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What is the CCD Philosophy?
1 Plays2 months ago
Four seasoned CCD leaders dive into the 8 Key Components of the Christian Community Development philosophy. Discover how this approach to ministry can restore and transform lives, communities, and systems. This audio is from the 2024 Conference workshop, Overview of CCD Philosophy, Theology, and Practice.
Timestamps
(~02:55) - Relocation (Jonathan Brooks)
(~10:11) - Reconciliation (Sandra Maria Van Opstal)
(~15:47) - Redistribution (Mary Nelson)
(~23:44) - Leadership Development (Sandra Maria Van Opstal)
(~29:33) - Church-Based (Eun Strawser)
(~34:17) - Listening to the Community (Mary Nelson)
(~40:00) - Wholistic Approach (Eun Strawser)
(~46:30) - Empowerment (Jonathan Brooks)
To go deeper with the CCD philosophy, read Making Neighborhoods Whole, or complete the Immerse course.
Rev. Dr. Eun K. Strawser (she/her) is the co-vocational lead pastor of Ma Ke Alo o (which means "Presence" in Hawaiian), non-denominational missional communities multiplying in Honolulu, HI, a community physician at Ke Ola Pono, and an executive board member of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) with 20 years in both local and trans-local church planting work at executive levels. She is the author of Centering Discipleship: A Pathway for Multiplying Spectators into Mature Disciples (IVP). She and Steve have three, seriously, amazing children.
Jonathan Brooks currently serves as Lead Pastor at Lawndale Christian Community Church. He was the former pastor of Canaan Community Church in Chicago for 15 years. He is also an adjunct Professor for Northern Seminary in their Christian Community Development Program and Trinity Christian College’s Chicago Semester program. He has a deep desire to impress this virtue on all who will listen whether congregation, classroom, or community. He is the author of the book “Church Forsaken: Practicing Presence in Neglected Neighborhoods” published by InterVarsity Press. Lastly, Pastah J has also recorded four hip-hop albums with the group Out-World and a mixtape to accompany the book Church Forsaken.
Rev. Dr. Mary Nelson brings over 50 years of experience to the Christian Community Development Association as a Founder and former Board Member. Mary is President Emeritus of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation, where she served for 26 years. She still lives, works, and worships in the same low-income African American community. Mary actively participates in city-wide, national policy advocacy efforts. She is also on the faculty of the ABCD (Asset Based Community Development) Institute at DePaul University, on the Board of Christian Community Development Association, and served on the Board of Sojourners. Mary has her PhD from Union Graduate School and six honorary PhDs and is now doing consulting, writing, and teaching. She is the author of the handbook Empowerment, published by CCDA (2010), and has authored chapters in a number of books on sustainable community development.
Sandra Maria Van Opstal, a second-generation Latina, is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Chasing Justice, a movement led by people of color to mobilize a lifestyle of faith and justice. She is an international speaker, author, and activist, recognized for her courageous work in pursuing justice and disrupting oppressive systems within the church. As a global prophetic voice and an active community member on the west side of Chicago, Sandra’s initiatives in holistic justice equip communities around the world to practice biblical solidarity and mutuality within various social and cul
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Transcript
Introduction to CCDA and Workshop Overview
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the CCDA Podcast.
00:00:12
Speaker
In this episode, you will hear audio from a 2024 CCDA Conference workshop titled, Overview of CCD Philosophy, Theology, and Practice.
Flourishing Congregations Initiative (FCI) Overview
00:00:22
Speaker
This workshop was hosted by Dr. Unstrosser, Dr. Jonathan Brooks, Dr. Mary Nelson, and Sandra Maria Van Opstel.
00:00:30
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.
00:00:47
Speaker
You can learn more about FCI by visiting ccda.org slash FCI.
00:00:54
Speaker
And with that, we hope you are encouraged and inspired by this look at the CCD philosophy.
00:01:00
Speaker
All right, everybody.
00:01:02
Speaker
Sounds like great conversation happening.
00:01:04
Speaker
There's great conversations happening.
00:01:06
Speaker
We love it.
CCDA Philosophy and Community Reclamation
00:01:07
Speaker
So my name is Jonathan Brooks.
00:01:11
Speaker
Pastor Jay is what everybody calls me.
00:01:13
Speaker
I am not a lead pastor at Lawndale Christian Community Church.
00:01:17
Speaker
Been a part of CCDA for a while and get the opportunity with these amazing ladies next to me.
00:01:24
Speaker
to share just a brief bit about each one of the eight key components.
00:01:29
Speaker
And I just want to start off because I get to do the first one to really focus on a couple of things.
00:01:35
Speaker
First and foremost, pay attention to their first word of this sentence.
00:01:39
Speaker
It says, a philosophy of ministry to reclaim and restore under-resourced communities.
00:01:44
Speaker
Everybody say a philosophy.
00:01:46
Speaker
All right, so A philosophy.
00:01:47
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.
00:02:01
Speaker
But I quickly learned that
00:02:04
Speaker
people doing great work in my community long before God called me there, and long before I stepped foot there.
00:02:09
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.
00:02:21
Speaker
And so recognize that this is a philosophy, but this philosophy does work in tandem.
00:02:26
Speaker
So everything that you'll hear us talk about, we're going to talk about separately, but we need to understand it collectively.
00:02:34
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.
00:02:40
Speaker
And not necessarily one being more important than the other or one happened to happen before the other.
00:02:46
Speaker
The idea here is that we practice these eight principles and we see them as one philosophy, a philosophy.
00:02:53
Speaker
All right.
00:02:54
Speaker
That sound good.
00:02:55
Speaker
All right.
00:02:55
Speaker
With that, I'm going to go ahead and get us started.
