Community development

Review: Bring Back Your People

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Cover image of "Bring Back Your People" by Aaron Scott

Bring Back Your People, Aaron Scott. Broadleaf Books (ISBN: 9781506494555) 2025.

Summary: A blunt discussion of how to reach out to those who have embraced Christian nationalism.

You might know “Randy.” He (or she, in this case Brandy) may be a sibling or relative. Maybe a next door neighbor. Or it could be your auto mechanic, or hair dresser, or a favorite waitstaff at a restaurant you frequent. Randy embraces ideas of American greatness, often coated with an icing of Christianity. As I write, Randy is probably in hog heaven. And you may be dismayed and wondering where do you go from here.

Aaron Scott has worked with a lot of Randys in his ministry. He helped start a church among the rural poor on coastal Washington State, many of whom have been attracted by Christian nationalism. He offers a blunt, plain-spoken ten-step guidebook to talking with the Randys in our lives. He begins by discussing the tenets of Christian nationalism and why they attracted Randy. Often it came down to someone talking to Randy and caring about him and offering a vision and ground game of how his life and community could be better. And sadly, more progressive folk probably never did.

That’s the starting place: talking to Randy and caring about his life. Sometimes, that means getting past the things that get under your skin to see the person and taking time to really listen. Scott also takes a deep dive into American history and how white supremacy, nationalism, and white evangelicalism have sadly walked together. Randy may well be where he is because a church embracing Christian nationalist ideas has taken him in and provided a place of belonging. Many progressive folk have nothing nearly as compelling to offer.

Scott shows how so much of the political rhetoric of both parties tries to recruit the poor while preserving the wealth of a tiny number. He believes the answer is mobilizing a people’s movement that calls both to account. He also recognizes this could be emotionally and physically dangerous. He discusses honestly assessing these to navigate both safely and strategically. He also argues that progressives need a religious strategy. Spirituality matters to Randy, yet progressives often shun it like the plague. All of this so that you can offer Randy a new home, one speaking compellingly into the real-life issues of one’s own community. He argues that we have to stop blaming people and “pledge allegiance to the bottom.”

In sum, Scott seeks to rally the church, not to the cause of American greatness, but to the 140 million poor in our country. He offers a bracing call to get to work. Christian nationalism has succeeded by relentless organizing that has extended into poor communities. Yet they are not delivering for the poor, an opportunity to “bring back” people like Randy. But it means talking to Randy, organizing to reach and serve Randy, and taking Randy seriously rather than dismissively.

As I mentioned, Scott speaks bluntly. His writing is laced with profanity (but that’s often the language Randy uses). While progressive both theologically and politically, he is critical of the abandonment of the rural poor by many progressives. His approach is one that goes beyond the church truly being the church to community and political organizing. It doesn’t strike me as an approach to healing the divides but rather of outdoing the opposition. I’m not sure I agree with that but Scott makes me ask hard questions about how we are caring for the Randys in our lives.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.

Review: Tending Tomorrow

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Cover image of "Tending Tomorrow" by Leah Reesor-Keller

Tending Tomorrow, Leah Reesor-Keller. Herald Press (ISBN: 9781513813356) 2024.

Summary: Facing an uncertain ecological future by drawing on one’s faith and learning from creation, to re-vision how we may live.

Many of us are convinced that our warming earth poses a threat to the flourishing of life on our planet. More deeply troubling is the awareness that our own patterns of consuming earth’s resources are a causative factor. In fact, that influence is so decided that scientists have named our epoch in global natural history the Anthropocene.

I’m a Christian who believes God loves his creation but observes a world responding inadequately to the threat. The question then arises of how then should we live into an uncertain ecological future without giving way to despair. Christians are people of hope. Leah Reesor-Keller wrestles with these questions in Tending Tomorrow. Her response to the uncertain future is to dig into the roots of her faith in five “thematic actions”: redreaming, retelling, renewing, reimagining, and rewilding.

Redreaming involves re-examining one’s religious and cultural roots and is foundational to the author’s project. It means recognizing the things worth embracing and the harmful trajectories it is time to re-direct, all with an eye toward what we would hope for the world in 2100. This leads to looking at our origin stories. The author illustrates with the story of her Mennonite family and how they settled in Canada. She learned that it was a story of colonization. A future might involve acknowledging that Indigenous presence and drawing upon Indigenous wisdom rather than dominionist theology for how one lives on the land.

