When I was preparing and visioning for VUP, I asked the question, "What do I want my students & staff to take away from VUP?" What I wanted for my students and staff to take from VUP was to have a more holistic view of Justice and for them to be able to better integrate their experiences back into their everyday communities.
To explain the holistic view of Justice, I want to refer to a book called,
When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself - Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert. If you get a chance to, I highly recommend this book.
Four-fold Justice Diagram (Shalom)
Originally, when I thought about Justice & Poverty, the first thing that came to my mind was more the social component. Yet, this image paints a bigger picture of what Justice & Poverty is. In the beginning (Genesis 2), everything was created to be in right relationship with each other:
Us & God: Our relationship between us and God was good and our perspectives of God were good.
Us & Self: Our perspectives of self are the perspectives that God sees us (No Shame)
Us & Others: Our relationships with each other was beautiful and good. (No blaming each other)
Us & Rest of Creation (aka Work): Our relationship with work is beautiful. Care for the land and it will care for you.
Also, there is a overarching circle that includes the political, social, economic, and religious systems. There are some things that are beyond the individuals control that could either lock people into poverty or remove them from poverty. The systems affect the people and also vice versa, the people affect the systems.
Four-Fold Justice Diagram (The Fall)
However, The Fall did happen as we read in Genesis 3 and we see very quickly how all the relationships (us & God, us & self, us & others, us & rest of creation) become broken. On top of that, since these relationships are broken it also can affect the systems around them too. This diagram is more of a representation of today and our VUP team could see each and every aspect of this playing out more and more in the Downtown Eastside.
The great thing though is that God isn't about leaving these broken relationships broken. He sent His only son Jesus to, first of all, repair our broken relationships between us and God and from that, restore the rest of our relationship (self, others, creation). On top of that, He is in the business of repairing the broken systems. The challenging thing is though... I believe He has called US to help repair these broken systems.
On VUP, we had a chance to take a look at each of these aspects or at least be exposed to how there can be brokenness in them. Along with that though, we explored the hope in beginning to repair these broken relationships and redeeming the systems of injustice.
Studying scripture (Amos, Sermon on the Mount, Urban Theology)
Speakers (Dave Diewert, Philip Owen, etc)
Internships (Salvation Army, Jacob's Well, etc)
Other (Eating together, Group spiritual direction, small groups)
It was indeed both challenging and life-giving at the same time but I feel that we were able to walk away from VUP with a more holistic view of God's heart for Justice in this world. How it doesn't just talk about social Justice but it includes all the aspects of Four-fold Justice.
.jpg)
