Possible: A Blueprint for Changing How We Change the World - Hardcover

Bauman, Stephan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1601425821 ISBN 13: 9781601425829

Publisher: Multnomah, 2015

Synopsis

We need a better vision for saving the world.
 
Across the world, people like you are rising up to fight poverty, oppression, and injustice—not just professionals, but bloggers, musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, and advocates. People who refuse to accept the world as it is, who dare to believe change is possible.
 
But we face a crisis of vision. We sense what needs to be done, but often we don’t know how to do it. Without a better blueprint for doing good well, our moment in history will slip away.
 
Stephan Bauman, president of World Relief believes true change begins in the hearts and actions of ordinary people. In Possible, he presents clear and biblical thinking, powerful stories, and practical tools for sustainably impacting our workplaces, neighborhoods, villages, and cities.
 
Possible is an eloquent and personal call to reconsider what it means to change ourselves so that we can change the world.

About this title

About the Author

Stephan Bauman is president and CEO of World Relief, a leading international relief and development organization. He is also a poet, ordained minister, and strategist who considers his African friends his most important teachers. Stephan and his wife, Belinda, live near Washington, D.C. with their sons, Joshua and Caleb.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Recovering Our Call
 
do we dare disturb the universe?
 
Do you want to do something beautiful for God? . . . This is your chance. —Mother Teresa
 
During an otherwise normal worship service near Washington, DC, I received a text message I couldn’t ignore. A rebel militia was wreaking havoc in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the world’s most Chris­tian countries yet also one of its poorest and most violent, especially for women and children. My wife, Belinda, was receiving similar messages on Facebook. Gunshots and mortar fire threatened the lives of people we loved.

I sat down to exchange a flurry of texts. Belinda sat down to cry. She was thinking about her friends in Congo. Only a few months before, Belinda knelt with Esperance, a victim of sexual violence, on the dusty concrete floor of a rural church, where they laughed and cried. “You remind me I am still human,” Esperance said.

When you and I hear stories about violence, war, stolen girls, boy sol­diers, or hungry children, we feel helpless, exasperated, sometimes even phys­ically ill. When we learn about senseless poverty, brutal racism, mind-boggling violence, or preventable disease, we feel overwhelmed. We pray. Sometimes we give. But we struggle to do more.

Why?

Because we cannot change the world.

Or so we think.

A handful of years ago a friend from Indiana, Joe Johns, began to ask hard questions about conflict, faith, and peace in Congo. He and a Congolese pas­tor named Marcel began to help people see how local militias were turning neighbors against one another. Tensions between churches, they realized, mirrored tensions between tribes. So Marcel convened a group of fellow pas­tors to help them see where they were wrong. Some shed tears as they forgave one another. Others knelt and prayed together. All committed to developing a better future, making peace a priority, and mobilizing their communities to help people become peacemakers.

And mobilize they did.

Meanwhile, back home, Joe inspired his church to take on the impossible—saving Congo. His friends began to recruit their friends to help. Others gathered resources. Hundreds ran in their local half marathon to raise awareness. One group even rode bicycles across the country in a race to end Congo’s suffering.

Across the country a rapper-poet and friend to Joe began to speak out on how tungsten, tin, and tantalum—all components in our cell phones and other electronics—help fuel the war in Congo, exploiting tribes and perpetu­ating violence against women. A few people from Bend, Oregon, also took the risk to talk about Congo, the impossible situation no one wanted to tackle. But they did anyway, their voices joining together to become a mega­phone, a collective shout too loud to ignore.

A group of women from across the United States heard their appeal and traveled to Congo to meet those most affected by the conflict. Belinda joined their cause. They met ten women, including Esperance. All ten had been victims of violence and had overcome incredible odds to start businesses, provide for their children, and even forgive their perpetrators. They asked Belinda and the others to tell their stories so the world would know about “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human con­science.”1 So one began to tell the world through art, another through digital portraits, and others through blogging.

And they haven’t stopped since.

When Belinda learned Esperance had escaped the warring militias, she cried tears of joy. Esperance and her sisters found strength in each other, their communities, and their new friends across the world. Now they are helping other women—their “sisters”—some as young as fifteen, to heal from rape and rebuild their lives. Some are also working to mitigate future violence.

