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It was another interesting night downtown. I continue to think and pray about how to be present more thickly as a congregation with the congregation that has grown there in the past years -- in the Salvation Army and, more recently, on the streets. I noticed a building for rent right across from the library (away from the Gas Lamp district). I can't help thinking of the information that Stan Ingersol gave last year that Phineas Bresee, the founder of the Church of the Nazarene in LA, left a mission to plant a congregation because the poor need a congregation more than a specifized mission. I think that is so. It could serve as a place to care for those who have drunk themselves into unconsciousness.

But, besides all that, I was struck tonight by Sean -- a man that Gaelan Gilbert brought to me. Sean desparately needed prayer because he had "hurt" a man last night -- beaten him up and left him in the hospital. Sean was in tears of remorse. He dropped on his knees in front of me, begging me to pray for him for forgiveness as the tears can through his less-than-completely-sober eyes.

We prayed and I absolved him of his sins and blessed him. We talked about his anger, and the fits of rage. He showed me the cigarette burns that he has afflicted on his skin to deal with the psychic pain. He explained that he had not always been this way; but he had served four different tours in the military. He talked to me about how his best friend shoved him out of the way and then was blown up by the mine. He knows the language of post traumatic stress syndrome. Whatever was there before hand, his participation in recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has left him guilty, violent, pained, and isolated. He spoke how he feels the rage rising in him; I gave him a different option of walking -- and we walked around the block. You could feel the anxiety drain from him.

Pray for Sean and all those like him. We knew when the Bush administration conducted the war and the rules of engagement in Iraq that we would encounter those like Sean. The same will happen by the expansion of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These are the living victims of war -- them and those who they victimize, like the elderly man that Sean accosted last night.

War and poverty and alcoholism and dissolution of families and ability to sustain relationships necessary to flourish in life as God's desires -- they are deeply related. The sins of the fathers will be passed onto the generations of those that follow. While the news only speaks of Iraq with the new levels of violence that have arisen, the tragic malformation of human lives, May God hear our prayers for Sean -- and Sean's prayers themselves.

Posted by johnwright at 9:33 PM | Comments (46)

Summer rhythms slowly unfold. I finished grading last Friday except for odds and ends (euphanisms for late work that I'm much too nice in accepting). Kathy and Tasha are in Chicago, looking after four young nephews while her sister and husband take a vacation. Now is the time to get up on the reading and start writing. Sabbatical draweth nigh!

I got thinking the other day that I've recently had the unusual (for me) opportunity to read several manuscripts of upcoming books. This is a profound honor and gift. I'd like to list and briefly comment on them:

(1) Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child. Eerdmans this fall. I had the opportunity to visit with Professor Hauerwas a couple weeks ago to receive his wisdom for a reader on theology and the university. Last fall he sent me an electric copy of his up-coming memoir as background for the interviews upon which I am still working and he is now revising the manuscript. I think that this will be one of Professor Hauerwas' most important works -- if not his most important. There is irony in Hauerwas writing a memoir in light of his theological emphases; but when one reads the work, one cannot but give thanks to God that God made Stanley a theologian because he couldn't get "saved." It has a poetic quality, a flowing prose,a dramatic story-line, Stan's straight forward honesty. It will demand a wide audience, and rank with noted spiritual biographies.

(2) Conor Cunningham, Evolution. Eerdmans. I have not seen the whole manuscript as it is not quite completed yet --- though he is entering indices stage. Conor's work shows a mastery of contemporary evolutionary theory and philosophical and theological insight. He shows how the "evolutionary positivists" and the Intelligent Design make claims far beyond the data. It is a surprising and profound treatment of the theological interpretation of evolutionary theory in line with orthodox Christian claims about God and creation. I look forward to reading the whole manuscript soon!

(3) D. Stephen Long. Speaking of God. Eerdmans (now overdue for publication!). If Steve engaged "God and goodness" in The Goodness of God, he now engages the issues of God and truth. The issue of the sense of the language about God, so prominent in the 60s and 70s has become sublimated in recent discourse as the issue shifted to theological method in the 70s and 80s. Steve here is at his theological best. He brings together the insights of the "postliberals," the "communio" catholics, the "Hauerwasians," radical orthodoxy, and Charles Taylor in a clear treatment about how we might speak well of God. I think that this is an extremely important work. We will read it in my summer class on "Apathei and Aseity as Names for the biblical God."

