. Senate is simply this: How long will you postpone justice?

Is there anybody on this hill, in this town, who believes that continuing outdated, outmoded, but enormous subsidies to the world's biggest and richest farmers at the expense of the world's smallest and poorest farmers is fair, is just, or creates global stability? I don't think so. I haven't heard that.

Unfortunately, poor cotton farmers in West Africa don't vote in races for the U.S. Congress. They don't contribute to senatorial campaigns. They have no lobbyists on Capitol Hill except for us - today. They're just too busy trying to make a living to support their families and allow their countries to earn their way out of poverty.

But they have a huge obstacle; they have a huge competitor to their efforts. Their competitor is the U.S. government; their obstacle is the U.S. government.

Everyone knows these inequitable subsidies must end. Everyone knows that by continuing them we put a gigantic obstacle in the way of the sustainable development we say we support - and then block. Everyone knows that these subsidies make a mockery of our rhetoric about caring for what happens to Africa. Everyone knows we are postponing justice again.

Seventy five percent of the world's poorest people support themselves by farming, and we stop them from doing that. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, has said eloquently and clearly, "a world where a billion people live in extreme poverty is neither just nor secure."

We need to make the reforms in the commodities in the farm bill - now. To not do so is to be guilty of moral shortsightedness and political blindness to the real path for global security. But that moral shortsightedness and political blindness is likely to happen again on the floor of the U.S. Senate unless some senators open their eyes, develop new vision, and find the courage to lead.

The religious community is asking them to do just that.

TAKE ACTION: The Farm Bill debate is typically dominated by big agribusiness and a handful of congressional leaders from farm states. But we can make a difference – Sojourners is asking our supporters to call their senators in support of reforming the commodity title – click here to make your call.

MLK said that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." New York Faith and Justice believes that poverty anywhere is a threat to God's shalom everywhere. Which is why when we were invited by the UN Millennium Campaign to host a local event in support of the Millennium Development Goals, we quickly accepted. The MDGs are some pretty decent things. When world leaders come together in a covenant-like promise to halve extreme global poverty based on 1990 measurements by 2015, it echoes the call of the biblical prophets that are often invoked on this blog. There has been much progress, but it's still no secret that some goals are way off target, especially the one about rich countries giving a higher proportion in development aid.

Last year, the UN Millennium Campaign organized a record-making event in which 23.5 million people around the world stood up in a single day in a symbolic proclamation asking world leaders who covenanted to halve extreme global poverty to stop breaking promises. This year, New York Faith and Justice became part of the global movement by hosting our own "Stand up and Speak Out" event in St. Mary's, a historic church in Harlem.

The ripple effects of our saying "yes" to the invitation to host this event are what truly humble us. There was an impromptu "Stand Up" that took place at a local ethnically diverse interdenominational church where 1800-plus regular attendees stood up in solidarity. Bishop Paul Mususu, representing the Micah Challenge and the director of the Evangelical fellowship of Zambia, asked their church leaders to do it and explained the importance of it. The movement is bubbling when megachurches stand up against poverty.

Jonathan Mendez is co-director of the Uniting the Church Action Team with New York Faith and Justice, and also a former Sojourners intern.

Last evening I attended a reception and dinner in Washington for evangelical Christian leaders, which is not an unusual event here. But the topic and, especially, the main speaker would seem highly unusual to many. The event, called "A Global Leaders Forum," was hosted by the National Association of Evangelicals and the Micah Challenge, a global advocacy campaign focused on achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are aimed at cutting extreme global poverty in half by 2015. The topics that brought 250 evangelical leaders together from around the U.S. and world were indeed global poverty and the urgent issue of climate change. Both issues are now firmly on the agenda of the evangelical mainstream, as last night's impressive list of leaders demonstrated.

The speaker for the evening was none other than Ban-Ki Moon, the new secretary general of the United Nations, which is driving the MDG initiative. Growing up in the evangelical world, I remember the great debate about who was the real "Antichrist" as described in biblical prophecy--it was either the pope or the United Nations. As Washington Post writer Dana Milbanks noted this morning

In the wildly popular Left Behind series of evangelical Christian novels, the Antichrist takes the form of the secretary general of the United Nations, sets up an abortion-promoting world government and becomes the Global Community Supreme Potentate. Last night, the National Association of Evangelicals met for dinner at the Sheraton in Crystal City. The keynote speaker? Why, the Antichrist himself.

Last night, the supposed Antichrist was listening to gospel music, speaking of his own faith, quoting scripture, celebrating a new alliance with "the evangelical church" on the critical issues of poverty and global warming, and bringing the conservative Christian crowd to its feet in smiling agreement with the secretary's agenda.

Indeed, leader after leader insisted this was a biblical agenda. A prominent leader from the Religious Right came up to sit right next to me, and then engaged me in an amazing conversation about finding common ground. This dramatic shift in the public agenda of the evangelical community is affecting American politics in very significant ways and promises to change them, especially if the political labels of left and right slowly slip away and are replaced by a common commitment to focus on the key moral issues of our time. Those issues are now defined more broadly and deeply than before and include the plight of God's poorest children and the fragile state of God's creation.

Mamta, a winsome, wide-eyed girl of 12 moves through her daily chores in a poor household in India. Although still a child, her life has little play, and she will too soon be bearing the full responsibilities and burdens of an adult woman: Mamta was married at the age of 7. At puberty she will quit school and move to the house of her husband, who she's had no contact with since her wedding night five years ago.

