With the wind of the Spirit at our backs, let us move forward in plumbing the extent of our modern-day famine, factor by factor.
Education by State and Zip Code
I lead off with education as the first of several factors to exposit in this first chapter because it was the crucible behind one of the strikes that I researched—the Kelso Education Association of schoolteachers went on strike as a part of the statewide wave of schoolteacher strikes in 2015. But Washington State was also replicating a phenomenon I saw out of my home state of Kansas—an intractable unwillingness by elected officials to fund our children’s education in an even minimally constitutional manner. As I write these words three years later, schoolteachers across the state once again have been forced to go on strike after being left little option by the state and their school districts.
While I have made my home on the West Coast for my entire adult life, I am a born-and-raised Kansan. I was born in a hospital in Wichita, raised outside of Kansas City, attended Kansas public schools, and formed my Christian faith in a Disciples of Christ congregation located in Kansas. Kansas will always be home to me. Which was why, even after moving away, it was wrenching to read all about the destructive consequences of the state government’s grand “tax experiment” over the past decade that slashed income taxes across the board and reduced a key corporate tax rate from 7 percent to 0 percent, leading to an almost immediate 10 percent loss in tax revenue, and subsequently devastating reductions to vital government services, including infrastructure and public schools.8
If state budgets are reflections of our society’s choices and values, then we are not properly valuing our children or their teachers. Washington is by no means the only state to cope with a teachers’ strike over inadequate funding or low pay. Teacher unions called labor actions in Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Ohio, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, among other areas, in the past few years to draw attention to their collective plight. In my own hometown of Kansas City, decades of white flight out of the city proper have contributed to lopsided underfunding of schools with a higher percentage of students of color, representing a generations-long theft. As an adult, I have come to realize that my own public school education unjustly benefited from such a disparity. My zip code and my home state determined much about the quality of my education.
Most school districts in the United States rely on a combination of state and local funding, along with a relatively small contribution of federal funding. Even if state funding nominally increases or simply remains steady, a loss of local funding can prove devastating for a school district. State funding for public education is neither increasing nor remaining steady; in a majority of states, funding has decreased on a per-student basis since 2008, and local funding has not been able to fill in all the budgetary holes.9
As we the people continue to underfund our public schools, the schools have begun to take on qualities of many churches—though perhaps not the qualities of communal prayer and scripture reading as some Christians would hope. Deferred maintenance, crumbling infrastructure, and underpaid staff are now daily parts of life for many schools just as they are with many churches. As a pastor, there is a painful irony in the reality that just as public schoolteachers are being forced to make do with fewer resources, so too is the church that was began by a public teacher in Jesus of Nazareth.
That Jesus was a teacher is a basic premise of all four Gospels. He teaches both large crowds and individual households. He taught through parable, sermon, and aphorism. He was called “rabbi,” which means “teacher.” Jesus’s classroom, like any other, needed supplies: a mustard seed, five loaves, two fishes, bread and wine. His example should call us to advocate for our teachers to have the resources, wages, and benefits they need to do their jobs well.
For at least seven to eight hours a day, five days a week, and nine months a year, our schools are the homes away from home for our children, homes where they can find their place and build themselves up into the sort of loving, thoughtful, and knowledgeable adults we wish for them to become. We must care for our schools as we care for our own homes.
Physical and Spiritual Homelessness
As I was graduating from Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry in June 2018, The Seattle Times exposed an explosive reality about a city already living with overpriced rents and mortgage payments: one in four apartments in Seattle was empty.10 Meanwhile, Seattle has a crisis of homelessness that, on a per-capita basis, remains one of the largest in the nation, with my own adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, not far behind.11 In both cities, rents and home prices are prohibitively high. Landlords are much more willing to offer a month of free rent rather than an across-the-board rent decrease in order to fill their domiciles.
While Portland and Seattle are relatively large cities, the debate over homelessness is happening in smaller towns as well. One of the biggest ongoing flash points I saw during my ministry in Longview, which combined with the adjacent town of Kelso has population of maybe fifty thousand, was addressing chronic homelessness there. I heard a laundry list of reasons for not ministering with thoughtfulness and compassion to those experiencing homelessness—drugs, irresponsible life choices, an unwillingness to help themselves—that felt devoid of empathy.
It was heartbreaking to watch many of the local politicians talk about the lack of compassion even as they attempted to rezone the area to functionally eliminate homeless shelters. It was heartbreaking to hear support from laypeople and clergy alike for those attempts, creating the sort of vicious feedback loop in which both elected leaders and their constituents feed off of one another’s shared animosities toward a disadvantaged population. It was also heartbreaking to see much of that viciousness emanate from within the wider church. We worship an itinerant Messiah who once said, “Foxes have dens, and the birds in the sky have nests, but the Human One has no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). That should call to question any of our manufactured moral objections to homelessness. Such attitudes are a testament to the extent to which we are willing to revise Christianity to justify our comfort with injustice.
Our willingness to reshape our faith for comfort’s sake lies at the heart of what needs to change within the church. Everything in the chapters that follow is an interpretation, whether of the Bible or of history, that seeks to offer a course correction for how our interpretations of God have replaced God within the church. We no longer worship God as revealed through the scriptures so much as we worship the scriptures. We do not learn from history so much as we revise and reframe history to see what we want to see. That may make our Christianity a comfortable home, but it moves that home from its solid foundation of rock to a foundation of sand. Jesus made clear what happens to the house built on sand. It gets washed away. We are setting ourselves up for spiritual homelessness.
It may not feel that way. We may still attend a church, listen to sermons, do the things Christians typically do to practice our faith. We may not feel homeless. But we are consigning our souls to live out of the spiritual equivalent of cardboard boxes and shopping carts, even as we cast stones at our siblings in Christ who live in such trappings in the physical world. It is a vicious hypocrisy.
Food Deserts and Food Insecurity
You may have lived in a desert without knowing it. You may be living in one right now. Millions of Americans live in deserts right now. I know that sounds like a sensationalized lead-in to a local news story, or perhaps the tagline for Al Gore’s next film, but food deserts are where many people live in America, the wealthiest country in the world. For all its riches, the United States inflicts food insecurity on millions of its own people.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, nearly one in four residents of the United States lives in a food desert, which is defined as being at least a mile away from a grocery store or supermarket in urban areas, and at least ten miles away in rural areas.12 The primary options for people who live in food deserts are convenience stores and dollar stores, which generally devote their limited shelf space to highly processed, shelf-stable foods that are high in fat, sugar, and salt, rather than healthier staples like fresh fruits and vegetables. Dining options in