1. THE BIRTH OF
AN IDEA
Since joining Broadway Baptist Church two years ago, I
have experienced a strong sense of calling to people in
normal, predominantly white, moderate churches. I
call my idea the Common Peace Community. The goal
is to look at the world through the eyes of the poor
and ask why.

2. THE IDEA OF A
COMMON PEACE
COMMUNITY IS
TIED TO MY
PERSONAL
STORY
Alan Bean, aspiring
theologian

3. Born in Calgary, Alberta in 1953, I spent most of my
childhood in Yellowknife (1955-1963) in the North West
Territories of Canada.

4. EARLY
INFLUENCE
Bill Davidson was my pastor at Calvary Baptist Church
in Yellowknife. Before coming to the church he and
his wife June spent two years at Trout Rock, a tiny
fishing village, translating the Bible in to the Dogrib
language. Although I didn’t think much about it at
the time, their example suggested to me that
Christianity was about living sacrificially for the sake
of the poor.

5. THE CIVIL
RIGHTS
MOVEMENT
CAPTURED MY
YOUNG
IMAGINATION
When we moved a thousand miles South to Edmonton,
Alberta in 1963, the civil rights movement was reaching a
tumultuous climax. In Canada, Martin Luther King Jr. was
a hero and white Southerners were dismissed as racist
bigots. To my young mind, the spirituality of the civil
rights movement looked like the closest thing to genuine
Christianity I had ever witnessed. By comparison, the
bland moralism of the Baptist churches I attended seemed
tepid and uninspiring.

6. I arrived at Southern in 1975 and married my
wife, Nancy, in 1977. We both graduated with
Master of Divinity degrees. During the 1980s, I
pastored churches in Canada and Wyoming
before returning to the Seminary in 1989 to
work on a doctorate in church history and
theology.
A LITTLE
BACKGROUND
ABOUT ME

7. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on William Owen Carver, a
relatively progressive missions and world religions professor at
Southern between 1898 and 1954. Carver wanted Southern Baptists
to cooperate with other Baptists and to cooperate with other
denominations on the mission field. This made him a controversial,
occasionally scandalous figure. By the end of his career he was
writing long, complicated books that avoided subjects that might
get him in trouble. Carver had been effectively silenced.
THE SAD CASE
OF W.O.
CARVER

8. When I arrived at Southern Seminary in 1989, the
faculty had changed very little during my ten year
absence. After two years, a fundamentalist faction
had taken over the board of trustees and the entire
church history faculty was gone. The formerly
moderate R. Albert Mohler had reinvented himself as
the voice of Southern Baptist conservatism. A crop
of conservative professors was hired, then fired for
not being conservative enough. Eventually, Dr.
Mohler had his faculty singing out of the same
hymnal.
A CHANGING
OF THE
GUARD AT
SOUTHERN
SEMINARY

9. Albert Mohler and his spiritual kin long for a homogenous
church in which authoritarian pastors echo the fears and
passions of the people they serve. Those who can’t march
in lock step are forced out of the parade. Many of us find
this kind of enforced conformity distasteful but we aren’t
sure what to offer as an alternative.
THE
HOMOGENEOUS
CHURCH

10. The Bean family moved to Tulia in the summer of 1998.
Nancy had lived in the town of 5,000 as a child and was
crowned Little Miss Tulia in 1959. Now, after a vivid
dream, Nancy felt a strong desire to return to her roots.
I had spent the past 20 years as pastor of Baptist and
Methodist churches. Nancy was a school teacher.
Lydia was a college freshman. Adam and Amos were Jr.
and Sr. high school students.
A TURNING
POINT

11. In the early morning hours of July 23, 1999, dozens of police officers
from across the Texas Panhandle descended on the poor end of Tulia,
arresting dozens of black residents at gun point. Startled defendants,
their hair unbrushed, were paraded before television cameras in their
underwear. The headline in the local paper read, “Tulia’s streets
cleared of garbage.” The forty-six defendants were called “scumbags”
and “a cancer on the community.”

