"Progressively Backwards" and Hope

Now, I have to tell you a bit about this place.  Iowa City is what I like to call "Progressively Backwards."  I know that when people call a city or a town "backwards" its usually a response to its lack of education, resources, revenue, etc. We look at lesser resourced communities in small towns and make the "backwards" response.  Yet this is not Iowa City.  Iowa City is one of the most educated cities IN THE WORLD!  You think I'm joking?  Our literacy rate is around 98%.  80% of the city are people who hold a bachelor's degree of higher, and that percentage isn't a small one as well.  Iowa City is a part of a state that has long since been touted for its education system.  Recently, Iowa City was named the THIRD LITERARY CITY OF THE WORLD by UNESCO.  Education, resources and revenue are not our problem.  Our problem is the application of that education.  

PROGRESSIVELY BACKWARDS: A society and a homogeneous group of people who awkwardly practice the misapplication of social education about a particular culture they are trying to empathize and/or sympathize with.

We're educated about poverty, about racism, about socioeconomic status (SES).  We're educated about Women's rights, LGBT rights.  However, our application of our knowledge is really, REALLY far off.  My realm is usually focused around race, poverty, and SES, and I see a community that has used its "blocks" of education,  not for building a bridge, but for building a wall.  We learned that poverty can drive folks to aggressive means of support, so we ignore where the problem is.  We tell others how this is a problem, but "I just don't have the time to do it."  Our pursuit of knowledge has created more fear of others than it has increase the empathy AND sympathy for others.  The more education we've recieved, the more we've come to fear others.  Why is this? Because we settle for only looking at people through a snapshot.  Books don't animate, and even animated books only give you one point of view.  Classrooms can only go so far towards educating others.  You also have to come into the experience and let your heart break, and be transformed.  Let yourself become unsettled and cry out, "I CANNOT SIT AND DO NOTHING...not anymore."

 I recently met with a very successful and wealthy individual who after our conversation challenged me by saying (in so many words) that I am the type of leader that can lift up the whole African American community, even the city...  I can tell you, I did not expect this when I planned on meeting him.  Since that time, I've had sort of a mini twilight zone moment.  Feeling like I was in a place, but yet not.  I've had the highest and lowest ranges of emotions.  Somebody just challenged me to be the world changer I'm destined to be, for my city, IOWA CITY!   

My vision for something so grand and on this is level is not just talking about planting a church, or just a non-profit organization, those are in it, but it's not all of it.  Has God placed in me the seeds and the call to planting a whole community, a movement that can transform the very structures of my society or the world?  

What if I said I had the ability to begin in the next 10 years to:

1. Unite all of the black clergy of Iowa City for the mission of serving our people
2. Develop a financial literacy program to serve the community
3. Build relationships between the local banks and local black businesspeople
4. Create a collaborative network for existing organizations who reach out to the Afr. Am. community.
5. Develop and culture exchanging experience between our community and other communities of the African Diaspora, both stateside and overseas.
6. Help African Americans parents have a stronger presence in our public schools.

And that would be the start of it? I'm literary trying to believe something about myself that bigger than anything I've ever done, or have tried to do.  Not on this scale.  I'm looking at the education of my city and saying to it, "its time to take your education and transform it into wisdom..."

I think this is where I'm at.  I'm a African American man, with all of the crazy experiences I have had in my life, living in the projects of Chicago, being witnessed to by Korean Americans, going to a Korean American church, going to college in Iowa City, IA.  Living for a period of life in Atlanta.  Being married in a bi-racial marriage with a bi-racial child.  Ministering to college students for the past 8, going on 9 years. My heart aches, and my lungs burn for the transformation and change that could hold ramifications at the level of transforming a city. But am I the right person.  What limits me from thinking that I can do this, actual limitations, or just the limitations I've set upon myself? Wow...

Education without the applicable experience to harness is still another form of ignorance in my opinion.  If all our city wants is to be educated about others, about Blacks, without the necessary step that moves knowledge towards wisdom, we will continue to move progressive backwards, where our technology will be further ahead, but our ability to love our fellow brother and sister will remain rudimentary.