Building a case for restorative justice in Tama-Toledo

Building bridges in the wild
(Rural east Marshall Co.)

In my ongoing work for Eastern Mennonite University, I've helped coordinate the technology aspects of the "Real World Restorative Justice" webinar series, and this past spring I taught a 3-week course on restorative justice at Grinnell College. These have helped keep alive my passion for restorative justice.

(For a primer on the field of restorative justice, see here.)

Meanwhile, over the past two years of living in Toledo, Iowa, I've been looking for opportunities to plant seeds, spread the word, and maybe even get some small restorative justice project started. But when it comes to institutional settings where restorative justice is often employed - criminal justice and public schools, for instance - I haven't found an opening. That's been frustrating at times, particularly when incidents that come up in the local community could be, in my estimation, better handled with a restorative approach.

Pets and the police: Neighboring in the 21st century

"Hey! Hey! Hey!" (thanks to Gary Larson)
Photo by glenn_e_wilson via Flickr

The dog would not stop barking. It barked morning, noon, and night. Out there in the front yard, seemingly barking at every visible moving object large or small, or every movement of air however slight. It just. Did. Not. Stop. Barking! And its owners, our neighbors whom we didn't and still don't know, were nowhere to be seen. This was a problem.

As a telecommuter that works out of my home office and as a family that tries to have our windows open as much as possible during Iowa's more pleasant seasons (limited as they are), the incessant barking of a neighbor dog has a real impact on the quality of my daily life. I had endured it for a few weeks, but finally I decided something must be done. But what?

One option seemed straightforward enough: Go over to the neighbor's house, knock on the door, and ask with all possible humility and kindness to please, please, do something about the dog's incessant barking. The only problem with this route was that we'd seen these particular neighbors displaying some rather troubling ways of relating to each other while outside their house, for all the neighborhood to see and hear. So I was not thrilled about what kind of reception I'd receive for my complaint, no matter how gently presented.

So I called the cops. But let me back up a bit...

By the rivers of Babylon?

"By the Waters of Babylon" - Evelyn de Morgan, 1882-1883 (via Wikipedia)

When I was in high school the band Sublime was cool. I graduated the year after their lead singer died of a drug overdose just weeks before their major label album released and became wildly popular. The summer after high school the rock band I was in with my friends, Honnold, played a number of shows with a punk band from southeast Iowa, Blank Skeme, who often played "Rivers of Babylon" by Sublime at their shows. I loved that song (still do).

Little did I know then (despite having grown up in the church), the song was based on another "song," Psalm 137, a lament by the people of Israel who were exiled to Babylon in the sixth century B.C.E. The people are asked by their captors to sing a song of Zion, which only brings to their mind images of Jerusalem burning. The people can only sit down and weep.

Hope: Whence, whither, and if

Sophia to Rascal: Hoping against hope that friendship is possible.

As I mentioned in the previous post, co-blogger and friend Jon Swartz is in his last semester in EMU's dual degree program between the Seminary and Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, the same program I completed nearly two years ago. It is therefore senior capstone season for him and he's apparently working on a project about hope. I don't know the particulars of his project yet (can't wait to read that paper, Jon!) - but his work includes a survey tool that he sent out and invited me and a number of others to complete.

It was a good exercise for me, and with Jon's permission I'd like to share an edited version of my responses to his survey, because I don't think I've ever written much here about hope and yet it strikes me as central to the Christian faith. So here's what happened in my head as I responded to Jon yesterday...

The gentle virtues of Grandpa Bud

Grandpa Bud (center), his son (left), and my family
at the WWII memorial in Washington, D.C., April 2012

On the last day of 2013, we buried my wife's grandfather, Bud Thiessen. He had been "Grandpa" to me since I married into the family nearly 15 years ago, and it was an honor to be asked by the family to officiate his funeral and graveside services.

Bud was a farmer and a truck driver. He was also a WWII veteran and proud of his service, which inspired a number of men in subsequent generations to serve in the military. He's pictured here at the right on an "Honor Flight," a program that transports WWII veterans from all over the country to the memorial on the National Mall in D.C. We were living in Virginia at the time and so were privileged to be there with him and his son, Sam, my wife's uncle. In light of all this, he could be rightly characterized as a "man's man."