Then renewing involves reflecting on how one has found hope in past challenges and suffering. One lesson in hope is that we don’t need to see all the steps to the end but just the next ones. Likewise, we nurture hope in community by continuing to show up for each other.

But the “re” word Reesor-Keller gives the greatest attention is reimagining. She begins with reimagining leadership, not as the hero leading the charge, but as an interconnected network of people. This is exemplified in the interconnected character of forests. She recognizes that the flow of power is always a reality of leadership in community. She describes her own leadership and use of Power Mapping to empower marginalized community voices. Then she turns to re-imagining accountability and repairing harm, both within the community, and in the wider Canadian culture with Indigenous people. Finally, she returns to Anabaptist roots to reimagine church communities as people movements rather than institutions.

As she concludes, Reesor-Keller meditates on re-wilding her yard and is reminded that such a project can go in a number of directions. Re-visioning the future has no singular outcome. Rather, we strive to create a flourishing space for many visions while taking the next steps we need to take.

The approach to this book was far more holistic than I expected. The author addresses our origin stories, our blind spots, marginalized people, redemptive community, as well as our care for creation. But in doing so, she shows us her understanding of what it is to be the church in the world. This both addresses our crisis of hope and vision and needs for culture change. She offers no silver bullets. But she offers a vision of how we might live into the uncertain future.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Plundered

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Cover image of 'Plundered" by David W. Swanson

Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice, David W. Swanson. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514007747) 2024.

Summary: The tangled roots of racial and environmental injustice. Traces exploitation and oppression of people and land to a common root of greed.

The basic premise of this book is that systemic racism and environmental destruction stem from a common root. Specifically, greed, and its outworking in theft, in the eyes of David T., Swanson, are the sources of what he sees as two intertwined ills. Often, those subject to racial injustice also suffer from depredations on the environment. The point of this book is not to argue what are disputed ideas in some quarters nor to propose policies for society as a whole. Instead, Swanson asks how churches might engage in caretaking of both people who have suffered injustice and the land they inhabit, often in urban settings.

Swanson comes uniquely qualified to address these questions. After training as an outdoor educator, Swanson experienced a call to establish a church on the South Side of Chicago, New Community Covenant Church, where he has lived with his family and worked the past fourteen years. The book reflects his own efforts to love and care for the people and place of the South Side of Chicago, specifically the Bronzeville neighborhood.

Before addressing his key insight, Swanson begins with the gift of creation, weaving biblical narrative and insights of Indigenous Christians into his sabbath day walks by Lake Michigan near the Center of Science and Industry, through the woodlands, canals, and lagoons of what was the site of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. From here, he considers our vocation, which he describes as priestly caretakers. As priests, we both bless the Creator and the creation. As caretakers, we seek the flourishing of all God’s creation, recognizing that our flourishing depends upon it.

Then, Swanson explores what we have actually done. We have so refashioned creation, resulting in mass extinctions and changing weather patterns. Scientists contend we have entered a new era in Earth’s existence, the Anthropocene. We have pursued extractive and exploitative policies not only with the creation but with ethnic minorities, the Black and Brown peoples of our country. As a result, these people often suffer the worst effects of our environmental depredations in what is called environmental racism. As Christians, we have often been complicit. Real healing can only begin with repentance, leading to repair, reconciliation, and renewal.

Part of how this happens, Swanson contends, is through our detachment from our place. We often do not know where our water, food, energy, clothing, and other necessities come from. And so we often can be oblivious to the exploitative and extractive practices implicit in our existence. But there is hope and the last two chapters in part one begin exploring what priestly caretaking under Christ’s redemptive work might look like in our communities, from gardens, to welcome of newcomers, to fighting for the quality of local schools.

All this comes in the first part, under the heading “tangled roots.” The second part is headed ” becoming naturalized.” Instead of detachment, Swanson considers what it means to become indigenous to a place. Swanson urges three practices to nurture our relationship with our place and its people. Instead of detachment, we nurture belonging, listening to and learning about our community. Instead of unceasing exploitation, we sabbath, resting both ourselves and the rest of creation and practicing generosity. Finally, in place of greed, we nurture virtue–prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope, and love.

