Jay-Z famously had 99 of them and they often animate our actions as individuals and communities – problems. Problems dominate our media, our social change frameworks, and a lot of community engagement in the church. But the problem with problems is their tendency to persist, to evolve into new and evermore complex problems, and to demoralize the people and the communities eager to contribute to the common good.
The first time I was ever recruited for meaningful social change work was through the lens of problems. I was a young adult waking up to the reality that many of my neighbors struggled to find housing they could afford, or to have access to adequate health care, or just exist as people of color in a country practiced in racism and white supremacy. The more aware of the problems I became, the angrier I felt, and that anger was an incredible motivator. It brought me into local issue campaigns, statewide political action, and culture change work within the church.
To be clear, the organizing and political action I’ve been a part of has taught me more than I could have ever hoped and connected me with dozens of long-term friends and comrades, and that anger was justified. But early on some of those experiences, exacerbated by a toxic media and social media culture, also taught me to see the world as a collection of problems to solve, and neighbors as deficient and defined by the problems they face.
For me, problems and the anger that they generated became the work. I could feel secure in my sense of call and identity so long as I could always identify the next problem (often without any direct experience of it myself) and become appropriately agitated by it. But over time I started to notice how isolating, how demoralizing, and how self-serving this problem-solving posture had become.
Asset-based community development (ABCD) introduced me to an alternative – the power of gifts, strengths, and capacities to contribute to an alternative story. Central to ABCD is the belief that “…every member of the community has gifts to give and that every gift is uniquely valuable and needed” [1]. With this in mind, social change work becomes a practice of naming, connecting, and sharing gifts that build the kind of life together we long for, rather than naming and reacting against never-ending problems.
Gifts have always been the actual animating force of a community, as anyone truly paying attention to power-building and community-building efforts can attest. Wins in community organizing campaigns are born of the collective capacities of communities to make decisions or get others to make decisions for the common good. Social change work takes gifts like strategic thinking, hospitality, care, public speaking, cooking, historical and political analysis, and more. And the campaigns I’ve been a part of that focus energy on gifts have always felt more capable and more creative than those with energy focused on solving or reacting to problems.
When I get stuck thinking about the world, my church, or my neighborhood through the lens of problems and problem-solving, I inevitably find myself caught in loops of toxic perfectionism, judgement, and blame. But when I pay attention to the gifts of my neighbors and community members, when I celebrate them and work to make connections between them, I find myself animated by possibility.
This posture reminds me of the Gospel text from a couple of weeks ago, Matthew 13:24-30, the Parable of Weeds among the Wheat. Jesus tells the crowd about someone who sowed good seed but who was sabotaged by an enemy who sowed weeds among his wheat. When the householder’s servants asked if they should pull up the weeds, the man replied, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” Now, Jesus is talking here about the children of the Kingdom, not the contrast between problems and gifts. But I think there’s something there that resonates with this conversation.
Rather than paying attention to uprooting the weeds, reacting to and attacking the problem, the landowner chooses to pay attention to growth and the production of the wheat, the gifts and abundance present in the midst of a very real challenge. There is faith that the weeds will be handled at the harvest, and an implicit assurance that the wheat need not be overcome by the weeds.
For me, the temptation to obsess over what is broken, what is wrong, and what is a problem is too appealing and too easy to ignore. If the work we are called to as the church, as faith communities rooted in place, is to participate in the same doom spiral as the rest of the world, count me out. I’m much more interested in a church who sees their community and their neighborhood as the context for sharing and receiving the radical giftedness that contributes to the common good. I’m interested in living out the freedom we have in Christ through the gifts, strengths, and assets that God has granted to each and every one of us.
That doesn’t mean we ignore the very serious challenges and brokenness present in our communities. It just means that our best bet for living into an alternative is through the giving, the animating, and the connecting of gifts, strengths, and capacities. It’s a social change practice rooted in creativity and possibility capable of bearing the weight of the human condition. Gifts, the gifts of you and me and every one of our neighbors, animate our communities and I’m eternally encouraged by the possibility they represent. So, let us set down our need to pull out every weed and tend more to the good gifts that Jesus has sown. Amen.
[1] The Abundant Community – John McKnight and Peter Block.
Photo by Hayley Murray on Unsplash