12. Nancy and I did a little investigating in
the poor black community . We
learned that most people close to the
sting operation believed the
undercover officer was lying and that
innocent people were being framed.
Our concern deepened when we
discovered that the officer had been
fired from every police job he had . In
fact, he had been arrested in the
middle of the Tulia operation because a
sheriff in a nearby county had filed
theft charges against him.
TROUBLING
DISCOVERIES

13. COLLATERAL
DAMAGE
We also found that over fifty children had lost one or
both parents to the drug sting. Nancy and I ended up
taking three of these children into our home because
there was no one to care for them.

14. FRIENDS OF
JUSTICE
Every Sunday evening the defendants, their
families, and a handful of supporters from the
white community would gather in the Bean’s
living room to pray, sing, and plot strategy. We
called ourselves the Friends of Justice.

15. VICTORY Friends of Justice cobbled
together an unwieldy coalition
of attorneys and advocacy
groups. After four years of
struggle, the undercover agent
was exposed as a liar with a
history of racist behavior.
Three months later, thirteen
inmates were released from
prison in a dramatic ceremony
at the Swisher County
courthouse. By the end of that
summer, Governor Rick Perry
had issued blanket pardons.

16. LIVING IN
EXILE
During this four year ordeal, Nancy and I
were virtually excommunicated from the
churches of Tulia. One congregation
wouldn’t allow us to join because we
were considered too controversial. Even
when it became obvious to everyone that
the sting we were opposing was deeply
flawed and racially motivated, most
church people continued to stand
behind the sheriff and his undercover
officer. Those who refused to conform
were excommunicated from polite
society.

17. LIVING WITH
A LABEL
I always intended to return to pastoral ministry when
our fight for justice in Tulia was over. I found,
however, that I was now regarded as a radical
nonconformist—hardly the kind of person you want
preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. Our earlier
experience at Southern Seminary helped prepare us
for these disturbing revelations. In the meantime,
our notoriety had caught the attention of a family in
Church Point, Louisiana who were being accused of
running a major narcotics operation.

18. Nancy and I moved to Arlington in 2007, shortly after
assisting six young men in Jena, Louisiana who faced
attempted murder charges after a series of racially charged
incidents culminated in a school fight. Friends of Justice
employs a narrative strategy. We tell stories that put the
pertinent facts of a case into perspective while giving young
defendants a face, a faith, a family and a future.

19. A
PERCEPTION
GAP
My work with Friends of Justice has made the
perception gap between white and minority
Americans painfully obvious. Most of the churches
in which I feel most comfortable are light years
removed from the issues poor people frequently
encounter.

20. THE BIRTH OF
AN IDEA
The Common Peace Community was designed with
churches in the “messy middle” in mind. I feel a
special calling to work with Christians who know
about as much about the issues affecting poor people
as I did when we started Friends of Justice in 1999. The
goal isn’t to create a homogeneous church where
everyone adopts the same opinions and social
attitudes. The goal is to look at the world through the
eyes of the poor and ask why.

21. THE COMMON
PEACE
COMMUNITY
CONSISTS OF
TWO CLOSELY
RELATED
PROGRAMS
First, Friends of Justice has been sponsoring
monthly Common Peace Community
gatherings.

22. JUSTFAITH Secondly, we are currently partnering with
First Presbyterian Church in an in-depth
study series called JustFaith. This weekly
study runs the entire length of the school
year. It is a logical next step for those who
wish to make a deeper commitment.

23. TWO
COMPLIMENTARY
ELEMENTS OF A
SINGLE PROGRAM When I refer to the Common Peace
Community, I am talking about both
the monthly gatherings and the weekly
JustFaith study group.
The Common
Peace
Community

24. TWO
REQUESTS
1. I am requesting that the
Missions Committee make the
monthly Common Peace
Community gatherings a program
of Broadway Baptist Church.
2. I am requesting that the
Missions Committee consider
adopting JustFaith as a
program of Broadway Baptist
Church beginning in the fall of
2014.

