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.