Your only label is grace
Can’t earn it, can’t sell it, can’t hide it

You want to keep us safe, and have offered to
You died so that we could have life together, not apart
You invite us into your house on one condition

We drop our labels
We walk in the same door as those we’ve labeled
We lose all confidence in ourselves
We lose all peace in oppression
We love our enemies

We accept the invitation, but we need help
We still feel like strangers at times, and not fellow citizens
We certainly don’t feel at home

But you are doing the forming and building, not us
Help us remember whose house we are in
Help us remember that you are the host
Help us remember that grace is the only label you go by
And that we are all labeled with it

1. See a need to start something
2. Find a solid, well liked, person who people follow or be that kind of person yourself
3. Invest in that person so that they can maximize their following

Now, a few things about this model.  First, you’ll notice that step number four isn’t there and it is certainly isn’t “start that thing that needed to be started” rather it just kind of ends at step three.  I see it this way because in this model it seems that the end goal is just to have good leaders with large masses of followers.  If you have that then you are successful.  Who cares if you ever start that thing you thought needed to be started there is lots of people here now so God must have lead you somewhere else because clearly it’s a good thing and there is nothing wrong with it.  Crowds equal success in this model.  It’s just a bonus if you are doing the very thing you started off thinking you needed to do.

Second, this model tends to see “leadership” as a spiritual gift in which some people have it and some people don’t.  Those that are leaders have a certain kind of personality usually.  They tend to get things done well.  They tend to be dynamic speakers.  Most important, they are usually great managers.  In other words, they are great at managing other people and making sure that they are doing what they should be so that the goals get accomplished.

Third, to build on the second, this model makes these ‘leaders’ find all their value in their abilities to lead.  If they are dynamic and good enough, their entire identity gets wrapped up in being a leader.  They end up crafting their leadership abilities and figuring out how to be the best leader they can be.  They end up needing to do more and more things and constantly be taking people somewhere.  If they are really good they might even start mentoring other leaders and send them off to do the same.  However, if the crowds start to dwindle, or the leader begins to notice that they aren’t being followed anymore they will very quickly start to feel restless and need to go somewhere (or start something new or push for a new direction) in which people will follow them still or listen to them.

The whole idea of leadership in the church is pretty much bull shit.  We have set most of our “leaders” up to fail by defining their role as leading (which btw is not a role at all).  As soon as it’s someone’s job to lead we have a serious issue on our hands.  When someone walks into a room full of people and their role is “leader” then we have lost sight of the Kingdom of God and how it understand relationships.  Unless of course this leader is washing everyone’s feet around him.  There is a reason why Paul has a five fold ministry setup.  There is a reason why none of them are designated as the “leader.”  There is a reason why Israel was dying for a king and God didn’t want to grant it.  There is a reason why we want to be followed.

The church was never meant to function with authoritative leaders calling all the shots and being put on a pedestal in the spotlight and teaching all the individuals how to think.  The church doesn’t need visionaries that are constantly dragging people around from one idea to the next.  The church doesn’t need more followers of Christian leaders.

Maybe I’m beating a dead horse.  Looking back at some posts that I’ve written over the last few years, it seems I’ve been saying the same thing over and over again. When Leaders Fail At Leading, What Next? | Church Is Just Leaders and Followers | The Art of a Good Leader | Servant Leadership Doesn’t Work. So I should just stop, I really need to get new ideas.

But I’ll end with this. Leadership isn’t a thing we need to be pursuing. Servanthood is, love is, community is. There is a reason why Christians didn’t call each other leaders and followers in the New Testament. Rather they consider themselves family (brothers and sisters) and part of the same body. In both cases, Christ is the first born and Christ is the head. That is the only leader we as Christians should be acknowledging.

My friend Dan, left this comment on my post called “Servant Leadership Doesn’t Work” that I thought was fitting to end this.

Neither Jesus nor Paul called people to be leaders. Instead, they created a fictive kinship group wherein the various individuals would relate to one another as siblings. Now, if you know anything about family relationships at the time those fellows lived, you will know that sibling relationships were to be defined by mutuality and equality (with the exception of the special treatment received by the first-born… but, of course, Paul refers to Jesus as the first-born so that conveniently removes that obstacle… just as naming God as the Father of this family conveniently prevents any person claiming the authority and power ascribed to fathers). This was a mutuality that involved each person sharing the same status and power as the others and each person sharing in the material belongings of the others.

