Spirit in Action
Mindful Methodist And Friend of Non-violence
Matt Hunter has been serving as Executive Director of FNVW- Friends for a Non-violent World for 2 1/2 years. Matt is Methodist and was dramatically turned to a belief in Jesus' nonviolent message in seminary. He's worked in South Africa around apartheid and HIV-AIDS, and worked with the homeless in Florida before coming to the Twin Cities.
- Broadcast on:
- 14 Nov 2010
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Matt Hunter, director for the past two and a half years, of the Twin Cities-based Friends for a non-violent world, joins us today for Spirit in Action. Matt attended seminary to become a Methodist minister in the past decade, changing his worldview profoundly, including his adoption of a core belief in non-violence and Jesus' message of peace. He's worked in South Africa in several roles, addressing HIV/AIDS, helping the underprivileged there, and learning about apartheid. He worked with the homeless in Florida for three years as director of The Shepherd's Way before moving to Minnesota and serving with friends for a non-violent world, or FNVW. He joins us today by phone from the Twin Cities. Matt, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you. Matt, I know you're Oklahoma-born, you're living in the Twin Cities now because you're the executive director for Friends for Non-violent World. When did you move north? Was it just too warm down in Oklahoma for you? We actually moved multiple places, and we ended up moving here from South Florida. I was directing a homeless shelter down in South Florida and came up here in May of 2007. My partner, Amanda, is a student at United Theological Seminary up here. You've got your own theological degree, and Amanda's just catching up with you. Is that part of it? Why didn't you take another degree, too? Well, Amanda is, hers is a little different. My master of divinity degree, which was the degree for ordination in the United Methodist Church. Amanda is getting a master of arts and theology in the arts. She has a large art installation at Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church in downtown Minneapolis right now. So she will not be ordained hers is more applying her theology and her theological understanding to her artwork. And I actually am now enrolled in a doctoral program, a Doctor of Ministry degree at United Theological Seminary as well. So I will one up her on the degree in the end. So I wanted to ask you, you're head of FNVW. I think you've been there as the executive director for two and a half years. Why is a person who's trained as a Methodist minister head of a Quaker organization Friends for Nonviolent World? Well, thankfully Friends for Nonviolent World has been open to many other traditions in leadership roles. I know the previous executive director Phil was Roman Catholic. While at Duke I studied under a theologian named Stanley Hauerwa who it's really funny knowing his personality. He's a I wouldn't say he's a curmudgeon and if you heard that he'd probably come through the phone and smack me. But right after September 11th he was named the most influential theologian in America by Time Magazine and he was on Oprah and all of this. But his stance is one of pacifism and he was one of the most important voices for me at Duke University. And so after studying with him and hearing, you know, I'd never really considered nonviolence until about 2000. And so hearing him really in the end I had no choice but to make a commitment to nonviolence for the rest of my life. So in other words going to divinity school changed you that way. Absolutely and my first week in divinity school September 11th happened. And it was a life-changing experience for me and actually ended up being in the positive. Before that time I had really not thought deeply about world affairs, knew nothing about US involvement in other countries throughout the world. So I was pretty blind and that experience forced me to put the lens onto the rest of the world and to start looking at myself and my country a lot more critically. That's amazing to hear. I think a lot of people when the Twin Towers fell they went the opposite direction. They had been relatively peace-minded before and then they said well you know now we're under attack so let's go to war. You went in the opposite direction. I did and my early education was of the fundamentalist Christian variety so I had a heavy dosage of sin. You know just thinking oh boy I really needed to be a better person than I was. The positive side of that was that I always look when something happens with me or if something happens in the world I don't automatically assume that someone else has it's all their fault. I really look deeply in myself and look deeply in the communities that surround me to better understand what's going on. So I would say you know I can't give many positives to the fundamentalist Christian education that I had in elementary school but I can't say that it didn't make me reflective when something happened. So I automatically went to the boy what is my country doing to bring this type of tragedy about? I want to talk about the progress that got you to where you are pretty soon and that progress includes you're working with a homeless or you're traveling in Africa and working about HIV/AIDS and your study relative to the apartheid overthrow in South Africa. So all that's part of the journey but before that let's start by talking about friends for non-violent world. Your executive director for the last two and a half years what is FNVW? Well it's a Quaker inspired organization of people committed to non-violence both as an ethic for living and as a strategy for achieving peace and justice. We've been around since 1981 and actually before becoming friends for non-violent world we were an office of the American Friends Service Committee here. And AFSC began to change their model of how they were doing things and they went to more of a regional office model and they went down to Des Moines