January Month Peace (New Look!) from The Global Immersion Project in San Diego, California, United States "January 2017 Monthly Peace" for Monday, 30 January 2017

January Month Peace (New Look!) from The Global Immersion Project in San Diego, California, United States "January 2017 Monthly Peace" for Monday, 30 January 2017
Monthly Peace

Your monthly peacemaking resource and inspiration
As we kick off 2017 we wanted to refresh our Monthly Peace. Each month you can count on this email to bring you resources, tools and inspiration to feed your journey as an Everyday Peacemaker.
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Parenting as Resistance: A Post-MLK Day Reflection
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Last week I picked up Ruby, our 6-year old, from school and she immediately burst

into questions about Martin Luther King Jr. A portion of our conversation went like this:
Ruby: “Daddy, did you know that white people used to not let black people drink from their water fountains or shop in their stores or ride on their buses?”
Me: “Yep, it’s terrible. How does that make you feel?”
Ruby: “Really sad. Why would people do that just because they look different?”
Me: “Because people are often scared of people who look or think different than they do. And some people think they are better because of the color of their skin.“
Ruby: “Did you hear about the man who said that we shouldn’t do that anymore? We are going to celebrate his birthday next Monday.”
Me: “Yep, his name was Martin Luther King Jr and he was a peacemaker who followed Jesus.”
Ruby: “We need to celebrate his birthday more often by doing what he said.”
I was undone. Both with pride for the way my daughter was developing and disgust at the evil of our shared history in this country.
A few days ago, some of our dear friends hosted an interactive MLK party where we read parts of his speeches, reflected on the significance of his prophetic work and witness, lamented our broken past (and present) and sang songs of hopeful protest.
Last month, I walked the streets of Montgomery, Alabama to study the history of slavery, racism and white supremacy in our country and learn from Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative who is actively working to heal the deep wounds in our country. As we stood in a building that once held African slaves in chains between their auctioning to the highest white, European bidder, we were invited into the history of systemic racism in the form of slavery, lynching, segregation/Jim Crow and mass incarceration.
A couple months before that, I found myself sharing and praying at the memorial service of Alfred Olango on the streets of my own city (San Diego) alongside the family of this unarmed black man killed by the police. The pain, misunderstanding and distrust was palpable.
Two years before that, like Joshua around Jericho, I marched with faith leaders in NYC after the murder of Eric Garner (who famously said, “I can’t breath,” while being choked by a police officer) pleading for God to tear down the walls of racism and injustice that hold us captive.
I’m no hero, but I feel as though I’m learning about and from those who are. Her are a few learning’s that have risen to the surface.
First, as a white man inheriting a narrative of dominance, I’ve had to confront how blind I’ve been to the plight of my friends of color and commit to a long, disorienting journey of (re)learning. Second, I’ve been deeply moved by the active nonviolent resistance put on display by black organizers for decades in pursuit of racial justice and equality. It is there that I have not only seen the actions of Jesus, but the people Jesus most often described as understanding and inhabiting the kingdom of God. And, third, I’ve been convicted and inspired to share about both — the ugly history and the beautiful peacemakers seeking to redeem it — with our children.
While my wife and I still have ALOT to learn in the parenting department, we are doing our best to stumble forward in a way that shapes our four littles in a way that reflects that of Jesus. We have found that when we expose, educate and invite our children to confront our broken past and build a new future, the act of parenting becomes a tangible form of resistance. It is resistance to perpetuating a narrative and life of apathy, privilege and violence. It is a resistance to the principalities and powers that promote the flourishing of a few at the expense of the many. At the same time, it is an opportunity to shape a generation that has learned from our mistakes and participates with God in healing our broken world.