Priestly caretaking is not idealistic utopianism. Rather it is a form of “long obedience in the same direction. Swanson writes:

“Caretaking in the ruins of industrialized extraction and exploitation is a generational commitment. Who can say how long it will take for a racialized people centered on Jesus and pursuing repair together to find that creation has re-exerted its formational power over them? How long will it take for a people who’ve been severed from the earth to learn to walk humbly and gently among their creaturely neighbors? There is no program for this, no curriculum or metrics. There is only the good and slow work of learning together how to exist as a blessing and a gift.”

What I appreciate about this book is that it doesn’t try to do too much. It doesn’t propose macro solutions for racism or environmental problems. Swanson does for urban communities what Wendell Berry does for rural farming communities. Both focus on care for people with names and their place. We can’t seek restoration everywhere if we don’t practice it somewhere. Swanson invites us to begin where we are to engage the long, slow work of community caretaking.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Agents of Flourishing

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Agents of Flourishing, Amy L. Sherman. Downers Grove: IVP Praxis, 2022.

Summary: An outline of how Christians may pursue Christ’s redemptive mission in six areas of cultural life, encompassing the whole of life.

Years ago, I listened to Gary Haugen, the founder of the International Justice Mission, an effort responsible for the release of thousands of women and children from human trafficking, discuss the breakthrough insight that led to his efforts. He was wrestling with the question of why God permitted so many injustices in the world when he felt God turning the question around and asking, “why do my people permit so many injustices to continue in the world?”

Amy L. Sherman believes that the redemptive mission of Jesus is intended not simply to bring personal redemption from sin but also bring God’s shalom, God’s flourishing into every dimension of life. And she believes that God’s way of bringing this about is through his people, and in the context of this book, through local congregations working within their own communities.

Sherman follows a model developed by the Thriving Communities Group’s “Human Ecology Framework” that identifies six spheres of cultural life that must be healthy for a community to be healthy. They are:

  • The Good: Flourishing in the Realm of Social Mores and Ethics
  • The True: Flourishing in the Realm of Human Knowledge and Learning
  • The Beautiful: Flourishing in the Realm of Creativity, Aesthetics, and Design
  • The Just and Well-Ordered: Flourishing in the Realm of Political and Civic Life
  • The Prosperous: Flourishing in the Realm of Economic Life
  • The Sustainable: Flourishing in the Realm of Natural and Physical Health

Six of the chapters of this book articulate a basic theology for each of these spheres discussing God’s creational intent, the malformations that the fall has introduced, the ways redemption re-forms this and how Christians have contributed to that re-formation in history and challenges in our current context. For example, under “The True” the creational intent includes our design to be learners, the goal of which is to know God and his purposes in the world, that parents are the first “teachers,” that Jesus affirms education, that God teaches us much beyond religious matters, and that common grace means that God desires all to achieve a broad-ranging knowledge. Sherman discusses the malformations of modernity and post-modernity and educational inequities. She then cites the contribution of Christians to making books in the codex form, to literacy, to scientific inquiry, to establishing schools and the early universities, and in the promotion of secondary and university education in the black community. Two challenges she identifies are the anti-intellectualism in many evangelical quarters, even the suspicion of learning, and the withdrawal of evangelicals from public schools, sadly in some cases, when schools were integrated.

Many books stop here. Sherman goes further in offering case studies of what churches have done in their communities to pursue each of these six initiatives. She discusses instances of churches pursuing the good by strengthening marriages, the truth by partnering with public education, the beautiful by investing in the arts, the just and well-ordered through restorative justice and reconciliation, the prosperous by redeeming business for the community good and using assets to build assets, and the sustainable by fighting environmental health hazards and addressing food desserts.

One of the most inspiring stories for me was that of two churches in a low income area of Los Angeles plagued by petroleum drilling operations that failed to provide health protections that would be standard in richer communities. They prayed, they collected information about health impacts, demonstrated publicly and built media awareness while working with city officials, attending public hearings, resulting in enhanced safety requirements that led the drilling company to decide to cease drilling and clean up the site.

