Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to the CCDA Podcast.
Speaker: In this episode, you will hear audio from a 2024 CCDA Conference workshop titled, Overview of CCD Philosophy, Theology, and Practice.
Speaker: This workshop was hosted by Dr. Unstrosser, Dr. Jonathan Brooks, Dr. Mary Nelson, and Sandra Maria Van Opstel.
Speaker: In this audio, you will hear the speakers make reference to FCI, which is our Flourishing Congregations Initiative, a comprehensive four-year program designed to empower church leaders to help their congregations deepen their community engagement, enhance their ministries, and contribute to the flourishing of their neighborhoods.
Speaker: You can learn more about FCI by visiting ccda.org slash FCI.
Speaker: And with that, we hope you are encouraged and inspired by this look at the CCD philosophy.
Speaker: All right, everybody.
Speaker: Sounds like great conversation happening.
Speaker: There's great conversations happening.
Speaker: We love it.
Speaker: So my name is Jonathan Brooks.
Speaker: Pastor Jay is what everybody calls me.
Speaker: I am not a lead pastor at Lawndale Christian Community Church.
Speaker: Been a part of CCDA for a while and get the opportunity with these amazing ladies next to me.
Speaker: to share just a brief bit about each one of the eight key components.
Speaker: And I just want to start off because I get to do the first one to really focus on a couple of things.
Speaker: First and foremost, pay attention to their first word of this sentence.
Speaker: It says, a philosophy of ministry to reclaim and restore under-resourced communities.
Speaker: Everybody say a philosophy.
Speaker: All right, so A philosophy.
Speaker: The reason why I'm going to focus on that is because I know even in my own zealous way when I first got into Christian Community Development, I somehow believed it was the philosophy of ministry to reclaim and restore other resource communities.
Speaker: But I quickly learned that
Speaker: people doing great work in my community long before God called me there, and long before I stepped foot there.
Speaker: And therefore, we are called to join in using a philosophy that we think that we have seen work throughout the decades and that God has been using and the Spirit has been using to reclaim communities.
Speaker: And so recognize that this is a philosophy, but this philosophy does work in tandem.
Speaker: So everything that you'll hear us talk about, we're going to talk about separately, but we need to understand it collectively.
Speaker: We'll give you these eight components, but I want you to think of these eight components on a wheel spinning and constantly going.
Speaker: And not necessarily one being more important than the other or one happened to happen before the other.
Speaker: The idea here is that we practice these eight principles and we see them as one philosophy, a philosophy.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That sound good.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: With that, I'm going to go ahead and get us started.
Speaker: And they gave me my favorite.
Speaker: All right, to start us off with.
Speaker: And that is relocation.
Speaker: Now, you will notice we also have a slash community base there.
Speaker: We recognize that some of the language that is used even now may not vibe as well in 2024 as it did when it was kind of thought of 30 more years ago.
Speaker: All right, and relocation is a tough word nowadays, right?
Speaker: Because it sits right alive.
Speaker: Relocation, gentrification, you know, displacement.
Speaker: And so we think of it more, and what we're trying to say is community-based, but our founder, one of our founders, Dr. John Perkins, coined the three R's that you'll hear, and relocation was his.
Speaker: And when he was coming up, everybody was running away from communities like ours.
Speaker: They weren't trying to come back and gentrify them.
Speaker: They were like, leave them for dead.
Speaker: So his thing was come back, right?
Speaker: So we still use the language to honor him and honor what he means, but we want you to know we want you to be community-based.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So let's talk a little bit about it, and I'm going to get out the way.
Speaker: Somehow I got drafted to do two workshops at the same time.
Speaker: So I'm going to do this one, go to my other workshop, and come back and do my second one later.
Speaker: Hit the next slide.
Speaker: Relocation from a community base.
Speaker: There's three major things I want you to focus on.
Speaker: First and foremost, how many of y'all were in Bible study this morning?
Speaker: A couple, a couple.
Speaker: All right, good.
Speaker: You heard me talk about Jeremiah 29, where it says, build a house and live in it, live in it, live in it.
Speaker: We believe in living in the communities in which we serve, not just to serve in them, but to make them homes.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And so living in our community is not about starting a ministry there.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's not about having a nice church there.
Speaker: Can I tell you a secret?
Speaker: Neighborhoods were not created for you to do ministry in.
Speaker: Neighborhoods were created for us to live in.
Speaker: That's why God created them.
Speaker: Place is not about us doing ministry or us just doing community Matthew.
Speaker: No, no, it's a place to live.
Speaker: That's what it's designed for.
Speaker: And we believe first and foremost that our neighborhoods have to become our home.
Speaker: And so we believe living in the Trinity, that means that your passion, your desires, everything that you think about in context of your ministry, of your work, of your vocation, of all that you do, begins with understanding that place.
Speaker: One of my good friends, Sean Castleberry, wrote a book back in the day, and he defined missions as falling in love with your place.
Speaker: And I love that definition, because the more you fall in love with your place, the more you begin to see your place the way God does.
Speaker: Because God has already fallen in love with your place.
Speaker: So living in the community, we don't just mean having your address there.
Speaker: There are some people I know, I'm not going to tell somebody business, who have an address in my neighborhood and they don't live there.
Speaker: And then there are folk who wish they could or don't have the ability to move and have the address in my community, but I know they live there.
Speaker: They love it.
Speaker: Their heart is there.
Speaker: So when we talk about living in the community, do we want you to have the physical address there?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: But if that's not a possibility, how do you wake up, think, breathe and sleep and eat it, wondering what God is doing in that place?
Speaker: Amen?
Speaker: That's what we mean by living in the community.
Speaker: And then we relieve it.
Speaker: What does that mean?
Speaker: That means that we become a part of it.
Speaker: Notice it doesn't say you need redirected.
