This is not liberation theology or a social gospel, but it is about being social and liberating the oppressed-by-wicked, and the oppressed-by-ignorance

I've been thinking about these things and, want to do more than just find a job, but find a means to be both upright and efficient--in its old term--as well; to effect just outcomes and preach righteousness, embody it, and demand it, for the sake of my Lord and His good name (all to myself in secret, first of all). This also means being social, in the sense of interacting, as well as loving--in the sense of obeying and conforming to Christ, and it also means persuading--meaning finding co-workers with the same ends in view. In our context, it also means legally bypassing power structures of the wicked, to avoid lending them any strength, demanding they go back within their limits, using every measure available to obtain that end, and to call for the proper trial and punishments of those who have done unjustly even though in the name of good.

I'm confident that the contemporary-Reformed community--which you never see madly urging people into the kindgom on the busiest of streets where you'll find plenty of the heretics, babbling preacherettes, and televangelist pento-charismatical knock-offs--is currently too plagued with indifference, leisure, comfort, the proud, the intellectually-stuffed (the we-came-cause-we-outgrew-evangelical-insanity-and-became-intellectually-dissatisfied-with-their-stupidity-but-are-still-evangsmellicals-who're-here-to-be-intellectually-satisfied!) as things go; whether OPC or PCA or URCNA, you'll find one kind of off-the-deep-end or another no matter how hard you look for purity, it's appalling; the PCA is infecting the RBs with Tim Kellerism and the last one I attended had men laughing at the idea of fighting over his mis-teachings; the OPC has men proclaiming better to worship with Lutherans than the schismatic baptists because they all deny the validity of their baptisms--despite so commonly Baptists, unlike Landmarkists, actually just require a credible profession of belief and evidence of sanctification (you know, real or Augustinian-type spiritual realities thinking).

The difference between the wackos on the streets and the Reformed in their steeple-churches (or God forbid, unchurch hip-scene constructs, or messianic-Jew-Judaizing-synagogues-to-reach-Jewry-with-Jewishness), with the former they're truly mad, though in love with something; we're sane-ish, calculating, just not in love at all. The tutelage of people I wouldn't really trust to help me isn't one I wish to put children under, yet the ones attempting to change things or do good, though often misguided, are also unsound in doctrinal matters: woe are we (as a nation) for the divorce between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Each alone gives rise to madnesses, and madness to destructions of various sorts. How can our kind perpetuate the unadulatered gospel attended by the Spirit of God, however, without going raving mad in the midst of such tragedy? Why aren't we raving mad exposing the false preachers in the streets, instead of civily speaking of their pros and cons in academic circles, and conferences of celebrated Reformed personalities speaking to the layment-from-far-off just as vainly done by the evangsmellicals, seeking acceptability? Where are the old-school PCA men being brotherly to expose and denounce Dispensationalism and its two-means, two-flocks, two-plans and other heresies, amidst RBs who profess to holding to the London-type Confessions, the 1st-Londoners who reject the second on the grounds of myths because their fundamentalism procludes them from carefully attending to history, or the RBs denouncing the baptismal-regeneration that is, indeed, common amidst the baby-sprinkling women of the paper-orthodoxy neo-orthodoxy professing Reformed-ism? Don't the let's-all-just-be-warm "civils" know that true friends sharpen each other like iron--that clashing with swords can be a good thing and is what friends do? My Chinese friend likes to say that true friends "fight" each other, both to exact understanding from one another and to urge one another to be better.

I am not out there because I do not believe I am altogether theologically sound, I am unlearned and mean, without understanding or proper instruction in doctrine; I was given over to much babble in my youth, and though I have worked to undo it, I confess acedie and also succumbing to terrible conditions: oppressive and awful as they may have been, it is still no excuse, I repent. All said, I am also unaware how to escape such traps without help--the poor are needy such as to lack even the means to their own improvement, such is I for now, but perhaps I have just enough to work, incrementally, out of it. It is not that there is no talent or opportunity, either, but that men need help anyway, if only in the acceptation of others to share their substance in exchange for value, whether work or a good, and the men we are surrounded with are not laborers or producers, they are consumers whether or not they wish to be. Many others are stuck. There is even a name for this when the non-choice is poverty, the "poverty trap"; indeed this applies to more than income, but the ability to gain knowledge and understanding, for instance.

If men were fair and rulers good, no one would be impoverished, for everyone could produce and be rewarded according to need and his labors, trading and working without fear or taxation or burden or exploitation or being leveraged. The reality is far different. Guys like me cannot accept, though we love, the MacArthurian-and-quasi/really/kinda dispensationalist RBs, 2nd-Lond-Baptist-Confession-is-bad-'cause-[we're-ignorant-of-history-and-still-fundamentalists-attempting-intellectualism-as-though-sophomores/schoolboys], charismatic-enthused-for-Reformed-theology-but-Arminian-in-practice, or even Orthodox-Presbyterian-but-Neo-Orthodox-in-practice camps; impurity and lukewarmness alike are all bad. I am myself guilty of another sin: despairing rather than looking in hope for strength after having been bludgeoned in life so long. But the solution to hard slogging is to slog harder, and get smarter to slog harder and wiser, and to keep going incrementally building strength until you laugh at the mire, something I've had to learn several times before and accomplish extreme feats and which, I realize, I should not only do again, but keep doing.

Guys like me have such bad current situations they are even attempting, foolishly, to take-in as much as possible reformulate, and undertake massive exploits which might undermine injustice, and give them space to live...legally, by which I mean homeless people can't sleep in a garage without violate some kind of "public protection" (taxable market values and "character of the neighborhood" i.e. town-created-privileging of property holders' interests over common-to-all rights and liberties) measure or "law" though of course do so outside and police are just as likely to come "greeting" as the crazy crack-addict (or other homeless guy) is to come to your aid if there are only one or two of them popo. That is unacceptable, and I think the first line of assault on entrenched and pervasive injustice is to take-up the means to defend, and do everything one can, to discredit those things which make defenseless, the most needy. Undermine privileges popularly supported which undermine rights, especially those made because ya'-don't-wanna-have-poor-foot-traffic (an actual argument in the original case where zoning was under assault/being defended that decided that zoning was legitimate), or a bad view, or a noisy poor person in his garage working next door (when ya know, you just can't be bothered to better insulated your household office and get thicker windows), or a rooster next door...

The next, of course, is to start educatin' those po' self-destructives...self-destructives they may be, but they are also likely people, at least when related, that are most apt to help. They might be inconsistent--may turn on a dime, later, and exact from you some sort of penalty for daring associate--but they're likely also more open, maleable, to being urged to repentance and faith, cause the poorer the less likely to be in this life's comforts, thus often the better, though not always. I’m hoping, Deo Volente, to gain means or strength at least to start reading good books with such people, and maybe in tens years of prep to shake-up the world around me.