Can we talk about it? Recovering the Church’s economic imagination
Photograph by Aaron Doucett via Unsplash
Rev. Paul Justice Snyder
We’ve all heard some variation of the phrase: “There are three things you don’t talk about: money, politics, and religion.”
This saying teaches us to keep the peace by not bringing up things that make people uncomfortable. But avoiding difficult conversations doesn’t make difficult realities go away. When it comes to the economy, those realities are certainly increasingly harder to ignore.
Recently, I spent time with one of our church’s ministries where we serve meals to those in need. Every time I’m there, I see new faces. This time I saw parents pushing children in strollers, older adults, people who are sleeping outside, those living in cars, and those who might have a place to live but are one unexpected expense away from losing it.
A few days later, a close friend called with some bad news. His pregnant wife just lost her job after her company shut down. Now, with a baby on the way, they are trying to figure out what comes next.
That same week, I spent hours on the phone, talking to different community resources to help a neighbor who has been sleeping under an awning at our church. A month ago, he was in a house, but that fell through. Our community doesn’t have transitional housing, so he is in housing limbo until he can find a place to live.
All the while, my week ended with me delivering a refrigerator to a woman who recently qualified for food assistance, but couldn’t afford the refrigerator needed to store the food.
And in the middle of all of this deeply pastoral work, my own family has been trying to figure out how to pay a significant plumbing bill our insurance didn’t cover after a water disaster impacted our home.
I’m not an economist. I couldn’t tell you much about the S&P 500, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers about economic policy. But I am a pastor, and I have spent enough time sitting with people in these circumstances to know that something is deeply broken. From my experience, the answer isn’t that people need to make better choices, work harder, or stop buying avocado toast. The reality is our current economic system is failing many people in our communities.
But, speaking that truth is only part of the church’s prophetic task.
Walter Brueggemann argues that prophetic ministry is also about helping people recover the hopes and desires they have learned to suppress. “The task of prophetic imagination and ministry,” he writes, “is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there.”[i]
When we read the Bible from beginning to end, we see that confronting economic injustice is an important task of our faith. If the modern church wants to proclaim good news to people whose lives are being squeezed by an economy so devoid of it, then perhaps it is time for us to recover the courage of our own tradition and dare to reimagine an economy that works for all God’s people.
That is what happens when we begin to assume the way things are is simply the way things must be. We stop imagining that life could be different. According to Brueggemann, the prophetic voice interrupts that cynicism, and it reminds us that we are allowed to hope again, to name the things we long for, and to imagine a world that looks different from the one we have inherited.
We see this taking place throughout Scripture. I think about the Exodus story which begins with God hearing the cries of economically exploited people (Exodus 1:8–14; 2:23–25; 3:7–10). After the Israelites find their freedom, they establish economic practices meant to protect the poor and immigrants, including releasing debts and restoring land through the radical vision of Jubilee (Leviticus 19:9–10; 25:8–55; Deuteronomy 15:1–11).
The prophets also repeatedly confront unjust economic systems, and they lay the foundation for Jesus’ own ministry, which begins with announcing “good news to the poor,” and includes challenging the accumulation of wealth, and flipping tables of economic exploitation (Luke 4:16–21; Matthew 6:19–24; Luke 12:13–21; Mark 11:15–18).
We also see that the early Church continued this prophetic task by creating communities where people shared what they had so that, as Acts tells us, “there were no needy persons among them” (Acts 2:44–45; 4:32–35 NIV).
When we read the Bible from beginning to end, we see that confronting economic injustice is an important task of our faith. If the modern church wants to proclaim good news to people whose lives are being squeezed by an economy so devoid of it, then perhaps it is time for us to recover the courage of our own tradition and dare to reimagine an economy that works for all God’s people.
Imagine the good news my friend would feel if he didn’t have to worry about his wife losing her income leading up to the birth of their child because paid parental leave was something our society guaranteed to every family.
Imagine the good news our church’s unhoused neighbors would experience if they didn’t have to sleep under our awnings because the community had transitional housing and long-term affordable housing options.
Imagine the good news my own family and so many others would encounter if the rising cost of food, childcare, and everything else didn’t force us to struggle through unplanned disasters.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine the economic systems needed to make those dreams a reality. And yet, that is what makes prophetic imagination so powerful. It gives us permission to believe that the world does not have to be this way.
Now, I don’t expect the Church to have all the answers, and I am not even saying the Church needs to develop a formal set of policy proposals. But I do believe we should talk about the things we’ve been told not to talk about. We should name what is broken, and, perhaps most importantly, we should dare to imagine an economy where all of God’s people can flourish.
Rev. Paul Justice Snyder is senior minister of the Central Christian Church in New Albany, IN. He graduated from Wake Forest University School of Divinity in 2019, where he earned his Master of Divinity with a Concentration in Food, Health, and Ecological Well-Being.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[i] Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. 40th Anniversary Edition. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2018, p. 65.
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