Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Amy Sherman & the biblical call for peace and prosperity
This week on Givers, Does, & Thinkers, Jeremy talks with Amy Sherman about how people of faith can go beyond politics to seek good for their communities.
Amy Sherman is the director of the Sagamore Institute's Center on Faith in Communities. She obtained her PhD in international economic development from the University of Virginia and is the author of Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society.
During this episode, Amy challenges believers to reconsider the role of churches in society, focusing on how they can extend their influence beyond their walls to foster true community flourishing, inspired by Jeremiah 29:7. She explores the six key arenas of civilizational life—social mores and ethics, human knowledge and learning, creativity and aesthetics, political and civic life, economic life, and human and natural health. This conversation is full of practical advice for believers and community leaders dedicated to making a tangible difference in their neighborhoods.
We'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas, questions, and recommendations for the podcast! You can shoot Katie Janus, GDT's producer, an email anytime!
Be sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube to make sure you never miss an episode!
Center for Civil Society's YouTube Channel
This week on Givers, Does, & Thinkers, Jeremy talks with Amy Sherman about how people of faith can go beyond politics to seek good for their communities.
Amy Sherman is the director of the Sagamore Institute's Center on Faith in Communities. She obtained her PhD in international economic development from the University of Virginia and is the author of Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society.
During this episode, Amy challenges believers to reconsider the role of churches in society, focusing on how they can extend their influence beyond their walls to foster true community flourishing, inspired by Jeremiah 29:7. She explores the six key arenas of civilizational life—social mores and ethics, human knowledge and learning, creativity and aesthetics, political and civic life, economic life, and human and natural health. This conversation is full of practical advice for believers and community leaders dedicated to making a tangible difference in their neighborhoods.
We'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas, questions, and recommendations for the podcast! You can shoot Katie Janus, GDT's producer, an email anytime!
Be sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube to make sure you never miss an episode!
Center for Civil Society's YouTube Channel
Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers. Today we talk to Amy Sherman about how people of faith can go beyond politics to seek the good for their communities. Let's go. Givers, doers and Thinkers. Introduces listeners to the fascinating people and important ideas at the heart of American civil society, to the fascinating people and important ideas at the heart of American civil society. We speak with philanthropists, reformers, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit executives, religious leaders, scholars, journalists and anyone else who will help us understand contemporary civil society's achievements and failures. My name is Jeremy Beer. Thank you for joining us. All right, thanks for joining us. This is Givers, doers and Thinkers, of course, and today is April 30, 2024. And I am happy to have the opportunity to speak with Amy Sherman, director of the Sagamore Institute's Center on Faith in Communities.
Speaker 1:Amy obtained her PhD in International Economic Development from the University of Virginia and she is the author of a new book titled Agents of Flourishing Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society. This is a book about the church and local community and how the former might better serve the good of the latter. At least that's my description of it. Amy might challenge that if she wishes, which is to say it's a book about faith and civil society, and so just the right sort of topic for this podcast. It's a very practical book as well, I will say. It really unites the theoretical and the practical. So with that, amy Sherman, welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for having me. Did I mess anything up there in that?
Speaker 1:introduction. No, that looked good, All right. Good, that's your chance to correct the record, so now we move on. Yeah, thanks for joining us. So the first thing I should make clear this is a book aimed at Christians of all kinds, but, you know, practicing believing Christians and its guiding spirit comes from Jeremiah 29, 7. What does that verse say, and how should Christians understand it?
Speaker 2:Well, jeremiah 29 is a letter that essentially, it's God speaking to his people who've been carried off into exile from Israel to Babylon, and it's providing them with his instructions for them about how to live in this place where they have been carried into exile. And at the heart of it Jeremiah 29, verse 7, god encourages his people to sort of settle down and to seek the peace and the prosperity of the city, for in its prosperity they will experience prosperity. And so it's a verse about this work of being in the world and pursuing the shalom, pursuing the flourishing of others, even others who are very, very different from us and, frankly, in this context, who are the Israelites enemies.
Speaker 1:And you understand this as a kind of living analogy or metaphor for the church in today's world.