This is also why Paul is writing letters to assemblies (ekklesiai) that are in constant conflict and turmoil. Because there was no clearly defined human leader(s) within the assemblies, things were terribly messy, factions developed, etc. Paul, however, encourages people to remain in this messy place rather than developing a more regimented structure of leadership. This is also why he must cajole, beg, plead and convince the audiences who receive his epistles — Paul did not do much to consolidate himself as a “leader”. Of course, as with most of his other efforts, Paul fails to convince here and so leadership structures rapidly appear (as in the deutero-Pauline epistles) and, not surprising, those structures favour people with (relatively) higher status and wealth (some things never change).

Thus, Nathan is bang-on when he argues we should strive simply to serve (and not be “servant leaders”). In service, I surrender my desire to lead a person anywhere. Instead, I assist that person in getting to where s/he wishes to go (even if I sometimes question the destination).

Really, the notion of “servant leadership” functions as little more than an ideological gloss for those who wish to have their cake and eat it too (i.e. I can be self-glorifying and possess power over others, while also having a clean conscience and believing that I’m acting in the best interest of others).

May we live your story every day through our words and lives

Teach us kingdom values of
Repentance, Forgiveness, Peace, Joy, Grace and Faith

May our children grow into their identity as Christians
Not so much as having all the right beliefs
But living the right way

May we be transparent constantly in repentance
May we teach our children to look to you, especially when we fail them
May we raise our children knowing that they are loved by you
May we submit ourselves to your will and your love

Amen

Sometimes I listen to an album for the first time and I know it’s going to get played a lot. That is the case with Grey Kingdom. I’m far from a talented writer and so I don’t really have a lot of fancy words to string together to put into words his art, but you should listen to it. Well thought out music, wonderful guitar player and his voice is filtered through that beard of his and that makes me respect it more.  Rumour has it that he might be coming to Festival of Good Things as well.

The other is Zachary Lucky. He played at our annual houseshow earlier in the year and blew us away. He’s one of those musicians that I feel like I will grow with as he continues to push out great work. He’s a talented and opens up his road travels and awe of what is around him with his listener.

For me it started by seeing the circular logic and inability to ‘prove’ things that were obviously giant leaps of illogical ideology.  The Pentecostals hold the belief that the initial evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit is speaking in tongues.  When I was around sixteen I scheduled a meeting with the senior pastor at the time and was genuinely curious about this core belief and asked him to explain it to me.  He explained that this doctrine comes from three or so stories from Acts where someone was baptized in the Holy Spirit and then after spoke in tongues.  This lead some to believe that unless you speak in tongues you were not baptized in the Holy Spirit.  This didn’t make much sense to me to make an absolute statement of the Spirit’s infilling based on examples of the early church spreading in Acts, especially when we have millions of examples today of Christians who do not speak in tongues who clearly are lead by the Holy Spirit.  I asked a few questions, he didn’t have answers but said he would get back to me.  He never did.

That started my long trek through understanding what the Bible was and why it was used the way it was.  For this pastor and my church at the time, no one actually knew what they believed, why they believed it or why it was important.  It ended up being a lot of emotional hype and turning salvation into a three step process until you were able to access the full power of God in your life.  Over the last 12 years, so many issues have arose where the Bible gets used as an oppressive tool to force upon beliefs that were never intended to come from the Bible and are pretty hard to come by.  My wife was never allowed to be called a pastor or paid as much as men, my gay friends are constantly bombarded with hurdles to be recognized as Christ followers, the poor are looked at as lazy and bad stewards, alcohol and tobacco have become worse sins, destroying the environment is excused, building projects are divinely ordained, tithing to a institutional church became mandatory, swearing means you have backslidden, going to church on Sundays is the main duty of a Christian and burning fossil fuels is as protected as our right to freedom.  All of these things have been backed and proven by the Bible.

This poses a number of problems.  First, it means that the Bible is not actually the authority, our interpretations are the authority.  As soon as someone says “the Bible says so” to explain to you a morality or an obligation you can almost be certain that this is a belief that they inherited from within a community of people that believe a certain ideology and call themselves Christian.  You can pretty much win any argument with a Christian just by saying “well let’s see what the Bible says about that” and then pointing to a random verse somewhere and you win.