You can meet Mamta in a special hour-long broadcast tonight of the PBS weekly newsmagazine NOW. In Child Brides: Stolen Lives, NOW senior correspondent Maria Hinojosa takes viewers to Guatemala, India, and Niger to explore stories of early marriages and to show how people are campaigning to end child marriage in many of these communities - sometimes at the risk of their own lives.

On a trip to Ethiopia last year, I saw firsthand the devastating ripple effects of child marriage on individuals and on an impoverished country. Millions of girls around the world are forced into marriages long before they are grown. They are usually deprived of schooling, virtually powerless when the husband or his family is abusive, at high risk for HIV/AIDS infection from their older, sexually experienced husbands, and face disability or death for themselves and their babies when they become pregnant before their bodies are ready.

The NOW broadcast is a great opportunity to learn more about child marriage and why it's so important to stand up on behalf of these children and support community-based efforts to end this practice. Child marriage legislation is currently before the U.S. Congress - to learn more, visit the International Center for Research on Women Web site.

Julie Polter is an associate editor of Sojourners.

New York Faith and Justice was inspired into being by Sojourners/Call to Renewal during their annual Pentecost Conference in 2006. It started with just a handful of committed Christians in New York who were focused on discovering how God was leading them to respond to the issue of poverty in their city.

As Becky Garrison reported last week, their mission is simple but profound: "Following Christ, Uniting the Church, Ending Poverty." The leaders of NY Faith and Justice are examples of people who understand that to be radically committed to Christ ALSO means to be radically committed to the poor. They show that these two commitments should no longer be mutually exclusive in the church in America.

Lisa Sharon Harper, co-founder and executive director of NY Faith and Justice, began her remarks with the words "The time is now." The worship was passionate, and there was no mistake that the Holy Spirit was alive and at work. One of our board members, Rev. Gabriel Selguero, praying in both English and Spanish, offered a blessing to begin the night. The event gathered people across every racial, socioeconomic, and denominational line, and was not afraid to give all the glory to God.

Approximately 300 people attended the event, and 72 people said, "sign me up" to be a member of NY Faith and Justice! While this may not seem like a historic event in terms of numbers, it is still very significant. Rather than just doing an event that excites people for one night but leaves little behind, we're developing leaders to build a movement.

NY Faith and Justice is proof that such a movement is really happening. Rachel Anderson from the Boston Faith and Justice Network shared her story of how a similar group in Boston was also inspired more than two years ago by Sojourners/Call to Renewal and began meeting as a small group to unite the church in Boston to address issues of poverty. You know it's a movement when local groups take ownership of the mission and do not wait for permission from some national group to send them a full time organizer or for permission to act.

Please pray that God would continue to inspire similar endeavors and raise up new leaders across the country. If you live in New York City (www.nyfaithjustice.org) or Boston (www.bostonfaithjustice.org) then get plugged into each of these groups. If you do not, then get together with some other passionate Christ followers who are interested in living out the gospel as it relates to addressing issues of poverty and injustice. Do not worry about getting massive numbers at first. Movements start with small groups of highly committed people.

Aaron Graham is the national field organizer for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

When I got an invitation to attend the launch of New York Faith & Justice (www.nyfaithjustice.org), their mission statement caught my eye. Simply stated, their goals are: Following Christ, uniting the church, and ending poverty in New York through spiritual formation, education, and direct advocacy. Grounded in the words of Isaiah 61, this movement envisions a city where New Yorkers are released from the oppression of poverty and the poverty of riches.

I can hear the naysayers now: "Here we go again. Another PC peace and justice group that's all talk and no action. They might spout a bit of scripture but in the end, they're really just a front for the Democratic Party. Been there. Done that. Next."

I understand this kind of cynicism. I've covered too many "religious" justice-oriented gatherings that were full of sound and fury but in the end signified nothing. The power of prayer and preaching about the Risen Christ seemed to take a back seat because God forbid we talk about Jesus and offend our secular counterparts. Also, after satirizing the antics of the Religious Right for more than 12 years, the last thing I want to see is the creation of a Progressive Left counterpart.

So when I read that this group was "ecumenical," I was skeptical at first. While religious leaders whose backgrounds ranged from PCA to ECUSA were invited to participate, would they actually show up? In a post-9/11 New York City, one seldom sees Orthodox, evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Pentecostals willing to set aside their differences and come together in the name of Jesus.

However, this movement showed all the spiritual signs of being Bible-based and truly nonpartisan from the get-go. You know something is up when 15 students from Intervarsity Fellowship and Union Theological Seminary carry a wooden cross -- literally -- for 5.3 miles, trekking from Trinity Baptist Church, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side, over to the Bronx.

This broad-based ecumenical spirit carried on throughout the evening with prayers offered by ministers representing a broad swath of the Christian faith. Liturgies, worship songs, spoken-word poetry, and visual art were intertwined with speeches by Lolita Jackson from Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office; Rachel Anderson, director of Boston Faith and Justice Network; Dale Irvin, president of New York Theological Seminary; Lisa Sharon Harper, executive director of NY Faith & Justice; and Jim Wallis. If you read the backgrounds of these spiritual seekers, you'll see that these are not cookie-cutter Christians all molded from the same batch of devotional dough.

