by Chris Horst | Nov 13, 2020 | Blog |
You don’t listen to Christmas music before Thanksgiving. Or so I’ve said.
But 2020 is no normal year. So this year, we’ve accelerated Advent. We’re breaking our normal rules and commencing the season of waiting and hoping for the arrival of Jesus. This has practical implications: Last weekend, I strung lights on the pine tree in our backyard and we dusted off our favorite seasonal Spotify playlists.
But more than that, accelerating Advent is about embracing a new posture for the remaining six weeks of the year. We look forward to the coming glories of Christmas, but before, we enter this season with the somber reality of how very bleak things are in our own hearts and in the world around us.
As our favorite Advent theologian, Fleming Rutledge, writes, “Advent is the season that, when properly understood, does not flinch from the darkness that stalks us all in this world. Advent begins in the dark and moves toward the light—but the season should not move too quickly or too glibly, lest we fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness.”
On a warm night in late April, Alli and I sat down on our patio after putting the kids to bed. I shared something aloud I had been feeling privately for a while.
“I think I might be depressed.”
This revelation did not surprise her. Over the course of the previous months, I had been distant, withdrawn, and emotionally flat. I was often lost in my own thoughts, my mind turning over the newest research or lockdown stories I had just read about. I devoured the news, often spending hours each day reading and assessing the latest outlook.
The steady, everyday stress began to eat away at my hope. The what-ifs consumed my thoughts. I was demoralized and discouraged much of the time, even if I attempted to be cheery. The leadership journey can be deeply isolating amid hard times and I really felt this. I wanted to inspire hope for my team. I wanted to cast a compelling vision for HOPE’s donors. But I struggled to believe the very things I said. My self-diagnosis was not clinical, of course, but the shoe fit. While I’m in a far better place today, I know I’m not alone this year.
Darkness is all around us. We see it in the deaths from the virus and the deaths of despair caused by the lockdowns. We see it in how politics dictate our national conversation, straining friendships and dominating our imaginations. We see it in how 2020 punishes the most vulnerable most severely. We see it in the surges of depression, suicide rates, drug addictions and overdoses, and catastrophic academic regression. Lord have mercy. It’s been a hard year.
But, as Rutledge acknowledges, Advent only begins in the darkness. It does not end there.
“The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterize life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come,” she writes. “In that Advent tension, the church lives its life.”
We step forward not with a naive hope, but in hope surrounded by the darkness. Jesus arrived in a world not so dissimilar to our own. A world wrought with poverty, racism, disease, and heartache. Right in the midst of a dark world, hope exploded into view in that nondescript town of Bethlehem.
More than ever before, we need Advent. We need to remember darkness is not novel in 2020. We need to ache. And, we need the hope of celebration. The hope of new life. The joy of Jesus’ arrival amid all that pain. So for this year, we’re breaking our own rules and ushering in the season we need now more than ever.
by Chris Horst | Aug 17, 2020 | Blog |
I looked at Alli and asked if she was serious. She was and we are. Next week, we launch a school in our backyard–Wildside Academy–for our kids and nine kids from our neighborhood.
Like parents across this country, school closures upended our 2020 plans. Denver Public Schools announced in-person instruction will not start till at least mid-October. With a highly social fourth-grader and a kindergartner excited for his first days in school, this news came as a blow. It’s challenging enough for our boys to put their shirts on right-side-out, let alone thrive in virtual school. We aren’t alone. A mom (who works nights) of one Wildside Academy student summarized her experience with virtual school by saying, “It’s been hell for us.”
Reopening schools for in-person education includes risk. Already, we’re seeing just how complicated it is to resume school safely and pragmatically. But not reopening schools for in-person education also includes risk.
“We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID,” said Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the CDC, on the risks of schools remaining closed. Recent CDC data showed 1 in 4 young adults had “seriously considered” suicide within the last 30 days.
And, there is ample evidence from school reopenings across the globe and even within the United States that reopening schools is reasonably safe, particularly for young children.
Still, many of our largest public school districts, including ours, opted for a virtual fall. Massive school districts like DPS are in an unenviable position. Amid our hotly politicized climate, a storm of opinions about the health and safety of children, parents, and teachers rain in from every direction. School administrators face a lose-lose proposition.