Speaker: The other thing I said this morning was, we're not trying to turn exile into Jerusalem.
Speaker: Not trying to turn Babylon into Jerusalem.
Speaker: Let's just make it comfortable.
Speaker: Why don't they all start us here?
Speaker: That's not what we're doing.
Speaker: We're valuing the place we're in and we're saying it's beautiful as is.
Speaker: How do I become a part?
Speaker: How do we become a part of what God is already doing in this amazing place that God already has fallen in love with?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So we're reweaving.
Speaker: That means that we're reconnecting.
Speaker: We're seeing people that we may have saw in one way in a new way.
Speaker: We're now seeing them the way God sees them.
Speaker: We're seeing places and institutions and organizations that we thought we understood and knew when we're weaving and we're seeing them in a new way.
Speaker: My way of seeing them is seeing the world the way God does, meaning that every person, every place, both displays the glory of God and some of the brokenness of humanity.
Speaker: If you can't see one or the other, there's nothing wrong with the place and nothing wrong with the people.
Speaker: There's something wrong with your vision.
Speaker: We want to reweave and reconnect.
Speaker: And then a theology.
Speaker: We heard it all day today.
Speaker: I'm so glad we started listening to our indigenous brothers and sisters who just took us to school this morning on place-based theology.
Speaker: We think we know what we're talking about, but this is at the core of who we are.
Speaker: This is why we can't no longer be an elder-free society.
Speaker: Because if we're actually going to understand the location, we have to understand place.
Speaker: Creator God already has a plan.
Speaker: And we are not separate from nature.
Speaker: We're not separate from the land in which we walk on.
Speaker: We're not separate from the history, both the colonized and organic history of the places in which we sit in.
Speaker: So our theology, our understanding of God, our understanding of our missiology, our Christology, everything that we do ought to be connected in some way to the place in which we sit.
Speaker: I'll give you an example.
Speaker: There's this guy who wrote a whole line of the Bible, the Luke Testament named Paul.
Speaker: What I love about Paul is Paul is a letter writer, okay?
Speaker: And Paul likes to write letters, but he doesn't just write general letters.
Speaker: You do know that Paul writes letters to individual churches in individual places.
Speaker: So he writes a letter to the folks in Thessalonica, and he says, here's what I need you to do in Thessalonica.
Speaker: He doesn't understand.
Speaker: If you don't write Thessalonica and what's going on there, commute over to Cormoran because there's some better churches over there.
Speaker: No, the folks who live in Corinth have a specific call and content that they are called to do.
Speaker: Their place impacts their theology.
Speaker: And that's all I want you to get.
Speaker: Your place too will impact your theology, but you have to relocate not only your father, not only your mind, but relocate your heart and your passions.
Speaker: There's three types of people that we think about when we talk about relocators.
Speaker: Those who have moved into a community as relocating.
Speaker: Those who maybe lived in a place and they decided to come back.
Speaker: That's what I was.
Speaker: I went to college, but I was never coming back.
Speaker: And God was like, ah, got you.
Speaker: Return there.
Speaker: And then my favorite is the remainder.
Speaker: Those who stick it out and say, God is doing something special here.
Speaker: Don't want to remain.
Speaker: These are very quick blurs, but I hope they go deep enough for you to recognize that relocation is not about transition and change.
Speaker: It's more about falling in love with your place the way God does.
Speaker: All right?
Speaker: I'm out of the way.
Speaker: Who's up next?
Speaker: I am.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So I'm Sandra.
Speaker: And I live just up the street from Jonathan, from Pastor Jay in Hubble Park on the northwest side of Chicago.
Speaker: And I live there.
Speaker: I'm a landlord there.
Speaker: I'm a neighbor there.
Speaker: I'm a mom there.
Speaker: So all the things that make up a neighborhood.
Speaker: And one of the things I've realized as I've been growing in this being a good neighbor and loving my neighbor and loving God is that we have to interact with a lot of people who are not like you.
Speaker: And that's not only for me as a Latina interacting with, let's say, the white community in my seminary or my white husband from Wisconsin or my black neighbors or my Puerto Rican neighbors, because I'm Colombian, not Puerto Rican.
Speaker: I live in a Puerto Rican community.
Speaker: So there's a lot of differences.
Speaker: There's socioeconomic differences.
Speaker: So in my seminary space, I was too emotional, too loud, too colorful, too whatever.
Speaker: And that in my neighborhood, I'm too educated.
Speaker: You know, I'm suspect in the church because I carry like some letters behind my name.
Speaker: And like, look, they have taught you anyway about the Holy Spirit.
Speaker: And, you know, I've heard so many things.
Speaker: And what I realized was that this second R that we look at, this R of reconciliation is a journey.
Speaker: It is a journey of understanding, first and foremost, who you are.
Speaker: who you are, where your feet stand, the place where you are located.
Speaker: And then from there, what are the bridges that God is asking you to cross?
Speaker: And so I think a lot of you, raise your hand if you were there last night for Dr. B's plenary.
Speaker: So Dr. Reverend Brenda Salter McNeil has been a theological mentor, an auntie, a preaching mentor to me.
Speaker: And so when I think about the word reconciliation, I know a lot of us, we don't like that word right now, but I am committed to the word.
Speaker: I'm just gonna let you know why, because it's in the scriptures.
Speaker: And the word reconciliation actually means to exchange places or to trade places, to understand something from a different vantage point.
Speaker: That's one of the meanings of the word.
Speaker: But I think about what it looks like to build bridges, to come together, to work across differences.
Speaker: Anybody in here cross-culturally married or interracially married?
Speaker: Oh my gosh, it's so hard.
Speaker: So hard.
Speaker: And so I think one of our brothers and sisters shared from up front that their parents, their in-laws came into town and they didn't stay with them.
Speaker: And I was like, it's just like part of our fighting every single year when mother-in-law comes into town, she wants to stay with friends.
