JOURNALISM 101

FALL 2007

RADICAL SERVANTHOOD:

DISCOVERING ACTIVISM IN A WORLD FOCUSED ON AWARENESS

 By Tricia Demmers

* edited for content & brevity.

... Melissa Davis and Delainna Batoon are sitting together; Davis puts her red purse alongside the wall and slowly leans back. Batoon leans forward, places her elbows on the table, and rests her head on her hands.

     “When I graduated from college, I initially wanted to go right out into the world and change things in third-world countries. But God was calling me to my home town, and I thought, 'Bryans Road, Maryland?…” Melissa Davis raises her eye-brow and her eyes grow wide, “…Come on.'”

     Davis pauses and, closing her eyes, she folds her hands together, “But if I can’t be faithful and serve God here, than how can I expect to be faithful and serve Him anywhere?"

James 2:14-17 says, “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”

“I feel like James 2:14-17, is the basis of the organization,” says Davis and Delainna Batoon nods her head in agreement.

Melissa Davis: Striving to fill a need for Activism

 “JESUSpolitik is a grass roots movement; people like that term, grass roots. But at the same time those roots serve no purpose if they don’t grow. We give people means to use the interests and talents they already have to get involved with JESUSpolitik projects,” says Melissa Davis, president of JESUSpolitik. She smiles and her face glows.

     Davis is different, in a good way. Perhaps a radical. Aside from her work with JESUSpolitik, she also works at her home church. She takes food to the poor, she helps people. It is obvious that she strives to lay everything down to do the work of Jesus Christ.

She says, “Life in this world is hard. Men are stripped of their strength, women robbed of their dignity, children are thrown away. You can't see these things and not have compassion, not want to change things. People will slip away into eternity without knowing that there is a God that loves them, unless YOU open up your mouth and tell them. Unless YOU allow Jesus to work through you to DO SOMETHING about their situation. This is radically different from how the world lives - seeking God first and others first, not just yourself. It's what the world is desperately longing for.”

She wears a white collared polo, and around her neck there is an old wooden necklace with a cross that has the word LIFE engraved in it.  

     “Awareness without action, just like faith without works, is dead,” Davis says and lifts her hands in the air, “And it will make you feel dead too. It is unjust to fill a person’s spirit with information and images of attacks against human dignity without providing a means of acting against those attacks.”

Davis went to Messiah College where she led the International Justice Mission chapter, the Invisible Children chapter, worked in the Agape Center offices as the Agency Coordinator for Service Trips and also volunteered regularly with Bethesda Mission’s soup kitchen.

     In 2005, Davis went to Thailand with a semester abroad program to intern with one of the International Justice Mission’s aftercare agencies for victims of human rights abuse at the New Life Center.

     She lived in a Karen hill tribe village in Musakee for a month. After leaving the tribe she learned about the persecution these people faced as Christians and noncitizens.

     She returned from Thailand with a sense of urgency, doubled up her classes and graduated with a bachelor in psychology and a minor in human rights pre-law.

Davis graduated from Messiah College when she was twenty years old. Over the course of her time there,  she saw that evangelism and social activism needed to be more active than it was becoming. She saw the need for greater collaboration between missions and human rights groups. She saw students grow weary and numb to the problems in the world, rather than empowered to use their gifts to solve them … and that was the basis that led her to form JESUSpolitik.

 

Delainna Batoon: Answering a Call

Delainna Batoon is the Executive Director of JESUSpolitik. She is originally from Bitburgh, Germany where she lived for ten years.

     Batoon wears a blue JESUSpolitik sweater, over a tie-dyed Love Maputo T-shirt, which is featured on the organization’s website.

Batoon now lives in the Washington D.C. area where she has remained for fifteen years. She graduated from Towson University in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in music education.

     While at Towson University Batoon became heavily involved with Campus Crusade for Christ, where she sang regularly on worship teams and led Bible study.

     “When Melissa came to me and asked me to be a part of her idea, I felt God pulling me toward the need that she wanted to fill.”