Though virtual school will be inconvenient for us, our concern is ultimately not about the effect school closures will have on our children. Virtual school is least effective with our country’s most vulnerable children. With a master’s degree in education and close to a decade of experience educating children, Alli was ready and willing to step into the opportunity to bridge the gap for kids in our neighborhood.
Based on surveys from Los Angeles, Boston, and even South Dakota, we now know more than 20% of public school students are not even signing on to their virtual school platforms. This 20% dropout rate has had and will have a cataclysmic impact on the children least able to bounce back. Given the evidence available to us, we have asked far too much of our children. Our kids have given up too much, especially the most vulnerable children.
So next week, we’re launching a backyard “micro-school” for our neighborhood. Over the last month, we’ve worked with our school administrators to identify the kids who most need an in-person environment. Nine students enrolled for Wildside Academy and will gather with our oldest sons in our backyard, three days each week, to learn, play, and adventure together. They won’t pay tuition to us, as they will remain enrolled in our local school, but the focus will be on allowing these kids to regain some sense of normalcy this fall.
Our backyard: Home to Wildside Academy
Given this unique moment, we hope Wildside Academy spurs on others who are concerned about the impact school closures will have on our neighbors. Already, we’ve been overwhelmed with the ways our community has rallied around the students who will gather here. And, we’re excited to see what might happen in this backyard in the months to come.
9/1 Update: The first week of backyard school is under our belts and we’re loving it!
by Chris Horst | Jun 9, 2020 | Blog |
Graphs! Charts! Phases!
Never in all my life have I seen (or sent) so many. With the onslaught of pandemic analysis, we’re awash in models attempting to make sense of our world. Regions, organizations, and churches are employing tools to make it clear to their communities where they are and where they’re going, such as: Red → Yellow → Green. In Colorado, our three phases are:
Phase 1) Stay at Home → Phase 2) Safer at Home → Phase 3) Protect our Neighbors
These tools help us interpret our current moment. As I’ve navigated the pandemic through the eyes of the one million families HOPE serves around the world, I’ve begun to see the situation through, you guessed it, three phases.
Phase 1: The Precedented Crisis → Emergency Relief
What feels abrupt and jarring to us in the United States unfortunately feels familiar in many places around the world. A shock of this scale has not hit my country in my lifetime. But crises like this are far more normal in places like Zimbabwe, Haiti, and Moldova.
We surveyed members of HOPE’s savings groups about facing financial emergencies. In Malawi, 28% shared they lost about half (or more) of their wealth over the previous year due to crises like drought, food insecurity, and violence. I have no family members nor close friends (read: 0%) who lost half their wealth last year. Here, we expect certainty and predictability. For many, certainty and predictability seem impossible.
When countries went into lockdown, we collectively leaned into our safety nets. In crises, we all rely on some combination of family and friends, our savings accounts, government stimulus checks, and even deep pantries to sustain us while we hunkered down.
The families HOPE serves are no different. Farmers in some cases harvested their safety nets— eating their cows and chickens, rather than selling their milk and eggs. Corner shop owners ate the inventory, using the flour and oil they intended to sell.
In that same survey in Malawi last year, we asked HOPE savings group members about their readiness to respond to an emergency. 81% reported being able to meet a significant emergency need ($19), compared to just 37% of the broader Malawian population. Some have been able to do even more than sustain their own families. Amazingly, HOPE’s Rwandan savings groups have purchased and donated more than 2.3 tons of food to their most vulnerable neighbors. For the first time in our history, HOPE joined these savings groups by providing food relief to those most severely affected by the virus and lockdowns across the globe.
Those we serve were ready to both stay afloat and help their neighbors through this crisis. But for many, the cost of serving as a safety net to others meant wiping out their own fragile safety nets.
Phase 2: Emerging from Lockdown → Grace Periods
As lockdowns begin to ease, economies churn back to life, and people return to work, new challenges confront entrepreneurs as they try and restart. With threadbare safety nets and slowly emerging customers, it’s not feasible to simply flip the livelihood switch back on.
