Pastoral Economic Struggles

Facing Together Global Capitalism's Domination in Daily Life

by Lee Van Ham

This Present Moment as a kairos Moment

The intensity of our current economic context is being called by some a kairos time.(3) In the 1980s and 1990s, kairos statements began to appear in various countries. Bold testimony and astute analysis came from sisters and brothers first in South Africa, then Central America, Asia, and other African countries. Each statement clarified what confessing Christ as Savior and Lord means today in their various contexts, contexts which, though different, all feel the oppressive, life-depriving weight of domination imposed by global capitalism.(4)

The bible uses 'kairos' to name a special time when God offers us a new set of possibilities, a surge of grace. Our 'yes' or 'no' to this offer has far-reaching consequences. God calls to us, announcing the glad tidings of a new direction that offers hope for what can be and the unmasking of what is. Jesus' words opening his ministry as given by Mark come to mind: 'The kairos is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.' (Mark 1:15) A new way of thinking and acting is now possible, both individually and collectively. And if this offer from God is now possible, then any of us who confess our faith in God will commit to following the new possibility -- whatever the changes it requires from our own status quo, poor or rich.

There is an either-or challenge to us in a kairos time that counters our both-and tendancies. The Kairos Document from South Africa shows how confessing Christians there came to believe that they had either to confess Christ as their authority for life or put their trust in the State, with its regimen of apartheid, as their authority for life. It was not possible to do both at the same time. In the same way, kairos Central America addresses the economic apartheid of rich and poor.

The Central American crisis has gotten more serious and more profound. The conflict has reached a climax in tension and in deepening of consciousness. Never before in our history have the poor felt themselves so moved by the Wind of the Spirit to be effective instruments for the purposes of the God who is Creator of all. Never before have the churches of Central America felt themselves so engaged and challenged by the God of the poor. Never before has the Empire had to turn so irrationally to 'might makes right.' Never before has the world had such a generalized feeling of international solidarity and shared responsibility in the face of what is in play in Central America, in the face of what this land is giving birth to for the sake of a New Humanity and a new world. (5)

Accordingly, 'Central America has become a kairos of unforeseeable consequences: either we close the door on the possibility of hope for the poor for many years, or as prophets we open up a new Day for humanity and thus for the church.'(6)

The kairos statements found some listening hearts in the U.S. and Europe as well. Some people of faith who are citizens of the modern Empire -- those countries who are the primary implementers of global capitalism -- also recognize the idolatry of the current devotion given to neo-liberal economics. An example of the anguish and hope of some citizens of the Empire is expressed in the 'kairos Document' authored by the Pro-Latino Ecumenical Association in Washington, D.C., for Latinos/as in the USA. They said, 'Today, kairos means reading the signs of the time, both in terms of the profound historical, social, political and economic conditions of the human family, and with a view toward discerning the authentic and sacramental presence of God in history. To the extent that Christians in the United States see the events of history and the structures of power in this country from the perspective of a crucified humanity, they will discern God at work in this time.'(7)

Kairos, then, defines the evangelical decision for pastoral ministry at this time. Pastoral workers either offer their devotion to the Powers of Empire that design the systemic economic domination and oppression, or we devote ourselves to the ancient-contemporary biblical wisdom of an alternative. That alternative does not come from the weary socialist-capitalist debate, but from what the bible presents as the Sabbath-Jubilee, God's old-new order, the gospel of a liberated and liberating humanity in Christ.(8) As we make our choices about which it shall be, we establish the framework and much of the content of our pastoral ministry. In kairos terms, it is a decision for Christ or for Empire. An either-or. The intensity of the current reality has moved us beyond both-and.

We believe that in this kairos time, God's Spirit is shaping a new 'confessing church' comprised of sisters and brothers together from across borders between poor and rich nations and neighborhoods. So the pastoral ministry presented in this chapter is for all who themselves long to be released from captivity to the Empire and to put their trust instead in God's alternative as their Way of Life. Making such a choice prepares us, then, to live the alternative, the Sabbath-Jubilee, in our personal and communal lifestyles. That practice must not insulate us from others nor from the Dominating Powers. Rather, we offer it as a gift and an invitation to others seeking similar release.

Poor-Rich Apartheid

Global capitalism has created an economic apartheid world-wide. The 1992 Human Development Report of United Nations Programs on Development graphically presented the poor-rich situation with a champagne glass analogy (See graphic no. 1). The Human Development Report (Oxford University Press) for 1999 updated the information and added research back to 1820. The results show an accelerating rate of inequality dating from that time, when the richest received 86 times more.(9)

That some are rich and others are poor is not mere coincidence. Each is the cause of the other, though not necessarily because they all want it that way. Many poor and many rich work against it. But the system is very aggressive and has overwhelmed and dominated our efforts. Now the system is global. [FIG.=The Champagne Glass Analogy] The result is an institutionalized poor-rich gap into an apartheid system. This system, however, goes by more benign names such as globalization or neo-liberalism. By using 'apartheid' we are awakened to see that the segregation of poor from rich is currently fixed in place with structures that assure it will be a widening gulf. Fewer and fewer can cross it.(10)

The dream of upward mobility out of poverty has become an illusion for most. Immigration across national borders has become a way of coping for thousands, even though it separates them from family and uproots them from their own culture and the heritage of their traditional ways and identity. They cross the border from a poor country to a richer one. When we look deeper into this migration, we can see that this unhappy choice is a forced immigration. Better called displacement, it is happening worldwide. This displacement is imposed by economic forces, by natural disasters intensified by globalization's exploitation of ecosystems, and by military actions to support the economic quests of Empire. Forced immigration, or displacement, brings more people into poverty than voluntary immigration brings into livelihood. Those who are finding a way may only be buying a better seat on the Titanic -- a luxury ocean-liner of the elite that wrecks because it does not accurately discern the danger below the surface. Similarly, current global capitalism cannot stay afloat, because it continues to ignore much that is below the surface, treating significant truths as external to economic progress.

