Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Mark 0:00
I think our prophetic voices are usually very specific. I remember reading this article like a decade ago and it was written shortly after Oscar Romero was assassinated, and it said that Oscar Romero wasn't assassinated because he called people to love and justice because everybody says they like love and justice. It says that he was specific about what love looked like and what justice required and so the specificity of our prophetic voices will change in each place. But there are some general things I think it's something that I see because of living in Minnesota is I think, we those of us who have more privileges need to lend our voice to the rights of indigenous people for their land. Because I think that is one of America's original sins. And I think it's really a spiritual matter. Like everything that has to do with pipeline resistance is tied up in indigenous rights because it's almost always when it comes to these oil pipelines, they're going across indigenous tribal treaty lands. And so I think that is a big one; that understanding the cause of Native Americans and the environment like the way those two things come together is a key prophetic issue for the church today.
Seth Price 1:33
January is done this is the Can I Say This At Church podcast, I'm Seth your host in January is done that's insane. You people are amazing! So over the course of january of the show continues to break numbers, weekly, sometimes daily on episode downloads and you know, the Facebook and the Twitter and the Instagram and the reviews. Love it. I love your intentionality and engagement and I encourage more of it. I've enjoyed the phone calls that I've had with some of you, the private facebook messages, it is a blast to be a part of the community that has developed around these conversations and it is a privilege to facilitate that in any way. So just a quick announcement in February, mid-February hopefully, my goal is…I plan to travel to see some family. And when I get back, I would like to intentionally engage with a handful of people on some of the work of Alexander Shaia of heart and mind and the quadratos view of the gospel and kind of what that causes us to do. And so I'll post links to those signup sheets in the show notes. And if that's something you want to do to those that have showed interest, expect an email. And I look forward to coordinating and doing that with you.
So I have a guest today on the show. Returning guests, Mark Van Steenwyk. Prior, we talked about you know, anarchy and what that kind of looks like for us. To be subversive of a government, and what it looks like for humanity to live in a church and to foster with and partner with the church in a subversive way to help be the kingdom of God. And I wanted to talk more about that with Mark. And so this kind of fostered from when Oscar Romero was canonized and my conversations with Paul Thomas and Mark had said quite a few things and we've done some private messages and I was like, you know, Mark, let's talk this through. I want to talk about what it looks like for people today. And in the recent past of what a prophetic voice looks like. Like I don't want to talk about it pie in the sky. I want to want to dig into the meat of it. How does it feel? What are its drawbacks? I'm gonna roll tape… Mark Van Steenwyk.
Seth Price 4:14
Mark, I'm excited to have you back on the Can I Say This At Church podcast you are on the list of less than I can…I can put the people on a list of one hand, I'm saying that wrong on my hand are five fingers and on those fingers are God….this is why I don't do this. So, welcome back to the show. Welcome back. There's been a handful of people that come back on the second time and you're on that list, you know, with Alexander Shaia and Austin Fischer, and Keith Giles and so welcome back to the show.
Mark 4:46
Thanks for having me again, with that illustrious crew.
Seth Price 4:51
Well, what do you mean by illustrious?
Mark 4:54
I don't know. It just sounds impressive, doesn’t it?
Seth Price 4:57
Well it is, I mean, this is the way…what do you say in the south? They're good people. They're good people.
Mark 5:04
We don't have that saying in the north.
Seth Price 5:06
What do you say then instead?
Mark 5:08
We just don't say anything. (laughter both)
Seth Price 5:12
sSo for those that haven't listened to our prior episode, and I forget what episode it was, I think it's like 24/23 we talked a lot a little bit about your political views and leanings and and that type of stuff. And so kind of bring me up to speed a little bit about what you do with the Center for Prophetic Imagination. Kind of what that looks like what its purpose is what that even means because a center for prophetic imagination, I think in America means also, I'm gonna start speaking in tongues or prophesizing, or the end of the world is next Wednesday, and you did not buy your five gallon bucket brownies yet. You know, so, what does that even mean?
Mark 5:56
Yeah, you're right, like, I mean, I grew up among charismatics and Pentecostals so the idea of prophetic is what usually what Pat Robertson thinks that he's doing but no like there's part of it's a riff off this book this classic text by Walter Brueggemann, which was I think just celebrated its 40th anniversary. We're not named after him. But as part of the inspiration, the book is called the prophetic imagination. And he talks about the sort of the spiritual posture of prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures. But then he does this wonderful thing and all of his work throughout his life has been a recognition that that same spiritual posture, that political posture of the Hebrew prophets, is part of what we ought to be about today so that's part of it. But for me, the prophetic piece is this recognition that it's not just this call for justice, but it's also this call to return to a full, life giving, relationship with our God. And so the nonprofit is about that like how do you nurture that sort of spirituality where we don't see a separation of like loving God and loving neighbor we recognize that as all the same work. I'm frustrated with this tendency just assume that being prophetic just means like any old spiritual person talking about any social justice thing it's a little bit more than that as spirituality. And that we've lived in a society for almost 2000 years where the way that we train and nurture leadership has been helping people maintain a sense of continuity with tradition, but the prophetic impulse is about discontinuity.
