It was the frumpiest of carnivals. Ramshackle fencing circled rides replete with burnt-out light bulbs and littered with trash. The tiny, traveling carnival sat in a small section of the parking lot outside our neighborhood Target. My family loved it. As we walked the carnival grounds, we ran into someone we knew, surprisingly. And this meeting, in a parking lot carnival of all places, ushered peace to my soul.
While waiting to board the Fireball ride, my wife, Alli, exclaimed, “Anthony!” Anthony, a first-grader, initially looked surprised, then thrilled, to see Mrs. Horst. He came over and hugged her around the waist. He stepped back, celebrated with his foster mom, and then hugged Alli again. And then again.
I stood to the side, exchanging smiles with Anthony and his foster mom. But inside, my heart grieved as I reflected on Anthony’ story. He was all smiles at the carnival, but this was a fragile little boy.
Alli and Desmond at the Parking Lot Carnival
Anthony began in Alli’s classroom last year, but it quickly became clear he was not yet ready for first grade. He returned for a second year of kindergarten. This year, he was again back in Alli’s first grade class. The second go-around did not start much better. Anthony acted out often. And there were troubling undertones to his defiance. Alli sensed his misbehavior found its roots in something. She soon learned what it was.
The school counselor and principal pulled Alli aside and shared tragic news about Anthony’s childhood: His grandfather was recently jailed. For sexually abusing Anthony and his brother. Anthony’s grandfather started abusing him in the most formative years, before he could even talk.
As a father of a toddler, hearing Anthony’s story caused me to feel a range of emotions. I reacted first with anger, but journeyed to pure lament. Anthony already has the deck stacked against him, I felt. As a minority kid from a single parent home in one of Denver’s toughest neighborhoods, Anthony had all the statistics working against him. Then this. The person closest to Anthony deprived him of his innocence.
Frederick Buechner once wrote, “If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors.”
Anthony did not finish this year in Alli’s classroom. He transitioned to a school better suited for his unique needs. When he walked out of her room for the second time, Alli felt disappointed. As if no progress had been made. But their carnival run-in allowed us to see the joy Alli had brought him in classroom 107. It was a gift.
Yesterday, Alli sent her scholars to summer break. She achieved remarkable academic results for these vulnerable children, but the most significant mark of her work does not show up on test scores alone. It shows up in Anthony’s eyes. And Alejandra’s hugs. And Angel’s endearing letters. This is the joy of my wife’s job. Our little neighbors are seen and known and celebrated in her room.
The moment at the carnival gave me unexpected hope. I will never know Anthony’s pain and I cannot take away the horrors this boy lived. But his huge smiles toward Alli—and the tender eyes of his foster mom—reminded me how grace can pervade even the darkest of places. Might we all find, love and see our neighbors, and reflect the hope of Christ.
“There are a lot of universities that would prefer to see us off-campus,” shared Alec Hill, president of InterVarsity USA. “But, we have a Lord to obey.”
Peter and I have conducted a grueling number of interviews over the past year. We held long phone calls and consumed copious amounts of coffee as we wrote, rewrote, and rewrote again for our forthcoming book, Mission Drift.
Just a few weeks remain before our deadline. Late last week, I picked up my phone and punched the numbers to Alec Hill’s office, with some fatigue. The call came at the very end of the workday and at the end of a long writing process.
The conversation rattled the fatigue off. Hill stirred my enthusiasm and steeled my resolve.
In Mission Drift, we share stories about organizations like Harvard and ChildFund, two organizations founded by Christians fervent about their faith. Sadly, neither Harvard nor ChildFund resemble the organizations of their founders. They’re not doing bad work. They’re just not doing the work they set out to do.
And this is what makes organizations like InterVarsity so compelling. A group of British students founded InterVarsity at the University of Cambridge in 1877. These bold students prayed, studied the Bible, and shared their faith with their classmates, despite the disapproval of university officials. 136 years later, InterVarsity stands Mission True.
InterVarsity now serves students on over 575 campuses, their leaders’ hearts beating to the same cadence as those who founded InterVarsity. But like the first InterVarsity groups, and just as Alec Hill acknowledged, they face increasing pressures on campuses across the country.
Alec Hill, president of InterVarsity USA (photo credit: Seattle Pacific University)
Over the past few years, news outlets like the Wall Street Journal featured the stories, all with the same basic headline: Christian organization expelled from campus. Officials at close to 50 universities—including prominent colleges like Rutgers, Georgetown, Vanderbilt and the University of Michigan—have challenged InterVarsity’s right to exist.
On a handful of campuses, school officials have given InterVarsity the proverbial pink slip. Because InterVarsity requires their campus leaders to be Christians, these schools allege discrimination. Vanderbilt hit national news in 2012 when university officials voted to disallow the organization on campus
Nicholas Zappos, Vanderbilt’s chancellor, outlined the university’s position:
“We… require all Vanderbilt registered student organizations to observe our nondiscrimination policy. That means membership in registered student organizations is open to everyone and that everyone, if desired, has the opportunity to seek leadership positions.”
