This post is reprinted from Marion Be The Change, a community development and advocacy organization in Marion, IN “aimed at giving those living in poverty a voice, while seeking tangible solutions to improve their lives.” The organization focuses on talking seriously with those in poverty to hear their own stories and suggestions. Check out some other organizations doing similar work in our community development forum last November, and stay tuned for more posts from MBTC from time to time.
By Jessy Pearson
Imagine a community that is thriving. A community in which its members find purpose and passion in the city they live. Imagine a community where children are safe and healthy and are given opportunities to grow and develop into happy, productive leaders who want to stay in their hometown and enhance their community through their chosen career. Imagine driving down streets where children are playing in the yard with their parents and every child on the baseball field has someone in the stands cheering for them. Imagine a community where parents are able to spend the weekends with their children at a local zoo or museum. Imagine a community where young adults are not forgotten, but rather they are the focus of the community’s time and resources, because that community knows children are their greatest asset.
Imagine if that community was Marion, Indiana.
Kayla, a twenty-five year old mother of three, has lived in Marion her entire life. Kayla has personally experienced the other side of the vision described above. Kayla did not receive support she needed from her parents and her community. As a young adult Kayla was forgotten and quickly made choices that drastically shifted the trajectory of her life.
Kayla has one drug related charge from when she was eighteen. It was, by many standards, a minor offense. So why is this young woman, mother of three, still atoning for a mistake she made seven years ago? The consequences of her mistake affect every facet of her life. This mother continues to struggle to secure housing for herself and her children and safe and reliable day care. This woman is overlooked for jobs as soon as employers see the felony she discloses on her applications. This member of our community fights to create a balanced personal life amidst the demands of working seven days a week, fulfilling her probation obligations, and caring for her three young children.
In less than a year Kayla will finally be off of probation. Yet, this is only one piece of the puzzle for her. Kayla is still working to shift the direction of her life so that she does not take the same path as her mother. Kayla wants to be the mother to her children that she needed when she was a child. Kayla wants to be sober and healthy, able to provide her children stability, and she wants to be present physically and emotionally to meet their needs. Kayla cannot do this alone. No parent can. Parents need the support and resources of an entire community to rally behind them as they bear the responsibility of caring for our children, our future.
There was one key argument Kayla emphasized many times during our interview. She directed the spotlight on a fatal error that, had it been corrected many years ago, may have changed everything for her. The message was this:
Give our kids something to do. You can’t be mad at children walking the streets getting into trouble when they have nothing better to do. If children don’t have something to do, of course they will get in trouble. Give children something to do and see how their lives change.
Our community does offer many opportunities for our children but, as Kayla is finding as she raises her own children, those options diminish rapidly as our youth become teenagers and young adults. Our teens are in crisis, and the community is upset that they are getting trouble, yet our community offers very little for the teenagers to engage in. Younger children have sports clubs, dance, and kid-friendly activities. Kayla worries about her own children and her nieces and nephew. Kayla wants to know, “what about our teens, what can we do for them?”
It’s an important question. Kayla is especially concerned for children who have absent parents, a situation that is rampant in our community. Too many children are in a battle where they must fight drugs for their parent’s time and resources. Kayla was passionate about the need to engage the youth in our community and provide them support and opportunities in their hometown. Inevitably, there will be children who lack the support and guidance they need from their parents, but isn’t that the void that our community should be willing and able to fill? Even in idyllic parent-child relationships, youth need opportunities to grow and explore that extend past their families; they need the network of their community to capitalize what they have to offer.
Don’t we all want a community where mothers have the ability to not only financially support, but emotionally invest into their children? Don’t we want children to know that even if their parents are absent, they have a community to fall back on? If we know and agree that our children are in desperate need from parental guidance and support, why is there not more focus on creating ways opportunities for our parents and resources for our children? The answer to these questions could change everything for Kayla, because for Kayla the answer is “yes”. That’s the change that Kayla would like to see.
