With Gospel Urgency: Visiting Fellow Navigates Politics of Poverty with Students, VIP Guests
By the Rev. Kyle Oliver
“She has to go into the cloakroom and take our call,” said Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner to a dozen or so assembled divinity and public policy students. The co-chair of the National African American Clergy Network was vamping a bit, interweaving the narrative threads of her lecture with impromptu check-ins to set up her interview with the day’s other guest.
This classroom session was unusual, even accounting for the predictably choppy rhythms of a Zoom call. In my experience, seminary courses tend to unfold at a somewhat measured pace. Studying ancient texts and time-honored traditions calls for rumination, for pauses pregnant with the inner soundings of the Spirit’s still, small voice.
But most seminary courses don’t focus on the fast-paced world of political advocacy, let alone feature appearances by chairs of powerful congressional committees. The Rev. David Beckmann, an ELCA Lutheran pastor and spring 2021 visiting fellow at CDSP, is working to change that reality.
On March 8, 2021, the House of Representatives was voting on the American Rescue Plan. And so his VIP guest, Rep. Barbara Lee of the 13th Congressional District of California, had to connect with Beckmann’s class via telephone rather than video. (It turned out she was in a Capitol-bound automobile, not the Democratic Cloakroom.)
“A lot of advocacy work is a little bit on the run,” Beckmann said a few months later, reflecting on that session. He served as designer and convener of the course, entitled Poverty, Faith Communities, and the Politics of 2021.“You’re always adapting to what’s happening in Congress, and the members of Congress are always adapting to what’s happening now. It’s not easy to govern a country of 350 million diverse people, especially nowadays.”
Lee and Williams-Skinner were among more than a dozen national leaders from the fields of politics, public policy, and faith-based advocacy whom Beckmann invited to take part in the interdisciplinary learning experience. The guest speakers came from a professional network he assembled throughout a career in faith-based leadership on global and domestic poverty issues. Their shared purpose, and the focus of the course, is taking part in political processes for the benefit of people in need.
From World Bank Gadfly to NGO President
A graduate not only of Christ Seminary in St. Louis but also the London School of Economics, Beckmann has always understood his ministry as connected to the alignment between public policy and God’s mission in the world.
“My call was to be a missionary economist,” he said.“To connect Christian faith and moral teaching to economics, especially poverty issues.”
He began this work at the World Bank, wherein fifteen years of service he developed a reputation as a squeaky wheel who challenged the organization to do more effective work transforming the lives of poor people around the world. He then served for nearly three decades as president of Bread for the World, which he describes as “the largest faith-based advocacy movement in the country, certainly on poverty and hunger issues.”
“We were able to play a major role in quadrupling U.S. foreign assistance focused on reducing poverty around the world, and also improving the quality of that assistance,” Beckmann said.“During this period, there was dramatic progress against hunger, poverty, and disease. Even now, the setback because of COVID-19 is huge, but nothing like a reversal of all that progress, not even close. A lot of Christian people and Christian leaders over a period of decades kept pushing on different aspects of getting the U.S. government to do its part, and we were successful.”
Beckmann received the distinguished World Food Prize in 2010, sharing that year’s honors with Heifer International CEO Jo Luck. He retired from Bread for the World in 2020, crediting his time there with transforming his entire understanding of what is possible in his mission field.
“When I started working at Bread for the World, I assumed [the potential] was just a matter of marginal changes at best,” he recalled.“But then we started seeing dramatic reductions in hunger, poverty, and disease in places like Ethiopia and Bangladesh. It made it clear that we can virtually end hunger, poverty, and avoidable disease within a couple of decades, if we can organize the necessary political give-a-damn.”
This sense of momentum and possibility is part of what keeps Beckmann motivated in his work. It’s also a key aspect of his theological interpretation of the progress so far.
“It’s like a great exodus underway,” he said.“Do we think God’s not part of this? You can’t worship the God of love that we know in Jesus Christ and not realize that this is something God is doing in our time, wanting us to be part of it in our time. [And it] seems to me to be really important to the integrity of the Christianity in the United States. “Our civic life, our life as citizens, is part of what we have to offer to God.”
Policy Progress Amidst Political Polarization
Listening to Beckmann describe the accomplishments of the various faith-based coalitions he has been a part of, I couldn’t help but feel a bit exhilarated. What brought me back to earth was how he balances lofty theologizing with a knack for communicating about the hard-nosed strategies and tactics that ultimately make these outcomes possible.
This mix of inspiration and perspiration probably feels familiar to CDSP students trained in community organizing. Still, Beckmann encouraged them to think about the discipline of legislative advocacy as a complementary skill, one just as relevant to a civically informed vision of discipleship.
“To get people experience in influencing public policy at the national level as well as the local and state level should be part of the life of our local congregations,” he said.
What has changed for Beckmann in recent years is the result of a tectonic shift in the partisan political landscape for anti-poverty legislation, voting rights legislation, and meaningful bipartisan collaboration. Beckmann is frank that the takeover of the Republican party by Trumpist forces has had a destabilizing effect on the cooperation he and his colleagues once counted on.
