At Dayspring we have a pattern of gathering for weekly reflections on Tuesday mornings–to talk about our work together and occasionally to think about the business of business, economics, and our wider world. Recently, I asked what we might be lamenting and longing for, since one of the themes of the season of Advent is that of longing–longing for what is not right to be set right, longing in the midst of the deep darkness and brokenness of our world.
In our conversation, one staff member brought up his sadness for people in fast food and retail who are increasingly reporting that customers have become more difficult, treating service workers as existing to personally cater to them. We lamented together the sense of isolation that has skyrocketed, especially for the elderly and for kids stuck at home. One staff member lamented that the pandemic, which, as a source of shared tragedy and suffering, had the potential to unite us, instead has become yet another point of division politically and geopolitically. We lamented inequity in global vaccine access. If intellectual property concerns (read “profits”) and the vaccine hoarding of the wealthy (that is, us) hadn’t gotten in the way, one could imagine a world where Omicron and even Delta wouldn’t have had the chance to develop. Pandemic has been apocalyptic in the original sense of that word–revelatory of where our commitments lie and how deficient our character is. The primary test hasn’t been PCR or rapid antigen, but the test of our moral character.
And one of the staff made a comment that fundamentally reframed for me the notion of “supply chain issues”, connecting that abstraction to people being unable or unwilling to work given the risks attending life in a COVID world and at the wages that the market economy has agreed their time and their life are worth. Perhaps many of you already made this realization a long time ago–I can be pretty slow–but this was illuminating for me. The idea of a “supply chain” and “supply chain issues” calls to mind some piece of machinery that is broken and that needs to be fixed. But, in doing so, our language obscures factory workers across the country or the ocean; warehouse laborers that have every movement and bathroom break managed for maximum efficiency via digitally-enabled surveillance; truck drivers who spend weeks on the road; delivery people that we see only briefly, if that, and to whom we may give a friendly greeting when we’re in a good mood but whom we, more frequently, curse for leaving our precious packages in an inconvenient or insecure place. And, specifically, it obscures the fact that perhaps our so-called “supply chain” issues are fundamentally because our addictions to product availability and delivery speed are humanly (or humanely) unsupportable. At a larger level, it pointed out to me that we run all sorts of risks when we abstract things from their on-the-ground realities, which is precisely what language like “supply chain” has a tendency to do. This indictment, of course, points directly back at me, since even “factory workers”, “dockworkers”, and “truck drivers”, because of my socioeconomic location, themselves operate, with a few exceptions, as comfortable abstractions.
Which leads us then to Christmas. While we like our abstractions, not least because they can function to excuse us from the demands of loving our neighbor, God personally entered the muck and mire of our world. “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood” as The Message translation of John 1 says. That baby born in a Bethlehem manger grew to become a man who healed blind people, fed the hungry, touched (and breathed near) those whose uncleanness was presumed transmissible, noticed a particular impoverished widow’s offering, and tied a towel around his waist as a personal servant to wash the grimy feet of eleven friends–and one former friend.
May God grant us all grace to live into the fleshly, gritty, neighborly reality of that life of God to which we’re invited in Jesus. And may we enact that “peace on earth and goodwill to humankind” that was proclaimed to second-shift, low-wage, service industry workers in a field near Bethlehem so many years ago. Such a world is possible. In fact, it has already begun.
Advent/Christmastide 2021
My family recently returned from a road trip through the Pacific Northwest. We started off the trip by driving to Sacramento, where even the hotel manager looked at us quizzically when we said that we were coming from San Francisco to vacation…in their 102 degree weather.
From there we gradually made our way to Seattle where we spent 5 days discovering Seattle and catching up with good friends.
Along the way, we stayed with the Church of the Servant King, a remarkable intentional church community that shares much of their life in common. Besides owning their houses in common, they also share coffee shop and bookstore businesses.
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Blessed are the slow,
for they don’t miss much.
Blessed are those who take their time,
for they tend to notice.
Blessed are the attentive,
for their friendships run deep.
Blessed are the patient,
for love dwells with them.
Blessed are the walkers, the waiters, the listeners, the meanderers, the birdwatchers, the lingerers, the savorers, the ruminators, and the unhurried—
for they have the joy of life.
Woe to you who are addicted to speed!
It kills.
Woe to you multi-taskers!
It shows.
Woe to the hurried,
a life of perpetual discontent.
Woe to you who pack people like sardines into the rigid tins of your overcrowded schedules,
for you will forever be running late.
Woe to you caught in the fast company, fast-talking, fast food, fast track culture—
truly, you will find it difficult to get off.
