Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Friday, July 8, 2011

Poverty Tourism, Poverty Elitism and Grace For All

http://rachelheldevans.com/poverty-tourism-poverty-elitism-grace

by Rachel Held Evans
posted July 6, 2011

When Matthew Paul Turner invited me to be part of World Vision’s Bolivia team this summer, the first thought that went through my mind was, Bolivia’s in South America, right? The second thought that went through my mind was, Why on earth would they need bloggers? What can we possibly do to help?

India - Kids - 092I was concerned because every blogger knows that posts about poverty, justice, and giving tend to result in notoriously low stats—not because people don’t care about poverty, but because it’s hard to say anything new or interesting about it. Furthermore, NGO-sponsored blog tours often produce posts that, as Kari mentioned in a comment last week, can be painfully predictable—you know, “the way that the bloggers are overwhelmed and then uplifted and then come home and, you know, can’t go to Wal-Mart without crying,” that sort of thing. I wasn’t sure I knew how to write about this trip in a creative way that would inspire readers to action.

“People don’t have opinions about poverty,” I told Dan, as I mulled over the trip. “A post about child sponsorship isn’t going to be followed by hundreds of comments and thousands of shares because no one’s going to argue against it. Opinion is the air that a blog breathes, and the only opinion people have about poverty is that it should be eliminated.”

Boy was I wrong about that.

Just a few weeks later, the blogosphere erupted into a heated debate, complete with thousands of comments and shares, about poverty. Well, not about poverty directly, but about how we, the “privileged,” should respond to it.

Poverty Tourism

It all started with an article in The Guardian that examined NGO-sponsored blogging trips from a somewhat critical perspective, questioning the effectiveness of writers “being flown to dirt-poor regions to solemnly observe the impoverished in their natural habitats before returning home with an interesting infection and an exalted sense of enlightenment.” The reporter labeled such trips “poverty tourism” and specifically mentioned a recent trip taken by Heather Armstrong, a wildly popular blogger who travelled to Bangladesh with Every Mother Counts, an organization that addresses maternal mortality.

Well this did not go over well with Heather Armstrong, who took to her blog and twitter account to defend her trip. Her post was followed by hundreds more, from bloggers and aid workers and missionaries alike, including some of our favorites—Nish Weiseth, Elizabeth Esther, Rage Against the Minivan, and Jamie The Very Worst Missionary.

I am thankful for the Guardian piece and for the debate that followed it because I believe that poverty tourism is indeed a problem. Churches are notorious for perpetrating it, usually with expensive weeklong missions trips that often inconvenience indigenous missionaries more than help them. We’ve all known…(or perhaps been)… the high school kid who returns from a week in South America with a camera full of photos, a suitcase full of souvenirs, and a heart full of “first-world guilt.”

In these scenarios, the countries visited are presented as one-dimensionally impoverished, its citizens cast as helpless innocents, and middle-class Americans portrayed as the only saviors who can help.

What I liked about the Guardian article was that it included some practical solutions for how bloggers can avoid poverty tourism. This, along with additional resources available to churches and individuals alike, can help those who find themselves experiencing poverty for the first time do so in a way that honors the people and places they encounter.

The truth of the matter is, many long-term missionaries, aid workers, and world-changers were inspired by short trips that changed their perspective forever. The right response to poverty tourism is to educate and reform, not to discourage people from experiencing poverty and reporting on what they learn.

Poverty Elitism

On other side of the coin we have another phenomenon that is just as destructive as poverty tourism. I call it poverty elitism, and it showed up more than a few times in the tone of the Guardian piece and in subsequent blog posts and comments on this topic.

All you need to become a poverty elitist is a little more experience with poverty than the people in your immediate vicinity. So, if you’ve spent six months in an orphanage in Romania and your friend has spent one week painting walls in Thailand, you can take advantage of that and wax eloquent on your poverty expertise while mocking your friend’s pathetic attempt at social justice via “tweets from Thailand.” But if someone in the room has spent 10 years working in refugee camps in Sudan, well then that person trumps you both. If he is a poverty elitist, he will promptly bemoan your pathetic foray into poverty tourism, causally reference all the times he had to carry water for three miles like the women of Darfur, and top it all off with a dismissive comment about Bono.

Poverty elitism is just as exploitive as poverty tourism, for it turns the poor into feathers in our caps and once again presents them as the helpless victims of well-meaning do-gooders.

My concern with poverty elitism is that if we belittle people for caring about poverty, if we make them feel small when they attempt to do something about it (albeit clumsily at times), then there’s a chance they will stop. If we’re serious about ending extreme poverty for good, then this is an all-hands-on-deck situation in which we can’t afford to be snobs. Yes, there will be poverty tourist. Yes, there will tacky t-shrits. Yes, there will be celebrities. Yes, there will be tweets. But this is one scenario in which we cannot allow the “I-thought-it-was-cool-before-everyone-else-thought-it-was cool” phenomenon to get the better of us.

Let’s face it. None of us who have the time and the resources to argue about this online truly understand what it’s like to suffer extreme poverty.

This is not to say that all opinions are equal. It’s important that we learn from those who have extensive experience dealing with government and non-government agencies, and it is absolutely vital that we learn from those who are actually facing the challenges of poverty themselves. The right response to poverty elitism is not to turn around and dismiss those with valuable experience, but rather to cut one another a little slack as we try and figure this out together.

Grace

So I decided to go to Bolivia. I decided to go because I was asked by a reputable organization, because the people at World Vision seem to think I can help, and because I’ll be able to work stories from my trip into my next book. I don’t feel a need to defend that decision any further.

As I consider how to proceed, I am fortunate to have as inspiration my sister, Amanda.

Amanda went on two-week trip to India when she was in college. She went with a group from school, the sort of trip that some might label “poverty tourism." But Amanda really connected with the people and the organizations there, and so she returned a few years later for a six-month stay….and then returned again for two subsequent visits. It seems that the friends she made among the indigenous missionaries and the poor they serve simply can’t get enough of her. They love her like a daughter, beg her to return, even called her on her wedding day.

When I visited Amanda in Hyderabad back in 2006, I had my “poverty tourist” moments—being shocked by the slums, throwing up all the time, taking an absurd amount of photographs, crying like a baby when the rickshaw driver ripped us off—but Amanda never looked down her nose at me or chided my efforts, even though a few weeks before she had held a dying little girl in her arms and a few weeks later she would severely burn her leg on a motorbike.

Amanda could have one-upped me. The missionaries could have one-upped Amanda. And the leprosy patients could have one-upped us all. But that never happened. Instead there was a sense that we shared a common brokenness and a common grace, and that there is no place for judgment or pity among friends.

What I love about the ministry of Jesus is that he identified the poor as blessed and the rich as needy… and then he went and ministered to them both. Poverty tourists need only look to the beatitudes (Luke 6:20-26) to be reminded that the poor are not one-dimensional victims in need of our help. Poverty elitists need only look to the story of the expensive perfume (Mathew 26:6-13) to be reminded that our Lord is more impressed with genuine love than effectiveness.

We cannot buy the lie that there are those who need and those who supply when the frightening and beautiful reality is that we desperately need one another.

That’s what I love about the Kingdom:

For the poor, there is food.
For the rich, there is joy.
For all of us, there is grace.

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So what's your take on this whole "poverty tourism" debate?

Have ever been a poverty tourist or a poverty elitist?

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