So while courage and honor were two of his noble virtues, in my eulogistic reflections I wanted to also lift out what I took to be Grandpa Bud's "gentler" virtues that were crucial to his being a good man, as he indeed was. My intent for doing so was theologically rooted in the fact that virtues which might commonly be called "gentle" are precisely those that Jesus taught and exhibited himself, and the New Testament writers commend to those who would follow Christ. In naming and celebrating them in Grandpa Bud, I also encouraged those who knew him to embody these in their/our own lives. So they are...

Morality and culture change in Tama-Toledo

Heath Kellogg, Director
Tama Co. Economic Development

The saga of the closing of the Iowa Juvenile Home (IJH) here in Toledo, Iowa, continues. This week the Director of Economic Development in Tama County, Heath Kellogg, used his weekly column in the local paper to directly address our state's governor on his order to close the facility.

After opening with his characteristic folk tale, Kellogg has a few great things to say here. In his appeal to the governor, he's attempting to bypass the political and even economic dimensions of IJH's pending closure, and pushes into the realm of morality and culture, two things that I have an abiding intellectual and ministerial interest in.

The Iowa Juvenile Home: It takes a village...

Town hall meeting at South Tama High School gym; Dec. 19, 2013

Just over a week ago, it was announced by the Iowa Governor's office and the Dept. of Human Services that the Iowa Juvenile Home and Girls Training School (IJH) here in Toledo would be closing on January 16, 2014. The IJH has been a staple of the local community for nearly a century and has served over the years as a state care facility for some of Iowa's most troubled youth, coming from some of the most dysfunctional family circumstances imaginable.

The news of IJH's closing was a huge blow to the local Tama-Toledo community. In a very short period of time, concerned staff, citizens, and elected representatives sprang into action in ways that have been inspiring to me, a relative newcomer to the community. A Facebook group was created as a way to organize support to protest the facility's closing. It now has over 9,000 members. Flowing from that online effort and the amazing support it received, a town hall meeting was organized and carried out last night at the local public high school gymnasium. So my friend Travis, a local councilman, picked me up at about 6:45pm last night and we attended the nearly 2.5 hour event. I went with my camera and notepad to do a little citizen journalism...

Planting the Church of the Brethren in Toledo: A modest proposal

Photo by snowmentality (via Flickr)

This post is part of the NuDunkers conversation on church planting in the Church of the Brethren, on which we'll be hosting a live video chat this Friday, Dec. 6th, at 10am Eastern. Check out the event page on our G+ community page for more info on that.

I've been talking recently about how "seeking the peace of the farm town" has been my mantra for living and ministering in the rural communities of Tama & Toledo, Iowa, since moving here last year.

This phrase is an adaptation of the Lord's commandment in Jeremiah 29, addressed to the exiles in Babylon in the 6th century BCE. The command is to "seek the peace/welfare/shalom of the city to which I've sent you into exile." The exhortation is an echo of the creational mandate found all the way back in Genesis, to "be fruitful and multiply," and that in seeking the welfare of the pagan city (and empire) in which they found themselves, God's people would find their own welfare.

I fell in love with this text in seminary, wrote a paper on it, and posted it here a few years ago. It became a paradigm for me, helping shape my early thoughts about what my church ministry might look like after seminary. In particular, I've found the thematic metaphors of "building" and "planting" throughout both Jeremiah and Isaiah to be particularly, um, productive ones. So church planting and community peace-building have for years now been inseparable concepts in my theological reasoning, and practical mission/ministry planning. My aim has been toward forming worshipping communities with community peacebuilding teachings and practices wired in from the get-go.

Cultivation takes time and patience and risk - among other things - and planting is just one step in the cyclical process of life (and death). So when I discovered the Slow Church blog a year or two back, which takes its cues from agrarian-minded sustainability movements, I found another fruitful metaphor for church planting.

