Chapter One
Hope Happens
If you're like some people (including my wife and a few friends who
have been nervous about this book since they heard what I was
writing about), you may already feel a little skeptical and suspicious,
having only read the title and subtitle of this book.
You've surmised that the statement "everything must change" is
hyperbole. Whatever your reaction to the subtitle's mention of "Jesus"
and "revolution of hope," you've judged "global crises" to be totally
depressing and overwhelming. You've determined that people who
talk about global crises aren't life-of-the-party types; instead, they
score high in the categories of being boring, humorless, and guilt-inducing.
If we're going to get anywhere, I have to convince you-and
fast-of at least four things. First, that I'm not another blah-blah-blah
person ranting about how bad the world is and how guilty you should
feel for taking up space in it. Second, that I can help you understand
some highly complex material and make it not only accessible but
maybe even interesting and inspiring. Third, that when you're done
with this book, you'll not only better understand the world and your
place in it, but you'll also know how you can make a difference.
(You'll also be able to engage in dialogue and further research through
the book's website-www.everythingmustchange.com.) And fourth,
I must convince you that making a difference is not another dreary
duty for an already overburdened person, but rather that making a
difference is downright joyful-fulfilling, rewarding, good.
You also may be wondering who I am and why I'm writing on
the subjects of Jesus, global crises, and hope. I'm not an economist,
politician, or certified expert on anything really. But I am a normal
person like you who cares and wants to do the right thing. I started
my career as a college English teacher and then became a pastor for
twenty-four years. In the mid-1990s, while I was a pastor, I started
writing books, a few of which have been best sellers. I serve on a
number of nonprofit boards and travel extensively as a public speaker
and networker. I've been on national news shows as a spokesperson
for "the emerging church" and "progressive evangelical Christianity"
and other such oxymorons (some would say), and you can Google
my name and find websites and blogs from fundamentalist groups
who consider me the son of Satan or on the wrong side of both the
"culture war" and "truth war."
More personally, I'm a rather ordinary person. I care about my
young adult kids and the kids they may someday have. I care about
my friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens and our common future on
this beautiful, imperiled planet. I care about the billions of people I've
never met and never will meet, including people who might be called
my nation's enemies. I also care about our fellow creatures-brown
trout and blue herons, raccoons and gopher tortoises, red dragonflies
and royal palms, barrel cactus and woodland ferns. I care about all of
these for a lot of reasons, especially because I am a committed follower
of Christ, and people with this commitment, it seems to me, can't
help but care about all these things.
As a follower of God in the way of Jesus, I've been involved in
a profoundly interesting and enjoyable conversation for the last ten
years or so. It's a conversation about what it means to be "a new kind
of Christian"-not an angry and reactionary fundamentalist, not a
stuffy traditionalist, not a blasé nominalist, not a wishy-washy liberal,
not a New Agey religious hipster, not a crusading religious imperialist,
and not an overly enthused Bible-waving fanatic-but something
fresh and authentic and challenging and adventurous. Around the
world, millions of people have gotten involved in this conversation,
and more are getting involved each day. (One reason we keep calling
it a conversation is that we can't find a short way of describing it yet.)
The couple hundred thousand people who have read my previous
books seem to find in them some hope and resonance with things
they've already been thinking and feeling, including a suspicion that
the religious status quo is broken and a desire to translate their faith
into a way of life that makes a positive difference in the world. They
share my belief that the versions of Christianity we inherited are
largely flattened, watered down, tamed . offering us a ticket to
heaven after death, but not challenging us to address the issues that
threaten life on earth. Together we've begun to seek a fresh understanding
of what Christianity is for, what a church can be and do,
and most exciting, we're finding out that a lot of what we need most
is already hidden in a trunk in our attic. Which is good news.
So this is a religious book, but in a worldly and unconventional
and ultimately positive way, a way some nonreligious people would
probably call "spiritual but not religious."
Unconventional Questions
I've always had a propensity to think a few degrees askew from
most people, especially about religion. And not only am I often unsatisfied
with conventional answers, but even worse, I've consistently
been unsatisfied with conventional questions.