Speaker 2:I do, I do and I think it's important. You know there's a way in which people some of these interviews I do they're like you wrote a whole book on one verse. You know you wrote a whole book on Jeremiah 29, seven. But Jeremiah 29, seven simply encapsulate um, and and is fully in in alignment with the mission of God in the world. God is on this mission. God created a work of flourishing, a world of flourishing, a world of shalom. We blew it, the fall happens, things fall apart, and God is on this mission to restore that shalom in our lives and in the life of the world until it will come to its fullness in the new heavens and the new earth, when we will enjoy a sort of recreated and perfect shalom once again. So this call to the church to seek the shalom of their neighbors is not the message solely of Jeremiah 29. It's like a huge message of the scriptures.
Speaker 1:Part of the overall narrative, so to speak. So the premise, though, that you're operating on maybe I can get you to elaborate a little bit is that this is not always how the church or individual churches see their role in the world. Are there two internally focused or not focused enough on pursuing the good of their neighbors, focused only in one particular area and not enough in multiple sort of the panoply of areas that one must be focused on in order to truly serve the good of our neighbors? Is that a fair way to put the operating premise here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think this is a book that primarily is me responding frankly to one very positive thing, which is many congregational leaders and pastors that I've met over the years because I've done a lot of work in the Christian community development kind of world kind of world They'll basically say we see ourselves as a Jeremiah 29 sort of church. We want to pursue the flourishing of our community. We don't actually know what that looks like and we're not entirely certain how to do it. So the principal motivation behind the book really is to offer help for that group right Now.
Speaker 2:I wish that I could say that I thought that the American church today was populated by, you know, millions of people asking that very question. Unfortunately, I don't think that's the case. I do. I would say that, you know, a lot of times our churches are too inward focused, a lot of times our churches are too narrowly focused, and so there's a way in which the book is also responding to that, to that, and I think at a, at sort of a meta level, the book is also responding to sort of the larger question of what is the appropriate posture of the church in, in society? Um, and maybe we can talk a little bit about that, but I have some convictions about what I think the appropriate posture of the church and society is, and the book attempts to really flesh that out with a with a theological undergirding, a historical reflection and a contemporary expression and a contemporary expression.
Speaker 1:All right, we're going to put a pin in that because we're definitely coming back to that. But I want to build up to that with a couple of other sort of laying the groundwork things and really I want to make sure we talk a lot about the practical sorts of ideas you put forward in the book. You did a lot of research, you talked to a lot of church leaders and found some really interesting ways of being, ways of engaging the surrounding community. Let me go back to a word you've used a couple of times to make sure we know what you mean by it. So you're sort of using flourishing and shalom, I think, sort of synonymously. What do you mean by flourishing? What is that?
Speaker 2:I believe that God's normative intentions for the world can be summarized in this Hebrew word, shalom, which we translate, of course, in English as peace, but that translation doesn't really give the full sense of what's meant, because the idea of shalom is that we are created for peace with God, for spiritual intimacy and wholeness. We are created for psychological wholeness. We are created for social peace and wholeness, peace with our neighbors, peace across all kinds of differences that we have, and peace with the created order itself, so our physical and economic flourishing. That word captures what was going on in Genesis 1 and 2, what was lost in Genesis 3, what is being restored by God through the redemptive work of Christ throughout history and what will ultimately be reclaimed and restored in the new heavens and the new earth. Do you want to get in at this point to sort of the differences between how Christians understand flourishing versus sort of secular definitions of flourishing?
Speaker 1:Definitely.
Speaker 2:The book's called Agents of Flourishing. I'm suggesting that we are called to join God in his mission of advancing flourishing in the world. And so that then, of course, begs the question well, what is flourishing? And because the scriptures have some key insights as to the nature of what flourishing actually is, and some of the contemporary secular understandings of flourishing don't align fully with that. So my sense was trying to study what the Bible teaches about flourishing. You find that this emphasis, um, that flourishing is about wholeness, it's about joy, it's about beauty, it's about truth, um, it's about goodness, uh, it's about life, it's about community and it's about, uh, sacrifice, interesting. So many contemporary versions of flourishing wouldn't have a a place for the notion of self-giving love, because the flourishing is flourishing about me getting what I want, to be as happy as I can be in all the ways that that gets expressed according to my freedom and desires, and it doesn't involve any pain, it doesn't involve any sacrifice.
