This fall the Boston Faith and Justice Network is starting up its fourth season of Lazarus at the Gate, the BFJN’s lifestyle discipleship Bible Study!  Lazarus at the Gate is a small group discipleship experience designed to impact global poverty. One of the premises of Lazarus is that Christians are called not just to believe in Christ, but also to follow Christ by deciding to live and act as Jesus did. For all, this process of modeling our life decisions after Jesus’ provides an invitation both to be transformed by God’s grace and to know Christ and his love more completely. As the Christian philosopher Dallas Willard writes,

“Practicing Jesus’ word as his apprentices enables us to understand our lives and to see how we can interact with God’s redemptive resources, ever at hand.”

A second premise of this group is that money is a critical object of modern Christian discipleship. Those of us who live in the United States spend most of our time either making money or spending it. As Christians in the U.S., we easily forget that Jesus identified his own ministry and person with the needy and the downtrodden. Today, globalization has placed Lazarus at all of our gates while we all remain aware that half of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day.

Over a 12-session study Lazarus discipleship groups will support each other in making four individual commitments:
• Spend joyfully: Regularly give thanks for the blessing of wealth Spend justly
• Make one lifestyle change to consume more justly Spend less
• Make one lifestyle change in order to buy less for personal consumption
• Give more: Make a substantial gift to fight global poverty

Near the end of the course, the group selects one to four international charities. They then they pool their individual gifts and give collectively.

Lazarus is an incredible opportunity to explore yourself and your giving potential. The Boston Faith and Justice Network invites you to join us in taking steps to understanding God’s plan the blessings He has bestowed upon us. Contact us immediately if you want to:

1. Participate in the Lazarus at the Gate leader training: The training sessions will be led by the course author, Mako Nagasawa. Although the materials for this course are free there is a $25 dollar charge for the two-session training, which includes lunch. The first session will be held at Park Street Church on September 25th and a follow up session will be offered in early November.
2. Join a Lazarus group: We’ve had a number of individuals reach out to us who would like to join other Christians in and around Boston in this course. Please let us know if we can put you in touch with others who share an interest.

The Lazarus at the Gate curriculum is available upon request and if you interested in leading a group please contact Ryan McDonnell asap as space is limited.

ryan@bostonfaithjustice.org

Over the past decade, discussions about justice have reached a tipping point in the evangelical world. Everywhere I go, people are talking about justice: from missionary gatherings to church planting conferences, justice is hot.

Of course the prophet Micah, in his verse that gets quoted more than the entire rest of his prophecies put together, said this: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

We prefer to translate Micah’s words as “Talk about Justice” or “have a conference about Justice” or “drink a cup of coffee for Justice.” But Micah says God requires of us not conversations about Justice, but Doing Justice!

To use a metaphor Jesus employed, the new wine of justice conversations is flowing in the United States. The unanswered question: do we have new wineskins to harness this new move of God, so we can move from conversations to action?

In early June, more than 50 people gathered in Washington D.C. to help craft new wineskins so we can truly DO JUSTICE in communities around the United States. Alexia Salvatierra, the director of CLUE-California, led a three-day training on what she calls “Faith-Rooted Organizing.”

The new wineskin of “faith-rooted organizing” is that our engagement with issues of injustice in the public arena begins not from self-interest or anger, but from our deep and abiding faith that God’s kingdom will come and God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Instead of traditional organizing, which labels people as targets and enemies, faith-rooted organizing calls us to always remember that every person is created in God’s image and can be redeemed and converted, even those perpetuating injustice.

Salvatierra challenged us to not shy away from quoting scripture in city counsel meetings, telling mayors and congress people that we are praying for them to do the right thing, and speaking out in the public arena from a place of moral authority rooted in the gospel.

So this week, in Phoenix and New York City and Boston and Minnesota and Oregon and Los Angeles and South Carolina, people are working to do justice in their local communities through Faith and Justice Networks.

Here in Cincinnati, we are working to encourage our city council to adopt a fair hiring process that will allow rehabilitated ex-felons to compete for civil service jobs in our city. To that end, we will be informing every council member and the mayor that we will be praying for them daily over the next week so they will be compelled to pass a fair hiring policy by the end of June. In Cincinnati and around the nation, Faith & Justice Networks are springing up, intent on not just having conversations about Justice, but on Doing Justice.

Troy Jackson is senior pastor of University Christian Church in Cincinnati, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, and earned his Ph.D. in United States history from the University of Kentucky. He is author of Becoming King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Making of a National Leader (Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century)and a participant in Sojourners’ Windchangers grassroots organizing project in Ohio.

