November 29, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

What we do while we wait

Today I’m writing from Orlando, FL, where the National Religious Leadership Roundtable is connecting with local clergy post-election and post-Pulse.

Naomi Leapheart, the Task Force’s Faith Work organizer, opened tonight’s meeting with a challenging reflection on the Christian liturgical season of Advent. I hope she publishes her remarks!

At the heart of her challenge to us was the idea that we can fill our hope for future deliverance with work that manifests that deliverance in this world. As Naomi spoke, I remembered the metaphor of pregnancy and labor used in both the gospels and the Pauline epistles: there’s an effort that accompanies the emergence of the new world, and it’s an effort that we get to participate in.

If I were planning it all out, I’d love to be among those who do the work and those who enjoy the results of the work. I’m sure most people would too. But at this stage, only the preparatory work is certain and none of us is guaranteed a taste of the fruits from the trees we’re planting.

My favorite people right now are people who are also motivated to do more than wait and to be more than bystanders. What is coming will come, and we also have responsibilities to stay actively engaged, to draw the best potentials from imagination into time, to replace inertia with intention and action.

Waiting by working: that’s how faithful expectancy transcends excuses for stagnating and opens the way for progress. Progress, as King once said, “comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So it is necessary to help time and to realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”

October 24, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Changing the world and still preserving agency

Terry Pratchett was a prolific English writer and a keen observer of social dynamics. His major work, the Discworld novel series, explored human nature and sociology through the eyes of marginal social figures: librarians, trainee magicians, elderly country witches and wise women, and even DEATH HIMSELF. (The all-caps in the previous sentence are entirely appropriate in the context of the books!)

In the 1991 book Witches Abroad, one of the elder women argues with a sister about the most appropriate way to use their gifts. Granny Weatherwax insists that they should not use their powers to dominate, coerce, or control other people: intentions to benefit others don’t wipe out people’s agency over their own lives.

This is a lesson that people in any discipline might learn, but the international development community has become especially sensitive to it over the last few years with the rise of “voluntourism”—structured trips that combine vacations, international aid, and volunteer or low-wage service, but often allow for limited engagement with the complexities of local culture or the problems that volun-tourists hope to resolve.

In January, Courtney Martin wrote about idealistic youths’ expectations of faraway Others and their problems for Medium’s The Development Set vertical. (She later republished the essay in the Guardian.)

The rise of the social entrepreneurship field in the last few decades has sent countless young people packing across continents… And, to be sure, a lot of those grads are doing powerful work.

But a lot of them, let’s be real, are not. They’re making big mistakes — both operationally and culturally — in countries they aren’t familiar with. They’re solving problems for people, rather than with, replicating many of the mistakes that the world’s largest development agencies make on a much smaller scale. They drop technology without having a training or maintenance plan in place, or try to shift cultural norms without culturally appropriate educational materials or trusted messengers. Or they’re spending the majority of their days speaking about the work on the conference circuit, rather than actually doing it.” —Courtney Martin

Along with the question of these trips’ impact on the people who go is how they impact the communities who host. Communities all around the world are receiving idealists and ideologues who want to change the world not with their hosts but for them.

The challenge for all of us who want a better world is that, just as Granny Weatherwax says, we “can’t go around building a better world for people.” Sometimes good work means laying aside our visions for others and choosing instead to support their materialization of the worlds that they imagine for themselves.

Even our prayers must honor others’ agency: we can’t strong-arm the emergence of the good, but we can choose to revise our common stories together.

Read more: Check out other comments on voluntourism and humility compiled by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

July 7, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Recovering from Rejection

Leading from outside of the org chart, or with limited social privileges is a constant apprenticeship in leveraging the seasons for every purpose.

We watch for the time when new things can be born and when old things must die. We guard the fields of our organizations, communities, and societies for the right time to plant new patterns and the right time to reap their harvests.

We mourn together in so many ways. We curate reading lists and freedom soundtracks like #BlackJoyPlaylist and threads of children being carefree and cute. Sometimes, we even dance.

Most of all, we navigate two of the hardest seasons: “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.”

I stopped writing a few years ago. I stopped again earlier this year.

And I started writing again about six weeks ago after renewing my commitment to my own voice.

For so many people in my demographic groups, it’s easy to default to silence, to reserve our thoughts, to hold back our stories, to disclaim our experience, to diminish our expertise. It’s what we’re taught to do, and we’re tagged and punished in so many ways if we don’t do it. But the entire game is vanity.

Polite silence does nothing to forestall violence, abuse, discrimination, or marginalization. The calm civility we’re trained to cover fear, fatigue, and frustration with doesn’t produce change and doesn’t reduce harm. It’s vanity.

