Father Gregory Boyle, affectionately known as “Father G,” is justly celebrated as a successful social entrepreneur for his vision for, and leadership of, Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles.
Its several operating businesses embody the motto of Homeboy Industries: “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” And beyond Los Angeles, its Global Homeboy Network encourages innovative strategies among other organizations for gang intervention in diverse cities around the country and the world. Thousands of lives have been touched and transformed by the program. New frameworks for diagnosing and addressing the challenges and opportunities in dealing with kids and gangs have been developed. Father G has drawn the attention of George W. Bush’s White House (and particularly Laura Bush), and both he and Homeboy Industries have been featured in documentaries, books and newspaper profiles. He even has a TEDx video.
I had known that Father G is a Jesuit priest, and that being a Christian is central to his identity and work. Early in his moving memoir, “Tattoos on the Heart,” he writes, “Not much in my life makes any sense outside of God.” His stories, and his life, shine forth with the light of Christ.
Until recently, though, I hadn’t quite realized how deeply his Christian faith animates his vision of Homeboy Industries. I, like many others, had seen Homeboy as a remarkable example of social innovation whose visionary founder just happened to be a visionary priest. After spending significant time recently engaging Father G in conversation, I realized that Father G isn’t a Christian who also is a social entrepreneur; he is a Christian social entrepreneur.
What do I mean by this distinction? Father G moves beyond a framing of Christian faith and social innovation to display how Christian faith animates social innovation in a distinctive way.
Three themes are essential to understanding Father G and Homeboy Industries:
Everything Father G does, including Homeboy Industries, is shaped by his vision of God and what it means to bear witness to God’s reign. He begins with the end, the telos. He often cites Habakkuk 2:2-3, “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.”
Father G keeps the vision plain and bold. He notes that while it will surely come, we also need the patience to be willing to “wait for it.” There is a profound patience in Father G’s vision and work, even as it is accompanied by a sense of urgency to bear witness.
“As a Jesuit for thirty-seven years and a priest for twenty-five years, it would not be possible for me to present these stories apart from God, Jesus, compassion, kinship, redemption, mercy, and our common call to delight in one another,” he writes in “Tattoos on the Heart.”
The genius of Father G is that he speaks these words in the same breath with words like jobs, prison reform, therapy, gang rehabilitation and drug testing. His commitment to social innovation is an expression of his Christian life. If we are in fact kinfolk, then we ought to be in relationship with our brothers and sisters and foster their flourishing as they do so for us — even if, perhaps especially if, they seem so different from us.
Father G describes his life as learning to see the world as a “companion of Jesus,” which means that he doesn’t see gang kids as unfortunate folks he will condescend to help because of his love for God; rather, he says, he has “learned, with their patient guidance, to worship Christ as He lives in them.”
Father G’s vision for Homeboy focuses on healing and wholeness, for people, communities and systems. Rooted in his vision of God’s reign, Father G’s work holds together what others push apart. He cares as much about the kids’ souls as he does their bodies, jobs and relationships.
Homeboy Industries began as an experiment, a jobs program, to support gang kids in finding new life, and to help change the environments in which they live. Its first commercial ventures, Homeboy Bakery and Homeboy Silkscreen, have become the cornerstone of the organization, which now includes nine businesses in several locations (including Los Angeles City Hall).
Father G has recently observed that he doesn’t think Homeboy’s well-known motto, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job,” gets at the heart of their mission. “It’s about healing,” he says. Jobs are a key part of that healing, but only part. Early on, he says, the focus was too much on transactions for jobs and job training, and not enough on relationships and healing — healing of the souls of the gang members, healing of the community, healing of our relationships one with another. It is, he suggests, about our unlearning the profound brokenness that diminishes and divides us from one another and learning to delight in our common kinship — and even hold one another in awe.
Today, Homeboy’s services include not only jobs programs but also mental health care, legal aid, substance abuse support and tattoo removal. Its campus also functions as a community center.
Father G is at his best as a visionary priest, and he entrusts the institutional expertise to others. Father G recognizes that Christian social innovation is a team sport. He embodies a humility shaped by his ever-deepening intimacy with God, a humility that enables him to focus on how best to accomplish the mission rather than presume he needs to be in charge. Early on, Father G had to play most of the roles of a social entrepreneur; over time, though, he began to realize where his gifts lie and where he needs to depend on and empower others.