So like when you go to be a pastor, if you'd like. So when I went to seminary, they didn't teach us about disrupting stuff they taught us how to maintain things. And so we ended up in this society we're in now where church folks are afraid to speak out against injustice or call people broadly to repentance, at least the way the Hebrew prophets did. Because we're afraid of alienating churchgoers losing donations, pissing people off, losing our 501(c)3 status. And so given that that's the default setting for most seminaries and churches, I started thinking about like, how do you nurture and support people who have more of a prophetic posture to do that work? Because no one else does not. There's tons of other people supporting people in that work. So that's what the Center for Prophetic Imagination is.
Seth Price 8:54
So I find when I call people out on just overgeneralize what I Part of what you're saying when I call people out on what I see. And so, you know, I think that honestly, the something I've learned the Bible is written to people that are oppressed. And like, for instance, I was recently talking with, with Paul, Paul Thomas, and he sent me some stuff about Oscar Romero, and basically talking about, you know, if we give it context for, you know, El Salvador there and before Vatican two, you know, the priest told you what the Bible said, and here's what it says, you know, there will always be the poor among you, man, just deal with it. We need your land, we're going to grow the corn, just deal with it.
And then when they translate the Bible into Spanish, and people can read it for themselves, and I heard him say, Well, you know, as these poor peasant farmers, I'm pretty sure you all lied to us. Like that's not exactly what scripture was saying. Pretty sure it's saying that. This is for me, like you're not supposed to use this to oppress me. And so I find when I tell people that if I see something on Facebook or Twitter or even in person and I say, you know, that is not the way that we're called to talk to people. And that's not even the right mindset to frame things around that I'm just called racist or politically correct or anti-racist or whatever other slightly passive aggressive adjective you want to assign to somebody to basically say, Don't tell me what I can't say. So how do I do that? How do I, I don't even know what that looks like. Because I find that I either don't do it well, or I suck at it or both. That's probably the same thing. But I don't even know how to do that. I don't even know how to do it.
Mark 10:35
Well, I mean, that's the thing is like, I think we can get better at it. And that's one of the points of Brueggeman’ Prophetic Imagination is that prophets usually try to find the most effective means of discourse, the most clear way of basically pissing people off and calling them to repentance. But at the end of the day, the greatest examples of people who do this failed in a sense, like so Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Romero was murdered while he was giving mass. Jesus Christ was crucified. And he said, like, you know, anytime the prophets came to you, you treated the prophets the same way and you killed him.
So in some ways, the prosthetic thing is never going to feel superduper successful because you're gonna win some people over and wake some people up but the the weight of oppression is such that those who benefit from unjust systems are too invested in it, and they're gonna want to kill you or silence you. And they're gonna call you things right now that's what happens. They'll call you a snowflake, libtard whatever it is, is a way of just quickly marking you as part of those liberal elite people who are disconnected from reality and espouse Fake News, and so I need to shut you up however.
Seth Price 12:04
How do you do that well on social media because as I become friends with you quasi through social media, you do this better than I do. And it may be because you give more thought to what speaking to people in a prophetically engaging way looks like, because that's not really what I do day in and day out. Even if I think about it, I don't really practice it. And I'm not intentional with it. And so what is the best way to enter into that discourse because most people don't talk face to face anymore? I think over I would have to guess but seven out of 10 conversations are digital conversations. And that's the new norm. So what's a good way to, I guess speak prophetically via 140 characters or less because if you type longer than my iPhone, I stopped reading it was too long didn’t read.
Mark 13:01
I think it's a mixture of things like for me, I feel like I'm in the sweet spot when people can call me names and I won't get mad. So I think that's part of it. Like that maturing process of self differentiation where you don't take personally when people challenge your truth. But then also like this, I try to do these little habits of that's part of it is like I still listen, listen to conservative talk radio, when I can have time because I want don't want to lose sense. Like I don't want to start treating rural conservative vote white voters that supported Trump as some sort of stupid class of people who don't deserve my respect, like and I get why a lot of people on the left will want to, it pisses me off because my family and my background is rural poor, Minnesotan. So I get like why it's easy to make these characters and stereotypes of the enemy. But I think there has to be a certain amount of compassion, not even condescending compassion.
Because the truth is like if I believe when I'm selling, that God is uniquely present in the experiences of the oppressed, that also assumes that there's a unique insight that rural poor people that are white have because it's a unique way of experiencing oppression. And like if we somehow say that just by virtue of their being white, that they're somehow part of the oppressor class in total, like, I think that's what happens, we end up getting into this monolithic way of thinking where we have this stereotype of the oppressor. And we're not patient and able to look at look. There's a reason that a lot of people are buying into these sort of like, really crappy ideologies in is not actually helping them. Somebody is exploiting their pain. Part of the work is not only to trounce them intellectually, but also recognize like that pain and their feeling of alienation is real. But the solution that they're clinging to is false.
Seth Price 15:13
What do you think some of those reasons are? You said there's reasons that people are basically taking advantage of their fear and their pain. What are some of those reasons? Or what do you think some of those reasons are?
Mark 15:22
The reasons why they're being taken advantage of or reasons why they feel angry?
Seth Price 15:27
I mean, either really, but yeah, you can manipulate that fear.
Mark 15:30
Well, I mean, this fear thing like so, you know, back in the 1700s, there were slave uprisings that included white poor people, who saw themselves as basically more having more in common with black slaves, and they did with slave owners. And so it became advantageous for slave owners to start treating poor whites as part of the same white group of people. So whiteness was largely created as a way of separating of divide and conquer between the lower classes which included slaves. So I think that i think that's that strategy is still being employed to this day.