Ending my silence doesn’t necessarily mean explaining and teaching. It doesn’t mean sharing with people who’ve proven unwilling to receive. It’s about releasing the old habit of denying what I bring with me when I show up in the world, because I’ve shown up in this world, because I’ve shown up as my organic self and not as a fungible Tetris piece.

For me, forgoing the vanities of silence is to release the hope that the status quo might grow a conscience. Knowing that there’s a time to speak, build, cast away, gather, and sew means I need not stop the clock while committees decide how tepid their statements about shooting victims should be. I need not stop the clock while people parse the distance between compassion and approval or between plain speech and divisiveness.

I need not stop the clock for any reason.

Forgoing the vanities of silence is to shift creative attention from the way things are towards our own zones of influence, responsibility, and control. We take seriously the saying, “When you tell me ‘No,’ it doesn’t mean I can’t do it; it only means I can’t do it with you.” Here—wherever we are—we talk with those who do respect our work and we build alternatives to the way things are with them.

The smallest of seeds, yet it grows into the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches. Small seeds. Simple actions. Local contexts. Shelter for all.

Which reminds me of how I first heard about an organization I now advise. About five years ago, the staff of one of its programs submitted an advert to a magazine, a Christian, ostensibly progressive magazine. The ad wasn’t edgy. It was subtle and traditional and focused on hospitality.

And that’s why the publication’s rejection turned my head.

Wait, I said to myself. So we can cut off our extremities and shave down our corners, and they still won’t make space for us? Then why do we go through all this torture to fit? We can stop it right now.

In my own life, I didn’t stop it right now, not entirely. I spent a great deal of energy for a few more years cortorting myself to fit expectations, environments, and communities that weren’t designed for me and wouldn’t grow with me.

But as I grew anyway, that organization’s case became an Ebenezer for me. While the organization’s staff recovered from that rejection and uncovered and led from their unique vision for faith organizing, I came to recognize my vision and value too.

Today we work together to amplify the whole Church, not just shattered pieces of it, and we’re seeing the spaces we’ve created making room for “the birds of the air.” Working for others’ freedom is our victory, just as Lorde dreamed.

June 22, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The gift of presence

This week, I’m in a class on philosophies of philanthropy and reading Eric Butterworth’s Spiritual Economics and Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money.

Butterworth’s book was first written the year I was born (some of the content shows that), but Twist’s book combines her reflections from a career in non-profit development, fundraising, and work on tough social issues like resolving global hunger and helping Amazon residents preserve their forest. Not all of Twist’s anecdotes resonate with me, but it’s clear her thoughts are grounded in her life and professional experiences.

Butterworth and Twist agree that we thrive as we practice giving, living generously (“contributing whatever [you] have without fear of loss”), partnering with others, and pouring our energy and affirmative attention into people and projects that we fully believe in.

They also agree on what now feels like a basic life principle: expecting one’s beliefs to be beneficial. They don’t mean that our beliefs should turn us a financial profit, necessarily. They mean that there’s no point building our lives around beliefs that leave us fearful, anxious for the future, or invested in the assumptions that violence, poverty, and hardship are inevitable and that efforts to resolve them are futile.

What if I could be radically present in my life, appreciating the beauty and challenges of existence moment by moment, giving my full attention to the people, work, and opportunities to contribute that come my way, and centering myself in who I am, not merely what I have or can get? What if I judged my choices and contributions, as Butterworth says, “out of the expanse of [my] wholeness, not at its expense”?

When I was about to complete my last year of college in Jamaica, I had a series of life-disrupting health events. I withdrew from school with a letter to the registrar—still one of the hardest letters I’ve ever written—and spent nearly 9 months back in the UK recovering. It wasn’t that I’d been living my life in getting mode and suddenly understood what giving meant; that’s not my story. But the experience did teach me a lot about what it means to simply be, even when I’m not in a position to meet cultural expectations and frenetically produce.

My presence is the greatest gift.

In the decade and a half since that experience, I’ve only become more inclined to spaces where people are valued for who they are, not primarily for what they can give, how much they possess, or what they can get for themselves or for others. When we show up in these kinds of spaces, we do bring all of our gifts and skills and perspectives and community resources with us, but we aren’t valuable for the gold in our backpacks. We are the gift.

From that perspective, imagine the power of entire teams of people who know who they are and bring their whole selves into collaborative relationships. Imagine communities filled with people who reach out to other people they respect and whose work they love enough to amplify without drama, score-keeping, or the hope of extra credit. Relationships win the race!

In a you-or-me world, reciprocity and collaboration don’t fit. A you-and-me world is full of collaborators, partners, sharing, and reciprocity… Collaboration becomes the circuitry through which the energy, attention, and resources of sufficiency flow and are continually renewed. Implicit in collaboration is the trust that says there is enough and we will figure out how to use it together wisely.” —Lynne Twist and Teresa Barker

These are counter-cultural priorities, yes. But they yield innovative, financial, and relational results that are far better long-term than living small-hearted, grasping, isolated, and suspicious.