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacdupree/4114159260
How do you build a business on love of neighbor? If, as Christians, we are called to love our neighbor–and this is a command that we cannot store in our cubby on our way into work to pick it up when we resume our so-called personal lives–what might this look like?
How does this look in the concrete businesses that Dayspring runs–in our consulting services business, in our home budget app business, and in our small business Web design offering? How might it look like in other businesses that Christians function in?
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Credit: alexdecarvalho CC-BY 2.0
It seems that everywhere I turn these days, the topic of changing the world comes up.
Being “disruptive”–of old technologies, of incumbent companies, of whole industries–is the mot du jour for technology startups. Influential people gather together at the World Economic Forum in Davos to try to address pressing global issues and “improve the state of the world.” Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs opens with a quote from Apple’s “Think Different” commercials, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Christians have taken up the call as well. Streets here in San Francisco have banners proclaiming the tagline of the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution: “Change the World from Here”. InterVarsity’s Urbana conference, that evangelical mainstay, had a business track titled “Business Changing the World” (which a colleague and I had the privilege of participating in), and James Davison Hunter’s 2010 volume about Christians working for cultural change is titled To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.
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What do the gospels say to the rich, powerful, influential? Is it, as James Davison Hunter has it in his (excellent) book To Change the World, that “Some will even operate in or close to the ‘center’ of institutions of social, cultural and political life. As such they will have disproportionate privilege, access, and influence that the majority of people simply don’t have” (257)–and that this, by implication, should be encouraged in those who have that or the capability to access that?
To put it personally, should I, because I have access to the center by virtue of worldly credentials, be trying to “change the world” (or embodying faithful presence, to use Hunter’s preferred language) on a larger scale or in more influential ways?
In this post, I walk through the gospel according to Mark looking at how it treats influence and the “center”.
Articles in the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly recently marked the YouVersion Bible app’s 100 million download milestone in breathless terms: “wildly successful”, “the app reached 100 million downloads, placing it in the company of technology start-ups like Instagram and Dropbox”, and “its app hit a monumental milestone — placing it among a rare strata of technology companies”.
The article titles themselves hint at transcendent significance: “In the Beginning Was the Word; Now the Word Is on an App” (NYTimes) and “The App of God” (Atlantic Monthly).
Elsewhere…
Conversely, my pastor asked us last month to please bring our (print) Bibles to Bible study and to worship, directly speaking to the growing trend in my small, relatively tech-savvy, San Francisco congregation to whip out our smartphones and tablets at Bible study.
I think about my writing here as a way primarily to do three things:
- Discipline thought. It’s easy for me to hold unconsidered opinions about things like business and the market and technology and how Christian faith shapes our relationship to these. Having to write about it hopefully forces me, in a good way, to make those opinions (somewhat) less unconsidered.
- Foster dialogue. For me this starts with dialogue with folks that I have face-to-face relationship with–my church community; the place where I work where we are trying to put into practice an alternative way of coming at our interactions in the marketplace; and other friends I’ve met along the way. If you’re reading, please tell me your thoughts about what you’ve read!
- Connect with others. I’m especially interested in connecting with others who wrestle with some of these same questions and want to thoughtfully engage them. We may not meet face-to-face (hopefully we’ll have opportunity to!) but we can carry on conversation nevertheless.
I hope that we can together think better and more clearly about some of the issues that face us so that we can live well in this world.
I came across two articles in the past couple days talking about Path, the “more intimate social network” and messaging app that made me think about the choices we make as creators and producers in business.
One trumpeted how Path was now signing up 1 MM users a week to reach 10 MM users. The other detailed how a good chunk of a user’s entire contact database got texted (and telephoned) during the 30 minutes that he had Path installed on his phone (or shortly thereafter).
I recently attended Urbana 12, a Christian student missions conference, as part of the Business track. I had attended Urbana ’93 in college and was returning after 19 years (!) to lead a seminar sharing Dayspring’s story and to serve on a panel discussion reflecting on how to engage business as Christians.
32,000 caregiver kits and one short woman.
The conference ran over 6 days and was personally renewing. One very significant experience for me happened on Saturday evening. Urbana had partnered with World Vision to put together 32,000 kits for AIDS caregivers in Swaziland. As with everything else on the main “platform”, this was very well led. They were clear that this was not a case of “rich North Americans” helping out poor Africans–but rather that there were caregivers who were on the ground doing ministry as the hands and feet of Christ and that this was a way for us to join in on their ministry by supplying particular items that the caregivers had requested.
At the Corner of Church and Market 