Speaker 1:It doesn't involve the cross to be yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's that, right, right, right. And yeah, there's no concept of you actually find the fullness of your life in laying down your life.
Speaker 1:That's the major difference. In other ways it's just sort of a constrained view of flourishing. It seems to be, you know, hyper-focused on individual freedom. Let's say you know, understood as doing, you know the ability to create myself. I shall accept nothing that is just given to me. I shall make all my.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think. I do think that is an accurate statement. And you know God. God knows far better than we do what the definition of flourishing actually is. God knows far better than we do how he made us, what we were created for and how we can experience the fullness that he made us for. Experience the fullness that he made us for, and so that requires a humility on our part, and it requires the submitting of oneself to the God who made us and who is all wise and all good. We are not all wise.
Speaker 1:We are not all good. Yeah, I think that's an empirical fact that most people could agree with that. We are not all wise and all good. So your point, though, I think, would be something like not only do we need this sort of capacious understanding, Christian understanding, inclusive of the cross in terms of what it means to flourish cross in terms of what it means to flourish, but it's not enough to seek that only for ourselves.
Speaker 2:But that's something we need to very actively and generously seek for our neighbors. Yes, that's exactly right, and that's another fundamental difference, I think, between certain secular definitions of flourishing and a biblical view of flourishing. The biblical view of flourishing tells me the reality is that my flourishing is tied up with your flourishing and your flourishing is tied up with my flourishing.
Speaker 1:It's not a competitive view, a zero-sum sort of view, that there's always so much flourishing in the world and we got to divvy it up. Let's get into specifics. We're still somewhat in the realm of theory, I think, when we go through these areas, but you build the book around what you call the six arenas of civilizational life. Perhaps, just to start here, you could just tell listeners what those six areas are, and then we'll go to our break. We'll come back and talk about, um, a little bit about exactly how local churches might contribute something, uh, really unique and useful in each of those areas. So what? What are the six areas or arenas of civilizational life?
Speaker 2:the book is organized around a framework called actually the human ecology framework, which argues that there are these six arenas of civilizational life that are called community endowments.
Speaker 2:And what I found when I studied the framework and sort of held it up against what I was seeing in scripture, there was a tremendous amount of resonance, which is not all that surprising, since the folks, the primary folks who are involved in coming up with the human ecology framework, are Christ followers.
Speaker 2:So the idea is that society has these six realms, these six arenas that are highly interrelated, interdependent, and that true flourishing only happens when each of those are robust and strong. And they are first, the realm of the good, which is the realm of social mores and ethics, the realm of social mores and ethics. Secondly, the true, the realm of human knowledge and learning. Thirdly, the beautiful, the realm of creativity, aesthetics and design. And of course these are, you know, some, this is classic language that you know many of your listeners will be familiar with. But then to the good, the true and the beautiful, the framework adds the just and well-ordered, which is the realm of political and civic life, the prosperous, the realm of economic life and the sustainable excuse me, the sustainable the realm of human and natural health, yeah, and that's great.
Speaker 1:So you're in the book, then you take. So I want to emphasize first of all, like you didn't make this up, like this, this framework exists out there in the world, which is one interesting thing to know here. What's it called the human ecology framework?
Speaker 2:Human ecology framework.
Speaker 1:And so then you go through in the book and talk about what, how the church might seek the good, the shalom of our neighbors in each of these areas. And before we get to that we will go to a break and we'll be right back and we'll talk about that with Amy Sherman, the author of Agents of Flourishing, pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society.
Speaker 3:Hi, this is Joe Gerecht, the Director of the Center for Civil Society, the nonprofit arm of Amphil. I'm inviting you to join us this October for our fourth annual Givers, doers and Thinkers Conference. This year's event will focus on higher education reform and will answer some very important questions, such as can America's colleges be saved and how do we protect free speech on campus. We'll be joined by Victor Davis, hanson, mark Bauerlein, hannah Scandera and some of the biggest names in the educational reform movement. The event will be held October 23rd and 24th on the campus of Pepperdine University, and space is limited. You can get a special early bird discount if you register before July 15th. To take advantage of this discount, use the code EARLYBIRD. That's all one word at checkout. To reserve your spot, please visit our website at conferencecenterforcivilsocietycom, slash 2024. I hope to see you there.