Seth Price 16:08
I agree. So, I haven't told you this, but I've set it outside. And I don't even know if it's aired on any of the episodes. other episodes. Oh my gosh, the other episodes yet. But I am at a place that I really do struggle with the day job. I'm really good at being a banker at a large bank. And I'm really struggling with it because I'm really good at it. I also genuinely feel like I'm helping people be more financially secure. And most of the people I help are not crazy rich. Most of them are paycheck to paycheck, probably less than paycheck to paycheck, but it is fulfilling to help them.
But at the same time, I know that part of what I'm doing is helping make the middle class less middle and the richer class more rich with a greater disparaging part of wealth and I don't even know what to do with it, but I do struggle with it deeply. But I honestly don't see myself changing because I still have a family to provide for. Yeah, it's it's a bad tension. I guess I just have to give away more money, more personal money. But that's about my guilt. That's not about giving it away though. So it's still a problem.
Mark 17:18
Well, I feel like we're all in some ways in a similar spot. Like even the most righteously living like idealist people among us are somehow ensnared within the system more than they want. And I even feel like that impulse to try to like enter into a pure posture where you're not tainted with the system. I think that impulse to move towards that is actually a flawed impulse. Because it pulls us away from people.
So I mean, this is a struggle like I feel like we have to find a way to just just dive deeper into the problems and the flaws of the society around us and leverage whatever we've got. Yeah, and the problem is like, at some point, like, I mean, this is the this is Jesus's narrative like, they told us disciples at some point, something's got to give. And he told everyone, if you're going to be in that spot, choose the cross. That's the good news for us.
Seth Price 18:20
You're gonna be in that spot, get ready for the pain—bring the pain.
Mark 18:22
Yeah, at some point sustainability has to give way towards the gospel.
Seth Price 18:29
So one of the questions that I sent you actually, really the only question that I sent you ahead of this is who is doing that now? If you were to list off a handful of prophetic people today, and I don't really care if they're alive or dead, I'd love for them to be alive, but it doesn't really matter for the conversation. What are some of those voices not necessarily in America, but that can impact the way that you and I live in western civilization and can impact the church and the way that we treat people. So who are some of those and then how are they doing it? What can we learn from them? What practices can we steal for lack of a better word?
Mark 19:11
I mean I feel like no one's pure. Like, there's no perfect example like, you know, besides Jesus, I guess, but like, everyone has their flaws, but you can see in on every invention, some of them like Óscar Romero. I mean, His story is great. And I'm hoping now, a lot of people know who he is. But a lot of people don't know his story. But now that he's he was sainted, maybe they'll know more, but he was, he was the safe bet for the Archbishop of El Salvador. And then he got to that spot and he started using his basically his pulpit to call out the government against repression of the peasant class.
And so and he was murdered for it. And that's why he's a saint now. Or Martin Luther King, Jr. same sort of story. Then they have people that weren't martyred like Dorothy Day. So she is one of the co-founders of the Catholic Worker movement. She leveraged what she had to create space for hospitality to people who are experiencing homelessness, but then also had a big platform because people listened to her voice. And she used that platform to challenge the Catholic church or fellow Catholics to live out their values more faithfully. And it was a big dent that she made, but it was hard like she had to sacrifice a lot of her comfort and ease in order to do that. She didn't use it to build up her platform as a national speaker so that she could have a good retirement plan. Like she didn't do that. Her retirement plan was to grow old and these houses of hospitality that she helped start, and then they'd help take care of her.
So those are some examples. Um, other people that are alive today. I feel like right now, just less than a mile for me, there's a homeless encampment, which Minnesota has tended not to have huge homeless encampments because it's cold. So that tends to happen more in warmer climates, but we have hundreds of tents nearby of people who were all homeless before, but now they're in camped. And so that created this sort of block of people who can then challenge the city to like make greater gains for them. And so I feel like any of the people that made the choice to stay in that encampment instead of like finding a more comfortable place to be, that's a little safer in other way. But they chose to be in this massive encampment to like leverage that to raise their voice against these things around them that need to be addressed.
I think anytime we do that, where we sacrifice the privileges and comforts we'd otherwise have, in order to raise the issue so that people have to look at it like we're prophets do is they make visible things that our society tries to make invisible. And so there's all kinds of great examples and anytime we do that even a little bit, we're being prophetic and if we do a lot of it Eventually, they'll try to kill us. That's kind of the that's the moral of the story of the prophets.
Seth Price 22:05
Beware what you wish for because they're gonna come at you.
Mark 22:09
But, but everyone can take the little steps. And then some people take even more and more steps. And if you take enough steps, you start becoming a clear threat to the system.
Seth Price 22:20
So the encampment that you referenced, is that-was that legal when they did it? Like is it against any ordinance to make this encampment and I have to assume they're getting power and infrastructure from somewhere? So is that a legal gathering or is it something that now the city or the state has to deal with? Because they're not going to move?
Mark 22:40
Its illegal and they I think people were hands off at first. And then as it grew, it became a political issue. Hmm. So that any of the city council if they wanted to get rid of them for a sake of expediency or making the this part of South Minneapolis look good, they would get political back. So it to me it's like I mean any good prophet embarrassed the hell out of people in power?
Seth Price 23:09
Is there a way to do it without breaking the law?
Mark 23:13
No, not usually. I mean, sometimes there are things you can put pressure like, you can put a lot of pressure without breaking the law. But at some point you're gonna run up against the law because (the) laws that we have aren't just made for the common good. They're usually laws exist primarily to protect the powerful and the wealthy.