What I love about this book is that it moves beyond a broad and biblically grounded vision to examples of how churches have had a redemptive influence in their communities in each of these area–churches across the country. In the concluding chapter, she outlines the steps church leaders can take for similar engagement in their own communities. The language of flourishing crops up in almost everything I read these days. The difference in the case of this book is that it shows how ordinary believers working together have pursued flourishing in a variety of ways that contribute to healthy communities. This work doesn’t gain the notice that scandals and political alliances do. But it pursues the common good and commends the gospel of the kingdom. In my book that is far better than media prominence!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Thirsting For Living Water

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Thirsting For Living Water, Michael J. Mantel (Foreword by Richard Stearns). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021.

Summary: How a young executive left a promising position to pursue the adventure in faith of providing both clean drinking water and the living water of Jesus throughout the world.

Michael Mantel thought he had it made. He had married his college sweetheart, found a thriving Christian community, and had risen to a key job in a major company. Then his company awarded a gift to a charitable group digging fresh water wells in Africa, and sent him to observe their work. His life was transformed as he saw the difference access to safe drinking water could make in the life of a village in Senegal.

He agreed with his wife Natalie to walk through a door, taking a leave from his company to work for World Vision in development efforts. After learning the work from funding to community development, he took the position as president and CEO of Living Water International, a ministry that uses an integrated approach of coming alongside people in a country to help with water access, sanitation, and hygiene efforts (WASH) that make a major difference in reducing disease and death from water-borne illnesses and fuel other development efforts. In addition, they are committed to sharing the message of the living water of Christ.

This book narrates a journey from hearing the call to be witnesses, beginning with his Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and reaching the ends of the earth. He describes a downward journey as he loses his father, walks along his wife in fighting cancer, faces tests of faith in growing the business, and goes through Hurricane Harvey and sees God provide for his Houston-based organization amid the pressures of so many needs in his own city.

It’s a story of both understanding his own calling and appreciating the breadth of the church. Through work with a couple Christian academics, he learns about appreciative inquiry, in which one learns how to assess the strengths of a community where development efforts are being undertaken, and how one works with a variety of partners inside and outside a community for its flourishing. Then the work of Living Water International gives him the chance to apply these lessons globally, glimpsing the bigness of God’s vision for the world, learning how God is already at work with churches abroad as well as awakening churches here through engagement in God’s mission. He contend that it is in this work of God’s entire body that the oneness of the church is truly experienced.

The book is filled with inspiring stories, not only of Mike and Natalie, but also of churches both here and around the world. But the aim of the book is to encourage readers to reflect on how God is meeting them in their own story. Each chapter both is a reflection and invites reflection in thought, writing, and discussion with others. It is both an encouraging and dangerous book, particularly if read with a group seeking to discern how they might walk into God’s vision for the world, his great story. Read this one if you dare!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Loving Your Community

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Loving Your Community

Loving Your Community, Stephen Viars. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2020.

Summary: A pastor whose church has developed a number of community-based outreach ministries, describes their journey into this work, and the variety of ministries that have resulted.

Is the motto of your church “Say no unless you have to say yes” or “Say yes unless you have to say no”? That is a question Stephen Viars poses in the opening pages of this book. Sadly, a number of churches say “no” to community outreach because of possible risks to their facilities. Viars proposes that it comes down to loving our neighbors in the name of Jesus.

This is where the journey began for Faith Church in Lafayette, Indiana. The church was growing and they began to ask what God was calling them to next. They started to realize that one of the best ways to do this was to listen to their neighbors. They surveyed the neighborhood, talked to law enforcement, and out of this discerned that the start was to build a community center instead of a larger sanctuary–a center that supported families, provided good childcare, youth programming, and served veterans and seniors. They are honest when asked why they are doing this, that they want to show love that reflects God’s love in sending his Son, and that they are glad to talk about that if people want to know more.

