Jim Wallis - Living Gods Politics: A Guide to Putting Your Faith into Action

W E ARE DELIGHTED that you are taking this opportunity to study Gods Politics by Jim Wallis and to use this workbook as a way to more fully equip yourself to understand and live its message. Living Gods Politics is not only a commentary on Gods Politics (though it is that). Rather, Living Gods Politics is intended to build upon the commitments presented in the book in three ways.

First, we provide resources and information aimed to help you probe more deeply into the major themes covered in Gods Politics (GP) . Second, while it is important to understand the content of GP, it is more important to begin to live out its challenges in our daily lives. To that end, we have provided specific suggestions on a number of different activities that might enable you to act on the message of GP . At the end of the day, both Gods Politics and Living Gods Politics (LGP) are intended to help you think through what your faith means and to learn how that faith can be expressed in public life. LGP has been structured specifically for these purposes.

The material is arranged so that you might work through LGP and GP together over a period of eight weeks. Each week covers one theme from GP, and each day of a given week focuses on a particular aspect of that weeks theme. In order to get the most from this study, we recommend that you gather together with others and undertake your reflections in a group setting. You could form a group from your congregation, school, organization, or other association. Either small groups or more formal Sunday school classes would provide excellent opportunities for community, fellowship, and study. In many cases, members of your group may choose to work together as you seek to study and act on your insights.

Second, we at Sojourners/Call to Renewal are constantly developing new resources and planning various ways to express a healthy and vibrant vision of faith in public life. We invite you to visit our Web sites (www.sojo.net and www.calltorenewal.org) to see the latest developments. In fact, when you visit our site, be sure to sign up for SojoMail, our weekly e-zine. (You can find it by going to www.sojo.net and clicking on SojoMail.) SojoMail is free, provides access to a wealth of resources and action ideas, and gives an entry into the Sojourners/Call to Renewal community.

Third, you can build on the material we present by making a firm commitment to each other for regular study and prayer as you work through LGP and GP . It is our hope that the experience will be life-transforming for you and your study partners. However, for it to be so, you will need a core of firmly committed people who are passionate about hearing the full breadth of the biblical call to social justice and are willing to experiment with what they have heard. We encourage you and your group to consider establishing a covenant to read and be prepared for each weeks study. Please go to the Sojourners Web site and use the meet up feature to locate other folks in your area who are interested in studying together. Let us know how your study is going.

Now lets take a look at the eight-week format. As noted, the study consists of weekly sessions built around the central themes addressed in Gods Politics . Those themes and the order in which they will be covered are as follows:

Week One: Faith and Politics

Week Two: War and Peace

Week Three: Economic Justice

Week Four: Poverty

Week Five: A Consistent Ethic of Life

Week Six: Racism

Week Seven: Strengthening Family and Community Values

Week Eight: Hope for the Future

Each week is prefaced with the connection between GP and LGP . In particular, we will indicate the appropriate chapters from GP to read in conjunction with that weeks theme. We will not repeat the content from those chapters, though we will provide a brief summary of each. Some chapters are used in more than one week. These introductions serve as the bridge between the workbook and the book. During the course of each week, specific aspects of the theme will be examined by means of a focused reading for each day of the week. The subtopics remain the same from week to week, as follows:

Day 1: Introducing the Topic

Day 2: Considering the Evidence

Day 3: Reading the Bible

Day 4: The Christian Tradition

Day 5: Living Examples in the Contemporary Church

Day 6: Putting Faith into Action

Day 7: Group Meeting and Reflection

Each week you and your group will consider one theme from Gods Politics from a number of different perspectives. Some are aimed at providing a better grasp of the issue (Days 1 and 2); some at how Christians have thought about this issue (Days 3, 4, and 5), and one day each for considering specific ways that you might live out concern for that issue (Day 6) and for personal and group reflection (Day 7).

You can organize and schedule your group in any of a number of ways. However, we suggest that Day 7 would be the best day to meet as a group. By then you will have processed the weeks material as individuals. Your group meeting will allow you to consider the issue together using the suggested questions and discuss each others personal reflections. It is important that your discussion explicitly consider the focus of Day 6. Of course, you should feel free to creatively move beyond the suggestions that we have included. Look for opportunities to select actions that meet the needs of your particular community. Dont feel discouraged if you are unable to plan an action item with regard to each and every theme. However, strategically choosing ways you will act on what you are learning is critical to the study. So even if you cannot engage in some activity from Day 6 each week, consider selecting a subset of the themes on which to undertake particular actions.

The appendix to this book provides a number of ideas on how to engage in different kinds of social action, from letter-writing campaigns to educational events to community organizing to demonstrations to nonviolent civil disobedience. Some forms of social action fit better than others with particular themes we will study together. In our material for Day 6 of each week, we have listed brief examples of the kinds of social action we see as best fitting each theme. To avoid repetition, however, we have provided the details in the appendix. As noted above, please feel free to step outside the box and come up with your own creative ways to act on Gods Politics.

Once again, welcome to this study! It is our prayer that Gods Spirit will be active in your life as you seek to live out the biblical call to justice and love.

A S YOU PREPARE to work through Gods Politics with Living Gods Politics as a guide, take a few minutes to prepare yourself by recording your current thoughts on several questions. Reflect, either individually or with your study group, on the following:

1. Before you begin to read through Gods Politics and Living Gods Politics, consider what you think of the relation between faith and politicsparticularly how faith should inform and guide us on political issues. Does God have a politics? Why do you say this?
2. Construct a list of factors that you think must be taken into consideration when developing commitments that adequately reflect Gods intentions for our public life together. In other words, how would a society that lives according to Gods intention that we work for the common good be organized and structured? What kinds of public and social institutions would it have? What would its priorities be?