Kara Powell interviews Alexie Torres Fleming of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice in the South Bronx, New York about ways we can combat classism in youth ministry and in our efforts to serve others.
Dr. Kara Powell is the Executive Director of the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI) and a faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary. Named by Christianity Today as one of “50 Women You Should Know,” Kara serves as a Youth and Family Strategist for Orange, and also speaks regularly at parenting and leadership conferences. Kara is the author or coauthor of a number of books, including the forthcoming Growing Young (fall 2016), The Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family, Sticky Faith Curriculum, Can I Ask That?, Deep Justice Journeys, Essential Leadership, Deep Justice in a Broken World, Deep Ministry in a Shallow World, and the Good Sex Youth Ministry Curriculum.
If you ask the Holy Spirit to work in your heart, this interview can transform your understanding of social justice, your paradigm of minorities and the poor, your entire Christian witness, your own eternal destiny and your relationship with Christ and those He died for. We recommend that you pray first, then listen to the entire interview, without interruption.
Brenda Salter McNeil on Being Witnesses
Earlier this year [in 2011] Fuller’s Ogilvie Institute sponsored the Mighty Waters conference on preaching and living God’s passion for justice. One of the featured speakers was Fuller alum Brenda Salter McNeil, an advocate for reconciliation and healing in all the places where our differences continue to keep us split.
I was moved by her message then, and wanted to share it now that it’s available to watch free online. My favorite takeaway from this talk is this: Credibility is determined by the places we will and won’t go. We can prove ourselves competent by our skills, but other people determine our credibility. Sit with that one a bit.
This video is another exellent resource on the importance of changing our paradigms of the poor and of minorities, in order to have our lives transformed to become the people God created us to be, and in order to have a witness to our "Judeas and Samarias" today. This is vitally important to you, dear Christian, and to the Church and the cause of Christ in the world today, and we again urge you to pray first, and then to watch the entire video, without interruption.
Social Justice Ministry - Ministry to the Church
To our viewers who are members of a church in the U.S., the substantial majority of the members of which are white, this is the most important page in this website, by far. Fifty percent of a chaplain's ministry is to the incarcerated and their families and staff in the institutions served. In today's reality, the other fifty percent of a chaplain's ministry must be to the church, on behalf of the subtantially poor and miniority populations he serves and their families, to help it become aware of the issues that through the centuries and, yes, even today are still first and foremost on God's heart - issues of social justice. These begin with racial injustice and the injustices that cause it - primarily economic opportunity inequality and the mass incarceration of minorities, which points to the need for criminal justice reform; and the strong but misguided paradigm within the church that the status-quo is from God; that 'health and wealth' are the hallmarks of those who serve God, and that the poor are poor primarily due to their own bad choices; and their adamacy in perpetuating the systematic oppression of minorities and the poor with their votes at the ballot box. Nothing less than a radical, Spirit-enabled born-again experience will be necessary to change that paradigm within the church, and until we seek that out, we remain today the prophecied "church at Laodicea" of the latter days written about in Revelation 3:14-22, neither hot nor cold, ultimately to be spewed out of God's mouth, not making it to heaven - a somber warning corresponding to that in Matthew 25:45-46 for those who marginalize, disregard, blame and fail to minister to the poor, and in Matthew 7:21-23 to those who persist in living in disregard to God's will. God will bring all these systematic oppressive systems down prior to establishing His millennial kingdom on Earth, but on Judgment Day, many will be present who weren't expecting to be there, and will be startled to hear HIm say "Depart from Me, I never knew you," protesting that, in their minds, they served Him all their lives in the church (Matthew 7:21-23).
The selections on this page are sometimes long, but I urge you to listen carefully to or watch all of them all the way through, and to pray about any paradigms you may have adopted that are contrary to God's heart for minorities and the poor. I challenge you to seek God's face and repent of any such insidious paradigms, to accept instead the gentle and peacable wisdom that comes from God, and to pray about how you might turn and become a voice for social justice within your sphere of influence. Thank you, dear reader, and may God bless you in this journey.
The following are an excellent selection of videos on how to live out God's passion for Social Justice, taken from the 2011 Mighty Waters conference at the Fuller Theological Seminary.
Dr. Mika Edmondson delivered this talk in May 2016 to Council members of The Gospel Coalition to help them consider how God is working for justice and mercy in our racially charged and polarized society.
Mika Edmondson is the pastor of New City Fellowship OPC, a church plant in Southeast Grand Rapids. He has earned a PhD in systematic theology from Calvin Seminary, where his dissertation was on Martin Luther King Jr.'s theology of suffering.