Seth Price 23:38
Yeah, definitely status quo.
Mark 23:40
Yeah, so if you're going to challenge the status quo, eventually you're going to bump up against the law. Otherwise, it's usually just pure charity. Which charity is, is good and alleviates immediate needs. But once you start going from charity to addressing the nature of injustice, it's like the Dom Hélder Câmara, quote,
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.
Once you start challenging the origins of the injustice you usually start bumping up against laws.
Seth Price 25:00
So if we think about our political climate, and that (at) recording we’re like a week and a half away from the next midterm elections (2018). And so what are what are for the next handful of years, what do you think are like the top five things that prophetic voices should be addressing or calling out? At least for our nation, or I guess for the not for the church, but well, maybe for the church? Because there's some mouthpieces that when I watched them speak, like a Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, Jr. I'm ashamed to call them Christian, but I also feel like I have to call them brother. But I'm still greatly ashamed at the words that come out. But what are the top you think four or five things that, you know, here's what we need to address? And here's why?
Mark 25:45
Well I think a lot of these things, they are based on your context. So I think our prophetic voices are usually very specific. I remember reading this article like a decade ago, and it was written shortly after Oscar Romero was assassinated. And it said that Oscar Romero wasn't assassinated because he called people to love and justice because everybody says they like love and justice. It says that he was specific about what love looked like and what justice required. And so the specificity of our prophetic voices will change in each place.
But there are some general things like I think, and something that I see because of living in Minnesota, is I think we-those of us who have more privileges-need to lend our voice to the rights of indigenous people for their land. Because I think that is one of America's original sins. And I think it's really a spiritual matter. Like everything that has to do with pipeline resistance is tied up in indigenous rights, because it's almost always, when it comes to these oil pipelines, they are going across indigenous tribal treaty lands, and so I think that is a big one. That understanding the the cause of Native Americans and the environment and the way those two things come together is a key prophetic issue for the church today. Two. I mean, it's a clear, obvious one, but I feel like we're losing right now is, is immigration. If there's anything that is super Biblical, it's supporting the immigrant in the stranger. And like, right now our whole like, so my wife teaches English to refugees, that's her job. And in that career area, they're having to layoff a lot of people because there aren't enough immigrants to really, to have teachers anymore in some places, because Trump has basically cut the pipeline. So and to be
Seth Price 27:48
Al there is not enough people that even need to learn English?
Mark 27:54
Yeah, I mean, it's slowed down. It's not like there's tons and tons of people in the ESL industry like compared to other types of teachers. It's not like, you know, despite what conservative folks want to say, it's not like we have an overabundance of immigrants, like especially outside of the borderlands. But the way we're treating undocumented people, immigrants, the children separated from their parents at the border. I mean, that's a crisis. It's not a crisis here but it's a crisis, like throughout Europe and around the world. How do we, as the church stand up for people who have become refugees, largely economic and climate change refugees, that's a huge church issue? And I don't see the church really talking about it a lot at least not in a way where they're offending people enough to lose donation dollars. I mean, this just needs to be more energy on that front. So that's like the second one.
The third one, I think this is every major denomination is in the fault lines of this right now is how we respond to our LGBTQ siblings. Because right now again, like Trump is about to, they're trying to redefine what it means to be trans. So they're going to take that definition away. And so there won't be any sort of legal status for trans people. In this country.
Seth Price 29:23
I read that something about you must be assigned gender A or B at birth, is I feel like that's what I read. But to be fair, I only read the headline and so if that's what you're referencing. I didn't read the full article. Which I know my wife is a nurse, and I've asked her before, and it has a word, but there's a way to be born where basically, you know, hey Mark and your wife. You've got to figure it out right now. This kid was kind of born in between so…
Mark 29:52
Intersex is the word
Seth Price 29:54
Yes. Yeah. I'm not good with the medical wards. But and I asked her, like, how often is that she's like, it's not that it's common, but it's not that it's uncommon like it happens. And then usually you know, when they hit puberty 50% of the time they're wrong like sometimes these these poor kids, they, you know, they chose wrong or they chose right but I can't see how that can even be close to humane much less, right in any thought process like that.
Mark 30:19
And especially like with people that who are assigned female at birth and chromosomally, and in terms of their sex, their female but realize that they that they're trans like so the reason so if you want to look at homelessness rates, or suicide rates, or murder rates, those populations all those rates spike if you're trans. Especially like the most one of the most murder groups of people in this society are trans women, people that were assigned male at birth and are female. And almost all the hatred about these groups of people come from really religious origins. It's like a religious thing.
And so like one thing we did, like, here's an example of I feel like what something we did that tried to be prophetic is a lot of folks in my community, including my coworker at CPI, Center for Prophetic Imagination are trans. And a lot of churches out there, and I understand why this is, theologically don't believe it's okay to be gay. But they don't want to seem like dicks about it. So what they do is they say, “everyone's welcome”, and they like really try their best to include everyone. But then behind closed doors, they're like, “well, if you're gay, we're not going to let you do anything in the church besides, maybe we'll let you be a member”. And so that seems kind of compassionate if you're conservative about it, because it's more than what people used to do.
But imagine going to a church for a few years where you think this is my family and my forever home. And then you find out you can't teach Sunday school because you're gay and you thought for the last few years, that they loved you for who you were. Now, we did this action outside of this church, Woodale, church in Loring Park, Minneapolis, where we just tell the sign that said “your queerness is made in the image of God”. And we offered communion to folks that were coming out of church.
