Edited by Peter R. Gathje, 2002. Published by The Open Door Community, Atlanta, GA

[8-4-03]

Review by Don Beisswenger, Professor of Church and Community, Emeritus, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN.

Don has spent time each year at the Open Door during summers and sabbaticals while at Vanderbilt, and has helped develop a ministry with the homeless in Nashville, including the Power Project, which is organizing the homeless for political action.

"We are an experiment with truth. We make the road by walking." Murphy Davis

"Man cannot live by cornbread alone." Willie Dee Wimberly

In this publication we are gifted with 20 years of reflection on the life and mission of a remarkable community: The Open Door in Atlanta. The passion and vitality of the community becomes a "Word" for us all. I have learned much from these folk over many years. This selection of some 90 articles, published over the years in their newsletter, Hospitality, derives from lives and community shaped by living in proximity with the homeless and the imprisoned, people seen as expendable by our culture. Deep wisdom about God is revealed for us through such situations.

The Open Door is an intentional Christian community, a community seeking to be shaped by the Gospel of God's love and justice. The community is remarkably diverse in educational background, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, and experience - a diversity seldom evident in most Christian communities about which I am aware. The mission takes form in regular occasions for table fellowship with persons from the streets and regular visits for families with persons in prison. The invisible punishments when persons get released from prison become evident as well: disenfranchisement, disqualification from public housing, welfare benefits, and job training. The community's mission is to seek just public space, such as toilets for homeless people where they can pee for free with dignity. Recently they, along with a coalition, engaged the governing powers regarding adequate medical care for all God's people. The festival of shelters will occur in September. Feisty readings about all this will be found in the book.

The six sections of the book deal first with the time of "settling in," where the interplay of convictions, life in community and a common mission were hammered out. The next two sections describe the work of hospitality with the homeless and the imprisoned. Christ, they believe, comes to the Open Door as a homeless person or one or death row. Homelessness is described as hell, and prison as slavery. The sacraments of hospitality are outlined in section five. Worship shapes their life together and life together shapes the liturgy. The liturgy gives respite from the journey as well as reshaping of their call. The next section contains stories of "saints" who have shared the journey; Willie D., Carl Barker, Sherman. The final section focuses on theological understandings which have emerged from their life in community, and from their living with the homeless and the prisoner.

The reader will see creative tension between convictions, a mission which keeps getting reshaped, and structures by which it is embodied in personal and social life. But all thought and action is shaped within the crucible of life with the poor and those in prison.

Each article is about two or three pages, and together they illumine a host of vital issues of life in community, advocacy in medical care for the homeless, and justice for those on death row.

I commend this set of readings. Each is a gem. I am reading one article each day as a part of my morning reflection. They help me close the distance, to keep close to issues facing the poor during this dirty rotten time. This book gives us the great gift of seeing proximity as a key spiritual discipline of our time

The global economy and the idolatry of efficiency seem to determine everything. It is totalitarianism of the market, Dorothy Sölle says. To achieve freedom we have to think out of character and thus the ancient vision is kindled again At the heart of the resistance is a wonderfully simple statement. Sölle says, "The world is not for sale. Life on this earth that God loves is not for sale." These readings embody her vision.