Exodus From Hunger (19 page)

We are expanding what we do to get the word out about Bread for the World and making full use of Web-based communication. We are training young leaders and engaging more African American and Latino churches.

We are also asking some Bread for the World leaders and activist teams to step up to a new level of competence and responsibility.

Many allied organizations and networks are also at work. The lines of work that strike me as especially important include advocacy at the federal level, advocacy at the state and local levels, and helping Christians grow in faith.

I don’t now see much evidence of a wave of activism that we can just join. What I do see is that the current economic and political environment gives us an opportunity for major social change, and I am asking the readers of this book to make themselves leaders of that needed change.

We can achieve a lot with a surge of activism over the next few years. But we will then need to keep pushing to sustain U.S. government attention to poverty. So we are called—by the love of God—to get involved in some new activities right now and also to be open to long-term commitments.

U.S. religious history has been marked by a series of revivals, starting with the Great Awakening of the 1730s. At these times, many people have been gripped by the gospel and drawn into a deeper relationship with God. Some of these revivals have also contributed to movements of social reform, and that’s what we should be praying and working for now—a justice revival. We need many people—some people who go to church and some who don’t—to open our lives more fully to the Spirit of God.

The constituency to reduce poverty is much broader than the Christian community, of course. We need increased effort from all kinds of people and from diverse organizations—charities, foundations, civil rights organizations, labor unions, corporations, and universities. We need leadership from political leaders and more attention to hunger and poverty within both political parties. Yet socially aware Christians have always helped to drive social-justice causes in the United States, and we won’t achieve the progress against hunger and poverty that is possible unless some Christian believers feel called to make urgent and lasting adjustments in their lives.

G
od moves through history and shakes nations, but God also moves in the hearts and lives of individuals. I want to tell you how God has drawn me into the movement to overcome hunger and poverty.

My story started in a family where I always knew that my parents loved me—and lots of other people—and that their love came from God and Jesus.

I was shaped by unearned grace, which is also the main theme of my Lutheran tradition. Lutherans haven’t always been strong in the area of social justice, but the emphasis on grace is a great resource. I experience a continual renewal, a continual sending out that comes from my baptism and from my ongoing experience of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Every morning God says, “Okay, you’re my child. You’re you, could be better, but you’re my child, and I have chosen you to go do this work today.”

My mother and father grew up in rural Nebraska. My mother’s father was a farmer, but became too ill to farm. She had to leave home at age sixteen, because her parents couldn’t afford to feed her. She got a job as an elderly woman’s helper in Lincoln, and she gave her parents much-needed furniture that first Christmas away from home. Mom never got to go to college.

Later in life, she taught sewing, paying particular attention to women who needed to sew to balance the family budget. When I was a teenager, she spent many hours studying the Bible and led a Bible study program at our church.

My father’s dad was a small-town banker, but the bank went bankrupt during the Depression. My dad became a math teacher and then a school administrator. As a young superintendent of schools in small-town Nebraska during the Second World War, he faced down threats of violence to protect a Japanese American family.

He believed strongly in education, debate about ideas, and human rights for all people. By the time I was growing up, Dad was a professor of math education at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. His primary focus was making sure that all children learned the basic math they needed to live in our society.

There were not extremes of wealth or poverty in Lincoln. It was a healthy community—although, in retrospect, some racial diversity would have livened things up.

I went to college at Yale University in the 1960s. That was during the Vietnam War and the movement to stop the war. I became convinced that the war was a mistake. I read critiques that viewed the Vietnam War as just one example of U.S. imperial power in the developing world.

William Sloane Coffin Jr. was Yale’s chaplain, and my dorm room was just above his office. Coffin was a leader in the antiwar movement, and he made me more aware of what the Bible has to say about social justice. I sometimes attended a Lutheran church on the Hill, the African American neighborhood near Yale. The Black Power movement was at full strength then, and many African Americans were angry. That moment in American life gave me an abiding sense of the injustices in our country and the world.

When I graduated, Yale granted me a fellowship that allowed me to travel around the world and spend a year in Ghana. I spent fifty days in Asia and East Africa on the way to Ghana and fifty days in Europe on the way back.

In Ghana I studied indigenous pentecostal churches, the fastest-growing movement in African religion. These churches are thoroughly African—with dancing and drumming, visions and trances. When I went to Ghana I thought these churches were also politically progressive, but that turned out not to be the case. I learned to speak Twi, so I was able to spend time in villages and get to know people who didn’t have much schooling. My first book,
Eden Revival
, was about indigenous African churches.

In my travels I focused on religion and politics—religion because of my upbringing, politics because of my experience at Yale. It was a moment of student unrest in most parts of the world, and I met with students in many of the countries I visited.

When I came back to the United States, I returned to Nebraska. Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Power movement, had visited Yale and said to his audience of mainly white students, “Don’t come to our communities to work. Go back to your own communities and change things there.” That logic led me back to Nebraska.

I worked in various ways to “make the revolution” in Nebraska. You may not have noticed the lasting effects. I taught courses on social justice issues at a free school and a community college. I also traveled around the state, gaining some exposure to farmers, Indian reservations, and Nebraska’s weak labor unions.