Speaker 1:I don't know if we'll get through all six of these, Amy, because I don't know how you know deep. We're going to go into the examples you give, so you can just pick favorites. I'm going to start you off with one. Okay, so in the realm of the good, the realm of social mores and ethics, one of the things you point out, one of the contributions of Christianity in this realm over time has been the elevation of women's status. I think you actually say particularly elevation of married women's status. Would you like to elaborate on that a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for each of these six realms I try to lay out kind of a biblical conception of what they are and what God's normative intentions for that realm of society are and then reflect a bit on the history of the church and the ways in which it has strengthened, you know, that particular realm, doing that through kind of a combination of thought leadership and sort of pioneering innovation. So the example I give in the book is that the early church in the book is that the early church existing in the Roman Empire, the early church has thought leadership in the sense that it's proclaiming this message of the Imago Dei, fundamental inherent human dignity, and then seeking to embody that conviction in actual institutions and practices. So not just sort of saying everyone has human dignity but then seeking to create a way of being in the world that honors that dignity of each person. And those ideas and those practices were very different from the central ideas and practices in the Roman Empire, because in Roman culture not everyone had inherent human dignity, only Roman citizens did.
Speaker 2:Everybody else was second, third, fifth, 20th class, you know people, including women. So non-Romans, children, poor people, slaves, people that broke the law, widows and women generally were not seen as having this dignity and into that cultural milieu the early church announces you know, in Christ there is no male or female, announces God has a tremendous affection for widows, affection for widows. And announces that women have this dignity that ought not to be abrogated in the way that it was in Roman society, in very horrific kinds of practices like the fact that a Roman male citizen could pretty much have sex with anybody that he wanted to and the women couldn't do anything about it or more male slaves for that matter, correct?
Speaker 1:it's interesting you end on that point because I was thinking as you spoke that the elevation of the status of women in the world that the church starts to bring about sexual restraint, the imposition of sexual restraint, is central to that. This brings us to our own time, when that's not a popular, you know, a high view of sex, very much tied to a high view of what it means to be human, means imposition of sexual restraint. This is not a popular sort of part of the church's teachings outside the walls of the church, typically, it seems. How should the local church think about that area of the church's thinking now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you're right. I mean, the Christian social ethic was quite revolutionary within Roman society and remains revolutionary in our particular cultural moment. Part of the obligation of the church is to stick to it, to continue to honor it, to encourage followers of Christ to live into it, knowing that this is the way that our good God has designed us and wants us to have health and flourishing. Now what gets really really, really difficult and tricky is that we find ourselves, I believe, in a sort of exilic posture, and the Babylonians don't agree.
Speaker 1:This gets to what we put a pin in earlier and the Babylonians don't agree. This gets to what we put a pin in earlier and you can talk about this now.
Speaker 2:the appropriate posture of the church in today's society. Well, let's come to that, but let's go through a little bit more of the endowments and maybe examples of some things.
Speaker 1:Great, yeah, well, go on.
Speaker 2:So the true is the next one the realm of human knowledge and learning yeah, so, um, I, you know, part of part of writing the book that was really, uh, particularly fun was kind of getting into church history and learning the various ways in which, um christians of old have contributed to strengthening each of these different realms. And, of course, you know, christians are rightly credited for, you know, not being the only people that establish institutions of higher learning, but certainly playing a very important role in the development of universities. And the other part of the book writing that was really fun was then also exploring contemporary examples in which churches are being thought leaders and pioneering innovators in pursuing the strengthening of these endowments in our day and age, and so some of the churches that I looked at were involved in things like whether it's after-school programs to complement the educational endeavors that children were involved in, you know, during the day, um, but also examples where um churches are um, like kids hope. Usa is a great um model where a church kind of comes alongside one particular elementary school and and develops a deep relationship and uh, sends mentors into the school um to really love on and encourage, a holistic way, students that have been identified as vulnerable. So that was really fun to look at various creative ways that the congregations were involved in the realm of education.
