Mike King

Bullying! How We Should Respond?

 “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.” Jesus Christ

One of the most difficult things I’ve ever experienced in my four decades of youth ministry was to serve as a Pallbearer for the funeral of one of a 13-year-old boy in my youth group.  Paul was the victim of repeated bullying by a large group of peers that tragically left Paul with the mistaken conclusion that his reality was too unbearable and he chose to end his own life.  This happened nearly 30 years ago.  Unfortunately, bullying has gotten much worse in the last ten years.

Right now the movie documentary Bully, along with several highly publicized  cases involving tragic results because of bullying among teenagers, has created a heightened awareness of the frightening dynamic of this issue in our culture.

Working with adolescents, we regularly hear stories of young people who everyday have to deal with being bullied.  Everyday, hundreds of thousands of young people have to deal with the fear of attending school where they know they will be bullied.  It’s estimated that an average of more than 150,000 young people stay home from school everyday to avoid being bullied.  Most of the time this occurs without parents being aware that it’s happening to their child. 

Bullying involves acts of repetitive negative behavior of a person or persons toward another person or persons that is aggressive and intimidating in nature.  Bullying can take the forms of emotional, verbal, and/or physical abuse.  Bullying can be a one-on-one issue but most often it involves a collaborative group engaged in peer abuse directed at one or more individuals.

Research reveals that young people who are regularly bullied face an increased risk of mental health issues.  Depression, anxiety, lack of motivation, despair, helplessness, and suicidal thoughts prevail among those who are dealing with being perpetually bullied. In addition to thinking about harming themselves, some begin to fanaticize about hurting their tormenters.  According to a report by the Secret Service, two-thirds of students who participated in school shootings were victims of bullying at school that had reached the level of self-described “torment.”

Mona O’Moore of the Anti-Bullying Centre at Trinity College in Dublin, has written, "There is a growing body of research which indicates that individuals, whether child or adult, who are persistently subjected to abusive behavior are at risk of stress related illness which can sometimes lead to suicide."

In addition to aggressive and physical actions that intimidate and harm the victims of bullying there are new forms of bullying that have emerged through social media.  This type of Cyber-bullying attempts to socially isolate the victim by spreading rumors, name calling, threatening, criticizing, manipulating, ostracizing, etc. through a variety of social medias, including Facebook, Twitter, and whatever new social media tools emerged last week, along with those that will surface this week.

According to the Cyberbullying Research Center, One in five teenagers are harassed regularly online. Almost one-half of all teenagers have experienced some form of online harassment. More than one-third (37%) of teens admit to using social networking sites to victimize and harass their peers.

Before we, as adults, rest in the idea that we have moved beyond the ability to bully, let me suggest that we may not engage in the overt bullying actions of adolescents but we must ask ourselves if we have not just adopted more sophisticated forms of bullying – gossip, character assassination, ostracizing, sabotaging, and exclusionary behavior toward others.

When Jesus was asked what it means to truly be his follower he says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself” Luke 10:27.  He then tells one of the best-known stories called the parable of the Good Samaritan in order to explain and explore the heart of what it means to be a genuine follower of Christ.  In this parable Jesus commends the man who comes to the rescue and takes care of a victim of extreme bullying.  We must stand up for those who are being bullied. Christians must speak up.  We have to take action concerning this issue

What is Youthfront doing about this issue?

• Teaching young people to treat all people with respect and the love, grace and mercy of Jesus Christ.
• Teaching young people the Golden Rule taught by Jesus, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.” Matthew 7:12
• Teaching and mentoring young people the importance of defending and standing up for the marginalized victims of bullying.

What can parents do?

• Talk to your kids about bullying.
• Go see the movie Bully with your age appropriate kids.
• Educate yourself on your kid’s world, their friends and the social environments they spend time in.
• Be appropriately curious of your kid’s social media world.

I believe that we have a window of opportunity created by this movie Bully and the media’s attention on this issue to double down our effort to radically alter the reality of bullying in our culture.  This, I believe is something that the followers of Jesus and God’s church must passionately engage in.  We must do this for our kids.