Speaker: I'm like, what happens wrong with our house?
Speaker: You know, why won't you want to stay with us?
Speaker: Because the Latina family, you would never, that's my rule, you would never go and stay with us on that.
Speaker: So there are all these differences that we carry.
Speaker: And when we're doing community development, when we're in partnership, asking God to transform our communities and make things right, we are working with people who are different than us.
Speaker: They have different theologies than we do.
Speaker: When we're in clergy settings, we don't all agree on what the Bible says, but there we are because housing is needed.
Speaker: We're not like, I can't sing with you because I don't agree with your theology.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: People are living kind of street, we don't have the luxury of that.
Speaker: So as someone who works in space and place and proximity, you have to work with people who are different than you.
Speaker: Across party lines, across theological differences, across class differences.
Speaker: People that you just don't like their personalities, you know, and now they're your older person or something, you know.
Speaker: And so you have to work across differences.
Speaker: And that is for the purpose of the restoration and the healing of the community that you're in.
Speaker: That is for the purpose of your restoration and healing.
Speaker: And so I wanted to take a look real quickly at what reconciliation is.
Speaker: I want you to know that through the scriptures, God invites all.
Speaker: God invites all to God and to one another.
Speaker: So the invitation that we have in Luke 14 through the parable of the big feast is that Jesus invites everyone to the table.
Speaker: And when the invitations go out and some of the guests are like, I don't know if they want to go to that table.
Speaker: So I'm going to just be like, I got stuff to do at home.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Those excuses that they all made, they weren't busy y'all.
Speaker: So if that's your interpretation of Luke 14, I encourage you to re understand that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What was happening in Lut 14 in a hospitable culture of the Near Eastern setting is that people would have already known there was a party that was going to happen because the streets would have been preparing for it all week long because the party lasts nine to ten days.
Speaker: So when the people come back and say, I'm so sorry, I just got married.
Speaker: I can't go to your party.
Speaker: I'm so sorry.
Speaker: You know, I have I just bought two ox and I got something to do.
Speaker: I have like, I'm so sorry.
Speaker: I got a check on my house.
Speaker: Those are excuses because they knew that that master was going to invite people to the table from the highways, the bodies that they didn't want to sit next to because they smell.
Speaker: Because they ate differently.
Speaker: Because they look differently.
Speaker: And so this kind of call, God invites all of us, is to rightness between people and God.
Speaker: It is to rightness between people and people.
Speaker: It is to rightness between people and structures.
Speaker: And it is to rightness between people and creation, which we learned about this morning.
Speaker: And it is to rightness with one's own self.
Speaker: Because many of us in this room did grow up in settings where we were told who we are is not good enough.
Speaker: And that journey of reconciliation includes your own reconciliation to self.
Speaker: I'll just say this, if I can get to it later, Ariel, but I wrote a book called The Next Worship.
Speaker: It's actually about how do we create spaces that bring reconciliation and justice.
Speaker: There's this content in there, but if I have time later, I'll cover it.
Speaker: But reconciliation is the second part.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Give her a hand.
Speaker: We're starting with the original three R's that John Perkins, my name's Mary, I'm the old lady in the group, and I've been around long time, but so excited to see this room full of people.
Speaker: And so we are talking about redistribution, and we have had some board members over the time that said, well, that's socialist.
Speaker: redistribution, because what it really means is that there would be a sharing of all things, access and with equality.
Speaker: But as we think about redistribution in the CCDA mindset, it's first of all economic development.
Speaker: And John Perkins used to always say, as we know the old idiom, you give a person a fish and they eat for the day.
Speaker: You teach a person to fish and they may eat for a long time.
Speaker: But if you want to see the community change, you own, you figure out how to own the pond and make it work for everybody that's living around it.
Speaker: So the notion of redistribution, economic development, and many of our groups have
Speaker: have started with social services, have started with handouts, feeding programs, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker: But many are not, we need to move to figure out how do we make some things happen.
Speaker: And so there's a whole bunch of wonderful micro enterprises happening.
Speaker: I happen to be wearing, I don't know how many of you know Shane Claymore and his stuff.
Speaker: Anyway, he's got this thing.
Speaker: His microenterprise is taking guns and turning them into garden tools and taking bullets and turning them into jewelry.
Speaker: And both as a statement of doing things, but as a way to get people involved.
Speaker: And many of our organizations have done both micro enterprises.
Speaker: We did a started out with a food pantry.
Speaker: Then we went into a food co-op.
Speaker: And then we say, man, you know, there's no business.
Speaker: good grocery stores in our neighborhoods.
Speaker: So then we had to get into advocacy and figure out how do we get a grocery store that sells good fruits and vegetables and all the rest of it.
Speaker: So that's the economic development piece.
Speaker: And we need the skills of so many other kinds of people to do the economic development piece in our neighborhoods.
Speaker: And the second thing is...
Speaker: the social justice and the systemic.
Speaker: And I love to use the story of the, that we were standing at Aronda River and the organization was trying to do things and there was somebody in the river saying, help, help, I'm droning.
Speaker: And so somebody would jump in and get them and drag them into shore.
Speaker: Help, help, I'm drowning.
Speaker: And another would jump in and drag them into shore.
Speaker: Help, help, I'm drowning.
Speaker: And finally, exhausted people might say, we better go upstream and figure out who and what.
Speaker: is pushing them in.
Speaker: And not only, so that takes kind of some of you come out of colleges and universities, figuring out the who and the what, because sometimes it's not always clear and we have to go behind the research for that.
Speaker: But that's not enough.
Speaker: You do the research, you want to figure out who and what.
Speaker: And then we figure out, uh-oh, it means we've got to, for us, man, ooh, we've got to do something about the school system.
Speaker: It wasn't working.
Speaker: And we knew we couldn't.
