Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 379 Kelley Nikondeha Returns - Jubilee Economics
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What does it mean to take Jesus seriously when he announces good news to the poor, freedom for the captive, and release from debt? In this episode of Shifting Culture, I’m joined by theologian and practitioner Kelley Nikondeha to talk about her new book Jubilee Economics and the disruptive, concrete vision of Jubilee found in Scripture. We explore why Jubilee was never just a spiritual metaphor but a real economic practice involving debt forgiveness, land, labor, and community restoration. Kelley shares stories from her work in Burundi—where economic collapse forced hard, human decisions about care, reentry, and neighbor-love—and helps us reframe Jesus’s sermon in Luke 4 as dangerous, embodied good news. This conversation asks what Jubilee might look like today, and what it might cost us to love our neighbors well in a debt-saturated world.
Kelley Nikondeha is a liberation theologian, community development practitioner, and author of First Advent in Palestine and Defiant. She is Co-founder of Communities of Hope in Burundi.
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While Jubilee is a concrete set of practices, you know, it also is a set of practices that set our imagination on a different kind of trajectory. I think Isaiah does that so beautifully. When he was imagining a new city, a way, the way a city could work better, work differently, and Jubilee was absolutely part of what he was dreaming and imagining.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, no, money is never neutral. It's theological because it tells a story about who belongs, who gets protected, and who gets trapped in Scripture. Jubilee isn't an abstract idea. It's concrete and disruptive. Debts released. People set free, land returned, communities given a chance to start again. In this episode, I'm joined again by Kelly, Nick and Deha to talk about Jubilee economics and what happens when we take Jesus at his word. Kelly shares this story from Burundi, where a fire destroys the Central Market. Everything gone in a few hours, people go to bed as business owners and wake up poor. The question becomes immediate, what does good news sound like when your inventory is ash and your loan is still due? The response wasn't a slogan, it was neighbor, love with a plan, food, presence, grief, then real paths back into the economy. That story reshapes how we hear Jesus in Luke four when he announces good news to the poor and released to the captives. He's not speaking in spiritual metaphors. He's naming the economic weight people carry in their bodies, and he's doing it in a world where saying that out loud was dangerous. This conversation is about practicing Jubilee now small, costly choices that make room for people to breathe, break cycles of debt and love our neighbors in ways that actually change lives. So join us for this conversation around Jubilee economics. Here is my conversation with Kelly. Nick and Deja. Kelly, welcome back to shifting culture. Excited to have you back on Well, thank you. I'm glad to be back. I'm excited to jump into Jubilee economics, your new book for the listeners. I'd love for you just to give us a brief overview of what Jubilee is, what it's about, and why it's important.
Kelley Nikondeha:So Jubilee is actually a set of economic practices, very concrete practices. So when I first heard about Jubilee growing up, it was about, you know, liberation and setting people free. It wasn't until I till I got older, and, you know, our understanding of the world thickens, that I actually realized that, oh, Jubilee isn't just this beautiful, operatic idea that we hear about with the prophet Isaiah, but it actually is very concrete set of policies that have to do with loans, labor and land, and the specific policy that I think most people First trip over is the idea of collective debt forgiveness. Because one of the big things, if you know anything about Jubilee, you know that on the 50th year, when the shofar is blown, everybody's debt gets forgiven. And you know, if that's the top line, there's been a lot of questions about, well, that's not realistic. And did that ever really happen? And are there any receipts for that? And that's just utopian rhetoric. I mean, that's a lot of what I grew up with, you know, when I first started learning about Jubilee. But my husband and I do development work overseas, and so actually for us, we really cared not just about liberation in the operatic tones, but what it actually, you know, we were looking for concrete