Resources                                                                                                                                          The Center for Parent/Youth Understanding, www.cpyu.org                                                          Wikipedia

How would you describe the various forms or types of justice?

The word justice and especially the phrase social justice have been in the media spotlight lately, thanks primarily to the culture wars and the attention-grabbing techniques of Glenn Beck. The issue of justice has been a focus of human beings since the beginning of recorded history. Often the issue of justice has forced Christians to determine where their primary allegiances lie—with God’s in-breaking kingdom or with political powers and national governments?

The prophet Micah declares in Micah 6:8, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Children of God are required to “do justice.”

One of the common phrases of children when they begin to interact with one another on playgrounds, neighborhoods, in social settings, schools, and especially among siblings is, “That’s not fair.”

“Studies at UCLA in 2008 have indicated that reactions to fairness are ‘wired’ into the brain... This is consistent with the notion that being treated fairly satisfies a basic need.’ 1 The issue of justice is a very important part of youth ministry and spiritual formation.

There are many ways the issue of justice has been classified. For instance: legal justice, commutative justice, procedural justice, criminal justice, social justice, punitive justice, restorative justice, universal justice, distributive justice, retributive justice, personal justice, supernatural justice, poetic justice, etc.

Instead of defining all the various forms and types of justice, I will respond to the question by suggesting two primary ways the issue and types of justice will impact your youth ministry.

1) Community Environment. The spirituality of your faith community is greatly influenced by how you deal with many of the different types of justice issues at work in your context. Let’s take the issue of punitive vs. restorative justice as an example. If your culture believes that those within your faith community must be punished (as an example for all) if they violate the group’s values, disobey Scripture, and/or make a serious mistake and sin, then you may be willing to lose a member of the community in order to maintain the group’s ethos and rules. Misguided punitive justice often relies on shame to recover and maintain a sense of order. Punitive justice focuses on the supposed need of the community to punish offenders. I’ve seen many young people in youth ministries significantly wronged and humiliated by unjust punitive justice.

Restorative justice, on the other hand, seeks to repair the wrongs and damages done and works to restore both victims and offenders. Often, restorative justice takes more time and is more complicated to accomplish, but the results are more in line with restoration and God’s redemptive mission. Allowing your environment to be shaped by grace and restorative justice will go a long way toward nurturing a faith community that is a safe place for all. Attempting to make things right for all is hard work but is essential for fostering Christian community.

2) Christian Formation. If we are going to be youth workers who make disciples who become lifelong followers of Jesus Christ, we must help the  young people in our faith communities grasp the overarching mission of God. It is not possible to fully cooperate with God’s mission of redemption and restoration without doing justice, as the prophet Micah states in the above verse. The prophet Isaiah weighs in on the mission of Messiah in Isaiah 42:1-4.

“Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth.”

Jesus Christ will fully establish justice in the earth. As Christ’s disciples, we are to follow Jesus in the movement toward a just world. One of the biggest problems we face in the Christian church today is our propensity to mostly talk about justice. We talk about justice but rarely do justice. And yes, I’m talking about us, I’m talking about you, but mostly, I’m talking about me.

Last week our Youthfront staff watched the movie Romero together as a part of our monthly formational practice. The movie is about the life of Oscar Romero, who was appointed archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, during a tumultuous time in the 1970s. Great injustices were happening throughout the country, and the poor were being exploited, raped, and murdered. Archbishop Romero was assassinated because he was willing to stand up against gross injustice. The movie portrays many different ways individuals who claim to be Christians react to what is going on around them. The issue of what it means to “do justice” was the focus of our staff discussion. The questions we wrestled with following this film are still provoking our imaginations and dominating our conversations.

As youth workers, we must search our hearts and explore what it means to live cruciform lives. As we read the gospels and see the life of Jesus, we see the reality of God’s in-breaking kingdom. Jesus Christ is doing a new thing, and it is this way of life that God is calling us to lean into. This is the way of life we invite young people to embrace. I believe it is a life that moves toward shalom and a world made right, a cause that young people might be willing to lay down their lives for.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice#cite_ref-4

This post originally appeared on Slant33 (used with permission)

An Extraordinary Life

This is from

The Nobel Peace Prize 1964

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.