Speaker: make all the difference in the world.
Speaker: But we said, we better try to figure out what we want in place of what we don't want.
Speaker: And so we started up the high school, CC Christian Community Alternative Academy, and then fought to get it accredited and then began to keep the data to figure out what works in place of what didn't work.
Speaker: So we taught math by shooting craps.
Speaker: We taught ratios that way.
Speaker: And had a lot of fun doing a whole lot of alternative things to figure out how do you begin to deal with some of these systems in terms of it.
Speaker: And then the other thing is too often we get subsumed in doing the frontline things.
Speaker: And we've got to figure out how do we get beyond the frontline things, whether it's, you know, even just providing when we have had residents that are formerly homeless.
Speaker: Well, you know, we've got to go the next step and the next step and the next step in terms of this stuff, which then when you think about impacting public policy, man, that takes doing it with other people.
Speaker: And we may have some strange bedfellows when we begin to do some of this social justice stuff.
Speaker: We may not agree on everything, but if we have a single focus, I'm really tuned in the environment right now.
Speaker: And so, you know, I'm working on environmental things with a lot of other groups that have a lot of other ways.
Speaker: And so the thing is, as we march down this road, don't get stuck with the frontline things that that's the only thing you do.
Speaker: Help to connect with other people and other groups so that we can really begin to change, to make alternatives to what's not working.
Speaker: And I want to say one more thing.
Speaker: When we put together this high school for dropouts, I was the original principal and I didn't have any idea what I was doing.
Speaker: But the important thing was we could then go and give testimony and say, here's what's working.
Speaker: Here's what's working in place of what's not.
Speaker: Not that we had all the answers, but we could speak from experience.
Speaker: And so that's so important.
Speaker: Redistribution is the concrete stuff and is also the changing the system.
Speaker: Thank you, Mary.
Speaker: So I want to give you guys a moment.
Speaker: First of all, I want you to know that you should all ask Siri later, who Mary Nelson is, because she has done the most incredible work.
Speaker: I mean, I read her in articles, I read her in journals, I listened to her at conferences, and then I had the honor and the privilege of serving on the CCBA board with a woman who has
Speaker: done the most creative work on the west side of Chicago.
Speaker: And so ask Siri or Google, depending on your preferences later, you have just experienced the three R's, relocation or location, reconciliation, and redistribution.
Speaker: There are going to be a lot of things that you hear this week.
Speaker: So I think it's super important just to take a breath every once in a while, even if you're a little late for a session or if you need to clock out in your mind during the session to just ask the Holy Spirit, what are you depositing with me?
Speaker: and in me, because I'm not going to be able to apply all of these things.
Speaker: I'm not going to be able to apply the 12 books that I just bought or talk to the 17 organizations that I just connected with.
Speaker: We've been doing this work for many decades, collectively, many, many decades.
Speaker: And what I've learned is that it is important along the way to take a breath and ask spirit, what are you leaving in me?
Speaker: What is for me?
Speaker: Our next one is leadership development.
Speaker: And I ask for this one every time we do this seminar because I went to seminary.
Speaker: Do we have any seminaries in here?
Speaker: I have an MDO.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: They did not teach me how to develop leaders.
Speaker: I'm so sorry.
Speaker: Hopefully they're doing that now, but I graduated in 2011.
Speaker: I did not learn leadership development.
Speaker: It was like, I was going to spend all my time in the office, 23 hours a week, like writing a sermon, exegeting the word and like delivering a sermon to people I don't even know because I haven't spent any time with them.
Speaker: What I did learn, where I did learn leadership development was in a parachurch organization called InterVarsity, because we led through students.
Speaker: So we didn't lead Bible studies, we trained other people to lead Bible studies.
Speaker: We put a scripture Bible study in the hands of an 18 year old and said, you could do this.
Speaker: We gave them a microphone and said, you can lead worship.
Speaker: You could preach.
Speaker: You could organize mission on your campus.
Speaker: And then we coached them and came behind them.
Speaker: And that was such a gift to me because it helped me for this principle in CCD.
Speaker: It helped me with this principle that the people in our communities and the generations that are coming after each generation are equipped and ready to lead.
Speaker: They should be leading at 10.
Speaker: They should be leading at 16.
Speaker: Like what kind of leadership?
Speaker: You know, kind of what kind of leadership are given depends on the capacity that they're at, but everybody should be given the agency to experiment with the gifts that God has given them.
Speaker: And so leadership development is kind of, for me, a passion, particularly as it relates to changing communities, because I truly believe what CCD believes, which is the people with the problem have the answers to the problem.
Speaker: The people with the problem have the answer.
Speaker: So I was on a CTA public transit bus in Chicago and I was hearing this guy that was getting his master's in bourbon something, urban development.
Speaker: And he was like telling his friend how the people in our communities actually don't like they don't know how to fix it.
Speaker: And I was like, who is this guy?
Speaker: Like, what is going on?
Speaker: I didn't want to start a fight on the train, so I just kept it to myself.
Speaker: But I realized like, oh, wow, these are people that want to make a difference in our communities, but they actually don't believe.
Speaker: And this person was a person of color.
Speaker: So they just didn't grow up in a community like that.
Speaker: So what they were trying to say was, oh, these people need me because clearly they don't know how they got there.
Speaker: I think if you ask any abuela, aunt, your grandmother, the community, they will know exactly how they got here.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So the people with the problem have the answers to the problem.
Speaker: The second thing we talk a lot about in CCDA is that we're doing things from the people and for the people.
Speaker: So the movement is coming from in the community.
Speaker: I always tell people when they want to come into, want to move into Humboldt Park and make a difference.
Speaker: I'm like, great.
Speaker: But we don't need you here.
Speaker: If you want to congregate at our church and use your spiritual gifts because God has given to every person in this world a charism, come and use it.
Speaker: You are free to use it.