“The best anti-poverty program is a job,” said President Obama at the recent Poverty Summit at Georgetown University. Overwhelming response on Twitter pushed #PovertySummit to a national trending topic.
God created us to work. When we don’t work, we can’t flourish — much less eat and pay the rent. When people don’t work bad things happen.
“Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and for communities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment.”
But jobs are about more than economics. According to Jobs for Life, one our favorite organizations, nothing attacks one’s dignity like a lack of work. Lack of work tears at the fabric of society creating a vicious cycle of poverty—economically, spiritually, and emotionally. Joblessness contributes to …
Homelessness: Escape from homelessness is virtually impossible without a job.
Depression & Suicide: Unemployed people are two to four times as likely to commit suicide.
Domestic Violence: The rate of violence against women increases as male unemployment increases.
Divorce: Financial stress is a leading reason couple site as a cause of their divorce.
Recidivism: 67% of ex-offenders are re-arrested within 3 years of release from prison
Crime: Rising unemployment and falling wages are key contributors to the crime rate.
Many churches have entered the fight to break the cycle of poverty, however, most have invested in efforts to provide food, housing, and clothing—and at the bottom of the list is work. Jobs for Life suggests we flip the list.
Rather than advocate more assistance and handouts, Jobs for Life “equips the local Church to address the impact of joblessness through the dignity of work. By mobilizing a worldwide network of volunteers committed to applying biblically-based training and mentoring relationships, Jobs for Life helps those in need find dignity and purpose through meaningful work.”
See why this can make all the difference in this thought-provoking video from Jobs for Life.
Memphis Teacher Residency intern Starr Garrett teaching at Kingsbury Elementary, a Memphis public school. MTR participants live and work together in a yearlong internship, then commit to teach in Memphis’ underserved schools. Photo by Karen Pulfer Focht
They prepare for their mission by meeting regularly for more than a year in the basement of an old Baptist church in Midtown Memphis.
“America is not short on information about the gospel,” says David Montague, a lanky, laconic former missionary, to the several dozen young adults in the room. “It is short on demonstrations of the power of the gospel.”
Montague says he wants them to find ways to share the good news about the Bible and Jesus and the redemptive and sustaining power of the Holy Spirit. But he doesn’t want them to preach. He wants them to teach.
He wants them to think about curriculum and classroom management and the redemptive and sustaining power of a good lesson plan, to see teaching “as a vocational response to the gospel and the work of the church to glorify God by bringing justice to the poor and oppressed.”
That’s the mission of the Memphis Teacher Residency, Montague’s faith-based teacher training program that is seeking to transform low-performing schools in impoverished urban neighborhoods into bastions of academic excellence.
Like Teach For America, which also has a large presence in Memphis, MTR seeks to recruit, train and support outstanding and primarily young urban educators. What makes MTR different is its mission to do that “within a Christian context.”
“As a response to the Gospel mandate to love our neighbors as ourselves, MTR will provide students in partner low-income Memphis neighborhoods with the same, or better, quality of education as is available to any student in Memphis,” the organization proclaims.
MTR’s founders believe that academic achievement gaps are biblically unjust. That’s why Montague, who spent 15 years as a stockbroker, has spent the past five years brokering a deliberate but delicate reconciliation between church and state here in the classrooms of Memphis.
Across America, decades of official segregation led to official desegregation in the early 1970s, followed by decades of unofficial resegregation by race and class, often aided and abetted by faith-based private schools.
Today, the population of Memphis is about 62 percent black and 35 percent white. But enrollment in the city’s public schools is about 88 percent black and 8 percent white. Nearly half of the city’s public schools are 99 to 100 percent black, and more than 8 in 10 students in those schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
Montague is under no illusion that Christians who have rejected public schools for decades for whatever reasons are going to return en masse with their children. But he does believe in the biblical obligation to support “the least of these,” which in the context of education he sees as public schools in the most distressed neighborhoods.