In pastoral ministry we err when we neglect the biblical analysis regarding poor and rich and heed instead the analysis of the markets, corporations, financial institutions, and ministers of economies. The 'priests' of global capitalism tell us that poverty is caused by under-development. The logic follows that if underdevelopment is the problem, then development through foreign investment must be the solution. But the bible takes a different view, attributing poverty to the dominating, oppressive behavior of the rich (James 2:1-7; 5:1-6).(11)

Proceeding according to this biblical diagnosis, there is little likelihood that the poor will be brought good news through the plans of the rich. Rich countries and neighborhoods continually design ways to invest in poor regions, developing them according to the rules of global capitalism. It is those same rules that have pushed poor people and countries to the brink of death in the first place. In pastoral care for God's people, we need to be clear that global capital's system on balance oppresses the poor. It liberates few of them. Mostly, it will extend their poverty for another generation or more, rather than give them a hand up. In pastoral ministry we are bound by the bible and the moral behavior of healthy faith communities to align ourselves with the truth of God's promises rather than to adapt our behaviors to the false promises of the Dominant System. Together, we can help one another see the lie in globalization's promises.

As pastoral workers we cannot continue to stand by to see whether development may work 'this time.' For we are in a kairos time. We must opt for the Way (Isa. 35:8, 40:3: Mk. 1:3: Jn. 14:6; Acts 9:2) that brings good news to the poor, not the promises of development from the rich. Such promises we now know from history to be false, and from biblical study to be an extension of oppression. They will only push more people to the edge of survival. By contrast, the Sabbath-Jubilee rearranges all people into community and into commonwealth.

Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Luke 16:19-33, urges us to address poor-rich apartheid in this lifetime -- now, in the kairos moment -- and not to wait for some utopian time when God will make it right. In this story, the gulf between Lazarus and the rich man in this lifetime was not bridged by the rich man, though Lazarus begged him to do so. So after death, Jesus pictures the unbridgeable gulf continuing, only now Lazarus, not the rich man, reclines in the place of privilege. Even in Hades, the rich man is trapped in his mindset of privilege. He calls to Abraham to have Lazarus serve him by bringing him a drop of water to relieve his torture. Abraham replies that the gulf prevents it. Indeed, the gulf of privileged mindsets prevents good news everywhere -- on Earth as well as in Hades. So then the rich man beseeches Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers, still thinking only of his family, not the human family, nor what the privileges of his family's wealth has done to add to the oppression of the poor. Abraham quickly replies that they have Moses and the prophets, teachers whom they, as upstanding citizens, have continually claimed to respect and honor.

Truth is, of course, that Moses and the prophets urged the economic justice of Sabbath-Jubilee, an economic structure shunned by the rich man, his brothers, and their family dynasty as they sought the privileges of the Dominant System. Had they heeded the Sabbath-Jubilee, they would have prevented the apartheid between poor and rich. But even in Hades, the rich man upholds apartheid. He pleads for sympathy within that unjust system, rather than opening his eyes to God's desire for human community that includes all. Finally, he argues that his brothers will listen if Lazarus goes as one raised from the dead. But Abraham recognizes that pity for the rich who will not repent from their systemic injustices will never bring good news to the poor nor release to the rich. It will only help keep apartheid in place, with all of its preferential options for the privileged. 'No,' says Abraham, 'even that won't bring the new order to them.' So the curtain falls on the drama of the rich man and Lazarus.

In pastoral work, we need to address the systemic causes of the tragic and grotesque separation between poor and rich. We must never imply in our teaching and practice that this apartheid can be overcome by good, ethical business choices within the system of domination. Nor that a change of attitude is all that is needed. Transformation of apartheid is not just about the rich becoming less greedy and more compassionate, nor about the poor becoming less docile and more assertive. It is about changing the gulf of apartheid which is held in place by an institutionalized complex of governments, trade agreements, the World Bank and all the international development institutions, the militaries, arms sales, intelligence networks, and the transnational corporations that seek cheap commodities, cheap labor and large profits without giving a hand up to the 50% of the world's people living on $2 (US) or less per day. (12)

If as pastoral workers we despair of changing such a complex of Powers, then, yes, we do need a remake of our faithless, disbelieving attitudes. Our minds, rather than conforming to apartheid's way of thinking, do need to be renewed. We do need to invite God to think divine thoughts where our own despairing ones have resided. The power of Christ unmasks this complex of Powers (Col. 2:15), and we are asked to function out of the liberation with which Christ has liberated us (Gal. 5:1), not the death and despair that the dominating system of global capitalism brings to the poor. The gospel that we live, teach, and offer to others in counsel must be able to offer liberation amid the poor-rich apartheid or it isn't the good news of God that we see embodied in the ways of Jesus.