00:02:57
Speaker
And they gave me my favorite.
00:02:59
Speaker
All right, to start
Role of Relocation in Community Development
00:03:00
Speaker
us off with.
00:03:00
Speaker
And that is relocation.
00:03:03
Speaker
Now, you will notice we also have a slash community base there.
00:03:07
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.
00:03:19
Speaker
All right, and relocation is a tough word nowadays, right?
00:03:22
Speaker
Because it sits right alive.
00:03:24
Speaker
Relocation, gentrification, you know, displacement.
00:03:28
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.
00:03:39
Speaker
And when he was coming up, everybody was running away from communities like ours.
00:03:43
Speaker
They weren't trying to come back and gentrify them.
00:03:46
Speaker
They were like, leave them for dead.
00:03:47
Speaker
So his thing was come back, right?
00:03:50
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.
00:03:56
Speaker
Does that make sense?
00:03:57
Speaker
All right.
00:03:57
Speaker
So let's talk a little bit about it, and I'm going to get out the way.
00:04:00
Speaker
Somehow I got drafted to do two workshops at the same time.
00:04:03
Speaker
So I'm going to do this one, go to my other workshop, and come back and do my second one later.
00:04:08
Speaker
Hit the next slide.
00:04:09
Speaker
Relocation from a community base.
00:04:10
Speaker
There's three major things I want you to focus on.
00:04:12
Speaker
First and foremost, how many of y'all were in Bible study this morning?
00:04:16
Speaker
A couple, a couple.
00:04:17
Speaker
All right, good.
00:04:17
Speaker
You heard me talk about Jeremiah 29, where it says, build a house and live in it, live in it, live in it.
00:04:24
Speaker
We believe in living in the communities in which we serve, not just to serve in them, but to make them homes.
00:04:34
Speaker
All right.
00:04:34
Speaker
And so living in our community is not about starting a ministry there.
00:04:38
Speaker
Right.
00:04:38
Speaker
It's not about having a nice church there.
00:04:41
Speaker
Can I tell you a secret?
00:04:43
Speaker
Neighborhoods were not created for you to do ministry in.
00:04:47
Speaker
Neighborhoods were created for us to live in.
00:04:50
Speaker
That's why God created them.
00:04:51
Speaker
Place is not about us doing ministry or us just doing community Matthew.
00:04:57
Speaker
No, no, it's a place to live.
00:04:58
Speaker
That's what it's designed for.
00:05:00
Speaker
And we believe first and foremost that our neighborhoods have to become our home.
00:05:07
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.
00:05:21
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.
00:05:28
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.
00:05:35
Speaker
Because God has already fallen in love with your place.
00:05:39
Speaker
So living in the community, we don't just mean having your address there.
00:05:43
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.
00:05:52
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.
00:06:00
Speaker
They love it.
00:06:01
Speaker
Their heart is there.
00:06:02
Speaker
So when we talk about living in the community, do we want you to have the physical address there?
00:06:06
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:06:07
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?
00:06:15
Speaker
Amen?
00:06:16
Speaker
That's what we mean by living in the community.
00:06:19
Speaker
And then we relieve it.
00:06:20
Speaker
What does that mean?
00:06:21
Speaker
That means that we become a part of it.
00:06:24
Speaker
Notice it doesn't say you need redirected.
00:06:26
Speaker
The other thing I said this morning was, we're not trying to turn exile into Jerusalem.
00:06:30
Speaker
Not trying to turn Babylon into Jerusalem.
00:06:32
Speaker
Let's just make it comfortable.
00:06:34
Speaker
Why don't they all start us here?
00:06:36
Speaker
That's not what we're doing.
00:06:38
Speaker
We're valuing the place we're in and we're saying it's beautiful as is.
00:06:42
Speaker
How do I become a part?
00:06:43
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?
Place-Based Theology and Community Engagement
00:06:51
Speaker
Right.
00:06:51
Speaker
So we're reweaving.
00:06:53
Speaker
That means that we're reconnecting.
00:06:55
Speaker
We're seeing people that we may have saw in one way in a new way.
00:06:59
Speaker
We're now seeing them the way God sees them.
00:07:01
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.
00:07:10
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.
00:07:19
Speaker
If you can't see one or the other, there's nothing wrong with the place and nothing wrong with the people.
00:07:23
Speaker
There's something wrong with your vision.
00:07:25
Speaker
We want to reweave and reconnect.
00:07:27
Speaker
And then a theology.
00:07:28
Speaker
We heard it all day today.
00:07:30
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.
00:07:40
Speaker
We think we know what we're talking about, but this is at the core of who we are.
00:07:44
Speaker
This is why we can't no longer be an elder-free society.
00:07:48
Speaker
Because if we're actually going to understand the location, we have to understand place.
00:07:55
Speaker
Creator God already has a plan.
00:07:58
Speaker
And we are not separate from nature.
00:08:01
Speaker
We're not separate from the land in which we walk on.
00:08:04
Speaker
We're not separate from the history, both the colonized and organic history of the places in which we sit in.
00:08:10
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.
00:08:19
Speaker
I'll give you an example.
00:08:20
Speaker
There's this guy who wrote a whole line of the Bible, the Luke Testament named Paul.
00:08:24
Speaker
What I love about Paul is Paul is a letter writer, okay?
00:08:27
Speaker
And Paul likes to write letters, but he doesn't just write general letters.
00:08:31
Speaker
You do know that Paul writes letters to individual churches in individual places.
00:08:35
Speaker
So he writes a letter to the folks in Thessalonica, and he says, here's what I need you to do in Thessalonica.
00:08:42
Speaker
He doesn't understand.
00:08:44
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.
00:08:49
Speaker
No, the folks who live in Corinth have a specific call and content that they are called to do.