Unlike some gatherings that talk around poverty issues without offering any concrete solutions, Harper noted how their programs are structured around the three mission points: Following Christ, Uniting the Church, and Ending Poverty. Right now, the program is far too early in its infancy to assess if these points can be sharpened into actual tools for social change. But based on what I saw this evening, I left the launch wondering if perhaps Shane Claiborne is indeed right -- that "Another world is possible." Will this ecumenical momentum continue? One can pray and hope.

Becky Garrison's upcoming book Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church (Seabury Books, October 2007) explores what it means to be the church in the 21st century.

Dear Mr. President,

When I first heard that you were vowing to veto a bipartisan bill to expand child health care, my immediate thought was more personal than political: What has happened to you?

I vividly remember a call at the office, only one day after your election had been secured. It was an invitation to come to Austin to meet you and to discuss with a small group of religious leaders your vision for "faith-based initiatives" and your passion for doing something on poverty. I had not voted for you (which was no secret or surprise to your staff or to you), but you were reaching out to many of us in the faith community across the political spectrum who cared about poverty. I was impressed by that, and by the topic of the Austin meeting.

We all filed into a little Sunday school classroom at First Baptist, Austin. I had actually preached there before, and the pastor told me how puzzled he was that his "progressive" church was chosen for this meeting. You were reaching out. About 25 of us were sitting together chatting, not knowing what to expect, when you simply walked in without any great introduction. You sat down and told us you just wanted to listen to our concerns and ideas of how to really deal with poverty in America.

And you did listen, more than presidents often do. You asked us questions. One was, "How do I speak to the soul of America?" I remember answering that one by saying to focus on the children. Their plight is our shame and their promise is our future. Reach them and you reach our soul. You nodded in agreement. The conversation was rich and deep for an hour and a half.

Then when we officially broke, you moved around the room and talked with us one-on-one or in small groups for another hour. I could see your staff was anxious to whisk you away (you were in the middle of making cabinet appointments that week and there were key departments yet to fill). Yet you lingered and kept asking questions. I remember you asking me, Jim, I don't understand poor people. I've never lived with poor people or been around poor people much. I don't understand what they think and feel about a lot of things. I'm just a white Republican guy who doesn't get it. How do I get it? I still recall the intense and sincere look on your face as you looked me right in the eyes and asked your heartfelt question. It was a moment of humility and candor that, frankly, we don't often see with presidents.

I responded by saying that you had to listen to poor people themselves and pay attention to those who do live and work with the poor. It was a simple answer, but again you were nodding your head. I told my wife, Joy, also a clergyperson, about our conversation. Weeks later, we listened to your first inaugural address. When you said,

America, at its best, is compassionate. In the quiet of American conscience, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation's promise. And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault ... many in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those who do,

my wife poked me in the ribs and smiled. In fact, you talked more about poverty than any president had for a long time in his inaugural addresses—and I said so in a newspaper column afterward (much to the chagrin of Democratic friends). They also didn't like the fact that I started going to other meetings at the White House with you or your staff about how to best do a "faith-based initiative," or that some of my personal friends were appointed to lead and staff your new Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives at the White House. We brought many delegations of religious leaders, again from across the political spectrum, to meet with representatives of that office. Some of us hoped that something new might be in the air.

But that was a long time ago. We don't hear much about that office or initiative anymore. Most of my friends have long left. I don't hear about meetings now. And nobody speaks anymore about this new concept you named "compassionate conservatism." And now, you promise to veto a strongly bipartisan measure to expand health insurance for low-income children. Most of your expressed objections to the bill have been vigorously refuted by Republican senators who helped craft the bill and support it passionately. They vow to try and override your veto. During your first campaign, you chided conservative House Republicans for tax and spending cuts accomplished on the backs of the poor. Now Congressional Republicans are chiding you.

What happened to you, Mr. President? The money needed for expanding health care to poor children in America is far less than the money that has been lost and wasted on corruption in Iraq. How have your priorities stayed so far from those children, whom you once agreed were so central to the soul of the nation? What do they need to do to get your attention again? You will be literally barraged by the religious community across the political spectrum this week, imploring you not to veto children's health care. I would just ask you to take your mind back to a little meeting in a Baptist Sunday school classroom, not far away from where you grew up. Remember that day, what we all talked about, what was on your heart, and how much hope there was in the room. Mr. President, recall that day, take a breath, and say a prayer before you decide to turn away from the children who are so important to our nation's soul and to yours.

God bless you,

Jim Wallis

Take action:

+ Click here to ask President Bush what happened to his "compassionate conservatism" - and urge that he sign this bill.

Yesterday our nation marked the solemn anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with news coverage highlighting the lack of progress made since the winds and water washed away so many hopes and dreams. For many Americans, the images from Katrina may feel like distant memory, even though the arduous process of rebuilding continues at a painstaking pace. I believed and hoped that Katrina would be a watershed moment that awakened national outrage over the sleeping and all-too-invisible giants of inequality and poverty.

It seems almost providential timing that at the same moment we commemorate Katrina, the Census Bureau releases its annual statistics on poverty. The Census report provides almost a national CAT skan of our nation’s health. This year’s report offers a glimmer of good news in that the number of people living in poverty declined last year by 500,000. However, this decrease represents a modest one at best and shouldn’t obscure the shameful reality that 12.3% of Americans still live in the quicksand of poverty. Even more alarming is that the number of families living in poverty actually increased from 7.6 to 7.7 million, as did the number of people without health insurance--from 46.6 to 47 million.