The second part of the book describes some of the ministries they developed. They offered biblical counseling and equipped counselors. They found ways to make their facilities available for everything from childcare to community forums. They tapped the talents of members to offer instructional classes on an array of subjects from marriage, family, and parenting to computer classes to financial management. They restructured ministries from just being oriented around church members to include the community–youth ministry, community picnics, and other gatherings. They developed outreach activities and collaborated with the community in staging them. At the request of the city, they engaged in neighborhood restoration. They built multiple community centers in different parts of the city, again at the invitation of the city and funders. They created residential treatment programs.

The third part of the book offers advice and answers questions for others considering getting started. They talk about risk management, disclosure, insurance, and legal reorganization (fourteen separate entities in all for this church’s various efforts). An important principle is to separate risks and assets so that “any entity that does ministry has no assets and any entity that has assets does no ministry.” They are committed to not compromising the gospel in any ministry. Viars outlines a twelve step process for others wanting to get started in community-based outreach. The book concludes with stories of two other congregations who worked with Faith Church in the launching of their own, context specific community-based outreaches.

All this may sound a bit overwhelming until one realizes this was a thirty year journey for this church. One of the big takeaways is that a church can listen to the community, work with public officials and outside funders without compromising gospel integrity. The key is a church known for serving its community, that shows up and can be counted on. This is so rare in any city, and people will listen to, or at least tolerate its message when it is accompanied by attentive listening and love in action.

The one thing I miss in this account is how this church collaborated with other churches in the community, particularly as they ministered in neighborhoods distant from their primary location. Sometimes, I’ve seen large congregations simply outshine and overwhelm smaller, under-resourced neighborhood churches rather than partner with and empower them. I don’t know what is the case here.

What is so helpful is the model of a church that keeps saying “yes” to God in terms of serving its community. Viars offers so much in the way of practical accounts of how each ministry developed and the process they went through that may serve to persuade other churches that it is really possible to love one’s community not only aspirationally but in deed as well as word.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: How Neighborhoods Make Us Sick

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How Our Neighborhoods Make Us Sick

How Neighborhoods Make Us Sick, Veronica Squires and Breanna Lathrop. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2019.

Summary: A case study showing how social determinants impacting health outcomes work in different zip codes and how these manifest in an urban neighborhood in southwest Atlanta.

Perhaps the single most sobering insight to arise from How Neighborhoods Make Us Sick is that life expectancy within different zip codes in the same city and metro area can widely vary–by a decade or more in some cases. There are a complex of factors in which these areas vary–social determinants–that profoundly affect the wellness and longevity of the residents in those neighborhoods.

The co-authors of this book, Veronica Squires and Breanna Lathrop, take academic discussion in the public health community and narrate how they personally experienced the realities of the factors that shape health outcomes. Their argument is that these social determinants go far beyond personal choices and “bootstrap” solutions. Much of this came through their personal realization that the presence and community involvement advocated in community development circles just weren’t enough. The first half of this book describes the journey of each of them in coming to this realization. Each chapter contains a sections describing the journey of each author around the impacts on health of poverty, employment (mostly in low wage jobs), food insecurity and nutrition, education and child development, housing availability, environmental issues (mold, lead), and homelessness, and health care access.

Breanna, a health care provider at the Good Samaritan Health Center in urban southwest Atlanta, came face to face with the reality that all her efforts at appropriate health interventions and care plans were being undone by these social determinants. Her patients were not getting better. Veronica and her husband moved into the neighborhood, lived out the commitments they had learned in community development, but little changed and both saw their own health deteriorate, despite having good educations and jobs. After nine years, they had to move out. Veronica writes:

“I left with severe anxiety, major depression, and recurrent panic attack episodes. Eric left with panic attacks too, along with high blood pressure and heart palpitations. We both left with psoriasis. Yet, even though I knew we were doing the right thing for the health of our family, I was grieving the loss of a vision and hope that community development alone could repair communities in a holistic, lasting, and scalable manner. As we pulled onto the highway, I turned around to look at the exit I had taken thousands of times to get home and thought, There has to be a better way to restore our communities.” (p. 89)

Part Two of the book begins with the co-authors writing about how they leaned into their faith in addressing these challenges. Their study of Jesus opened their eyes to his commitment to healing and overturning oppressive systems and structures that undermined the health and lives of the poor. They saw that to pursue this work was kingdom work.