00:08:55
Speaker
Their place impacts their theology.
00:08:58
Speaker
And that's all I want you to get.
00:09:00
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.
Reconciliation and Inclusive Community Development
00:09:11
Speaker
There's three types of people that we think about when we talk about relocators.
00:09:15
Speaker
Those who have moved into a community as relocating.
00:09:19
Speaker
Those who maybe lived in a place and they decided to come back.
00:09:23
Speaker
That's what I was.
00:09:23
Speaker
I went to college, but I was never coming back.
00:09:25
Speaker
And God was like, ah, got you.
00:09:28
Speaker
Return there.
00:09:29
Speaker
And then my favorite is the remainder.
00:09:31
Speaker
Those who stick it out and say, God is doing something special here.
00:09:34
Speaker
Don't want to remain.
00:09:36
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.
00:09:46
Speaker
It's more about falling in love with your place the way God does.
00:09:50
Speaker
All right?
00:09:51
Speaker
I'm out of the way.
00:09:52
Speaker
Who's up next?
00:09:53
Speaker
I am.
00:09:53
Speaker
All right.
00:09:55
Speaker
So I'm Sandra.
00:09:55
Speaker
And I live just up the street from Jonathan, from Pastor Jay in Hubble Park on the northwest side of Chicago.
00:10:03
Speaker
And I live there.
00:10:04
Speaker
I'm a landlord there.
00:10:05
Speaker
I'm a neighbor there.
00:10:06
Speaker
I'm a mom there.
00:10:07
Speaker
So all the things that make up a neighborhood.
00:10:10
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.
00:10:22
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.
00:10:36
Speaker
I live in a Puerto Rican community.
00:10:38
Speaker
So there's a lot of differences.
00:10:40
Speaker
There's socioeconomic differences.
00:10:42
Speaker
So in my seminary space, I was too emotional, too loud, too colorful, too whatever.
00:10:49
Speaker
And that in my neighborhood, I'm too educated.
00:10:51
Speaker
You know, I'm suspect in the church because I carry like some letters behind my name.
00:10:55
Speaker
And like, look, they have taught you anyway about the Holy Spirit.
00:10:57
Speaker
And, you know, I've heard so many things.
00:10:59
Speaker
And what I realized was that this second R that we look at, this R of reconciliation is a journey.
00:11:07
Speaker
It is a journey of understanding, first and foremost, who you are.
00:11:13
Speaker
who you are, where your feet stand, the place where you are located.
00:11:19
Speaker
And then from there, what are the bridges that God is asking you to cross?
00:11:24
Speaker
And so I think a lot of you, raise your hand if you were there last night for Dr. B's plenary.
00:11:30
Speaker
So Dr. Reverend Brenda Salter McNeil has been a theological mentor, an auntie, a preaching mentor to me.
00:11:37
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.
00:11:44
Speaker
I'm just gonna let you know why, because it's in the scriptures.
00:11:47
Speaker
And the word reconciliation actually means to exchange places or to trade places, to understand something from a different vantage point.
00:11:56
Speaker
That's one of the meanings of the word.
00:11:58
Speaker
But I think about what it looks like to build bridges, to come together, to work across differences.
00:12:03
Speaker
Anybody in here cross-culturally married or interracially married?
00:12:06
Speaker
Oh my gosh, it's so hard.
00:12:09
Speaker
So hard.
00:12:10
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.
00:12:19
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.
00:12:24
Speaker
I'm like, what happens wrong with our house?
00:12:26
Speaker
You know, why won't you want to stay with us?
00:12:28
Speaker
Because the Latina family, you would never, that's my rule, you would never go and stay with us on that.
00:12:32
Speaker
So there are all these differences that we carry.
00:12:34
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.
00:12:45
Speaker
They have different theologies than we do.
00:12:47
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.
00:12:53
Speaker
We're not like, I can't sing with you because I don't agree with your theology.
00:12:56
Speaker
No.
00:12:56
Speaker
People are living kind of street, we don't have the luxury of that.
00:13:00
Speaker
So as someone who works in space and place and proximity, you have to work with people who are different than you.
00:13:07
Speaker
Across party lines, across theological differences, across class differences.
00:13:12
Speaker
People that you just don't like their personalities, you know, and now they're your older person or something, you know.
00:13:17
Speaker
And so you have to work across differences.
00:13:21
Speaker
And that is for the purpose of the restoration and the healing of the community that you're in.
00:13:29
Speaker
That is for the purpose of your restoration and healing.
Redistribution and Economic Development Strategies
00:13:32
Speaker
And so I wanted to take a look real quickly at what reconciliation is.
00:13:36
Speaker
I want you to know that through the scriptures, God invites all.
00:13:39
Speaker
God invites all to God and to one another.
00:13:42
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.
00:13:52
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.
00:13:56
Speaker
So I'm going to just be like, I got stuff to do at home.
00:13:58
Speaker
Right.
00:13:59
Speaker
Those excuses that they all made, they weren't busy y'all.
00:14:01
Speaker
So if that's your interpretation of Luke 14, I encourage you to re understand that.
00:14:06
Speaker
Okay.
00:14:07
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.
00:14:20
Speaker
So when the people come back and say, I'm so sorry, I just got married.
00:14:23
Speaker
I can't go to your party.
00:14:24
Speaker
I'm so sorry.
00:14:24
Speaker
You know, I have I just bought two ox and I got something to do.
00:14:27
Speaker
I have like, I'm so sorry.
00:14:28
Speaker
I got a check on my house.
00:14:29
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.
00:14:36
Speaker
Because they ate differently.
00:14:38
Speaker
Because they look differently.