Father G recognizes that there are gifts he brings to Homeboy Industries as a priest: vision, storytelling, blessing, helping the pilot light of hope catch fire. Even his “recruitment” strategy to attract gang kids to Homeboy is deeply rooted in his celebration of Masses in diverse settings, especially in jails and prisons.
He also candidly admits that he is neither particularly good at the day-to-day administrative tasks of leading an institution nor particularly interested in them. If you want to know about how to build and lead a remarkable institution, he directs you to others.
Father G, whose leadership at Homeboy extends more than two and a half decades, says he isn’t particularly worried about succession planning, because other people are in place to lead the organization. Businessman-philanthropist (and board member) Bruce Karatz has helped Homeboy discover new revenue-producing strategies to make the nonprofit more sustainable financially. A former gang member, Fabian, now leads the drug counseling aspect of Homeboy’s work. Father G has cultivated virtuous cycles of training and leadership for the whole organization and beyond.
Those efforts address the sustainability of the day-to-day institutional operations. When the time comes for Father G to step away from the work, though, they will not easily replace his priestly leadership, which has cultivated a culture where, as he says, quoting Julian of Norwich, “we are ‘clothed in God’s goodness.’” It is tempting to focus only on the gang intervention strategies and underestimate the significance of Father G’s Christian vision in shaping Homeboy’s culture.
Father G’s hope gives Homeboy Industries its lifeblood. He continually points to miracles, kinship, awe, blessing and delight, even as he acknowledges the pain, brokenness and suffering. Father G is no optimist; he has buried too many kids felled by gang violence. But neither is he a pessimist; he has witnessed too much transformation. He embraces both a hope-filled future orientation and a clear-eyed awareness of humanity’s brokenness.
He shines that hope through his vision of God, his work for healing and wholeness, and his empowerment of others to lead. Father G’s witness and leadership invite us to see how the end is our beginning, to learn to see as God sees and to join the team of Christian social innovation.
Throughout his life, Tsietsi Mashinini, a young black South African, had been told he had no value as a human being. That changed in the mid-1970s, when he found a discipleship group in a local Methodist congregation.
The people in that church befriended him, not just as casual friends, but as holy friends. They challenged his sense of having little self-worth. They encouraged him to claim his gift for leadership. They helped him dream of the end of apartheid.
Mashinini went on to become one of the leaders of the Soweto Uprising of June 16, 1976, an event that South Africans name as pivotal to the beginning of the end of apartheid. His dream became reality with the election in 1994 of Nelson Mandela, four years after Mashinini died. June 16 is now a national holiday — a day that has some of its roots in the practices of that discipleship group in which strangers became holy friends who worshipped, studied and prayed together.
Holy friends challenge the sins we have come to love, affirm the gifts we are afraid to claim and help us dream dreams we otherwise would not dream.
Initiated by God, holy friendships draw us ever closer to God. They do not develop simply through exchanging pleasantries before board meetings, passing the peace during worship or “liking” a friend’s Facebook status. These relationships require sustained quality time and are oriented not to casual updates about the moments of our days but to discerning and deepening Christian vocation and learning how to live holy lives.
How do we cultivate communities and institutions in which more people can discover the significance of holy friendships for their own lives, and offer such friendship to others? We do so through shared practices that enable us to recognize the interconnected character of our stories and to re-narrate our lives in more life-giving ways.
In “Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change,” Timothy Wilson calls this overall approach “story editing,” and he reports numerous social science studies that show the significance of such an approach. Wilson writes that story-editing techniques share three assumptions:
- We must see the world through others’ eyes if we want to change behavior;
- Our interpretations are not always set in stone and can be redirected; and
- Small changes in interpretations can have self-sustaining effects that create long-lasting behavioral changes.
The practices that sustain holy friendships are rooted in learning to see the world first and foremost through God’s eyes, so we can locate ourselves in the larger story of God. We need help from our holy friends, and we in turn offer such hope to them, in order to see God at work in our lives and in the world. Too often our own self-understanding is distorted by sin, by self-deception, by our participation in destructive mindsets, habits and practices. Holy friendships reorient us and stir our imaginations; Mashinini learned to narrate his story in the context of God’s love, and so empowered, he helped imagine a world whose effects have impacted the lives of millions.
