c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Our worsening recession will be long and deep. Many lives will be scarred through homes lost, jobs lost, careers derailed, college delayed, small businesses shuttered, large employers driven to bankruptcy, and dreams abandoned.

This will be a human drama unlike anything most of us have known. Some stark new behavior will be required, and much of it will be healthy.

Parents will need to say “No” to their children _ and thus reinstate the proper order of authority in the family and douse the demon of entitlement.

Families will need to spend more time at home and less time in restaurants, malls and cinemas _ and thus reclaim the main reason people got married and had children in the first place.

People will need to live within their means _ and thus reconnect with the true abundance of God-given harvest, as opposed to the delusional largess of an ever-expanding credit line.

People will need to do without _ painful after so many years of having everything, but in the end a refreshing walk with the basics, as opposed to a frenzied dance of more, more, more.

People will need to stop competing by way of extravagance _ and start collaborating by way of dreams, capabilities and shared ventures. We won’t dig our way out of this mess by finding more credit or waging war on some imagined enemy, but by joining hands in fresh and imaginative enterprises grounded in noble purpose.

The heroes of this moment will be those who can promote goodness, as opposed to appetite and self-indulgence.

I hope the greed and irresponsibility of those financial and corporate leaders who led us into this mess will give way to wisdom and perspective. I hope that a new generation of bright and ambitious students will look beyond the narrow dream of making it on Wall Street and turn instead to the engineering, organizational development, technology, infrastructure management and teaching that truly create value in society.

I am telling church leaders that it is time to let go of old anxieties, especially self-centered fussing and stale traditions, and to focus instead on being lean, efficient and self-sacrificial enterprises that are dedicated to serving others. Too many congregations are strangling on yesterday’s bickering and priorities.

There are so are many families and businesses with arguments that don’t end and business models that don’t work. We all need fresh starts. In fact, when we stand back from our recent history, I think we will see why we ran up $2.3 trillion in personal debts: we were trying to escape ourselves and the difficult decisions that we needed to make in order to have peace and meaning in our lives.

We have tried to live without God. We have tried not to see our skills, blessings _ indeed, our very existence _ as God-given assets entrusted to our care, but rather as economic engines for amassing worldly wealth. In our world-view, we weren’t engaged in a dynamic transaction with a living and high-expectation God. We were living as we chose, and if we turned to God at all, it was only as a last resort.

We weren’t leveraging God’s gifts for God’s benefit or sharing them with the less fortunate. We were behaving as if God hadn’t given us anything.

That is the “great depression,” or what I’d call the “great delusion,” with which we now must deal.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

KRE/AMB END EHRICH

600 words

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