00:14:40
Speaker
And so this kind of call, God invites all of us, is to rightness between people and God.
00:14:47
Speaker
It is to rightness between people and people.
00:14:49
Speaker
It is to rightness between people and structures.
00:14:52
Speaker
And it is to rightness between people and creation, which we learned about this morning.
00:14:58
Speaker
And it is to rightness with one's own self.
00:15:01
Speaker
Because many of us in this room did grow up in settings where we were told who we are is not good enough.
00:15:07
Speaker
And that journey of reconciliation includes your own reconciliation to self.
00:15:11
Speaker
I'll just say this, if I can get to it later, Ariel, but I wrote a book called The Next Worship.
00:15:15
Speaker
It's actually about how do we create spaces that bring reconciliation and justice.
00:15:20
Speaker
There's this content in there, but if I have time later, I'll cover it.
00:15:23
Speaker
But reconciliation is the second part.
00:15:26
Speaker
All right.
00:15:27
Speaker
Give her a hand.
00:15:29
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.
00:15:46
Speaker
And so we are talking about redistribution, and we have had some board members over the time that said, well, that's socialist.
00:15:56
Speaker
redistribution, because what it really means is that there would be a sharing of all things, access and with equality.
00:16:05
Speaker
But as we think about redistribution in the CCDA mindset, it's first of all economic development.
00:16:14
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.
00:16:24
Speaker
You teach a person to fish and they may eat for a long time.
00:16:29
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.
00:16:40
Speaker
So the notion of redistribution, economic development, and many of our groups have
00:16:46
Speaker
have started with social services, have started with handouts, feeding programs, and there's nothing wrong with that.
00:16:57
Speaker
But many are not, we need to move to figure out how do we make some things happen.
00:17:03
Speaker
And so there's a whole bunch of wonderful micro enterprises happening.
00:17:08
Speaker
I happen to be wearing, I don't know how many of you know Shane Claymore and his stuff.
00:17:14
Speaker
Anyway, he's got this thing.
00:17:16
Speaker
His microenterprise is taking guns and turning them into garden tools and taking bullets and turning them into jewelry.
00:17:27
Speaker
And both as a statement of doing things, but as a way to get people involved.
00:17:33
Speaker
And many of our organizations have done both micro enterprises.
00:17:38
Speaker
We did a started out with a food pantry.
00:17:45
Speaker
Then we went into a food co-op.
00:17:47
Speaker
And then we say, man, you know, there's no business.
00:17:50
Speaker
good grocery stores in our neighborhoods.
00:17:53
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.
00:18:03
Speaker
So that's the economic development
Listening to Communities and Developing Local Leadership
00:18:05
Speaker
piece.
00:18:05
Speaker
And we need the skills of so many other kinds of people to do the economic development piece in our neighborhoods.
00:18:14
Speaker
And the second thing is...
00:18:17
Speaker
the social justice and the systemic.
00:18:20
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.
00:18:38
Speaker
And so somebody would jump in and get them and drag them into shore.
00:18:43
Speaker
Help, help, I'm drowning.
00:18:44
Speaker
And another would jump in and drag them into shore.
00:18:47
Speaker
Help, help, I'm drowning.
00:18:49
Speaker
And finally, exhausted people might say, we better go upstream and figure out who and what.
00:18:57
Speaker
is pushing them in.
00:18:59
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.
00:19:12
Speaker
But that's not enough.
00:19:14
Speaker
You do the research, you want to figure out who and what.
00:19:17
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.
00:19:24
Speaker
It wasn't working.
00:19:25
Speaker
And we knew we couldn't.
00:19:28
Speaker
make all the difference in the world.
00:19:30
Speaker
But we said, we better try to figure out what we want in place of what we don't want.
00:19:36
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.
00:19:51
Speaker
So we taught math by shooting craps.
00:19:55
Speaker
We taught ratios that way.
00:19:57
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.
00:20:08
Speaker
And then the other thing is too often we get subsumed in doing the frontline things.
00:20:18
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.
00:20:33
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.
00:20:48
Speaker
And we may have some strange bedfellows when we begin to do some of this social justice stuff.
00:20:54
Speaker
We may not agree on everything, but if we have a single focus, I'm really tuned in the environment right now.
00:21:01
Speaker
And so, you know, I'm working on environmental things with a lot of other groups that have a lot of other ways.
00:21:09
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.
00:21:18
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.
00:21:31
Speaker
And I want to say one more thing.
00:21:33
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.
00:21:42
Speaker
But the important thing was we could then go and give testimony and say, here's what's working.
00:21:50
Speaker
Here's what's working in place of what's not.
00:21:53
Speaker
Not that we had all the answers, but we could speak from experience.
00:21:57
Speaker
And so that's so important.
00:21:59
Speaker
Redistribution is the concrete stuff and is also the changing the system.
00:22:06
Speaker
Thank you, Mary.
00:22:07
Speaker
So I want to give you guys a moment.
00:22:12
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.
00:22:21
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
00:22:32
Speaker
done the most creative work on the west side of Chicago.
00:22:35
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.
00:22:47
Speaker
There are going to be a lot of things that you hear this week.
00:22:51
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?
00:23:05
Speaker
and in me, because I'm not going to be able to apply all of these things.
00:23:09
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.
00:23:17
Speaker
We've been doing this work for many decades, collectively, many, many decades.
00:23:22
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?
00:23:32
Speaker
What is for me?
00:23:35
Speaker
Our next one is leadership development.
00:23:37
Speaker
And I ask for this one every time we do this seminar because I went to seminary.
00:23:43
Speaker
Do we have any seminaries in here?
00:23:45
Speaker
I have an MDO.
00:23:45
Speaker
Okay.
00:23:46
Speaker
They did not teach me how to develop leaders.