became the closest office. And so the Minneapolis office was closed and the local Quakers weren't really happy about that so they formed their own organization Friends for Non-violent World and the initial staff was the outgoing staff from American Friends Service Committee's office in Minneapolis. And what do you do? What is the purpose of that office? What are the programs that you oversee as executive director? We have three main programs one of them is the Alternatives to Violence Project which has been a project of FNVW since 1992. We call it AVP and AVP was formed when inmates of Greenhaven correctional facility in New York came together and said we need a program here that teaches something different than violence. The Minnesota version of that project here goes into prison facilities and including brand new facility we go into is the Waseka Federal Women's Facility, our first federal facility, and teach conflict resolution really explore the genesis of violence in people and help them understand where that came about and new ways to react when another situation arises that does not bring violence into the picture. And the benefits of that program is it's been proven to reduce back to prison or recidivism rates by a good 25%. That was a study that was done in Vermont. We have not done a similar study here. But it also when someone in prison gets an alternatives to violence project certificate to say they have graduated from the workshops, it's good to be able to show a parole board and it makes for more successful meetings before a meeting for parole. So about how many people are involved in AVP program as staff and the people in prisons and other places that are being trained by the alternatives to violence program. We have two staff people. We have Erica Thorne who is our AVP program coordinator. Demetria Carter who is a brand new employee. She is actually a VISTA volunteer through AmeriCorps. She's an outreach coordinator trying to spread the word more into the community and there are plenty of organizations doing prison work that we're trying to collaborate with. So she's responsible for a lot of that. Now, though we have these staff people, AVP and its charter has to be volunteer in nature. So we have a steering committee that is made up of nothing but volunteers. They're all certified as facilitators of the workshops. And so they make a lot of the decisions regarding which prison facilities to go into. How do we grow our facilitator pool? There are approximately 80 facilitators. Each workshop has approximately four facilitators that work it. And we've done over the course of our 17 year history, we've had more than 10,000 inmates in Minnesota correctional facilities go through our workshops. So that's an immense load of volunteer work that's being done. Absolutely. What are the other two programs? The other two, one is Peace in the Precinct and it was formed following the start of the Iraq War. And it was the executive director at that time, Phil Steger and a bunch of people from the community, volunteers once again, who really felt strongly that this was the wrong decision to go to war. So they formed this program and the idea was to make key issues or keys to the whole of the candidate. They didn't want people supporting this cult of personality or just supporting people because they liked them. They wanted keys to be the issue. So if a candidate, regardless of their political party, fell into certain things on the Iraq War or on military budgets, then they would seek to encourage support or let people know about this person and let people know what their views are on the war and things. They were not doing any work on behalf of these candidates, that would be illegal, but they were trying to make peace the issue instead of these individual personalities and they had a great success. I believe it was in 2006 is when they had at one of the congressional district conventions, they had 40% of the population there vote for the peace standard that they had had. And the candidates that were up for office, including Keith Ellison, had to endorse that or say, "I endorse this peace standard." So they played a role in helping people focus on peace and Keith Ellison was one of those candidates that did indeed end up focusing on peace because of the work of peace and the precincts. The second program we have is People Camp, which is a really interesting model. It's after I believe it was called Family Camp and it was down, I think it came from Chicago area in Illinois. It's been around since 1971, but it's a week-long experience where families come together. It's not just summer camp for kids, it's for families or single individuals that wanted to be involved and that's why it was named People Camp instead of Family Camp. And they'll go up and discuss ideas for how to live together in non-violent community, their workshops this past time where one of them was an advanced workshop on non-violent communication. And the art of speaking and being in dialogue in such a way that you do not bring about a violent situation or violent response to what you're saying. So those are our three main programs. So what are the other kinds of things that you do besides those three main programs? In addition to our programs, we have been running conferences back in February. We did Turning the Tide, Tortoform, Policy of Human Dignity, Jack Nelson, Paul Meyer and William B. Men and lots of other folks spoke there. Most recently the conference we're having is it's coming up on Halloween, October 31st of Saturday, and it's called Ways of Peace One, Non-Violence in the Christian Tradition. It will be out of the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities on October 31st. I'll ask you a little bit more about that later, but right now I want to continue into some more about your work with FNVW. And your role as Executive Director, I mean you've got your BBA degree in Finance Economics. Are you there as Director to make the programs work that way or is this non-violent