(4) James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Eerdmans, August release date. This is volume one in a three volume set by Jamie on :"Cultural Liturgies." Jamie continues his unbelievable productivity. I was asked by my friend, Todd Ream of the Honor's College at Indiana Wesleyan to participate in a forum on the book in Christian Scholars Review -- which I made progress on today. Jamie takes on Christian education. He places a "worldview" understanding of the Christian university within the deeper context of pre-rational embodied human desires. Christian worship, therefore, becomes the essential matrix for understanding Christian education as formation, not merely the impartation of information. I am hopeful that this work will inspire Christian universities to understand why it is that we have the ability to educate more thickly and truthfully than secularized, state and private, institutions. Another very important work.

(5) Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetities: A Theological Grammar. Catholic University Press, released in August. When visiting Duke, Professor Hauerwas lent me the manuscript of this work and I devoured it. He investigates the difference of intellectual appetites as understood in the pre-modern period, the difference between "curiosity" and "studiousness" as the vice and virtue for intellectual desire. He shows how Christians provide a much richer rationale for the intellectual life than those in the West who seek to learn in order to dominate or control. An absolutely beautiful book that reappropriates the Augustinian Thomistic tradition for understanding God and the world around us -- and ourselves.

One of the wonderful things about these works is their accessibility. Particularly the manuscripts by Hauerwas, Smith, and Griffiths are accessible to a wide audience. Bon appetit!

Posted by johnwright at 7:18 PM | Comments (16)

The last four weeks have proven very full. We finished the end of the church year; began a new one. Honors projects defended; final papers and exams given. I'm still working my way through them. Also entailed was a quick trip to Durham, North Carolina, and a few days with Stan Hauerwas who advised me on contents of a reader on theology and the university. Kathy and Tasha left today for eight days in Chicago, to care for four young nephews of Kathy's sister while the parents escape for a vacation. All in all, life has been full.

Soon I hope to have grading completed -- tomorrow? Until then I wanted to post my annual report from the church. Your observations and comments are welcome. When grading is done, summer leading into sabbatical begins!!!

May 3, 2009

Dear Friends and Members:

As we look back over the last year, we can see that we have remained committed to our mission to preach the gospel, celebrate the sacraments, and to minister with and among the poor. Our work in this world finds – and must find --its end in God. Our mission arises from the depth of the historic witness of the church catholic, grounded in God’s own revelation in Christ as witnessed to in the Scriptures by the Holy Spirit. We are a pilgrim people, moving through this world from God, through God, and to God.

God has continued to surprise us, to stretch us, to see if God may make us adequate to our task amid the “Great Recession” that has struck the world. Who could have anticipated that God would call upon us to distribute 60-70 tons of food and supplies a month to persons and families in need, up to over 1700 a week? Who could have imagined that tent cities would form outside the Salvation Army downtown, and that we would find new friends there? Who could have expected that a Swahili language congregation would emerge among us from the violence of the Congo? Who could have guessed that donated fiberglass reinforced concrete would emerge amid the parking lot, broken from the weight of the trucks moving across it?
Of course, such work has not “just happened” nor has it left any of us who have become immersed in the work unchanged. It reminds me that some Christian leaders have argued that the future of the church amid a progressively secularizing world – and church – will be found in “creative minorities”. Creativity has become a necessity – how else can one unload two ton containers without a working lift on the truck? The church board has not only overseen and supported the mission of the church, but has been personally involved in its hands on work. Bryan Poole, followed by Samantha From, as graduate interns have overseen the food distributions with grace, resolve, and wisdom without any compensation and at personal cost. Cody Ellis has overseen our Thursday distribution as a student intern with stature and wisdom. Jon Manning has taken over the San Diego Coalition for the Homeless’s “First Friday” distribution, working with and through and past government bureaucracy to change the tone and witness of this gathering of the neighborhood. Pastor Deron has become the “mortar” of the bricks of the work that has taken place in and through this place; the figurative air in the tires of the refrigerated truck as it loads and unloads the goods for distribution. We all owe Deron our thanks and support for his work with all the other congregational and multicongregation responsibilities that he bears. Pastor Kathy has remained profoundly faithful in her work, often unseen except in cyber communications that provide the organizational basis for our life together. Pastor Shawn, amid an at times grueling educational process, remains a blessing and uplift to us all merely by his presence. Eric Dorris has tracked our finances with integrity as God takes our loaves and fishes and multiplies them in ways that we often cannot understand.

