This abridged article highlights only two of the five "Tables." The entire article is available at www.kristafoundation.org or in The Global Citizen vol 3. It is based on a keynote address given by the author at the annual conference of the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship, May 28, 2006.
Sarah, a recent college graduate from Minnesota, lives in downtown Los Angeles as a Salesian volunteer working with the children of homeless women. Randy uses his Columbia University engineering degree to help design community centers, water projects, orphanages, and medical clinics in the Middle East with Engineering Ministries International. Katie is studying for an advanced degree in Ecology after serving for two years at a homeless shelter with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Jay shares his gifts as an urban musician by facilitating a partnership with a local music production company and a Presbyterian church in Tacoma, Washington to create a music development program for inner-city youth.
Each of these young adults shares a commitment to engage the world through service. They have chosen to share in and contribute to the social, economic, and spiritual development of a specific community of people. That they each made such commitments demonstrates that there are likely some shared values between them. Living out such commitments, however, is likely to transform them, pushing them further toward a common set of values or ethic: the ethic of service, civic engagement, and global understanding. In a word, it is the ethic of the global citizen. While the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship believes that service commitments are a powerful influence toward this ethic, we recognize that they are not the only things that lead people to develop into global citizens. However, this article attempts to articulate some critical components of this ethic from the angle or perspective of service. Alongside this essay appears "Staying for Tea: Five Principles for the Community Service Volunteer," a piece I wrote a few years before. In some ways, this is a companion piece to that article: while that essay deals with principles, this essay addresses values. It may be helpful to differentiate then what I mean by these two words. I don't pretend to offer authoritative definitions, but rather to clarify the distinction within these two articles.
A principle guides how we express our values in the world. It is a general rule of behavior that, if kept, will by and large keep us aligned with our values. A value, on the other hand, is something to which we steadfastly assign higher-order worth. By "higher-order" I mean that if you were to group everything that is of worth to you into sets, your values would be in that first set that you'd hang onto even if it meant foregoing something from a lower set. When trade-offs are forced between things that have worth to you, the result is generally clarification about your values. Both are critical to identify and remain aware of as we go about making the myriad choices we face each day, both large and trivial.
It is not enough to have one without the other. I might say, "I value community," yet have no idea how it impacts my day-to-day decisions. So, we develop principles like "Staying for Tea" that guide our behavior as we attempt to live out our values.2 My hope is that the following article engenders better thinking about what values we bring with us and desire to express in the communities we serve. The things of worth we put into that higher order are not part of an immutable set. We choose our values. We think about them and make preferential choices regarding the set of values to which we compose principles. The metaphor of invitation to a table is meant to allow you to add our own meanings along the way, as you consider the relevance of each to your own journey into global citizenship. The five tables are: The Communion Table: Mutuality, The Negotiation Table: Influence, The Study Table: Competence, The Operating Table: Humility, and The ‘Hearthing' Table: Celebration. In this abridged version I discuss two of these tables.
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