thing which is so strong in your past and in your theological development? Is that an important part of what you do? Non-violence is an important part of what I do. When I saw the job posting when Amanda and I were moving to the Twin Cities, I jumped at it. It was a chance to actually have my work really reflect this commitment to non-violence. You know, sure as Executive Director, I'm not really doing hands-on program work most of the time. A lot of times I'm the face in the community, I'm trying to organize fundraising and write grants and things like that. But at the same time, I also need to cast a vision for the office, hold people accountable for the way that they are treating one another or how they are communicating with one another. And so, by committing to non-violence in my own life, I've been able to work really closely into positive relationships with the staff. The existing board clerk has said that the attitude in the office right now is better than he's ever seen. He calls it the "spree decor." And it's because we hold each other to a higher communication standard because of our commitment on the whole to non-violence. So it does matter both in my role as Executive Director, and even though I don't get into the program, it helps me understand better how to make a program work even better if they aren't quite working along the lines of our values. Your email address is Mindful Methodist. Usually, I think Mindful is something you might connect with a Buddhist, or maybe a Quaker, and people who are into silence. Are you some kind of a hybrid between Methodist and wherever you're headed? You know, I actually have been studying and participating in the Zen tradition as well. So that's where the focus on Mindfulness comes from. I am a huge fan of Tiknad Han and Thomas Martin, and I've studied their interactions back in the six years together surrounding the Vietnam War and both of their commitments to non-violence. The Methodist Church is an interesting combination. In my last newsletter article, I wrote that our roster includes George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Harriet Tubman. You can go on and on. These voices that are more for dialogue versus these voices that have been more for war. Oh, Rush Limbaugh is also a United Methodist. I found that out recently. So my tradition has not been overly friendly to the concept of non-violence, and my hope and one of my projects is to try to get the Methodist Church to consider being a peace church or what it would take to at least allow individual churches, if not denomination-wide, to have more of a focus on peace. I've prepared a tiny musical medley, symbolic of Matt Hunter's religious journey. Let's start out with a song from the Methodist hymnal. I sing the mighty power of God, and then go to a song by a Twin Cities band, "Cloud Cult." Matt told me I conclude anything by Cloud Cult, so I picked out one called "A Good God." I sing the mighty power of God, let me go all day fast, 'cause friend of holy sees the rock, let me go all day fast. I sing the hymnal with the breath of it, but I'm so too proud of it. God will try to back things up, and when all of us come so way. I sing the goodness of the heart, and will be here to grow. We've all the creatures with a place made, and then from those that go. For our Alma Mater is safe, wherever I turn the high. In the valley of our Alma Mater, or there is our Alma Mater. In four months, I saw God, and it was so. F'ing precious was an 80-year-old dog, a little girl kissing a frog, a little boy who thought Jesus was he when. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. I found divinity in the hole in the front of your head. He spoke of broken bombs, you trust the devil in his thought. You turn the hero, cries into love of life, songs. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. In the school, we would be punished, and that would be swats if we would say "gosh" or "g" because it's a derivative of God or Jesus. So I learned that any type of foul language at all was the stuff of brimstone, and I learned a very unforgiving God. I learned that forgiveness was something that, which is amazing, now my understanding of the Christian faith is so different, back then I viewed it as a vengeful God, almost as if God was a cosmic tyrant. And so that really shaped my worldview, and I suffered depression as a young man, panic attacks, all kinds of things, well before my tenth birthday. I learned a great fear of death as a young person. So I started this fear-based young man, and just over time I began to discard that. I'm sure it still has holds on me in certain ways, but I began to see the wider world. You know, traveling to Africa in my 20s was helpful. Going to Divinity School was huge in that because I had the opportunity as a student at Duke to travel to Africa to work with refugees as a placement by the Divinity School. So my worldview just gradually expanded from that US-centered, Oklahoma-centered worldview to one that thought more about the world. I mentioned how 9/11, in my own consciousness of the world, actually had a positive effect. I would never wish that to be the reason for that positive effect coming about, but it happened that way for me. I can't really point to a single incident in my youth that I could say really pulled me out of the doldrums and into this more inclusive worldview, but it's been just a long journey from my childhood to now my late 30s of walking a path that hasn't always been predictable. Certainly there's a lot of paths that we end up wandering before we find the one that's taking us in the direction we're really going. You mentioned your placement in Africa by Divinity School, and that's a process I'm not familiar with. Could you say what that placement was about and how that's part of your Divinity School teaching, learning, how that fits into Divinity School? Sure. It's become a thing for Divinity schools or seminaries in the United States to bring on people from areas of the world that have experienced