Speaker: You don't have to be shy like my husband.
Speaker: You don't have to be shy because you're a white guy in a round church.
Speaker: No, use your gift.
Speaker: But if you think you're coming here to fix things or because we're like in need of you, don't come.
Speaker: Because you're going to be frustrated and we're going to be frustrated, right?
Speaker: The third thing is, this is not in our principles, but we do it a lot.
Speaker: And I would hope that we'll read Elon's book on it.
Speaker: Looking at contextual discipleship.
Speaker: So what do anyone, children's curricula, I'm not going to name them because I'm not going to shame them, but you know,
Speaker: Children's curriculum that is written out there, we have not been able to use any denominational or youth programming because our children are traumatized, migrant children who need a different kind of spirituality than those things address.
Speaker: And when people ask me, what kind of discipleship can we do for our young people and our youth and our children in the church?
Speaker: I'm like, just read the Bible.
Speaker: There are people that are displaced in the Bible.
Speaker: There are people who are disenfranchised in the Bible.
Speaker: The Bible is about, for, and by a politically, economically disenfranchised community.
Speaker: Just teach the scriptures that they are.
Speaker: Don't pull Moses out of his context.
Speaker: Don't make Jesus like you.
Speaker: Teach it how it is, you know?
Speaker: So we want to have a trauma-informed culture and intelligent discipleship.
Speaker: And I want to say, this is just one side I want to focus on, which is we're in a discipleship crisis.
Speaker: So I'll just put this out here for you.
Speaker: This is research for Barna on teens and justice.
Speaker: I just want to put this out there as an opportunity for you to see what's happening.
Speaker: as it comes to developing leaders in the church and the next generation in the church.
Speaker: 87% of all teens agree, at least somewhat, that their generation has the ability to make a positive and meaningful impact in the world.
Speaker: 87%.
Speaker: 35% believe Jesus was an advocate for justice.
Speaker: We have a theological crisis.
Speaker: We have a discipleship crisis.
Speaker: We have a leadership development crisis because we have a generation that sees that the world was designed to disenfranchise, not systems broken, but systems designed, and they think they can do something about it, but they don't think that Jesus was an advocate for it.
Speaker: So what have we been teaching in a Sunday school over the last 20 years?
Speaker: What have we been teaching from our pulpits?
Speaker: What have we been singing?
Speaker: What songs have we been singing that have given this next generation idea that Jesus is not an advocate for justice, right?
Speaker: Leadership development, not just who you develop in the community, by the community, but how you develop that.
Speaker: Because we have had so many people come into our community and develop disciples with a discipleship that does not help them stand the context they live in.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So how do we develop leaders?
Speaker: That's you.
Speaker: Man, it's so hard to go after these three incredible people.
Speaker: If Mary Nelson is the old lady in the room, then I'm the for sure new lady in the room.
Speaker: And since Sandra unplugged my book and I'm Asian, super Asian, I won't do it.
Speaker: Here it is.
Speaker: It's pretty blue cover, center and discipleship.
Speaker: It's at the IBP table.
Speaker: Ask Keisha right there if you want to talk about it.
Speaker: But I get the honor to talk about church-based.
Speaker: And I think that this is probably for all the FCI people in the room, this is why we're here.
Speaker: And we think that community development is something that is just like an extracurricular thing that the church does.
Speaker: But I love that church base is actually part of the philosophy of CCDA because we're not asking a question about what we're supposed to do, what the church is supposed to do.
Speaker: We're asking a question about the identity of the church.
Speaker: So the identity of the church is we are not these five things, Christ-centered, body of Christ, an integrated community, discipleship, spiritual and communal transformation.
Speaker: These are not things for us to do in the church.
Speaker: These are things about a communal identity that us as church leaders, lay leaders, participants in the body of Christ, if we don't understand how to define these five things,
Speaker: that relates ourselves, within ourselves, how we're embodying these practices, and also how we as a church is embodied within the neighborhoods we live in.
Speaker: If we as a church do not make sense or have any reason to be on the streets that we are in, then we are not a church-based anything.
Speaker: Okay, so I'm just going to quickly go through this because I'm going to keep my time.
Speaker: Christ-centered, if we're saying that this is our identity, then not just me, individualized, privatized religion of the postmodern 21st century U.S. of A. church.
Speaker: We're saying if we as a communal identity—
Speaker: as a diverse body of Christ, do not understand that all of us are not trying to be culturally informed, but we are Christ-informed about what kind of how we live, how we love, how we practice, what we get angry about within our neighborhoods, Christ actually should be who is orienting how we're supposed to be church.
Speaker: Next thing, body of Christ.
Speaker: Body of Christ is not just a thing where it's nice to say about the unity of Christians and we play nice and we're polite, nice, modest people or moral people.
Speaker: Body of Christ, as Alexios Avateros, who is a friend of CCDA, always says, it's actually an act of resistance.
Speaker: If we as a church do not identify ourselves as the body of Christ, that is always usually against empire, right?
Speaker: Body Lampers, that Apostle Paul said was not about some sort of nice metaphor because I'm also a vocational physician, so I love the body.
Speaker: But he wasn't using it as that.
Speaker: He's using it as an act of resistance against what the body of Rome was saying about people, their dignity, what we're supposed to do, that some people are disposable and others are not.
Speaker: So the body of Christ is actually the church should be a community of resistance.
Speaker: An integrated community does not mean that we'd want to strive for a community that just grows on the inside, but an integrated community means we are integrated with and within the community and the neighborhood and the city that we resided.
Speaker: If our identity is not tied to the city and the place that we are in, then I don't know why our churches exist.
Speaker: Number four, discipleship.
Speaker: You saw that little blue book right there.
Speaker: If you write a book about it, then I don't need to talk that much about it.