In another story a woman anointed Jesus with expensive, imported nard (Mark 14:3-9) only to have his male disciples object to her extravagance in light of all the poverty in the world. But Jesus disagreed with his disciples. Poverty, he knew, could not be corrected through charity alone. It required changing the economic system away from privileging the rich at the expense of the poor. In anointing him, this woman acted on what she had come to see, namely, that Jesus put himself wholly toward systemic change in his every act of compassion. So Jesus chided the disciples for their lack of insight and analysis even as he held up the woman, one of the oppressed in the social-economic hierarchy. He said that her story needed to be told wherever we preach his gospel. That her story is not better known clearly reflects on the difficulty we have in seeing the need for systemic transformation in our own poor-rich apartheid.

These two stories, first a very poor man and then a woman excluded from the privileges of the Dominant System, reveal the structural apartheid that exists between poor and rich. They also make clear our either-or choice. In this kairos time we cannot define economic pastoral work as simply being compassionate toward the poor, nor only in moving money from rich to poor. True pastoral work calls us to a new order and practice. It implements the insights of the gospel of the kingdom, the Sabbath-Jubilee structural adjustments that equalize rich and poor in a community of God's new humanity. Our work also invites the Spirit to change our attitudes and to move money generously from those with more to those with less. But most especially, it tells us to shift the entire economic framework of how we think and live to the old-new wisdom of Sabbath-Jubilee.

We turn now to how the apostles and people of the primitive church undertook such pastoral work.

Pentecost and the Early Church

Most contemporary readings of Acts 2 focus on the outpouring of the Spirit, but miss Luke's careful contextualizing of this event within the economic reality of that time.(13) When economics is left out of our understanding of Pentecost, we cheapen and distort the story. In today's kairos time, pastoral workers are needed who can see in Luke's story of the Holy Spirit what we have too long missed.

The Feast of Pentecost, as experienced in Acts 2, is the antithesis of global capitalism. It was a pilgrimage festival, so people came to Jerusalem from diverse sectors of the Empire to observe this Feast of Weeks -- a marvelous, cross-cultural social gathering, rich in history and spiritual worship. Its social value was increased by its economic significance. Because it was a harvest festival in an agrarian society, its economic importance was on everyone's mind as they celebrated the ripening of the first fruits. The first of the crop to ripen called forth such great thanksgiving from all involved in food production because, with the arrival of the first fruits, a harvest was assured. Hallelujah! Praise God! Now a rather accurate estimate of the harvest could be made, and hence people could project their livelihoods and the state of the economy for the next months.

Luke maximizes this economic context in how he presents what follows. Remember, Luke has already given us the story of Jesus framed in the economics of Sabbath-Jubilee. In that story Luke first presented Jesus bringing himself to people publicly in his hometown synagogue. There, among the people who knew him as a boy, Jesus claimed the Jubilee vision of Isaiah (61:1-2 and 58) as his own. Like Isaiah, he felt 'in the Spirit' to bring good news to the poor and release to the captives by living a year acceptable to the Lord. The political, social, and economic impact of what he said was not missed by his hearers who, first, were amazed, and then, turned murderously angry.

Now Luke, with a similarity that is not accidental, gives us the story of the Holy Spirit in his second volume -- what we call Acts. He introduces this story with the Sabbath-Jubilee framework just as he did with Jesus. The Spirit that came upon Isaiah, and that came upon Jesus at his baptism, now came upon the gathered followers. It was that Spirit that was the energizing power by which Isaiah could see a new social order and by which Jesus had lived it in his present moment. kairos! Now, the Spirit was having the same impact on Jesus' followers gathered in Jerusalem. Peter preached a sermon connecting that moment's events with the outpouring of the Spirit that their prophet Joel had envisioned. That vision, Peter proclaimed, would now be practiced by all of them as a new socio-economic order. The people felt inadequate. 'How?' they asked. So, Peter urged upon them repentance (Acts 2:38), that is, they needed to open their minds and hearts to thoughts and actions that would transcend the way they had been thinking and acting. He urged them to enact ritually their movement into this new order by being baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, because he had lived the new order that they were now to practice and carry to others. They needed, Peter said, to be released from their sins and debts, that is, their complicity with the current Powers. Through this change of mind and the ritual enactment with water, they would be released from the domination of the Spirit of this Age and be filled instead with the Spirit of God, an awesome and holy Spirit.

Notice how similar the sequence is here at the start of the story of the Holy Spirit to the sequence Mark used at the start of the story of Jesus. In Mark 1:15, Jesus also urged repentance right after he was baptized by John, a baptism for repentance, meaning, for release from captive thinking and acting into new-order thinking and acting.

We want to make the point here that in order to live the Sabbath-Jubilee socio-economic Way in the midst of Empire and Temple domination, it would indeed have taken the outpouring of a divine and holy Spirit. The Spirit of the Age, which gripped everyone's way of life, resulted in a certain surrender to and rationalization of Empire. Nonetheless, that Spirit could be displaced in and among all who would receive the divine and holy Spirit. To this day, she continues to empower all people and groups who yield to her, energizing them to live according to another Way -- the Way of Isaiah (Isa. 35, esp. vs. 8; 40:3), the Way claimed by Jesus (Mk. 1:3; Jn. 14:6), and The Way lived in the early church (Acts 9:2; 19:2,23; 22:4; 24:14,22).