conflict where the church has played a positive role. South Africa is the perfect example of that. Desmond Tutu was at Emory for a time, and Bishop Peter Story, who was the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches before Desmond Tutu was. Bishop Story also was on the team to staff the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Duke brought Bishop Story in as a professor, and so Bishop Story would spend half the year in the US and half the year in his house in Simonstown, South Africa. As my seminary experience, the way that Duke structures it is you have your coursework during the year, but then in the summer you might have a field education placement. One of my field education placements was at a large urban church in Tampa, Florida, and the second one was at a small congregation of Congolese refugees in Cape Town, South Africa, a district called Woodstock, which was in the inner city. And so I spent three months working with that congregation and beyond that with the Congolese and Burundian communities, which include Muslims as well as Christians, and learning from them for three months. And what did you learn? I learned, though I had traveled to Africa one time before, it was the first time I'd really experienced and seen Africa, I just to let you know some of the projects I did, and this is something you wouldn't expect a minister to do. I would call on the Congolese refugees the half for apartments and things, and to get interviews for apartments and go to interviews with them because my accent was golden. It was not a Congolese accent, and I don't know if you're aware of all the troubles that happened in South Africa. I think it was last year surrounding a lot of people in Johannesburg. A lot of the local population there felt feel that the refugees from the Congo and Burundi have been taking their jobs Zimbabwe as well. So there's been a lot of violence against immigrant communities in South Africa, so I was there before that violence was happening, but there was still that discrimination based on, hey, they're taking our jobs. And what's interesting about it, you hear that same thing here in the United States surrounding those coming up from the south, but there you have that recent history of apartheid, even more recent than our history with segregation. So I just learned that Africa has made up of many different voices and that discrimination is not something that is solely limited to the US or Europe. So that's one of the things that you did there in South Africa. You were also working, I think, on a Pan-African conference on HIV/AIDS? I was. The group there, it's an organization called SHADE and it works with refugees. There's a pastor there named Timbo Kalinga and Pastor Kalinga fled from the Congo. And one of her daughters, a beautiful girl named Nissia was, as an infant, soldiers came into their church because she was harboring people, protecting them from the violence, and they threw Nissia against the wall, causing her great physical damage, but thankfully it has not resulted in any permanent damage. So Nissia is now, I believe she's about eight years old now, but Timbo had, as one of her projects, she wanted to educate the rural communities and representatives from those rural communities on how to care for people with HIV/AIDS. It was hard to get, and I believe it still is, to get the anti-retroviral treatments that have become so common and have done wonders and treating things, but they were trying to treat it with their nutrition and certain things in their diet that could extend life and improve the quality of life. So she started developing these different offices around the continent, one in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Namibia, and on and on, where they could care and provide resources for these local communities on how to care for the people in their midst that were suffering with HIV/AIDS. And so I had the privilege while I was working at this congregation in Cape Town to help Timbo coordinate the conference in 2003, and it was called the sister-to-sister network, because the primary caregivers in those villages are the women. And it was a wonderful experience. I helped create the nutrition manual and helped raise some funds for the conference in South Africa. You're listening to Spirit in Action. This is a Northern Spirit radio production, always available on the web at northernspiritradio.org. And I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. We're visiting today with Matt Hunter. He's Executive Director of Friends for Nonviolent World, F-N-V-W, which is located in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. We're visiting here with Matt, who has been Director for two and a half years now, and he's just talked about his experience working in Africa back when he was in Divinity School. And I wanted to ask you a couple things about that, Matt. One of the things that has struck me as interesting is this rapid transition in South Africa from apartheid to shared power. Is South Africa still strongly racist? Is racism still endemic there? How has it proceeded there versus what we saw in the United States with the civil right era, slowly moving in the U.S. in the direction of less racism, or at least that's what we're hoping? Oh, yes, it's still racist. Bishop's story was telling me that over the decade following the end of apartheid, the first democratic election to over 1 million of the European Americans left. South Africa went to the U.S., Australia, other places. The biggest difference for me is that the black population is in power there, between Nelson Mandela and Abu Mbeki who followed him, and that's the majority population. So here you had a minority situation with the African-American community. The majority was oppressing this minority, and in South Africa, you still had this oppression, but it was by a minority, a significant minority. So since the 60s, it took us 40 years to actually have an African-American president, it took them about 10 minutes after