Many of the entrepreneurs we serve are unable to repay their business loans. To meet these entrepreneurs in this vulnerable place, we rewrote our rules entirely. HOPE’s microfinance institutions and partners extended wide-ranging loan rescheduling, grace periods, and flexibility so entrepreneurs like Jofrey can get back to work quickly.
Jofrey, a grocer and restauranteur we serve in Congo, said, “The confinement imposed to fight COVID-19 has been a tough and unexpected time, but I am grateful to God as my grill and grocery business were authorized to open three days a week… The grace period helped me a lot and I have been able to save while keeping in mind the repayments resumption.”
Saturnin Lembouono, entrepreneur, Congo
We’re now seeing opportunities to invest big in the old and new dreams of bakers, barbers, and blacksmiths. Recovery lending is an essential service for communities lacking stimulus funding and the Paycheck Protection Program many can take advantage of in the United States. For asset and cash-depleted entrepreneurs, we’re rolling out new loan products with flexible terms and delayed repayment schedules to allow them to jumpstart their livelihoods.
And we’re beginning to see the fruit of this approach. After reopening his business, Jofrey paid it forward. He decided to extend a grace period to some of his customers—taxi drivers who could not work during the lockdown—allowing them to buy food for their family on credit. For millions of entrepreneurs like Jofrey, rebuilding will require perseverance. But, we have witnessed this resilience before and are confident we will see it again.
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by Chris Horst | Apr 14, 2020 | Blog |
A big rig rolled past our family bike caravan. The driver delighted our kids by laying on his air horn as we waved to him.
With four kids under age ten in quarantine, we seek and savor all our outdoor moments. Our family bike rides these days make us look at the traffic all around us in a new way. This weekend we particularly noticed the delivery vans and freight trucks on the roads–all busy hauling packages and pallets full of food, toilet paper, and medical supplies.
This global pandemic has created heartache, but it has also revealed new heroes. Amid the public health and economic pain inflicted by this virus, we also see it chipping away at old stereotypes and dismantling our chronic underappreciation of service roles in our economy. The men and women cleaning hospital rooms, stocking grocery shelves, and navigating delivery routes are no longer assumed, but esteemed.
“In 39 years, I don’t recall ever being thanked for just being a truck driver before,” shared Allen Boyd about driving for Walmart during the pandemic. “I appreciate being thanked for a change. I hope that it’s not just during this time and when it goes away, we’re back to just being in everybody’s way again.”
Photo source: Milo Manara, Washington Post
Though truck driving is one of the most common occupations in the United States, it is not generally an occupation held in high esteem. Until now. Just how would we survive without them? This has always been true, of course. But now we feel it. Whether it’s Amazon, Grubhub, Prime Trailer or USPS–these men and women make widespread quarantine and flattening the curve possible.
God designed us to work. Before sin entered the world and marred both how we work and how we view work, God made it for us. Creating value through our own labor is core to what it means to be human.
“Right now I feel proud,” shared Jorge Chavez, a truck driver. “I feel good because somehow we’re helping the community to make sure that they get whatever they need in their homes.”
For the last two decades, my older brother, Matthew, has served as a cashier’s assistant at Costco. While I’ve always believed in the dignity and importance of his work, this pandemic certainly magnified it. While many of us hunker down, Matthew ventures out. He takes pride in his work and he should. Matthew, his colleagues, and the 3 million grocery store workers in the US make it possible for the rest of us to withdraw–at significant risk to themselves.
We will come out of this peril with new scars, but also with new heroes. The teenager stocking the soup and pasta aisle isn’t in our way. He diminishes his safety to make our daily meals possible. The woman mopping the bank floors and teller counters isn’t an afterthought. She ensures we’re all healthy and safe. The man driving the truck on the freeway isn’t clogging the passing lane. He keeps our society working. May we never again forget it.
by Chris Horst | Nov 29, 2019 | Blog |
In this month‘s issue of Christianity Today, you’ll read the following article I co-wrote with my colleague, Claire Stewart.
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Americans do the most shopping during the last two months on the calendar, fulfilling Christmas gift lists, taking advantage of online deals, and snagging up holiday favorites at local stores. But the spendiest season of the year also offers a broadening array of moral dilemmas regarding our consumerism and a yearning to make something better of it.
Beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday—lest the holiday gift of charity be overlooked—the shopping season now brings sustainable gift guides, fair trade festivals, promotions from charity-minded startups, and shop local movements like Small Business Saturdays. The ethical options force us, as Christians and as consumers, to think more deeply about the items we buy year-round, the companies we support, and how we steward our money and resources.
Take any product we’ve purchased, and we could probably tell you how much it cost and the store it came from. A $55 duffel bag from REI. A $9,000 used Subaru Impreza. A $10 V-neck tee from Target. But beyond that, plenty of questions go unanswered: What materials were used? How much waste was created? Who made the components? Were the workers cared for at each step in the process? How far did these elements travel to get here?
“The modern market economy adds layers of complexity between production and consumption, which makes it hard to see the impact of each choice we make,” said Hunter Beaumont, pastor at Fellowship Denver and a board member with the Denver Institute for Faith and Work. “A lot of our Christian moral convictions were shaped in a simpler economy, and it can feel paralyzing to apply those convictions to our complex, modern economy.”
We want to become more conscious consumers, and more shoppers are weighing the global consequences of their purchases before they click “checkout.” Millennials are the generation most likely to care about corporate behavior, and Gen Z is catching up fast.
But for every feel-good story of a socially conscious company, there is a report exposing the other side of the marketplace and our worst fears about what major companies do with our dollars: Nike sidestepping responsibility for human rights abuses in its supply chain and Amazon selling counterfeit books.
It’s no surprise that modern consumers are well versed in the moral dilemmas accompanying every purchase. We’re confronted with the choice between unprecedented convenience and affordability and a sense of responsibility to hold companies accountable to honor all their stakeholders and care for God’s creation.
So how are Christians called to faithfully steward our consumer decisions? Is it even possible? The answer may lie in the unlikely founder of the fair trade movement and the Christian convictions that can lead us to challenge the system of consumerism itself.
The Mennonite crafter who unintentionally started a movement
When Edna Ruth Byler began selling textiles from the back of her car in 1946, the concept of conscious consumerism was far from mainstream, and no one had heard of fair trade. Byler, a traditional Mennonite who donned a head covering and was known for her homemade donuts, started with a simple desire to help vulnerable women she met in the La Plata Valley of Puerto Rico.
Byler taught baking, sewing, and canning and belonged to a group that formed a new local church in Akron, Pennsylvania, where she and her husband worked for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). Their involvement eventually opened up opportunities to visit vulnerable communities in Puerto Rico and later in Hong Kong, Jordan, and beyond.
Ruth Edna Byler (Photo source: Yes! Magazine)
In each place, she connected with women who overcame enormous obstacles to provide for their families and serve their neighbors. Like many who would come after her, she jumped without looking—promising to help these women by selling their handiwork in the United States, not knowing how she would make her idea work but determined to do so.
“There is a human story behind every product.” – Whitney Bauck
She led MCC’s Overseas Needlework and Crafts Project for over 20 years before it was renamed SELFHELP Crafts of the World, which grew into the now independent and popular chain Ten Thousand Villages.
Ten Thousand Villages is the first fair trade organization in the world and remains one of the largest and best-known. Byler never intended to pioneer a movement that today connects shoppers to over a million small-scale makers around the world. But her Christian commitment to treating these makers with dignity and celebrating the beauty of their craft developed momentum.
Similar organizations emerged in Europe, and by the ‘60s and ‘70s the movement entered the political sphere to advocate for greater equity in international trade—not only in handicrafts, but also in agricultural commodities such as coffee and cocoa.
Around the same time, America’s understanding of corporate social responsibility began to thread together. The Committee for Economic Development—an American public policy organization— declared that there was a “social contract” between business and society, building on economist Henry Bowen’s 1953 book Social Responsibilities of the Businessman.
The idea of businesses working for a greater good, and not just a bottom line, grew over the ‘80s and ‘90s, spurred on in part by President George H. W. Bush’s call for organizations to serve each other and create a “thousand points of light.”