Speaker: But I think discipleship is not just an identity about, oh, I'm just a follower of Jesus and we'll all just kind of make up what that means.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: I think discipleship means it's about equipping and sending out.
Speaker: If we are about teaching and keeping in,
Speaker: I don't know if that's the kind of Jesus followers that Christ set out to do, right?
Speaker: We at the church should have an identity about equipping our people, all of our people, not just for leadership, but to be sent out to love their neighbors well and together.
Speaker: And lastly, spiritual and communal transformation, our identity should be about how we are not just spiritually connected,
Speaker: in our spiritual know-how, right?
Speaker: And foundations and things, those are important, but how we live out our formation, how we live out our practices in real life, in a real place, in a real time, matters deeply about our identity.
Speaker: Who we say we are is actually informed to an outside world about how we live.
Speaker: All right, that's it.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: Here's my favorite part, listening to the community.
Speaker: And it's so important.
Speaker: And Sandra said it in her thing, the people with the problems have the best solutions.
Speaker: But, you know, we sometimes we get all our college degrees that we've worked hard for and stuff.
Speaker: And we think we know how things work.
Speaker: And listening to the community means saying we have to have a new set of ears because people don't say, well, here's the plan and here's how you should do it.
Speaker: That's not the way it's messy.
Speaker: And it takes a while to even listen.
Speaker: And I'm thinking of some bishops who went to do a site where the hurricanes had just destroyed everything.
Speaker: And they came to a shack along the beach that was almost totally destroyed.
Speaker: And an old lady was sitting on the bench and the bishops came up to her and said, oh, because they were getting ready to go.
Speaker: Oh, we want to help you.
Speaker: We want to help you.
Speaker: What should we, how can we help?
Speaker: And this lady looked at these bishops and her ruined house behind her, and she said, come sit with me.
Speaker: And if we're gonna listen to the community, we gotta do some porch time.
Speaker: We gotta do some coffee table time.
Speaker: We gotta do some laundromat time.
Speaker: We've gotta do those things that give spaces and places.
Speaker: And in terms of this morning in the Native American response takes a little longer sometimes.
Speaker: to do things.
Speaker: So listening means taking the time and letting our own busyness.
Speaker: That was the hardest thing I learned in all the years because I still keep, I want to get to get something done.
Speaker: So listening to the community.
Speaker: And secondly, then as we think about this, we have to be, have a different role.
Speaker: And sometimes we become midwives.
Speaker: midwives to helping give birth to the ideas and the things that people want to see happen and want to make happen.
Speaker: Okay?
Speaker: And so that's a different role than it is trying to be the organizer to get things done.
Speaker: That's a very different.
Speaker: And that's hard for a lot of us, especially as white folks with college degrees, because we think we've learned it all and we know.
Speaker: And people don't dot their I's and cross their T's and take a long time to say what they're going to say.
Speaker: But that's where the real stuff comes out, if we can sort that out.
Speaker: And then sometimes the other thing is it takes new eyeglasses.
Speaker: You know, we're looking at the community with all our data and stuff, and we don't see the gems that are there, whether it's the people, the Mama Joneses, who's down the street and she knows everybody.
Speaker: And if you ever want to know who you should talk to, you go to Mama Jones and you say, hey, who should I talk to about this?
Speaker: Because she knows.
Speaker: She knows we've got to find those people, right, to help guide us and help make things happen.
Speaker: And then there is the, so the asset-based community, ABCD, asset-based community development, it's just a fancy name for this whole process.
Speaker: of listening to the community and taking these new eyeglasses to see.
Speaker: We discovered in our community on the west side of Chicago that a transit stop was an asset.
Speaker: It was an abandoned, you know, very few people were there and there was a liquor store and another little store at that stop.
Speaker: But see that as an asset.
Speaker: Here's something to build on because people get on and off the training.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So we then out of that developed a commercial center with a daycare center so mommas could drop off their kids and get on the L and go to work.
Speaker: And a branch of a bank that we had to persuade the bank to come into our neighborhood so they could do their banking as they got on and off.
Speaker: So beginning to see with new eyes the assets that are there.
Speaker: You want to view the next one.
Speaker: And then I want to take a moment for us.
Speaker: This is a CCDA.
Speaker: John Perkins brought this.
Speaker: It's a Chinese saying.
Speaker: And I want to take a moment.
Speaker: I'd like to have us just say this together because it's so important and it's a summation of actually all of our values in CCDA.
Speaker: And then have you think about, talk to your neighbor and neighbor.
Speaker: First of all, let's just say this together.
Speaker: Go to the people.
Speaker: Live with them.
Speaker: Learn from them.
Speaker: Love them.
Speaker: Start with what they know.
Speaker: Build with what they have.
Speaker: But with the best leaders, when their work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say, we have done it ourselves.
Speaker: So this means to give away the credit.
Speaker: It's a new way of thinking.
Speaker: It's called leadership by stepping back.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But it has to be genuine.
Speaker: It can't be that phony kind of, boy, you really did all the work and we want it.
Speaker: So it's an exciting part of this part of our values of CCDA.
Speaker: Mary, I hate going after you.
Speaker: Man.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I get a holistic approach.
Speaker: Just a little context about me.
Speaker: So I am co-vocational.
Speaker: I'm a physician by day.
Speaker: It helps to pay the bills.
Speaker: But I'm also a senior pastor of a missional community or spiritual family or family.
Speaker: a neighborhood-based community, a multiplication church in Hawaii.
Speaker: I'm sorry, floral blazer.
Speaker: I gave it away.
Speaker: This is why I'm very tropical.
Speaker: I'm originally from Philadelphia.
Speaker: So my context, and I was born in South Korea.
Speaker: So my context about place,
Speaker: I probably learned it the best actually through CCDA about where I am in context and who I'm listening to and all those kinds of things are really, really important skills to land on.
