Last month, I wrote about Liberation Theology and summarized Gustavo Gutierrez’ Theology of Liberation. Gutierrez argues that Christians need to be engaged in healing structural and systemic sin in the world versus only healing personal sin.
This has brought a lot of my attention to government systems that I take advantage of such as city governments. Every day there are laws passed and justice executed on my behalf right in my city that I really know nothing about.
When I think of giving back to the community, I usually think about church or non-profit organizations, but rarely do I think about city or other governmental organizations where justice or injustice are executed on my behalf.
There is danger in trusting non-governmental organizations to enact justice rather than governmental organizations. Haiti is a great example where more non-governmental organizations exist than in any other country in the world, and their affect has been to increase poverty.
It’s also very common for Christian, suburban, mid-upper class dwellers like me to be more worried about crime rates in our area than whether actual justice is taking place. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people vote for local politicians exclusively on what the crime rate is. Crime rate itself is a dubious and unjust way to measure justice this article from the New Yorker talks about.
Giving to and volunteering in non-profits is comfortable because they are typically founded by people that look and talk like us. Government organizations represent everybody (in theory). Government is messy and boring.
Corazon and I were foster parents during 2019 through the department of children and family services in Illinois. Requirements for the family to get their children back changed during each court date, translators would leave in the middle of court appointments, and red tape slowed every good thing we wanted to do as foster parents.
This experience gave me a new love for being engaged in government because I understood more how the state actually acted on my behalf.
As justice becomes more important for Christians around the world, here are a list ways to volunteer and give back to government (as opposed to non-governmental organizations) that I had never thought of. The list is from Energize, a training and resource organization for volunteer engagement.
- Public schools
- Courts and prisons
- Public libraries
- Parks and recreation programs
- Homeland security projects
- Community policing/police auxiliaries
- Veterans hospitals
- State departments such as elder care, services to children and families, public health
- Fire departments and emergency response teams
- Natural Resources Conservation Service (formerly Soil Conservation Service)
- Cooperative Extension Service (including 4-H): individual volunteers who care about the services they support as volunteers can have a huge impact when they choose to become activist volunteers in political (not necessarily partisan) ways
If you enjoyed this content, subscribe here to my newsletter to receive future articles.
Joshua Ballantine 