For instance, when I was a pastor, people often asked my opinion
on hot-button issues like evolution, abortion, and homosexuality.
The problem was that after discussing those issues in all of their
importance and intensity, I couldn't help asking other questions:
Why do we need to have singular and firm opinions on the protection
of the unborn, but not about how to help poor people and how
to avoid killing people labeled enemies who are already born? Or
why are we so concerned about the legitimacy of homosexual marriage
but not about the legitimacy of fossil fuels or the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction (and in particular, our weapons as
opposed to theirs)? Or why are so many religious people arguing
about the origin of species but so few concerned about the extinction
of species? Then I'd wonder, If we religious people have exclusively
seized on a couple of hot-button questions, what other questions
should we be thinking about that nobody's asking? That's the kind
of wonderment that can turn into a book like the one you're holding.
Part of what it means to be "a new kind of Christian" is to discover
or rediscover what the essential message of Jesus is about. As I
explained in some detail in The Secret Message of Jesus, more and
more of us are realizing something our best theologians have been
saying for quite a while: Jesus' message is not actually about escaping
this troubled world for heaven's blissful shores, as is popularly
assumed, but instead is about God's will being done on this troubled
earth as it is in heaven. So people interested in being a new
kind of Christian will inevitably begin to care more and more about
this world, and they'll want to better understand its most significant
problems, and they'll want to find out how they can fit in with
God's dreams actually coming true down here more often.
Which is why I wanted to write this book: because when I started
caring about these things, I didn't know where to begin. I started
reading books and websites and talking to knowledgeable people,
but I soon felt my naïveté being replaced by an overwhelming complexity.
I kept looking for a way to tame the complexity in a big picture
or metaphor, and when the big picture began to come into
focus, I felt I had discovered something worth sharing.
The Leverage Point-A Better Framing Story
To make preliminary sense of the crises that surround us, I can
briefly introduce a few metaphors or word pictures that we'll consider
later in more detail. For example, I can speak of a perfect storm
of global crises brewing like an undetected hurricane out at sea,
sending preliminary rain bands ashore that aren't themselves the
problem but are signs of the problem that approaches. I can develop
a disease metaphor, comparing our global crises to varied symptoms
of a single as-yet undiagnosed autoimmune disease. Or I can explore
the ways our society has become an addict.
In particular, I can use the image of a suicide machine that co-opts
the main mechanisms of our civilization-our economic, political,
and military systems-and reprograms them to destroy those they
should serve. It's not coincidental that the image of a machine that
turns on its creators has recently become popular in movies from The
Matrix to I, Robot. In this book, I suggest that the image is true.
Whatever metaphors I employ-an undetected storm, an undiagnosed
disease, an unacknowledged addiction, or a machine that has
gone destructive-I'll suggest that our plethora of critical global crises
can be traced to four deep dysfunctions, the fourth of which is the
lynchpin or leverage point through which we can reverse the first three:
1. Environmental breakdown caused by our unsustainable global
economy, an economy that fails to respect environmental limits even
as it succeeds in producing great wealth for about one-third of the
world's population. We'll call this the prosperity crisis.
2. The growing gap between the ultra-rich and the extremely
poor, which prompts the poor majority to envy, resent, and even
hate the rich minority-which in turn elicits fear and anger in the
rich. We'll call this the equity crisis.
3. The danger of cataclysmic war arising from the intensifying
resentment and fear among various groups at opposite ends of the
economic spectrum. We'll call this the security crisis.
4. The failure of the world's religions, especially its two largest
religions, to provide a framing story capable of healing or reducing
the three previous crises. We'll call this the spirituality crisis.
By framing story, I mean a story that gives people direction, values,
vision, and inspiration by providing a framework for their lives.
It tells them who they are, where they come from, where they are,
what's going on, where things are going, and what they should do.
In searching for a better framing story than we currently proclaim,
Christians like myself can discover a fresh vision of our religion's
founder and his message, a potentially revolutionary vision
that could change everything for us and for the world we inhabit.
We can rediscover what it can mean to call Jesus Savior and Lord
when we raise the question of what exactly he intended to save us
from. (His angry Father? The logical consequences of our actions?