The double bottom line
While the fair trade movement focuses on caring for people and the planet first, corporate social responsibility is intended to keep companies accountable to social impact as a secondary objective. Both movements have intensified in recent years, raising the bar for ethical standards and giving us new opportunities to have a positive impact with our spending.
From Fortune 100 companies like like Disney and Apple to the oft-cited champions of social responsibility Patagonia and TOMS, and even to Hollywood’s red carpet and the Super Bowl, paying attention to social impact and performance—the double bottom line—has grown. Now it’s everywhere we look.
It’s firmly rooted in the mainstream business world; so much so that consumers, the media, and even governments have come to expect companies to do some form of social good.
Large corporations’ sustainability efforts can have the potential to make a major difference and influence a whole industry—but only if companies are following through with the do-good promises pushed in their brochures and ads.
Though corporate social responsibility has become part of doing business, the level of commitment to the cause varies. As companies get bigger, it’s hard to hold them accountable to ethical practices, said Whitney Bauck, assistant editor at Fashionista.com and a Christian writer covering ethical consumerism.
Even with the advent of a conscious consumer spending index, watchdog groups like Transparentem, social business legal structures like L3Cs and B Corps, and brand-ranking organizations like Ethical Consumer, it’s still overwhelming to try to figure out who is actually doing good. Large-scale consumerism is convenient, but it is complex and hard to navigate.
And on a smaller scale, the market for fair trade enterprises has continued to expand, thanks to the demand of consumers and the convictions of their founders. Today’s Christian entrepreneurs have launched a range of these cause-driven ventures selling gifts and goods: Akola Project, Giving Keys, Sseko Designs, Noonday Collection, Jonas Paul Eyewear, Tegu, Westrock Coffee, Krochet Kids, and dozens more.
These companies are rooted in creative ideas and redemptive entrepreneurship, using their processes and profits to create jobs for women, fund college scholarships, develop artisan businesses, expand access to healthcare, support sustainable farming practices, and provide social services for people in poverty. Like Byler and Ten Thousand Villages before them, their leaders seek to care for makers and the environment alike.
Melody Murray, the founder of JOYN bags, shares Byler’s commitment to dignify the people who create the goods we buy. Murray coined the phrase “purposeful inefficiency” as a way to honor those involved in every step of production—for her company that means harvesting cotton, weaving fabric, printing designs, sewing bags—rather than wishing for a mechanized solution to speed up the process.
But Murray, with a background doing marketing and sales for major companies, also brings business savvy and ambitious vision to the venture.
With her husband and fellow John Brown University grad David, Murray felt called not just to provide makers like her team at JOYN with a global market to buy their goods, but to resource and train local entrepreneurs to start their own agricultural or handicraft ventures to impact their communities.
Through JoyCorps, they have offered training and resources for a range of ventures in rural Asia. JoyCorps’ accelerator and incubator programs focus on innovation and restoration, believing that sustainable business spurs social change.
Over the years, their initiative has launched six businesses through its incubator program, with ten more coming through the accelerator program. For the Murrays, fair trade is all about local ownership and making things that are good for the world. Each entrepreneur they work with, they say, is rooted in their community and committed to holistic impact.
The kinds of companies the Murrays help create, ones where buyers can read stories of Dina who stitches the bags and Uma who does the packaging, put people and their stories up front.
“It’s easy to forget that real human hands make products,” said Bauck. “Fair trade organizations communicate to consumers that there is a human story behind every product.”
Llenay Ferretti, former CEO of Ten Thousand Villages and founder of the social enterprise of Bhavana World Project, puts it this way: Fair trade organizations invite us to “know our neighbor enough to love them.”
“The biblical definition of wealth includes our relationships with God and others.” – Hunter Beaumont
But there are still blind spots and areas of critique. Some worry about ventures that emphasize the story over the product, as customers may be tempted to approach it as charity rather than business. In certain companies, fair trade arrangements stop with the small-scale producers and do not extend to the people they hire. And arbitrarily fixing prices high above a product’s market value can create negative unintended consequences for those it aims to help.
Plus, everyday shoppers aren’t always familiar with sustainable options or don’t have the resources to purchase the higher-priced fair trade products.