The way to recognize very quickly if you are having a conversation with someone with a dominant ideology is just to show them the story where Jesus tells the man to go and sell everything and give it to the poor and follow Him (matthew 9:21, mark 10:21, luke 18:22) and ask them why they haven’t done that.  If you hear a string of excuses about context, it not being for everyone and that’s not what he really meant.  You can then discard any other ‘biblical belief’ that comes up in the conversation as not being biblical at all but rather being part of that person’s worldview that was shaped around a specific sect of Christianity that talked a lot about the Bible and how powerful it was, but the power only came in their own use of us as a way to be right.  Believing the Bible is inerrant generally means that their interpretation is inerrant and if someone believes that, only God will be able to change their mind.

The perfect book, in almost too subtle of ways, becomes a distraction leaving us unable to see the living reality of the mission of God recounted and extended to us through the Scriptures as handed down to us in the church. Instead, through the way we speak and the way we practice Scripture as evangelicals, we are held fixated by the sublime object of “the inerrant Bible.” We parse it, exegete it, defend it, uphold it, inductively study it, take notes on it, all the while distracted from ever fully participating in the story it tells of the mission of God.

The belief in “the inerrant Bible” dares to promise certainty regarding truth about God independently of God. In other words, it dares to say we can know this truth objectively, through modern science and historiography, and we can prove it by these means! In its excess, it puts the true believer in the false position of making God an object of our own control—a truth we can know without knowing Him.35 This over-exuberant claim to “objective absolute truth” in effect fetishizes the Bible.

Fitch, David E. (2011-02-04). The End of Evangelicalism?

In my recent discussions with my friend who has recently become an Atheist, the question keeps going back to ‘is it true?’ or ‘can you prove it?’ For him, what can be proven and come to logically is the ultimate deciding factor for him if he will consciously believe it or not.  I can’t help but see this as subconscious result and backlash against this kind of belief about the Bible and what it has done to humans.  When people just believe things and are assured they are absolutely correct it makes them do all sorts of crazy and stupid things.  So when someone’s foundation of belief is the Bible and they are absolutely certain that it is inerrant and 100% true then they no longer need to seek truth, or ask questions or think about their decisions.  They’ve already made up their mind about what is right or wrong.  Basically whatever they believe about the Bible is their moral guide to truth.  There is no wonder that the New Atheist movement pushes so strongly for proof of Christianity and religion and how there is none.   What fascinates me even more is the amount of Christians that understand their faith strictly as being the right and true one and then use the Bible and their certainty as the only means of this so called proof that they are right.  I’m thankful that the Bible or Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything.  I’m also thankful that it isn’t a set of propositional statements that must be adhered to whether true or not.

There is a document that records God’s endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it.

Terry Eagleton. Reason, Faith, and Revolution

Christians desperately need to approach the Bible differently.  Not as some book of rational and logical propositions that prove why women are different than men, why gay people have something wrong with them, why our way is the best way, that God does in fact exist and how the world was created.   The Bible is a fascinating collection of literature that invites us into seeing the world as a gift and gives a story to live into that will radically transform any community that sees it this way and lives into it.  We cannot enter into God’s story, know where we came from and know where are going and know how it happened and remain unchanged.  I have no interest in proving the rightness of the bible through logical arguments.  I have no interest in proving one doctrinal statement more correct than another or using it as a proof text from where I get my morals.   What matters to me is if we actually see ourselves as a community of faith working alongside of our creator bringing the Kingdom of God wherever we go.

The Bible is essentially an open, imaginative narrative of God’s staggering care for the world, a narrative that feeds and nurtures us into an obedience that builds community precisely through respect for the liberty of individual Christians.

-Walter Brueggemann

The Peace of Wild Things

BY WENDELL BERRY

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Why Do We Raise Our Kids As Christians?

At first glance this seems like a really stupid question, but it’s actually quite complex and plays itself out deeper than you would think. If we haven’t belaboured this point enough, the answer to this question is not because we don’t want our kids to go to hell. So if we get that out of the way and a dualistic understanding of heaven and hell and our only purpose here on earth is to go to heaven when we die then we are left with some serious questions not just about our parenting style but about the core of our faith.