25. WHY DO WE NEED
A COMMON PEACE
COMMUNITY?

26. LIVING IN THE
MESSY
MIDDLE
Messy middle churches are a complex blend of
conservative, moderate and progressive
perspectives on economic, theological and social
issues.

27. MESSY MIDDLE
CHURCHES
BRING A HOST
OF
CONFLICTING
OPINIONS WITH
THEM TO
CHURCH
The members of messy middle churches are all over
the ideological board. For instance, a single person
might be conservative on economic issues,
theologically moderate and progressive on many
social issues.

28. FEAR
We don’t talk much about the issues that
affect the poor because they tend to be
controversial. We are afraid that
addressing moral issues might expose
internal divisions and spark conflict.

29. THE
SOLUTION IS
THE PROBLEM
The easy solution for messy middle churches is to
fall silent on issues that might divide us. In the
process, we lose our prophetic voice. We have
nothing to say on the great issues of the day.

30. MESSY MIDDLE
CONGREGATIONS
CAN’T TALK
ABOUT PRESSING
SOCIAL ISSUES
If all you knew about the world was what you
learned from attending messy middle worship
services, you would never suspect that issues like
immigration reform, mass incarceration, abortion,
pornography, gun violence, the wealth gap, the
shrinking of the middle class, or the environmental
crisis existed in the wider world.

31. HOW THE
CHRISTIAN
COMMUNITY
REPRESENTS
JESUS
According to a study conducted by the Barna
Group, Christians of all persuasions are more
pharisaical than Christlike

32. AMERICANS
ON RELIGION
AND POLITICS
Most Americans think religion has no place in
public debates about political and social issues

33. IN MESSY
MIDDLE
CHURCHES
THERE IS NO
CONSENSUS
REGARDING
THE PUBLIC
ROLE OF THE
CHURCH
87% of religious progressives believe that religion is a
private matter best kept out of public debates. By
contrast, 82% of religious conservatives believe that if
everyone had a personal relationship with God, social
problems would disappear.

34. RELIGIOUS
ORIENTATION
BY
GENERATION
A religious compromise cobbled
together by the Silent Generation and
Baby Boomers isn’t working for younger
generations.

35. ECONOMIC
ORIENTATION
BY RELIGIOUS
AFFILIATION
African American and Latino Christians are
conservative on social issues but moderate-to-
liberal on economic issues. If our cross-cultural
conversation ignores money issues, it isn’t a real
conversation. The perception gap reflected in
this graph is likely much greater in Texas.

36. THE THOMAS–
KILMANN
CONFLICT
MODE
INSTRUMENT
There are five basic ways in which people who
differ on important issues can relate to one
another. We have chosen avoidance when the
goal should be collaboration.

37. AVOIDANCE
GENERATES
FEAR
Much of Western Christianity today is fearful.
Our churches have become places of retreat, bastions
of intellectual and spiritual timidity. Sundays are
times to convince ourselves that what we believe is true
even though it seems to have little bearing on the other
six days of life in the big bad world.

38. WALTER
BRUEGGEMANN:
CANDOR OR
DENIAL
The Old Testament presents us with a choice:
Generosity > Candor > Hope
or
Scarcity > Denial > Despair

39. BIAS ISN’T
BADNESS
We all bring biases to the table. It’s only a
problem when we pretend we don’t.

40. ACCORDING
TO A RECENT
STUDY BY
THE BARNA
GROUP . . .
Our inability to address pressing issues has
consequences. Between high school and turning
30, 43% of once-active Millennials drop out of
regular church attendance—that amounts to eight
million twentysomethings who have, for various
reasons, given up on church or Christianity.

41. RACHEL HELD
EVANS ON WHY
“MILLENNIALS”
ARE LEAVING
THE CHURCH
“We want churches that emphasize an allegiance to
the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single
political party or a single nation . . . You can’t hand us a
latte and then go about business as usual and expect
us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church
because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re
leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.”

42. INDIFFERENCE Affluent Christians have little interest
in issues like deportation, mass
incarceration or homelessness
because they almost exclusively
impact the lives of poor people.

