Faith In Community
Lessons Learned in the Work for Justice and Compassion: 1969-2000
II. The Importance of "How" in Working For Justice
GBM has been taught by some of the most talented and gifted people in our community, most of them people struggling in very difficult circumstances and trying to both survive and transform the situation. Many of them initially came to GBM for some type of help. In the process, we have repeatedly learned that people have almost always already thought of nearly everything that anyone at GBM can think of. It is not a matter of thinking up a new answer. The question is how to help turn their ideas into reality.
Through the years, GBM has seen a pattern of how justice emerges and manifests itself in the process of addressing community problems. We put forward the following "marks of justice" in the hopes of nurturing our community's walk toward justice. Those marks include:
- Everything must be done in community;
- Those most directly affected by injustice set the agenda;
- There must be honest, accurate analysis of what keeps things the way they are and why;
- Movements toward justice require hard choices and risk-filled commitments.
1. Everything Must Be Done In Community
Americans often tend to look for extraordinary individuals as the answer to most problems. We seek stories about heroes. While the struggle for justice indeed produces great leaders, GBM has learned that individual leaders, no matter how gifted, are no substitute for an organized neighborhood or group committed to a vision of a better future. In fact, skilled leaders are people who focus on helping to organize and bring out the talents of others. Good leaders facilitate the emergence of a shared vision produced by a community of people and then help the group move toward that vision together utilizing the skills of everyone. This is the only road GBM has seen lead to lasting and sustainable work.
Acting in community rather than searching for a single, gifted leader is essential for very practical reasons as well. It is precisely the nature of poverty that it tends to isolate individuals and neighborhoods, keeping the poor without the
the ability to control what happens in their own neighborhoods or to direct the future of their neighborhoods. They lack the economic and social power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Without their own organizations, the poor as individuals are constantly vulnerable to being ignored or actively oppressed. Either way, they find their path to full participation in human life blocked and stifled.
In a market setting such as that of American society, GBM has learned that in the eyes of many systems, the poor are either invisible or they are viewed as a problem. On the one hand, systems oriented to a market setting simply assess the poor as people and neighborhoods of relatively little interest to the system because of their weakened economic position.
It is simply true that, generally speaking, the poor are not the preferred customers or partners of most systems and organizations built around profit and profitability. In the competition for investment, for example, an affluent neighborhood and its residents possess an enormous advantage over a poor one. The market, left to itself, will always prefer to deal with people with more money because the profit possibilities are greater. Markets are good at following economic potential since it promises the greatest profit. As a result, low-income people and their neighborhoods are often all but invisible to the systems and organizations that distribute services and opportunities.
When it comes to systems that do deal with the poor because of either economic or socially mandated reasons, the poor are regularly viewed as a problem to be managed. Such systems continually try to figure out ways to make the poor more compliant and responsive to the demands and requirements of the system in order to make it function more smoothly. The poor, almost by their very existence, are a problem for the system. The system tends to wish that the poor would simply go away--or at least allow it to go away from contact with them.
Very rarely do systems, whether governmental or those organized strictly for profit, actually step out into the lives of the poor themselves to see how the system itself needs to change in order to advance the well-being of the people they claim to serve. Rarely in any of our systems are the voices of low-income people included in the decision-making processes in any of our social institutions, when often they are the very people most directly affected by those decisions.
Changing systems and restoring health to a community's overall life require the uniting of all people with a stake in the issue, particularly those being most adversely affected by the current situation. That realization leads to community organizing, the hard and often slow work of bringing people together who have a stake in the situation and seeking to build community around a vision of a more holistic and just arrangement of decision-making and use of our God-given resources.
2. Those Most Directly Affected by Injustice Set the Agenda
The poor are people, not problems. Like all human beings, they are people with problems but they are not, as systems tend to assume, problems themselves. Since they are human beings, they should have the same right to have a say over decisions that affect their lives. This is made all the more urgent by the fact that their ability to defend or advance their interests is overshadowed by much more powerful groups and interests in the community. Justice requires that the poor be included in decisions and that they not be crowded out from the table because they are poor.
The only way that the poor can have this say is if they are at the table where decisions are made and discussions are held. But hard realities make it difficult for low-income people to be at the table of decision-making. First there is the obvious reluctance--if not outright hostility--that many non-poor people have toward including the poor in discussion and decision-making. The non-poor tend to view the poor as intellectually inferior and to think that those with the greatest economic power should make the decisions anyway. The poor are, wittingly or unwittingly, frequently assigned the place of beggars who should be happy with what they might get from the largesse of the powerful. Such a view finally turns the surviving vocabulary of charity into a defense of oppression itself.
In addition to the reluctance of the non-poor to include them, other forces make it difficult for the poor to make their voices heard. The daily grind of poverty eats up valuable human energy and adds to the barriers keeping the voices of the poor from reaching the places where decisions affecting their lives are made. Lack of transportation, difficult work shifts, lack of money, and lack of ongoing communication all make it hard for the poor to meet with each other, much less attend meetings and impact decisions outside their own neighborhoods.
These factors combine to leave the poor at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to organizations which reflect their interests and support their own efforts for economic advancement. These organizations usually have to built from scratch. The forces of the market will generally not create them, systems do not generally like them, and the non-poor will often be hostile to them. But if the poor are to be heard simply as human beings, organizations of their own interests and views must be created and sustained.
