Kingdom Calling

Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good

Amy L. Sherman

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780830869558
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christianity Today Book Award winnerImagine the scenarios: - a CEO successfully negotiates a corporate merger, avoiding hundreds of layoffs in the process- an artist completes a mosaic for public display at a bank, showcasing neighborhood heroes- a contractor creates a work-release program in cooperation with a local prison, growing the business and seeing countless former inmates turn their lives around- a high-school principal graduates 20 percent more students than the previous year, and the school's average scores go up by a similar percentageNow imagine a parade in the streets for each event. That's the vision of Proverbs 11: 10, in which the tsaddiqim—the people who see everything they have as gifts from God to be stewarded for his purposes—pursue their vocation with an eye to the greater good.Amy Sherman, director of the Center on Faith in Communities and scholar of vocational stewardship, uses the tsaddiqim as a springboard to explore how, through our faith-formed calling, we announce the kingdom of God to our everyday world. But cultural trends toward privatism and materialism threaten to dis-integrate our faith and our work. And the church, in ways large and small, has itself capitulated to those trends, while simultaneously elevating the "special calling" of professional ministry and neglecting the vocational formation of laypeople. In the process, we have, in ways large and small, subverted our kingdom mandate.God is on the move, and he calls each of us, from our various halls of power and privilege, to follow him. Here is your chance, keeping this kingdom calling in view, to steward your faith and work toward righteousness. In so doing, you will bless the world, and as you flourish, the world will celebrate.

Part One

Theological Foundations

1

What Does a Rejoiced City Look Like?

The citizens of God’s city are the best possible citizens of their earthly cities.

Rev. Tim Keller

If the missional call of the church is to “rejoice” our cities by offering our neighbors foretastes of kingdom realities, we need to understand what the Scriptures tell us about the coming kingdom. Congregational leaders need to know the marks of the kingdom—its characteristics, features, purposes and virtues. Then they need to preach and teach on these kingdom marks, helping their congregants catch a vision for what a rejoiced city looks like. Church members then have direction for strategically deploying their God-given vocational power to advance those kingdom expressions.

One helpful way of identifying these kingdom features is to examine closely the “preview” passages in the Bible. Pop a movie into your DVD player, and you’ll first see previews of coming attractions. Similarly, throughout the Bible are previews of the coming “feature film”: the kingdom of God in all its consummated fullness. These texts offer us glimpses into what life will be like in the new heavens and new earth.

Jesus used a preview passage (Is 61:1-2) when he stood up in a Nazarene synagogue and announced his mission on earth. Many believers are familiar with preview passages like Isaiah 11:6 (“the wolf will live with the lamb”) and Micah 4:3 (“they will beat their swords into plowshares”) because these are commonly read during Advent. Many other preview passages, however, are less familiar.

A comprehensive study of all the preview passages is beyond the scope of this book. However, we can launch an initial excavation based on a collection of preview passages.[1] These offer us a clear view of the characteristics of the consummated kingdom. Preeminently, the preview passages reveal that the consummated kingdom is marked by two major, closely related features: justice and shalom. A rejoiced city, therefore, is one where ever-greater tastes of justice and shalom are made real.

Both concepts are massive. Using a couple of shorthand organizing schemes, I’ll examine several specific dimensions of justice and shalom. Along the way, we’ll meet Christians who are nurturing those aspects of justice and shalom through their work. My hope is that this material provides fodder for sermons and illustrations as church leaders seek to inspire their flock to catch a vision of being the tsaddiqim who rejoice the city.

Justice

The latter half of Proverbs 11:10 draws our attention to the vital place of justice in rejoicing the city. The full verse reads, “When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices; when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.”

Readers familiar with Old Testament study recognize a structure here common to much Hebrew poetry: parallelism. Essentially, the poet says the same thing twice in a verse, using two slightly different constructions. In Proverbs 11:10, there is a connection between the “righteous prospering” on the one hand, and the “wicked perishing” on the other. Notice that both events—the righteous prospering and the wicked perishing— produce the same reaction: wild rejoicing. Jubilation arises when the wicked—who are described over and over in the Old Testament as doers of injustice and inequity—are cast down and replaced by the tsaddiqim, the doers of justice.

When the righteous prosper, justice prevails. The tsaddiqim seek to bring into reality three dimensions of justice that mark the consummated kingdom.[2] These are presented in figure 1.1. We’ll look at each in turn.

Rescue. The consummated kingdom is marked by the end of all oppression. In it, the poor, the innocent and the helpless will be rescued from all the grim realities they face at the hands of violent oppressors. Psalm 10 paints a terrifying picture of these realities, noting how the wicked person “hunts down the weak” and “lies in wait like a lion in cover” to attack and drag off the poor. The prophet laments in Isaiah 5:23 that the wicked “acquit the guilty for a bribe but deny justice to the innocent” and that they are “swift to shed innocent blood” (Is 59:7). Under the wicked, the social order is bankrupt and the people feel hopeless: “Justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows” (Is 59:9).