“You don’t have to talk about the love and compassion and mercy of Christ to demonstrate it,” Montague said. “Becoming the best math teacher a kid’s ever had is a valid response to the gospel.”
Mission is what you do
Emily Vassar wants to serve God and Memphis by becoming the best math teacher any public school kid has ever had. That’s why the former youth minister joined the Memphis Teacher Residency.
Vassar, 35, grew up in nearby Manila, Arkansas, a small Delta town where she learned to love math and the Lord. She helped her high school math teacher with tutoring and lessons and thought about becoming a teacher herself. But she felt a call to ministry.
After graduating from Union University, a Southern Baptist school near Memphis, Vassar took a job as a youth minister in Seattle, Washington. Eventually, she began to wonder whether she was following the right call in the wrong setting.
Emily Vassar, an MTR graduate, is in her sixth year of teaching. A former youth minister, she decided she could serve Christ better as a teacher and applied to MTR in 2009.
“There’s nothing more important than the education of our kids, but I want to do it in a way that represents Christ, and I didn’t think I could do that in a public school setting,” said Vassar, MTR’s first applicant in 2009.
“When I was growing up,” she said, “a mission was about what you said, not what you did. MTR has shown me how I can represent Christ in a positive way, legally, responsibly and respectfully, rather than the old Bible-beating, ‘turn or burn’ approach we’ve all seen. Actions speak louder than words.”
Montague calls it a theology of work, noting that Jesus spent more time helping and healing others than just talking to them.
“You don’t have to talk about Jesus to be Jesus to people,” he said. Montague instructs MTR students that if they want to evangelize, they need to find another program.
“We can bring glory to God by the life we live,” he said. “We can do God’s work by flooding low-performing schools with potentially effective teachers who serve God by serving others.”
How do you shape imagination?
The Memphis Teacher Residency uses instruction, experience and community. How do you form employees and constituents?
Montague, 48, majored in finance at Southern Methodist University. He left the corporate world in 2000 to run a Memphis nonprofit ministry called Service Over Self, which helps repair and restore the homes of poor and elderly residents in the Binghampton neighborhood.
Montague joined Campus Crusade for Christ in 2006 and spent two years as a teaching missionary in China. He returned to Memphis in 2008 and began looking for a way to bring a mission focus to inner-city teaching. A year later, he launched MTR, a faith-based version of a national program called Urban Teacher Residency United.
MTR founder David Montague visits with children at Kingsbury Elementary.
MTR’s participants begin their service with a four-year training program set up like a medical residency. Residents serve a 12-month internship, earning $1,000 a month while studying for a master’s degree in urban education from Union University.
Under an agreement with the local school district, interns are paired with mentor teachers in a yearlong apprenticeship in a Memphis classroom. They spend four days each week in the classroom, then two days taking master’s-level classes in the church basement.
The large room, once a youth Sunday school classroom, is filled with folding tables, computer stations and smartboards. When they’re not taking classes or having group discussions with Montague and other MTR staff, the students use the room in the evenings and on weekends to study or socialize.
Each resident costs MTR $50,000, funds provided entirely by local philanthropists and foundations. Graduates continue to be mentored and coached by experienced teachers and MTR staff and to meet regularly for professional development.
In return, each promises to teach at least three years in one of 29 MTR partner schools, which are part of what they call a “feeder pattern.” The goal of sending MTR teachers to the feeder schools is to provide students with excellent teachers from kindergarten through high school.
MTR graduates are not guaranteed a job, even after a successful internship. But graduates have not found that to be a problem.
“We have never had anyone not hired,” Montague said. “In our contract, we state that if you make a good-faith effort at getting hired and cannot find a job, we do not hold you responsible for that year’s repayment. It’s a risk, but risk is always a part of Christian mission.”
That sense of mission makes all the difference for Robin Henderson, MTR’s director.
Teaching in large, urban systems “is too hard, too demanding not to have a sense of mission about it,” said Henderson, a former Indiana public school teacher and an ordained AME Church minister.