Speaker 2:The story that I write in the section of the book on the beautiful is about a church in Kansas City that deliberately located itself in one of the arts districts of Kansas City District of Kansas City, and from the very beginning the church established an art gallery that was co-located, and I found that one to be just particularly winsome because I think there can be, you know, and I know we're going to get to this later but when we're in Babylon there can be a sort of sense that the Babylonians are absolutely other, there's them and there's us, and there can be sometimes a desire to just withdraw, have nothing to do with them. And in this setting I found it wonderfully winsome that, you know, the sphere of the arts in a lot of our contemporary society is not a sphere in which a lot of Christians maybe feel particularly welcome. They may find views animating that world that are distasteful, that are weird, that are untrue, and the reaction can be just sort of a withdrawing from that, and so I loved how what this church was doing instead was to sort of say we believe that this realm of the aesthetic life is absolutely part of God's creation and part of his good creation. And God is the most beautiful and artistic being there is, and so we want to celebrate this realm and we want to provide opportunities to get to know local artists that come alongside art students and to acknowledge the importance of the vocation of creators and artists, while also engaging in really good dialogue along the lines of art that actually has meaning. So the art gallery that this particular church founded was called.
Speaker 2:It's called four chapter gallery and four chapters refers to the idea of the of the biblical story of creation, fall, redemption and consummation, and the idea is that that that art is meant to have a message.
Speaker 2:Art is meant to tell a story and, um, the truest and most beautiful art is art that taps into the various elements of the true story, of the meaning of art, and encouraging some of these emerging artists to think about like, what is the message? Because they go, you know the contemporary thing now in art schools is your art, your art's just about you. It doesn't really have, it's not, you're not trying to really communicate anything except yourself. It doesn't really have a message, doesn't really have a story, and yet many, many young people that are in the art world feel that they do want to say something with their art and have some sort of meaning and content and have some sort of meaning and content, and so this is a church that's able to acknowledge the rightness of that inclination, while also then dialoguing about, well, what are some of those messages, and so that was a really fun one to go deeper on.
Speaker 1:I actually thought you were going to go in a different direction with that. I read that in the book I. The even more fundamental thing, it seemed to me, was simply to call art back toward being about the beautiful, before we even talk about what the beautiful allows us to tap into in terms of sort of the fundamental story of the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, that's another challenge.
Speaker 1:And that's something that the church has not done a really very good job of for a couple, several hundred years or so, it seems to me. Uh did for a long time right, there is no art, artistic tradition essentially in the western world without the church, um, at least a big chunk of it would be missing, and that just calling the church back to sort of concern for the beautiful, which seems to me to be a, if accomplished, a massive victory in and of itself.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, exactly Exactly.
Speaker 1:Talk about the just and well-ordered. That's your fourth Urbina.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know that was an opportunity to reflect on, you know, the very, very powerful and ubiquitous theme of God's heart for justice throughout the scriptures and an attempt to kind of probe well, what does biblical justice look like? How are conceptions of biblical justice different from other conceptions that have been posited? And, in particularly, I just sort of lean into the notion of restorative justice and tell a story about a congregation up in the Grand Rapids area that has for many years now you know close, close on 30 years taken the time to reflect on concepts of biblical justice and encourage their people to understand this notion of restorative justice. That justice is relational. That justice aims at not merely retribution and punishment of offense. There is restraint of offense, that's very important. Deterrence is important, accountability for having engaged in injustice, but ultimately understanding the heart for restoring the offender back into community.
Speaker 2:And not only has this church been sort of noodling on that, talking about it, and it's quite an erudite church.
Speaker 2:A lot of the professors from Calvin Seminary and Calvin University are part of that particular congregation.
Speaker 2:But they're not just talking about it, they're embodying it, and so this is a church that was very involved in helping to come alongside believers that were in prison who wanted to start their own congregation, and the church was very involved in helping to bring that into fruition and then also very involved in helping those that are returning you know, returning citizens out of the prison system, navigate that return and provide a lot of practical assistance and mentoring to folks to help them kind of get back on their feet and then also to have a responsible involvement in the political process in the state of Michigan thinking about the areas of criminal justice that need reform.