February 11, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

We’re not all alike, and that’s not a problem

We’re in this life together and substantive solidarity is important.

A NASA color image of Earth from space: the Americas are visible under wispy white clouds. The background is deep black. — NASA captured this image of Earth from one million miles using its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera. (Learn more.)

We share one planet, and if we kick one another off the rock, there is nowhere else for us to go.

But we’re not all alike.

There are differences between social groups that can make social solidarity challenging, and there are also differences within social groups that can make rough-cut rules based on single identity factors remarkably unhelpful.

The analytical model of intersectionality emerged from Kimberlé Crenshaw‘s studies of anti-discrimination case law and feminist and anti-racist activism. Why do well-intentioned social interventions consistently leave some group members wounded in the traffic intersection? What are the designers of these interventions missing?

In “Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color,” Crenshaw shows how intra-group differences can yield big variations in group members’ outcomes: in one case, Black men and Black women experienced different degrees of discrimination in a company whose policies penalized employees who weren’t male as well as employees who weren’t White.

Crenshaw also explains that race and gender aren’t the only axes of difference that we need to account for as we engage intra-group differences:

“The organized identity groups in which we find ourselves are in fact coalitions, or at least potential coalitions waiting to be formed… With identity thus reconceptualized, it may be easier to understand the need for and to summon the courage to challenge groups that are after all, in one sense, ‘home’ to us, in the name of the parts of us that are not made at home. The most one could expect is that we will dare to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations, that we might call attention to how the identity of ‘the group’ has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few.” (Emphasis added.)

Over the last few weeks, Herb Montgomery of Renewed Heart Ministries has been working through the Sayings Gospel Q and encountering anew Jesus’s and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s teachings about engaging oppressors and oppression (Herb is a friend and client).

As Herb has explained to his readers, both Jesus and King addressed their communities from within, not from without. They were addressing their peers, not imposing norms from above them, and knowing this should help us to better understand the tone and content of their teachings.

Some Christians like to say “The ground is level at the foot of the cross.” The ground is not level at the base of a social pyramid: intra-group variations mean that it’s sometimes less oppressive to hear a norming message from someone in a different social group from yours if they share other facets of your experience.

Martin Luther King was a Black American Christian who spoke out of the Black America church tradition first to other Black people and thence to the leaders and other U.S. citizens regardless of their ethnicity. He was also a middle-class, highly educated, charismatic man who drew public authority from his position as a member of the clergy.

As a minister, King had social influence that the best cook in the country couldn’t have had. As a man, his public work and time away from family for the common good attracted far less criticism than the work of his female colleagues. That includes his wife: most people don’t know that Coretta Scott King was an activist in her own right and began her anti-segregationist work before meeting the man who became her husband.

So intra-group differences make a difference: we can’t assume solidarity or common experience with another person on the basis of a single characteristic like age or ethnicity or religion or sexuality. People who seem similar can have entirely different priorities (compare Professor Imani Perry and Justice Clarence Thomas or Jane Elliott and Phyllis Schlafly), and people who seem very different can build coalitions to meet their mutual goals (compare Urvashi Vaid and Dean Spade or Ted Olson and David Boies).

Take no shortcuts when it comes to understanding who people are and the social vision they’re working towards, and you’ll make a better teammate for other people who realize that not only is this the one rock we have to live on but also we don’t all have to be alike to live here.

Time to Speak Up

"Where are our LGBTI voices? — A new meme asks “Where are our LGBTI voices?” at the GC’s summit on gender and sexuality this March in Cape Town, South Africa

As I wrote last year, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists has planned a global summit on gender and sexuality for March 21-24 this year. The summit falls under the planning authority of Elder Pardon Mwansa, a GC vice-president and chair of the committee on “alternative sexuality practices” [sic] that will report to the church in session in 2015. He has been receiving a great deal of feedback on this summit far more graciously than most.

Despite recent criminalization initiatives in Nigeria and Uganda that were influenced in part by US-based Christian evangelicals and received limited on-continent pushback from local or international Adventists, the General Conference decided to host this meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. South Africa is one of 9 African nations that has embedded anti-discrimination principles in its law, but it also has a disturbing culture of sexual violence against women, especially women known or assumed to be non-heterosexual.

The summit schedule and presenter line-up has now been released and several observers have wondered how the global church can gain from excluding so many participants from a conversation that already affects them.