Youth Workers and Community Development

What are youth workers' roles in "community development" in their own cities?

This is a post I originally wrote for Slant33.  Re-posted with permission.

This is an interesting question. The phrase community development became a part of our culture’s vernacular during the 2008 presidential campaign  because of President Obama’s past role as a community organizer. The phrase community development has defined organized and ongoing efforts dedicated to improving community life, especially focused on caring for those who have been marginalized.

Recently the phrase community development is increasingly used more broadly to describe efforts to improve the quality of life and deal with challenging issues in our residential communities, especially within neglected urban centers. A growing number of Christians who believe that engagement in social justice is a part of God’s missional calling are using the phrase community development to define their activities of service and ministry within needy communities. I have used this language because I live among networks of Christians who use this nomenclature.

However, as I have considered an answer to this question, I suggest that we use the phrase community development frugally and specifically. There are people who have been called vocationally into community development. I think we belittle their work when we call sporadic service projects the same thing. When our youth ministries and churches engage in meaningful work that blesses our communities, we are behaving missionally and honoring God. It is important for God’s people to participate in God’s mission to help those in need, to extend mercy, and to work for justice.

Our activities of service should be intentional and ongoing. The church of Jesus Christ exists to engage in God’s mission. The church is to be about blessing the world, not itself. Our commitment to follow God in the way of Jesus sends us into the world to serve God, our communities, and our neighbors so that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. The church is called to embody the love of God in our communities, our cities, and throughout the world.

Serving communities in proximity to where we live for the love of God and love of neighbor is crucial if we desire to embody the great good news. It is the role of a youth worker to help our young people understand what it means to participate in God’s mission in the world. Too often we depend on the Mission Trip to shape our kids missionally. The mission trip may result in wonderful ministry, but it can create a distorted theology of mission.

In fact, I will go so far as to say that short-term mission trips should be suspended until you find a meaningful way to serve in proximity to where you live. If we (youth workers) do not build a missional ethos and behavior in our own communities first, we reinforce the tragic idea that serving God is something done “over there.” Missional thinking and living must be rooted in the here and now if it is to become a way of life. If your response to suspending short-term mission trips is concern for the people you serve “over there,” wherever “over there” is, then I suggest sending the foreign mission a portion of the money your youth group would spend to go “over there.” In the future, make faithful involvement in serving communities locally a prerequisite to going on a short-term mission trip.

I think we should reserve the phrase community development until we are deeply, regularly, and sustainably involved in serving and living within a particular community of need. Even if we are involved with works of mercy and actions of justice as we participate in God’s mission in a particular community over a long period of time, I still think we would be remiss to call our efforts community development. I believe one must actually live in the community of need one is serving to be able to consider the efforts community development.

I see an ever-increasing number of Christians relocating to communities that have been neglected by churches, government, and society in general. I admire those who move into certain neighborhoods for the purpose of living missionally. We should connect our youth groups with these bold missionaries and develop consistent and deep partnership to glorify God by embodying the gospel in communities that have been forgotten.

How is caring for the environment practicing justice?

This is a post I originally wrote for Slant33.  Re-posted with permission.

The Psalmist declares, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it” (Psalm 24:1, NRSV). “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31, NRSV). God created human beings and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28, NRSV). “Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15, NASB).

These verses make it clear that God created all that was made and declares that it was all very good. Human beings were entrusted to care for God’s creation.

God’s creative work was good and whole, so God ceased creating on the seventh day. Shalom saturated all of God’s creation, a shalom of wholeness, peace, and beauty. This shalom was to be the state in which all of God’s creation existed and flourished. But as the creation narrative unfolds, we are told that human beings sinned and disobeyed God, introducing a brokenness that would bring destruction and interruption to God’s shalom for all creation. Human beings are not the only part of creation to bear the consequences and brokenness of sin. In Romans 8, Paul tells us that creation itself is in bondage to decay and that the whole creation has been groaning.