The enormity of this change generated awe among them. The awe, a combination of great fascination and holy fear, gathered them into a koinonia(14) of new humanity that broke through social hierarchy. It included the koinonia of economic commonwealth that replaced private ownership (Acts 2:44; 4:32-5:11). The Spirit was distributed across social borders (Acts 2:7-11, 38-39; 4:31, 10:44-48), and, under her influence, possessions were distributed across economic borders (Acts 4:36-37). The social and economic rearranging went hand-in-hand. With the Jubilee coming every 50 years, it appears to be important to Luke that these events happened on Pentecost, coming, as it does, 50 days after Passover, which was the Feast of the Exodus that liberated people from domination by the Empire of Egypt. A little later when Paul wrote to followers in Corinth, he urged them to implement an economy in which those with more did not have too much, and those with less did not have too little (II Cor. 8:13-15).

The pastoral work of the Spirit of God today is, then, guided by the story of the Holy Spirit poured out at Pentecost. We all need to accept the anointing of the Spirit of God to convert us out of the spirit of this age by which the thought patterns and lifestyles of global capitalism dominate us. This is our repentance. Then, as we become liberated from our sins and our debts to the Dominant Culture and Empire, the Holy Spirit comes as gift -- a divine provision essential for our commission. The Pentecostal experience of God's Spirit, as we urge one another to live in the Spirit, not in the flesh (Rom. 8:1-17), puts into practice the experience of the early church. Instead of practicing global capitalism, we practice the economics of Sabbath-Jubilee, because it, not capitalism, brings good news to the poor. In our daily lives we can learn to be mindful, prayerful that no less than one half of the world's people 'live' on $2 (US) per day or less, so that all of our choices are made prayerfully within the reality of our kairos time, not according to the advertising wizards of Empire.

Global Capitalism	Sabbath-Jubilee
Brings bad news to the poor; good news to the elites; reinforces and accelerates economic apartheid	Brings good news to the poor and a choice to the rich for a liberating redistribution; redesigns economic hierarchies into a distribution of God's sufficiency for all
Requires privatization. Complete self-reliance is valued because it makes each person into a customer for commodities.	Private property is never absolute because all is God's. Encourages de-privatization and moves us toward commonwealth. Fewer commodities are needed because they are shared.
Roams the globe seeking countries with laws that favor corporate power over labor rights; seeks people willing to work long hours for low pay. People become commodities.	Arranges for rest every seventh day for all laborers, plus every 7th year and every 50th year. Economy is arranged around laborers and community, rather than a hierarchy of owners and laborers.
Opts for countries with weak environmental laws or ones that do not enforce them. As a result air, water, and land are polluted; forests and mineral-rich land are abused.	Knows that the Earth belongs to the Lord, as do all the inhabitants; believes that the stones and the Earth herself cry out for justice. Rituals, ceremonies, and worship all celebrate the incarnation of God in all that is and breathes. As a result, harmony with the environment achieves sustainable and life-giving productivity.
Has close alliances with the world's richest countries and dictates directly or indirectly how the economies of the rest of the world's countries will follow the neo-liberal model.	Encourages local and regional market economies that seek a 'community of countries' -- a world with many worlds within it.
Expects militaries and police to support what will assure the security of transnational investing.	Is a nonviolent economic practice that develops security through relationships and dialogue. In this way all live in the sufficiency of God's abundant enough.

Going forward from the day of Pentecost, the early church followed this new-old Way, practiced constant prayer, and dissented from Empire. So can we. Next we turn to the interplay of prayer and protest in living the gospel amid Empire.

Prayer and Protest

In our kairos time, people in increasing numbers are discovering that prayer fuels protests of global capitalism, and that protests, in turn, fuel the desire to pray. It is the linking of the two that we want to emphasize in this segment, because many Christians are timid toward one and zealous toward the other. But living the Sabbath-Jubilee amid Empire brings us quickly to a new knowledge of how much prayer and protest need each other and lead to each other.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel was marching arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King during the civil rights protests of the 1960s in the U.S. South when someone called out to him, 'Rabbi, shouldn't you rather be praying?' He replied, 'My feet are praying.'

But in the Domination Culture of Empire, considerable effort is made to keep prayer and protest separated. The Dominant Culture uses prayer to support imperial authority, not to protest it. Protest must be demonized, not embraced with prayer. So linking protest to prayer threatens Empire, because it makes protest a spiritual act and gives it spiritual authority. Prayerful, spiritually-based dissent has the capacity to delegitimate the Powers. Once Powers lose legitimacy, people feel empowered to go a different way. Empire, therefore, claims prayer for its side and denigrates people who use it in protest. But in the spirituality of Sabbath-Jubilee, prayer and protest are two actions of one's integrated devotion to the Lord of all life.(15)

Prayer shifts what inhabits our minds. As we pray, the awareness of the Dominant Culture is replaced by the awareness of Divine Presence and a new order. We are released from the grip of Empire and freed to be awed by the possibilities of a new Way. It is not even so much that we pray, but rather that God prays, groans, sighs, and anguishes in us with the intent to transform Empire into serving divine rule.

We, then, do not engage in tepid or timid prayer. But, ignited by the friction with the Empire, we burn with the desperate need for divine power. Our own powers soon run on empty because the struggle is apocalyptic, not made for flesh and blood. As our resourcefulness wanes, if we are wise, we call out in prayer. Like children who have gotten ourselves in deeper than we knew, we call anxiously and desperately, 'Mommy! Daddy! Help!' Far from being a place of weakness, it is in such moments that dependence becomes strength. The mystery of prayer operates.