wisdom for the kind of work that we do. And so as I dug deeper into the text, you know, we see that Moses was having these conversations about neighborliness and what it was going to look like when they moved into the promised land, and among them was these deep conversations about indebtedness. You know that that there was this recognition that if anything was really going to destroy the neighborliness that they had built as they traveled through the desert, it was going to be debt. And so conversations that we see, both in Deuteronomy and Leviticus talk about these practices of freeing people from debt, which actually it's not commercial debt, it's personal debt, releasing people from their indebtedness. Conversations around labor, it's letting people go free. But again, people who were enslaved because of their indebtedness, they were in right servants. They became somebody's servant because they owed them a debt they couldn't repay or land that was lost in the rough and tumble of the economy. So when that shofar blew, yes, debts were forgiven. People got to go back home, they were no longer enslaved, and they got the land back that family, land that had been lost. Well, that is good news. I mean, there's a reason that Jesus preached about it in Luke four and said, This is good news for the poor. You get your money, you get your you know, the your that weight of indebtedness is relief. But of course, it also is hard news, because somebody is not going to get repaid. Somebody has to let go of the land deed. So I've always felt like Jubilee. These practices are both good news for the poor, but they are really challenging or hard news for those of us who have a different standing in the economy. But as I started to really lean in to the deeper history beyond the biblical text, because the question was always, well, this was not practiced. We don't have receipts for this as a way to kind of say we don't need to really, we don't need to really do it. Because I think people have a gut sense that if this was, if this really is something we're called to do, if this is a true biblical imperative, Whoa, that is going to trouble the waters and so as I looked, actually, we do have receipts. They're not really in the text as such, although I see winks and hints throughout the text, which I explore. But actually, if we look back to Sumer and Assyria and Babylon, we actually do see actual records, artifacts that show us that debts were forgiven, that the when a new emperor would come in, one of the first things he would do is announce, well, he would say, I'm going to proclaim justice. Proclaiming justice was debt forgiveness, which I also think opens the door to some very interesting conversations that the biblical idea of justice is more rooted in that understanding it's about economic justice, but they would proclaim justice, and yes, it would curry favor with the new leader, because everybody you know could lighten the load. But there were also some very practical reasons about recalibrating economies that have gotten stuck or hung up, and at some point, the only thing you could really do was to wipe the debt clean and start over. And there were some other reasons, you know, they were trying to make sure that there wasn't a rising creditor class that could rival them and compete for power. There were all those dynamics. But we actually do have records that this was practiced by all the neighbors that would have been around the tribes of Israel, and they would have been pulling from these traditions. Now, what I now know is that Israel did innovate. They brought some fresh ideas, but they were pulling from things that were already happening around them, and they didn't feel the need to give us receipts. First of all, the Bible is a theological document, right? But also, they didn't even need to prove it or let us know how it happened, because it was happening everywhere around them. So that was like answering a question nobody was asking at the time. But now we can look back and say, oh, there were receipts, and so this was practiced, and so kind of how does that then push us to think about Jubilee and economics for us as development practitioners, we think about it all the time because we're working in one of the poorest economies in the world, in East Africa. But it it also has implications for us. There is, there is no part of our life that economics don't really touch, right?
Joshua Johnson:So how do we think about Jubilee in a Western economic mindset, as opposed to maybe how it was lived back in the day. What are we getting that throws us off because of our place and our time in history? Sure.
