Postscript on Money Matters: Occupy Wall Street

I am still watching the Occupy Wall Street movement and wondering what impact it will have and what role public Christian leaders should be taking. 

Reuters offers its analysis (October 7) arguing that although the majority of Americans are looking at our society through rose-colored glasses and do not recognize the growing division between the haves and have nots.

Kate Sprutta Elliott, editor of Gather, blogged on the Women of the ELCA website and speculated about the timeliness of a Debt Jubilee, an idea taken from Leviticus 25.  Here are more thoughts about the faith factor and the Occupy Wall Street Movement from the writers at Sojourners. They offer a one page congregational discussion guide about the movement if you provide your contact information.

On Saturday, thousands rallied in Times Square in New York City while protests continued to spread to other cities. A local favorite here in western NC, Carolina Chocolate Drops' singer Rhiannon Giddens recorded the following song, "The Bottom 99:"

The movement is gaining support although many are still questioning whether it has leaders who will move it beyond noise-making toward solutions. What is the role of our faith communities?  What is our role as individual people of faith?

Money Matters

Stephen Barton suggests that economic matters are integral to Christian practice and living because Christianity transforms or turns upside down our understanding of “what really counts and …how to attain it.” (56) After a survey of the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke and Acts, Barton describes what he calls a “re-narration” of these values. (ibid)  He writes briefly about the continuity and discontinuity that Christianity brought to the world, noting that there are life-giving practices of sharing resources and households that are patterned after pagan practices but there are also ways of re-ordering things and people so that the patron system was dismantled.(57-59) And he leaves us with the challenge that we are neither to proclaim a theology of glory nor a “Manichean separation of the spiritual and material” but instead

(1) follow the lives of the saints in “[creating ]space …where the value of things and people can be seen and practices in new ways” and become “agents of a different [ordering] of things and people”

and

(2) preserve the juxtaposition of money matters in worship  where, through the bread and wine,  we remember the sacrifices made by Christ and offer our own “self-giving” for the sake of the world.

As we reflect on how we adapt to discontinuous change in our post-modern world, perhaps we can retrieve the examples through our history as the church and use those examples to discover new ways of leading and serving.

Reflecting on Barton and the emphasis on reversals in the gospels provoked my curiosity about the recent development of movements throughout the U.S. that have followed the lead of Occupy Wall Street in New York City.  Here in my own city of Asheville, protesters have begun occupying our own Wall Street and organizing in the nearby Pritchard Park downtown. 

The local newspaper covered the story in today’s edition and I noticed the number of businesses and leaders who are now involved and also the absence of churches or faith communities, at least in the newspaper coverage.  In this recent video of the protests here in Asheville, a chaplain speaks at 13:30 invoking the Spirit and remembering civil rights activists who have gone before this group. 

What do you think about this new movement? Is there a role for churches and faith communities?

Barton, “Money Matters” (p. 37-59) in Longenecker, Bruce and Kelly Liebengood, eds. Engaging Economics: New Testament Scenarios and Early Christian Reception. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009.