Battering and US foreign policy

This is an article I wrote a few weeks before the US invasion of Iraq. It came to mind because of a recent conversation with a colleague. I have made only minor editing changes to clean it up for posting to my blog now. I reference it from time to time and want it to be publically available.

Mark Lee Robinson
February 16, 2003

I wasn’t able to get to the Instead of War rally at Pilgrim Church on Saturday until almost 2:00 and thus was only able to get into the room by standing behind the screen by the organ bench. I have never seen so many people in that sanctuary. The Fire Marshall would have had a fit.

I was late because I had been upstairs with the men in the Abuse Prevention Class that meets at Pilgrim on Saturdays. These are men who are ordered as a condition of their probation to complete an intervention program because they have used violence against an adult intimate partner. These are called “men who batter.” The juxtaposition of these events in my life only served to underscore for me how much George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein have in common with the men in the Abuse Prevention Program.

The news coverage about the Instead of War Rally disclosed that there was a lone dissenter across the street from the church. It seems his position was that we shouldn’t tolerate Saddam’s behavior any longer. Well, I’m with him. I don’t see Saddam’s behavior as acceptable. The question is not do we support his policies, but how do we oppose them. George W. and his cronies are of the opinion that we stop a bully by being a bigger bully. This is not about whose side we are on, but about what we see as effective mechanisms for positive social change. I want to be very pragmatic about this. A military attack on Iraq will not create peace in the Middle East. It may very well cause a regime change, but we have no reason to expect that the new regime will be able to create greater social justice and stability than the present one.

The men in the program are not men who like beating up their loved ones. They are men who are so scared of the instability in their relationships that they get frantic and do the only thing they can think of to do. They even say about the violence, “there was nothing else I could do.” The purpose of the Abuse Prevention Program is to show them all of the other things they can do to create what they need. There are many other choices. They just don’t see them as ways to get what they need. This is largely because they don’t know what they need. What they know is what they want. And what they want is for someone else to change.

The roots of domestic violence are the belief that the only way I am going to get what I need is for me to get someone else to change and the belief that I have the right to use violence to make others change. Thus “when I want to go out with my buddies and my wife is complaining that I am taking the car when she was going to take the kids to see her mom, and she won’t shut up, I decide I have the right to slap her to get her to be quiet. What else am I supposed to do? She was getting hysterical. You can’t let them push you around. They won’t respect you if you act soft. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

There are, of course, differences between domestic violence and international violence. But there are some significant commonalities as well. They include:

• The offender/attacker defines the problem as being someone else’s behavior. Because the other is doing things they must not do (or failing to do something they must) there is a problem.
• The solution to the problem is in getting the other to change and the offender/attacker gives himself permission to use violence to effect that change.
• The offender/attacker refuses to look at any of the ways that the problem as it is defined is a problem for the offender or is caused by the choices of the offender. There is no willingness to be accountable for the problem.
• Any suggestion by others that the offender/attacker has some responsibility for the problem is met with indignation and a charge of disloyalty (treason).

There may well be lessons for us in addressing the international violence by looking at the successes of domestic violence intervention. Among the strategies of the domestic violence intervention community we find:

• Support for victims: without supporting the victims of the violence, there is no awareness that the problem exists. The preparation and distribution of hygiene packs is an example of this support for the Iraqi people. There are many other ways to provide support and there are many other victims.
• Ending secrecy: the fact that the violence happens in hidden ways allows it to continue. By bringing the facts to light the oppression is undermined. One way this is happening now is the call to have the Bush administration reveal estimates for civilian casualties in the event of an invasion.
• Isolating offenders: by getting the peers of the offender to remove permission for the behavior. This happens in domestic violence intervention when groups of men come out against violence against women. It happens in the international arena when other nations refuse to support the invasion.
• Battering Creating legal consequences: when offenders are arrested for criminal behavior and experience sanctions, there is the strong message that such behavior will not be tolerated. We must work to get the US to agree to the establishment of a world court to which we will be accountable.

Clergy Day of Discernment Task Force

Over the past year a group of clergy of the St. Louis Association (with a token lay person or two) has met every month to six weeks to discuss the future of the Association and the Church. This group has no formal authority. It was responsible for the Clergy Day of Discernment at Parkway in May and has pledged to follow up on the findings of that day with future events. Donna Kendrick-Philips chairs the meetings and Margaret Philip handles the mailing list for reminders. We meet at Eden. All are welcome to attend.

The most recent meeting was in the commons on July 28, 2010. The next meeting will be September 7 at 3:00. What follows are the observations of one participant in the July meeting. This should not be considered minutes of the meeting but only a collection of the observations of one person.

I found this to be a fascinating and spirited conversation by the nine who attended the nearly two and half hour meeting. Present were Starsky Wilson, Traci Blackmon, Karen Miller, Randy Orwig, Donna Kendrick-Philips, Margaret Philip, Jacki Tyler, Betsy Happel, and myself, Mark Robinson. A focus of the meeting was the memo I wrote following the June meeting which began with the “elephants” that Cindy Bumb had identified as having been finally named, and ended with my sense that what we are looking for is greater clarity and commitment around building mutually accountable relationships.

A second focus of the meeting was the content we each shared as we “checked in” about what was currently arising in our personal and professional lives. Portions of this check-in referenced broken covenants by youth on mission trips and lock-ins. While no one got harmed, the transgressions hurt the whole community. We also considered the request by Gateway ONA that the Association begin a process of discerning whether to declare itself Open and Affirming.