My name is Savanah, and I am currently interning with the Boston Faith and Justice Network, which is co-hosting a film screening that I am incredibly excited about.  The featured film is an exciting new documentary about the escalating nuclear arms race, Countdown to Zero. Produced by the award winner Lawrence Bender (An Inconvenient Truth and Inglorious Basterds) and written and directed by Lucy Walker (Blind Sight and The Devil’s Playground).  Countdown to Zero features an array of important international experts and statesmen and makes a case for world wide nuclear disarmament.

This film is of particular interest to me because of my background as a student of international politics.  The issues associated with the large-scale production of weapons of mass destruction among nations, especially among rogue states has moved its way to the forefront of American Foreign Policy.   This screening is such an exciting opportunity to learn more about the global nuclear situation and how you can be part of the movement in the countdown to zero.

Who?

Co-hosted by:

Rev. Richard Cizik, The New Evangelical Partnership
Dr. Ira Helfand, Physicians for Social Responsibility
Ryan Scott McDonnell, Boston Faith & Justice Network
Dr. James McCarthy, Union of Concerned Scientists
& Global Zero

When?

Screening is on June 16, 2010
7:00 – 9:00 PM

Where?

Coolidge Corner Theatre
290 Harvard Street
Brookline, MA 02446

RSVP

Seating is limited, please RSVP at

rsvp@globalzero.org

Hope Fellowship Church will host its 3rd Annual “A Passport to the Nations” Multi-Cultural Festival on Friday, May 14th at 7:30 PM at the church facility. We invite you to join us as we celebrate the cultural diversity of our Lord’s creation. The evening will consist of food, art & clothing exhibits from around the world. There will also be cultural performances and demonstrations representing the beauty of the nations.

This event is free and open to the community.

Hope Fellowship Church is located at 16 Beech Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 (near the Porter Square T-Stop on the Redline).

For more information about this festival, please contact Odoi Odotei (odoi@hopefellowshipchurch.org) or visit www.hopefellowshipchurch.org.

We look forward to seeing you next Friday!

Boston Musica Viva
Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen
a multi-media chamber opera by Shirish Korde
April 23 & 24, 2010, 8pm
Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center

Contemporary music ensemble Boston Musica Viva and Music Director Richard Pittman present the world premiere of a ground-breaking new chamber opera, Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen, by Cambridge-based composer Shirish Korde. Performances take place at 8 pm on Friday and Saturday, April 23 and 24, 2010, at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. Tickets are $15-$30 and are available at www.bmv.org.

The multi-media chamber opera Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen is based on true events. This compelling story focuses on the life of Phoolan Devi, who was born into poverty, sold as a child bride, abducted by bandits, abused and victimized, imprisoned, and finally elected to India’s Parliament. Just as she was assuming national recognition as a crusader for the poor, she was assassinated in 2001 at the age of 37.

Korde’s contemporary score is a powerful synthesis of Asian and Western musical traditions. Drawing on the musical styles of India such as Vedic chant, Qawwali, Bollywood, and tabla drumming, as well as contemporary Western music, the composer unifies many diverse genres into a seamless lyrical score. An international cast of musicians, dancers, and singers will join Boston Musica Viva, including Zorana Sadiq and Elizabeth Keusch, sopranos; Brian Church, baritone; Aditya Kalyanpur, tabla; Chirag Katty, sitar; and dancers Prachi Dalal, Mesma S. Belsare, and I Made Bandem.

Business was good. By 2:30, we had met our sales goal for the day and customers were still streaming in. Regardless, I didn’t want to interact with any of them.
“Can I help you?”
“No, I’m just looking.”
“Ok, great. Let me know if you have any questions.”
Back to the counter to continue doing inventory and trying at least have an engaging look on my face.

Then, just as I was about to curl up in the fetal position on the floor behind the cash register to take a nap, Bill comes up to the counter with our new Salt Crystal Lamp from Pakistan. He’s happy to have found such a piece. After all, it has a natural pink hue that will go well with the Italian conch shell that sits on the other side of his room. It also has a natural salt formation on one side, that serves as clear evidence that this is not an “all natural” piece that, under careful scrutiny, proves to be plastic.

Bill and I got to talking. It turned out that he used to be a correspondent with CBS and a number of smaller, independent European news networks. He covered just about every civil war in Eastern Europe and Latin America during the 80s and 90s, but his most memorable experience was radio documentary work. Most of these documentaries focused on how the customs and traditions of indigenous people groups were being affected by the increasing reality of globalization.