Katrina held up a mirror to our nation, forcing us to ask the basic and penetrating questions, Are we really our brother or sister's keeper? What kind of nation do we aspire to be? How would we want to be cared for in the midst of a national tragedy that shipwrecks lives? What are our responsibilities to and for each other, particularly toward the weakest and most vulnerable? These are fundamentally biblical questions echoed by the scathing indictments of the biblical prophets, and by Jesus’ judgment in Mathew 25 that "Just as you did to the least of these, you also did unto me." Katrina tests our nation’s compassion, mercy, and commitment to justice, and demonstrated the urgent and unparalleled need for good and effective government.

But the government response at all levels has been at best a disappointment and at worst an unconscionable failure. We have seen an abundance of bureaucratic red tape, a cycle of inter-governmental blame, and a deficit of bold leadership. The evidence is in post-Katrina conditions and statistics that are heartbreaking. An estimated 66% of residents have returned to the city but only 10% of residents have from the now infamous Lower Ninth Ward. New Orleans suffers from the highest crime rate in the country, and an estimated 20% of the city suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Ten of the 23 major hospitals and medical facilities remain closed, creating a severe health care crisis.

I traveled to New Orleans in February to attend the Samuel DeWitt Proctor conference. The trip was like beholding two separate cities in one. In the French quarter it felt like the best of times, with tourists returning for revelry, while the worst of times are still being felt just miles away in entire neighborhoods and parishes struggling to rebuild from the waterlogged ashes. While the waters have receded, pain and trauma remain indelible. Where the government has failed, civil society has triumphed with an outpouring of charity and volunteerism, arguably providing the greatest engine behind the progress made so far.

I pray that the week of August 29 becomes a week of national repentance for the indifference we have so often shown toward our most vulnerable brothers and sisters. The week can also be a time for national redemption as we rededicate ourselves to the work of uplifting and empowering those Americans whose lives are circumscribed by inequality and destitution. There are Lower Ninth Wards across our country, both in urban and rural settings, whose social levies remain fragile and broken. On this anniversary I hope you will redouble your efforts to support the rebuilding efforts in the Gulf Coast and deepen your commitment to redress the root causes of poverty in our nation.

Adam Taylor is director of campaigns and organizing for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

Last week I received an interesting package in the mail from Sweet Beginnings LLC, a Chicago-based neighborhood non-profit "committed to training and employing residents who are often locked out of the traditional labor market due to past criminal records and other barriers to employment."

Opening the large cardboard box, I discovered two of their signature "beeline" products: homemade beeswax body cream and lip balm. I met Brenda Palms Barber, the CEO of this remarkable organization, at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month.

The Sweet Beginnings story is one worth sharing—an example of success against some pretty incredible odds.

North Lawndale, a neighborhood on Chicago's west side (where the organization is based), has seen its share of challenging circumstances in decades past. With six in 10 residents having been in trouble with the law and one in four currently unemployed, the community faces some of the most troubling realities confronting urban America.

Experiencing an alarming rate of "white flight" in the years following World War II as government housing policies favoring white Americans incentivized mass migration into new suburban communities, North Lawndale saw its white population drop from 87,000 to 11,000 between 1950 and 1960, while its African American population increased sharply, from 13,000 to over 113,000, during that same time.

Moreover, "the next two decades [saw] a series of economic and social disasters for this increasingly isolated, segregated community. Riots followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, destroying many of the stores … accelerating a decline that lead to a loss of 75 percent of the businesses in the community by 1970," according to the Steans Family Foundation—the Lawndale-focused foundation enabling Sweet Beginnings to get off the ground in 1999.

Confronting the twin challenges of rampant unemployment and the difficulty of finding work for individuals with a criminal record, Sweet Beginnings provides job opportunities for once-incarcerated community members while equipping them with the skills, experiences, and hope necessary to sustain and pursue work in the future.

As I've often said before, "Work works," but only when it empowers people to meet their needs while affirming their dignity as image-bearers of God. When people are given the right information, the right education, and sufficient economic opportunity they are far more likely to make good choices.

For more information, please check out the Sweet Beginnings Web site here.

Additionally, Sweet Beginnings and their Beeline products were featured on the CBS Evening News awhile back. Check out the story here.

Last Friday the House passed a 741-page Farm Bill, largely keeping intact the existing system of subsidies for commercial farmers while adding billions of dollars for conservation, nutrition, and new agricultural sectors. While Democratic leaders will call this a success, the bill demonstrates the brokenness of our politics in which the common good is so often sacrificed to political expediency and powerful corporate interests.

The Farm Bill is a massive, complicated piece of legislation that addresses everything from nutrition programs to commodity subsidies to rural development. It symbolizes the crisis facing American farmers, who are captive to a rhetoric-filled battle over how best to preserve their livelihoods. However, rather than protecting the livelihoods of small farmers, this current bill goes to even greater lengths to provide a form of corporate welfare to large commercial farms and agribusinesses.

Late Friday morning, House lawmakers defeated an amendment sponsored by Representatives Kind (D-Wis.) and Flake (R-Ariz.), which provided desperately needed reforms to this deeply flawed bill. The Kind/Flake Amendment would have made crucial reforms by denying subsidies to large commercial farmers with an average adjusted gross income greater than $500,000 and limiting annual subsidies to $250,000 per person. The savings would be redirected to fight hunger, protect the environment, and help poor farmers.

