NASHVILLE — The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has taken the right positions on social justice issues for years, Jim Wallis contends.
But that doesn’t accomplish much, he says, if no one is listening.
Wallis is the editor-in-chief of Sojourners Magazine and an organizer of Call to Renewal, an interfaith advocacy group trying to bring people of faith together to work on issues such as poverty and the environment. Wallis travels the world speaking widely and provocatively, trying to change the political winds.
He wants to convince the politicians and the people with power that the grassroots is shifting — that enough people care about things such as global warming or about children dying by the thousands each day because they don’t have food or medicine that the politicians need to pay attention.
Wallis was the kick-off speaker at the National Presbyterian Evangelism Conference Aug. 31-Sept. 3 in Nashville — part of a renewed emphasis the PC(USA) is trying to place on the importance of spreading the gospel. And he challenged Presbyterians, whose long suit historically has not been evangelism, to call for a “justice conversion,” to overtly link religious faith and work on behalf of justice.
“We have a problem,” Wallis told the Presbyterians. “Most people have the idea that Christians in the church are supposed to stand for the same things Jesus did. What a crazy thought is that? When we don’t stand for those things, people get confused, they get disillusioned.”
And “I don’t think we’re going to move the mountains” — to do something about climate change, about the AIDS epidemic, about the majority of people in the world who live on less than $2 a day — “without a revival of faith.”
Among Wallis’s talking points:
· Young people want to make a difference in the world. He met an 11-year-old who told him: “I think we’re going to have to change the world, people like me.” Or the third-grader who was concerned about what he calls a “silent tsunami,” killing 30,000 children a day from disease and malnutrition — afflictions she understood that her American friends were protected from. “If I’m a Christian,” the girl told Wallis, “I’d better do something about this.”
· Some people who care about social activism are still searching for faith. The mainline denominations need to do more than just take stands on social justice issues, Wallis said. They need to tell the world the good news of the gospel, about what Jesus had to say about caring for the least and the lost — what Wallis described as Jesus’ “Nazareth Manifesto.” Young people who care about social justice, Wallis said, will be drawn to a vibrancy of faith “that just feels alive.”
· A disillusioned and cynical world needs “good religion” — religion that doesn’t lean on prejudice or hatred or intolerance, but which can “pull out the best stuff” from people, can push them to work for compassion and love and peace in the world. “There is so much confusion in the country about what we as Christians even mean by our gospel, by our proclamation, by our theology, by the things we say we believe,” Wallis said. “People out there honestly have no idea what we’re talking about.”
· Many people have been wounded by religion — hurt so much by “bad religion” they’ve become separated from faith, Wallis said. He appeared one night on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and afterwards got thousands of e-mails from people talking about losing their faith to television evangelists or pedophile priests or people who didn’t seem to live out what they said they believed.
One man he met on a book tour in Nashville — a Jewish country music songwriter — suggested that Christians who care about social justice describe themselves as “red-letter Christians,” for the Bibles that print all that Jesus said in red letters. “I love the red stuff,” the songwriter said. “The rest of it, I can do without.”
So Wallis argues that it’s time for a religious conversion — that “a whole generation wants to hear a different message,” one that melds again faith and social activism.
He recalled an elder who told him years ago that “Christianity has nothing to do with racism. That’s political. And our faith is personal.”
So Wallis turned away from the church for a while, although he later had a conversion of his own, based on the 25th chapter of Matthew’s gospel — when Jesus said, “As you’ve done to the least of these, you did to me” — a conversion that led him to seminary.
Wallis now says: “God is personal, never private. This God wants relationship.
This God knows everything about every person in this room and wants a relationship with us anyway. Why? To sign us up for God’s purposes in the world.”
To prepare us, Wallis would say, to move the mountains.
