Brett and I just got back from hearing Jim Wallis speak at the Champions’ Club in San Diego. Holy crap. It was amazing. If you haven’t heard of him, Jim is the head of a very cool organization called Sojourners, which focuses on uniting people of faith with causes of social justice. I’ve read his last book God’s Politics: Why The Right Gets It Wrong and The Left Doesn’t Get It twice (the second time was for school), and he was in town today promoting his new book The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America.
I think what I appreciate most about the message of Jim Wallis is that he is trying to call people of faith to a level of social and political engagement that transcends obnoxious partisan politics. Also, he’s calling people of faith to a spirituality that is less about building big churches and singing fun songs (to quote from his talk today, “Christianity has an image problem”) and more about taking on profoundly spiritual issues like poverty and climate change. He said today that we are on the verge of a new awakening in our country where people of faith usher in a new era of social action and responsibility. I believe he’s offering the sort of compelling vision for what it means to be Christian that my generation desperately needs. I think we’re a generation that doesn’t much care about building mega-churches and being hip and cool, and we’re more concerned with actually being people that make a difference and make our lives count for something. As Jim said, “the voice of the Religious Right is being replaced by the voice of Jesus”. I don’t want to speak for my entire demographic, but from the conversations I regularly have, it appears that is the voice that we want to follow.
I also appreciate Wallis’ message because it’s a message of hope. There is certainly much to be cynical about in our world today, but as he says, cynicism is something that buffers us from engagement. When we’re cynical, we believe that nothing will ever change and can thus sit back and allow ourselves to continue to point out problems without being part of the solution. When we’re hopeful, on the other hand, we can be honest about reality while seeking ways that we can affect positive social change.
Given the mountain of school books I’m currently wading in, I probably won’t get to crack open The Great Awakening for a while, but I’m very much looking forward to it.