Instead, billions of dollars of price support subsidies will go to commodities such as wheat, soybeans, and cotton, resulting in one of the greatest heresies in the religion of free trade, let alone fair trade. These subsidies lead to overproduction and distort prices on the international market, making it almost impossible for poor farmers across the developing world to compete and earn their way out of poverty. Ironically, the interests of the small cotton farmer in South Carolina are much more aligned with poor farmers in Africa than with the agribusinesses and large commercial farms that keep winning the lion's share of Farm Bill benefits.

In order to win sufficient support, the Agriculture Committee loaded the bill with billions of dollars for nutrition programs, conservation, black farmers, and Florida and California fruit and vegetable industries. However, Democratic leaders were unwilling to defy corporate pressure and overhaul the corporate welfare of commodity subsidies.

The Farm Bill exposes a clash between the pragmatic politics of compromise and incremental change with the prophetic politics of the common good. Congress was caught between advocates for reform, including a broad faith-based coalition, and the heavily financed commercial farms whose power in 20 congressional districts dominates the debate. This outcome in the House illustrates the brokenness of a political process in which corporate interests too often drown out the voices of faith-based and civic advocates. It also demonstrates the urgent need to reclaim our democracy on behalf of the common good.

Prophets such as Amos, Isaiah, and Ezekiel didn’t mince words or withhold prophetic judgment when leaders advanced the interests of the strong over the welfare of the weak. With our pastoral side we can sympathize with elected officials who are trying to do the right thing—balancing the interests of multiple stakeholders while facing real and perceived constraints around what’s politically possible. However, our prophetic vocation calls us to hold elected officials to a higher standard and change the very parameters within which these policy decisions are made, one that privileges and protects the interests of the weak and dispossessed—in this case, small farmers at home and abroad.

Fortunately, the debate around the Farm Bill now moves to the Senate, giving us another chance to fight for the common good. But senators must believe there’s a real political cost to preserving the status quo, and the prophetic voice must overpower the voice of lobbyists representing commercial farms and agribusinesses.

Adam Taylor is director of campaigns and organizing for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

The New York Times ran two pieces this week that tell us a great deal about where our country is economically. On Sunday's front page, "The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age" told the story of how

many of the nation's very wealthy chief executives, entrepreneurs and financiers echo an earlier era—the Gilded Age before World War I—when powerful enterprises, dominated by men who grew immensely rich, ushered in the industrialization of the United States. The new titans often see themselves as pillars of a similarly prosperous and expansive age, one in which their successes and their philanthropy have made government less important than it once was.

The story noted:

Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution—currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics. Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back...

As if to prove the scientific law that for every action, there is an opposite reaction, the Monday front page headlined "A New Populism Spurs Democrats on the Economy."

Democrats are talking more and more about the anemic growth in American wages and the negative effects of trade and a globalized economy on American jobs and communities. They deplore what they call a growing gap between the middle class, which is struggling to adjust to a changing job market, and the affluent elites who have prospered in the new economy.

It is indeed time for a new populism, a new progressive era. Charges of class warfare will certainly be raised, and when they are, let us point out that it is indeed—the class warfare of tax cuts and budget priorities that make the rich richer while decimating low-and middle-income families.

I heard this report on NPR this morning while getting ready for work and was inspired. I'm not only encouraged that poverty is finally getting on the national agenda; I also found this particular report to be almost poetic. At our candidates forum on CNN, John Edwards made a commitment to keep poverty on the political agenda in this presidential election, and he is following through on his commitment.

From today's NPR segment by Dee Davis, who directs the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, Kentucky:

This week, presidential candidate John Edwards is coming to retrace the RFK visit. I wish they were all coming. These things matter. It is not about party; it's about eyeballs. And there are sights that need seeing. ...

People will tell you government doesn't work. But I've seen it work. It starts with somebody showing up and making an effort. I have also seen it fail. Mostly that happens when no one's paying attention.

Davis (who was a high school Republican when Bobby Kennedy came through Kentucky in 1968) is right—this isn't about party, it's about real people and places becoming part of our national political conversation.

We’re in the homestretch for Pentecost 2007: Taking the Vision to the Streets. It promises to be an informative and inspiring event: a Sunday evening justice revival; a presidential candidates forum focusing on faith, values, and poverty; an organizing institute; and discussion on how to put poverty on the agenda of your local church. We will sing, pray, learn, and strategize together.

This conference is the next step in a vital campaign aimed at the critical presidential election year of 2008. Our plan is nothing less than to put poverty on the national agenda, and to compel candidates from both parties to present the nation with their plans for dramatic poverty reduction both at home and globally. I believe we can vote out poverty, but only if we are all in it together.

As we make the final preparations for the candidates forum, we’re excited to have our constituents playing a critical role in this history-making event – suggesting questions, voting on questions, and hosting watch parties on Monday evening. After the forum, participants in the watch parties will dial in to an exclusive conference call with Mike McCurry and Brian McLaren to react to the forum and kick off our "Vote Out Poverty" campaign to put overcoming poverty on the national agenda.

There are now more than 150 watch parties scheduled in 40 states. If you have not yet signed up to attend, click here to find one in your area. Watch the forum with other people of faith – then discuss what was said.

If there’s not one scheduled in your area, there is still time to host a gathering. We’ll give you a guide with everything you need to make your event a success. Click here to sign up. And, if you haven’t yet, you can still vote for your favorite question to be asked on Monday.