Kelley Nikondeha:Well, I'll start off with a story. It's, it's kind of one of the ones that anchors the book, but it's when it became, when I started to have to wrestle with the very question you are asking. So we had started a bank for the working poor. So Burundi, which is the country where my husband is from, 97% of the population is unbanked. Don't have a bank account, keep the money in a little coffee can buried in their closet or in their backyard. My mother in law used to do so they don't have access to any of the basic banking things that we you know, savings or safe place to put your money, etc. So we started a bank for them to help get them into the economy. And we. Were maybe six months old, so we were a very young financial institution, but we were credentialed through the central bank. I mean, we had to go through all of the paperwork. Took us a year to get all the documents in place and be approved and be able to take deposits, et cetera. Six months in, there's a fire in the Central Market. This is like the heart of Burundi's economy. All the goods came in, you know, from the port and from other countries into this marketplace, and they went out, you know, to all the other little rural, up country markets. But this was the hub. The fire on a Sunday morning burned this entire marketplace to the ground in about five hours. And luckily, it was a Sunday morning, so there weren't many people in it. Most of them were getting ready to go to church. But it destroyed every Yeah, it destroyed the economy, but it also was a challenge for us, because 70% of our the people that were banking with us in our new little enterprise. 70% of them, their business was in that market, their inventory, their that was their location. That was so that was the place that they had, that was all their inventory. And a lot of them still had their little cash boxes in there because they were learning to trust us. So they didn't have all of their money with us, yet they were, you know, so they also lost money. And you know, my thought was, well, this is when Jubilee comes into practice, because the Bible says you forgive the debt, right? This is what Jubilee for these people would be. Is we were a bank, we could write off the debt. And my husband said, if we did that, we would have our certificate of Operation pulled so quickly by the Central Bank, we'd be shut down, because you actually can't do that as a banking institution in Burundi or anywhere else, right? And that was when I first realized that I couldn't have that very wooden you know, if it happened this way in the Bible, it has to happen this way now that that we are talking about, you know, an ancient world versus a modern world, very different economic dynamics, and so I had to be willing to think differently. And, you know, my first thought was, oh my gosh, have we kind of gone into the land that is beyond Jubilee. Is Jubilee no longer efficacious in our world? Does it no longer have any meaning other than a metaphor? And that really, that really frightened me, because I was like, I've really believed this, you know? So I felt like I was really frightened that maybe we were, we were moving beyond the reach of Jubilee and and the wisdom of the texts. But for me, part of that journey, my husband had to work on the ground with the actual people who had lost. And that's a story in and of itself. But for me as a theologian, it was okay. So if Jubilee isn't in our current world, the ability to wipe off the debt as a bank, what does that look like? And so part of what we discovered in the next set of years was actually Jubilee is about re entering the economy after you know that nobody should be permanently locked out. You know, if that that 50 year cycle tells us something that every 50 years there needs to be some kind of a reset. I mean, that was their understanding, but I think that still holds true, this idea that there is always going to be an ebb and flow in our economy, whether it's natural disasters. I mean, for them, it was famines or pestilence or war things, right? There's always things, or the loss of a patriarch, or these kinds of things. But what do we have here? We had covid which shut down modern economies. We've had hurricanes that have shut down entire regions of our country, like there are just these big things that are going to impinge, as well as personal things, on the dynamics of our economies. And so to have that understanding that there always needs to be mechanisms for reset, because this is the truth of the economy, that is one thing that for all the people who talk about Jubilee being utopian, I actually find it's quite clear eyed in its recognition that the economy undulates. It moves like this, and we have to have ways to let people back in after the rough and tumble of a bad set of years. And those things might feel drastic, but that is what is going to meet the moment. So I think Jubilee speaks to that need for reset. It speaks to the fact that nobody should be permanently locked into poverty. I think it speaks to the importance of reentry, that there need to be viable ways for people to get back in after they've been kicked out, or get in at all. I mean. I know in Burundi, we have a huge problem with youth employment that's getting them in the economy to begin with. And I think we have similar challenges here. I think there are these deeper movements in the Jubilee canon, you know, that push us to think about all of these kinds of things that are all part of how we engage with our economy as as individuals, as organizations, especially if we want to see transformational work in our communities, I
Joshua Johnson:think with some people, especially in our individualistic Western culture, yeah, I actually think that the system, I think most people think that the system of insurance deals with some of those issues, saying that, hey, if you're responsible enough to get the insurance, or that you know, the hurricane insurance, the flood insurance, whatever type of insurance it is that you are secure against, whatever you know you have FDIC insurance in your bank. So you right? And so there's, there's an insurance system, but it feels like a if I'm good enough as an individual, I'm going to opt into some of that. How much of that insurance system is Jubilee adjacent? How much of it is still systemic problems that actually keep people in poverty. How do we deal with an insurance system? I know, like in Burundi, they probably don't have an insurance system at all. I know, you know, when I lived in Jordan, we didn't have an insurance system. Like, it's, they don't do it at all. So for for us, so let's think about it wider, like, how, how do we record with, like, insurance and that getting people back on their feet, right?