I also spent time with my parents, who were always interested in what I was learning. I made friends with the most radical students I could find in Nebraska. I also found Janet Williams, who became my wife in 1972.

My experience of teaching about justice quickly convinced me that lack of information was not the main obstacle. The persistence of injustice was rooted in spiritual problems. As a teenager I had thought I would become a pastor, and now I decided to go to seminary.

I attended Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, a seminary of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, the conservative denomination in which I had been raised. Again following Stokely Carmichael’s advice, I decided to train for the ministry in the Missouri Synod rather than escaping to a more moderate denomination.

Concordia’s strength was biblical exegesis. The faculty was grounded in the Christian gospel and was helping the Missouri Synod become more open-minded. I served a year as a student pastor in Omaha, Nebraska, working mainly with low- and middle-income teenagers.

Just before I graduated from seminary, aggressive conservatives in the Missouri Synod launched a purge. They fired the seminary’s president. Nearly all the faculty and three-quarters of the students eventually left our campus and formed Concordia Seminary in Exile.

The Missouri Synod was going through a schism, so most of the students graduating from the Seminary in Exile couldn’t find paying positions. The congregation I had served in Omaha couldn’t support me, but they ordained me as a missionary-economist—charging me to connect Christian faith and moral teaching to economics, especially poverty issues. The Lutheran World Federation gave me a scholarship to study economics at the London School of Economics. That led to a degree and my second book,
Where Faith and Economics Meet
.

The Lutheran World Federation hired me to work for the Rangpur Dinajpur Rural Service in Bangladesh. Janet and I moved to Thakurgaon, a small town in northwest Bangladesh. I evaluated problems in a silk production project. I learned some Bengali and then spent four months in a tiny rural settlement, trying to come up with new approaches for the agency. I mainly learned how difficult it is for very poor people to take advantage of development opportunities. Their cattle are too weak to pull improved plows. If a person can’t read, it’s hard to think systematically about how to improve your life.

Janet is grateful for our time in Bangladesh, but living in rural Bangladesh was tougher for her than me. Women don’t have much freedom, and that includes foreign women. She taught English to a group of girls at a high school near our home.

On a visit to Calcutta we met Mother Teresa. She was pleased to meet a Lutheran. “The Lutherans send me blankets,” she explained. My mother was part of a quilting group at her church in Nebraska that made blankets for Lutheran World Relief, and I find it wonderful that what Mother Teresa knew about Lutherans was that they sent her blankets.

When I talk with young adults now, they sometimes express interest in my young adult years. Based on my experience, it makes sense to explore and tackle problems that seem important, even if it isn’t clear how these activities will fit together into a career. These explorations will help address a pressing issue and may move the young person to the cutting edge of needed changes. My checkered set of experiences prepared me for a career I could not have planned.

While Janet and I were in Bangladesh I was offered a position at the World Bank. The World Bank is an intergovernmental institution that provides financing and advice to developing countries. It is a major center of knowledge about development, and I thought it would be a good place to spend a few years and learn about macro issues that affect poor people. I ended up serving as an economist there for fifteen years, working almost entirely on poverty reduction activities.

I worked on projects that focused on reducing urban poverty in East Africa and Latin America. I wrote speeches for Tom Clausen when he was president of the World Bank. I then played a leadership role in helping the Bank engage with nongovernmental organizations and grassroots groups around the world.

The Bank’s board and management wanted the Bank to help reduce poverty, but the Bank was not always very good at it. Connecting with farmers’ associations, religious groups, and organizations that advocate for the poor has now become standard practice at the Bank, but it was a fringe idea when a few colleagues and I started pushing it. The spread of democracy and the flowering of civil society in many developing countries put wind behind our sails.

At one point I was the only staffer responsible for the Bank’s relationships with civil society in developing countries. The Bank now has 120 staff working in this area, and the involvement of the Bank with civil society has made it more effective in reducing poverty.

I draw two primary lessons from my experience at the World Bank. First, reform in big institutions is possible. Second, words are important. When the World Bank’s president and board committed the Bank to make focused efforts to reduce poverty, the Bank didn’t change in a day. But words have power. People like me were able to point to the Bank’s stated purpose and work for change over many years.

I started a group of World Bank staff who met each Friday morning to discuss spiritual values and development. They came from many countries and diverse religious backgrounds. Occasionally members of the group worked together from their different positions within the Bank on reform issues. Four of us—a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, and a secular person—wrote a book together about this long-running interfaith dialogue,
Friday Morning Reflections at the World Bank
. The Friday morning group continued to meet for thirty years.

While I was still at the World Bank, a Bread for the World intern helped me write a book on service in developing countries. I later became a member of Bread’s board.

When Arthur Simon, Bread’s founder, decided to step aside from the leadership of Bread for the World, I felt that this was the job for which God made me. My initial salary at Bread for the World was about a third of what I had been earning at the World Bank, and the drop in salary intensified my sense of vocation.

I continue to love my work at Bread for three reasons. First, the effort I invest has a big impact among hungry and poor people. Second, I think we have a good chance to overcome mass hunger and poverty. I expect to see the number of hungry people in the world drop dramatically in my lifetime. Third, it’s important to me that Bread for the World does this work in the name of Jesus and to the glory of God.