Toward a Missional Economy, Part 1

I recently spoke on “Economy and Mission” at Verge L.A. 2009. Since starting Twoshirts.org almost two years ago, this has been a significant subject of study for me and it has direct bearing on how we shape community – something we’re currently neck deep in defining over at Ikon Community. So, over the next few days I’ll share my Verge presentation here in the hopes of stimulating some thoughtfulness about how missional churches might follow the Holy Spirit in cultivating subversive, grassroots economic communities in a desert of greed and inequality.

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I am an economist. Not by education or by training. The truth is I don’t know much about “macroeconomic rigidities” or “consensus forecasts,” but what I do know, perhaps naively, is that the heart of economics is merely the stewardship of resources, or, quite literally the “rules of the household” (Greek: oikos & nomos). Therefore, I am economist simply by living.

This means you are an economist too. It doesn’t matter if you’re poorly educated or hopelessly impoverished. Economics isn’t about what you know, or how much you have; it’s about how you handle what you have. Everyone has stuff, and everyone has a way of figuring out what to hold on to and what to let go of.

Obviously, then, God is also an economist because God has stuff – lots of stuff! So if, as I take it, “mission” means going where God goes and doing what God does (John 5:19) then a critical question for us is, “What is God the economist doing?” Or, perhaps a more helpful question for shedding our cultural prejudices would be, “What are the rules of his household?”
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Manna in the Desert
There are several powerful economic stories in scripture, but I’d like to suggest that the defining economic narrative for the Kingdom is found in Exodus Chapter 16. It’s a familiar story. The Israelites are sojourning in the dessert, starving and desperate, and God caused food to fall from heaven. Manna in the desert. We tell this story to remember that true sustenance comes from God – including the eternal sustenance of Christ (John 6) – but something else amazing happened those forty years in the dessert, something that has direct bearing on our economic orientation as a community of faith, and we almost never discuss it in American churches because it disrupts our preferred neo-liberal economic narrative: Exodus 16:18 recounts that after the Manna fell,

“He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little” (Ex 16:18).

What this means, bluntly, is that God’s generous daily gift created an economy of open sharing. Paul explicitly exegetes what Exodus implies, flatly stating in 2 Cor 8 that whoever gathered too much shared with those who gathered too little, thereby creating a society of genuine economic equality. Paul then confers this same economy to the early Church, saying,

“Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality” (2 Cor 8:13-14).

God even created a mechanism for those desert-dwelling Hebrews to insure that selfish hoarding couldn’t occur: any Manna stored for more than one day (other than on Friday) quickly infested with maggots (Ex 16:19-20), thereby creating the powerful object lesson that greed invites decay into the community of God.

Questions:

  1. What narratives (biblical or secular) would you say presently define the economic orientation of U.S. Churches and Christians? Why?
  2. How can the story of Manna in the desert challenge our economic thinking?
  3. What does “equality” mean to us as Americans? How does Paul use this word differently in 2 Cor 8 than we usually mean it?
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