He mentioned, for example, how the installation of natural gas pipelines in Eastern Europe disrupt the migration patterns of reindeer – and the nomadic people who herd them. Or, how Guatemalan men now leave their villages to work in cities, since local agrarian employment is dying off in the face of large, corporate-controlled farms. Not to mention the fact that Native Alaskans, tempted by the allure of the city, wind up leaving their villages and moving to Anchorage, where they learn English and stop speaking their native tongue – and stop telling their oral histories to their children.

All of these groups remind me of the Biblical character David facing Goliath. Faced with the choice of trusting in God’s power for miraculous deliverance, or becoming a slave to the encroaching Philistine Empire, David chose the right path. In a world that is much more globalized than David’s was, our neighbors face difficult choices. With little mouths to feed and often on the verge of survival or death – and rarely prosperity – do they vie for a better, harder way with the faith that God will deliver them, or, in the face of such a giant struggle, do they pack up, leave their children, and migrate – in order to survive and protect the very families they may leave behind?

We in the church often forget that we, too, are like David: faced with busy lives and an overwhelming sense that the structures we interact with are immense and immovable, we can say a prayer of faith and then throw our own stones at Goliath to support our fellow men and women across the world: buy Fair Trade. Pray for the people making our stuff and corporate executives who employ them. Grow some of our food. Pray for the farm workers and agribusiness executives. Walk or bike to work. Pray for people in Nigeria and Alaska affected by energy policies. And never lose sight of the fact that David’s trust was in the Lord, not his own hand, or even the stone itself.

Ben Cressy lives in Uphams Corner in Dorchester. He has a rough-edged passion for food sustainability and is figuring out how to live life with his neighbors who worship at and live near the Quincy Street Missional Church. He works as the Fair Trade Campaign intern at the Boston Faith and Justice Network and as a part-times sales associate at Ten Thousand Villages in Brookline.

It has just become a part of our culture. A discussion about Fair Trade at the Greater Boston Vineyard involves food. I like to eat, so I’m particularly partial to this development. At our meeting in October we made ice-cream sundaes. Pretty easy right? As my contribution, I stirred up sugar, cocoa, and vanilla — all Fair Trade Certified™, of course — for the chocolate sauce. The result was delicious, if I do say so myself. However, with my meager cooking skills, I was a bit apprehensive about our next culinary challenge. For this month’s meeting, we decided to bake cookies, cake, and other delectables to complement the Equal Exchange hot cocoa and tea that our featured speaker had offered to bring.

Three local leaders were featured as speakers at the meeting. Anna Utech, Interfaith Program director at Equal Exchange, gave a history of the Fair Trade movement from the 1940s to today. Ryan, executive director of Boston Faith & Justice Network, advocated for why the church should be involved in social justice. Liz Green, lead organizer for Fair Trade Boston, outlined the next steps in the campaign and how we might all individually get involved.

I was greatly impressed with the remarks that Anna gave. The level of engagement between her and the audience was electric. Many good questions led to greater understanding. She started with a discussion of how the interrelationship between actors in the north and the south helped to birth the Fair Trade movement.

Anna explained that in the global south, where colonialism was rampant in the past centuries, there has been a historic oppression of workers and local businesses. Powerful corporations based in countries in North America and South America have historically profited from this relationship, providing cheap goods to consumers in the global north. Note that as decades and centuries passed, this cycle of oppression contributed to the global north becoming richer (and more powerful) as the global south became poorer. This aggressive drive for increased wealth has also led to the environmental degradation and slavery that persists to this day. The graphic below simple depicts the North/South development divide as determined by the United Nations.

Anna pointed to how religious organizations have been directly part of the struggle to free the global south from unfair trade practices since the 1940s. The movement started in the south as local workers united to demand fair wages with northern advocates, often Catholic clergy, marching in solidarity. Soon, groups such as the Mennonite Central Committee and the Church of the Brethren created alternatives to charity by importing handicrafts from their foreign missions to sell in the United States and other rich countries. These two movements created the long-lasting retailers now known as Ten Thousand Villages and SERRV International. “Trade not Aid” became the rallying cry of the movement. In the 1970s attention began to shift from handicrafts to agricultural goods such as coffee. According to Anna Utech, church basements in Holland were one of the earliest places where fairly traded coffee was made available. One quarter of Equal Exchange’s current coffee sales are to faith organizations.