I’m looking forward to discussing putting our faith into action, building a new commitment to a society where all have genuine access to the resources needed to live a decent life. I know our time together in Washington will be filled with hope, inspiration, and ideas. And I hope you believe, as I do, that in our unity we can further the biblical imperative to overcome poverty.

On Wednesday President Bush made a second major speech on the crisis of HIV/AIDS announcing a major commitment to double U.S. funding for global prevention and treatment programs around the world to reach a level of $30 billion over another five years. We should applaud this increased funding and the way in which President Bush has made fighting AIDS in Africa arguably the most positive part of his legacy. Even as we celebrate, though, we must also bear in mind that even this bold step will fall short of stemming this epidemic.

The crisis of HIV/AIDS continues to outpace even our best response, with an estimated 4.3 million new infections last year. The epidemic tracks the fault lines of poverty and vulnerability. The real U.S. share of the cost of meeting the global need to fight AIDS is more in the order of $50 billion by 2013, which would include continuing to provide life-prolonging treatment to one-third of the people in clinical need.

The president made his announcement in advance of the upcoming G8 summit, which takes place in Heiligendamm, Germany, from June 4-6. The German Chancellor Merkel will preside over an agenda that includes a focus on global warming, primary school education, and the crisis of extreme poverty.

Since the 2005 G-8 summit at Gleneagles raised the bar for global leadership, this year’s summit faces a crisis of expectations. With the exception of the U.K. and Japan, other G-8 nations, including the United States, have dragged their feet in realizing many of the solemn promises made to the continent of Africa, the largest of which was to double the levels of aid by 2010. Collectively, G-8 assistance to sub-Saharan Africa has increased by only $2.3 billion since 2004, instead of the $5.4 billion promised.

Tragically, promises are much easier to make than to keep. While the U.S. has made important steps toward increasing its aid through the Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the Millennium Challenge Account, and contributions to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, the U.S. must increase its aid by nearly $1 billion in order to remain on track.

At the turn of the new millennium, the global AIDS crisis was only beginning to grab headlines and prick the conscience of our nation. I was converted to the cause of ending AIDS by the opening remarks of Judge Edwin Cameroon’s speech at the International AIDS Conference in 2000 in South Africa, when he prophetically said, “I represent the inequality of this world…because of my job and skin color I had access to drugs that brought me from the brink of death back to life…. But this disease still represents a death sentence to the majority of people living in poverty across this world.” These words highlighted in sobering terms how a preventable and treatable disease like AIDS must lend the urgency necessary to bring an end to extreme global poverty.

Through media savvy and celebrity-driven efforts like the ONE campaign, the cause of ending HIV/AIDS and extreme poverty has become more widely embraced. Seven years ago, it would have been almost impossible to imagine regular commercials featuring your favorite movie stars or a millions calling in to American Idol to raise awareness and money to fight poverty and AIDS in Africa. While we have reached a tipping point in public awareness and even public opinion, we are far from a tipping point in public action. Changing the politics of delay and incremental leadership will also require a dedicated constituency of committed leaders who are willing to put their faith to the test. Join us in taking action in advance of this year’s G-8 meeting by joining forces with Archbishop Desmond Tutu in telling G-8 nations to keep their promises to Africa!

On June 6, the leaders of the wealthiest nations will meet in Germany at the G-8 Summit. But this is not just any meeting. It's a meeting where life and death decisions will be made, affecting the lives of millions of people.

You can help. Join Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and tell G8 nations to keep their promises!

The commitments made by the G-8 leaders in 2005 on poverty, aid to poor countries, HIV/AIDS, health systems, and education, are solemn promises, made to impoverished people. Breaking these promises is morally unacceptable. Yet, the G-8 is not on track to keep these promises:

• Less than half of all people in urgent need of AIDS treatment by 2010 will be receiving it;



• 77 million children have no access to school; and



• Africa alone faces a shortage of nearly 1.5 million health workers.

This petition calls for the G-8 nations to agree on a financing plan to reach the promise of universal access to all AIDS services by 2010, to fully support a coordinated plan to strengthen health systems, and to provide full funding for education so every child can have the chance to go to school.

Tell the G8 leaders they must get AIDS and education funding back to the promised level. Take Action!

Thank you for making a difference!


Adam Taylor is director of campaigns and organizing for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

This column is adapted from a commencement address that Jim delivered at Georgetown University on Sunday, May 20.

Each new generation has a chance to alter two very basic definitions of reality in our world - what is acceptable and what is possible.

First, what is acceptable?

There are always great inhumanities that we inflict upon one another in this world, great injustices that cry out to God for redress, and great gaps in our moral recognition of them. When the really big offenses are finally corrected, finally changed, it is always and only because something has happened to change our perception of the moral issues at stake. The moral contradiction we have long lived with is no longer acceptable to us. What we accepted, or ignored, or denied, finally gets our attention and we decide that we just cannot, and will not, live with it any longer. But until that happens, the injustice and misery continue.

It often takes a new generation to make that decision - that something that people have long tolerated just won't be tolerated any more.

So the question to you as graduates, as ambassadors for a new generation, is this: what are you going to no longer accept in our world, what will you refuse to tolerate now that you will be making the decisions that matter?

Will it be acceptable to you that 3 billion people in our world today - half of God's children - live on less that $2 per day, that more than 1 billion live on less than $1 per day, that the gap between the life expectancy in the rich places and the poor places in the world is now 40 years, and that 30,000 children globally will die today - on the day of your graduation - from needless, senseless, and utterly preventable poverty and disease? It's what Bono calls "stupid poverty."