In short, Zappos believes that a Christian ministry selecting Christian student leaders is impermissible. And the implications of this rationale extend far beyond university campuses. The implications extend to foundations, urban ministries, and missions agencies. And it is in these moments when leaders of faith-based organizations face two options.
The first option? “You can kowtow to the pressure, accommodating culture to be liked and accepted,” stated Hill.
Or you can stand by your convictions, knowing it could hurt. Hill and InterVarsity’s leaders didn’t back down. They doubled-down, refusing to bend their knee to those who demand they change their mission or soften their approach. Softening their approach, they realize, will strip away their very raison d’être.
InterVarsity student leaders at the University at Buffalo of the State University of New York understood the significance of their crossroads when officials asked them to change their club’s constitution to open leadership to everyone. These courageous students knew the implications were high. They knew their “immutables” and didn’t budge on their core.
“We have decided to retain our current constitution,” the students stated with resolve.
It’s more than keeping a constitution. InterVarsity leaders decided to retain their identity. My conversation last week with Alec Hill reminded me why the late-night writing and vigorous editing sessions are worth it. The stories of Mission True organizations like InterVarsity need to be told. Our culture needs vibrant faith-based organizations. And our faith-based organizations need to hold fast to their identity.
“Holding the gospel in humility and grace,” Hill responded. “We will be faithful to our calling whatever the cost.”
My son, Desmond, has a new favorite toy: Tegu wooden blocks. And while I bought the blocks “for” him, they’re my favorite too. These beautiful magnetic blocks are hand-crafted by a terrific company based in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. I was drawn to purchase from Tegu for three primary reasons.
Honduras is the first country I traveled to internationally and will forever hold a soft spot in my heart
Tegu’s founders run their company the right way, serving their Honduran staff and customers with care.
Tegu was part of the Praxis accelerator program, a program founded and led by my good friends, Josh Kwan and Dave Blanchard
My son, Desmond, with his Tegu blocks
Winston Churchill once said, “Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.” Do young Americans believe entrepreneurship is a target, a cow or a horse?
Tegu’s founders, brothers Will and Chris Haughey, see it as a horse. And that’s why they created Tegu, which now employees over 90 Hondurans with great jobs. I’m so encouraged by the fresh crop of innovative companies founded by passionate Christian young people like Tegu. Shoemakers like Nisolo, headquartered in Peru. Home furnishing companies like Chaka, based in Ecuador. Men’s apparel companies like Urban Offering, creating an innovative design-you-own suit approach through tailors in China.
Over at Values & Capitalism, they produced a short film highlighting the motivation and mission of the Haughey brothers and Tegu. It’s a beautiful film. I commend you to check it out!
The pizza box doesn’t fit in the refrigerator. Cable only lets me record two shows at once. The batteries in my toothbrush are dead. First world problemsare funny. It’s healthy to illuminate how petty inconveniences are, well, petty. When our biggest problems are dying batteries and forgotten Wi-Fi passwords, we have a lot to be thankful for. In contrast to dirty water and ramshackle housing, awkwardly sized pizza boxes become trivial nuisances—and rightly so.
But the meme misses the truth: Real first world problems are far from minor.
Our world is much less materially poor than it was thirty years ago. Less than half as poor, actually. In the year I was born, over half of the world’s population asked the question, “Am I going to survive?” Today, less than 15% of people ask that question. The landscape of poverty shifted in just a few decades.
Broadband, oil, cell phones, and mass transportation opened doors of opportunity in places almost unthinkable even two decades ago. Commerce—the engine of prosperity—has chugged into nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. You can now buy Pepsi in Kigali and chat on Skype from in Manila. The rest of the world has begun to look a lot like here.
Global poverty is still alive and well, don’t read me wrong, but it looks much different than thirty years ago.
While in Hong Kong last fall, I walked miles and miles through the city streets. I saw some of the world’s tallest buildings and meandered through many of Hong Kong’s bustling neighborhoods. In the 1940s, poverty plagued Hong Kong. Violence, food rationing, and widespread disease reigned. Today, Hong Kong is one of the wealthiest cities in the entire world. But not everything signals progress. I saw a troubling undercurrent as I walked the city.
Hong Kong
On my way to a lunch meeting, I noticed something peculiar: Upscale jewelry stores sat on every corner. That in itself was intriguing. But the concerning sight was how these stores were all mobbed. With teenagers. And they weren’t just browsing; they were buying.
Groups of adolescents entered and exited these stores adorned with Chanel watches and Cartier necklaces. Bags hung on every elbow. This was extreme materialism. Their parents felt the pains of prosperity too. Parents I met lamented the culture of workaholism.
Greed, obesity, hedonism, isolation, spiritual apathy, lethargy and depression lurked in the shadows of Hong Kong’s glassy towers. Hong Kong used to look like North Korea looks today—mired in grinding poverty and shackled by failing economic policies. People lived short, hard lives and many died simply for lack of food or basic medicine.