Our tendency to act in ways that produce undesirable logical consequences?
Global self-destruction?) The popular and domesticated
Jesus, who has become little more than a chrome-plated hood ornament
on the guzzling Hummer of Western civilization, can thus be
replaced with a more radical, saving, and, I believe, real Jesus.
The Hope That Can Change Everything
As I worked on this book-grappling to understand our world's
top problems and to see them in relation to the life and message of
Jesus-I was struck as never before with the one simple, available,
yet surprisingly powerful response called for by Jesus, a response
that can begin to foment a revolution of hope among us, a hope that
can change everything. That hope may happen to you as you read,
without you even noticing it. If it happens in enough of us, we will
face and overcome the global crises that threaten us, and we will sow
the seeds of a better future.
I spent 2006 and early 2007 writing and editing this book. It
brings to fruition thought processes that go back for several decades.
This book took shape in a variety of places around the world, over
twenty countries in all: Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa,
Canada, England, Wales, Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark,
Sweden, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica,
Chile, Argentina, Malaysia, Kenya, Uganda, and the United States. It
was written in slums, in airports and trains, in hotels, in homes, in
seminary dormitories, in places of great natural beauty, in places of
great human ugliness, and some of it (thankfully) in my own home
in Maryland, in the good company of my wife and life companion,
Grace. It was written under the musical influence of Bob Dylan and
Bruce Cockburn, Afro Celt Sound System, the Putumayo Mali collection,
Steve Bell, U2, Harp 46, Carrie Newcomer, David Wilcox,
Eva Cassidy, Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach, and Keith Jarrett. These many
influences, plus the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion
of Lebanon, the deteriorating conditions in Darfur, and the slow,
sad burn of the Congo . all of these have marked and flavored this
book in some way, making it, of all of my books so far, the most
"worldly."
The book is a first visit to a new way of seeing the world and
hearing the message of Jesus. Many things I have understated in the
interest of gentleness; they could have been expressed in much
stronger language, but that more passionate language would have
been off-putting for uninformed readers (just as the understatement
may be off-putting for informed readers, which shows my
bias). Everything here also could have been explored in much greater
detail. That's why in the back of this book, you'll find extensive
notes that cite resources to help you go deeper in areas that grip you.
You'll find much additional background in The Secret Message of
Jesus, and although it is the prequel to this book, you can read
either book first.
Having finished writing the book, I am eager for you to read
it-slowly and thoughtfully, I hope, and with some friends if possible-and
I'm eager for all of us to get to work. There is much to dismantle,
much to overturn, much to rebuild, much to imagine and
create, and there are many seeds to be sown and grown.
GROUP DIALOGUE QUESTIONS
1. As you begin this book, what are you most excited
about? Confused or curious about? Eager to learn more
about? What feelings has this chapter elicited in you?
2. What are your impressions of the author? Is he winning
your confidence, or do you feel some of the skepticism
he identified in the opening paragraphs of this chapter?
3. How do you react to the summary of global crises in
this chapter-environmental breakdown (the prosperity
crisis), the growing gap between rich and poor (the
equity crisis), the danger of cataclysmic war (the
security crisis), and the failure of the world's religions to
address the first three crises (the spirituality crisis)?
Think of issues you've seen in the headlines lately. How
do they fit under these four categories?
4. This chapter introduces the subject of hope. How
would you describe your level of hope about global
crises as you begin this book?
5. What would you like other people in your discussion
group to know about you as your group begins?
6. Are there some traditions or patterns you would like to
observe when you gather (whether you gather in person,
by conference call, or online)? For example, would you
like to begin an end with the Lord's Prayer or one of the
prayers attributed to St. Francis? Would you like to take a
collection each week and use the proceeds to help
someone in need? Would you like to sing or a play a
theme song to conclude your meeting? If some of you
are writers or poets or artists of other sorts, would you
like to share things you're inspired to create as you read?
7. You can find links to other group resources at the book's
website: everythingmustchange.org. Discuss with other
group members some of the resources you discovered
on the website.
(Continues.)