Godly consideration over mindless spending
But even when we identify fair trade organizations or socially responsible corporations we trust and can afford, buying better is not the whole picture. It may ease our consciences and increase the likelihood that our money is doing good when we buy placemats from Ten Thousand Villages or handbags from JOYN, but purchasing different goods is simply choosing an alternative form of consumerism.
Faithful consumerism is about far more than which products we buy; it’s not a matter of who does the most research or knows how to read the labels (though those skills can reflect a more thoughtful approach).
Ferretti sees each purchasing decision as an opportunity to look to Christ’s life and how our faith ought to inform all our decisions. It’s an invitation to consider not just what we do, but how our decisions are shaping us and affecting our communities and the world.
While Edna Ruth Byler was, in many ways, a foremother of the conscious consumer, she wasn’t motivated by a desire to influence consumer decisions at all. “She was trying to love her neighbor,” Ferretti said.
Beaumont, the pastor in Denver, agrees community is intertwined with consumerism. “Our modern economy is built around a limited definition of wealth—that you can have more stuff, more money, more time,” he said. “But that doesn’t factor in the relational, psychological, and spiritual components of wealth. The biblical definition of wealth includes our relationships with God and others.”
When Beaumont’s barber moved across town, he could easily have found another shop nearby. But it was important to stay with the same guy. “We have a relationship,” he said. “We talk about what’s going on in our lives. I hear about his fishing trips with his grandkids, and I know my business helps to pay for that.”
Beaumont cites 1 Timothy 6 as Paul’s instruction for how to be faithful stewards of what the Lord has given to us. For those who are “rich in this present world,” Paul urges them to “do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.”
“If we really take that to heart,” Beaumont said, “it bends us toward the communal, toward sharing and giving.” It leads us to focus less on “spending more and more on ourselves,” he said, and more on giving, sharing, and enjoying what we already have.
Less is more
Based on her reporting on ethical fashion, Bauck suggests that buying used products is the most morally responsible mode of shopping. Keeping existing goods in use longer means producing less waste as the byproduct of creating new goods. And in most thrift or charity stores, shoppers see where their money is going and can be confident that their spending is supporting their community.
Our faith also prompts us to contemplate what we really need. When we aren’t focused on asking, “What products should we buy?” we may realize that we already have enough.
Here again, Byler can serve as role model. In her close-knit Mennonite community, they didn’t have much more than the bare necessities. But even during the years of wartime rations and the Great Depression, the Byler children remember a happy home. We can buy better, but even more, we can challenge ourselves to practice contentment.
“The most ethical clothing is the stuff you already have in your closet,” wrote Kohl Crecelius, founder of Krochet Kids, which sells ethically made clothing and knit goods.
Even with minimalism and Kondo-ing becoming trendy, it’s still countercultural to decide we can happily live with less, to reject the idea that we need a new phone, car, television, winter coat, Christmas wreath, or whatever else. Yet we believe, as Scripture warns in the account of the rich young ruler in Matthew 19, that God grants us freedom through a modest and simple life.
Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, said in an interview last year that while she believes simplicity is essential to our faith, it’s a hard path: “As consumerism eats away at every bit of our lives … Christians have to think really radically, honestly, and strategically about simplicity.”
For some believers, that means reining in Christmas spending, going for quality over quantity under the tree, or even opting to do homemade, found, or repurposed presents. Putting a pause on Target runs and Amazon “Buy Now” clicks can even serve as a spiritual discipline as people challenge themselves to do a “no spend” month—restricting purchases to the necessities. Christian author and Cultivate What Matters founder Lara Casey just completed her “no spend” year, challenging herself to “grow a faithful life over a comfortable life.”
We will never fully avoid the moral dilemma accompanying our every purchase, but maybe our unease can push us to think more deeply about what we need to buy and who our purchases impact. Even in a broken system, where can our dollars be a blessing? As we seek to follow the Greatest Commandment, our biggest consideration should be loving our neighbor.
The call to be faithful stewards of our consumer decisions is an invitation to consider how Christ’s example may challenge how and what we buy, propelling us to love our neighbors—both near and far—and to practice simplicity, knowing that God is the provider of all good things.