Most recently, I've written and submitted a church-planting proposal for my local community that takes cues from this "slow church" movement. As a bi-vocational minister (i.e. I have a day job that is not professional/paid "church ministry" in a congregation), I've committed to a small, open-ended, slow, patient, and discerning approach to church planting, with explicit nods toward community peacebuilding. It's been approved by the committee overseeing these things in my district and is on its way to the Northern Plains District Board for final approval at their meeting next month. I'll outline a few major points below, and embed the entire document at the end if anyone is interested in seeing how I approached this proposal...

Seeking the peace of the farm town: The never-ending sermon

Uptown Toledo during our annual Stoplight Festival; July 3, 2013

I recently preached at the three local United Methodist congregations, including the one in our neighborhood where we worship. The sermon was titled "Seeking the peace of the farm town" and it was from Jeremiah 29, verses 1, 4-7, & 11-14, which reads:

These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. […]

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare (shalom/peace) of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. […]

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

Here's the sermon:

Healing for the healer

Stained beauty; in the former Otterbein United Methodist Church, Toledo, IA

Last night our monthly prayer group met at an unused and slowly deteriorating church sanctuary here in town, as is our custom - but after our initial worship and opening prayer we went outside into the gray afternoon and walked a few blocks to the home of a husband and wife who usually meet with us. They were home because the wife had recently undergone open heart surgery and was still recovering, so we went to them to pray for her continued healing.

But last night I was not in the healing mood. I was in a real funk and struggled through the praise songs (I usually struggle through any praise song, even on my best days) and through the prayer. They did soften me up a bit but I was still carrying a lot of angst as we walked from the church to the house, and my friend Travis - who leads our prayer group - could see it on my face.

When we arrived at our friends' house they welcomed us in with smiles and embraces. Their hospitable welcome started softening me up more. As we sat listening to the wife's recounting of her successful surgery and good initial recovery, I paid special attention to the look on the husband's face as he watched his wife tell us her story. He had a smile of profound joy and love for his partner and her wellbeing. It softened my heart yet further.

When we gathered around her to lay hands on her and pray, we prayed for specific areas of healing for her ongoing recovery. As we each spoke our prayers for her, I gave thanks to God for the picture of Christian love I was witnessing in their marriage. When the husband prayed, he gave thanks for the spiritual heart of his wife which had only grown stronger through this and other health trials of recent years, and how it's impacted their wider family. He also acknowledged that our life is not our own and whatever the outcome for any of us - more days or fewer, sickness or health - life itself is a gift we receive and ultimately relinquish for the hope of resurrection on the last day and life abundant beyond that. For the meantime he had this prayer: "It's not how long we have, it's what we do with what we've been given. It's not what we know, it's what we do with what we know."

As we left their house, I reflected with Travis that through our service of healing prayer for our friend and sister in Christ, I had experienced healing myself.

Small town vitality: No community without economy

Uptown Toledo, Iowa - "Remembering our past, looking toward the future..."

Evangelical blogger, Jake Meador, had a piece put up on Christianity Today just over a month ago that I had been meaning to read:

Why We Need Small Towns

Having just moved to a small town last fall, the title caught my eye, and being somewhat familiar with Meador's postings, I wasn't surprised to see him talk positively about Wendell Berry, who has been an inspiration to us both. Indeed, Berry's work has helped inspire me to persevere through what has been a hard transition back into small town life, after leaving my own small hometown 15 years ago.

It was all college towns and suburbs in those intervening years, and it's been this difficult transition back that prompts me to wonder about the title. Need? We need small towns? What, precisely, is here that's needed elsewhere? - In what follows (and it's a lot) I don't so much respond to Meador directly, as much as I reflect on my own small town context and current struggles with it, in light of his little piece on small towns...

When home is not yet home

Morning devotions; Aug. 16, 7:30 a.m.; Harrisonburg, Virginia

The authors says:

So then let's also run the race that is laid out in front of us, since we have such a great cloud of witnesses [martyrs] surrounding us. Let's throw off any extra baggage, get rid of the sin that trips us up, and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith's pioneer and perfecter. He endured the cross, ignoring the shame for the sake of the joy that was laid out in front of him, and sat down at the right side of God's throne.
(Hebrews 12:1-2; CEB; Revised Common Lectionary reading: Year C, Proper 15 (20))

It was an interesting time in Harrisonburg last week. I was back for my second return trip for my ongoing work with EMU, and this time my wife and daughter accompanied me, their first trip back since moving back to Iowa last summer. And...all three of us wept at various times.

