CCDA Philly

I will certainly be blogging about the things I learned at the CCDA conference over the next little while. Here is an overview.

On Wednesday, Brittany, Julia, and I arrived in Philly. We all ended up taking Robert Lupton’s Institute Class entitled Empowerment. Lupton is on the CCDA board and is the author of Theirs is the Kingdom, Renewing the Inner City, and You Call Yourself a Christian (I am particularly fond of Theirs is the Kingdom). He argues that the Christian Community Development movement was so successful that inner cities were made places where wealthier people want to live again, thus spurring on the current situtation of gentrification. He spoke about parlaying gentrification for the Kingdom–mostly in the area of creating mult-income housing. I was very surprised to hear him say, that it is pretty much too late to move into most poor inner-city neighborhoods–that your presence will ensure quicker gentrification and be bad for your neighbors. (By the way, for those of you not familiar with the CCDA, they have historically promoted the three R’s, Redistribution, Relocation, and Reconciliation.) Instead, he suggests greeting the poor as they move into the inner suburbs, perhaps having your suburbanite church purchase apartment complexes to provide multi-income housing.

There were many great plenaries. I was particularly impressed by Tony Campolo of Eastern University’s Compolo College of Graduate and Professional Studies. I’d seen him on the Colbert Report, but never heard one of his speeches. It wasn’t the most meaty, but was entertaining and got some excellent points across in a non-threatening manner.

I also got to attend a lot of great sessions on everything from getting the suburban church involved in justice work, to loving teen mothers, to ecclesiology (with Shane Claiborne).

As I said in a previous post, we left without a place to stay. The first two nights we ended up staying with Brittany’s college friend’s friends. It was great. Friday night, after Brittany and Julia had left, I was graciously given shelter by some Center for Student Missions folks in Philly (Kelly, Jason, Erica, and Jes) we’d met on the first day. They are great!

It was a wonderful week, full of amazing moments and insights!