Paul J. Wadell, in “Friendship and the Moral Life,” gives us a picture of what an institution that supports holy friendships can look like. He begins his book with the story of Mother of Good Counsel, a high school seminary in Warrenton, Mo., where he spent four years with 200 other adolescent boys living under “strange practices” and “baffling rules.”
Wadell recalls a transformative Eucharist in Advent 1968, six months shy of graduation, when the boys came to see each other differently — realizing they loved one another and had transformed one another on their paths to discover whether they were called to become Passionist priests.
“Warrenton was a school of friendship not because it sought to make us friends, but because it presented us with a purpose that made friendship possible,” Wadell writes. “The intimacy we felt that night in Eucharist, and the transition from strangeness to kinship it marked, would never have occurred if we had not assented to a way of life designed to uncover whether that promise was ours. … One of the graces of Warrenton was that the discipline required for that discovery blessed us with an intimacy that so many years later still feels amazingly fresh.”
Like the discipleship group in South Africa and the seminary in Warrenton, the communities and institutions where we work, worship, play and rest bring together people who, without a shared purpose, may never have known one another. We can help those strangers become holy friends to one another through the practices of listening, reading (Scripture and other materials), crossing borders, praying, worshipping, practicing silence and breaking bread.
At the center of these practices is the commitment to create time and safe spaces in which faithful, and faith-filled, story editing can occur. Consider listening. How often do we really listen to those to whom we are speaking? Without discipline, our minds return to the past and jump to the future, missing out on the present. Faithful listening builds the trust that enables acquaintances to come to know one another more deeply. This practice requires discipline to set aside time on a regular basis to really hear a friend’s stories, and to do so with our hearts focused on how God’s Holy Spirit is working in and through them.
Study, through reading widely and crossing borders, opens our hearts, minds and souls to the stranger and reminds us that God-centered friendship draws us all into communion with one another. Studying Scripture connects us to the tradition that forms our lives as disciples of Christ and connects us to those who have walked in the way of the Light before us; it helps us locate our stories in the larger context of God’s story. Reading across disciplines exposes us to new ideas and ways of thinking and shows us the many ways God is present. Likewise, crossing borders, embedding ourselves in new places and with new people, sets our sights on the abundant diversity of the places, cultures and people of our world. It puts us in touch with the challenges we face today, as well as the places of hope.
Praying, worshipping and practicing silence are at the heart of our wider Christian community. Through these we intentionally listen to God, speak to God and give thanks to God. Often, some of our best story-editing insights are discovered through such practices. How often do you set aside time to participate in communal prayer, worship and silence rather than lead it?
Sharing a meal, or breaking bread, is a fundamental act of our life together as Christians. Preparing food and sharing it signals our care and nurture of another person. This act invites us into deeper discernment about showing hospitality to strangers and recalls the ways that Jesus invited all people to the table. There is a deep connection between sharing stories and breaking bread, reflected in the Gospel narratives, as well as in the lore of families and lifelong friends.
Taken together, this story-editing approach and the practices that undergird it enable us to connect with other people on the deepest of levels, sharing our fears and failures, our hopes and dreams. Wilson notes that “the best predictor of happiness is the quality of our social relationships.” He goes on to say that, even so, our perspective on the world can be shaped to make us happier. The key? Having a story about ourselves that gives us meaning, hope and purpose.
Holy friends help us edit the stories we are used to telling about ourselves: challenging sins, affirming gifts, dreaming dreams. Wilson’s story-editing techniques can be practiced by individuals; they include reflecting on upsetting events as though a distant observer, imagining our future lives and then writing down what it would take to get there, and doing good works that connect us to others and our best selves. Yet we are most likely to engage in such activities if we are part of larger communities of holy friends who accompany us to see the truth of our lives in its complex interconnections of sins, gifts and dreams.
Does your community or institution invite people into times of listening, reading, crossing borders, praying, worshipping, practicing silence and breaking bread? Our lives are about communion with God and one another, and these practices, especially when linked to the development of holy friendships, help us draw ever closer to God and God’s reign.