00:23:47
Speaker
I'm so sorry.
00:23:48
Speaker
Hopefully they're doing that now, but I graduated in 2011.
00:23:52
Speaker
I did not learn leadership development.
00:23:54
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.
00:24:06
Speaker
What I did learn, where I did learn leadership development was in a parachurch organization called InterVarsity, because we led through students.
00:24:14
Speaker
So we didn't lead Bible studies, we trained other people to lead Bible studies.
00:24:17
Speaker
We put a scripture Bible study in the hands of an 18 year old and said, you could do this.
00:24:22
Speaker
We gave them a microphone and said, you can lead worship.
00:24:25
Speaker
You could preach.
00:24:26
Speaker
You could organize mission on your campus.
00:24:28
Speaker
And then we coached them and came behind them.
00:24:31
Speaker
And that was such a gift to me because it helped me for this principle in CCD.
00:24:36
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.
00:24:46
Speaker
They should be leading at 10.
00:24:48
Speaker
They should be leading at 16.
00:24:49
Speaker
Like what kind of leadership?
00:24:53
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.
00:25:03
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.
00:25:17
Speaker
The people with the problem have the answer.
00:25:19
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.
00:25:26
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.
00:25:33
Speaker
And I was like, who is this guy?
00:25:34
Speaker
Like, what is going on?
00:25:35
Speaker
I didn't want to start a fight on the train, so I just kept it to myself.
00:25:38
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.
00:25:44
Speaker
And this person was a person of color.
00:25:46
Speaker
So they just didn't grow up in a community like that.
00:25:50
Speaker
So what they were trying to say was, oh, these people need me because clearly they don't know how they got there.
00:25:56
Speaker
I think if you ask any abuela, aunt, your grandmother, the community, they will know exactly how they got here.
00:26:02
Speaker
Right?
00:26:02
Speaker
So the people with the problem have the answers to the problem.
00:26:05
Speaker
The second thing we talk a lot about in CCDA is that we're doing things from the people and for the people.
00:26:11
Speaker
So the movement is coming from in the community.
00:26:13
Speaker
I always tell people when they want to come into, want to move into Humboldt Park and make a difference.
00:26:18
Speaker
I'm like, great.
00:26:20
Speaker
But we don't need you here.
00:26:22
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.
00:26:31
Speaker
You are free to use it.
00:26:32
Speaker
You don't have to be shy like my husband.
00:26:34
Speaker
You don't have to be shy because you're a white guy in a round church.
00:26:36
Speaker
No, use your gift.
00:26:38
Speaker
But if you think you're coming here to fix things or because we're like in need of you, don't come.
00:26:45
Speaker
Because you're going to be frustrated and we're going to be frustrated, right?
00:26:49
Speaker
The third thing is, this is not in our principles, but we do it a lot.
00:26:53
Speaker
And I would hope that we'll read Elon's book on it.
00:26:57
Speaker
Looking at contextual discipleship.
00:26:59
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,
00:27:04
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.
00:27:19
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?
00:27:24
Speaker
I'm like, just read the Bible.
00:27:26
Speaker
There are people that are displaced in the Bible.
00:27:29
Speaker
There are people who are disenfranchised in the Bible.
00:27:32
Speaker
The Bible is about, for, and by a politically, economically disenfranchised community.
00:27:40
Speaker
Just teach the scriptures that they are.
00:27:42
Speaker
Don't pull Moses out of his context.
00:27:43
Speaker
Don't make Jesus like you.
00:27:45
Speaker
Teach it how it is, you know?
00:27:47
Speaker
So we want to have a trauma-informed culture and intelligent discipleship.
00:27:51
Speaker
And I want to say, this is just one side I want to focus on, which is we're in a discipleship crisis.
00:27:57
Speaker
So I'll just put this out here for you.
00:27:58
Speaker
This is research for Barna on teens and justice.
00:28:01
Speaker
I just want to put this out there as an opportunity for you to see what's happening.
00:28:05
Speaker
as it comes to developing leaders in the church and the next generation in the church.
00:28:10
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.
00:28:19
Speaker
87%.
00:28:19
Speaker
35% believe Jesus was an advocate for justice.
00:28:27
Speaker
We have a theological crisis.
00:28:31
Speaker
We have a discipleship crisis.
00:28:33
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.
00:28:50
Speaker
So what have we been teaching in a Sunday school over the last 20 years?
00:28:55
Speaker
What have we been teaching from our pulpits?
00:28:56
Speaker
What have we been singing?
00:28:58
Speaker
What songs have we been singing that have given this next generation idea that Jesus is not an advocate for justice, right?
Church Identity and Contextual Discipleship
00:29:06
Speaker
Leadership development, not just who you develop in the community, by the community, but how you develop that.
00:29:12
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.
00:29:20
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:21
Speaker
So how do we develop leaders?
00:29:24
Speaker
That's you.
00:29:26
Speaker
Man, it's so hard to go after these three incredible people.
00:29:29
Speaker
If Mary Nelson is the old lady in the room, then I'm the for sure new lady in the room.
00:29:35
Speaker
And since Sandra unplugged my book and I'm Asian, super Asian, I won't do it.
00:29:39
Speaker
Here it is.
00:29:40
Speaker
It's pretty blue cover, center and discipleship.
00:29:42
Speaker
It's at the IBP table.
00:29:44
Speaker
Ask Keisha right there if you want to talk about it.
00:29:47
Speaker
But I get the honor to talk about church-based.
00:29:50
Speaker
And I think that this is probably for all the FCI people in the room, this is why we're here.
00:29:55
Speaker
And we think that community development is something that is just like an extracurricular thing that the church does.
00:30:03
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.