Francis Schaeffer wrote, "...nature: it is not our own. It belongs to God, and we are to exercise our dominion over these things not as though entitled to exploit them, but as things borrowed or held in trust.

We are to use them realizing they are not ours intrinsically. Man's dominion is under God's dominion" (Pollution and the Death of Man, 1970, p. 69).

God’s mission is to redeem and restore creation to shalom. God is liberator and has invited the people of God to join as co-agents of restoration. Unfortunately, we have not cooperated very well with the Spirit of God. In fact, for the most part, it seems that we have worked against God’s plan. Wendell Berry declares, “Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or  stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into his face, as of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them”(Cross Currents, Summer93, Vol. 43 Issue 2, p149, 15p.). In response to Berry’s assertion, I pray, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.

How can we, God’s children, participate in such sloppy stewardship (at best) or flippant destructive behavior (as the norm) toward God’s wonderful creation?  Yes, I understand how a whole generation of our fathers and mothers were turned off to environmental issues by tree-hugging crazies, but we must get beyond that stereotype and get on with recovering a theological and scriptural warrant for engaging in environmental justice.

Using the phrase “environmental justice” works for me for several reasons. First of all, our world belongs to God, and to misuse it is an injustice toward God. Secondly, it is often the poorest and most marginalized people who experience the greatest harm from a sick environment.

It wasn’t that long ago (40 years) when throwing trash out the car window wasn’t that big of a deal. But today, few people would even consider littering. The young people in our youth groups are much more environmentally aware today than the older generations of their youth workers. We have a wonderful opportunity to help them see that this is more than a political issue. This is a theological issue. This is a biblical issue. This is a spiritual issue. We must help our young people see how environmental care is a significant part of the narrative of God’s work of restoration.

I remember being mesmerized by the enchanted planet Pandora in the movie Avatar. The 3D animation allowed the flying creatures and animals to escape the screen and enter the movie theater. The luminescent fauna and flora were  exotic. It hit me, as I watched the ground illuminate around each footprint of Neytiri and Jake as they navigated the mysteriously beautiful rainforest, that the planet I live on is equally enchanted. The beauty of creation is all around me—trees, flowers, clouds, sunsets, rainfall, thunder and lightning, waterfalls, mountains, streams, deserts; plus, creatures of all shapes, sizes, and kinds too numerous to count. What a wonderful world we live in, and what an amazing Creator we have. We have been blessed to live on such an amazingly beautiful planet. For the glory of God, let’s steward well that which has been entrusted to us by our Creator.

Kurt Rietema on Immigration

For the past six years I have had the honor of working with Kurt and Emily Rietema.  For the first five years Kurt and Emily developed our mission site in Croc, Mexico.  During their time as Directors in Croc they served as architects to design a ministry of community development that has deeply impacted the village of Croc in every way - socially, economically, spiritually, educationally, vocationally and physically. 

During the last eighteen months, the Rietema's have moved back to Kansas City.  Emily has been teaching and Kurt continues to oversee our initiative in Croc, Mexico while developing a Youthfront ministry in Argentine, an hispanic community of Kansas City.  Youthfront has served in Argentine for several years but now we are being intentional about doing something more deeply immersed in this community. 

Our Youthfront School of Formation is located in Argentine.  We have been intentional about subverting the North American Script of consumerism and cultural arrogance with young people who have served in Croc, Mexico and in the Argentine district.  We do not want to reinforce a North American Youth Ministry practice of going on a Mission Trip to "help the poor people."  So many Mission Trip endeavors are drive-by encounters with "those people" that often resemble a group vacation. 

We have been wrestling with the issue of Immigration, trying to see it first from the perspective of our vocation as citizens of God's Kingdom instead of allowing it to only be a political issue.  Underneath the following picture is an article written by Kurt on this issue and I think he does an amazing job of challenging all of us to think deeply about this issue.  

“If by force you make a creature live and work like a beast, you must think of him as a beast, else empathy would drive you mad. Once you have classified him in your mind, your feelings are safe.”                                    John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley, 1962.