“You can’t just hand inner-city children education on a platter. You have to know the obstacles they face just getting to school every day. You have to know the real-world poverty and violence in their lives outside the classroom and the baggage they bring to the classroom. You have to see urban education as a calling.”
Being with others
Frank Jemison didn’t see urban education as a Christian mission and calling until his senior year at Duke University. He took a class called “Ethics in an Unjust World,” taught by Samuel Wells, then the dean of Duke University Chapel.
“The class was based around a short essay Dean Wells had written called ‘The Nazareth Manifesto,’” Jemison said. “The basic idea is that there are three primary ways to interact with people across major social, economic or racial barriers: we can work for, work with or be with.”
Wells observed that Jesus spent 30 years of his life being with others, three years of his life working with others and only one week of his life working for others.
“Dean Wells said that we should consider those percentages,” Jemison said. “I raised my hand and asked, ‘Well, we go to Duke. We have this great education, these skills and abilities. I mean, I see the importance of this “being with” stuff, but we don’t want to just throw this all away, do we?’
“Dean Wells smiled and said, ‘I can understand your dilemma. I mean, your skills really are truly impressive, but Jesus was the Son of God. So there’s that.’ I wanted to climb under the carpet. It was the most humbling and one of the most important moments of my life.”
Jemison, 27, is one of 132 MTR graduates since 2009. Of those, 125 are currently teaching in Memphis, all of them in urban schools, and all but five in public schools. That doesn’t include 60 interns in the 2014-15 class, including about 20 from AmeriCorps.
After five years, results are mixed but generally positive. MTR graduates are performing as well as their better-known Teach For America colleagues.
For several years in a row, MTR (and TFA) “have consistently produced teachers that are outperforming … other teachers in the state,” according to a 2014 report by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.
Yolunda Bass is an instructional coach and mentor for the Memphis Teacher Residency program. She observes teachers and provides feedback and support.
Student test scores for MTR teachers are generally higher than other teachers statewide in high school subjects — although generally lower in middle school reading and social studies.
Montague believes that the key to MTR’s high retention rate and long-term success will be its partnerships with other faith-based nonprofits.
“This isn’t just about training effective teachers,” Montague said. “This is about restoring communities by building relationships. Education is just one piece in the restoration of a neighborhood.”
He referred to the “creation mandate” in Genesis 1:28.
“God began the work of creation, but he tasked the people called the church to continue the work of creation,” he said. “Christians are not called to run away from dysfunction; they’re called to run into it and bring peace, love, joy, integrity and harmony.”
Jemison, who graduated from Duke in 2010 with a major in public policy, said he was drawn to MTR’s community-building approach to teaching. After his MTR internship year in 2011, he got a job teaching third-grade math at Cornerstone Prep.
The charter school is in the same Binghampton neighborhood where Montague led Service Over Self. It’s also home to two other large and influential nonprofits, the Binghampton Development Corporation, led by Montague’s brother, Robert, and Christ Community Health Services.
“MTR only goes into neighborhoods where there are already community development programs with which we can partner, because education is only one piece of the puzzle,” Jemison said.
“If a neighborhood has a great school but poor housing, no health care, no healthy food, no jobs, no transportation, that great school isn’t going to make that much of a difference,” he said. “That is why it has to happen in the larger community-development context.”
Living and teaching together
Kathryn McRitchie, who joined MTR as a teaching coach in 2011, was drawn to the organization’s community building in another way. After graduating from college in 2003, she came home to Memphis and taught for a year in a high-achieving middle school.
She felt unprepared and isolated.
“I was also frustrated with how hard it was to motivate students, as well as to meet their range of needs,” she said.
Her experience as a new teacher made her appreciate the MTR approach. MTR students are never alone. During their first year in the program, all MTR interns live in a 1950s-vintage dormlike apartment complex that also provides housing for Christian Brothers University next door.
MTR students study together, worship together and socialize together at nearby coffeehouses, parks and music halls. They write lesson plans with each other and pray for each other.