Many people don't really know that, or sort of do but have never really focused on the reality or given it a second thought. And that's the way it usually is. We don't know, or we have the easy explanations about why poverty or some other calamity exists and why it can't really be changed - all of which makes us feel better about ourselves - or we are just more concerned with lots of other things. We really don't have to care. So we tolerate it and keep looking the other way.

But then something changes. Something gets our attention, something goes deeper than it has before and hooks us in the places we call the heart, the soul, the spirit. And once we've crossed over into really seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting the injustice we can never really look back again. It is now unacceptable to us.

What we see now offends us, offends our understanding of the sanctity and dignity of life, offends our notions of fairness and justice, offends our most basic values; violates our idea of the common good, and starts to tug at our deepest places. We cross the line of unacceptability. We become intolerant of the injustice.

But just changing our notion of what is unacceptable isn't enough, however. We must also change our perception of what is possible.

In that regard, I would encourage each of you to think about your vocation more than just your career. And there is a difference. From the outside, those two tracks may look very much alike, but asking the vocational question rather than just considering the career options will take you much deeper. The key is to ask why you might take one path instead of another - the real reasons you would do something, more than just because you can. The key is to ask who you really are and what you want to become. It is to ask what you believe you are supposed to do.

You do have great potential, but that potential will be most fulfilled if you follow the leanings of conscience and the language of the heart more than just the dictates of the market, whether economic or political. They want smart people like you to just manage the systems of the world. But rather than managing or merely fitting into systems, ask how you can change them. You're both smart enough and talented enough to do that. That's your greatest potential.

Ask where your gifts intersect with the groaning needs of the world - there is your vocation.

The antidote to cynicism is not optimism but action. And action is finally born out of hope. Try to remember that. At college, you often believe you can think your way into a new way of living, but that's actually not the way it works. Out in the world, it's more likely that you will live your way into a new way of thinking.

The key is to believe that the world can be changed, because it is only that belief that ever changes the world. And if not us, who will believe? If not you, who?

+ Click here to download mp3 audio (14MB)
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As announced on CNN last week, we're hosting a forum of the leading Democratic presidential candidates at our Pentecost 2007 event (Mary will also be speaking at the conference). We've invited several of our bloggers to discuss their questions for the candidates, but we're also asking our readers to submit their questions, and TOMORROW will let YOU vote on the ones we should use!

+ Click here to submit your questions

Little of the campaign rhetoric has touched on the issues and concerns of our low-income, minority communities, and how to help people move out of poverty. We know that it will take personal responsibility, government action, and partnership efforts with communities of faith and the corporate sector. But it will take presidential leadership to move forward.

Jonathan Kozol, in the Shame of the Nation, calls the re-segregation of public schools and the great disparity between schools in wealthy communities and in low income communities the damnation of our future, perpetuated by financing schools on property taxes and our public lack of concern for equity in education. What is your plan, candidates, for enabling quality public education for every child? For fairness in funding of public education?

Rising costs, gentrification of communities, drastically reduced government subsidies and incentives have created a dire shortage of decent housing affordable for low income people; most poor are paying over 50 percent of their income for crammed substandard housing. What are your plans to deal with this crisis? How do we help enable mixed-income communities, with spaces and places for “community” to happen?

Rising fuel costs and reduced air quality mandate a redirection of federal transportation dollars and incentives toward public mass transportation. Yet highways still get most of the transportation funds and incentives, and public transportation is struggling to stay afloat. What are your plans to deal with redirecting our efforts towards fast, efficient, and affordable public transportation?

Mary Nelson is president and CEO of Bethel New Life, a 24-year-old faith-based community development corporation on the west side of Chicago. She is also a board member of Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

As announced on CNN last night, we're hosting a forum of the leading Democratic presidential candidates at our Pentecost 2007 event (Shane will also be speaking at the conference). We've invited several of our bloggers to discuss their questions for the candidates, but we're also asking our readers to submit their questions, and will let YOU vote on the ones we should use!
+ Click here to submit your questions

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Don’t let anyone make you think that God has chosen America as [God's] divine messianic force to be reckoned with.” There are compelling voices who claim that God has chosen America (not the church) as a special embodiment of hope for the world, and then there are times (perhaps in more recent history) when it seems America embodies an antithesis of what God hopes for. U.S. flags colonize the altars and the money is branded “In God We Trust,” but the economy is an eerie reflection of the seven deadly sins listed in scripture, with a culture dangerously close to the sins of Sodom, a culture the prophet Ezekiel describes as “arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned.” Given the fact that America and God’s kingdom are not the same - and are often at odds - how do we resist the temptation of thinking that America, rather than God or God’s church, is the hope of the world?

Perhaps reflect on the following words from George W. Bush: “The ideal of America is the hope of all mankind ... That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” And the recent words of Barack Obama on the Late Show with David Letterman, “This country is still the last best hope on earth.” As Christians, how do we reconcile where our ultimate faith lies, especially within an empire as mesmerizing as Rome or America?


Shane Claiborne is a Red Letter Christian, author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, and a founding partner of the Simple Way community, a radical faith community that lives among and serves the homeless in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia.

This article in Sunday's LA Times caught my attention:

Evangelical leader Rick Warren came to the heart of the religious right movement last week to criticize a narrow focus on abortion, homosexuality and pornography as un-Christian.