their country became a democracy. And there's still pockets of that, and the instance that I talked about about the populations in Africa actually discriminating against one another because of jobs and fear about them taking jobs. So the discrimination has occurred along tribal lines or along national lines as well. So there's a dramatic difference just based in the power structure in South Africa at this point. As you said, there were about a million people, whites, who fled South Africa with the change of power in that country. Is there a significant problem with reverse racism, or is white racism against black still common there? I don't know that in your three months there you thoroughly understand this, but I'm sure you had a lot of vignettes that gave you some ideas. I am not aware of reverse racism. After decades of the apartheid system, I'm guessing there had to be some backlash. You know, it's pretty understandable when a long time oppressed population responds in a way. The stories I have about white racism against black population, and in South Africa, the three main populations are, they say there's white, black, and they call them colored, and that's every mixed race person. And those are three designations that are used widely in the country, and so they're very open about the racial problem, even in their language. So I just heard language that would be used. For the most part though, I was hanging out in circles that were very involved in the struggle. So I didn't really get to experience, I didn't live out in the suburbs. You go to some of the suburbs around Cape Town, and it feels like you're in Sacramento. You know, everyone out there was white. I was just amazed because I spent so much time in the inner city, and this vibrant, loud atmosphere. And I go out to a standard suburb, which you'd see anywhere in the United States, and it looked like the suburbs in the United States. So the stratification now, since it can't happen legally, it happens economically, the townships are still there. There are shacks and shanty towns all over the country, and what's been interesting is they now have what they call township tours, and you can actually go and spend the night with a family in a township, and they will, you know, for a small fee, they will give you a bed, and you took your meals and take you on tours throughout the township just so you can understand it. And there's like a pride of environment and this desire for people to understand where they've come from. And I was able to spend the better part of a week in a township outside Johannesburg living with a family. It was church related, but living with a family, and it was an experience I'll never forget. ♪ ♪ Everybody wants to be free ♪ ♪ Everybody wants to be free ♪ ♪ Everybody wants freedom ♪ ♪ Everybody wants to be free ♪ ♪ Let no one take your precious freedom away ♪ ♪ Never ♪ ♪ Freedom is a natural thing ♪ ♪ Freedom is a natural thing ♪ ♪ Freedom is what you wanna see ♪ ♪ Freedom makes you wanna see ♪ ♪ Let no one take your precious freedom away ♪ ♪ Never ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Never ♪ ♪ Freedom is the only thing we want ♪ ♪ Freedom is the only thing we want ♪ ♪ Freedom is the only way ♪ ♪ Freedom is the only way ♪ ♪ Let no one take your precious freedom away ♪ ♪ Never ♪ ♪ Why I say ♪ ♪ How we do ♪ ♪ ♪ Freedom is the right to be wrong ♪ ♪ I'm not the right to do wrong ♪ ♪ ♪ Another thing to know ♪ ♪ Freedom comes with a prize ♪ ♪ A prize to share forever now ♪ ♪ Pride is tolerance ♪ ♪ Tolerance for each other ♪ ♪ Or else freedom is dead ♪ ♪ And one ♪ ♪ Why can't you hear ♪ ♪ Why can't you hear the voice of freedom sing ♪ ♪ Freedom is here to stay ♪ ♪ Why can't you see ♪ ♪ Why can't you still love that freedom brings ♪ ♪ Freedom is here to be ♪ ♪ Let no one take your precious freedom away ♪ ♪ Never ♪ ♪ Let no one take your precious freedom away ♪ ♪ Never ♪ ♪ Let no one take your precious ♪ ♪ Let no one take your precious freedom away ♪ ♪ Never ♪ That was a Twin Cities, Minnesota artist. His name is Wanaku, and the band is Sunplugged with their song, "Bakasi Chant," "Freedom Song." Wanaku is from West Africa, the country of Cameroon, and he was my guest for Song of the Soul this past year. Although he's not from South Africa, his experience does overlap richly with that of many South Africans. And my spirit and action guest, Matt Hunter, is sharing some of his time in South Africa, working with the underprivileged there, and addressing issues like HIV/AIDS. But now, Matt, let's talk about another facet of your time in South Africa. In the United States, I think there is a strong belief in violence as a solution. That military might is what we need to protect us to make us strong. And in fact, you know, we had to have the Revolutionary War. We had to do with violence to get rid of the yoke of England. Of course, I think you have studied about nonviolence, so you know that in India, they got rid of the English oppressors without using violence. And obviously, something happened in South Africa. I have a feeling that many people in the United States would have predicted it would not have been possible using nonviolence to change the whole structure of apartheid. But obviously, it happened. Can you explain a little bit about that? Why did it go in the direction of nonviolence? Why didn't they have a bloody uprising? Why was it successful nonviolence? The power of the leadership. I mean, when you have Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, and Nelson Mandela, having been, I believe it was 27, 25 to 27 years in prison, and he comes out calling for nonviolence, that's pretty powerful. This man who was imprisoned wrongly can come out after all of this time and say, "Listen, let's find another way to do this." Now, don't get me wrong, there was great violence there. It was just not endorsed by the leadership in any way, or Mandela, or Tutu. But there were other people that took it into their own hands to create great violence. The thing about nonviolence