The Occupy Church

…”Our relationships are holy, and so they must be sustainable: wrought with great care for the integrity of communities and creation. Our tables are a microcosm of the way we live out our faith. We know that hospitality is a sacred duty, as are all of our relationships within our economic system. A sacred relationship [...]

“Christian leadership is about listening for vision from God within community and then being given the authority and power to execute that vision — to take new Kingdom ground. That’s the birthright of every Christian…to hear the voice of their Father. But in the way we do leadership, suddenly it’s like we are pre-Reformation where [...]

“As we left those sad sites of Zuccotti and Trinity I recalled what I had said to Rector Jim Cooper after a forum the prior week. “Let’s move on; Trinity’s old news.” His only reaction was relief still apparently missing the deep sadness of our Church missing something special in history.”

“Occupy provides an opening to reexamine the basic teachings of Jesus, rediscovering the radical call to economic justice and self-sacrificial love that is at the heart of the gospel. … We begin to see that, if we want to be like Jesus, we must imitate his humility.”

“The Occupy movement has been largely a white, urban phenomenon, and one with a bit of a tendency toward vanguardism, which makes it not entirely surprising that it’s often blind to the fact that there is no force more potentially revolutionary in U.S. history or in the country today than religion. But the movement remains [...]

“I read in the Hebrew Scriptures that the land doesn’t belong to us – we are actually tenants of the land. The Lord is our landlord and we owe and account to God for how we are going to treat the land people on the land. We need to be really careful about strict ideas [...]

“Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, [...]

“…regeneration, in addition to being a mystical reference to the world’s return to an Eden-like state, is about letting go of the envy and competitiveness being shown both by the young rich man and especially by Peter (who eventually won the big competition among the apostles and is regarded as the first pope, oddly enough).”

“God stands in judgment over our economic arrangements” [Micah] told us and quoted Luke 4:18-19. [He] told us that some secular Occupiers were uncomfortable with his particularly Christian outlook, whereas many clergy seem reticent to be too radical. There needs to be a challenge to the Christian dominionist view that the government should be run according to conservative Christian values. There [...]