Without question, I’ll choose modern-day Hong Kong over modern-day North Korea. But the first world problems they experience in Hong Kong are not petty inconveniences. We joke about first world problems as if trifling annoyances are our chief concern. They aren’t.
The problems are not as dire as failing hospitals or corrupt governments, but they are just as oppressive. We don’t need to look beyond Manhattan’s boardrooms or Hollywood’s film studios to know the seriousness of the problems we have exported to places like Hong Kong.
Henry Ford was the poster child of the Industrial Revolution. Before Ford, laborers built automobiles one-at-a-time. But Ford changed all that. He built the industry’s first moving assembly line, enabling “workers to stay in one place and perform the same task repeatedly on multiple vehicles that passed by them.”
Ford made cars faster than anyone before him. This allowed him to pay his workers better than his competitors, while also dramatically elevating the vehicle quality. He introduced standards and consistency never before seen in his industry. Parallel innovators to Ford emerged in other industries. Isaac Singer invented the sewing machine. Charles Goodyear created a method to harden rubber. Alexander Graham Bell made it possible for people to talk to each other over wires.
These titans of American industry electrified the world, accelerated transportation and created ways for stuff to be created faster, cheaper and standardized. Today, however, we celebrate innovators who do exactly the opposite. We’re in the midst of the Deindustrial Revolution.
If Detroit served as the epicenter for the Industrial Revolution, Denver might play that role in the Deindustrial Revolution. In Denver–and even moreso in Boulder, our hippy neighbor to the north–“manufactured” is a near profanity. We don’t brew coffee, Coloradans correct, weFrench press fair-trade, hormone-free, machineless coffee.
Hand-crafted Coffee (photo source: Prima Coffee Equipment)
Henry Ford and his compatriots built things quicker and standardized, but today’s revolutionaries are compelled to build things slower and customized. If you don’t believe me, consider these examples:
The hottest coffee products right now are those allowing everyday folk to brew coffee like it was meant to be brewed. “Manual coffee-making methods are becoming an increasingly popular option for home enthusiasts and coffee shop baristas alike…This new popularity has prompted the birth of several new methods and devices, as well as the resurrection of older methods.” Folgers is so 1995. Deindustrializers posit, “OK, but we want to know: How did people brew coffee in the Roman Empire?”
The beer brewing scene is also exploding. Small “craft” breweries produce nearly twice the beer they did just six years ago. Four times more home brewing clubs exist than did just twenty years ago. Deindustrializers debate how big is too big. The “craft versus crafty” debate surges between brewers who are truly small and brewers are who faux small. The drama!
A popular destination on Denver’s Broadway Avenue is Fancy Tiger. It’s a top-shelf craft store (and my first stop when Christmas shopping for my wife). Not only can you buy homemade goods and clothing, but you can also buy all the supplies and tools you need to stitch your own wardrobe, knit your Christmas gifts and outfit your free-range toddler. British retailer cites 500% year-over-year growth rates on its most-affordable sewing machines (quite a paradox, really, that sales of the cheapest sewing machines have grown fastest, but I digress).
I recently read the label on the water bottle at a hotel where we stayed recently. I can’t remember the exact language, but it essentially said, “We’ve got a guy who climbs the Colorado mountains each morning, finds untouched rivers, and fills up hundreds of these bottles by hand. Also, we have another guy who rescues plastic bottles out of trash cans, scrubs them with organic cleaning products and repackages them for your use. Also: Local and organic.”
In Colorado, it’s almost a mark-of-shame to buy mass-produced celery, wheat or chickens. We even owned shares in a community supported farm last summer. In a brilliant Portlandia skit, the lead actor presses a waitress to reveal the true identity behind the chicken sandwich. “Could you tell us a little bit more about the chicken? …Is it USDA organic or Oregon organic or Portland organic? …and how big is the area that the chickens are able to roam free?”
http://youtu.be/l2LBICPEK6w
There is so much to love about the Deindustrial Revolution. I love craftsmanship. My grandpa was a builder. And so was his grandpa. It’s in my blood. Just last fall, we built our first raised vegetable beds and will be planting our tomatoes any day (but my farmer “cred” pales compared to my San Diego farming friends!). I’m all for learning and replicating how people did stuff hundreds of years ago. But, we need assembly lines as much as we need handcrafted thingamajigs.
There are a few reasons cars aren’t built by two dudes in a repurposed brick warehouse. There are reasons we love mass-produce smartphones. Consistency and cost might not be the exclusive values Henry Ford thought they were. Customization and craftsmanship are important too. But, our world needs estate-grown hipsters and process-driven industrialists.
I’ve started writing more letters recently (not with the remarkable artistry of my friend, Jake Weidmann, however). It’s my favorite Deindustrialized flavor-of-the-month. What’s your favorite?