and the criticism that I've heard, and I've read some books on this, you know, that say, "How dare you from the West come out with us with your nonviolence and tell the Palestinian population to behave themselves?" You know, "Put down your weapons. Let's do a nonviolent movement." You know, I agree that nonviolence is the way, we've seen it, it's worked. But at the same time, if I am going to sit here from my position and say, "Hey, put down your weapons," I need to sure as heck back that up by doing something about it, by having a strong movement of nonviolent action surrounding that. If we're just talking, then we're doing no good either. You know, living my own little life and being nonviolent in the way that I treat my neighbors needs to also be done politically through my political views and the actions that I undertake. So I want to follow up just to say, I believe that any commitment to nonviolence must include a strong movement of nonviolent action behind it, otherwise it's just words. So are you saying also that South Africa, was it a special case that nonviolence could work? Is it just the special case that you had the couple leaders who were correctly oriented or were somehow willing to consider this radical approach of nonviolence? Was that what made it different than so many other countries, which seemed to have to overthrow using violent methods? I don't think South Africa is a special case. I think having leaders like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela helped, but I don't think it's inevitable that that wouldn't work in other places, what it would take is just a very strong leadership to get people to commit to this, because it works. There's no question it works. It just takes numbers and resilience and just discouraged. I don't know if I have the courage to stand in front of people burying weapons the way they do against nonviolent protests. They're so threatening to people. So it can be done, it's been done in many other places, and it can be done again. It's just it takes leaders that will speak nonviolently. I mean, the problem with that has been that a lot of those leaders end up getting killed, look at Martin Luther King, you know, they are targeted. They're imprisoned. They're vilified in the populations that they're calling for nonviolence. So a lot of times those voices get silenced before they even start, and the government or the power in that country will have a run at it. And the response that comes toward that is one, not surprisingly, of violence. So it really just depends on the leadership. What has led you to change, I think, from your more traditional method of disappointing point of view about violence to belief in nonviolence. Why do you believe it works? I believe it works because I've seen the evidence. I also believe it works because if I'm looking at my Christian faith and I look at what Jesus was about, you know, I'm seeing a whole lot of nonviolence there. I'm not seeing any way that in the actions of Jesus you can condone war or killing. There's just no evidence for that. People have to jump through theological hoops or use other passages in the New Testament to even try to get to the fact that war is necessary. My commitment has come that I believe that the words of Jesus and the teachings of Jesus, the actual life of Jesus, you know, theological speculation on death and cross and crucifixion become very easily, oh, death becomes redemptive. Jesus' death redeemed. So, you know, though we might have to kill these people, it'll be redeemed and good and come out of that. Well, I don't buy that. I think that's theological speculation on the nature of the cross. This meant Jesus was tortured. Jesus was a victim of torture and people that consider themselves followers of Jesus to this day are backing torture. And that, to me, is unconscionable. If the leader or if the person you look to is murdered and is tortured to death and you can still allow capital punishment or allow torture or just shrug it off, you're ignoring a huge part of your faith. And I think as a Methodist and as a beyond being a Methodist, as a person who is a follower of Jesus and the life of Jesus, I feel I have no choice but to provide a non-violent witness. I'm also interested in this connection you have to Zen. Is it okay in the Methodist Church to be a Methodist minister and be into Zen? Is that still acceptable in a wider Christian sense? It would depend on who you talk to. I mean, I know a whole lot of pastors that do mindfulness meditation. You know, I don't think sitting and being in silence is anything that any Christian should have a problem with. You know, there's examples in the New Testament of Jesus going away to be in silence, to be on a mountain, to be away from people. That's the same kind of thing. I think in the Christian mind you can definitely cross the line and become more, or maybe you're following more the Buddhist way than the Christian way. But I think in my understanding of it, for the most part the ways are very compatible. And if you look at the healthy dialogue that's going on between Buddhists and Christians, there is so much to share there in the monastic traditions, the silence, and much of what the Buddha first taught, you can hear and just sense in the words of Jesus. So, you know, some people may have a problem with, oh, he actually has a respect for Zen in practice, but really I don't see anything contradicting my Christian faith there. Well, let's talk, Matt, a little bit about your experience working with homeless families in Fort Lauderdale in Florida. You were executive director of a place down there called the Shepherd's Way. And what does that mean? What are you doing with homeless families? You've got it warmed down there. They don't have to worry. Homeless families up here, and if they're in the Twin Cities where you're loving, homelessness is a real issue, particularly in January. What do you do? What was the efforts? Is this something that can actually be changed? That's a good question. What