Kelley Nikondeha:Well, I think insurance, obviously, I mean, I have insurance on my house and on my car, right? I mean, we, we opt into these systems, and they do provide some measure of help when things go sideways. But as you said, you have to have the, the capacity to buy in. You have to have you have to know to buy in, which sounds like a simple thing, but, you know, I know a lot of folks who, if they don't have a family, a healthy family system, they don't know that you buy in to this. You know, I had to teach my kids. I'm teaching them now. I have two young adults about buying into car insurance. And what is that? Like? Somebody has to teach you to opt in, then you have to have the financial capacity to do that and to maintain that. I mean, when my daughter found out how much a month you pay for car insurance, she's like, I don't know if I can afford to drive once I once I stop, yeah, as a mom paying, and I'm like, yeah, like, right. But so I think it speaks to a bit about our social location. Some of us are located in places where we can opt in and we can sustain that and that help. Assurance can be helpful. But that is not this, that is not the story for everybody. And so when you talk like you said about the systemic issues, it doesn't help every it has helped a lot of us, but doesn't help all of us. And I think we've even, I've started hearing stories coming out of Florida and a little bit out of California, where now insurance companies are are saying, Wow, there are some things happening right with with climate change, that are really changing our capacity as a financial as an insurance institution, to be able to to back you because you live in a flood zone, you live in a fire zone like so, even those mechanisms, while they can be helpful, they do have their limits.
Joshua Johnson:If Jubilee is something and is like a reset after 50 years, you thinking about this fire in Burundi of the central market, what does re entering the economy? What does resetting start to look like, practically for you on the ground, when you're actually working with real people with real debt and real poverty?
Kelley Nikondeha:Well, again, I'll tell a little bit of the story, because that's what I part of. What I I am a lay economist. The thing that makes me most nervous about having this conversation with you this morning is I am not an economist. I'm a theologian and an armchair No, I'm more than an armchair practitioner, but I'm not an economist, but I have engaged in the economy over the last 17 years. So when the fire happened on the Sunday, Monday morning, when my husband went to the bank, and at that time, we just had the one little branch. We now have 12, but back then we just had the one, there were about 40 women at the gate waiting to get in. So he goes, he unlocks the gate, and he points, he tells them to go to the back where we had an outdoor training area with chairs and, you know, et cetera, shaded area. And so the women went out there, and they just started sharing their stories about, wow, we lost everything. We lost everything. And one of them stood up and said, I went to bed on Saturday night as a business woman. She was she, she was starting to make money and contribute to her family, and had a sense of pride about that. She says, I woke up Sunday morning and I was poor again, like it was that dramatic to her that night and day, that before and after the fire. And so these women went around and they shared their story, and they supported each other, and they cried together. And, you know, Claude had donuts, and Fanta brought in, and they just sat for hours, you know, weeping together. But then came okay, what are we going to do about it? Now, these women represented the most precarious of all of you know, of all of our clients, what we would call high risk borrowers. They didn't have any collateral, and so they were going to be the hardest ones to get back in. And on top of that, we also had people who were in the hospital, because some of them were there on Sunday morning and had to escape and got burns. And so the first plan was, Is everybody okay? So all the loan officers were charged with find out where your people are. If they're in the hospital, you go and you visit them, you know, and you don't ask about the money, you don't ask about the you ask if they're okay, yes, if their family's okay. We got together bunches of food, and it was like we deliver food to everybody's house. All of our people make sure they have a bag of rice, make sure they have cassava, make sure they have beans, because we you know. And again, he kept telling them, don't ask them about the loan. We are caring for people. These are our neighbors, right? There is a the immediate sense of actually caring for the well being of one another. Then for the next three months, each loan officer met with their portfolio of people, and they came up with individualized plans. What do you need to get back into the economy now, some of our folks who had a little more capacity and were a little further along in their journey, were like, you know, hey, I can bring more