Figure 1.1. Three dimensions of justice

The work of rescue is about remedying these sorts of violent injustice. It involves identifying, exposing and transforming situations where there is an abuse of power, typically perpetuated through coercion and deception. It means bringing about the kinds of foretastes of justice celebrated in Isaiah 62:8-9 (ending bonded labor) and Isaiah 61:1 (freeing the illegally detained from their dark prisons).[3]

British solicitor Matthew Price has deployed his vocational talents to affect these kinds of rescue. For two years, Matthew and his wife and baby boy made their home Kampala, Uganda, serving the cause of justice on a short-term assignment through a British mission agency, BMS World Mission. There Matthew came alongside the Ugandan Christian Law Fellowship (UCLF), mentoring paralegals and law-school students to train them in “maintain[ing] justice in the courts” (Amos 5:15). Under his supervision, the students reached out to prisoners, many of whom were victims of illegal detention. They were not served due process of law and had languished in overcrowded jails for months, not even knowing what crimes they were charged with.

Matthew and his team visited police stations and jail cells to advise prisoners of their rights under Ugandan law. By the end of his first year, Matthew and the UCLF lawyers had offered representation to more than 260 prisoners, and nearly two hundred of their cases were completed. He explains, “Through the intervention of Christian lawyers these prisoners have finally tasted justice in their case, whether by way of an acquittal and release or conviction and a defined term of sentence.”[4]

Equity. The second dimension of justice we see in the preview passages is equity. Isaiah 11:4 celebrates the time to come when the King will right­eously “judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth” (asv). Jeremiah looks forward with similar anticipation: “‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will grow a righteous branch for David. He will be a king who will rule wisely. He will do what is fair and right in the land’” (Jer 23:5 God’s Word Translation).

Other prophets also celebrate the equitable relations that will characterize life in the new heavens and new earth. In Isaiah we learn no more scoundrels will be in power, defrauding the needy (Is 32:5-8). Ezekiel prophesies that there will be no one who plunders the weak (Ezek 34:17-22).

Equity is not a simple word to define. It denotes fairness and impartiality. Equity is about ensuring that the poor and weak are not disproportionately burdened by society’s common problems. It is about promoting public policies that do not favor the rich over the poor but treat people equally. It is about avoiding policies that unfairly burden the poor and weak.

Equity is somewhat easier to describe than to define. Consider, for example, the process of seeking equitable solutions to the challenge of providing affordable housing in a community. Such housing has to be constructed, and that requires money. Decisions have to be made about where to locate the units. Those decisions entail costs. To oversimplify for the purposes of illustration, in light of this societal challenge, two possible paths could be pursued. One involves concentrating the building and placement of affordable housing in poor, politically weak communities such as inner-city neighborhoods. We might label this approach “concentrating the burden.” The other path involves distributing the cost of building the housing over a wide region and spreading those units across many different neighborhoods. We might label this approach “sharing the burden.”

In many cities, the first path is taken—largely as a result of NIMBYism (“Not In My Back Yard”). Better-off citizens in suburban municipalities don’t want such housing to be built in their neighborhoods, out of fears about crime or depressed property values. Since the economically well off are typically also well connected politically, affordable housing often gets built only in already depressed areas of an inner city. This creates what scholars call “concentrated poverty neighborhoods.”[5] And that brings attendant problems such as overwhelmed schools, higher crime rates and social isolation. These social problems have economic costs (for example, it is harder to start businesses in concentrated poverty neighborhoods). This approach also financially squeezes the municipalities where concentrated poverty neighborhoods exist. They have to spend more money on law enforcement and social welfare programs while having less revenue from property and business taxes.

The second path is the more equitable approach. In this scenario, the costs for constructing housing are shared across a metropolitan region, and the housing units are scattered throughout the area to avoid creating concentrated poverty neighborhoods. This is a more difficult approach to put into practice politically, but it has been implemented in places where persevering citizens demanded it.

Lobbyist Rich Nymoen played a role in a successful faith-based campaign to pursue just this approach to the affordable housing issue in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota back in the mid-1990s.[6] He was a new attorney from the University of Minnesota Law School. His decision to get involved in the effort was prompted in part by his embrace of the concept of metropolitan equity. He’d learned of this idea through an adjunct professor at the university, Myron Orfield, who was also a state legislator at the time.[7]

Orfield was pushing a variety of legislative initiatives, including one called “fair share” housing. The approach was attractive to Nymoen as it emphasized that “we’re all in this together.” It called for a regional approach to share the costs of constructing affordable housing.

Nymoen began working with a coalition of congregations and nonprofits that event...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• 1 What Does a Rejoiced City Look Like?
• 2 What Do the Righteous Look Like?
• 3 Why We Aren't the Isaddiqim
• 4 How the Gospel of the Kingdom Nurtures the Isaddiqim
• Part Two
• 5 Integrating Faith and Work
• 6 Inspiration
• 7 Discovery
• 8 Formation
• Part Three
• 10 Pathway 1
• 11 Pathway 2
• 12 Pathway 3
• 13 Pathway 4
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Notes
• About the Author