Service: the Path to Justice by Terry Beitzel and Cal Redekop (2022)

Review by Sarah Nahar, PhD student in Religion and Environmental Studies, Syracuse University and the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. I am posting it here a year after I wrote it, but as it hasn’t appeared elsewhere on the internet, I wanted to share it.

Service the Path to Justice is a timely addition to the conversation about justice. Now more than ever, people in the North American mainstream speak of justice. However, it is not clear how service—apart from its military definition—relates to justice. The authors’ aim throughout the book is to make the connection between service and justice. To do this, they foreground the efforts of a distinctive group of Christians: Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren. The book outlines how this group, collectively known as the historic peace churches have more or less consistently held these two concepts together. It focuses on their agency-level formations that helped institutionalize service programs and provide pathways for thousands of people to put their faith and values into service action that inadvertently or purposefully worked for justice by challenging existing societal inequalities around the world, and in the United States. This type of voluntary service, the authors boldly claim, has been the way to reverse some of the harm caused by injustice, and prevent additional injustices from happening. Through the recounting of various examples, Beitzel and Redekop conclude that much of the procedural and distributive justice we see today was created by those who found ways to sustain prosocial (sometimes sacrificial) behaviors.

Any young reader today who is frustrated with the state of the world can see their concerns historicized, as the chapters detail the despair experienced by previous generations of youth who experienced hostility for their beliefs, were fearful of the world’s end, and yet retained the desire to do something that mattered. Participating in serious service, now, in a time of climate catastrophe may provide the type of grounding daily rhythms that many young people need in order to not succumb to depression, anxiety, isolation or violence. Reiterating the book’s thesis, a prolonged experience life alongside others and carefully listening, will likely result in transformation of the social structures of separation. This type of service, they argue, brings justice closer while it also always remaining on the horizon.

Indeed, the bold actions of this relatively small group of Christians has had, and continues to have, global impact. The historical record that this book synthesizes is one of its great contributions to future scholars who will investigate this subject. Yet the book does not examine how an understanding of service as the path to justice shifts when the people serving come from historically ‘underserved’ populations. One’s societal position greatly influences one’s understanding of justice, and service. Though the authors repeatedly emphasized the voluntary nature of the service they were analyzing, the text would have been enriched by the inclusion of theory generated by those in different subject positions than the majority of historic peace church administrators.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s directive to challenge social structures and not only respond to the symptoms they produce does receive a mention in Urbane Peachey’s appendix, which is critical of the historic peace church’s enterprise. Peachey’s thesis is that Mennonite’s narrow definition of service prevented them doing the policy-level advocacy necessary to address the root causes which replicate injustice and generate “underserved populations.” Here could have been one opportunity to go further, as the Civil Rights Movement is an example of a fairly successful social justice movement that also emphasized service. In 1968, King preached, “everyone can be great because everyone can serve.” He goes on in the sermon to draw on Jesus’ servant leadership, noting that higher education is unnecessary in order to participate in voluntary service, what is needed is only “a heart full of grace, and a soul generated by love.” Given this congruence with Anabaptism, the book missed an opportunity to cite examples from various institutions created by people of color at the same time as the historic peace churches efforts to sustain works of prosocial behavior at scale were in full swing. Service institutions created within marginalized and targeted communities often have a different orientation and programmatic thrust than those closer to dominant culture.

Though the text does not wrestle with how service and philanthropy converge and diverge, this is a crucial question many practitioners deal with today as they seek the best method to heal a plethora of societal wrongs. The authors do offer a historical view, however, noting that the peace churches made decisions throughout the late 20^th century to center embodied relationships rather than wealth transfers. At at a time when much of life happens online and philanthropic efforts are critiqued for reinforcing class divisions, emphasizing the power of what in-person interaction-over-time-with-Others makes possible is a particular perspective of how service happens on the path to justice. It remains unresolved however, if it is still service if all parties depart from service work feeling good and connected, but their work didn’t necessarily create a more just society.

My own life has been influenced by the service opportunities created by several of the church institutions named in the book. They have been a formative part of putting me on the path to justice. The relationships formed during service work are ones that I keep, and the experiences of the rawness of life that I had within these interactions has left an indelible mark on me. Serving as a young woman of color, ongoing systemic oppression meant I navigated our service placements differently than my white male colleagues, whose expertise in an area was often immediately respected. To address the tricky and layered dynamics of power we encountered, we created spaces among ourselves to talk about them. Though fumbling at times, we found language that assisted all of us in becoming more human and increasingly committed to the cause of justice over the course of our lifetimes.

Another review is here, published by John A. Lapp in the Anabaptist World in March 2020.