Boyle, Fr. Gregory | Barking to the Choir

Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship
Gregory Boyle

Paperback: Simon & Schuster, 2018, 224pp.

Introduction 

Father Greg Boyle’s book Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship is not only an immensely helpful book for churches as they seek to live faithfully to their calling to follow Jesus, it also is a delight to read! Boyle, a Jesuit priest who lives and works in Los Angeles, is the founder of Homeboy Industries, a gang intervention, rehab and re-entry program that has started a wide range of social enterprises. 

Barking to the Choir consists largely of a collection of stories about friends that Boyle has made through his work at Homeboy Industries. These anecdotes are engaging, and often quite funny, but there is a deep current of wisdom about what it means to follow Christ (and what it means to be human) that flows through these stories.

Boyle founded Homeboy Industries in 1988, in what was then one of the poorest and most gang-infested parishes in L.A. Over the last three decades, thousands of young men and women have been guided out of gang culture and given jobs, they’ve removed gang tattoos, received therapy and all they need to contribute to their community. Many of these young folks joined gangs because gangs offered them a meaningful sense of belonging, and a key part of what Homeboy Industries has done is to provide an alternative sort of community to which the former gang-members can meaningfully belong– a community that is less destructive and more empowering than gangs. 

Barking to the Choir is fundamentally about this new sort of community that is emerging around the work and services of Homeboy Industries, a community that is marked by the radical kinship that it cultivates.

Radical Kinship

Greg Boyle, a white, well-educated Jesuit priest, and the gang members – most of whom are Latino/Latina or black – would seem to have little in common. And yet, as the stories of Barking to the Choir remind us at every turn, deep bonds of humanity unite them. The work of Homeboy Industries, Boyle writes, “aspires to put a human face on the gang member. If this doesn’t happen then kinship is impeded. It is also meant to soften our conventional take on who this gang member is and ushers in an abiding belief that we belong to one another. It is anchored in the truth that all demonizing is untruth” (8).

The sort of radical kinship that Boyle depicts in this book is rooted in truth, most specifically the truth that we are loved immeasurably by our Creator. Boyle reminds us that Jesus spoke of those “who belong to the truth” (119). As we come to know the love and truth of our belonging to God, we find healing and grow in our capacity to extend this love and belonging to others. The radical kinship that we share with others is not rooted in any sort of human commonality (nationality, language, race, gender, age, etc.), but rather in the basic truth that as humans, we all are created in the image of God and are loved by and belong to God. Boyle writes: “Homeboy receives people; it doesn’t rescue them. In being received rather than rescued, gang members come to find themselves at home in their own skin. Homeboy’s message is not ‘You can measure up someday.’ Rather, it is ‘Who you are is enough.’ And when you have enough, you have plenty” (84). 

Boyle encourages us to relish the freedom found in radical kinship, especially the freedom from judging others. “We must try and learn,” he writes, “to drop the burden of our own judgments, reconciling that what the mind wants to separate, the heart should bring together. Dropping this enormous inner burden of judgment allows us to make of ourselves what God ultimately wants the world to be: people who stand in awe.” He continues: “Kinship asks us to move from blame to understanding. Our practice of awe empties a room, and suddenly there is space for expansive compassion” (57).

Active
Disciple-making

Although radical kinship is the primary focus of Barking to the Choir, the sort of kinship that Boyle describes also nurtures the mutuality of an active and empowered practice of making disciples. Jesus taught his disciples: “But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students” (Matt. 23:8), and Boyle compellingly embodies for us this sort of kinship rooted in our mutual vocation as disciples/students. Although Boyle is a Jesuit priest with a deep theological education, his writing reflects the awe he has for the former gang members of Homeboy Industries and the multitude of ways that he is being discipled by them. “I can’t think, breathe, or proceed – ever –,“ Boyle writes in the book’s introduction, “without stories, parables, and wisdom gleaned from knowing these men and women who find their way into [the Homeboy] headquarters … In all my years of living, I have never been given greater access to the tenderness of God than through the channel of the thousands of homies I’ve been privileged to know. The day simply won’t ever come when I am nobler or more compassionate or asked to carry more than these men and women.”  He continues, “In the pages that follow are the lives of men and women who have pointed the way for me. For my part, to sit at their feet, has been nothing short of salvific” (4-5). Although Boyle has undoubtedly had a hand in discipling the former gang members of Homeboy Industries, it is equally clear that he is just as much being discipled by them. 

Bearing Witness to God’s Reconciliation of All Things

One of the most striking things about Homeboy Industries that stands out in the stories collected in this volume, is the ordinariness of the community of radical kinship that is emerging there. This community is not a particularly pious or religious community, and its practices revolve largely around caring for each other and caring for their neighbors in everyday ways such as creating jobs that do good work and help cultivate their place. 

When a congregation imagines what it might look like to Live the Word, I suspect that the building blocks of this imagination are often churchy sorts of things: worship services, ministries of benevolence, and so forth. While these church-focused practices are certainly important, the community around Homeboy Industries offers us a glimpse of a more holistic community that bears witness to God’s healing and reconciliation of all things. Traditional church congregations, I believe, have much to learn from the radical kinship and holistic care embodied in a non-traditional sort of congregation like that of Homeboy Industries. Our churches must find ways to be more than merely religious communities that gather once or twice a week to worship and then depart to live our individual lives in the “real world.” We must learn to receive one another, as God receives us, without judgment and in the fullness of our giftedness and brokenness. Indeed this is our calling, as communities of Christ followers, to embody in our life together the hope and the truth of Christ’s love for us and his call for humanity to live in radical kinship.