A number of people have asked my opinion on what I think about immigration and what is happening in Arizona. It’s a question that honestly, I’d rather avoid. It’s a more economically and socially appealing choice to plead my fifth amendment right to be silent than to offer a polemic on immigration to friends and family who financially support our ministry. I’d like to avoid it because quite often the storyline of immigration gets flattened. Questions of legality allow us to forget that human beings are involved. Soon immigrants get reduced to cost-benefit ratios with arguments about how they either contribute to our economy or how they drain government resources. “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” is popular pundit propaganda that seems to shut the door on further conversation. Whatever personal histories or corporate colonialism that give rise to leaving one’s homeland for a chance at a better life can simply be dismissed before one gets a chance of defending oneself. Once we classify undocumented immigrants as “illegal”, just as whites in this country were once able to classify people of color as less than human, our feelings are safe. We don’t need to bother with stories of mothers who choose between being with their children and having nothing to offer them to eat but a glass of sugar water or leaving them to find work in the US and providing them a measure of material decency. We don’t need to ask why they left their countries; we only need to ask how we can keep them out of ours. If we dare ask ourselves these questions, empathy would drive us mad.

Our world is more understandable when it’s black and white. Sterile categorization makes things easier. You’re either right or your wrong, you’re either liberal or conservative, you’re for us or against us, you’re either legal or illegal. Religion, too, loves black and white. We see it all throughout the gospels. “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” ask the disciples. “Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” “In the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such adulterous women. What do you say?” Religion loves black and white because it allows us to know exactly where one stands before God and one another. Yet at every step, Jesus refuses to play that game. Jesus, like anyone who has muddied himself in the pain of the world, knows that the answers to those questions are rarely that simple. Motives, lies, and complex personal and political histories blur the lines. Real life and the pain of the human experience often play out in the gray.

Having many documented and undocumented Hispanic immigrants as neighbors and friends, I’ve come to see that their stories are filled with shades of gray. More than sixty percent of undocumented immigrants in the US were once rural farmers, like many of my family and friends back in Iowa are. Many of them came here because trade policies like NAFTA allowed US-subsidized grain into Mexico. These farmers lost their way of life because they couldn’t compete with subsidized commodities. It’s a difficult thing for me to own up to. The very policies that have benefited me, my family, friends, and community are the same ones that have devastated the livelihoods of other farmers and rural communities not so different from us. Do undocumented immigrants break a law when they cross into the United States illegally? Yes. But it seems like crossing the border illegally isn’t the only line of justice that’s been transgressed.

If empathy can track with the plight of undocumented immigrants this far, we might often concede, “I don’t have a problem if they’re here or not, but can’t they just do it legally?” It seems like a fair question and a reasonable solution. That is until you realize the bureaucratic impossibility of obtaining a legal work visa. As a country Mexico is allowed up to 25,460 work visas from the United States per year. If the 1,000 Hispanics in my hometown of Sioux Center, Iowa with a population of around 6,000 received a legal US visa, they alone would constitute 4% of the US-issued visas allowed for Mexico! Our current system simply doesn’t allow for it.

How am I to steward a truth like this? Maybe I can ignore it if I classify the plight of these immigrants as the reality of business in a free market, global economy. But I wonder how free it truly is when cheap goods can flow freely across borders yet labor cannot. My Reformed faith that claims that we are Christ’s agents of restoration and reconciliation in all areas of our lives doesn’t allow me to subject the majority of our daily lives and our business to the rules of Darwin and only a few sacred hours a week to the rule of Christ.

“Who sinned, this child or his parents, that he is here illegally?” “Is it right to cross Caesar’s border or not?” "In the Law, we are commanded to deport such women. What do you say?” I imagine that Jesus would refuse to play this game as well. His compassion for the victims of the politicos and the powerful trumped any allegiance to any nation’s economic interests. Jesus made for a poor Roman citizen as much as a poor Jewish nationalist. I imagine his immigration policy wouldn’t hold up too well. Conservatives and liberals alike can claim Jesus to be on their side but Jesus refuses to do so because God is not a Republican, nor is he a Democrat. He proclaimed a different Kingdom altogether that didn’t define citizenship by political boundaries, privileges, or rights. God’s Kingdom would be one where citizens lay down their rights as servants, see others as better than themselves, and love one another as one loves themselves. These are the subversive politics of Jesus. If we truly claim that our primary citizenship is in the Kingdom of God then we must let that vision of shalom, of the lion laying down with the lamb, guide and critique the politics of our worldly kingdoms.