“I worked in a bipartisan way all my life, but I’m really disappointed with the Republicans in Congress this year,” he said. “Not with all Republicans, but I think the congressional leadership has been really off the tracks. If the Democrats don’t win in 2022 at the national level, I think we’ll see a big reversal for poor people from what we’re seeing now with a slight Democratic majority.”
Although cognizant of the care that leaders of congregations must take when it comes to explicitly electoral advocacy, Beckmann nevertheless believes a greater focus on this area will be necessary for advancing gospel priorities. For example, he says Christians should consider political contributions to be a part of their charitable budget, and likewise voter registration and working for candidates to be excellent ways to faithfully volunteer their time.
“It’s a wonderful thing, the extent to which congregations are still bipartisan,” he said.“That is really crucial. The gospel of God isn’t Democrat or Republican. But I think many people who are Christians who follow through the logic in our current political situation will say, ‘Geez, we’ve got to get Democrats elected in 2022.’
“I’ve never said that in my life. I’ve always talked about, ‘Let’s work together.’ Bipartisanship is not dead, but it’s not enough.”
A Course Born of Partnerships
However, in two important ways, Beckmann’s time with CDSP has been deeply shaped by a different sort of cooperation.
For one thing, Poverty, Faith Communities, and the Politics of 2021 was not solely a divinity school course. Beckmann had a joint teaching appointment with the Goldman School, the public policy unit of the University of California, Berkeley. Seminarians from CDSP and other schools of the Graduate Theological Union shared the classroom with Goldman grad students. He said the different institutions have a lot to contribute to shared conversations.
“CDSP is very much focused on not only pastoring the people in the church but helping the people in the church to be in mission to the world,” he said. “And Goldman knows a lot about the public policies that would actually help us get to a world that better reflects what God wants.”
Beckmann’s relationship with Dr. Henry Brady, longtime Goldman School dean and past divinity student at Union Theological Seminary in New York, served as a partial catalyst for the course. Beckmann also credits the Very Rev. W. Mark Richardson, president and dean at CDSP, with playing a key role in bringing the course to fruition.
The other dimension of partnership at work in the class was Beckmann’s collaboration with the various guest speakers. Certainly for the session I attended, entitled “How the Black Church Built Electoral Power,” it was Williams-Skinner and briefly Lee in the driver’s seat. Williams-Skinner examined the history of Christianity’s influence on both white people’s justifications for American enslavement and Black people’s long struggles for liberation.
“Why did Black people build so many churches?” she asked the class. “It was the one thing they could control.”
She went on to explore how this foundation of dignity, belonging, sacred purpose, and collective endeavor translated into civil rights advancement for African Americans, with implications for today’s politics.
“Why are they now trying to cut Sunday voting in Georgia?” she continued in her early March lecture. “Because that’s how Democrats were able to take the Senate.”
For her part, Lee discussed the policy changes that are possible when electoral power is paired with ongoing issue advocacy.
“Public pressure is everything,” she said, recounting the role of faith communities in advocating for global aid increases she helped win during the George W. Bush administration.
Other guest speakers in the course included Josh Dickson, former national faith engagement director for the Biden-Harris campaign; Gabriel Salguero, founder & president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition; the Goldman School’s Brady, who discussed how churches foster democratic participation but too often shy away from conflict; and Eric Sapp, whose political marketing firm, Public Democracy, works to amplify disenfranchised voices online.
Beckmann also saw these partnerships as a way to immerse course participants in real-world skill-building opportunities. He required each student to give twenty volunteer hours to an activist project. In at least one case, that challenge may have catalyzed a minor turning point in a public policy career.
“One of the students contacted Eric [Sapp] and asked if he could be an intern in that company for these twenty hours,” Beckmann said. “He ended up working 200 hours and getting a paid fellowship to continue working for Public Democracy.”
Seeking Strategic Impact
Beckmann lives in Metro Washington and returned home when his course wrapped up in April. But he has plans to continue translating his vocational experiences into practical learning experiences for ministry leaders and other people of faith who want to be more involved in anti-hunger advocacy.
Last fall, Beckmann offered a new iteration of his course at Union Theological Seminary. This time around, he focused the conversations even more deeply on proven actions that faith communities can take to change the politics of poverty. He recently began work as dean’s advisor for political and economic justice at Virginia Theological Seminary.
“You can’t food bank your way to the end of hunger. You’ve got the food bank, but you’ve also got to get the U.S. government to provide leadership, and we can do that,” he said. “Once you get that, the feasibility of progress makes the politics of poverty ‘gospel urgent.’ I don’t think poverty is just another issue. The widow, the orphan, and the immigrant are really close to the heart of God.”
In addition to teaching new iterations of his course at other seminaries, Beckmann is publishing resources he hopes will help individuals and local churches get more involved in anti-poverty advocacy in a savvy way.
For example, he received a grant to turn recordings of his class sessions into a “Poverty, God, Politics” Webcast. The series, outlined in the sidebar below, is now available on the Public Policy Channel of University of California Television and has collectively been viewed more than 17,000 times on YouTube.
Readers can access the webcast at cdsp.edu/poverty-god-politics and learn more on Beckmann’s blog at davidbeckmann.net.