Both describe the transformative practices they’ve had a part in implementing at the Good Samaritan Health Center, a donor-funded effort. Veronica is the chief administrative officer, and Breanna, the chief operating officer. They make some challenging statements about some of the mantras surrounding charitable giving in church circles, including volunteering as a substitute for giving, and “diversifying.” The health center itself offers a “full circle” of health care including medical and dental care, behavioral health care, health education, and healthy living practices.

Most strategic though are the partnerships they have developed to address housing issues, employment, health care for the homeless, nutrition (through neighborhood food initiatives and gardens), and a focus on early child development and education. They stress the importance of partnering with the community, listening to the community for its advice about what will be most helpful. They also address the issue of health access and insurance in the U.S. and the current decisions that exclude many from access to good health care, particularly preventive care. They argue that many of the interventions they have pursued save money, or even return money to communities, compared to the current alternatives that often result in repeat incarceration, emergency room usage, and hospitalizations.

It struck me that these women, and those they work with did not stop with the many reasons why things weren’t changing in southwest Atlanta, but looked for smart and biblical ways to pursue health equity, addressing the other factors that often undermined their patients’ health. They hit bottom, were honest about what that looked like for them, and then persisted.

The book also raises questions about whether we will recognize that equality is not enough when the playing field is not level. They advocate for health equity, recognizing that those at the bottom of the hill face a much harder task than those at the top to achieve the same outcome. Will a nation graced with so many resources rise to this kind of greatness? And to come back to the sobering insight with which I began, how will we respond to the fact that some of our near neighbors in the same city have a shorter life expectancy than we do? How is this not a pro-life issue? These were the questions I’m pondering after reading this book.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: To Alter Your World

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To Alter Your World

To Alter Your World, Michael Frost and Christiana Rice. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017.

Summary: Explores a different metaphor for the church’s role in God’s mission, that of midwife to what God is birthing, and how this might change the ways we engage with our world.

One of the dominant metaphors for Christian cultural engagement today is that of battle, whether of spiritual warfare, a war to “reclaim” the culture, or retreat, because of perception that either we’ve been fighting the wrong war, or that we are seriously losing and need to re-group and re-build. A more sophisticated model is that of “changing” or “transforming” the world. Yet as James Davison Hunter points out in To Change The World, this has often been an exercise in starry-eyed naivete’ and a prescription for burnout when the world doesn’t easily or quickly change.

Michael Frost and Christiana Rice, two missional practitioners and theorists have come together in this book to suggest a different model, a different way of “joining” God in the mission. Their inspiration is drawn from Isaiah 42:14:

“For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant.”

Their contention is that it is God, through his work in Christ, who is birthing a new world and our role is akin to that of the midwife. They write:

“If God is groaning like a woman in labor, and if a new world is being born before our very eyes, being pushed forth through the cracks of our broken world, our job isn’t to hurry it along. Rather our job is to join God and partner with him in the delivery room and to stop imagining we can birth the new world with our own strategies and methodologies. Indeed, our attempts to usher in the new order in recent years haven’t produced the kid of restoration, redemption or reconciliation in this world that we believe God envisions” (p. 17).

Frost and Rice don’t stop with a new metaphor or a new paradigm but press this out in the practical work in which teams of missional people engage. They challenge us to forego our colonizing and rootless efforts at church planting that fail to listen to and attend to communities and develop wholistic ministry in partnership with its people. Instead they elaborate the metaphor of midwife, both in ancient Israel and contemporary practice.

Midwives neither give birth to the child for the mother nor “make it happen” according to a plan but attend women during their pregnancies. They make space for a birth to happen to remove all barriers to giving birth and welcoming new life. They study place, they notice signs, they look at physical space. They act flexibly and fearlessly to the changing circumstances of the birth process. They don’t spend lots of time arguing the importance of midwifing, but quietly live that narrative with the women they attend. Rice and Frost work out practical applications of these principles.

They also see that collaboration to effect change is a multi-level process: with individuals, interpersonally in small groups like families, in community, in institutions and in structures and systems. Much of this happens not just through “church” activities but through a transformed vision of our work that things about our work societally as well as individually.