“Our students develop deep friendships and celebrate the victories and defeats of becoming teachers,” said McRitchie.
“Just this week, the wife of an MTR graduate and mentor had a baby. Within 24 hours, members of three different MTR cohorts visited and served the growing family, not because MTR mandated it, but because they just plain love each other.”
MTR interns and graduates also teach together, clustered within the 29 partner elementary, middle and high schools that serve six of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods — Alcy Ball, Binghampton, Frayser, Graham Heights (Kingsbury), Mitchell Heights and Orange Mound.
Montague and other MTR leaders have developed good working relationships with the principals in those neighborhoods.
David Montague and Yolunda Bass observe MTR interns at work in the classroom.
Berclair Elementary School is in the Graham Heights area, one of the most diverse schools and neighborhoods in the city. Six in 10 Berclair students speak English as a second language. Nine in 10 get a free lunch.
“This is a very challenging environment for even the most experienced teachers,” said Principal Sam Shaw. This school year, Shaw is employing three MTR graduates and five interns. Students of one 5th-grade MTR teacher posted the highest test score gains in the school.
“They have a remarkable support system,” Shaw said. “Their students have great test scores. And they have something you can’t buy: Passion. They aren’t just working to pay off student loans. They are committed to urban education and passionate about this being their mission.”
MTR leaders say it’s too soon to know how much impact the program is having in distressed neighborhoods such as Kingsbury and Binghampton.
“I believe MTR has this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform education one school and one feeder pattern at a time,” Montague said.
“And in doing so, we have the opportunity and potential to transform and redeem public education in Memphis for God’s glory,” he said. “And in doing this work we wish to show that God is real and powerful and faithful to his promises to those in need.”
Vassar believes it, too. She’s now in her sixth year of teaching algebra at Kingsbury High School, one of the city’s most diverse schools. It’s the same school where she served her internship. Not long ago, she bought a house in the neighborhood.
“My biggest fear about teaching in Memphis was wondering how I was going to relate to these urban kids. I’m just a country girl,” Vassar said. “It turns out, kids are just kids. Now I can’t imagine doing anything else anywhere else.”
Questions to consider:
The Memphis Teacher Residency program combines theory, practice and support. How do you form your employees and constituents? Does your approach include instruction, experience and community?
MTR is dedicated to training teachers who are excellent and can have an immediate impact. Does your organization demand excellence from the people who carry out its mission? How do you measure it?
Community, in the form of mentors and peers, is a key part of MTR’s teacher formation. How could you foster community among people you are teaching and training?
MTR’s leaders believe teaching is a vocational response to the gospel. How do you equip your community members to identify and live out their vocations?
People who want to help low-income communities should see them as “half-full glasses” — places with strengths and capacities that can be built upon, says the co-developer of the asset-based community development strategy.
Most people and institutions that want to serve poor communities are focused on what the residents lack. “What are the needs?” is often the first question asked.John McKnight says that approach has it backward.
“I knew from being a neighborhood organizer that you could never change people or neighborhoods with the basic proposition that what we need to do is fix them,” he said. “What made for change was communities that believed they had capacities, skills, abilities and could create power when they came together in a community.”
McKnight is co-director of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute and professor emeritus of communications studies and education and social policy at Northwestern University.
McKnight also wrote “The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits” and, with co-author Peter Block, “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.”
McKnight spoke to Faith & Leadership about asset-based community development and the role the church can play in helping people identify and leverage their strengths to empower their communities. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What is asset-based community development?
Our most common metaphor is a glass with water up to the middle. Is the glass half-full or half-empty? In our time, particularly in terms of cities and lower-income people, the institutions — including almost all the churches — look at those neighborhoods and they focus on the empty half of the glass.
They call the empty half “needs.” These people are needy, or they’re needy neighborhoods, right? That is the beginning point of almost all responses by institutions to lower-income and minority neighborhoods. This was something that I experienced in my life as a neighborhood organizer before I came to the university.
