You’re right about not setting out to exclude anyone! I’m not sure who you mean though – people who aren’t Christian? They are all certainly welcome but this particular event is an attempt to get more Christians – who are currently under-represented in climate change direct action – involved.

Thankfully there’s a whole host of options for a wider audience – eg. join the Greenpeace activist network or come along to the Climate Action Camp …

I am sure it was no intention of yours to exclude anyone, and perhaps that could be clearer in your message.

Funny you should ask – we’re just putting together plans for a day or possibly a weekend program in the next couple of months. I will email you with details when they’re ready.

So, what’s my alternative?……

I am involved in the Oodgeroo Sacred Treaty Circles process -
http://treatynow.wordpress.com/

This is a process of direct support for Aboriginal agendas, based on a spiritual unity within aboriginal customary law processes.

The St. Mary’s Catholic community of South Brisbane (who are presently being threatened by the Vatican with excommunication) have joined this process which, I believe (and hope) can open up new pathways for the whole Australian church to explore new ways of bringing the good news to the poor.
http://treatynow.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/fr-peter-kennedy-bejam-denis-walker-and-sam-watson-on-the-st-marys-treaty/

This process is open to anyone anywhere if anyone wants to get involved, but I am just offering it as an example of a different paradigm of doing theology.

There are many injustices, not just Aboriginal oppression, but it seems to me that if we can’t address that one, the war under our own feet, then we won’t be able to tackle such things as homelessness, addiction and ecological collapse with anything but tokenistic bandaids. Like the law and culture of the Hebrews, Aboriginal culture has much to offer in developing new paradigms of responding to all the other issues, from outside the sick and dysfunctional imperial culture that has gotten us into all the problems.

JT

Whether it be the institutions such as the Salvos or St. Vinnies or the radical hospitality of christian community, the framework of engagement is within a welfare charity mode where the christian/missionary has all the power and the poor are just powerless recipients of charity.

Like NVDA, the welfare/charity mode is driven primarily by the desire of the christian activist to deal with their own inner motivations such as fulfilling a religious obligation or a personal desire to have a relationship with the poor.

The poor must come into our own philosophical or institutional framework and a relationship is built totally within the terms of the christian activists own needs and agendas.

Like NVDA, the poor fulfill the needs of the christian activist rather than the other way around. The poor become the platform on which the christian activists can manifest their own ideas and priorities.

When christians read the bible, they often identify with the apostles and seek the meaning of Jesus as if it were preached directly to them. However the apostles and the whole Jesus movement up to the 2nd century was an indigenous hebrew movement, disposessed of its land by the brutality of the Roman empire. The contemporary parralell of the apostles of the bible are not the rich white christians in Australia, we are the gentiles, samaritans and Romans of the bible story.

Even the Roman centurion was welcomed into the Jesus movement, but he had to join and adopt the spiritual consciousness of the indigenous Hebrews, he had to live according to the God of the land and the poor, not his imperial masters.

The rich young ruler was not asked to extend a helping hand to the poor but rather to sell all he had and give it to the poor – to existentially join the poor.

Jesus calls the rich to a family relationship with the poor, to join the poor who, in the bible, are the disposessed Aborigines (lost sheep) of Israel. They had a culture, a spirituality and a social organisation which could be joined. Poverty was not a theoretical concept that the disciples discussed, it was their very life. This poverty is where we find Jesus.

“Whatever you do unto the least of these you do unto me” yet what has the church done to the “least of these” in today’s world? At best they have offered a coffee, a sandwich or perhaps substandard temporary accomodation. is this really good news for the poor? or is it a satisfying feel-good project for the rich? Church social justice reports or public witness events may clearly articulate a problem that those “other” people have – the Aborigines or the homeless or the starving Africans, but such so-called prophecy speaks from outside of the experience of poverty and oppression. The christians might consider themselves advocates of the poor and oppressed but this is a self appointed authority based on the values and consciousness from within the rich sociology.

Since Constantine bastardised and co-opted the indigenous Hebrew religion, christians (radical and conservative) have imposed their own imperial culture and consciousness onto the indigenous stories of the bible. The message of Jesus is no longer good news for the poor based on the faith, health and action of the poor themselves, as in the new testament. Church mission has evolved to a process of charity and welfare from the rich imperial church extended to the poor, who were made poor by the very same culture that the church has been a pillar of.

So, I am not just picking on NVDA but rather on the cultural assumptions of modern christianity including the radical communities and activists.

If the rich young ruler (which i suggest can be used to describe powerful and affluent white Australian society) cannot enter the kingdom of heaven until he has joined the circumstance of the poor as an equal, then any prophetic statement he might make prior to giving all he has to the poor, is not based on the kingdom of heaven but on a material legalism of the kingdom of Caesar or of the corrupt temple hierarchy.

I claim that non-violence is a material legalism that obstructs rich christians from communion with the poor and entering the kingdom of heaven. I am not pro-violence, like Ghandi I believe non-violence is always the most sensible option. it is the idolotry of raising non-violence – a cultural construct, to the point of a spiritual law.

I do not condemn the Aboriginal guerilla resistance to British invasion, nor do I condemn the violence inherent in Aboriginal customary law today (e.g ritual spearing or even kidnapping young men against their will for initiation). To understand Aboriginal history and culture, white christian nonviolence has to be, at least temporarily, transcended.

To transist from a product of affluent imperial society to an equal member of the family of the poor requires a massive consciousness shift – to be born again.

We have to come to the kingdom as children, not with a sophisticated cultural framework of non-violence. Non-violence is just one of the many conditioned assumptions that we have that need to be transcended before we can even begin to see the truth.

here is an essay I wrote on being born again
http://unlearningtheproblem.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/as-i-see-it/

The power of prophets such as Ghandi and Martin Luther King is that they were speaking on behalf of their own experience and people. Ghandi’s central philosophy was not non-violence, rather it was satyagraha – “truth force”. Ghandi spoke the truth because he lived the truth, not because of a comprehensive moral philosophy that he applied as an advocate to other people’s experience and oppression.

Thanks for reading my rants,

JT