My understanding of “community” includes supporting others who receive direction from God. In my case, I believe that God provided a way for me to serve on our local school board. To continue in that opportunity, I needed to be elected.

I didn’t win by many votes, but I was elected. During my time on the Board I had the opportunity to defuse an initiative for a district-wide diversity instruction at all grade levels (including proposed discussions of religious differences and alternative lifesyles). In another situation, I participated in a discussion that gave Christian teachers continuing freedom to meet with students on campus and off. Do those situations matter to Christ-followers? They do if you happen to have children in our school district.

Your discussion of voting seems to focus on the “big” issues. Sometimes, Nate, the community of believers needs your participation (and only a few others) to make a big, lasting impact for Christ on a whole generation in one of the many, smaller issues that are decided at the ballot box.

Dad

One really simple one is to vote for the candidate who has received fewer campaign contributions in excess of 50 bucks per person or who has run a cleaner campaign as measured by some organization like fact-check.

A lot of people in political elections do simply decide right before election day, “Am I better off than I was 4 years ago” and decide their vote on that basis. I think we don’t need to get really complicated to come up with some simple rules of our own that are less self-centered and materialistic and that collectively will impact our governance.

dlw

A couple clarity things: The quote from Tony’s site wasn’t Tony. It was an email he received from someone else. Secondly, my understanding is not coming from an idolization of others or a regurgitation. Granted, I dropped a few names in there… but their words are not my own. Everything I have written is from my own heart and head, based on my understanding of scripture, life, listening to the Spirit, and the breadth of my reading.

I have held this position longer than I have even known about the emerging church. And I am the first to come down hard on postulating from the sidelines. I try not to say much about things that I am not living… which leaves me with not much to say really. But I am dead set against just thinking in hypotheticals and ideals without doing anything.

Yes there are implications of me putting this stuff here on this post. I needed to get some feedback… but I don’t throw it out there as an idea that I want to defend or force on others. I put it out there as something that I am committed to living. In regards to monasteries… we have a tendency to think that monks were not connected with the real world. Study the Celtic Monastics… they were about as engaged as any one could be.

Peace all around. I’ll see you on the street, in the pub, over lunch, or at a house party… but probably not in the voting booth.

maybe every spiritual quest leads one out into the desert, but in order to bring fruit to one’s pilgrimage, eventually you have to come back into the city to turn the money tables.

best regards.
Micah 6:8

Be careful about idol worship of others. We’ll all let you down Nate. Make sure your opinions and thoughts are your own rather than a regurgitation of something you found intellectually titillating from somebody else. Musing about things is one thing. Certainty about them is quite another.

That stuff from Tony in your post from his blog “you can’t escape ideology except by escaping politics altogether” — hmmmm….that tastes like ideology…smells like ideology….looks like ideology….by gum! It IS ideology.

The suggestion that you can form tolerant communities that are apolitical sounds like it emanates from a stint cloistered in a monastery rather than on the streets of real life. It is also a contradiction of profoundly successful movements of the collective efforts of human beings in various social movements throughout history. I would offer the independence of India and the U.S. civil rights movements as two obvious examples.

What you need to do Nate is get involved with people at a level where you have day-in, day-out real life experience with the pain of everyday living…where lives are in fact, at stake, due to the present public policies that create the inequities that hurt people — right in your own backyard. Don’t go on a “mission” somewhere. Get a mission “here.” This stuff about creating “community” with the absence of any ideology (or a tolerance of all ideologies) is well — well intentioned at best — destructive nonsense at worst.

The effect of this line of thinking is to keep one on the sidelines, smug in the posture of observing and commenting on the fray before you. That’s symptomatic of self-induced paralysis cloaked behind the veil of an insidiously subtle form of self-righteousness. With a laissez-faire philosophy embodied by Tony’s statement that “No new political discoveries will come out of emergent Christianity” — I would agree — if you buy Jones characterization which, it should be fairly clear by now, that I do not. Tony is as entitled to his views of whatever he defines as “emergent” as I am. We disagree. I urge you to think long and hard before you make public statements like the one you have made in this post, considering all the implications of what you’ve heard, what you’ve processed, what you’ve experienced, what you haven’t experienced and what you’ve said.