Why coffee? Anna Utech explains that coffee was seen as an agent of change because it is a critical source of income for people in many developing countries, continues to be heavily traded, and is largely grown by small-scale farmers.

Equal Exchange itself was started in 1986 by three guys who had come up with the idea while working in the warehouse of a natural foods company. In 1991, the company adopted the new European Fair Trade Certified™ standards, and, then in 1999 it adopted the standards set out by upstart TransFair USA. Equal Exchange continues to push the limits of what is possible for trade by sharing risk with its farmers, offering up to 60 percent of the purchase price before harvest.

After Anna’s talk, Ryan and Liz talked briefly about their respective responses to the issue and, then we opened up the meeting to further questions from the audience. Anna addressed some of the challenges to Fair Trade including the economy (for the first time Equal Exchange has been forced to reduce their contracts), co-ops vs. plantations (cooperatives support democracy and community-based development), big brands (impact of Starbucks, Dole, Nestle). A member of TransFair USA’s board – who showed up unexpectedly – was able to fill in the gaps.

Luckily no one was forced to eat the Swiss chocolate roll that I baked Saturday afternoon. Plenty of other goodies were available. Later in the day, as I reflected back on the meeting, I cut myself a slice to sample the cake. Epic failure. The remainder slid off the tray into the trash.

Jeff Purser has a real passion to find sustainable solutions to eliminate extreme poverty. He serves as a community organizer for Fair Trade Boston and lives near Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

On January 21st, however, Stop and Shop will begin a trial run of Equal Exchange bananas.  This trial run represents a large step for Stop and Shop, owned by the grocery chain Supervalu, which operates stores under various names across the United States.  Fair Trade products are typically found in small quantities at larger, conventional grocers, which typically work with Dole, Chiquita and more established brands that can provide a quantity sufficient to supply hundreds of stores. Unfortunately, the human and environmental costs that must be paid to produce such a large quantity of bananas are numerous.

This trial run represents a larger paradigm shift occurring in the North American grocery economy – one that believers in the Fair Trade concept ought to support.  There is a growing presence of Fair Trade, organic, and generally “ethically produced foods” at conventional grocery stores like Shaws, Stop and Shop and even Market Basket.  These trends will continue if there is a consumer demand for them.  A new market of Equal Exchange bananas at Stop and Shop means increased revenue for the company, and increased capability to form new relationships with small farmer co-ops abroad.

Second, and more important to me personally, is the appearance of Fair Trade products at the grocery stores where my neighbors shop.  As a resident of Uphams Corner, a neighborhood of Dorchester, that is generally regarded as underprivileged, Fair Trade grocery options are all but unavailable locally.  In order to buy a Fairly Traded product, I have to get in my car or make a long bus commute to another neighborhood.  To my neighbors, most of whom feed extended families on food stamps, this concept is ludicrous. They do all of their grocery shopping as quickly as possible – and usually at Stop and Shop, because it’s close, the bus stops in front of the entrance, and it has everything one could need.

But, when a large company like Stop and Shop begins to explore carrying a Fair Trade product line, it reminds me that perhaps there is hope that my neighbors will be able to participate in the same just economy that I believe in, one in which they are often excluded from or simply don’t have the means to participate in.  It also reminds me that perhaps there is even hope for grocery giants, whom we often tend to demonize in favor of smaller, local options, to change their direction.

This trial run must be supported by consumers in order to pave the way for a consistent supply of Equal Exchange bananas to be available in stores. I encourage all readers to check their local Stop and Shop for these bananas on or shortly after January 21st and grab a bunch! You can identify them by spotting a a red and blue Equal Exchange label. If you cannot find them in the store, ask a produce manager if they have been ordered. If they haven’t been, let the produce manager know that you are aware that other stores are participating in the trial run and that you would like to see the particular Stop and Shop you frequent carry this product. Stores listen to customer desires. A consumer demand opens up a larger market for Equal Exchange product, and greater profit from the enlarged market, which enables the growth of fair, social just partnerships around the world.

This is a step to be celebrated and supported by all of us who believe in Fair Trade, reminds us that, in the words of Equal Exchange, Together we can create stronger local communities, a more just food system and a healthier planet.

Ben Cressy is a program intern with the Boston Faith and Justice Network, where he enjoys working with college students to bring Fair Trade food options to their dining centers.  He lives in Uphams Corner, Dorchester, and is pursuing a passion to enhance  local food sustainability, security and nutrition in his community.