And a lot of people thought we were like, out of our minds because they thought the church was really affirming of LGBTQ folks. And I remember this one person was arguing with me like “no, we're an affirming church”. Meanwhile, like 10 steps away from me, someone was calling my friend Marty who was in drag at the time an abomination. Like someone from that church was like saying they're going to hell. And so all I had to do and they started saying, No, we're an affirming church is point…
Seth Price 33:00
You see your boy over there?
Mark 33:01
Yes! So I feel like the church needs to be honest. Like, we need to be honest about how we stand on this. And those churches that are affirming or celebrating of queer folk need to really put their money where their mouth is. They need to invest time and energy into queer, homeless youth, which is a huge percentage, like just tons of homeless youth are homeless because they were kicked out of their homes, their religious homes, because they came out.
So these are like crisis level issues within the church, that we need to start taking a painful stand on even if we lose donations. You know, because that's what keeps people from making the hard choices is they're afraid of losing donations yet. And Jesus had lots to say about that, I think.
Seth Price 33:51
Yeah, so that leads me so one of my favorite, I don't want to say meme, but I enjoy when specifically the Center for Prophetic Imagination on Facebook, and it's gotta be you. I can't think that anyone but you because I sound like your voice or the pictures seem like you.
Mark 34:06
I'm the primary meme generator.
Seth Price 34:10
There you go, and so it was it's basically a painting that I'm sure someone in the Renaissance era did of Jesus basically flipping tables in the temple. And the words were Jesus didn't get mad because the temple was being desecrated. He got mad because the poor were being desecrated. But the way that you hear preaches it's about the money, you did it wrong. You're buying lambs. You got the wrong stuff. And as I watched that devolve into people arguing about semantics of language and I think it was even you that came in at the end and said, so you're arguing about the verbiage, but you're fine with the image. How are you not seeing the hypocritical”ness”, is that a word? HIPAA?
Mark 34:50
That is hypocrisy.
Seth Price 34:51
There it is. I did it. I'm taking it. I'm gonna edit it like I said it. (Laughter) But I see that often in what you post and what the CPI posts have just the right amount of the right amount of I don't know that I want to read that. So I guess my question is with that in mind, how do we evaluate things so that the the voices that we need to hear aren't just mixed into the loudness of the world? So it's just not a cacophony of sound. It's just overwhelming? How do we filter out for voices as we read them as we see them as we hear them? How do we discern that like, how do we get to the meat of what we need to be hearing? Not what we want to be hearing?
Mark 35:36
Yeah, you know, I don't know like I wish I knew the answer to that. Because here's the thing like, I have to remind myself almost every day when I'm encountering people online that seem just bizarrely extremist from my perspective, I remind myself, they are actually technically mainstream. I'm the extremist, like people that believe that Hillary Clinton ran in a child pornography ring, or child prostitution ring underneath a pizza place—pizza gate— well, yeah, there are more people that believe that than think like I do. Like that's statistically likely. So like, I have to remind myself and the reason this is problematic and hard is like because the content being generated by hate mongers, I mean, technically they're hate mongers. They're selling hateful things. They have more money and resources and they sell more books.
And so, you know, like, what, whenever I feel discouraged that no one's listening to what I'm trying to tell them, I'll go and look up the Amazon sales rank of the people I most admire, and some of the greatest towering people, the most prophetic and amazing voices, even the books written by Martin Luther King Jr., don't sell! We get fooled into thinking that people are listening to The Violence of Love by Oscar Romero or The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone, or any of these great, amazing books. Dorothy Day, William Stringfellow, Howard Thurman, all these amazing things that have changed my way of looking at (the world) all those things put together don't sell as much as one Joel olsteen book. So like, you know, this is what I've got to have like this, you know, I don't know if we're gonna make a difference but we got to keep fighting.
Seth Price 37:36
I would think that we have to because if I look back at history, maybe it's only in depth that difference is made because Martin Luther King obviously made a difference because we still talk about him. Jesus obviously made a difference because the church, and Dorothy Day, so we still talk about those people and obviously their words still have great impact. But people seem to only bring them out of the cupboard when there's an emergency and we need to feel better about the pain. You know after after a mass shooting we'll talk about you know, there's that badly paraphrase Martin Luther King quote about you know, darkness cannot drive out darkness only light can or something like that which you people seem to only bring it out when it's convenient. But they're still spoken about
Mark 38:21
Yeah, or we bring out the the safe quotes, like the long arc of history bends towards justice, which no one would disagree with that even like, fascist would say, yeah, we need justice. And so the long arc of the history like; and then you get people that coopt like so this is my favorite example of Rush Limbaugh like a decade ago said on his radio show that he was the he basically was the inheritor though person keeping Martin Luther King Junior's legacy live.
Seth Price 38:57
By what metic?
Mark 39:00
By his own metric, but tons of people agreed with that. So these figures get co opted or like, sometimes it's severe like the the Rush Limbaugh example. Sometimes it's more subtle, like, the reason that Dorothy Day who was an anarchist, who fed people and protested things. The reason that the Catholic Church, the bishops, wanted to make her a saint was because she also was pro life and so they wanted to make her a pro life like saint, right. Which wasn't the main thing about her message, but they found it useful. So this is what happens is we misquote we appropriate, we misdirect. And so, you know, most people don't know the harder things that Martin Luther King Jr. said.