43. THE IDEA OF
A COMMON
PEACE
COMMUNITY
WAS
INSPIRED BY
EPHESIANS
2:14
No matter what walls divide us;
Jesus can knock them down. He is
our peace. Our common peace.

44. THE COMMON
PEACE
COMMUNITY
IS ROOTED IN
THE JESUS
STORY
The Jesus story includes what Jesus taught,
the stories he told, the prophetic acts he
performed, the Old Testament texts he
emphasized in his preaching, and what the
Bible says about him.

45. THE INAUGURAL
ADDRESS OF
JESUS IN LUKE 4
ESTABLISHED
THE THEME THAT
WOULD GUIDE
HIS MINISTRY
He stood up to read, and the
scroll of the prophet Isaiah was
given to him. He unrolled the
scroll and found the place where it
was written:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the
poor.
He has sent me to proclaim
release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the
blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favor.’
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it
back to the attendant, and sat
down. The eyes of all in the
synagogue were fixed on
him. Then he began to say to
them, ‘Today this scripture has
been fulfilled in your hearing.’

46. THE LAST
PUBLIC
WORDS OF
JESUS IN THE
GOSPEL OF
MATTHEW
Then the righteous will answer
him, ‘Lord, when was it that we
saw you hungry and gave you
food, or thirsty and gave you
something to drink? And when
was it that we saw you a
stranger and welcomed you, or
naked and gave you
clothing? And when was it that
we saw you sick or in prison and
visited you?’ And the king will
answer them, ‘Truly I tell you,
just as you did it to one of the
least of these who are members
of my family, you did it to me.’

47. BLESSED ARE
THE POOR
Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the
kingdom of God. “Blessed are you who are
hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are
you who weep now, for you will laugh. Luke
6:21-21

48. BLESSED ARE
THE POOR IN
SPIRIT
Some of us possess great wealth, but we
can become “poor in spirit” by viewing
the world through the eyes of the poor.

49. WE ARE KNOWN
BY THE
COMPANY WE
KEEP
In the Gospels, no one could get to Jesus without
wading through a throng of poor, sick, hungry
and desperate people. We must look at the world
through the eyes of the poor because it is the only
way to encounter the living Christ.

50. SILENCING
JESUS
when we can’t repeat his message
about wealth and poverty the voice
of Jesus falls silent.

51. THE
RECIPROCITY
PRINCIPLE
Patron-client relationships, in which we do
all the giving and the poor do all the taking,
create dependency. When we are dealing
with issues that impact the poor, affluence is
ignorance. We have much to offer those in
need; but they have much to teach us.
IGNORANT BY
VIRTUE OF
AFFLUENCE
NOT
BUT
PATRON CLIENT
INFORMED BY
POVERTY

52. PURPOSE
# 1
The first purpose of the
Common Peace Community
is to celebrate and
strengthen existing
ministries of compassion.

53. PURPOSE
# 2
The second purpose of the Common
Peace Community is to transcend culture
war divisions by creating a distinctly
Christian discourse rooted in the Jesus
story.

54. PURPOSE
# 3
The third purpose is to help messy middle
churches develop a simple public theology
and a distinct prophetic voice.

55. PURPOSE
# 4
The fourth purpose is to bring affluent Christians into
close conversation with poor Christians who know
the realities of poverty and with religious leaders who
work with the poor.

56. THE COMMON
PEACE
COMMUNITY
IS FOR
EVERYONE
The Common Peace Community isn’t
reserved for peculiar Christians of a
particular ideological bent; it is for
everyone.

57. TWO
COMPLIMENTARY
ELEMENTS OF A
SINGLE PROGRAM When I refer to the Common Peace
Community, I am talking about both
the monthly gatherings and the weekly
JustFaith study group.
The Common
Peace
Community

58. TWO
REQUESTS
1. I am requesting that the
Missions Committee make the
monthly Common Peace
Community gatherings a program
of Broadway Baptist Church.
2. I am requesting that the
Missions Committee consider
adopting JustFaith as a
program of Broadway Baptist
Church beginning in the fall of
2014.