“When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” Leviticus 19:33-34

How is caring for the environment practicing justice?

Check out the three slants on this question here on Slant33. 

Homeless Man a Hit-and-Run Victim

Thomas Wasmer IV, 39-years-old was a pedestrian victim of a hit-and-run case in Kansas City this month.  Unfortunately, not only did the Police not investigate this incident, they didn’t even make a police report.  What did Thomas Wasmer have going against him that resulted in this inhumane treatment? Thomas Wasmer was homeless.  Paramedics arrived on the scene of the“hit-and-run” and took Wasmer to a hospital.  Wasmer had multiple injuries and spent six days in the hospital before insisting that he be released so he could attend church and smoke a cigarette. 

Wasmer attended church every Sunday.  After the service church members helped pain-stricken Wasmer return to the hospital where he underwent surgery.  Thomas Wasmer died several days later with fellow church members by his bedside.  The Rev. Stan Runnels of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church sent an e-mail to church members to inform them of Wasmer’s death.  A KC Star reporter who saw the e-mail made an inquiry with the police department to find out how the investigation was going.  It was at that point the reporter discovered that no report had even been filed.  Wasmer was an alcoholic and insisted on being homeless but he was loved and accepted at his church and regularly worked around the church grounds

The KC Police have not explained why a criminal report was not filled out and pursued.

"Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.” Proverbs 31:9

SOAP/SODA

Those of you who read my blog know that I speak occasionally of Nick Pickrell, (as recently as last weekend) who was in my youth group, Student Life group and involved in Youthfront during during his adolescent years.  Nick served on our Youthfront staff for several years and now lives at Cherith Brook working among the people living in the Northeast part of our city.  Several weeks ago we had several young people working at Cherith Brook during Serve Day.

Nick contacted me this weekend to let me know about a city resolution called SOAP/SODA (Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution/Stay OUT of Drug Areas). SOAP/SODA will make it legal for judges to tack onto any prostitution or drug offender's sentence a geographical ban. Meaning, if someone is charged with prostitution, it will become illegal for her/him to even be seen on certain streets (public places) in the Historic Northeast. Nonprofits from the Northeast (Grace United, Veronica's Voice, Cherith Brook, Micah Ministries, Reconcilation, etc.) will be radically impacted in a negative manner in their efforts to work with and help people trying to move out of these kinds of lifestyles.  For many people this will be forced displacement. 

Nick and many of the people who have been delivered from prostitution and drug abuse went to ask the city council to postpone the vote on this resolution until the nonprofit organizations (those who actually work with those most affected by this resolution) could have their voices heard, but to no avail. The resolution passed and is now on its way to becoming an enforceable ordinance.

I encouraged Nick to contact the ACLU, never thought I would make a recommendation like that.  There are more hearings on Tuesday and people are being mobilized to speak up for more restorative ways to deal with these issues.

Training young abolitionists

On Saturday I attended the Student Abolition Leadership Training.  Sally Rymer, an Associate Youthfront staff member at the ripe age of 16, provided training for a group of high school students and adults.  The training was held at Lakeland Community Church.  Once again I was blown away by the passion and giftedness of Sally and her ability to help her peers catch the vision for working to eradicate global slavery in all its forms.  The adults who attended had no problem being a student of Sally.  It was also cool because several students from my church, Jacob's Well, attended the training day. 

This training will be offered again on Saturday, February 7, 2009 from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM.  If you want to give your students an opportunity to co-operate with God's agenda to bring restoration and shalom encourage them to attend. REGISTER HERE

Here is a video featuring Sally when she was 14 years old.