The early church rediscovered such praying. The days preceding and following Pentecost were a school of prayer. People's minds and hearts became inhabited by the Divine Presence. The Spirit of God displaced the Spirit of the Age. A Power greater than Empire and Temple oligarchy inhabited them. Peter and John (Acts 3-4) illustrate what was happening. As they invited people into the alternative Way, and got a great response, the Temple authorities, surrogates of the Empire, arrested them. In court the next day, the authorities admonished Peter and John to stop teaching the name of Jesus, the name that was clearly anti-imperial. But upon returning to the koinonia of the other followers, the place was shaken as they prayed. For them there was to be no caving in to the authority of Empire. This was a kairos, either-or time. They would be back on the streets with the message of the new order of Sabbath-Jubilee, a message that the Powers heard as a protest of their position and authority. The new order would not tolerate their privileges and hierarchies. The economic, political, and social hierarchies would be leveled.

In so far as we who are in pastoral work today are able to live an alternative Way amid global capitalism, we will do so as people who pray and protest. The forces of the Empire chill the hearts of the best of us. The numbing chill thaws when we are not embarrassed to call for help like when we were children in need. When we pray the Spirit rekindles us.

Today, global capitalism continues to speed along its freeway of imperial domination -- an Empire that distributes most of God's resources to a small percentage of God's people even as it claims blasphemously that it is the best system history has ever known. Its unfolding story has moved into apocalyptic dimensions. Note, for example:

Debt -- The starvation of 19,000 children daily because of the debt of poor countries onerously 'owed' to rich countries and to the international financial institutions they control. The debt, structured so that it will never be repaid, allows the creditor nation and institutions to dictate the poor country's choices. Those dictates never include feeding the poor nor assuring healthcare or education. The dictates by the creditors follow a rigid, fundamentalist imposition of neo-liberal economic theory. These continually shift the burden to the poor through devaluation of currency and new trade agreements to foster 'development.'(16)

Hunger -- Extensive hunger and starvation on a planet that can grow enough food for all reveals the impotence of the Dominant System to meet basic human needs. Global capitalism distributes food to where there is a market, namely, people with money. The rest of the people are excluded in a grossly immoral, non-sharing system.

Democracy lost -- Wealth is increasingly concentrated through corporate management of resources with a result that democracy is destroyed. This happens despite the often repeated mythology that capitalist markets and democracy go hand-in-hand.

Lies and truth -- Lies and megalies are put out by government and economy leaders in ever new guises. The corporately owned media transmit them as truth through the newspapers, television, radio and cinema. Empire, we need to remember, relies on lies and distortions of truth, because they are the only way to justify the concentration of wealth, power and privilege. Hence, when we pastoral workers speak and live truth, we are in dissent even as we serve God's rule.

Force with impunity -- Abuses by military and police continue without judicial accountability as long as they serve the security and interests of the rich nations and their elite allies. The elites of poor nations serve an important role in Empire as they betray their own people while running the businesses and governments of their poor nation for both their own benefit and that of the rich nations with whom they are allied.

Budgets for violence -- Military budgets, justified in the name of national security against enemies, spiral worldwide beyond all truly sensible reason. By 1996, annual world military expenditures stood at $780 (US) billion. The World Game Institute has shown that 30% of that total would address all the needs of our planet -- starvation, malnourishment, shelter, healthcare, stable population, preventing soil erosion, retiring poor nations' debt, energy efficiency, conversion to renewable energy, literacy, and topping deforestation. It's doable. Truth costs less than lies.(17)

Ethics of leaders and stockholders -- Business leaders are blinded to the long term impact of their decisions and override their own ethics as they scramble to meet quarterly objectives so that stockholders will not abandon them for greater profits elsewhere.

In the face of all of this, pastoral workers cry out in assertive prayer. Walter Wink proclaims eloquently:

Intercession is spiritual defiance of what is, in the name of what God has promised. Intercession visualizes an alternative future to the one apparently fated by the momentum of current contradictory forces. It infuses the air of a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of the present. Those who have made peace with injustice, who receive their identity from alienated role-definitions, and who benefit economically from social inequities, are not likely to be such intercessors.
The message is clear: history belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being.(18)

Those around Jesus recognized not only that he countered the Empire and the Temple oligarchy with authoritative teaching, but also that he prayed a lot -- and with different results from their own praying. Likewise today, we see the quiet power in all women and men who bring contemplation and action, prayer and protest together in a holy union.

In our pastoral work today we need to engage in prayer and protest, holding them together as the friends they truly are. We can pray with focus and openness to the Divine Presence within us, among us, and beyond us. As part of the same spirituality, we can protest with prophetic savvy and creativity as we perceive the divine nudge to do so.

We turn now to look more closely at how the bible speaks of the Powers with which we are in a life and death struggle, and how the Power of God engages them.

Principalities and Powers

Most of us in pastoral work today have not been trained in, nor have we developed on our own, a spirituality of structures and institutions. This is true despite the bible's very insightful spirituality of Powers. To live redemptively amid global capital's domination we need now to reclaim this particular wisdom of the bible. Here, we will focus on only one phrase, 'principalities and powers,' as it was used in the early church (see Eph. 6:12 and Col. 2:15).