This is not to say that challenges do not await us, or that we don’t need to exercise deeper care in certain areas of our mission. If we are creative, we are also very much a minority, not merely as Christians, but even among Christians in the focus of our task. We must remember that we are a minority, and continue to develop the creativity that comes with such status and sustain our unity. We cannot forget to call persons to join us through repentance and faith in God through Christ. As a pilgrim people, persons move continually through us at multiple levels of involvement. We cannot discount the importance that our fundamental existence and practices are institutional -- instituted by Jesus Christ through his institution of the church. We remain in an institutional flux that has often characterized our life as people move in, through, and beyond the congregation, both with greater demands upon us. We live in a culture that distrusts the church as an institution without thinking through the implications of that distrust for particular congregations. We need to encourage each other to move from exposure to our worship and practices to active participation to ownership of the way-station as part of our vowed community of care. Too often too much falls back upon Pastor Deron to ensure that we sustain our credibility to the neighborhood and others who have come to trust us. Reliability and constancy are necessary to sustain our witness to the world. We count on each other.
We need to renew our commitment to bible studies for our continual formation in the faith and mutual support, prayer, and love for each other – and to keep our end in God and life everlasting in God. Within a culture that exalts “personal freedom of choice and expression,” it seems demanding for commitment to both works of devotion and works of mercy – but we cannot have one without the other, nor can individuals decide which one they think most important for their own lives. Both are necessary to sustain our commitment as a pilgrim people vowed to care for this pilgrimage way-station over time, and to have God make us holy as individuals and a people in the process.

Finally financial constraints weigh at us. Perhaps I am not very good at begging, and you join me in the lack of this skill. After three months we have only begun to approach $3000 of the $9000 we need to replace the broken lift on the truck with one more adequate to the loads our work demands. We have somehow functioned this year with income nearly 25% below our budget – a budget that was based on the previous year’s income. Again we have learned to be creative to compensate for our lack of funding. God has blessed us in our poverty, and perhaps God will always keep us poor. The board has consistently committed our common good to the common mission of the church. The more that we have, the more we can give away to the poor in our congregation, in our multicongregation, in our neighborhood, and in our world.
What does the future hold? God knows. Perhaps it is deeper, more sustained presence downtown with the destitute, those that Dorothy Day called “the unworthy poor.” Perhaps it is with Pastor Anthony of the French-Speaking congregation finding ways to celebrate our unity with our sister congregations in Haiti. Perhaps it is in the formation of a vital multicongregational youth group that reaches into the teenagers of the neighborhood. Perhaps it is working across too long divided Reformation lines, finding a shared faith in Jesus Christ and practices with others that we had too long dismissed. Perhaps it is in finding ways to oversee the sick more effectively, both within our own congregation and others deprived of such care. Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be a surprise, for we have seen recently that God is a God of surprises – joyfully consistent with God’s revelation in times past!

Let us not grow weary of doing good. Let us continue and deepen our faith, hope, and love to God in Christ in our work in the congregation. Let us let the God of peace sanctify us holy that we might be found blameless in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is the One who calls us – He will do it!

Respectfully Submitted,

Rev. Dr. John W. Wright
Senior Pastor, English-Speaking Congregation
The Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City

Posted by johnwright at 12:25 PM | Comments (4)

Tuesday night was Bread of Life as usual. I have come to treasure our congregation that meets in the Salvation Army downtown. They are the most gracious group who has ever received my preaching. They have taught me the good news of the gospel that does not trivialize the difficulty of life or the fallenness of the world in a real and concrete way.

In the past several months I have also watched also a tent city has emerged on F Street on 8th Street. I noticed its growth correlated with the dropping numbers at our food distribution – people leaving/forced out of housing as the Great Recession. What began as three tents, two weeks ago grew to eighteen tents. I was thankful that the city did not force people away – though they delayed when the tents could be built until 9:00 pm. It is okay to be poor as long as one is not visible.

A month ago I began spending some time on the street as the “neighborhood” grew. I was told that we could best accompany them with sandwiches and fluids. We have had adequate bread recently and access to lunch meat to make the sandwiches. The past three weeks we have distributed around 100 sandwiches and 16-20 ounces of drinks to persons who have build this neighborhood. Last week a conflict ensued to distribute excess food and drink, so we needed more presence to hand out the materials and tighten our distribution system so as not to cause conflict and upset the fragile equilibrium that the neighborhood had established. Each night the tents went up; each morning, by 6:00 am, the police come by with the wake-up call, the tents come down, the people clean up the area, and the day proceeds. Their presence has also opened up parking spaces as others fear of the “homeless” kept the spaces unoccupied!!!

