Social Justice: a long, hard road

We’ve just completed a Week of Transformation: an annual youth week that a group of us from several churches put on. It involves a lot of serious teaching, about 4 hours a day. This year’s topics were Worldview (including a biblical worldview of sexuality), The Bible, Leadership and Social Justice.

Last year we had Social Justice as a large theme. A couple of us did some teaching on it and then we organized a service learning afternoon where groups got to see organizations in Harare that are addressing the various issues of social justice. It was a successful day and I think many of the youth were challenged by what they learnt and saw.

We decided Social Justice was important enough to repeat again this year. I spent two days giving some intense teaching about Social Justice to the 60+ 15-25 year-olds we had in attendance. I tried to give a biblical basis for justice first and then to illustrate where they fit in the scheme of things, kicking this second lesson off with an unfair but reality-based, class-divided lunch. We served 10 of them a beautiful lunch, 20 beans and rice and the rest just rice. They were not impressed but it led to some excellent discussion and thinking that provided the perfect intro to my talk on how we should possibly deal with the differences that are built into our lives. And finally, before we went out to visit sites that are doing justice, we talked about the difference between deep justice and not-so-deep service.

But although the afternoon was mostly a success again (barring the usual mishaps and confusions that happen when trying to organize the movement of 75 people to different places all at the same time) I left that night discouraged. The group I went with had gone to a disability daycare centre in a low-income, high density suburb of the city. A centre where mothers of children with disabilities come each day with their children. They cannot work because caring for their children is full time job and they use the centre as a place to support each other and try to start small businesses together. Our guide was a member of our church who works for the micro-finance trust that is also connected to our church and he tried to get our group to respond after we had left, asking them what we could do for this place or similar places that would be sustainable and would work with them rather than at them. With each response my heart sank.

“We could fundraise.”

“We can collect toys and things and go and visit them.”

“We could hold a charity concert!”

The charity concert was the final blow. After two days of teaching, they didn’t get it. They couldn’t distinguish service from deep justice. Now, later, after some sleep and logical thinking, I realise that these are new ideas for many of them. That many are young (I had several of the 15 year olds) and struggle to think outside the box. That the concept of justice verses service is very difficult to practically apply. That the fact that they are even aware of these places and people is a good outcome. But most importantly, perhaps, that social justice is a long, hard road. Changing unjust systems and working towards sustained mercy takes years and years. And perhaps so does people’s understanding of what social justice actually is. And while that is discouraging—both the time justice takes and the time people take to realise what justice is!—I think that it is worth it. And maybe next year, they’ll get it a little bit more.