Some see raising your kids with a specific religion as a horribly indoctrinating move that limits their freedom and refuses to allow them to make their own decisions and choose their own direction in life. Some raise their kids as Christians because they are Christians and they know no other way. The reasons are endless to either do it or not do it. For me though, I want to know why I’m doing something and I want to make a conscious decision to do it. So as I venture into a place in my life where I’ll be a parent (one day) I want to know why I should raise my kid as a Christian and with Christian values.

At another glance you might also be thinking that I’m asking why to raise our kids as Christians as opposed to Islam or Judaism or Buddhist or Sikh. But I’m not really asking that question either. You see Christianity is not just another religion that you can follow on the side as if there is options and Christianity’s competitors (if we have to call them that) aren’t just religions. One of the main things I am asking is why we should raise our kids Christian when we have jobs, technology, video games, cars, planes, politics, schools and a million other things that can raise them. Why should their identity be “Christian” rather than “Canadian” or “Plant Worker” or “business man.” Reading through the scriptures, it wasn’t just other religions that people were up against, it was pretty much anything at all that took the place of God. Any idol at all was seen as a front on their belief and way of life.

To begin we need to ask ourselves what normally raises our children? We like to think that we as parents would do all the raising and that our kids turn out exactly how we intended them to. But if we look deeper and start to understand childhood development we start to recognize that there is a lot going on that makes up our kids, our kids are products of their environments and their families and their experiences and their friends and their habits.

Q: What influences our children and how they are raised?

The reality is, that if we don’t raise our kids, they will be raised anyway. If we don’t set a direction for them, a direction will be set by someone else. The world that we live in now, especially the media saturated West, corporations and the powerful are dying for an opportunity to raise your kids and they will take it at any chance they get.

Marketers plant the seeds of brand recognition in very young children, in the hopes that the seeds will grow into lifetime relationships. According to the Center for a New American Dream, babies as young as six months of age can form mental images of corporate logos and mascots. Brand loyalties can be established as early as age two, and by the time children head off to school most can recognize hundreds of brand logos.

But it goes beyond intentional branding and influence that corporations do. There is also an entirely different set of forming principles that our kids are being influenced by within their schools, by their friends and the onslaught of information and tools at their fingertips. So now more than ever, we need to be intentionally raising kids with specific formation in mind and not just allow whoever is the loudest and around the most to choose the direction. Understanding why we raise our kids Christian means that we understand that we our kids are being raised whether we choose a direction or not and that we would rather have a part in raising them to grow up a certain way rather than just see what happens. Raising our kids Christian means that we are intentionally raising them in a way that we think is best. And for us, in this situation, as arrogant as it may seem, we think raising Christians is best! Also, I think it is the best because I’m not convinced that there is another way to raise kids that will form them into loving, graceful, peaceful, smart, forgiving people that have a grasp on the reality of the world around them, other humans and creation. This is in no way saying that raising your kids as not Christians that these characteristics won’t be present. Of course they can be. But I think by raising our kids Christian that we are making a conscious decision that we want our kids to look like Christians should look. If I refuse to raise my kid as a Christian then I have to answer the question what am I refusing but more importantly I have to ask myself then how will I raise them? What worldview will they have? What will they value? What will they care about? What will their habits be?

There are basic ideas of human development that are important to understand before we answer this question. The first thing that we should realize that raising our kids Christian does not mean that we raise our kids to believe what we believe. Now this must also be a shock because most of our basic understanding of the Christian belief is that it is a way that we think about Jesus. If you believe then you are saved! What cognitive science can teach us is that the way that we think doesn’t necessarily change the way that we act. In fact, in most cases, the way that we think about things has very little to do with the way that we live.

We need to appreciate that our actions as citizens are based, not primarily on cognitive deliberation or even on our “perspectives,” but for the most part on acquired habits, unconscious desires, and pre-intellectual dispositions. And so our education has to be attuned to how those desires and dispositions are formed. We might have a highly developed, articulate worldview and yet act in ways that are remarkably inconsistent with such a perspective.
- James KA Smith

This is why when we talk about raising our kids Christian we are not talking about them believing that Jesus died and rose again and that God is in fact real and that they should do what he says. We are talking about raising them into a story. This is a story that passes on an identity of who they are in the world and what their purpose is. It helps form their values and their desires and their actions. The goal isn’t to raise kids so they believe the right things. The goal is to raise them so they live the right way. We can just say out loud over and over again that they need to be good people, but that isn’t what raises kids. What raises kids is participating into a way of life that lives and breathes who we are and acts in a way that’s appropriate to how the world is.