Today thousands of peacemakers are changing Congo, and their num­bers continue to swell. With their friends from across the United States, they are waging peace to save Congo one village at a time.2

A poet and a blogger, a few warrior moms, two tenacious pastors, and a crew of volunteers offered their gifts, their strengths, their vulnerability, and their grit to inspire a sea of Congolese women, heroes on the front lines of suffering, to change their forgotten corner of the world in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Can we change the world? I believe people like you will do extraordinary things when given the chance, turning some of the most entrenched, seem­ingly intractable situations of our day into something hopeful, something . . .

Possible.

I’ve seen it firsthand: students who took the time to help a child in Ghana learn how to overcome a life-threatening disease. A young couple who helped a woman they’d just met to escape a war in Sierra Leone. The gutsy, over¬worked doctor who helped a frightened mother deliver a baby girl only hours after an earthquake hit Haiti.

I believe “there are no ordinary people,”3 only people who are bold enough to think they can save a life, or some corner of the world, and fierce enough to try.

seismic shift

I am convinced the world’s suffering lingers not because people aren’t willing to help. Faith, compassion, and justice stir the souls of many. They are blog­gers, technicians, musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, writers, nurses, electri­cians, rappers, moms, politicians, PhDs, lawyers, students, researchers, and doctors. They are you, and people like you—a groundswell of individuals who simply refuse to accept the world as it is. They want to give their lives to something more, something greater—something possible.

But we cannot change the world the way we used to. The vision of the past is insufficient to carry us into the future. While we honor those who have given their lives before us—their sacrifice, their ingenuity, and their perseverance—we are on the cusp of a seismic shift in how we bring change, moving from an era of a few extraordinary heroes to an era where tens of thousands, even millions, will effect change.

We face a crisis of vision, not will. I meet people every day who long to be part of meaningful change but experience disappointment instead. You may feel this way too. You may wonder if you can really make a difference, if you can genuinely impact the world. You understand the urgency, the gravity—real people, real lives, a billion hungry, twenty-seven million slaves4—and why we must do something. You may even understand what can be done.

But you may not know how.

Unfortunately the idea of changing the world has become rhetorical, superficial, and sometimes even cliché. What we call “change” may ring hol­low or prove false. Efforts may be short-lived, paternalistic, or even harmful.

Many would-be activists succumb unwittingly to cynicism. A well-intentioned vision is oversold or gets reduced to a marketing slogan:

Overcome poverty by sponsoring a child.
Buy something “red” and eradicate AIDS.
Tweet “abolition” to end modern-day slavery.

We want to believe the world can be fixed that easily. But we know the challenges are far too complicated for easy solutions. And not only do quick solutions fall short, but they are also costly. Sometimes we do injustice to the very people we seek to help. We dabble with one issue, then shift our atten­tion to another, or lose interest altogether, leaving our relationships shallow. We pursue versions of human progress void of local ownership, creativity, and perseverance.

We hurt ourselves too. We assume the answers—whatever they are—reside with us, because we’re slow to recognize the deep wisdom and un­tapped potential of those who suffer. Our theology and practice remain tethered between false dichotomies of word and deed, sacred and secular, us and them.

God forgive us.

History is inviting us to join something deeper, something more, some­thing beyond ourselves, where we boldly stare down the facts without dumb­ing down the issues, where we stay the course—from impossibility straight through to possibility.

Our tipping point is near. We can seize it—or miss it for a generation or more. With a better vision for how to change the world, you and I can reset how we engage and overcome some of the world’s most desperate problems.

As outrageous as this might sound to you, this book tells how.

honest questions

Belinda and I didn’t set out to change the world. In our twenties we left our rural hometown in Wisconsin for a six-month stint in West Africa, hoping to do some good while trying to find our calling. Having barely traveled, we were inexperienced and naive. Within months we were asked to lead a medi­cal team into the bush. Villagers streamed to our makeshift clinic, some with mild infections, others with rare tumors, and one woman with a severe case of gangrene, her wound wrapped in chicken manure and banana leaves, the local remedy. Overwhelmed by the needs, the medical staff asked for our help. Belinda and I pulled guinea worms—a common, waterborne parasite—from the legs of children. I remember a boy letting a tear slip as I cleaned a wound near his eye. He was ashamed, perhaps for the pain he felt but more likely for needing help from me.

Days later I scavenged a used newspaper in Ghana’s capital city of Accra. Its front page reported the World Health Organization had eradicated guinea worm from the planet.

I begged to differ.

Belinda and I had planned to volunteer in Africa for six months. We ended up staying for six years. I resigned my job in business back home, and Belinda resigned hers as a teacher. Africa became our home and justice our calling.