The spirituality of the early church recognized that to live the Sabbath-Jubilee order amid Empire, and to do so in a way that sought to redeem society rather than to condemn it or revolt against it, required more than working with 'flesh and blood' (Eph. 6:12). Their witness sought to do more than change peoples' hearts or win the minds of youth. In addition to such important personal spirituality, they sought to redeem social and economic systems. They understood how the death and resurrection of Jesus had exposed the Empire's weakness. This was a great irony. For Empire had conspired to show Christ's impotence. Instead, Christ had disarmed the 'principalities and powers' (Col. 2:15). Empire was de-legitimized. With this conviction, the followers of the Way had done a 180 degree change from what they had perceived before as truth and reality before the resurrection. They had indeed repented! Furthermore, the repenting continued, repeating itself in a process of the 'renewing of the mind,' away from 'conformity to the Dominant System' (Rom. 12:2), and to God's way. Empire, they came to see, was built on lies and mega-lies. Christ was truth (Jn. 14:6).

This brilliant socio-economic analysis understood the impossibility of countering the Spirit of the Age (Eph. 2:2) with flesh and blood. Minds had been numbed into thinking that there was no alternative to Empire; hearts had become habituated to cultural norms. The positions, privileges, and power-patterns of Greek and Jew alike were accepted as the only practical alternative. To even conceive of a 'new humanity' would take an immaculate conception. Yet, when human minds and hearts receive the Holy Spirit, such new conceptions happen.

One of the most mind-boggling and persuasive evidences that a new order was possible began happening soon after Pentecost when the Greek-Jew apartheid began to be deconstructed. People, who had been segregated by ethnicity, were built into a new people on the cornerstone rejected by the designers of dominant systems, namely, Christ (Eph. 2:11-3:21). Likewise, the economic and social hierarchy of slave and slave-owner was eroded, though apparently not totally deconstructed. So too were the female-male gender inequities. Sadly, it is a testimony to the enormous influence of 'principalities and powers' that all three of these segregations and hierarchies have continued in all Dominant Systems since. Tragically, faith communities show their faithlessness in having allowed all three to re-enter their ways of ordering life. Our Christian traditions have been so reliant on 'flesh and blood' analyses and behaviors, that people have been unable to live the redemptive revolution of Jesus.

But in this new kairos time, we pastoral workers are reawakening to the Truth that Christ has disarmed the Powers (Col. 2:15). Therefore, despite their global proportions and the military might that supports them, we, nonetheless, proceed to create with Christ the new creation. We see it modeled by both Jesus and the early church in radical, life-giving fashion as they lived the Sabbath-Jubilee. We see how global capitalism, today's supreme vortex of 'principalities and powers,' functions as an idolatrous deity. Our pastoral work can show an economic way separate from this deity. The God of Sabbath-Jubilee works with us to redeem economics from global capitalism's reign of violence and death.

As people in pastoral work, we can begin with cleansing our own hearts and minds from their habituation to and numbing by global capitalism. Steve Biko, who wrestled with the principalities and powers of racial apartheid in South Africa, observed, 'The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.' Moses, remember, while organizing enslaved, broken people for release from Empire, discovered that at first 'they did not listen to him because of their broken spirit and cruel bondage' (Ex. 6:9). So repenting from our addiction is an ongoing spiritual process for all of us. Let us pray and work to be released from our addiction to global capitalism's bright, shining lies and alluring myths.

Our pastoral work also needs the Holy Spirit because she will conceive in us a new creation, empowering us to live it amid global capitalism's pernicious web of entrapment that enslaves most while privileging few. We need daily to perceive that global capitalism's promises are false. In addition to its empty promises for the poor, we can see that its track record is grim, even though it formulates ever new products and new promises. In contrast, the Holy Spirit's fruit includes love, joy, and peace (Gal. 5:20) -- 'products' on which life thrives.

Like at Pentecost, this divine Spirit comes upon communities, not just individuals. So in our pastoral work, we need to rearrange our lives out of the individualistic patterns dictated by Domination Systems, and into an ecclesia(19) and interdependent koinonia that is social, spiritual, and economic. Our example is the early church. The economic component, shaped according to the Sabbath-Jubilee, leads to periodic adjustments and levelings of financial resources. Such economic activities test us all beyond what our 'flesh and blood' can achieve. So, come, Holy Spirit.

In our faith communities, we need to remind each other in word and ritual, in action and Sabbath, that Empire exists as a nexus of lies. Accordingly, . . .

we must seek out truth and practice it even as we pray for systems, not just people, that they will be redeemed out of Empire and into a new creation.

we need to encourage each other to love our adversaries who carry out the deeds of Empire, or we are likely to act just like them.

we need to pray for healing of illnesses and diseases in ways that include their social and economic components as well as their medical, emotional and biological aspects.

Today the domination of the many by the few is arranged by global capitalism, not from Rome, but from the G-7 nations and the global corporations whom they primarily serve. Thousands of churches and humanitarian organizations, not unlike the Jerusalem Temple, are largely in compliance with the scheme. In our pastoral work we must push away from the Spirit of the Age far enough to nurture people in another way.

We turn next to how pastoral ministry needs to be prophetic in order to move from compliance and apostasy to greater faithfulness.

Pastors and Prophets

Global capitalism demands that pastors and prophets be close friends. The best way to build such friendships is to know the pastor and the prophet who reside within each of us. Pastors need the prophet's savvy regarding socio-economic injustices and the systems that create them. Prophets need the pastor's soulful wisdom regarding the habits of peoples' hearts as well as the mystical connection to the Divine Presence that nurtures and transforms. Though some burn with a desire to be prophetic, wanting to deconstruct and reconstruct the systems and structures of society; and others have an equal passion to be pastoral, wanting to address the habits of the heart and soul; these are not exclusive in one of us or another. The fact is, the pastor and the prophet in each of us need to be joined, so that we live out the gospel as pastor-prophets and prophet-pastors. At the same time, we recognize that for most of us one will be more prominent.