Rather than smoking a pipe in a bungalow in Bend, swilling coffee in a local watering hole, browsing books and contemplating what others are saying about “life” and then synthesizing that on your blog….well….dive into life Nate instead of pontificating from your perch in the lifeguard’s chair!

As I have shared with you before, have written about and most recently, had the pleasure to discuss with several faith & culture authors in Portland this past week — Get out of the intellectual contemplation (“dialogue”) dimension of the emergent conversation and at least, intentionally get some real world experience day-in and day-out of serving somebody else vastly different and distinctly, socially, physically and mentally disadvantaged versus yourself. Spend a couple years living with them. Garner a tangible, boots on the ground appreciation for all the various dimensions of the advocacy required on their behalf to rectify and alleviate their pain and suffering.

—Then tell me what you think of voting.

You’ll meet plenty of people in life Nate willing to pat you on the back as you float by, headed for the waterfall I’m not one of those. The people who have been most important in my life are the one’s who are willing to hurt my feelings — or even risk our friendship — when I’m sharing with them my new fragrance and it stinks.

Read 2 books by Samantha Power – “A Problem From Hell – America and The Age of Genocide” as well as her most recent one, “Chasing The Flame – Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World.”

There — now you have my vote.

“Engage Maverick! Engage!”

Good luck mate.

Take a shower.

I have much to think about now and will no doubt be considering your thoughts for a long time.

I must say that I completely agree with Bob in many ways. And Nate, you know that I consider you a good friend and I greatly enjoy our dialogues about following Jesus and living life. But dude…your logic in this argument just doesn’t follow. To say you don’t want to be stretched too thin by delving into the world of politics seems lazy and selfish. To say you don’t want to vote but you want to influence the voting of others seems irrational. I would challenge you to reconsider our responsibility as believers in the political arena.

I agree with Kyle that we should be active in our community as the primary way to affect change in the world, but I disagree that this means we shouldn’t vote. We should do both! Both are important and we shouldn’t over-emphasize one to the detriment of the other.

Of course you want to live out the way of Jesus everyday and not be worried about what tomorrow brings. To me, that has nothing to do with voting or not voting. The people who legislate policy in this country have influence not only on your individual life, but also on the local community you live in, our national direction, and our global impact. Its true that whoever is in office will not change the way you follow Jesus. But it is also true that whoever is in office has an incredible impact on people around the world –we are talking about poverty and suffering, the very lives of millions. Let me illustrate this…

Chelsea and I went to a lecture this last Thursday night in Bend called “Prospects in Darfur” given by the CEO of an organization called MercyCorps… great talk and really good Q and A afterwards. One of his main points was that voting AND political activism AND actually doing the aid work all matter. In our world, each plays its part and we should not let up in any area. In this example, our political involvement or lack of political involvement has direct impact on the lives of 2.5 million displaced people in Darfur alone. Your vote matters to those people, Nate. If we don’t value them enough to stand up for them, what does that say about our love for others? And what does that ultimately say about our love for Christ?

I would suggest that you vote because our government makes decisions that affect millions of lives in our community, in our nation and across the world. As a Christ-follower, those lives should matter to you. I know that you care about these people – and one important way to show that is with your vote.

If the person you vote for doesn’t make it into office…that’s okay. You will still be following Christ in the same way, you still have made your voice heard, and you will still be involved. You had the opportunity to get someone on your team who had great influence, but it didn’t happen. I would much rather that be the case than have to say I never even tried.

You don’t have to get wrapped up in the political arena to make a good informed decision. Do some simple research; talk to people who are informed; and be a responsible citizen of the Kingdom of God by voting – I think Romans 13 would back me up here. Don’t sell yourself short – don’t be overly-contemplative. As Foster argues in Celebration of Discipline, we should meditate on the current events of our time and prophetically speak into them. Meditate and then act and be part of the world changing process – this includes voting.