My tears came on suddenly during corporate prayer last Sunday as we worshiped at Park View Mennonite Church, our last church home in Harrisonburg. "And for those who are grieving, Lord...," the leader intoned. - Boom. Quivering lips, the whole nine yards. My daughter patted and rubbed my back. It had been a while since she'd seen her old man cry.

Grief. I'm still in it.

We're home in Toledo and our sense of God's calling us to move here remains unshaken. But it's also the case that I miss university life and the dynamic community of Harrisonburg. Plus struggling rural Midwestern towns are not easy places to live for people with visions of radical ecclesia and community peacebuilding/development. The fruits of the Spirit - especially patience - are rarely manifest in my daily being in our still-new nearby. My cup of compassion runs low and it impacts my ability to faithfully love my family, neighbor, and enemy.

The text above from the lectionary is water for my dry soul. The race metaphor is familiar, but the cloud of witnesses strikes me afresh when I was doing devotions the other morning (from which this post is derived - the filling out of the blank page pictured above). This cloud of witnesses, it's as if they are watching the race we run, cheering on the runners who yet toil on this earth; not in vain (we pray), but for the joy of life abundant in Jesus Christ.

It's important to notice in the previous chapter that this cloud of witnesses is comprised of those prior champions of the faith who...

...were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented— of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.  Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, without us, be made perfect. (Heb. 11:36-40)

Not without "us" are we made perfect. Suffering, resurrection, and the body of Christ - all inextricably linked. Taken with the other New Testament texts like Romans 5:3-5 which reflect on the fruits of suffering in the Christian faith, this is an encouraging text. It helps put my "suffering" (a strong word for what I'm experiencing, yes) in perspective.

As we continue to discern what faithful and radical discipleship looks like here - seeking the peace of the farm town - I'll continue to seek spiritual nourishment where I can (trips back to Harrisonburg; my dear friend Travis here in town) and try to run the race that's laid out before us here in Toledo...

RAGBRAI 2013: A coffee snoot's dilemma, Pt. 2

Photo by Richard Masoner/Flickr

This is the second and final post on my thought experiment/journaling last week while riding my bike across the state of Iowa on RAGBRAI. See part one.

RAGBRAI Day 2: Mon. July 22; Perry, IA

I'm writing from the house of an extraordinarily hospitable Presbyterian minister, a colleague-of-a-collueague-of-a-pastor/friend...the kind of connections you make when trying to secure your own overnight stays for RAGBRAI. We didn't know this lady one little bit before tonight but she's treating us like royalty, even with her difficulty getting around due to health issues and simultaneously babysitting her adorable grandson. So grateful.

No entry for yesterday due to passing out from exhaustion, and I'm getting there tonight. Adventures in coffee snobbery continue: Yesterday on the route, just outside Council Bluffs, there was a Fair Trade and Organic coffee hut. All the magic words to which coffee snoots swoon! The place was called "Fair Shot" (cute). But I passed it by; the guilt of Day 0 was still too close at hand. Later, my sister-in-law expressed her being impressed by my self-control. I didn't tell her it was based in shame.

This morning, though, I had a hankerin' for Good Coffee. We left Elk Horn... (We stayed there instead of the official overnight town of Harlan because we have family there. We ended up riding 10 extra miles the first day and 10 fewer miles the next. So we kinda cheated.) - Anyway, we left Elk Horn just before 6am this morning and got to our mid-point of Guthrie Center around 9am. Due to said cheating we were very early, and there were very few cyclists in the vendor village set up in the city park at the edge of town. I only found one vendor selling coffee, and I hovered there, consulting with Erin - who was at that point supportive of my quest for Good Coffee.

A few teenaged boys working the stand, watching me hover, asked me if I wanted anything. "Um...aaah...what kind of coffee do you have?"

