When I wrote my book on globalization and the Midwest, I devoted a great deal of space to the people and institutions -- governments, mayors, planners, universities, newspapers -- whose job it is to deal with the problem and solve it. I made no mention of churches or religion, and this was a mistake. I heard quickly from both pastors and laity, letting me know that the Midwest's problems are the church's problems too, and they want a voice in this debate.
That voice took shape recently at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, located on the Northwestern University campus in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. Garrett sponsored a three-day conference on "Ethical Leadership, the Church and the Global Economy." Ethical leadership and the church are well outside my area of expertise, but they invited me to sit in and I'm glad I did.
The attendees were mostly Midwesterners -- bishops, pastors, theologians. They live in the same Midwest as the rest of us and feel the same economic impact -- emptying cities, crumbling old factory towns, dying rural areas, brain drains. Even more than the rest of us, they have to deal with the human fallout -- families coping with unemployment, the pain of shattered dreams, the divorces and drinking and dropouts and drugs that are the pathologies of economic decline. On top of that, they live in shrinking cities and so see their own churches shrinking, their pews emptying, their parishioners leaving. They live on budgets, too, and have to deal with leaky roofs and broken boilers in churches they can't afford to keep up.
Most of all, they have to guide congregations that have lost their way in this world. What do you tell them? Do you hold their hands and succor them in their pain? Do you tell them to fight back? If so, how? Do you preach acceptance or fury? Most of all, how do you help people understand economic turmoil, when your own education left you with a stronger grip on theology than on economics?
As one speaker said, we are at the intersection where economics and consciousness meet. The church, in a sense, is the traffic cop at that intersection. So how does it cope?
It's clear that this is a discussion that's just begun. The Garrett conferees came to no firm conclusions. But they were talking about the right issues, asking the right questions, staking their claim to this debate. It's clear that, in the Midwest, globalization's impact is running far ahead of our ability to cope with it, and the church can't sit on the sidelines.
The church teaches the eternal verities, which can be both comforting and limiting in a time of wrenching change. "Is Christianity helping people to cope with this change?" one bishop asked, and then concluded that it wasn't. Too often, this bishop said, churchgoers themselves want "to keep our church a good-news resting place."
But that too often means "rest," as in "rest in peace." Instead, she said, churches have to shake people up, stir the pot. Change is with us, especially demographic change in some of the whitest and most conservative parts of America. The Midwest is different now, and Midwesterners, including Midwest Christians, have to be "different," too, or get left behind.
One speaker, an academic, argued that the church's mandate to "love thy neighbor" means, in a global age, loving all people everywhere. But this seemed to disarm Christians for any sort of global competition, leaving them content to celebrate advances abroad, even at a time of local loss. In this view, church teaching dictates that the market must be allowed to have its way.
But the general feeling at the conference seemed to be that God helps those who help themselves. "Much of the church as we know it in the Midwest has been lost," another bishop said. If the church is to be relevant in this time of turmoil, it must go beyond comforting the wounded and be a leader in rebuilding lives.
But there's a problem here, as one of the theologians commented. Seminaries provide little teaching in economics, so their graduates are as adrift as their parishioners when it comes time to understand economic change and try to guide it.
If churches are going to reach out to other civic leaders, they also much reach out to themselves. The kind of Balkanization that keeps Midwesterners from working together seems to afflict churches, too. Even individual churches that are shrinking seem disinclined to merge with other churches: old loyalties still trump common sense.
In addition, I couldn't help noticing that this Garrett conference was a gathering of Methodists. Nothing wrong with Methodists, but the Catholics, Presbyterians and Baptists have an equal stake in this global era, not to mention the Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. The Methodists might have something to learn from a little ecumenical economics, and vice versa.
What I heard at this conference were good people agonizing over a new world for which their training has not prepared them. The realities of globalization, the temporal impact of economic change, are here and affect the lives of their people on a daily basis. They must be faced. If churches are to have value, they must enter the arena.
But if religious faith is to have value, it has to rise above the temporal and the mundane, must use the timeless stories and truths as a guide to a life beyond the daily grind.
Globalization is real, these believers said. So is faith. Each must respect the other. But this means a search for a new crossroads, and this is what the Garrett conferees were seeking. I came away with the feeling that their search has just begun.
Certainly, the creation of a new economics and a new politics is too important to be left to just the economists and the politicians. Many of the issues facing the Midwest are moral and ethical questions -- not just the rebuilding of our society but what kind of society do we want. If we're entering a new economy, whom should that economy serve?
It is right to hope, one bishop said. He recalled that he was a 10-year-old boy in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus and ignited the civil rights movement. For him, this was personal. His father, a mechanic, worked for that very same bus company. Occasionally, he said, his father would take him to work and let him change the signs in the bus, including the ones instructing "coloreds" to move to the rear.
If the South can change that much in his lifetime, he said, who knows what changes await the Midwest?
For more information on globalization in the Midwest, visit the In the News section of the Global Midwest Web site.
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