Speaker 2:And so you know, a number of the folks that are at Church of the Servant have been involved, for example, in helping to craft and pass legislation that enable juvenile offenders to have alternative sentences so that they wouldn't be put into the prison population for their offense but they would kind of have an alternative track, uh that would get them involved in community service and and restitution and and and other other areas. So that was, that was a a lovely um time of learning about, really, I think, very thoughtful, theologically informed ways of pursuing justice that really advanced neighbor love.
Speaker 1:It's a good example. The citizen reentry stuff in particular. It seems like churches can be much more involved in it. That's a whole other show, if not a day's worth of shows, to go down the justice roads, and it's precisely a concept over which churches are falling apart right now, frankly taking different, theologically informed roads, but I won't take us down that now, since we only have a few minutes left. That's a very. It does point to me, though, to sort of you're not always going to have full agreement on how the church instantiates these concepts right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I think that that's the case with, you know, with a variety of these endowments, when you, you know, in the realm of economic life you know I'm coming from a certain perspective, even as I choose, you know, what strategies to showcase and what churches to showcase, because my, you know, sort of my reading of the scriptures suggests that God really cares about our economic lives, cares about economic justice, cares about not just care of the vulnerable but opportunities for people who are vulnerable, and therefore our economic solutions ought to lean into what I call asset-based strategies and certainly that's not language that's unique to me and into strategies that take very seriously the opportunities for creating new wealth and helping people to find pathways to wealth creation that are sustainable.
Speaker 1:What was an example that you saw of the local church community doing?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I've spent a lot of my career I don't really like the word career, but much of my work over many, many years has been trying to help churches stop doing a lot of short-term, relief-oriented, commodity-based forms of benevolence, as though the goal was to help people manage their poverty and just make it a little bit easier by tossing some canned goods and used clothing at them and instead trying to foster a vision and a passion for coming alongside people, to tap into their own God-given capacities and to provide resources and opportunities that enable people to get out of poverty, not just to manage it a little bit better.
Speaker 2:One of the churches that I that I write about is a really um, very creative, very entrepreneurial um congregation outside of Cincinnati that has actually um, it's actually filled with business people and entrepreneurs and is led by a pastor who himself is not a businessman, but he has had a love of business and for business, you know, kind of his whole life.
Speaker 2:And this very creative church has created pathways that help Christian entrepreneurs think through how to establish businesses that advance the common good and that embody what people call the stakeholder approach to the way of doing business, as opposed to the shareholder way. So the shareholder way is the business exists, its purpose is to create a profit for the shareholders. That that's it's, that is its fundamental meaning. And the stakeholder perspective says no profit is is legitimate, value, valuable and essential. But it is a means to a greater end and the business's purpose is to create value for a variety of stakeholders and I love the creativity with which this Grace Chapel has lived into that for again a quarter of a century and they've helped start 26 different businesses, creating jobs, good, creating opportunities that is a unique story for sure of, lastly, the sustainable, the realm of the natural environment.
Speaker 1:It seems like an area where, again, there is really a very sharp maybe needlessly so, but a very sharp though not entirely needlessly so between the secular approach to that arena of civilizational life and what could be a Christian approach. It embodied for me in a recent exchange I had with a friend who wrote to me very sort of contradictorily, looking forward to a world which, when humans were gone and the natural world could, you know, repair itself. We are, you know, just a blight, and that's a very, very mainstream, very, very mainstream view Humans as blight rather than as Imago Dei or anything else that we've been talking about here. How can the church help sort of bring a different perspective to bear on the natural environment?
Speaker 2:Well, the sustainable is actually the realm of both human and natural health, and the idea is God created us and God created a planet. God created us and God created the natural world to have a harmonious relationship, relationship. Setting human beings into that context to both develop and keep that good created order and both parts of that cultural mandate of developing and keeping are very important, and the realm of the sustainable kind of leans into a little bit more of the keeping side, and so one of the things that was fun for me again was just sort of learning about how green some of the early monks were. You know um Irish monks, um, I think they were called the Cistercians, um was the, was the order that?
Speaker 2:Um, I can't quite remember. Um been a while since I looked at that particular part of the book, but you know just in their, in their farming, in their agricultural practices. And, um, you know just in their farming, in their agricultural practices, and you know just really taking seriously the care of the environment so that it could continue to flourish and have longevity and productivity over the long haul. And learning about Christians in the early American story of. You know what we would now today sort of call conservation movements. Right, I don't know that they use that language back then, but but that's essentially what they were.