We have in many churches and humanitarian organizations today a domination of the pastoral over the prophetic as well as a segregation of prophets from pastors and vice versa. So the prophets are found mostly on campuses, in peace and justice organizations which may or may not be faith-based, and in non-church jobs with a humanitarian bent. A lot of us in pastoral work serve congregations and chaplaincies where the prophetic voice is often muted by the dynamics of the institution, or lost in the sheer quantity of care and priestly functions required by people.

There are many in pastoral work whose hearts have a prophetic fire, but it remains very contained. It is often smothered into smoldering embers because the struggle with economic globalization as a system is very hard where we work. Many people in congregations and on the boards of humanitarian organizations serve the Dominant System. Many receive its privileges, and so defend that System. They may even be evangelists for its mythology and do not warm to suggestions that more just alternatives need to be tried. If they hear that the bible teaches an alternative, they will be surprised, but rarely are they open to any thorough study for further reflection. They would rather find texts or authorities to support their views. Their mind is fixed. They work long hours in the System and keep church largely focused in family and personal life, not the workplace. They expect the humanitarian organizations they support to be engaged in charity and civic responsibilities, not systemic change. In all of these ways the System's emphasis on privatization and individualism reduces religion and humanitarian service from its ideals to imitating the System and serving it. The systemic engagement characteristic of Jesus, the early Church, and prophets old and new is muted.

So churches and humanitarian organizations dominated by the middle class can rarely muster prophetic action. There, if prophetic action exists at all, it is relegated to a small group who have an occasional voice. The leaders may include some prophetic vision in their teaching, but direct actions, dramas in the streets and on Temple steps, and other enactments characteristic of biblical prophetic witness remain largely unknown in middle class churches and organizations. Loyalty and devotion to the Dominant System rule. It is an idolatrous situation, an unfaithfulness that the kairos documents name and call us away from.

Churches and humanitarian organizations of the underclass are not usually prophetic either, but for different reasons. There the energy is used up in addressing basic survival needs of people. The spirituality and theology typically focus in privatized relationships with God. Many stress praise and the anointing of the Holy Spirit as a transcending power amid the oppression of the System's domination of daily life. This is not without value. For to show that our capacity to praise cannot be taken away by oppressors is a great act of protest indeed.

Underclass churches also give a lot of attention to 'binding up the broken hearted,' but not usually in the way Jesus did it. Jesus' attention to the broken hearted was not just psycho-spiritual, but politico-spiritual and socio-spiritual and economic-spiritual. Jesus, for example, when he healed the bent over woman (Lk. 13:10-17), did so on the Sabbath. He spoke to her among those in the synagogue, thus breaking the holiness code which forbade him to speak to a woman in public. He invited her into the portion of the synagogue where only men went and gave her prestigious recognition by calling her a 'daughter of Abraham.'(20) When he evangelized a woman of Samaria it happened because he made a point of traveling through Samaria, not going around it like all other faith-people did.

So prophetic action is as absent in churches of the underclass as the middle class. Indeed, the fact that churches get arranged according to socio-economic class reveals what we don't want to acknowledge: the Dominant System has created congregations in its image instead of congregations being created by God in the divine image. Thus, the potential for a redemptive presence amid the System is lost. These dynamics among churches of the underclass and middle class are often found also in the humanitarian organizations that have lost their prophetic tone.

For a variety of reasons, we pastoral workers, whether of the middle class or underclass, have been unable to mount the prophetic voice and action to create accurately a contemporary witness that expresses the prophets, Jesus and the early church. We have been in a retreat from the prophetic to the pastoral and have found ways to justify it. But even our pastoral ministry has become distorted from truly wholistic pastoral work. To be sure, we find more than enough work to fill our time. Because global capitalism devastates many lives and contributes to ecological and natural disasters, 'binding the broken-hearted' can take all of our time. But it does not tell the story of the woman who anointed Jesus -- a story that Jesus wanted told everywhere along with his gospel.

What then are we to do? We can redesign our work to be in relationships with peace and justice groups and with today's prophets wherever we find them. One place of action where our pastor-prophet presence is too absent, but where it is greatly needed, is in the struggle to educate and organize laborers. So many laborers are at the cutting edge, challenging global corporate abuses. Managers of plants and companies have enormous power over labor in global capitalism. The laborers need 'Moses' and 'Miriam' to walk among them. Because so many of our churches and boards of our organizations include managers whose companies may be adversaries of organizing labor, the pastor-prophet task in this arena challenges us to the core of our faithfulness. In some cases our work may be to help laborers form cooperatives of production.

We can also work with university students who get into the work of justice. To move alongside of the intelligence and energy of youth is a holy task for pastor-prophets. Students have shown they understand very well the issues of privatizing education. They understand how global capitalism pressures all sectors of society to privatize if there is a way for that sector to offer corporations and private investment a profit. Student strikes and other strategies have repeatedly shown discipline, accurate analysis, and a desire to act nonviolently. United Student Against Sweatshops has organized on scores of U.S. campuses to protest clothing and products carrying the university logo that have been made with sweatshop labor. They would welcome more presence and support from pastoral workers.