We know this is true because we are the same way. We have strong beliefs about the world right? We would never have slaves. Yet for some reason we have no problem buying computers, ipods or clothing that is made from them. We think we should eat healthy, yet we still find ourselves buying processed food or in the drive through at McDonalds. We think we should support local businesses but we still go to Wal Mart. We think should exercise but we have a hard time doing it. We point to this a little a bit in our exhibit on Friday called A Bake Sale To Solve World Hunger. We have stared at these images of starving and poor kids our entire lives and yet it doesn’t actually make us live differently. The answer to helping people live better IS NOT to help them know more and think more about the world and make more people aware. We can’t just make people think more about what they are doing. That approach doesn’t work and it is leaves us lacking. It’s not a matter of changing someone’s mind rather it’s a matter of helping people acquire new habits.

Raising our kids Christian doesn’t mean that we are raising our kids just to believe Christian things, it means that we are helping them acquire Christian habits. We raise our kids with all sorts of habits that will help them one day. Such as brushing their teeth. But they are also raised with other kinds of habits that are a bit more meaningful. We can raise our kids with the habits of sharing, or serving, or being grateful, or being respectful. It’s all part of the habits that they form from an early on age. But when we get into talking about Christian habits we are making an even deeper claim. We are saying we want to raise our kids with the habits of confession, repentance, forgiveness, grace, joy, love and peace. We are saying we want the Christian story to be our children’s story. These are not something that you learn through agreeing with the concept of them. They are things that you learn within a community of practice, which is what we are trying to be. On top of that we want them to understand they are loved, that they have meaning and that they have purpose. We want them to know what it is to love and to be loved.

This is why we raise our kids as Christians. The Christian story has these kinds of values and characteristics built into it from the very beginning. It’s a story that shapes people that are good, built for good works, and longs for the world to be set right. Right from Genesis 1 is a picture of God making things good and making humans in his image. What a scene to behold! So we enter into this story and we pass this story along. We are good, and even though things went wrong, we were still created to be good and it is still within us to be good. So we long for when things will be made good again. Then for the rest of this story we have humanity’s struggle to live into that goodness and bring it wherever it goes and the constant failure to do so.

The church is called to live into this story and make it their own. What other story has that kind of invitation? We as the church then live in and by this story so that we may learn and grow into habits that will make this story more true in our own lives. Remember when we did the sermon on why we go to church? It’s all tied into each other. We come over and over again to form habits to remind us of who we are and what we are called to be. Remember when we did the sermon on why we practice disciplines? It’s because discipline gives us the actual ability to be who we are called to be rather than it just be a nice thought in our head. Remember when we did the sermon on how what we do hear on Sundays makes us into a certain kind of people? It’s the same kind of thing that turns our kids into certain kinds of kids. We raise our kids Christian because we want our kids to have Christian habits because we believe that Christian habits are a good way to live.

This is why I will raise my kid as a Christian. I want my children to be raised with the knowledge that they are created in God’s image and that they are called to be an image bearer wherever they go. And beyond knowledge I want them to naturally be these kind of image bearers, that they don’t have to think about the right answer but they subconsciously live this kind of life because it has been built into them since the beginning.

The Christian story is a story of redemption that gives a foundation to humans unlike the rest of the stories that the world offers them. The world tells them that they can get what they want if they trample over those that are weak. The world tells them that they can eat whatever they want and not care about where it comes from. The world tells them that they can live however they want and not worry about who else it is affecting. The world tells them that power, wealth and money are the keys to happiness and success.

I want to raise my kid a Christian, because if I don’t, then the world will raise my kid however it sees fit. I don’t want my kids natural inclination to be selfish, or to think they are better than someone else, or to be unforgiving, or to grow up thinking violence is normal and peace is weird. I want to live into a story that has a God that loves his creation so much that he would be willing to kill himself to get it back on track to his purposes. I want my kids to know that they are loved and it is going to take a lot more than me just telling them that over and over again.

Q: Why do you think raising your kids as Christians will be more beneficial than not raising them that way? What does it mean for you to raise your kids as Christians?