If you’re a neighborhood organizer, you have to start with the belief that the people here have capacities and abilities and that if they come together in a community organization, they can be powerful.
I knew from being a neighborhood organizer that you could never change people or neighborhoods with the basic proposition that what we need to do is fix them.
What made for change was communities that believed they had capacities, skills, abilities and could create power when they came together in a community — that that’s how change happens.
I’ve never seen a low-income neighborhood that really changed because they finally got enough health, human service, religious or government agencies fixing them. That doesn’t work. It may make life more tolerable for individuals, but it doesn’t change communities.
Asset-based community development is a phrase for the resources that exist in communities where people don’t seem to have a lot of money.
What we were doing was identifying the resources that are there, and we called those resources “assets,” so that we could say, “If you want to know what is in a neighborhood — not what’s wrong, not what are the problems, not what are the needs, but what are the problem-solving resources in a neighborhood — those are assets.”
You have to start with what you have before you know what you need. Institutions can be helpful, but always in the second stage of a community’s life. The first stage has to be, “What do we have, and what can we do with it?”
The second stage is, “What can outside institutions do in addition to what we can do?”
Helping institutions that are focused on needs teach people in the neighborhood, “What you need to do is start with a needs survey. We don’t care at all how many of you can do carpentry; what we want to know is how many of you have bad eyes.”
But because institutions are so powerful and have so much money, they create a culture of neediness.
That’s the basic proposition of our work. We published a workbook called “Building Communities From the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.” It has become the alternative to the world of helping through a needs focus.
Institutions that are helpful provide support or incentives for local people to focus on what resources they have, and that particular neighborhood has, and how they can be connected, to begin to make the people feel they are producers rather than clients.
That’s the great shift that we’re trying to focus on — that the real issue of having empowerment is whether you are a producer or a client.
Q: What role can churches and church institutions play?
I would say that there is more recognition of the full half in the church field than there is in the health, human service, government fields.
You can see churches that are attempting to manifest themselves as neighbors rather than saviors. There are church leaders who understand that the guiding Christian principle is friendship, not service. It’s those people who I think are the light of the world.
If I were saying something to church people, I would say, “Go spend time with people who have friendly churches, who are part of a neighborhood rather than serving the neighborhood, who are as enhanced by the relationship with the people and the place as they are part of enhancing that place and people.”
In our book, there’s a chapter on churches that has a series of examples of what churches do when they are friendly rather than serving. I’d be much harder pressed to find that kind of thing in the other helping fields, so we recognize the churches for positive examples in the book.
That’s another asset-based understanding — that in anything to be done, the question is, “Who produces it?” Not, “Who do we consult; who do we have as advisors; who do we allow to be our shadow assistants?” but, “Who’s the producer?”
So when we look at anything, the question we ask is, of the outcome, “Who’s the producer?” If the institution did it all, you have put another foundation stone in the dependency system.
There’s this idea, which really has grown hugely in my lifetime, that somehow if you surround people with enough services, that’s what makes a good life. What makes a good life is being surrounded by friends who are mutually productive with you so that you have greatly diminished the services you need or use.
Q: So you’re not just talking about poor people, then. You’re talking also about …
Anybody. I meant that; we started out doing the research in low-income neighborhoods, but it’s true every place. This understanding is manifested now in ABCD Europe. There’s Global South ABCD. There’s a Pacific Rim ABCD. So it’s something that crosses cultural boundaries.
Q: What made you think of this? How did you come to think differently from other people about this core issue?
Why did I think of it? I know why I thought of it. If you’re a neighborhood organizer — I was an organizer in neighborhoods in the [Saul] Alinsky tradition — to get something done, you’ve got to see that people have integrity, productivity, capacities and that if you put them together, if you connect them, that they will multiply in their power to be productive and to deal with outside institutions.
You can’t organize people by saying, “I’m here because you’re a poor, pitiful soul,” right? “God, you’ve had a bad life, and I feel sorry for you. I feel compassion for you.” That would never organize people.
