{"id":3695,"date":"2012-02-28T03:28:22","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T03:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/karenspearszacharias\/?p=3695"},"modified":"2012-02-28T03:34:57","modified_gmt":"2012-02-28T03:34:57","slug":"justice-conference-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/karenspearszacharias\/2012\/02\/28\/justice-conference-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Justice Conference 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>
By Shelby Dee<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

I\u2019ve never been to Africa or Haiti, and I wouldn\u2019t know the first thing about running a non-profit organization. I sometimes worry that I\u2019ve disappointed God with my lack of imagination.<\/p>\n

I spend most of my days alone, sitting in an upholstered red chair next to a window where I can feel the warmth of the sun. I\u2019m sitting in that chair now, doing what I have done nearly every single day for the past fifteen years \u2013 writing.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m what \u00a0the renowned Old Testatment scholar Dr. Walter Brueggemann calls a \u201ctalker\u201d.<\/p>\n

Brueggemann is a talker, too. That\u2019s what he told the crowd gathered this past weekend at Oregon\u2019s Convention Center in Portland for the Justice Conference 2012. Over 4,000 attendees came from 41 states and 20 countries. They represented hundreds of ministries that are addressing every conceivable social ill that human brokenness creates.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou are the walkers,\u201d Brueggemann said. \u201cI\u2019m the talker.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lunging forward from his center-stage seat, Brueggeman\u2019s hands grasped the air, as if he was about to throttle his own thought. He animatedly explained that compassion, rightly-defined and rightly lived-out, should create an emotional upheaval in our gut.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should have our guts stirred by the injustices of this world,\u201d Brueggemann said. \u201cThis is not right. It cannot sustain us and it must be changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The vulnerable were mesmerized by Jesus and the power establishment resented him because of that.<\/p>\n

\u201cJesus was a huge threat to the status quo,\u201d Brueggemann said. \u201cAnd the followers of Jesus are always a huge threat to the status quo when they carry out justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Living justly is more than a romantic notion. It\u2019s the Christian\u2019s compulsion, and if Francis Chan or John Perkins or Rachel Lloyd are any example, it should be our obsession.<\/p>\n

The trap we fall into is that most of us feel just awful when we hear as we did this weekend from Lynne Hybels,<\/a> of Willow Creek, and Stephan Bauman, CEO of World Relief,<\/a> that nine out of 10 women in the Congo are brutally raped. In a country where 80 percent of its populous is Christian, Bauman noted wryly.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
by Shelby Dee<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We puzzle over the hypocrisy of such a thing, blinded to the fact that right here in our own midst over a half-a-million foster children are stuck in the state system, with no families of their own to belong to.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can that be in a country with millions of Christians?\u201d Francis Chan <\/a>implored. Then he related the very real ways in which he has witnessed congregations change their communities.<\/p>\n

Up until then, much of the conference had been a very cerebral exercise for me, the writer. I took notes, tweeted quotes, memorized names and ministries, faces and facts. I wasn\u2019t wading in the shallow end. I was going deep but figuring all the while that I would process it all at some other time, when I could sit in this here red chair and ponder the greater truths of people who do the walking and those who do the talking.<\/p>\n

But something happened within me as Francis Chan spoke. A move of the Spirit. That ah-ha<\/em> moment, when instead of thinking of others as vulnerable I began to see that I, too, belong among the crowd of the downtrodden and discouraged.<\/p>\n

For the past five years I\u2019ve been writing but I haven\u2019t been alone. A murdered child has been at my side. Her framed photo rests behind me on the bookshelf. I\u2019ve been aware all along that three-year-old Karly Sheehan has been with me, looking over my shoulder, making sure I get her story right.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
by Shelby Dee<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Not that it will help her, now. She\u2019s already one of the statistics of child abuse fatalities in this state. Five children a day in the U. S. die from child abuse. The BBC reports that the America has the highest rates of child abuse of any industrialized country. They called it \u201cepidemic proportions.\u201d<\/p>\n

I often feel overwhelmed thinking about the 800,000 children suffering from child abuse and neglect in this nation full of Christians. I don\u2019t know how to help other than to tell their stories. One by one.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not even a talker, really. I\u2019m a storyteller. But the thing of it is, I tell stories few want to hear. Part of the reason child abuse has reached epidemic proportions in this country is because dead children don\u2019t talk, and abused children have no money and no lobbying power.<\/p>\n

Everyone feels awful when I tell them Karly\u2019s story, but abused children don\u2019t need our pity. They need us. They need us to hear their stories until our guts become twisted and we finally act on their behalf.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth does not change based on your ability to stomach it,\u201d said Stephan Bauman. He was quoting the beloved Georgia writer, Flannery O\u2019Connor, who grew up just a stone\u2019s throw and an afternoon drive from where I was raised.<\/p>\n

It was a Baptist church in that southern town that changed the trajectory of my life when they took me, a broken and displaced child, into their arms and proceeded to love me to Jesus.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think any of those people at Rose Hill Baptist Church thought about what they were doing as social justice. They just were doing as they were commanded to do in James 1:27.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrue religion, the kind that is pure and faultless before God the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their difficulties and to keep the world from contaminating us.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Justice isn\u2019t a by-product of our faith. It is the hands and feet and eyes and heart of faith.<\/p>\n

Without justice, all any of us are is loud-mouths.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot fix the world through justice, but we can change it,\u201d said Pastor Ken Wystma.<\/p>\n

Amen. Amen. Amen.<\/p>\n

Karen Spears Zacharias is the author of A Silence of Mockingbirds: The memoir of a murder<\/em>. April, 2012 MacAdamCage.com. She can be reached via Twitter @karenzach<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Karen w\/Wendy Grisham <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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