Place and space is a big part of what they talk about, and often overlooked. They draw on the work of the Project for Public Spaces to identify seven principles for creating great spaces that missional communities in a space need to consider:

  1. The neighborhood is the expert.
  2. Craft a place, not a design.
  3. Look for partners.
  4. You can see a lot just by observing.
  5. Have a vision.
  6. Money is not the issue.
  7. You are never finished.

The concluding two chapters concern the missional person. Not only do they attend to the changes God would birth, but they are changed themselves in the process. Often this comes through suffering. Change is disruptive and there will be push back. To love a place and its people and to persist in all this is hard and we will be changed through it.

The call of this book is not to quietism as opposed to human-centered activism, a kind of can-do, we can make it happen spirit. The midwife, is active, but in a different way, and this is what I most appreciate about the theme and approach of this book. It offers, to people who have begun to think they must make something happen to advance the mission of God, the insight that God has something God would give birth to in the world. Perhaps most striking is that this is a distinctively female metaphor–one of a woman attending to another giving birth, and God uses it of God’s self! Many of us who are fathers went through childbirth classes that taught us how we might attend and accompany our wives, perhaps in the presence of an obstetrician or midwife, in the incredible process of birth, one we could only support as our wives labored. Perhaps we might begin to draw upon that to understand and become skillful midwives in the birthing process of the new creation.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Wick Park

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wickpark

Wick Park in the early days. Public Domain

A park with walkways, a pavilion, playground, picnic areas, shaded with abundant trees. Around the perimeter on three sides some of the grandest homes in the city. On the fourth, an auditorium in neoclassical style, and in later years a senior facility. That was, and still in significant measure is, Wick Park. In the boom years of the first part of the twentieth century, this area was home to many of Youngstown’s most affluent citizens, sheltered away from the mills and factories that made their fortune. This Metro Monthly article gives you a good idea of what some of the homes were like back then.

My first encounters with Wick Park were during a summer when I volunteered with a children’s ministry working in a more urban part of the North side. They offered a summer program and I helped volunteer, helping organize games and activities for the children at the park. I loved the combination of shelters, open spaces and an abundance of trees and shade that made this a delightful recreation spot for the children who were both a delight and challenge and left me beat at the end of every day.

Later, while I was in college, I took a physical conditioning course and one of our regular activities was to don our running clothes and do laps around Wick Park. Each lap, as I recall, was about a mile. When I started, I barely made it up Elm Street to the park and had to walk-run even one lap. Eventually I reached the point where I could do three or four laps easily, and the Park was a favorite place to run with a buddy or two whenever I needed a study break.

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A view of Wick Park across Fifth Avenue from Park Vista (c) Robert C Trube, 2011

In recent years we would drive past Wick Park when we would visit my mom and dad during their last years when they lived in Park Vista, across the street. One of the nicest features of where they lived is that the front windows of their dining room looked out over the park.

The larger Wick Park district extended all the way over to Wick Avenue running north of Youngstown State. Wick Avenue at one time was Youngstown’s version of “millionaire’s row.” Apart from the restored Pollock Mansion and the Arms Museum of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society, most of these are gone, replaced by many vacant lots. Auto dealerships like State Chevrolet, where my wife bought her first car, are long gone. Going up Wick Avenue, one of the few businesses left is the Golden Dawn, where a number of us would go after volunteering at a free clinic next to campus in one of those mansions owned by First Christian Church at the time.

Many of the large homes were broken up into apartments, which eventually led to decline in their condition. Vacant homes that were eventually demolished are a reality here as elsewhere in Youngstown. But from what I’ve read and heard, there are some neighborhood organizations collaborating with others to renew the area. According to Metro Monthly efforts by the Wick Park Neighborhood Association and the Northside Citizens Coalition has led to everything from urban gardens, farmers markets, property divestment that has brought new residents in and rehabilitation of a number of the grand old houses. Efforts by Youngstown CityScape has led to improvements of the park including new signage, sidewalk repairs, accessible parking near the pavilion, a new playground, and security gates.