If I’m a doctor, the proof of my effectiveness is I served 1,000 people this year. I did something about their empty half. That’s fine. I go to a doctor; it’s a noble profession. But as a neighborhood organizer, you’ve got to be a full-half person, not an empty-half person.
Then, when I was about 40, Northwestern University asked me to come there and help them start an urban research center. Everybody else was an academic, but they felt they had to have somebody who had been really active in the city, in Chicago, so they invited me to come and they made me a professor.
It’s 1969 and the cities are burning, and all the institutions say, “My God, we’d better do something, finally, about these people.”
So I entered that world and found that the research being done about neighborhoods was all about what was wrong — needs surveys. The policies that were developed were developed on the premise that needs were met by institutions and if you strengthened and enhanced institutions, then everything would be OK.
I personally was insulted by what I found, because I could tell that these were not the people I knew, that I had organized, that were my friends.
I thought if I could bring anything to this place, it would be to see if you could get them to consider the possibility that these people were not broken and needy problems but they were people like them who had problems and assets.
So we got a grant and we collected about 3,000 stories of what people had done with the resources they have, from cities all across North America, in lower-income neighborhoods.
That’s what “Building Communities From the Inside Out” is. It has had influence on quite a few institutions of all kinds — on some churches, on some governments, on some social service agencies, on people in the public health field, and some people in business, even.
Q: Were you motivated by your own faith as a Christian to pursue this work?
I would say it’s one part. I’m a loosely Episcopal person, but the current things you see on the website are the result of a lifetime of previous activities, and beliefs coming from my family.
On the McKnight side of my family, the people are all Reformed Presbyterians. They’d be called, among themselves, Covenanters. In general, they didn’t buy into most of the propositions of modern society.
Underlying most of what they tended to believe was a proposition that you couldn’t trust institutions, so I was raised in that context with a belief that in general, communities of faith were trustworthy but most institutions weren’t. The outside world was generally on the wrong track.
My Covenanter grandfather was a minister. I remember his telling me very frequently, “John, if the majority of people agree with you, you must be wrong.” That sort of sums it up.
Q: Why is it so difficult to change the thinking about communities?
It’s very clear that we have a service economy, right? The majority of our people don’t produce goods; they produce services. If I say to the service provider, “You know, if people were organized at the local level and able to identify and mobilize their own resources, they’d need you half as much,” what do you think people would think about that?
Because that’s what’s the problem. I wrote another book called “The Careless Society,” which is a series of articles which have as their basic point that we serve more and care less — that service has replaced care, that clienthood has replaced citizenship, that productivity has been greatly diminished by dependency.
Q: A lot of what you talk about seems to be based on hope and respect. You haven’t used those words, but that’s what I hear coming through.
Yes. I like the way you’re putting it. Respect I would put way up at the top, because I’d say respect and trust are the bedrock of friendship. Now, hope — I like that, too, but I don’t normally think in those terms. My highest value isn’t hope. It’s friendship.
Faith, Work, and #Ferguson: An Opportunity for Us: Vincent Bacote outlines how the faith and work movement could respond to the broken systems that contributed to the recent events in Ferguson, Mo.
Reframe Your Life: Here’s How: Information on a new curriculum about connecting faith to daily life, produced by the Washington Institute for Faith, Culture, and Vocation in cooperation with Regent College. You can read even more about it in these other posts on the topic.
Does Blue-Collar Work Have Any Meaning?: Former pastor and factory worker Larry Saunders on why he couldn’t feel fulfilled on the factory floor despite following all the precepts he preached to his congregation.
Faith and Work Movement, Heal Thyself: Chris Armstrong talks about how consumerism in the American church has disconnected us from any real efforts to transform the culture.
Our Twitter handle for the Patheos Faith and Work Channel has changed: the channel now tweets under @PatheosFthWork. Same great content, better reflection of the fact that “MISSION:WORK” is just one of the great blogs on the channel.
By Jessy Pearson
McKnight is co-director of the 
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