But Africa changed us more than we changed it. We left home with the hope of changing the world and came back wondering if it was even possible. We had answered the why question without adequately considering the what and especially the how. Well-intentioned as we were, if we learned anything, we learned by doing things the wrong way first. We went to Africa with an¬swers and left with questions—honest questions regarding faith, culture, and what seemed like superficial solutions in light of a torrent of pain: What is God’s purpose in human suffering? What is my calling in light of this pur¬pose? How can we create lasting change—change that meaningfully empow¬ers those who suffer most? What must I learn from those I am seeking to serve? Who must I become? What is my appropriate role, given the rise in capacity in the majority world?5 Maybe you’ve asked similar questions.

Times have changed, and so have we. We’ve learned from our mistakes, the grace of friends, and the wisdom of those who suffer. There are good answers to your questions and mine, questions we’ll explore together in the pages ahead.

In one of T. S. Eliot’s poems, the character J. Alfred Prufrock asks, “Do I dare disturb the universe?”6 But he queries not with courage or resolve but with cynicism and cowardice. Prufrock has given up, resigned to finish out his days without dreams or hope. But where Prufrock whimpers, you and I can declare, “With God we dare.”

I am convinced that clear vision and thoughtful action will unleash us to do more and to do it better. There is a fork in the road for all of us. Faith or fear, courage or capitulation will determine our path. One is easy, the other difficult, but only one can create the lasting change we need most. As in every age, God calls his people to do the very thing we think we cannot do. Dallas Willard spoke of a coming age of unprecedented heroism, “a time for men and women to be heroic in faith.”7

I believe that day has come.

overhaul

What if there was a better way to change the world, a vision of such pervasive change that only the language of reformation would suffice? God invites us to change the world. Biblical? Yes. Possible? Yes. But it will require an over¬haul of how we understand our calling, a radical shift in how we see the problem, and an honest look at how we think, who we are, and how we live.

We cannot remain as we are. “Vision leaves our present situation indefen-sible,” says Bill Hybels.8

Can we imagine a different future?

Envision tens of thousands, even millions, of people, whether young or old, rich or poor, super gifted or modestly talented, discovering their callings and employing their strengths to create meaningful, compre-hensive, and lasting change in neighborhoods, villages, and cities.

Thus far, most of our efforts to change the world involve only a few—experts, clergy, and professionals—leaving the majority on the sidelines to serve marginally or to observe passively.
Imagine instead a village or com¬munity that invites everyone, especially the most vulnerable, into the prob¬lem; that calls upon their diverse, resilient, and profound strengths; that co-creates solutions with those closest to the problem.
Imagine our global faith community, in all its expressions of worship, prayer, and study, focused first on those who are left out, those who suffer, those who are unable to experience the tangible love of God.

Much of our faith community is organized around ourselves, mainly our spiritual and social welfare. Out of our excess we devote a bit of time and resources to the vulnerable. But what if we were to flip this paradigm on its head and instead organize around God’s love for the least first, where worship doesn’t sidestep the world’s suffering but includes them?

Consider a group of people so thoroughly captivated by truth, compas-sion, and justice that their words and actions spontaneously impact others to pursue the same.

Too often we offer compassion or “do justice”9 merely to feel better about ourselves. We serve only if it’s safe. We risk primarily for reward. Imagine, instead, a groundswell of people so thoroughly infused with the love of God that they risk their lives for others in uncommon ways.
I know people like this. Maybe you do too.

blueprint

This book proposes a set of universal principles—what I am calling blueprints—for anyone seeking to create and sustain change. Blueprints give just enough detail to help us visualize and build or arrive at something new. Think of a topographical map of a forest or mountain that shows the elevations, the likely terrains, the lakes. The geographical features are fixed, cre¬ated years before, but the path you cut through the forest or over the mountains is personal and creative. Blueprints don’t show everything, but they do point the way and infuse our creativity. The right blueprint can turn your life into a sacred adventure or quest, a journey that actually chooses you and changes you so completely you cannot resume your old life.10

There are three essential blueprints for us to discover:

1. The first is universal, archetypal, and invitational. It’s God’s divine blueprint for saving the world. It speaks to the purpose for everything and why you are invited, by design, to join in. We’ll explore several archetypal patterns of change and their implica¬tions for us today (chapters 1 and 2). And we’ll grapple with, and refra...

Edition details

• Publisher: Multnomah
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1601425821
• ISBN 13: 9781601425829
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224