Batoon says she believes in reaching people holistically, not just ministering to their bodily needs, but to their souls as well.

      

What is JESUSpolitik?

There are so many ways in which the world is hurting, JESUSpolitik wants to heal that hurt one project at a time.

JESUSpolitik works with local missionaries overseas that want to help their own people. It then unites these missionaries with human rights organizations and missions groups that want to get involved in the same area. JESUSpolitik then gets the word out about these collaborated projects here in the U.S.to concerned students, church groups and individuals who want to help.

Now it has grown to aid college and university students in finding ways to be active about situations in both third world countries and their own country.

“We’re a tiny organization, but little is much in the hands of Jesus. We're meeting needs and seeing lives change.” Davis says.

      “We strive to do everything with the integrity, dedication and seriousness that comes with having the Lord’s name attached to it… and that’s how it should be,” Batoon says.

“Downloadable right off the site are posters, pamphlets, PowerPoints... everything people need to get started. This way, people don’t have to burn their energy so much on ‘raising awareness’ that they are too tired to act when it comes time to do so.”

There is also a forum for activism ideas for people to benefit from, use and contribute to on the site. People are given all sorts of ideas for how they can use their individual and specific talents to get involved.

 “JESUSpolitik empowers people to use the resources, skills and talents that they already have as a way of making a difference. It makes activism simpler and more personal than it has been in a while,” says Davis.

 

Change and Hope in Maputo

     The Love Maputo Project is currently led by two local Mozambicans.   According to the ILO, childhood doesn’t last long in Mozambique. In 2002, it was estimated that 31.9% of all children ages 10 to 14 years in Mozambique are already working.

     Mozambique has become the source country for child trafficking. A growing number of street kids are being forced into prostitution, bonded labor and drug dealing as a means of survival.

     “Most first-year college students are eighteen years old, and they're just beginning their lives -  while more than half of the country of Mozambique is under eighteen years old,” says Davis.

“We work through local missionaries in the outreach to Mozambique,” says Batoon leaning forward, “ because they already know the language, the culture and they have the trust of the people.”

"Local missionaries are the key to longevity in international projects - we don’t want to just send in a few Americans, do a lot of great stuff, and then leave a huge vacuum in our absence,” says Davis.

Davis puts her hair behind her ear and says, “We’re looking for change that lasts. Change like that must come from people reaching their own people. We just equip them in doing that.”

The kids in Mozambique who are being reached through the Love Maputo Project live on the street, says Davis, and face starvation, extreme poverty, AIDS, and police brutality every day.

The Love Maputo Project reaches out to boys as young as eight who are often trafficked as drug couriers, says Batoon, the project also reaches girls who have turned to prostitution to survive.

JESUSpolitik's Love Maputo Project recently opened a small training center where girls that were in prostitution can come in and learn how to make toys, clothes, how to embroidery...means of a living outside of prostitution.

There are two sewing machines in the house and the girls can learn to sew and embroider clothing and design dolls. This way, they can sell clothing and toys as means of surviving, instead of being forced to sell their bodies.

“This does not happen without support and encouragement from people who believe in this cause,” says Batoon.

 This summer, bands from across the country will be holding benefit concerts this summer to raise much needed funds to provide dry staple foods, such as rice, cornmeal and beans, as well as clothing to the kids that the Love Maputo Project reaches.

"For the first time these children are experiencing hope in Jesus Christ," says Davis, "they realize that they have worth, they are not forgotten, there is a God that cares about them and they can have a new life."

“They don’t hear a message of hope anywhere else,” Davis says.

 

A Challenge

 “Serving, finding your calling, living for God - whatever you want to call it -  is about using the talents that God has already given you, and doing the most that you can with them to glorify Him and reach people. Work with what you’ve got, to the best of your ability, with integrity, and enjoy it. That’s what God expects of us,” says Davis.

“Many people live, die and sacrifice radically for gods whom they believe to be true. They lay their lives down with fervor that you almost never see here for Christ. Laying our lives down, living for Christ and putting our faith into action, shouldn't be considered radical, it should be considered normal.”

* edited for content & brevity.