You live in a community that’s been overlooked and oppressed for years. Neighbors are turning against neighbors, refusing to lend money or otherwise help one another out. Your community is a joke to the greater community. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Come and see four inner-city neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama. Or hear them, rather, in this 18-minute podcast episode.
Gerrel Jones has discovered Jesus as an effective community organizer, and his Renew Birmingham and its extraordinary team of staff members and volunteers are putting Jesus’s community-building principles to work in the four poorest neighborhoods in Birmingham. Renew’s story, its approach and its outcomes will challenge you to help communities in new ways—and perhaps to understand Jesus and his mission in new ways, too.
Above: Gerrel Jones, Renew Birmingham Founder and Executive Director
Resources:
Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America by Nathan McCall
Gerrel’s plug for Makes Me Wanna Holler:
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Gerrel’s plug for Man’s Search for Meaning:
Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine by Richard A. Horsley
Jesus and the Politics provides an excellent theological and historical framework for understanding Jesus’s work as a community organizer.
From the publisher: “Learning from anthropological studies of the more subtle forms of peasant politics, Horsley discerns from these sources how Jesus, as a Moses- and Elijah-like prophet, generated a movement of renewal in Israel that was focused on village communities.”
Gerrel Jones’s talk before a group of Birmingham church leaders on what church should look like
Connective Tissue’s great interview of Gerrel Jones
Above: Jason Williams, Renew Birmingham Youth Program Director
Music: “Wild Wild Wet” by Pecan Pie. Used by permission.
Citations to quotes:
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second edition (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 318.
Richard A. Horsley, You Shall Not Bow down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul (Cascade Books, 2021), 71.
