Six months after.

In October of 2011 I was one of 700 protesters arrested as part of the Occupy protest movement. It was the first mass arrest and would be followed by almost 6000 more arrests across the country. I spent six hours in a small holding cell with 150 other protesters while the patient police officers performed their half of the civic duty.

In November I had my court date. The court agreed to drop the charges after a six month period in which I did not get re-arrested in New York state. Today the charges will be dropped and my official record will be cleared.

I wanted to spend a few moments reflecting on the movement and on the experience of being arrested while protesting.



I don't believe that I was arrested before most of my High School classmates. I still don't believe that I was arrested.

I was in missionary training camp, just a few days away from being commissioned as a missionary for the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries when I marched. I grew up in a conservative family in a small town in rural Western Pennsylvania. I come from the mountains. Good people don't protest - and they certainly don't get arrested.

I am thankful to come from a religious tradition with a long history of social action and engagement. Methodists fought for the rights of women and children. We ended child labor in Europe and fought against slavery. Our opposition to alcohol brought about prohibition (hey, some causes are winners - and some not so much so!). We believe in a more just society - and we are willing to take to the streets to accomplish that.

Historically, we have marched long before the causes became popular in the public opinion. Some of our southern United Methodist clergy lost all credibility with their all-white congregations by marching with their African American brothers and sisters. Dr. Dorothy Height sat beside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr when he shared his dream for America. We are a people who stand up to be counted long before it is politically profitable.

I don't agree with everything that the Occupy movement stands for. We are misunderstood, misrepresented, and missing the crucial voices of age, wisdom, and racial diversity.

But make no mistake: the central rallying cry for a more fair economy and for the hyper-rich to have less control of the government will not go away. When our encampment at Zuccotti Park was dismantled, the ideas and the people behind them did not die.

Our current economy is no longer sustainable.

As Christians, we are called to think about the economy in a different way than our secular friends. The housing bubble bust should have had little to no effect on the American Christian community. We are taught to neither borrow nor lend for profit. We are called to live simple, sparse lives and to give the rest away. If our houses are large; they should be filled with people in need of a place to stay. If American Christians chose to live in the economy Jesus painted for us it would be our strongest witness to a changed and different life.

It breaks my heart to see brothers and sisters in Christ believing the lies of the news cycle. When I see friends going into tremendous debt because a guest bedroom and office are "needs" I literally cry. We work for things that we don't need instead of working in the name of Christ. It's terribly sad.

We envy the rich. We want to be them. We genuinely don't care how immoral they are or what actions they had to do to get to the top - we still keep them as role models.

A hooker who sells sex for enough money to feed and house her children is disgusting - but a bank executive who cheats, lies, and tricks his way to the top is a role model. This makes me think that Christians need to spend some time studying sin and the way that some sins are worse and require more condemnation than others (hint: they aren't and they don't!). Why do we revile the woman who sins to earn enough to live and exemplify the one who sins to earn enough for another Porsche?

We learn to step over and ignore the homeless and to stop and allow Mercedes to have the right of way. The world would be a lot better if we learned to do the opposite.

The Occupy movement changed the national conversation for a few weeks. Hopefully those of us involved in the movement will continue to challenge people to think about the concepts of wealth, poverty, salary, education, globalization, etc. These issues will shape the world we live in - and we owe it to the world to be aware and educated in these subjects.

I believe in a better future. That is the reason that I had no qualms about being arrested and the reason that there is only joy in my heart regarding the incident. But, perhaps more importantly than that, I believe that God calls us to live into and create a better future.