A Possible Approach to Conversation

I know several more people who have met with attendees or plan to do so ahead of the summit. If you’re among them, reflect on and/or pray about your approach before you do. I offer you a few items you might consider to help guide your thoughts:

Concerns: What most concerns you about the summit given what you already know? What are you hearing from SDA Kinship, from the Seventh-Gay Adventists film community, and other sources? Believe Out Loud published an article on this today too; are your questions being answered? If not, what other questions do you have?
Goals: What do you think the church wants to accomplish with the people it intends to gather? What might the church worker you reach out to be able to tell you about the denomination’s goals? What questions might you have about whatever they tell you?
Your Own Story: What’s your personal stake in what happens at the summit? Does your contact already know about it? If not, how might you share your story with them in a brief, but relevant way? What about your biography and experience do you most want them to remember when they go to all the sessions at the summit and/or vote on any statements that result from it?
This Friendship: How do you plan to keep in touch with this person after you talk? What if you might be able to share with them over the long term, no matter what their opinions are right now? Would that continued relationship be meaningful to you? If so, how can you let them know?
Overall: Simply enjoy being one human sharing conversation with another: you and this person, regardless of their organizational status, are peers. Enjoy their company as much as you can and consider that they may be even less at ease with the conversation than you are! Whatever is said, however it’s said, offer them grace.

Climate Concerns

The climate for workers at the General Conference hasn’t been too open in the last few years. Some have shared with me that they feel hyper-monitored or even repressed because of informers and backlashes. They don’t want any drama; they want to keep working and serving, so they guard what they say to colleagues and church members, especially in sensitive cases like this. This is one of a few possible adaptations to a surveillance subculture.

In this climate, should you have the chance to speak to a church worker, please do whatever you can do to show that you want to keep their confidences and honor their willingness to discuss freely with you. Also, the denomination is quite comfortable framing the “issue” in terms of arguments and decontextualized text debates. If conversants refocus their discussions on real people, their lives, families, and consciences instead, that’s likely to produce more effective and more humane outcomes all round.

My Thoughts

To be sure, as an individual, I have very strong opinions on the arguments and the last 40+ years of research and experiential evidence, and I continue to pursue my own inquiry about the subject. I could argue confidently about this with family and friends, but for the last several years, I’ve chosen not to. I don’t see these debates as a good use of my time or energy or as beneficial for the people involved in them. The Backfire Effect is real.

I also don’t accommodate these debates for the same reason that I wouldn’t debate a White supremacist about ethnic segregation. I don’t accept the core premise that the mainstream’s “approval” or “agreement” is required or appropriate in this case. If they don’t own the “standard” from which Others deviate, they also have no authority to police it.

We are each born into this life and come to know ourselves as one of billions. We’re not responsible for the demographic categories we occupy. We are responsible for the quality of relationship we nurture with people in and beyond those categories. That’s what guides me.

What about SDA Kinship?

As far as the SDA Kinship membership goes, I think there is an incredible, mostly latent power in its stories and in how widely members’ stories vary. I don’t think Kinship should respond to the denomination’s Single Story about LGBTI people (“Not a category of their own, just a broken, maladjusted subcategory of us!”) with a Single Story of its own (“Just like you, but with a twirl!”). At minimum, SDA Kinship is an LGBTI group and not just a “gay” one; not all members remain Adventist today—some have been chased out of membership and others have voluntarily moved on.

But beyond these basics, the organization shouldn’t agree to tell a Single Story because it’s not the Borg. It thrives because it isn’t. Members have different experiences, different beliefs, different approaches, and different strengths to bring to the organization’s table as well as to the commonly held table of their church. The under-acknowledged fact is that LGBTI people have co-built, co-funded, and co-staffed the Seventh-day Adventist church from its founding days and continue to do so. They don’t serve the church to claim any special stars in their crown; they serve because of their religious convictions and beliefs in improving the world and witnessing through healing work. For decades, LGBTI Adventists have worked alongside heterosexual members to advance the church’s mission regardless of those heterosexuals’ marital statuses—whether they are unmarried, married, or remarried, whether they are content, struggling, or suffering. And this will always be true.

The diversity of the people who have co-created the church as it stands today—that is what I think makes SDA Kinship such a powerful continuing witness to the mainstream, mainstreaming SDA church. Variance makes learning possible, but we have to be open to that variance in order to draw its best out of it. I do hope the church learns to listen to its own diversity: listening is a holy act, and not listening isn’t sustainable.

Fortunately, the church will have plenty of opportunities to choose new directions for this and similar conversations in the near future: Kinship’s community and its growing cloud of witnesses and advocates isn’t likely to fall silent, and the LGBTI Adventists around the world won’t disappear.

It’s time to start learning; it’s time, they say, to speak up.

social good

Also Read

A Possible Approach to Conversation

Climate Concerns

My Thoughts

What about SDA Kinship?