It seems that one thing every Rust Belt city is discovering is that you re-build neighborhood by neighborhood, business by business, institution by institution. It takes scrappiness, perseverance, and collaboration of city leaders, businesses, neighborhood leaders and residents–over a long period of time (think what it takes just to renovate one home!). The Wick Park Historic District is one of the jewels of Youngstown. I’m glad to hear there are people thinking, talking, and working hard to both recover past glories and build toward a new future in this area, and providing models for other neighborhoods in the city to follow.

I’d love to hear both about memories of the Wick Park area, and from those who are working to revitalize this area!

Review: Reading for the Common Good

/ rtrube54 / 3 Comments

Reading for the Common Good

Reading for the Common Good, C. Christopher Smith. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016.

Summary: Explores how the communal practice of reading in congregations fosters a learning community and shared social imagination the results in clearer congregational identity, sense of mission in one’s setting, and wider engagement with the environment, economics, and political order.

I came across the work of C. Christopher Smith a few years ago through an online version of The Englewood Review of Books. The online site has become one of my “go-to” places to learn about new releases and also great books available for discounts (usually in e-format). Smith is the editor of this enterprise which is tied in with the ministry of Englewood Christian Church in Indianapolis, an urban congregation on the east side of Indianapolis. In his previous book, Slow Church, which I reviewed a year ago, Smith offered a few more clues that books were not just a personal passion that his church indulges but that reading plays a role in its common life. In this book, Smith articulates a vision for reading that goes beyond personal or even common life to the common good of his congregation and wider community.

Fundamentally, he and his community have fostered the idea of becoming a learning organization, building on Peter Senge’s idea in The Fifth Discipline. Learning to read together, beginning with the scriptures both in preaching and the practice of lectio divina, and discussing other works together has helped his church understand its context as well as envision a different “social imaginary.” This is a key idea in the book, borrowed from the work of Charles Taylor. Social imaginaries are our mental images of how things are done in our social context, often not articulated nor evaluated. For example, it might be contended that we have accustomed ourselves to a very polarized political dialogue between two parties. And we may think we must choose one of the two alternatives, both individually, and communally as congregations or church bodies. A different social imaginary might envision a very different type of political engagement.

Smith contends that as we read, reflect, discuss and imagine together around the scriptures, and around books that may speak to our context, we can explore, and be confronted by different social imaginaries that change the way we think about who and why we are as a church, about when and where we are in our context, and how we think about our presence in our communities, in the physical environment we inhabit, in the economic order in which we participate, and the political order of our communities, states and nations.

I had two questions in mind as I was reading this book. One was, can you really hope for all this to happen from our reading of scripture and other good reading? The other was, how does he get his congregation to do this kind of reading together? The answer to the first question was simple. I found myself asking, “isn’t this in fact why I do Bob on Books in the first place?”  I believe that not only the “book of all books” but also other good writing can change the way we see the world and our place in it and shape our actions in ways that seek the greater flourish of the people and the places we share life with. What Smith did here is give me better language for what, instinctively, I’ve sought to do on the blog, both in my own writing and my reviews of the writing of others.

Chapter 9 in the book helped answer the second question for me. As noted already, Smith and his community begin with the slow reading of scripture, and he believes that learning to attend to God’s word in these ways is both foundational and helpful in learning, and loving to attend to other words. Congregational leaders promote reading within various teams related to the particular work they are doing. Their goals are modest. Even one book read and discussed together in a year is good. They create spaces for conversations about reading in classes, book clubs and seminars. They make resources available including books related to a current sermon series, they develop a process for including reviews of books on websites and a process to curate those reviews. And they keep fostering the love of reading among the children of the congregation. I read this and was struck with the conclusion that even in a busy congregation (whose isn’t?) of people who don’t read much, this is doable.

Smith concludes the book with a couple of reading lists: an annotated one of books related to the chapters of the book, and a list organized by subjects of books that have been helpful to his church community. My impression was “meaty, but accessible” for both lists–plainly richer fare that the inspirational fiction and non-fiction that is the typical “Christian reading diet.”

It is refreshing when a book comes along that connects the dots and clarifies one’s understanding of the things one cares about. This was such a book, and in doing so, the book accomplished for me, or rather in me, what the author contends reading does for us. I concluded the book with fresh ideas about fostering learning community around books in the professional and church communities with which I connect. Hopefully, that will indeed lead to some “common goods.”

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.