Michael Mather - Having Nothing, Possessing Everything: Finding Abundant Communities in Unexpected Places

We live in a time when many churches are anxious over scarcity. Here is a book to turn that paradigm inside out and upside down, like the gospel itself. Michael Mather shares his journey as an urban pastor through decades of personal and communal transformations that challenge stale assumptions about want and plenty. With humility and generosity, Mather shares an abundance of hard-won insight, helpful ideas, and inspiration for church leaders longing to approach their work with fresh eyes and to flourish in unforeseen ways.

HEIDI NEUMARK

author of Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx

In our times, many religious leaders suffer the despair of impossibility. The faithful seem trapped in the consumer culture, the church trapped by institutionalism. Nonetheless, there is a path to possibility. Having Nothing, Possessing Everything describes the adventures of a pastor who has walked that path. He discovers the gifts that surround him. He walks into the unknown, and the invisible becomes visible. He goes surrounded by neighborsnever alone. When you read this book, you will discover the joyful possibility of another way.

JOHN MCKNIGHT

Northwestern University

Having Nothing,
Possessing Everything

Finding Abundant Communities
in Unexpected Places

Michael Mather

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

2018 Michael Mather

All rights reserved

Published 2018

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ISBN978-0-8028-7483-2

eISBN978-1-4674-5140-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mather, Michael, 1959author.

Title: Having nothing, possessing everything : finding abundant communities in unexpected places / Michael Mather.

Description: Grand Rapids : Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018020963 | ISBN 9780802874832 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Broadway United Methodist Church (Indianapolis, Ind.) | CommunitiesReligious aspectsChristianity. | WealthReligious aspectsChristianity. | Church work. | Church.

Classification: LCC BX8483.I53 M38 2018 | DDC 287/.677252dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020963

Opposite page: Lucille Clifton, in the inner city, from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright 1969, 1987 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

in the inner city
or
like we call it
home
we think a lot about uptown
and the silent nights
and the houses straight as
dead men
and the pastel lights
and we hang on to our no place
happy to be alive
and in the inner city
or
like we call it
home

Lucille Clifton

Contents

Preface: Finding Riches Where
I Had Thought There Was Nothing

Something needs to be turned on its head.

Graduates get sent out every year to make a difference in the world, and yet, how is this venture then... NOT about THEM. We dont go to the margins to make a difference. We go to the margins so that the folks at the margins make US different. We dont walk with the poor and the disparaged to rescue them. Butgo figureif we locate ourselves WITH them, we all find rescue.

Mike Mather invites us into the beauty of exquisite mutuality at the margins. The scales fall from our eyes as we no longer insist on the divide between Service Provider and Service Recipient. We want to bridge even the space that keeps us from each other in service. At Homeboy Industries, a vicinity Ive been privileged to occupy for over thirty years, I am not the great healer and that gang member over there is not in need of my exquisite healing. We are all a cry for help... we are all in need of healing. This is one of the very things that joins us together as we share our common humanity. When we discover that there is no longer daylight separating us from each other, we inhabit our mutual nobility and dignity, and everyone finds resonance in the line often uttered before Buddhist teachings: O nobly born,... remember who you really are.

Our notion of service needs to find itself situated in an expansive, spacious notion of the God who loves us without measure and without regret. We allow ourselves to be reached by the tender glance of God and then feel compelled to be that tender glance in the world. This, of course, is where the joy is. Mike Mather knows this and shares this insight with us. As Jesus says, My joy yours... your joy complete. Then the widow, orphan, and stranger guide the rest of us to the kinship of God such that God might recognize it. The fact that service is not, now, some grim duty, but rather a selfish endeavor meant to lead all parties to shared nobility, is a good and necessary shift.

Time to turn something on its head.

FR. GREGORY BOYLE

When I was nineteen years old, I was called to be a pastor. I had thought I was going to be a professional jazz trumpet player. And then, late in my first year of college, I found myself making a different choice. A very different choice.

In my calling as a pastor, I wanted to live and work in low-income parishes. I grew up in small towns in southern Indiana, and I loved those places. I wanted to spend more time in the city, thoughnot for the culture, the theater, and the bookstores, but because there were concentrations of poverty there, and I wanted to do something about that.

For the last thirty-one years, Ive worked in two low-income parishes, one in South Bend and the other in Indianapolis, Indiana. The people of those parishes, inside and outside of the congregations, tolerated me, challenged me, loved me, and taught me.

What they taught me, most fundamentally, was a different way of seeing the world. I began my ministry seeing scarcity, seeing only the need and the things that seemed to be missing in the neighborhoods in which I pastored. What I learned from those among and with whom I worked in South Bend and Indianapolis was how to see abundanceI learned to see the love and power that was overflowing in even the most economically challenged neighborhoods. I began my work as a pastor committed to addressing the scarcity that I saw in the lives of the poor and the marginalized, and now I often feel overwhelmed by the abundance I see, riches where I had thought there was nothing.

This journey has often been painful, humbling, trying. But Ive not been alone. My wife of thirty-seven years (at this writing), Kathy Licht, and our two sons, Conor and Jordan, have been not only constant companions, but also witnesses with their own lives of the abundance and joy that are always present. My journey so far has been well worth the challenges, and I imagine and expect that I will continue to grow and learn in this life.

I certainly hope you will find the stories, mistakes, and lessons contained in this book good fuel for your own growth and learning. But I want you to know at the outset that this book doesnt propose a model for the work of ministry, for urban ministry, or for any kind of work in low-income neighborhoods. There is no model, no replicable system to be imitated in community after community, no summons to multiply something that worked well somewhere else. The only thing being sold in this book is the invitation to pay attention to the wondrous children of God (especially low-income, low-wealth persons) around us and to the gifts they bring to the world.

The stories in this book, my own and the stories of people of our parish, are stories of disappointment, failure, death, and new beginnings. Grief is wound in and through these stories. But thats not all. They are also stories of change, hope, learning, and power.