we were doing was we were the largest houser of homeless families in Broward County. And Florida is an incredibly diverse community. Just south Florida is incredibly diverse. In sections you've got Little Havana down in Miami, a huge Haitian immigrant population, large Brazilian and Argentinian populations, and a lot of the people that we were housing were Haitians. So there's a great problem down there. The advantage is, for the most part, you've got weather that is not potentially as dangerous as the winter up here. I mean, you'll have some heat advisories. It's funny to see how having lived up here now for going on my third winter, the frost advisories down there for, you know, it might hit 32 degrees. And, you know, we're having to scramble to get blankets for people out on the streets. The problem is really when you get up here and see a new perspective on it, it's pretty amazing. The numbers down there of homeless people are much greater than they are up here. I haven't been involved in the homeless community up here in the homeless services community, so I don't know if that's because it's better services. I would suspect so. But it's also the housing environment down in South Florida following Hurricane Wilma. A lot of people, you know, Katrina got a lot of the press, obviously, for what happened in New Orleans. But the eye of Katrina actually went over for Lauderdale as well. And following that, later that summer, the eye of Wilma went over, we didn't have power at my house for 10 days. We lost water for three days. We didn't have power at my office for 17 days. So you can imagine the mold problems. But what happened in that time is a lot of people lost their housing. There were blue tarps everywhere. And they began this series of condo conversions. So landlords were trying to sell their apartments and upgrade them to condos because the housing market at that point was still booming, which has completely fallen off the map down there, too. Now, but people who were making a decent living suddenly found themselves priced out of living. And you would be amazed at some of the incomes of people that were homeless in South Florida. So the problem was very different down there than it was up here. There's certainly a quotation from Jesus. A lot of people like to toss around. You'll have the poor with you always. Some people take that as an indication that you might as well give up. You can't do anything about it. You know, why try? On the other hand, we also know that in Matthew, we're told that we're going to be judged based on how we respond to the least of these. What was your motivation for working with homeless families? What is the aspiration of a person like yourself who was working with homeless families? Is it to get them homefold? What is the purpose of your work? It was multiple purposes. I was also on the Broward Coalition to End Homelessness where we began executing a 10-year plan to end homelessness in the county. So it was advocacy and working on legislation and working with the government to provide for homeless shelters or other homeless programs. The other was just, for me, we were providing short-term housing. Most people that we were running across were becoming homeless because of a shock to their system. Whether or not it was a hurricane or a lost job. You know, most of us are one paycheck away from being homeless. If you suddenly unexpectedly lose your job and you had a $1,400 a month rent, chances are that you would have to be looking for another place to live unless you have a really good unemployment system in South Florida. That wasn't really the case. You know, we were trying to meet direct needs and provide that housing. But the advocacy side was huge too. I don't want to be just housing someone and then put them right back out in the community that they're going to be homeless again in four months, six months. I want to address the problems so that the people coming to us wouldn't have to be homeless at all. It would never have had to be homeless. The whole idea of any social justice work or any nonprofit work is to work yourself out of a job. I don't want the demand for my services to be huge. I would love for Friends for Nonviolent World to be able to close its doors someday because the world is non-violent. I have a lot of work to do on that front. But I would love for the Shepherd's Way to be able to close the doors and not have to house homeless people because we've got legitimate housing for the people of South Florida and for Minnesota. Well, that does bring us back to Friends for Nonviolent World, F-N-V-W, where you're Executive Director. I want to mention that your website is F-N-V-W dot O-R-G, right? And what do we find on the website? I can find announcements. The biggest thing coming up is an upcoming conference on non-violence in the Christian tradition. We found ourselves in a unique position, you know, being a Quaker organization to be able to explore non-violence in various traditions. So this is the first in a series of conferences. The speakers for this, it's a wonderful list. It includes Walter Wink, who has some great South African ties who smuggled a book on non-violence into South Africa against the government's wishes back in the '80s. I think it was 1986. Then eventually after teaching classes in non-violence, turned himself into the authorities and was expelled from the country. He never had a visa. I think he was snuck in through Namibia. Other speakers include some locals. Gerald Shlabak, who wrote a book called "Just Policing, Not War." Bill Kavanaugh from St. Thomas wrote a book called "Portrait in Eucharist." The myth of religious violence is his newest book. Rita Nakashima Brock, Kathy Kelly. It's just a great list of speakers. And we're going to do the next version. We don't know if we think it might be on the Buddhist tradition, but we also are looking at possibly asking someone like Sammy Rasouli from Muslim Peace Games to help us pull together a conference on non-violence in the Muslim