Two ways of life: exploitation or nurture.

One of Wendell Berry's most influential articles is "The Unsettling of America", in which he (1) shows how the mentality of exploitation in deeply rooted in the American ethos, (2) how fundamentally revolutionary this way of thinking is, and (3) how this has effected the way we relate to our land, and how it has destroyed community and character. Although Berry is writing as a farmer, his insights are profoundly instructive for all spheres of culture (a term which derives from agriculture!).

In this essay, Berry argues that "we are divided between exploitation and nurture". In outlining the difference between the two, Berry writes: "The exploiter is a specialist, and expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health...The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order--a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts:; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind...The exploitative always involves the abuse and the perversion of nurture and ultimately its destruction...The first casualties of the exploitive revolution are character and community."

As we lament the break-down of community and character, it might do us well to reflect upon the ways in which we have been complicit in exploitation. I think particularly of the two spheres in which I navigate on a daily basis--pastoral ministry and academics. The default mode of operation for both professions aligns more closely with what Berry has described as exploitation. Those who want to be nurturers rather than exploiters will have to intentionally choose to swim against the current if they want to build character and community.Take it from Eugene Peterson, who has been around the pastoral block:

The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans. Any kind of continuity with pastors in times past is virtually nonexistent. We are a generation that feels as if it is having to start out from scratch to figure our a way to represent and nurture this richly nuanced and all-involving life of Christ in a country that 'knew not Joseph'...The cultural conditions in which I am immersed require, at least for me, a kind of fierce vigilance to guard my vocation from these cultural pollutants so dangerously toxic to persons who want to follow Jesus in the way that he is Jesus...I wonder if at the root of the defection [of pastors from their vocations] is a cultural assumption that all leaders are people who 'get things done', and 'make things happen'...the pervasive element in our two-thousand-year pastoral tradition is not someone who 'gets things done' but rather the person placed in the community to pay attention and call attention to 'what is going on right now' between men and women, with one another, and with God--this kingdom of God is primarily local, relentlessly personal, and prayerful 'without ceasing'...I want to give witness to this way of understanding pastor, a way that can't be measured or counted, and often isn't even noticed.