Seth Price 39:46
So I don't know that full quote. You said it's it's misappropriated and misquoted, what is the full quote talking about the arc of history?
Mark 39:53
That's the quote, he's talking about that but like, if you just take it in isolation, you'd think that that just applies to whatever any old definition of justices but Martin Luther King Jr., had a clear vision of what the Beloved Community looked like and as part of why he got killed.
Seth Price 40:10
Can you frame that? What is the difference for that because I agree with you like for Nazis a justice is this for you know dictators a justice means something different shoot for white guy in the middle of Virginia justice is different for you know, African American justice is different for that poor guy that just immigrated from Canada because he wanted to get a job and then terrorists happen. Justice is different.
Mark 40:33
It is different so how did the Martin Luther King Jr., like what he said about race and people hated him for it. But then when he took a stand almost a year to the day, I think it might have even been his a year to the day before he was assassinated, he gave his speech, I think it was called on Vietnam and he came out against the Vietnam War and he named the giant triplets of evil, militarism, economic exploitation, and racism. And so he started to move beyond talking about ending segregation. He wanted to end to the war and he wanted to start organizing, he started organizing the poor people's campaign. And he wanted blacks and whites and people of all races who were experiencing poverty, to create a permanent encampment in Washington to declare economic human rights to eradicate poverty.
And he was a socialist, like, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a socialist. And he saw that the Gospels supported his socialism. But no one ever talks about Martin Luther King Jr. the socialist, what we do is we have Colin Powell, on MLK Day talk about how America is the great place where people are equal. And so you have this man of the military commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day as though he doesn't represent one of the great evils that Martin Luther King talked about.
Seth Price 41:53
I'm realizing now I don't know enough about Martin Luther King Jr., not even nearly enough, which is probably my fault. I'm gonna blame it on the schools, but it's definitely probably now my fault—it might have been their fault, but it's now probably mine.
Mark 42:07
I mean, it's not…well, I mean, I'm sure you could have done more reading but here's the thing. Churches don't preach from what Martin Luther King talked about in his great sermons. The schools don't talk about Martin Luther King Jr. except for the most antiseptic ways, the quotes you see on TV like no one would know. So you'd have to have enough wherewithal to say, I think they're keeping things about Martin Luther King, Jr. from me. So I'm going to go take the effort to go read through some stuff written in the 50s that might be a little hard for me to process. Like it shouldn't be up to individuals to figure this stuff out.
This is where the church has failed we don't call we don't cultivate prophetic voices, we tend to silence them until they get so loud that we can't ignore them anymore.
Seth Price 42:51
Say that again. We tend to silence prophetic voices until the…
Mark 42:54
We silence them until they are so loud that we can't ignore them anymore.
Seth Price 42:56
I don't understand that…that oxymoron breaks my heart and breaks my brain. So how do I silence something so that it's so loud that I can't hear it?
Mark 43:03
No, we silence it until it gets so loud that we can't ignore it anymore. So like, once a moment starts…
Seth Price 43:10
Yeah, okay, yeah, okay. Yeah, I missed…I was mishearing what I thought you were saying.
Mark 43:15
So this is what churches, what our institutions do like. And I'm not anti-church like I believe that the church at its best as a movement, but institutions tend to want to preserve themselves, even at the expense of the individuals in the institution. I mean, institutions want to maintain and survive, and they make compromises for that. So they're gonna want to silence voices that disrupt and threaten their survival. But then when a voice gets loud enough, they'll feel like Oh God, we have to do something about this or it could ruin everything.
Seth Price 43:52
As I've talked with other pastors and theologians, but mostly pastors, I find them when I can get them away from their congregations most of time, they say if I do my job really well, and I get you in a healthy place, you'll stop coming to church, which is the problem. And so I don't, there's a part of them in the back that they can't say that out loud. And they also have to really hold back from preaching truth, because if they do it well, I'm called to leave that church and do something like I'm called to go up to I think it's one of the Dakotas right now, where they're trying to make it where Native Americans can't vote. Like I'm called to go leave or do something and I don't know the ins and outs of that, but I'm called to now pick up and go do this because that's what you should do. And there's fear that if they do that, well, the same fear that I talked about at the bank, like if I do it, and I do it the way that I'm supposed to do it, well, I'm gonna lose the house, you know, declare bankruptcy. I don't know there's a tension. There's a definite tension.
Mark 44:52
And here's the thing like I don't, you know, maybe it'd be good, but I don't assume that it'd be good if everyone, all of us, who have a conscience and convictions basically became destitute overnight like I'm not sure that would do it. But here's the thing like each of us, you working in a bank, me trying to figure out how to make a living with a nonprofit. All of us, the church should be a place where we can start discerning, with other people, of how we are to live, individually and collectively to challenge the things we see around us that bring death to people's souls, right.
But the churches are increasingly not the place for that. In some ways, they're the least safe place to do that. So this is why I like…Black Lives Matter was formed by predominantly queer women of color, queer black women, who were no longer safe feeling in their churches and had to find spirituality somewhere else. And Black Lives Matter came from that. Any opportunity for the church to become a nourishing source for that movement. early on was cut off and then church people came alongside afterwards. But this is the history of radical movements is we have to fight against the churches and then maybe later after they're, it's they can't ignore it they might come along, and that's backwards, churches should be the place where this kind of discernment is happening.