00:30:14
Speaker
We're asking a question about the identity of the church.
00:30:18
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.
00:30:28
Speaker
These are not things for us to do in the church.
00:30:31
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,
00:30:43
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.
00:30:53
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.
00:31:03
Speaker
Okay, so I'm just going to quickly go through this because I'm going to keep my time.
00:31:07
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.
00:31:20
Speaker
We're saying if we as a communal identity—
00:31:23
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.
00:31:44
Speaker
Next thing, body of Christ.
00:31:46
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.
00:31:56
Speaker
Body of Christ, as Alexios Avateros, who is a friend of CCDA, always says, it's actually an act of resistance.
00:32:02
Speaker
If we as a church do not identify ourselves as the body of Christ, that is always usually against empire, right?
00:32:10
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.
00:32:20
Speaker
But he wasn't using it as that.
00:32:21
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.
00:32:33
Speaker
So the body of Christ is actually the church should be a community of resistance.
00:32:38
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.
00:32:53
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.
00:33:00
Speaker
Number four, discipleship.
00:33:01
Speaker
You saw that little blue book right there.
00:33:04
Speaker
If you write a book about it, then I don't need to talk that much about it.
00:33:07
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.
00:33:14
Speaker
Right?
00:33:15
Speaker
I think discipleship means it's about equipping and sending out.
00:33:19
Speaker
If we are about teaching and keeping in,
00:33:23
Speaker
I don't know if that's the kind of Jesus followers that Christ set out to do, right?
00:33:28
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.
00:33:38
Speaker
And lastly, spiritual and communal transformation, our identity should be about how we are not just spiritually connected,
00:33:45
Speaker
in our spiritual know-how, right?
00:33:49
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.
00:34:00
Speaker
Who we say we are is actually informed to an outside world about how we live.
Comprehensive Vision for Church Engagement
00:34:06
Speaker
All right, that's it.
00:34:08
Speaker
Thanks.
00:34:09
Speaker
Here's my favorite part, listening to the community.
00:34:14
Speaker
And it's so important.
00:34:16
Speaker
And Sandra said it in her thing, the people with the problems have the best solutions.
00:34:23
Speaker
But, you know, we sometimes we get all our college degrees that we've worked hard for and stuff.
00:34:28
Speaker
And we think we know how things work.
00:34:32
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.
00:34:41
Speaker
That's not the way it's messy.
00:34:43
Speaker
And it takes a while to even listen.
00:34:46
Speaker
And I'm thinking of some bishops who went to do a site where the hurricanes had just destroyed everything.
00:34:53
Speaker
And they came to a shack along the beach that was almost totally destroyed.
00:34:58
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.
00:35:06
Speaker
Oh, we want to help you.
00:35:07
Speaker
We want to help you.
00:35:08
Speaker
What should we, how can we help?
00:35:11
Speaker
And this lady looked at these bishops and her ruined house behind her, and she said, come sit with me.
00:35:21
Speaker
And if we're gonna listen to the community, we gotta do some porch time.
00:35:26
Speaker
We gotta do some coffee table time.
00:35:28
Speaker
We gotta do some laundromat time.
00:35:30
Speaker
We've gotta do those things that give spaces and places.
00:35:35
Speaker
And in terms of this morning in the Native American response takes a little longer sometimes.
00:35:43
Speaker
to do things.
00:35:44
Speaker
So listening means taking the time and letting our own busyness.
00:35:50
Speaker
That was the hardest thing I learned in all the years because I still keep, I want to get to get something done.
00:35:58
Speaker
So listening to the community.
00:36:01
Speaker
And secondly, then as we think about this, we have to be, have a different role.
00:36:08
Speaker
And sometimes we become midwives.
00:36:12
Speaker
midwives to helping give birth to the ideas and the things that people want to see happen and want to make happen.
00:36:22
Speaker
Okay?
00:36:23
Speaker
And so that's a different role than it is trying to be the organizer to get things done.
00:36:29
Speaker
That's a very different.
00:36:31
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.
00:36:39
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.
00:36:45
Speaker
But that's where the real stuff comes out, if we can sort that out.
00:36:50
Speaker
And then sometimes the other thing is it takes new eyeglasses.
00:36:55
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.
00:37:08
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?
00:37:15
Speaker
Because she knows.
00:37:17
Speaker
She knows we've got to find those people, right, to help guide us and help make things happen.
00:37:26
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.
Empowerment and Inherent Dignity
00:37:38
Speaker
of listening to the community and taking these new eyeglasses to see.
00:37:43
Speaker
We discovered in our community on the west side of Chicago that a transit stop was an asset.
00:37:51
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.
00:38:03
Speaker
But see that as an asset.
00:38:06
Speaker
Here's something to build on because people get on and off the training.
00:38:12
Speaker
All right.
00:38:12
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.
00:38:26
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.
00:38:35
Speaker
So beginning to see with new eyes the assets that are there.
00:38:39
Speaker
You want to view the next one.
00:38:43
Speaker
And then I want to take a moment for us.
00:38:45
Speaker
This is a CCDA.
00:38:47
Speaker
John Perkins brought this.
00:38:49
Speaker
It's a Chinese saying.
00:38:53
Speaker
And I want to take a moment.
00:38:55
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.
00:39:06
Speaker
And then have you think about, talk to your neighbor and neighbor.
00:39:09
Speaker
First of all, let's just say this together.
00:39:11
Speaker
Go to the people.
00:39:13
Speaker
Live with them.
00:39:15
Speaker
Learn from them.
00:39:16
Speaker
Love them.
00:39:18
Speaker
Start with what they know.
00:39:20
Speaker
Build with what they have.
00:39:23
Speaker
But with the best leaders, when their work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say, we have done it ourselves.
