Young congregations are struggling across this country as their physical plant’s construction debt, created when the economy was booming, is suddenly becoming a major drag on their ability to provide the programs that were fueling their growth.
Just as I told my children about the Civil Rights Movement, my parents told me about the Great Depression. I heard about the grandfather who lost a farm because he co-signed a note for a less provident brother, the grandfather who kept a farm because a New Deal program enabled him to pay a mortgage note just in the nick of time and a once prosperous great-grandfather who managed to pay off all his depositors in his small town bank before dying a broken man.
The downturn is giving us fresh excuses for moral flagellation, of ourselves and others. If yesterday’s White House proselytized shopping, today’s is shaming bankers for their greed.The message: We sinned with profligacy, and now we repent in parsimony. Thrift is the new abstinence.
ABC News: At the last minute, Moore found Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago and counselor Sandra Wells. “She told me ‘I want to keep my
The ad states: “Suppose you spent $1 million every single day starting from the day Jesus was born — and kept spending through today. A million dollars a day for more than 2,000 years. You would still have spent less money than Congress just did.” To which the response can only be,: And your point is?
With the downturn in the economy people are struggling to learn how to manage their finances in a new and difficult setting. A somewhat surprising turn of events has significant numbers turning to their local churches to find support and advice.
Like in the United States, in the United Kingdom we have had bankers come to the House of Commons and attempt to explain how they got what they got wrong so wrong. Perhaps even these leading bankers were as much locked into the system as everyone below them. Yes they had more freedom to act, but they were acting systemically. This is the point about corporate sin: it puts its systemic tentacles around everyone.
As the crises intensify, those who have will be tempted to hold on to what they have, become less generous and ignore even more the realities of the weak and vulnerable. So we pray that you do not lead them into that temptation but deliver them from their selfish tendencies and endow them with changed attitudes and new lenses through which to view the world.
Through the ebbs and flows of the neurotransmitter dopamine, our emotions motivate us to seek tangible rewards for ourselves and our families. Dopamine should guide us, but it often ends up controlling us. Logic and rationality hardly stand a chance in overcoming emotionally driven money habits mediated by dopamine.
In January alone the American economy lost 598,000 jobs. The official unemployment number is 7.6% but that’s an artificially low figure; it doesn’t include those unemployed for over a year or contractors who have no work once a corporation has canceled their project. Some look at this figure and see a crisis needing swift and solid government intervention. Others see it as a system reaping the fruits of failed fiscal policy. Me, I look at it and I see—competition. I already got the call.