Why the Church Cares

When I was a tyke, my older sisters had one key responsibility on summer vacation. Make sure the boy did not drown in the hotel pool.

On one occasion, a sister followed me over the edge and into the shallow end, despite being dressed for dinner. On another, a lifeguard (who wasn’t fond of me) pushed me into the deep end. I found out I could tread water. He lost his job. We expect lifeguards to pull us out, not push us in.

My favourite part of my job is leading the Blanket Exercise. I love seeing a light go on for people as they learn parts of Canadian history that they never learned in school and realize how we came to the broken place we are today. I love learning from participants in the sharing circle afterwards, especially when they speak about Indigenous people that they know. I love how it helps our intellectual, brainy denomination to learn with our hearts as well.

In late 2015 I had a chance to learn firsthand about this mass migration. I saw up close the forces pushing people to risk everything, the pull of Europe and the wealthy North, and the greed of those who profit from the migrant’s dangerous journey, taking desperate people’s money, their bodies, and sometimes, it seems, their souls in payment.

It’s been a great year for Do Justice. Thanks for reading and learning along with us, as we wrestled with faith with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other (Karl Barth)!

What is “restorative justice”? Those words are becoming more common in our conversations about criminal justice and even everyday interpersonal conflicts. Perhaps you’ve even heard of restorative justice as an approach to use when dealing with church conflict. The Office of Social Justice now even has a monthly newsletter called “Catching Stones” that points people towards resources to learn more about and practice restorative justice. 

What this pro-life series has taught me is that the CRCNA is deeply, unapologetically pro-life. 

To me, being pro-life means lamenting the disproportionate number of Indigenous women who are missing and murdered. 

To me, being pro-life means that you commit to the life, goodness, hope, image-of-God in a person—even when that person can be really, really difficult to be around. Being pro-life means that there’s no such thing as running out of chances. To be pro-life is to learn to see a person’s whole story—not just the front cover.

That night, life support was removed, and Dylan died in the loving arms of my wife and I rather than dying alone in a plastic incubator. 

“Why are they doing this to us?” I will never forget when an individual with several disabilities posed this question to me.