Tom Sine has written a very thought-provoking and imagination-stoking article which was recently republished at The Ooze. He asserts that Christians have done a poor job of choosing housing with Kingdom values, instead looking out for themselves and following the “more is better” attitude that characterizes so much of the American lifestyle.
With the American poor unable to find adequate housing and the middle-class young spending such a staggering portion of their income on it, we need to view how we house ourselves as a justice issue.
I had never really thought of it that way before. In fact, I haven’t really thought that much about the local poor. In our immediate neighborhood, the poor are mostly young people and older men who live on the streets, either by choice or because of substance abuse, neither of which we can do much about. But Seattle has a large generationally poor population in the Rainier Valley, the neighborhood in which Amy and I work.
To be honest, I have seen my work with my population of students - the added difficulty of working with poor students vs. middle-class students - as a personal act of service, but not as related to our church planting efforts. I must admit that no one on our team is from a church background that really emphasizes social justice. Several of us have done mission work (short- and long-term) in poor countries, but it just isn’t a part of how we were raised to think of the plight of those in our city who are different from us. It should have been a concern, but it’s hard to raise kids to be sensitive to the less fortunate when you live in a homogeneous, monoethnic small town (as most of us did growing up).
So this is a stretching area for me. It was challenging to read how the Solomon’s Porch community moved their offices and meeting space to a poorer neighborhood, and saw it as an opportunity for growth. We need to find ways to get out of the middle-class ghetto and really view all people as our brothers and sisters, particularly when so many of the urban poor are Christians.
Tom offers a few radical possibilities:
This small mission group bought a quarter-acre lot in inner-city Oakland and refurbished the two older dwellings that were on it. They then constructed seven new units for the 22 people in their group. Everything was designed to be environmentally friendly, with water-on-demand water heaters and photovoltaic collectors that provide 85 percent of their electricity. They have a play area and a mini-soccer field for the kids and a common room where they eat together a couple of times a week.The new community has come to represent the shalom of God in their neighborhood. Rather than homeschool their kids or place them in private schools, they send them to the local public school where members of the community volunteer in order to redeem it for all the kids that go there. One of their nine units is a transition house for mothers coming off welfare. They organize neighborhood block parties and host art shows for the community. They even interview older residents so their stories can be shared with the neighborhood.
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Imagine a new generation of Jesus followers creating a spectrum of cooperative communities that seek to flesh out the values of God s new order through creative forms of mutual care, celebration, and service. Imagine Christians with resources establishing revolving, interest-free mortgage funds to enable less wealthy members of the community to pay what their unit actually costs over seven to 10 years instead of three times the price over 30 years. Finally, imagine the difference it would make in our society if Christians all over America, like those in the Oakland cooperative, really decided to seek first God s kingdom by creating communities that both reflect and advance God s new order.