As white parents with plenty of privilege, here are a few ways we are working to understand our parenting as resistance:
Expose Our Kids to Injustice
As a parent, there is a temptation to isolate our kids from the injustices of our world. While requiring necessary discernment, I would argue that we need to more regularly expose our kids to injustice. Not only does it allow them to confront the brokenness of our world (and the ways we’ve contributed to it) while still under our care and guidance, it gifts them with the opportunity to see a reality beyond their own. Many kids are raised embedded in systems, structures and everyday realities of injustice, so it is only in our isolated privilege that we “choose” to expose our kids to injustice. As followers of Jesus, we often see God’s best work unfolding in and among those on the underside of power. Not only was this the reality of Jesus, it was the very nature of the way he described the kingdom of God. If we don’t accompany our kids into realities of pain and suffering, they miss an opportunity to meet Jesus in the lives of those often dismissed by society at large.
Educate on the Good and the Bad
It’s easy to teach our kiddos all the good stuff of our history. Or, to twist the “bad” stuff of our past to make it sound “good.” Not only is that incomplete (or even untrue), it short-circuits their formation and perpetuates harmful narratives. In preparation for MLK Day, we read to our kids about Rosa Parks and talked about why black people were treated badly by white people. We watched Kid President who talked about MLK and the tragedy of his assassination. We opened up space for them to ask hard questions, which as a parent, is both terrifying and thrilling. If we stigmatize the hard questions as “out of bounds,” they will either ask someone else or get more curious on their own. We’re not big fans of either of those options.
Invite Them Into a Story Worth Living
We are adamant about not only helping our kids identify what they are against, but inviting them into a life that reflects what they are for. We need to invite them into story that is shaped by an enemy-loving God (Jesus) and sustained by enemy-loving people (Church). In short, we want them to identify with our global family by following a Jesus who crossed every kind of border and boundary as part of God’s mission of reconciliation. We don’t want them to be peacekeepers who embrace the status quo, but peacemakers who upset the status quo for the sake of restoring what is broken. To be “peacemakers” has now become our kiddos greatest aspiration and we talk about what that looked like for them each day on the way home from school.
This is not a time to sit on the sidelines in silence. It’s the moment we must follow Jesus into the middle of our broken story to stand with and alongside those who have been abused and sidelined in our society. For those of us with influence in and among the next generation (not only biological parents!), parenting may be both our best resistance to the evil and best opportunity to usher in the good.
Original post can be found here on Jon Huckin’s personal blog
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All is not Lost
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2017 Peacemaker's Playlist
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Just Mercy
by Bryan Stevenson
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latest from the blog:
Go Disturb the Peace
While white Christians sing songs about a God who ‘fights our battles’ and ‘sets us free,’ those who are not white and Christian tremble in fear. They’ve been threatened by an overt racism and simply cannot afford to “wait and see.” They don’t have time for our prayers and platitudes. They need to experience white American Christians following the Jesus we talk about.
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“Let’s wait and see. Let’s pray. Let’s hope for the best.”
These are the most repeated phrases we’ve heard and read from white American Christians since November 8th. They come from friends and family members who span the rural/urban, wealthy/poor, educated/uneducated, Christian/non spectrums of our country. While not every one of them voted for Donald Trump, this man’s unprecedented ascendance to the most powerful seat in the world and the emergence of his administration is being tolerated by white American Christians like an unpleasant odor that we’ll learn to live with.
Accompanying these sentiments is deep confusion over why people of different skin tones, religious traditions, and documentation statuses are outraged or even terrified by Trump and his administration.
Our confusion simply exposes that we white American Christians know very little about life on the underside of privilege. Most likely, we’ve never been impacted by a traffic stop that went lethal. We’ve probably never been racially profiled in our neighborhoods, schools, stores, restaurants, and airports. There’s a good chance that our lives have never been touched by the tragedy of American mass-incarceration. It’s likely we’ve never had to march the streets, engage in creative non-violent action, and risk hospital and jail time for civic disobedience because these were the only options we had left to demand the just treatment of our people.