Strikingly, top Christian conservatives agreed.

During a three-day summit here, members of Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ joined Warren and dozens of other pastors from across the nation in a pledge to devote more of their resources and clout to helping children in need.

"We've got some people who only focus on moral purity and couldn't care less about the poor, the sick, the uneducated. And they haven't done zip for those people," said Warren, a mega-church pastor in California and author of the best-selling "The Purpose-Driven Life."

Warren hastened to say that he also opposed abortion and gay marriage. But too often, he said, Christians these days are defined by their "big mouth" - what they argue against, not what they embrace. He pointed to a verse from the Book of James that calls caring for orphans an essential element of a "pure and undefiled" faith.

"It's time for the church to stop debating the Bible and start doing it," Warren said.

I've had some good conversations with Rick Warren about his deep passion to serve the poor. He's helping to guide a shift among religious conservatives that should not go without notice or welcome. I pray that this movement keeps moving - beyond personal changes that produce acts of charity (where it always begins) to structural changes that bring about social justice. The criticism Warren alludes to - that conservative activists seem to care more about unborn children than about those living and suffering in poverty - has often been accurate. So when they begin to talk about moving from a narrow focus to a broader agenda that includes loving and sacrificial action for the poor, it feels like a movement of the spirit; one that shows there's hope for the church, and hope for the poor.

There are two pieces on poverty from today's Washington Post that are worth reading and discussing. The first is by one of my favorite columnists, E.J. Dionne Jr., If Democrats Want to Help the Poor. . . :

Republicans once preached compassion, but then went off to war. Democrats waged a war on poverty, but then lost some elections. They decided the middle class is where it's at.

But the poor are still with us, and their ranks are growing. One in eight Americans lives in poverty, which seems obscene given that the really rich are enjoying a level of privilege that makes the Gilded Age Vanderbilts look like abstemious Puritans.

And A Powerhouse for the Poor, by Steven Pearlstein:

You often hear that the poor and working people don't have a voice in Washington, that they invariably lose out to special interests that give big campaign contributions or can mobilize a vast membership.

As it turns out, this bit of conventional wisdom is wrong for one reason: Bob Greenstein and his crew at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Cal Thomas' essay "The Beginning of the End of the Religious Right?" uses the occasion of the closing of one of the Coral Ridge Ministries of D. James Kennedy to argue that:

Christians must first understand that the issues they most care about – abortion, same-sex marriage and cultural rot – are not caused by bad politics, but are matters of the heart and soul.

Thomas goes on to write:

Some evangelicals wish to broaden the political agenda beyond these issues to poverty, social justice, and the environment. Politics can never completely cure the ills of any of these, but the message Christians bring about salvation and redemption can.

He concludes with a warning to those too wrapped up in partisan political activity:

To paraphrase a verse familiar to most Christians, what shall it profit a [person] if he gains the White House, but loses his own soul?

Jim Rice is Editor of Sojourners magazine.

Last week, Sojourners/Call to Renewal joined many other advocates in asking the Senate to take a step toward a moral budget. In a letter that went to every senator, I requested that each “make sure to prioritize poor and working families, children, and the elderly as you determine where our nation commits its energies and resources.” I continued, “what is needed now is bold leadership and an agenda that sets clear priorities and seeks to empower families. We need to protect critical programs and increase aid, but also recommit ourselves to the notion of the common good.”

But what does that recommitment look like in a budget? In line with the Covenant for a New America, I asked the senators for a $50 billion commitment for reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), $15 billion in new spending for the Farm Bill (to be used to strengthen the food stamp program and ensure that all eligible families receive increased support), and greater support for the Millennium Development Goals through $5 billion in effective U.S. foreign assistance for poverty-reducing programs.

Last Friday, because of the chorus of advocates speaking with a common voice, the Senate made some progress with the passage of its budget blueprint (S Con Res 21), adopted by a 52-47 vote. How did it fare according to the Covenant vision?

• Regarding SCHIP, the Senate resolution signaled a commitment to find the $50 billion required to expand the program and cover more kids.
  
• The Senate’s budget resolution also allocates $15 billion to “strengthen our agriculture and rural economies and critical nutrition programs” under the Farm Bill. Much more work is needed to make sure that those funds are actually directed to those who need them most, but this is a step forward.
  
• Another clear success concerned U.S. foreign assistance for poverty-reducing programs. The faith community played a pivotal role in pushing for an amendment that reversed a proposed $2.2 billion cut to the international affairs budget. In the end, a strong bipartisan group of senators publicly confirmed their support for the amendment, providing the leadership needed to result in passage by unanimous consent. The overall increase to the international affairs budget is $3.7 billion, the greatest one-year increase for global poverty-focused assistance in recent history. This money will go toward critical programs for clean water, life-saving medication, education, economic growth, as well as diplomatic programs in the world's poorest countries.

This week we have another chance to influence the process when the House votes on its budget blueprint. The Senate has taken certain steps toward the faith community’s vision with their budget resolution, but we are asking that the House cast an even bolder agenda with their 2008 budget resolution. We’ll give you a chance to ask them to support a bolder agenda soon.

Our nation needs the affirmation that budgets are moral documents, and we need our leaders to commit to that vision in order to recover some of our nation’s greatness; greatness that comes from empowering families, protecting the common good, and acting upon the needs of “the least of these” among us.