tradition. You'll find all of our action alerts that we've printed, our past newsletters, some financial information if you want to know. We are a very small budget organization. So I guess outside of announcements and some materials and links to our partners, that's pretty much it. You mentioned the conference coming up. What exactly is it happening? Can people register via the FNVW.org website? They can. It is on Halloween. It will be all day on Halloween. The first speakers of that day will be the Winx. June Keener Winx is coming with Walter. And so they'll speak beginning at about 9.30 in the morning on Saturday. And Kathy Kelly will end the day speaking beginning at about 7.30. And it's going to be held at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities in New Brighton. The first 240 people that sign up. A maximum capacity in the Bigelow Chapel at UTS is 242 people. So get your tickets early. We expect with internationally known figures like Walter Wink that tickets will go very quickly over the next two months. I'm assuming you can get me a press pass so I can be there reporting on it. We can do that for you. Is costume optional on that day? Since it is Halloween, I thought maybe you'd want to come dressed as your most favorite non-violent expert. That would be great. We'd love to see some gaudies in the crowd. Feel free to come to St. Sebastian with the marrows coming out of you. All that kind of stuff. I'm assuming on the website there might be opportunities that people connect with to either volunteer. I don't know, be on your board. What kind of roles can people take to get involved in either your programs or your structure? We do a lot of work. And we're a fairly visible presence in the community. But we do it with a very small staff. I am actually the only full-time employee with the organization. The others are half-time. And we do the vast majority of our work through volunteers, including our AVP program, which is almost all volunteer. So there are so many volunteer opportunities. You could become a facilitator of an alternative to violence project workshop. You could attend people camp. There's opportunities in the office. You could attend our conferences. There's also the ability to donate to help us increase the staff presence here to coordinate those volunteers even more thoroughly. FNVW, Friends for Nonviolent World, website is FNVW.org. We're speaking with their executive director. His name is Matt Hunter. He's been director there for two and a half years. A mindful Methodist who is leading this organization. In terms of this organization, it's Quaker founded. It certainly has Quaker roots. Are there things that you, Matt, had to do to fit into this Quaker? Is there any kind of a Quaker straight jacket there that limits you from being a fully functioning Methodist? You know, the biggest difference, we do business in the manner of friends. So, for example, a board meeting is run on consensus. The decision-making process in a Quaker setting is a lot more deliberate than I'm used to. So, there was a transition period there and I've really come to appreciate it. And one thing I've noticed is, you know, you take a little more time on a decision and it comes out better. So, I think the decisions that we've been making as a board and as a staff have really been positive because of the more deliberate process. There are ways that we can get actions taken more quickly. But for the most part, it is that consensus model. And that was a bit of a challenge at first. And so, are you going to carry that method of doing it back to the Methodist world? Are you going to now make a consensus or a sense of the meeting-type-based methodism? It actually has impacted my management style in the church. I think I've always sought other opinion. I would hope I would be doing that. But it's more intentional now as part of what I'm doing. One thing Methodists and Quakers have very much in common is committees. The Methodist Church has committee upon committee and it takes a lot of patience. And so, actually, decision-making in the Methodist Church has extended out as well. The consensus is more on a committee basis rather than a congregation-wide basis. A lot of the Methodist communities are larger than the Quaker community. So, my own church had an avenue to get consensus we would have to have about, I believe it's close to 3,000 members agreeing with us. And that's pretty hard to build consensus among 3,000 people. But isn't it our aspiration for the world? I always figure if we can't work out problems between ourselves and our small communities here in the U.S., what hope could there ever be for the Middle East? So, it leads me to give all the more effort to working things out locally in the hopes that in these major problem sites in the world that there's some hope for them. So, you know, if we work it out, maybe they can too. One thing about the consensus decision-making too is it's not that everyone agrees. But if you have a decision, you might have someone who says, "I don't necessarily agree with the path we're taking, but my agreement is not to the point of blocking this action. I just want to express that I might choose to go in a different way." So, wouldn't it be nice if even if there's disagreement, people would respectfully listen more to the other people around them and not block processes? Yes, it would be great hope for the world. I want to thank you so much, Matt, for your leadership for FNVW, for Friends of Nonviolent World. They're in the Twin Cities. I want to thank you for your work. Just watching your progress as you've learned, as you've experienced the world, as you listened to the insightful people on nonviolence and other transitions in your own thinking, it's inspiration for me. So, thank you so much for joining us for Spirit in Action. Thank you, Mark. That was Matt Hunter, Director of Friends for Nonviolent World in the Twin Cities. Check out their website, FNVW.org. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ (upbeat music)