Speaker: But speaking as a fellow pastor for all the FCI folks in the room, I think the holistic approach is really important because if church-based means that we are trying to think through what our communal identity is,
Speaker: the church's communal identity ought to be, then the holistic approach, next slide, is thinking about what is our vision for our church.
Speaker: It's a vision question.
Speaker: Our holistic approach is not methodology in CCDA.
Speaker: It's a vision question.
Speaker: Because if we don't ask about how we holistically approach our neighbors, our communities, our cities, how we're engaging with both Jesus followers and non-Jesus followers that we have interactions with, then we will just think that there's some simplistic method that we all can just take up.
Speaker: We all know this, right?
Speaker: Read a book, maybe it'll work.
Speaker: If that was true, I bet we would all still be doing the same thing, right?
Speaker: But my church in Hawaii ought to look different from a church in Chicago that should be looking really different from a church in Nairobi, right?
Speaker: So holistic, of course, helps us to think about what is the vision that God has given our church, unique, localized, rooted churches, these faith communities that love our neighbors, right, as ourselves.
Speaker: It's a vision question.
Speaker: So to all the church leaders in the room right now, you have to be thinking, do I actually include a thought and a vision for not just my church or myself or some particular holy people who look like me, sound like me, alike like me in my church, but for my entire city and community and neighborhood?
Speaker: Do I have a vision for their spiritual, social, economic, I'm just going to go through the list, political, cultural, emotional, physical, moral, ethical, educational, family, mental, race, history, tradition.
Speaker: Do I consider all of these things when I'm thinking about where is my community that God has given me to lead and love going?
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: One of the ways that we actually figure out church, this is my second church plant in Hawaii.
Speaker: The first time I did the whole Sunday worship service model church, you know, we grew from 20 to 450 people on a Sunday morning worship service in five years time.
Speaker: Hooray!
Speaker: It's amazing, right?
Speaker: But if that was what I really wanted as a holistic approach for why I wanted to pastor in the neighborhood and community that I was pastoring in, then I am not thinking about any of these things.
Speaker: I'm probably just thinking about, wow, what is my approach to multiply butts in the seats?
Speaker: Grow my cues so I can build more seats, right?
Speaker: Increase my budget, right?
Speaker: That's what I would be thinking about.
Speaker: And it's not a knock on any of the churches that actually do have a Sunday morning worship service.
Speaker: I crave it because I haven't had it in the past six years, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But the different approach for my current context was if I was going to have a holistic approach to thinking about where was my community going, how will they actually be meaningful in the neighborhood that we wanted to serve?
Speaker: We started thinking about all of these things.
Speaker: In our church, we think about are there categories where people and some of our leaders are going to handle specifically the arena of fam?
Speaker: Are there going to be leaders who are going to be specifically tasked and think about education?
Speaker: Are there folks who are thinking about how arts and entertainment actually bring a value of beauty?
Speaker: And it probably answers a lot more culturally about what love is like.
Speaker: That's important, right?
Speaker: So we kind of think through all of these cultural aspects on purpose.
Speaker: We put it into our discipleship on purpose and we include our neighbors into having conversations around what it means to have a holistic approach so that we don't have a vision just for our church and our limited community.
Speaker: We have a vision that will include everybody in the mix.
Speaker: Another important thing about this is thinking about history and tradition.
Speaker: So if I am set in Hawaii that has a history, a recent history of having an overthrow of our monarchy, then me as a transplanted person has to really think clearly about what kind of message of Jesus
Speaker: I'm going to be bringing into this mix, right?
Speaker: One of the ways that we have a holistic approach is we have about once a quarter of public worship gathering and we don't center a sermon.
Speaker: I think most people have not heard me speak.
Speaker: You guys are hearing me speak longer than most of my people at home.
Speaker: It's because we want to center women, indigenous Hawaiian women, who are going to be praying their own written prayer of lament in Hawaiian because it's the place where their language was taken from them.
Speaker: And I don't know what they're saying.
Speaker: But man, I know from the bottom of my heart that all the community members, both Jesus followers and non-Jesus followers in that place will remember how her heart was grieving.
Speaker: She's praying her own language.
Speaker: in a context where people had come and taken our language away.
Speaker: Because a holistic approach in Hawaii means that it has to include Hawaiian language and indigenous language, even if me as the main leader does not speak it or understand it.
Speaker: Everybody will leave me too included in that grieving and lamenting of our past and our history.
Speaker: And then we can together think about what kinds of powers can we name that we are lamenting and grieving about, that we're asking Jesus to come and integrate these kinds of powers.
Speaker: So holistic approach, it's not a method, it's a vision for your church.
Speaker: All right, Pastor James.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Y'all tell my Charles I'm getting my steps in.
Speaker: All right, I'm going to do the eighth component, empowerment.
Speaker: Love this component.
Speaker: Not such a fan of the name.
Speaker: Okay?
Speaker: It gives this false idea that somehow we can give power to people or somehow make them powerful or give them ability.
Speaker: And even our old founder, Dr. Perkins, says you don't, you know, give people dignity.
Speaker: You affirm it.
Speaker: And so this is not something where we're really talking about like giving power.
Speaker: We're really talking about the affirmation of power, the affirmation of dignity, the affirmation of their God-given identity.
Speaker: So I started primarily talking about the image of God in every person.
Speaker: And Imago Dei is the center of this component.
Speaker: Every single person is created in the image of God.
Speaker: And the creation story tells us that when you're created in the image of God, you're already given dominion, authority, and power, right?
Speaker: And we recognize now that dominion, authority, and power, what we heard this morning from our indigenous brothers, sisters, is not about ruling over, but about being a part of all that God has created.
Speaker: So we've recognized who we are.
Speaker: And that means that we have inherent worth.
Speaker: We have inherent dignity.
Speaker: No one has to give it to us.
Speaker: Sometimes we just have to have it awakened in us.