00:39:36
Speaker
So this means to give away the credit.
00:39:40
Speaker
It's a new way of thinking.
00:39:41
Speaker
It's called leadership by stepping back.
00:39:44
Speaker
Okay.
00:39:46
Speaker
But it has to be genuine.
00:39:48
Speaker
It can't be that phony kind of, boy, you really did all the work and we want it.
00:39:54
Speaker
So it's an exciting part of this part of our values of CCDA.
00:40:01
Speaker
Mary, I hate going after you.
00:40:04
Speaker
Man.
00:40:05
Speaker
Okay.
00:40:06
Speaker
I get a holistic approach.
00:40:10
Speaker
Just a little context about me.
00:40:12
Speaker
So I am co-vocational.
00:40:14
Speaker
I'm a physician by day.
00:40:16
Speaker
It helps to pay the bills.
00:40:19
Speaker
But I'm also a senior pastor of a missional community or spiritual family or family.
00:40:24
Speaker
a neighborhood-based community, a multiplication church in Hawaii.
00:40:29
Speaker
I'm sorry, floral blazer.
00:40:31
Speaker
I gave it away.
00:40:32
Speaker
This is why I'm very tropical.
00:40:34
Speaker
I'm originally from Philadelphia.
00:40:36
Speaker
So my context, and I was born in South Korea.
00:40:38
Speaker
So my context about place,
00:40:40
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.
00:40:51
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,
00:41:06
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.
00:41:16
Speaker
It's a vision question.
00:41:17
Speaker
Our holistic approach is not methodology in CCDA.
00:41:20
Speaker
It's a vision question.
00:41:22
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.
00:41:40
Speaker
We all know this, right?
00:41:41
Speaker
Read a book, maybe it'll work.
00:41:43
Speaker
If that was true, I bet we would all still be doing the same thing, right?
00:41:47
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?
00:41:56
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.
00:42:09
Speaker
It's a vision question.
00:42:12
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?
00:42:31
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.
00:42:43
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?
00:42:51
Speaker
Right?
00:42:52
Speaker
One of the ways that we actually figure out church, this is my second church plant in Hawaii.
00:42:57
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.
00:43:06
Speaker
Hooray!
00:43:07
Speaker
It's amazing, right?
00:43:08
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.
00:43:18
Speaker
I'm probably just thinking about, wow, what is my approach to multiply butts in the seats?
00:43:24
Speaker
Grow my cues so I can build more seats, right?
00:43:27
Speaker
Increase my budget, right?
00:43:30
Speaker
That's what I would be thinking about.
00:43:32
Speaker
And it's not a knock on any of the churches that actually do have a Sunday morning worship service.
00:43:36
Speaker
I crave it because I haven't had it in the past six years, right?
00:43:39
Speaker
Right.
00:43:40
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?
00:43:53
Speaker
We started thinking about all of these things.
00:43:55
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?
00:44:04
Speaker
Are there going to be leaders who are going to be specifically tasked and think about education?
00:44:10
Speaker
Are there folks who are thinking about how arts and entertainment actually bring a value of beauty?
00:44:16
Speaker
And it probably answers a lot more culturally about what love is like.
00:44:20
Speaker
That's important, right?
00:44:21
Speaker
So we kind of think through all of these cultural aspects on purpose.
00:44:25
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.
00:44:40
Speaker
We have a vision that will include everybody in the mix.
00:44:44
Speaker
Another important thing about this is thinking about history and tradition.
00:44:49
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
00:45:05
Speaker
I'm going to be bringing into this mix, right?
00:45:08
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.
00:45:17
Speaker
I think most people have not heard me speak.
00:45:19
Speaker
You guys are hearing me speak longer than most of my people at home.
00:45:23
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.
00:45:37
Speaker
And I don't know what they're saying.
00:45:40
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.
00:45:52
Speaker
She's praying her own language.
00:45:55
Speaker
in a context where people had come and taken our language
Reflections and Closing Remarks
00:45:58
Speaker
away.
00:45:58
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.
00:46:09
Speaker
Everybody will leave me too included in that grieving and lamenting of our past and our history.
00:46:16
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.
00:46:26
Speaker
So holistic approach, it's not a method, it's a vision for your church.
00:46:30
Speaker
All right, Pastor James.
00:46:32
Speaker
All right.
00:46:33
Speaker
Y'all tell my Charles I'm getting my steps in.
00:46:38
Speaker
All right, I'm going to do the eighth component, empowerment.
00:46:44
Speaker
Love this component.
00:46:46
Speaker
Not such a fan of the name.
00:46:47
Speaker
Okay?
00:46:50
Speaker
It gives this false idea that somehow we can give power to people or somehow make them powerful or give them ability.
00:46:59
Speaker
And even our old founder, Dr. Perkins, says you don't, you know, give people dignity.
00:47:05
Speaker
You affirm it.
00:47:07
Speaker
And so this is not something where we're really talking about like giving power.
00:47:11
Speaker
We're really talking about the affirmation of power, the affirmation of dignity, the affirmation of their God-given identity.
00:47:18
Speaker
So I started primarily talking about the image of God in every person.
00:47:22
Speaker
And Imago Dei is the center of this component.
00:47:26
Speaker
Every single person is created in the image of God.
00:47:30
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?
00:47:37
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.
00:47:50
Speaker
So we've recognized who we are.
00:47:52
Speaker
And that means that we have inherent worth.
00:47:54
Speaker
We have inherent dignity.
00:47:56
Speaker
No one has to give it to us.
00:47:57
Speaker
Sometimes we just have to have it awakened in us.
00:48:00
Speaker
And that's what empowerment is really about.
00:48:03
Speaker
So how many of you ever heard the golden rule?