This is a big deal to me because I think we all too often think that raising our children as Christians means make sure they are at church on Sundays and believe Jesus is God. While at least this is something, it is much better than simply identifying ourselves as Christians but not actually having any action or belief that would agree with that.

So we end with this. Your kids are going to be raised by you whether it’s as a Christian or as a shopper or as a selfish whiner or as a hoarder or as a Republican or as a workaholic. So the better question is, are you living the way that you want your kids to live? Are you living yourself into God’s story of redemption and goodness? Are you practicing habits that you want to pass on to your kids? Are you constantly repenting and confessing where you have messed up and seeking to be closer to God?

So with that, let’s pray.

Dear God, may we know your story
So we can be good storytellers to our children and the rest of the world
May we live your story every day through our words and lives
Teach us kingdom values of
Repentance, Forgiveness, Peace, Joy, Grace and Faith

May our children grow into their identity as Christians
Not so much as having all the right beliefs
But living the right way

May we be transparent constantly in repentance
May we teach our children to look to you, especially when we fail them
May we raise our children knowing that they are loved by you
May we submit ourselves to your will and your love
Amen

Do our communities even need to be protected? Who should decide when it’s protected and when it’s not? What do we do with those who continue to disrupt community life by their harmful lifestyle and refuse to repent? Many will point to 1 Corinthians 5

5 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. 2 And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this? 3 For my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. As one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this. 4 So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, 5 hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,[a][b] so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

I think this is all fine and dandy, but what is rarely mentioned is that Paul says “And you are proud!” Which all of sudden puts this into an awfully delicate situation. Does this community, who once looked at incest with pride, read this letter and then all of sudden flip on the guy and say “we are handing you over to Satan.” Has the entire community not already been handed over to Satan in the first place? How does a community that once took pride in their sin all of sudden hand someone over to Satan as if it was an entire system that perpetuated the sin in the first place?

I only bring up this situation because I am realizing just how difficult it is to ‘deal with sin’ within a community. Not only am I a sinner, but I am guilty of perpetuating community life that makes it easy to sin as well. I can’t just all of sudden decide that was the sin that broke the camels back and kick someone out. So then I think, maybe we need to start way further back and be much more strict up front. Maybe people who unrepentantly sin should never be allowed in the community in the first place? Ya that won’t work either.

Not really sure about the point of this whole bit but to just express how fragile our communities can be and how important it is to protect them while at the same time acknowledging that protecting them probably will work against the community in the first place.

This week for First Friday downtown Sarnia we are putting together our first ever Bake Sale To Solve World Hunger. We’ll have tons of tasty treats for sale from our very own in house baker and they will only be $0.25 each! We will keep track of how our proceeds are doing live on a website while contrasting the total with the total world debt and display it on the wall behind us. If you buy a treat you will also get one of the postcards below.

As people walked by I always said “Can I interest you in some baked goods so we can solve world hunger?”

Some Great Results and Responses

50 people completely ignored us
300 people acknowledged us but refused
90 people made a donation and took a baked good
9 people only donated but didn’t want any baked goods
34 people had a baked good and didn’t make a donation
15 people acknowledged that they knew what our angle was
15 people tried to pay but we told them not too
95 of the people that acknowledged us told us they had already ate and were stuffed
2 people said “good for you”
1 person said “not tonight”
1 person said they were in a “super hurry”
6 people asked how this solved world hunger.
1 person said “you are killing me”
1 person said they had severe allergies
1 person made a donation and gave a baked good to their dog
1 person was a street preacher who donated
1 person just shrugged
2 people said to send the food and the money to people who need it
2 people said “we’ll end violence you end hunger” (they were from women against violence against women)
1 person gave us a coupon

It got me thinking. You know how there is the Rolling Jubilee and Google Will Eat Itself two organizations that basically use money for purposes that either topple the source of the money or relieve people from the debt of money. So I was thinking that someone should start a Rolling Co-op where we would collect money from people to eventually buy companies and then release the employees from the hierarchy of their company and give the entire company back to the employees and the workers. I think that could certainly catch on. It would be a similar move that this man made when he gave away his grocery store to his employees when he retired. How awesome would it be to give the entire company over to the employees and start them on a path of participatory economics where they actually control their own organization and business. Awesome.