Speaker 1:They don't use it much anymore either. It's conservation's an out concept. You know, it seems too moderate, uh huh, uh, huh.
Speaker 2:So the story I actually ended up writing. I mean you, I could have picked a variety of of you know, interesting things that churches are doing. Well, you know, I I love the fact that so many churches are getting into using some of their property to. You know, kind of turning in. I've written a couple of articles about like, you know, churches turn in their lawns in the community gardens and, you know, kind of turning in.
Speaker 2:I've written a couple of articles about, like, you know, churches turning their lawns in the community gardens, um, and, you know, trying to fight food deserts by um, by doing creative things like that. But the story that I focused on, um, was actually one that was more about human health, um, but it it related to the fact that there was a small church in a lower income neighborhood in Los Angeles that had this oil drilling facility literally right there in than feet of people's homes and was an operation that for years had not conformed to a variety of environmental regulations that were important for the protection of human health and how, this little church. It was sort of a David and Goliath story of this little church, you know, seeking to hold that company accountable and ultimately the company, rather than agreeing to do the sorts of modifications to their processes that would end the toxic pollution that they were creating, simply decided to close so we're back now, I think, to the thing we put a pin in twice.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:That was going to lead me just to ask this sort of question though the appropriate posture of of the church in today's society. Yeah, give give us now your thought on that I.
Speaker 2:I think what strikes me, uh, and again, this is by no means am I the only person saying stuff like this. So I'm not trying to take credit for these ideas in any way. But as we find ourselves in this uncomfortable position of exile, should our posture be to withdraw from it, let the rest of the world go to hell in a handbasket. We're going to be hunkered down inside the four walls of the church, caring for one another. Is that the right way to engage when we are surrounded by Babylon? Or is the right way to engage to sort of throw our hands up in despair and say, my goodness, there are an awful lot of these Babylonians, my goodness, there are an awful lot of these Babylonians, you know, maybe we should just, you know, try to get along and accommodate, not really rock the boat too much. And then a third option is the sort of angry well darn it. We're going to conquer these Babylonians and there are enemies. We're here, there are enemies, and we're in the right and they're in the wrong.
Speaker 2:And the point is to take things back. And I think that all three of those postures are not what is being taught in the vision, that is, within, specifically, jeremiah 29. But, more broadly, the vision of Scripture as a whole, as we join Jesus and his you know mission to renew all things, which then leaves us with a fourth option or posture, which is a kind of you know, an engagement that retains deep convictions and a countercultural way of living in the world, that does not simply accommodate to the craziness of the world around us and that also engages in sort of subversive acts of neighbor love in a way that I think is very Jesus-like, with the hope of causing the Babylonians to sort of tilt their heads and become curious and become a little startled as we interact in ways that are not what they expected, are not what they expected, and that therefore provides an opportunity for, for dialogue and an opportunity for really demonstrating, uh, neighbor love without capitulating to cultural convictions that are at odds with our orthodox christian.
Speaker 1:I now can see why you wanted to end with that. That's a great way to to sum up what the options are and your and your point of view Very well put. Amy Sherman, thank you so much for for being with us today. I appreciate this conversation.
Speaker 2:Well, I enjoyed it, jeremy. Thank you so much for for being interested in the book and for allowing me to participate on the podcast.
Speaker 1:The book is Agents of Flourishing Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society. It's published by InterVarsity Press. It's available at the InterVarsity Press website, as well as everything else, Amazon and so forth. Amy, tell me if I have this right, but you can follow Amy's work at the Center on Faith and Communities at Sagamore Institute. Just go to sagamoreinstituteorg. You can find it there. And are you doing any social media?
Speaker 2:I am not on social media.
Speaker 1:Good for you. Cannot follow Amy on social media, go to the Sagamore Institute website. Find her there, buy the book and it's well worth it. So thank you, amy again, appreciate your time and good luck. Thank you for joining us for today's episode. If you enjoyed it, we invite you to subscribe and or rate and review this discussion on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to our podcasts and have a guest you'd like to hear from. Send your request to our producer, Katie Janus, at kjanusatamphilcom. That's K-J-A-N-U-S at amphilcom.