00:48:06
Speaker
The scripture, right?
00:48:06
Speaker
What is the golden rule?
00:48:07
Speaker
Somebody just say it.
00:48:09
Speaker
Okay, y'all do know that.
00:48:09
Speaker
Do unto others as you will have them do unto you, right?
00:48:12
Speaker
Well, CCDA adds a rule.
00:48:14
Speaker
It's called the iron rule.
00:48:17
Speaker
Never do for a person.
00:48:19
Speaker
That's all.
00:48:20
Speaker
I'll give it to Saul.
00:48:22
Speaker
Never do for a person what they can do for themselves.
00:48:25
Speaker
Because we steal the inherent worth and ability in them when we continue to do for them what they could do for themselves.
00:48:34
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.
00:48:44
Speaker
As long as those same people who may be coming to that food pantry one day get to serve at it.
00:48:50
Speaker
Right?
00:48:50
Speaker
We're fine with that.
00:48:51
Speaker
But our ultimate goal is that people won't continue to need your food pantry.
00:48:57
Speaker
Right?
00:48:57
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.
00:49:05
Speaker
Stop walking around talking about and bragging about how many people your entity, your church, your ministry is feeding.
00:49:12
Speaker
That's not a CCBA point talking point.
00:49:16
Speaker
We are only impressed when that number decreases.
00:49:19
Speaker
That's the difference between CCPA and other mercy ministries where they're gonna tell, we fed millions and millions of people.
00:49:25
Speaker
We're like, oh, that's too bad.
00:49:29
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.
00:49:45
Speaker
So the next time you come report to us, you say, we're down to half a million.
00:49:49
Speaker
And I go, you better go.
00:49:51
Speaker
Now you're empowering people.
00:49:53
Speaker
See the difference?
00:49:54
Speaker
That's CCD.
00:49:55
Speaker
So CCDA talking points a lot, how many people you're serving.
00:49:58
Speaker
Hopefully it's you're working yourself out of a job.
00:50:02
Speaker
That is CCDA's focus and goal.
00:50:04
Speaker
That's what we're trying to do.
00:50:05
Speaker
All right.
00:50:06
Speaker
So I'll give you my favorite actual definition of empowerment.
00:50:10
Speaker
And it comes from a longtime member of CCDA, one of the early voices, Bob Lepton.
00:50:16
Speaker
This is my favorite example of empowerment.
00:50:19
Speaker
All right.
00:50:19
Speaker
So I'm going to get out the way because I see people taking pictures and I'm going to read it.
00:50:22
Speaker
Empowerment is a popular word these days.
00:50:26
Speaker
It may be a misnomer.
00:50:28
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.
00:50:43
Speaker
Assist this emerging butterfly as it struggles to break out of its cocoon and it may never develop the strength to fly.
00:50:51
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.
00:51:05
Speaker
Butterflies, like people, cannot be empowered.
00:51:11
Speaker
They will emerge toward their uniquely created potential given a conducive environment.
00:51:18
Speaker
This is CCVA's mindset around empowerment.
00:51:22
Speaker
There's many of us who are trying to make people like us.
00:51:25
Speaker
All right?
00:51:26
Speaker
That's not what we're doing here.
00:51:28
Speaker
Leadership development goes right with empowerment.
00:51:31
Speaker
Our goal is to help them to emerge into their God-given potential and ideals and who God's made them to be.
00:51:37
Speaker
All we can do is put them on a conducive environment.
00:51:40
Speaker
Maybe we just make sure they don't have to worry about where the next meal is coming from.
00:51:44
Speaker
Maybe we make sure that they're out of place for their kids to go while they go pursue their greater education.
00:51:48
Speaker
Maybe we just create a conducive environment for them to emerge as the butterfly God already created them to be.
00:51:55
Speaker
That's what we're doing.
00:51:56
Speaker
And whenever we do for people, we strip them of that ability.
00:52:01
Speaker
Their wings are clipped.
00:52:03
Speaker
They're not even going to fly.
00:52:05
Speaker
And so CCDA, while we use the word empowerment, really what we're saying is just create environments where people can fly.
00:52:12
Speaker
This is the CCDA philosophy.
00:52:17
Speaker
And we need all of them to live out this philosophy of changing the world.
00:52:22
Speaker
All right?
00:52:24
Speaker
Can I just pray for us as we close?
00:52:26
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.
00:52:43
Speaker
I think that we can feel challenged and burdened and have an increase of heart.
00:52:47
Speaker
So Jesus, I just pray and I thank you for every single leader here.
00:52:50
Speaker
I thank you for every single person here.
00:52:52
Speaker
I thank you for every single heart.
00:52:54
Speaker
That you love all of us, each one of us.
00:52:57
Speaker
You love every community and neighborhood and city, people in these places where each person here has seen or have not yet seen.
00:53:06
Speaker
We're so thankful that you are a God who sees all of us.
00:53:10
Speaker
So I pray for hearts that feel challenged, that they won't feel condemned.
00:53:15
Speaker
I pray for hearts that feel proud, that you will be softening and humbling.
00:53:19
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.
00:53:35
Speaker
So in your good name we pray.
00:53:36
Speaker
Amen.
00:53:38
Speaker
Thank you, everyone.
00:53:40
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.
00:53:50
Speaker
See the show notes of this episode for more information about each of these speakers and their organizations.
00:53:56
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.
00:54:10
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode.
00:54:12
Speaker
Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:54:18
Speaker
This episode is produced by me, Sarah Callen, in association with Christina Fore.
00:54:22
Speaker
We will be back soon with another episode featuring CCD practitioners who are committed to seeing people and communities experience God's shalom.
00:54:31
Speaker
We'll see you then.