But precisely because their voices are the ones so seldom heard at the decision-making table, and because their well-being is so often the one in most jeopardy, their voices must heavily shape the strategies and the plans for the restoration of justice. Justice means that the poor have a place at the table alongside the most affluent, because all are equally human, no matter how many inequalities wealth or social standing may create. Movements toward justice must themselves embody this commitment if the larger community is to be expected to do the same.
This means that facilitating meetings among the poor is crucial work, but it is not easy. And this is why GBM has spent time trying to learn how to listen to the voices of poor people and to poor neighborhoods. GBM continually tries to shape its own work according to the vision of the poor rather than recruiting the poor to a vision GBM itself might create. GBM also spends as much time as possible supporting the creation of a vision by low-income people themselves and then bringing as much support as possible to its advancement. We see this as our truest form of service to the poor. For us, it defines what true help means. Help means assisting the poor in their own work as their wisdom leads them. GBM has sought to trust their wisdom as well.
Such a style of helping the poor by working alongside them in their own work requires patience and time. GBM has come to believe that time invested in facilitating meetings of the poor, building relationships with the larger community, and supporting the poor's efforts to formulate a vision and a strategy are among the most effective uses of resources that it has to offer. Time and people are the key words, because it takes time to nurture trusting relationships among people who have seen hard times, as well as supportive relationships with those who care but are not in such circumstances at the present time. Making sure the poor set the vision and the strategy in the midst of this process requires ongoing careful, ethical reflection.
GBM is convinced that movements toward justice require this level of respect for the wisdom of the oppressed and suffering. It is a difficult new walk for the non-poor in many cases. But it is the journey toward recovering the human community God created us to be.
3. Analyze the Social Arrangements of Power that keep the problem in place
GBM has learned that it is rarely an accident that "things are the way they are." "The way things are" usually reflects the way groups with economic and political power want them to be. Even the unjust situations that have been created mostly through community neglect produce situations favorable to the interests of some segments of the community, and it may be very difficult to convince those groups to think about joining efforts for change.
While we celebrate the successful individual in America, most of the non-poor are actually the beneficiaries of powerful groups, institutions and organizations that work on their behalf providing them with crucial advantages and opportunities. The average low-income neighborhood has to struggle to recruit virtually every employer, business and service provider to its location. Affluent neighborhoods have whole systems that market their area to all sorts of potential investors and economic interests. Again the advantage of already having money is a significant one in a market economy.
GBM has learned that to propose a change on behalf of the poor will inevitably lead to conflict with other interests who see the needs and vision of the poor as a potential threat to their own. This explains why it is often so difficult to keep a moral or faith-based vision alive when economic interests are at stake. It is one thing for us to affirm in our congregation that God will give us all that we need so we can share freely with others. It is still another to affirm it when proposals for change are made that impact our livelihoods. Even when convinced that there has been injustice, a fear of including others, such as the poor, can take hold in public and economic discussions. The struggle in our hearts for economic justice means that our faith has to overtake our fears and the accompanying tendency toward hoarding God's gifts.
These faith struggles are compounded in our society by the prevalence of the market as a central organizing concept. The market tracks economic potential and prizes efficiency expressed as profit. Working toward social justice has often been interpreted as outside the realm of market-based entities. It is viewed as a form of inefficiency when the goal is strictly profit.
The market is indeed a tremendous invention. It has done much good. But to worship the market to the point that the well-being of people disappears behind economic theory is to take the market and turn it into an idol. Markets are tools to enhance human life and to meet needs creatively. They are wrongly used when turned into a justification for relegating the poor into the status of economic non-entities. There is much work left to be done in turning the power of the market into a tool that benefits those with little or no economic purchasing power rather than leaving them on islands of poverty in a sea of prosperity.
Justice according to our Scriptures requires us all to analyze whose interests are served by current arrangements of power (political, economic, social), and then begin the hard work of communicating and sustaining a new vision that includes more people, particularly those most excluded.
4. Movements toward Justice Require Hard Choices and Commitments.
Anyone who has ever wanted to be a part of a movement toward justice knows that fear and its twin, self-righteousness, are constant. Without some answer to these dilemmas, all our best efforts--to build community, to listen to the voices of the poor and oppressed and to analyze the current arrangements of power in pursuit of reshaping them toward justice--will finally remain disembodied dreams. They will not have been a waste of time, but the moment in time that God faithfully gives such efforts--the kairos--will be wasted and lost if we do not give ourselves to living out the vision that the work of community building creates.
Of course, community itself--strong trusting relationships among people committed to a vision of justice--is itself one of the most powerful antidotes to fear and to the temptation to view others as enemies or as people deserving of self-righteous disdain.
This is also why GBM has always believed that the community-building process must be spiritually grounded. Justice is God's work, and while we are invited to join it, we never own it. It is not for humans to use as a weapon to humiliate others. It is meant to travel in step with community so that one form of exclusion will not simply be replaced with another.
GBM has learned that it takes great faith to believe in justice and to believe that God can not only overcome the odds against its realization but also win all sorts of human hearts and minds in the process. Yet GBM has learned that God does exactly those kinds of things. That knowledge is what keeps GBM alive, seeking to serve the mission of justice and compassion and striving to be true to the twin calling of courage and humility.
The history of GBM has been about learning the steps toward human justice and increasing the possibilities for expressing it in our community life, economically, politically, and personally. Our faith requires that justice be in all facets of our life as people and include all seven days of the week.