As I pulled up yesterday, I saw what I feared had happened – the tents were gone. Carole was waiting for me to tell me the events. The FBI had sent four agents to clear out the area! (I heard that they were very gracious in asking people to leave), and move people to another side of another building that is more invisible. As I learned more about the situation, the technicalities of the situation emerged – those on the streets know the law. They had taken up residence around the post office and library -- federal, not city property. The cities jurisdiction was limited over the space and they did not have authority to move people off the property. Evidently what happened was eventually the “feds” were called, and without enthusiasm they asked the “tent city” to move farther from the tourist Gas Lamp district to a less accessible side.

As we were winding up, I was told by one of the members of the community that one man who had received a sandwich was laying on the side walk in his own urine across the street behind the post office. I walked to check on him. It was a person whom I had gotten to know earlier, Richard – a 60ish year old man. He had taken in much alcohol. I looked at his breathing; it seemed steady, and went to move him to a more comfortable position on the hard concrete. He barely stirred, groaned a little, and then sunk back into his drunken stupor. One of his friends walked by and suggested that I call 9-1-1 and tell them I was a pastor. I thought the police would arrive and take him to “sleep it off.” Instead an ambulance arrived. The EMT’s were male, in their 20s-early 30s, very professional and prompt; one was white, the other African-American.

I asked what would happen to Richard. The white EMT said that they would take him to the hospital; he would be examined, treated, and released and then “we will pick him up again tomorrow night – we pick this man up all the time. There are 200 hundred just like him a couple of blocks over” – one could hear the moral disgust in his voice. The African American man remained quiet. They loaded Richard and took off.

I’ve reflected on this experience in light of the moral options provided by liberal political theory. The “right” would insist upon the moral responsibility of Richard; leave him on the streets to suffer the consequences of his addictions. The “left” would say that it is the state’s responsibility to care for him in his addictions to provide opportunities for future choices. Both presuppose a “buffered self” – Richard’s good is seen in terms of his “freedom” – his choice to live as he wants, even if it is in his own self-medication via alcohol. The right looks to keep such a freedom and its consequences tied together; the left to keep the option of freedom through ameliorating the consequences. In the process the expenses for Richard’s care in a stretched medical system show that his self is anything but buffered – as experience by those who wait in the hospital waiting room for 6-8 hours for treatment as the doctors.

I know Richard a little, not well. He can be a gracious, kind man. He obviously has fallen into alcoholism that have stolen his freedom – defined negatively as the ability to chose his own good and positively as defined as his ability to do what is genuinely good. Ironically both the moral choices of treatment leave him as buffered, alone, isolated – most likely what is at the basis, with other traumas as a result of both his choices and his circumstances, of his self-medication. The practices of both the right and left, the two sides arising from liberal political theory, reflect the same philosophical anthropology, perpetuates the very struggles that it seeks to solve in Richard’s situation.

Wednesday morning I came into school trying to process the evening – FBI, Richard, the EMTs, my own moral responses. I talked to Mark Wright who asked, “What is a Christian response?” I stuttered, stammered, drooled a little. Then I thought of the Missionaries of Charity. I said, “How about the church getting gurneys and picking up those passed out due to alcohol downtown and taking them to a place where they could have some medical oversight, a clean place to sleep, wash and dry their cloths, give them breakfast. Get someone there to listen and write their biographies – give them a history as human persons made in the image of God. And then release them again for the day. If we have to pick them up night after night, so be it. Let them know the unmerited, unending love that God is as seen in Jesus even as the “unworthy poor”. Of course, we all would have to learn some medical skills and would need person committed to the task as vowed members to show God’s unmerited charity. In the process we could relieve some of the stress on an already over-stressed urban medical system.

I don’t know if this is an idle dream or even possible. I have no idea of the implications or unintended consequences of such an endeavor. Yet it seems to me that the Missionaries of Charity provide a model within India for those who are the most outcast in our culture – the abjectly poor, urban drunk in an unconscious, alcohol-induced stupor – the epitome of the “unworthy poor.” Christ was there in the weak, stupor, groaning body of Richard; it seems that the church should be there as well, not merely to make him “worthy” but to model the love of Christ who while we were yet sinners, died for us. Maybe it would even provide an opportunity for a genuine freedom for Richard to show and become who he really is - - a human person created in the image of God, one for whom Christ died, and whom the Spirit calls back to God the Father through the Son.

Posted by johnwright at 7:06 PM | Comments (1)