There arose from the discussion a new vision of what the Church might be like for us and how it might manifest in the St. Louis Association. I want to start with that vision and then talk about some of the implications and some of the program ideas that came from the conversation.

 

The Homogeneous Church

It was never really true that all of our congregations were alike or even very similar. But I think it is true that, for most of our members, there is a sense that there is a best way to be the church. Some churches have a better choir and some have a better youth group and some have better mission trips, but all churches are supposed to excel at being all things for all people. Thus, when someone moves their membership from one church to another that means they find the new church to be in some sense better. Not just better for them, but ontologically better. When a pastor loses a member or a family to another church that means the pastor has failed.

One of the “elephants” is the sense of competition for members and the concern that, when members move, the pastor who has “won” them has engaged in sheep-stealing. But out of our conversation a different sense of the Church emerged for me and it allows us to see the transfer of members in a very different way.

We have never been alike. Our churches have always been distinct but have never been very skilled at articulating the differences that make each unique. When we see that some churches have great music programs and some have robust youth groups and some are dedicated to addressing problems of food insecurity and some are active in Habitat for Humanity and some are able to articulate a progressive theology in the idiom of the Black Church and some can minister to people who are rich in things but poor in the Spirit and that it is just fine and even precious that we are so distinct, then we can see all of our congregations as unique expressions of one Church. When a family leaves my congregation and joins one with other strengths, I didn’t lose members of my church. They are still members of my Church, just attaching themselves to a different congregation which better speaks to their needs at the moment.

 

The Association as Church

One of the barriers to seeing ourselves as members of the same Church is that “they” are so different from “us.” I can’t think of any issue for which this is more vividly true than for how we address concerns about openly affirming our members who are GLBT. There are deep wounds left from the affirmation of full marriage for all people by the General Synod three years ago. We have members who are horrified by being in a church that condones sin and we have members who are infuriated and hurt that they are still not fully accepted by their own church.

If we can see the request to have a conversation about the Association becoming open and affirming as an opportunity to address and heal these wounds we can go a long way to becoming a more unified but not uniform Church. This will require a process that may have to be more careful and complex than has been used by other Associations as they have considered these questions.

A second issue arose out of the awareness of the Confirmation Day event coming up in October at Eden. While we think it is a great event, we are bit puzzled about why it is something Eden does. What would it be like if we were able to create a confirmation program as an activity of the Association? What would it be like for Confirmation to be an activity of the Association rather than of the Congregation? What if we all pooled our leadership and our eligible youth and conducted something that connected the kids in a vibrant and vigorous way with the larger church as manifest in the Association and the closely associated institutions in the St. Louis area? What if our kids grew up looking forward to being old enough to do Confirmation with other kids from all around St. Louis and then “graduated” into a Youth Program of the Association that kept them active in fellowship and mission?

But wouldn’t that require an Association staff to run the programs? Perhaps, but if we look at the recent and rousing success of the Hope for Haiti event a couple of weeks ago we can see a model of collaboration. That event worked because everyone working on it knew they couldn’t do it on their own and so asked for help. It worked because knowing they needed help, they knew who to ask and those they asked came through. It worked because they were able to construct relationships that are mutually accountable.

 

Becoming Mutually Accountable

We sometimes refer to the buildings we own as “the church.” We know that isn’t true. The church isn’t the building but the people. But, in fact, that isn’t true either. The church isn’t the people. You can get a bunch of people together and still not have a church. The church isn’t the people but the relationships between the people. It is the history, the commitment, the agreements, and the hopes of all who identify as members of the church.

Church is relationship. Relationships are hard. They have always been hard but they have gotten much harder. Not but a couple of generations ago we all knew who we were and how we were to be with each other. The roles were clearly defined. We may not always have done what we were “supposed to” do, but at least we knew what that was.

Now it is much harder. Roles are changing…fast. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the institution of marriage. I don’t know anyone who has, or even wants, the marriage that their parents had. And the same thing is happening in the role of pastor. We aren’t sure who we are supposed to be.

We know we need integrity. We know that when we enter into a covenant, even when we sign one with our parents before going on a mission trip or other activity with the youth group, we expect that everyone knows what they are agreeing to and will abide by it. When our youth willfully and repeatedly violate the covenant and then think “putting on puppy-dog eyes” will atone, we become alarmed at their capacity to build healthy and just relationships.

It may well be that the task of the Church is to support the creation of healthy and just relationships. For us to be able to do that, we first have to know how to do it for ourselves. But a relationship isn’t something I can do by myself. I have to construct them with others.

Toward the end of the meeting I tossed out that I have had a series of conversations about building on the content of Boundary Training by going on to look, not so much at what we shouldn’t do, but at what we can do to be healthy. The last portion of the most recent iteration of Boundary Training does this by introducing the theme of accountability. This will be the core of a seminar I would like to create under the banner “Beyond Boundaries: Building Mutually Accountable Relationships.” I will spell out more of what I have in mind in another memo.

I have tried to weave together in this narrative some of the themes that arose for me in this remarkable meeting. I hope I have captured some of what others experienced as well. Let me just close with the observation that we all want to celebrate who we are and not gather to make lists of how we know we are dying. We are living and growing. We just don’t know who we are going to become as we grow up into the fullness of Christ. We trust that when two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name, we are the Body of Christ which will not die.

Mark Lee Robinson