Seth Price 46:18
Yeah, another interview said that, that if we're following the Spirit, we shouldn't be looking behind we should be looking forward and we should be setting the example. The rest of the nation should be coming alongside us as, oh, the church is doing this and we should probably get behind it, including people regardless of their gender or their sexual orientation. We should probably do this because the church seems to be the forefront or we, you know, whatever the human rights are or inherent rights that we have. He was basically saying, you know, the Church should be showing how that looks as opposed to heck no. Yeah, can't do it. Let's do it. Of course the hurricane hit because there's too many gays down there. I need it to end
Mark 47:05
Oh, yes.
Seth Price 47:07
So I don't know, maybe a month and a half ago you had a conference for the CPI what does that look like do you do that every year?
Mark 47:17
I mean, we've only been around for like, now two years as a nonprofit. That was our first conference and we'll do more. And we're trying to figure out the timing for that. And, you know, look, here's the thing, like I grew up among Charismatics, and Pentecostals and Evangelicals. And, I mean, I'm far left politically. Theologically, I'm not very evangelical anymore, but I still have that same sensibility of like church should be minimalist, like it should be about people getting together and like all the smells and bells are a distraction from that. But I realized, like if I'm gonna do this work, I have to connect more with the main line, which tend to be more progressive. So we have this conference that we aim for this sweetspot radical voices but some voices that I thought like mainline like Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, blah, blah, blah, would come to.
And so we aim for that to try to meet with more of our like minded people. And we invited some folks that…it was amazing…all of our main speakers we didn't set this up ended up having kind of overlapping messages around how do we deal with hopelessness, and it was real! Like, a lot of people felt exhausted after the weekend but a lot of people felt energized because it was the only time they could really talk honestly about the fact that we feel abandoned, the society is is marching towards destruction, and we don't want to believe we can just believe that somehow God will like to swoop in and make it better. We're in a predicament and we need to have spirituality sturdy enough to see us through this moment. And it was heavy and raw. And it's not the sort of thing that tons of people would come to.
Seth Price 49:05
It's not a passion conference.
Mark 49:06
No, but it was great. And it was a lot of, you know, a whole lot of pain. It was a lot of pain and not a lot of trying to organize (around) what do we do about it? Because part of the problem is like, a lot of people just think they already know how we should respond to stuff. So we're running around like chickens with their head cut off doing busy work, without slowing down to discern the moment and making sure our actions count.
Seth Price 49:35
I guess the question is, how do you do that without becoming another institution, a prophetic institution? And I mean institution in the way that like, I mean, Southern Baptist or the Presbyterian Church of America, or the Catholic Church, like how do you do that without becoming, especially because I see it now. I see progressive Christians becoming just as tribal as what they're calling against from the Evangelical right. So how do you do that prophetically without becoming what you're prophesying against?
Mark 50:06
Yes, good question. I don't know. It happens. Institutions happen. And I really think we can, if we start fooling ourselves into thinking “well, we're not going to create an institution” then we're going to just act like..,we're going to be pretending that we're not an institution when we are. I feel like what needs to happen is we need to keep investing in movements that happen and be okay with the things we start dying, we have to let things die. Because at its heart an institution is a group of people that aren't willing to let that thing die. That's what an institution is.
Seth Price 50:45
So start something and see the work through maybe have a vision at the beginning of this is what success looks like or as close as we can get to it. And when we reach this, we're done.
Mark 50:55
Let it go and make sure the resources can then go back into the compost.
Seth Price 51:03
So don't make an endowment fund to continue to pay for that (program) for 250 more years.
Mark 51:07
No. And that's hard because like, here's the thing, like, you got to do a little bit of that. Because I'm not exaggerating and I say like, unless I figured out a way to sustain stuff like, it's possible that I will retire into government housing, like I don't have retirement and things like that. And you got to, you have to have some of that because the church is broken, like in an ideal world if you decided, like, oh, I've had this vision of what I need to do, but I'm a banker, and I need to do it. But if I do that, I'll end up homeless, then the church would say, No, we got you. You might not make as much money but we got you. But the church doesn't do that.
So what ends up doing is putting the burden on individuals to be heroic, and then be cut off. So the best you can do is try to make some sort of relationship with churches or institutions to keep yourself going I realize that it's a little bit compromised, like in the scheme of things, but you can't be so beholden that you care more about making sure the nonprofit exists or the Church exists and make that more important than the work. And that's always hard. This is where discernment as a practice, like as a spiritual practice, needs to happen and it rarely is practiced or supported by the church. It'd be great if you had a church meeting like, about, hey, we have this one's like, maybe we should talk about maybe we should just sell the church and stop being a church because there's these needs in the neighborhood. That’s, like no one would ever take that seriously but why not‽
Seth Price 52:44
This meeting is over and we didn't even vote? Well, so my pastor and I, mostly him, but he's taken some of the content from the show and we've had a conversation over the course of six weeks at church. And last night we talked about gratitude taken from a conversation I had with Diana Bass, about an economy of grace. And we talked about making compassion and gratitude and making that a scarcity, like you have to earn it or a quid pro quo. And Diana argues that, you know, in God's economy or if the churches doing the economy, right, and she references Martin Luther King that if we can learn to just freely give at the table, just bring what you have, it could solve so many theodicies, so it would solve, you know, it could solve so many theodicies and then we talked about that, you know, hey, the people that are here, how does that sound and the word that came up was “Well, that sounds socialist, and everybody was like, but it also sounds Biblical, but it sounds socialist”. And so everybody was in this horrible tension.