As we’ve traveled the country and worked with churches from the east to the west, we’ve discovered that the vast majority of us are out of touch with the pain of people who are different than “us.” We’re out of the loop because, for various unfounded reasons, we’ve chosen not to be in relationship with them. Most of us are ignorant of and indifferent toward the plight of our migrant, Muslim, LGBTQ, and black neighbors. While we’ve notice the dehumanizing rhetoric of the President-elect and are aware that his administration has zero track record for protecting the rights of the marginalized, we simply mumble our sentiments about hope and promise to pray for “peace” from within the confines of our homogenous neighborhoods and worship spaces.
While we sing songs about a God who “fights our battles” and “sets us free,” those who are not white and Christian tremble in fear. They’ve been threatened by an overtly racist Presidential administration and simply cannot afford to “wait and see.” They don’t have time for our prayers and platitudes. They need to experience white American Christians following the Jesus we talk about.
This is what Martin Luther King Jr. called his white Christian colleagues to on April 16th, 1963.
A few days prior, Dr. King was arrested for disturbing the peace in what was, at that time, the most segregated and one of the most “churched” cities in the United States. The status quo of racism and segregation in Birmingham, AL, marked by a broken criminal justice system and bombings of black homes, business, and churches, was a pseudo-peace that favored the white community. It was a “peace” that was reinforced by the silence of the white worshipping community.
This was a “peace” that demanded disturbance.
So, for months, Dr. King and his allies worked tirelessly with the faith community, civic community, and economic influencers in Birmingham to bring the violent injustice to an end. Sadly, the protection of power by the white community trumped their desire to acknowledge the human dignity and equality in their black neighbors. Benefitting from the unjust status quo in Birmingham trumped faithfulness for its white Christian inhabitants.
With the diplomatic efforts falling short, Dr. King and 1000 friends showed up in non-violent protest. Their intent was to impact the economic infrastructure of the city but before their strategy could materialize, King and his associate, Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, were arrested and jailed.
Behind bars, King received an open letter from the white pastors and rabbis of Birmingham renouncing the unrest caused by his protests and condemning the “outsider” for poor timing.
On April 16th, Martin Luther King Jr. penned a letter in response to his white colleagues. It reads as strongly today as it did fifty-four years ago and exposes a very scary reality: we (the white Church in American) have made very little progress since that day.
It’s a letter saturated with what have become words enshrined in infamy. Statements like “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” are on the lips of contemporary white faith leaders who look back on this letter and “those times” with generous imaginations. We automatically position ourselves as allies who would have unquestioningly marched, even laid down our lives, for the rights of the threatened.
But are we? Have we put in the time to move from strangers to allies with those different from us? Are we engaging in acts of creative non-violence alongside those whose rights have been and are being threatened? Are we outraged to the point of action about the overt racism of the President-elect and the racist agendas of his administration? Are we leveraging every bit of the power and privilege we have in order to ensure the flourishing of the marginalized in our neighborhoods and cities? Are we men and women who are actively following Jesus by disturbing a pseudo-peace in the same way he did 2000 year ago?
Or are we like those white Christians in Birmingham AL who worshipped their safety and protected their power from within buildings adorned with stain glass images of sacrificial love? Are we like those well-intentioned white Christians who noticed the pain but could only muster platitudes like, “Let’s wait and see. Let’s pray. Let’s hope for the best.”?
From King’s perspective, well-intentioned white Christians who worship safety, remain silent, and encourage the marginalized to “hang in there” were more dangerous and a greater threat to justice than the violent few. He wrote, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Friends, history has proven that white American Christians are fluent in apathy. King put it this way: “…the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound.”
History has proven that we are indifferent to the pain and plight of those not like us, and are, therefore, irrelevant. King’s offered this: “Far form being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of the thing as they are.” He continued, “If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”
The evidence is in. But more than irrelevant, the white American Church has become a liability to justice in the eyes of those who are not “us.”
The time has come for us to become fluent in creative love. The time is now for the white American church to reclaim its identity as the Reconciled Beloved and its vocation as Beloved Reconcilers.
Toward this end, we give our lives.
Author: Jer Swigart – Cofounding Director of Global Immersion Project
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