Sarah Fine caught the vision. Nurtured in the comforts of the suburbs, she set her eyes on making a difference in America by stepping into a vocation of significance. She chose to teach in the inner city of Washington DC. Her are the words of her own discovery of the realities:
The
president is right: My generation does seem to care a lot about Important
Stuff. We put our lives on hold to canvass for the causes we believe in. We
volunteer like our hair is on fire. When it comes to teaching, however, this fire
only burns for so long. We millennials are jostling each other for a place at
the whiteboard, but few of us stay long enough to see our students make it
through.
I’ve seen Sarah’s story dozens of times in my fifteen years of teaching college students: a middle to upper class background, studying at North Park University in the City of Chicago, and experiencing first-hand the realities of poverty and homelessness and (what everyone justly calls) “systemic injustice.” I see such students wandering through degrees until they catch the vision of making a difference and contributing to the “millennial” vision of justice. Most change majors, opt for something nitty-gritty like the social sciences or something with potent vision in the humanities, like biblical studies or philosophy, and graduate and off they go to make a difference.
For two or three or, like Sarah Fine, four years and then burnout and the whole vision thing collapses. Some, of course, return to the “norm” and enter the business world and start heaping up dollars and get married and buy a big house and the whole cycle starts over. But each one of these millennial visionaries is changed – from the inside out they know they tried. They will never be the same, but they usually have a haunting nightmare of “why didn’t it work out?” They also wonder if they will cave in like their parents.
Let me make a suggestion: I believe this vision is the right one. And I applaud the effort and sacrifice of the millennials who have attempted to change the world, but I have a theory: they are attempting too much on a thin foundation.
This vision for a just society comes from Moses and from the prophets, and the Christian Sarah Fines of this world get it from Jesus, especially as articulated in the Gospel of Luke and then found in brilliant display in Acts 2:42-47. But the biblical story tells us something profoundly important for those of us who want to see what Charles Marsh has called “the beloved community.” What it tells us is that the beloved community, the society where justice, love, and peace prevail, where the post-racial society can flourish, is a process and it is unswervingly local. The process is that we must be reconciled with God and self and others and the world through the good news of Jesus Christ. Without that we burn out; without that we stand on a flimsy foundation. Without that we do it all on our own efforts. Furthermore, the way to change the world is not by focusing on the world but by forming, in your life and in your family and in your neighborhood and in your church, a local community where each works for that beloved community. Foundation and focus must be right for genuine change to occur.
Pastor Bill Hybels constantly declares that the local church is the hope of the world. He wasn’t the first to say this. Jesus and the earliest Christians were. Because they were so convinced that the way to change the world was through the conversion process and through local displays of God’s beloved community, they did it – and the gospel rang out from a rag-tag group of Galilean fishermen. The bell was first rung in the Land of Israel and it began to echo, first in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and then in Greece and then in Italy and Rome, and within four centuries, the Roman empire was transformed – perhaps the most remarkable transformation of any society in the history of the world.
It began with Jesus’ vision and it was implemented when person after person surrendered themselves to him and his vision and invited others to follow Jesus by joining the beloved community. It was an experiment born of the deepest vision ever dreamed. It lives on today.
Link for Sarah Fine’s story:
Title of book for Charles Marsh: The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
Blessings,
-Scot McKnight