Mark 53:54
To me this is a great pastoral question or how do we begin to be so free in our ability to Talk about money, that it's possible within a church for someone who makes $300,000 a year, and someone who makes $13,000 a year to actually be facilitated into figuring out how to share resources so that they both live…
Seth Price 54:17
So that they both make $117,500 a year?
Mark 54:21
Or maybe it's not even that. Maybe it's like, well, maybe that person should make $30,000. And then the other person is like, well, it's still better. Like we don't even get that far. But it's so taboo to talk about money and there's such an entitlement. It's funny, we use entitlement as a negative word in our society to talk about poor people, but it's the rich, they feel entitled because they they somehow bought into this lie that they earned it. So it's bizarre to me like how a theme like Protestants, evangelicals, will talk about how God's grace is unmerited favor. You don't do anything to earn His free gift. But we weren't willing to start thinking about what does it mean if you apply that logic to economics? Now all of a sudden, like, I don't earn my salvation, but I did earn all this money. Because capitalism is pure, it's neutral. It's natural, and it and I happen to work harder and be smarter than you.
Seth Price 55:20
Do you think, and this is not theologically relates, but I feel like you have to have an opinion, do you feel like capitalism will break in our lifetime and that the youth of America will basically go, “we're so tired of this crap, we're changing it,” or will that never be allowed to happen? And I'm not arguing that it should. I don't know that I'm educated enough in the economics of both sides to make a cognizant…I know what my personal inclinations are but I'm no economist. Do you think somehow in the future just from the voices that you hear and the people that are around you that it's just going to change, or we'll still be pissed off 80 years from now you and I'll be dead but my kids will be pissed off?
Mark 55:58
I think Capitalism is already broken. And I think there are already a lot of younger generation people who are trying to, like, there's already a movement happening, like, and it's growing. But the problem is we've enslaved them to debt.
Like, if you have someone indebted to you and they can't like have their own self determination. There's not a lot of freedom in their actions. And so I think the system right now is exists, we have a hyper debtor society, the economy is moved to a gig economy so that the younger generation never has enough freedom of resources and time to actually start challenging this stuff. And I think that's where we're at.
I think the reason that the gap between the rich and the poor is so vast and it tends to fall increasingly on generational lines is because this is what happens when capitalism is broken and they want to silence the younger generation. So I don't know, like whether or not they rise up and overthrow or something. I don't know if that'll happen.
But it's already broken. I mean, I hope for a non violent revolution against capitalism. I think it's more likely that there'll be some sort of violence. And that's sad. And I think that when we look back, I don't I don't blame the people who take up arms, I blame the fact that the church, which is 2 billion of us couldn't like the word term is prefigurative politics. We couldn't put this in action enough ourselves to show the world how it could go. And so our lack of prophetic imagination, our lack of political will, brings about violence. It's kind of like when the church stood by and did nothing. Eventually it caused Hitler to rise to power. Right so it's on us right now. The church needs to, you know, show up.
Seth Price 57:57
Yeah, absolutely. I hope we do. Well, I know my son probably will…I'm hopefully not indoctrinating them, but hopefully I'm influencing him. final words mark, what, what else? Anything that I didn't touch on that you're like, here's what people need to hear before they turn this off?
Mark 58:15
Here's this is where like people are like, okay, I don't know what to do with any of that I think every church where there's at least two or three people who generally agree with what I'm talking about. You need to start just meeting together. And I'm going to get old school start praying and asking God, what should we do? And if any two or three people just need help figuring out like, how do we begin, I will respond to your email to help you figure out and discern what's next without like, just telling you what I think you should do. I'll help you discern.
This is my work, like I want to support this. And I think it has to the idea that we somehow are supposed to as individuals put pressure on our church to do the right thing- that's not going to work. We need To start organizing with people that are like minded, even within our churches and start trying to figure out, what does this look like? And so that's my final message. Start where you're at with what you got.
Seth Price 59:13
So how do they email you? Where do they do that? Where do they get in touch with you?
Mark 59:16
I mean, if you go to this center for prophetic imagination, look that up on Facebook and send a message that way, I'll get it. Also, I'm on Facebook Mark Van Steenwyk, just look me up on Facebook. And send me a message and we'll go from there.
Seth Price 59:29
Awesome, well thank you again, Mark for your time this evening.
I'm gonna be real honest with you. I still don't know how I sit with this conversation with Mark. I don't understand in my brain…still that last question that I asked how do we how do we uproot a system without becoming the next institution and I'm willing to wrestle with it? It's worth wrestling with the future of a lot of things, I believe, hinge on that question. And that's the question that has always been there it’s a question that Jesus modeled. Because the price is very high and it's uncomfortable, and that sucks.
Engage with the Center for Prophetic Imagination; follow Mark on Facebook. He posts some, some very thought provoking articles. If you like the type of conversation that we had today, you will really enjoy what happens there on social media. And take him up on his offer, if you feel called to do this type of searching and conversation at a local level email Mark, you'll find that link in the show notes on how to reach him. So I hope you'll do that.
Today's music was provided with permission by artist Built by Titan, you'll find links to all of his music in the show notes and as always the the tracks from today's episode, and as with every prior episode, it has been added to the best playlist on Spotify Can I Say This At Church playlist.
I'll talk with you next week.