Speaker: And that's what empowerment is really about.
Speaker: So how many of you ever heard the golden rule?
Speaker: The scripture, right?
Speaker: What is the golden rule?
Speaker: Somebody just say it.
Speaker: Okay, y'all do know that.
Speaker: Do unto others as you will have them do unto you, right?
Speaker: Well, CCDA adds a rule.
Speaker: It's called the iron rule.
Speaker: Never do for a person.
Speaker: That's all.
Speaker: I'll give it to Saul.
Speaker: Never do for a person what they can do for themselves.
Speaker: Because we steal the inherent worth and ability in them when we continue to do for them what they could do for themselves.
Speaker: That's why CCDA, while we don't knock people who do great relief work like food pantries and that, as long as you do it with dignity, we're fine.
Speaker: As long as those same people who may be coming to that food pantry one day get to serve at it.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: We're fine with that.
Speaker: But our ultimate goal is that people won't continue to need your food pantry.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Our ultimate goal is that they will get to a point where the inherited dignity and ability in them will cause them to be able to feed their own family.
Speaker: Stop walking around talking about and bragging about how many people your entity, your church, your ministry is feeding.
Speaker: That's not a CCBA point talking point.
Speaker: We are only impressed when that number decreases.
Speaker: That's the difference between CCPA and other mercy ministries where they're gonna tell, we fed millions and millions of people.
Speaker: We're like, oh, that's too bad.
Speaker: Because we're hoping that day by day, as people awaken to their dignity and their inherent ability, that they will be getting opened up and free to express and get the skills and tools and resources that they need to be able to feed themselves and their own families.
Speaker: So the next time you come report to us, you say, we're down to half a million.
Speaker: And I go, you better go.
Speaker: Now you're empowering people.
Speaker: See the difference?
Speaker: That's CCD.
Speaker: So CCDA talking points a lot, how many people you're serving.
Speaker: Hopefully it's you're working yourself out of a job.
Speaker: That is CCDA's focus and goal.
Speaker: That's what we're trying to do.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So I'll give you my favorite actual definition of empowerment.
Speaker: And it comes from a longtime member of CCDA, one of the early voices, Bob Lepton.
Speaker: This is my favorite example of empowerment.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So I'm going to get out the way because I see people taking pictures and I'm going to read it.
Speaker: Empowerment is a popular word these days.
Speaker: It may be a misnomer.
Speaker: People, like butterflies, have an in-bred capacity to emerge into creatures of unique beauty, but intervene in the chrysalis process when the caterpillar is undergoing its transformation and the process may be aborted.
Speaker: Assist this emerging butterfly as it struggles to break out of its cocoon and it may never develop the strength to fly.
Speaker: We may protect the cocoon from predators, even shielded from winter's hostile blasts, but do more than create the conditions for timely emergence and we will cause damage.
Speaker: Butterflies, like people, cannot be empowered.
Speaker: They will emerge toward their uniquely created potential given a conducive environment.
Speaker: This is CCVA's mindset around empowerment.
Speaker: There's many of us who are trying to make people like us.
Speaker: All right?
Speaker: That's not what we're doing here.
Speaker: Leadership development goes right with empowerment.
Speaker: Our goal is to help them to emerge into their God-given potential and ideals and who God's made them to be.
Speaker: All we can do is put them on a conducive environment.
Speaker: Maybe we just make sure they don't have to worry about where the next meal is coming from.
Speaker: Maybe we make sure that they're out of place for their kids to go while they go pursue their greater education.
Speaker: Maybe we just create a conducive environment for them to emerge as the butterfly God already created them to be.
Speaker: That's what we're doing.
Speaker: And whenever we do for people, we strip them of that ability.
Speaker: Their wings are clipped.
Speaker: They're not even going to fly.
Speaker: And so CCDA, while we use the word empowerment, really what we're saying is just create environments where people can fly.
Speaker: This is the CCDA philosophy.
Speaker: And we need all of them to live out this philosophy of changing the world.
Speaker: All right?
Speaker: Can I just pray for us as we close?
Speaker: We talked a lot about so many things and I think that we could leave this place feeling really... Burdened is not a bad thing, but if we feel guilty or feel condemned by it, I think that that is not God's intent for us.
Speaker: I think that we can feel challenged and burdened and have an increase of heart.
Speaker: So Jesus, I just pray and I thank you for every single leader here.
Speaker: I thank you for every single person here.
Speaker: I thank you for every single heart.
Speaker: That you love all of us, each one of us.
Speaker: You love every community and neighborhood and city, people in these places where each person here has seen or have not yet seen.
Speaker: We're so thankful that you are a God who sees all of us.
Speaker: So I pray for hearts that feel challenged, that they won't feel condemned.
Speaker: I pray for hearts that feel proud, that you will be softening and humbling.
Speaker: I pray for minds that feel so complicated and overloaded that you will give a clarity and a sense and a calling and a vision that all of these things will be rooted in our love for you and the ways in which that you love us.
Speaker: So in your good name we pray.
Speaker: Amen.
Speaker: Thank you, everyone.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to the CCDA podcast, and thank you to Unstrasser, Jonathan Brooks, Mary Nelson, and Sandra Maria Van Opstel for sharing their experience and wisdom with us.
Speaker: See the show notes of this episode for more information about each of these speakers and their organizations.
Speaker: If you're looking to go deeper with the CCD philosophy, check out the book Making Neighborhoods Whole by Wayne Gordon and Dr. John Perkins, or check out the Immerse course by visiting ccda.org slash immerse.
Speaker: Thanks again for listening to this episode.
Speaker: Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker: This episode is produced by me, Sarah Callen, in association with Christina Fore.
Speaker: We will be back soon with another episode featuring CCD practitioners who are committed to seeing people and communities experience God's shalom.
Speaker: We'll see you then.