The pastor-prophet's work is as impossible at times as it is required. We need each other for support, for prayer, and for ever-new strategies that enact the gospel in the streets of daily life. It is when we are with those most oppressed by global capitalism that we learn how well we can put the gospel into action and speech.

Conclusion

So we return to the musing of the psychotherapist at the beginning of this chapter. Society creates wholesale the destruction, disease and despair that pastoral work addresses retail. There is no keeping up. We must redesign our witness, our use of time, our church's and organization's activity, and the witness of our daily lives so that we engage the Powers of domination for their own redemption.

In conclusion, as we do pastoral work in the current economic context and kairos time, we can take heart when we read the Gospels with eyes to see how Jesus taught and healed, because he did so with great awareness of the economic realities of Empire and Temple hierarchy. His strong and gentle pastoring asserted value after value contrary to the ways of imperial domination that emanated from Rome and the hierarchical control of the Temple. Our work today can hardly do better than to join the many who, over the centuries, have based their personal and communal patterns on his Sabbath-Jubilee exposition of life pleasing to God. It is a prophetic-pastoral way of resistance to the current reality while living a bold, visionary alternative.

References

Brown, Robert McAfee, ed. (1992) Kairos: Prophetic Challenges to the Church, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans.

Clinebell, Howard. (1965). Mental Health Through Christian Community, Nashville: Abingdon Press.

Collins, Chuck & Felice Yeskel (with United for a Fair Economy). (2000). Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality & Insecurity, New York: New Press.

Hanks, Thomas. (1983). God So Loved the Third World, Maryknoll: Orbis.

Kinsler, Ross & Gloria. (1999). The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life, Maryknoll: Orbis.

Myers, Ched. (1996). Interpreting the Lessons of the Church Year: Pentecost 1, Proclamation 6, Series B, Minneapolis: Fortress.

Wink, Walter. (1992). Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Minneapolis: Fortress.

Footnotes

1. Quoted by Howard Clinebell, Mental Health through Christian Community, p. 103.
2. For a fuller description of the Sabbath-Jubilee see Appendix entitled Sabbath-Jubilee Economics in Brief: An Alternative to Neoliberal Globalization; also Ross and Gloria Kinsler, The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life.
3. An example of a kairos time is given by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and some other Christians in Germany during the Nazi regime of the Third Reich. They discerned that they were in a kairos time, meaning that they had come to the decision that they could not obey both Christ and their government. It was, they said, an either-or situation. So they formed a 'Confessing Church' and wrote their confession in The Barmen Declaration. The kairos Document from South Africa declared a similar situation. Many Christians were unable to follow Jesus and also the apartheid government leading their country. Their action withdrew religious legitimacy from the apartheid regime (see Kairos: Three Prophetic Challenges to the Church, edited by Robert McAfee Brown). This chapter takes a similar position regarding neo-liberal globalization's domination of the world. It is an either-or time for many of us who can no longer be faithful to God and also to the gods of Empire. The challenge of doing pastoral work in this context is now before us.
4. Kairos: Three Prophetic Challenges to the Church, edited by Robert McAfee Brown.
5. Paragraph 85 in Kairos Central America: A Challenge to the Churches of the World, April 3, 1988.
6. Ibid., paragraph 86.
7. See Challenge, Summer 1999, the quarterly of EPICA (Ecumenical Program on Central America and the Caribbean in Washington, D.C.), pp. 7-8.
8. Ephesians 2 and Kairos Central America, paragraph 65.
9. This research is from Ross and Gloria Kinsler presented in a handout during a seminar in 2000.
10. See Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity, by Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel, 2000, with United for a Fair Economy for a fuller description of data supporting our understanding of the current system as apartheid. Even though they write only about the U.S., because it is the primary country in contemporary Empire, what they say ripples across the globe. From them we have taken the language of “economic apartheid.”
11. Thomas Hanks, God So Loved the Third World, Orbis, 1983, p. 38 and elsewhere for a clear exposition of this biblical perspective.
12. See the United Nations Report on Human Development mentioned above for this statistic telling us that one-half to two-thirds of God's human family lives as Lazarus -- cut off from the resources God intended for them by the current apartheid system.
13. See Ross and Gloria Kinsler, The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life, p. 141, which joins the Spirit and economics in Pentecost, thus increasing its significance. They cite the work of Ched Myers in this regard.
14. This Greek word, koinonia, names a strong, communal solidarity among people that includes a community-wide sense of God's presence. The experience of koinonia animates actions and breaks through into thought patterns that do not happen without the experience.
15. See Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers, chapter 16, 'Prayer and the Powers,' for a bright, shining call to prayer as we engage the Powers. He influences several parts of this segment.)
16. See JubileeSouth.org, JubileeUSA.org, and 50years.org for more information on why debt is another form of colonialism and imperial slavery.
17. See WorldGame.org/~wgi.
18. Ibid., pp. 298-99.
19. Ecclesia is a Greek word meaning 'called out ones,' i.e., ones called out of the Dominant System into structures of a new order. It is commonly translated 'church.' But churches today are often so acculturated, so much like the Dominant System, that the word has lost its original meaning. In this kairos time, all of us who feel we are being 'called out' of the Dominant System are eager to create a new koinonia with other 'called out ones.' We need each other and can use the word ecclesia with great authenticity if we choose to do so.
20. Note that Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers, p. 129, cannot find any other use of this 'title' in literature, thus emphasizing just how radical it had to have sounded in the ears of those gathered.

Page updated 6 April 2014

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