RAGBRAI 2013: A coffee snoot's dilemma, Pt. 1

Photo by Richard Masoner/Flickr

Last week, the Bros. Jonathan and I took a break from our book-blogging series. For my part, I completely disconnected from digital technology, hopped on my bicycle to ride across the state of Iowa with my wife's family and tens of thousands of other cyclists in the proud Iowa cultural liturgy called RAGBRAI.

When I get away from computers, the slower pace - and whatever else - tends to put me in an observant, reflective mood. I notice things, something catches in my eye-and-brain, I think about it for a while, and sometimes I write about it.

And before we even got to the western edge of the state to our starting town of Council Bluffs, something struck me and stuck with me. So what follows in the next few posts is a topical travelogue of sorts for my RAGBRAI 2013 experience, culled from the pages of my diary/journal, in which I scribbled as we traversed the state from river to river, Missouri to Mississippi - seeing again after four years on the east coast the subtle beauty of my home state. Now, the entire experience for me was much more fun and awesome than what follows, but this is what got written down...

The political eschatology of Les Misérables

Eschatology at the barricade; Photo by Laurie Sparham/Telegraph.co.uk

Here in the little town of Toledo, we have a local treasure: The Wieting Theater. It's been in town for ages, but had started to fall on hard times and was threatened to close until a few years ago when local citizens and the theater guild - who didn't want to see this public gathering place die at the hands of a 60" HDTV in every home - got organized. Because of their efforts, today we have a beautifully restored classic small-town theater with a state-of-the-art digital audio and projection system, and a great stage for the periodic live performances that run. The movies are usually a few months behind, but for someone like me who couldn't care less about seeing most movies right when they come out (except "The Hobbit"), this is fine.

Well this past weekend, the recent movie production of Les Misérables was at the Wieting. My wife went on Friday night with a few other gals, came home and said "I'm going again tomorrow night." So Saturday night, my wife, daughter, and I caught it together.

It is stunning. It is incredible. Wow. There are a hundred directions this could go for me, but I want to focus on something peculiar I noticed at the end of the movie, having to do with eschatology or "kingdom(s) coming, on earth as in heaven." But first a bit of set-up...

Lay visitation as post-Christendom ministry

Ty Grigg, a co-pastor of Life on the Vine in suburban Chicago, has a great post up at David Fitch's blog. He asks: Do We Still Need "Home Visitations" in Post-Christendom?

He lists the following challenges to the tried and true pastoral ministry practice:

• The “parish” is more geographically unbounded
• Home is a private space
• The pastor has lost privilege of access
• In a co-pastor model, who visits who?
• We are busy
• People are shepherded through house groups and by caregivers in the church
• We pastor through Facebook

Some of these challenges are unique to their own congregation and their suburban locale, but others (busy-ness) are more generally true for Christians in the U.S., even here in rural Iowa where the pace is a bit slower and the parish is still fairly geographically bounded.

Ty says that despite these challenges, home visitations can still be a vital ministry in a post-Christendom context, and I agree. He says that a house visit...

• Is vital for paying attention to people’s lives (Acts 20:28)
• Is vital for the work of prayer
• Is vital for the work of preaching
• Is vital for leading a community
• Lays the relational groundwork helpful for future crises and celebrations
• Is vital for blessing lives in their everyday context
• Is vital for caring for lost and straying sheep

Settling in, finding a new voice

Christ United Methodist in Toledo; east out my home-office window

It's been quiet for a few weeks here at this little blog. This has mostly to do with being exceedingly busy with moving back to Iowa, moving into an old house in Toledo that needs some tender loving care, and trying to figure out what it's like working remotely for EMU. Things have been busy, we've been tired, but we're settling in and with each passing day it feels like more and more like home.

Another factor contributing to the quiet blog has to do with me trying to find a new voice. No longer am I part of a university community; I'm a small town boy once more. So I'm trying to figure out what the heck I'm going to write about here now that my daily rhythms aren't being shaped by an academic community, which is where this blog was born and raised over the past three years. It's the "organic intellectual" and "missional minister" gig that I've been thinking and writing about but now have to figure out in concrete terms.