stuff in from Kenya. I just need what can we extend the time horizon for us to repay the loan? And can we maybe get a little bump, you know, to just get, you know, a little advance to get us, you know, that, you know. And so everybody had a very individualized plan of what they needed, whether it was the time horizon, an advance, lowering the rate, so that they could, you know, like everybody had a way to get back in and, I mean, I think that was really crucial, you know, that everybody got time and got an individualized plan. And then there were these high risk mamas, and no, they they did not know how they were going to get back in. And they were the one that, you know, Jubilee requires a fair amount of creativity. And, you know, it was okay, how do we help them, because the collateral was a big issue. If we were going to extend fresh loans to them, they needed more collateral. I mean, all these things we had to demonstrate to the central bank. And so that was where we brought in people to do some fundraising, to create a fund that would basically be their guarantee. We had to bring in people like carpenters to help them rebuild kiosks in other markets, like the very basics of they actually need help building a new stand in a new place. Maybe they were just selling mandarins or tomatoes or mangoes, so it wasn't like they were bringing product in from abroad. But, you know, they actually needed the hardware and they needed help. So we had a fund that helped them and other women from other banks. Actually, we had enough that we were able to help others get back in and so for us, like every every context is going to be different, but the Bible talks about, you know, part of Jubilee is when you set somebody free. You don't just set them free and say, you know, God bless. You know, the biblical imperative is that you actually have to give them some things to walk away with, something that they can rebuild with some money. You know. I mean, remember, with the conversations about reparations, is that, you know, when slaves were set free, they were supposed to get, what, 40 acres and a mule. It was that recognition that you can't just tell people you're free and then not give them any means to rebuild and re enter the economy. And so that same thing, I think, is part of the Jubilee conversation, is, how do we you know, in every context, we'll be different, but for us, it was carpenters and loan rearrangements and bags of food, and, you know, checking in on people, and you know that their well being as a person mattered.
Joshua Johnson:It would be really nice. I'd love to have 40 acres and a mule.
Unknown:That would be great, right? I don't know. About the mule, but I could take the 40 Acres.
Joshua Johnson:40 Acres. I could definitely take the 40 Acres. The question for me, then is, like you're talking about this economic system, debt re repayment and forgiveness. How do you think that if you now see the Jubilee passage in Isaiah 61 as as an economic passage when you see Jesus as he rolls out that scroll in Isaiah and Luke chapter four, and he shares this passage and says that this has been fulfilled in your hearing, yeah, how does like seeing that as an economic passage even shift the way that we view the ministry of Jesus and what he's trying to say.
Kelley Nikondeha:I think it's quite fundamental to my my understanding of the Gospels at this point, because if we understand Luke and the story Luke is trying to tell about Jesus and Jesus's work, the inaugural sermon is about an economic practice like, right? It's like what you know, that it's not about discipleship, it's not about the four spiritual laws. It's not about, you know, going to heaven. Like it. The first thing he says is that the good news is somehow rooted in an economic practice like, okay, let's, let's back up and rethink this. And I, I think that really what Jesus was doing was inviting them into a jubilee campaign, a jubilee way of seeing the world. So I think part of the backdrop that we often don't calculate is that for all the for all the year, the centuries prior and the Empires prior, debt relief was practiced, you could assume that at some point relief was coming your way or coming to your kids, if, if not, you. Rome was very different. Rome was one of the first empires, at least in this area, in the Levant that said we're not practicing debt forgiveness as an empire. They were fine with empowering a creditor class. I mean, think about the rich young ruler, right? They were fine with actually empowering that dynamic. And so there was no talk of debt forgiveness in Rome. And a matter of fact, there started to come out stories that if, if a public figure talked aloud about debt forgiveness. They were they were done, they were gone, they were killed. And so this is part of the backdrop where Jesus standing up in the synagogue and saying that debt forgiveness was actually part of the good news. He wanted to talk about these were dangerous words for him to say in a public space to a bunch of poor people, because all of his neighbors in Nazareth in that region would have been impoverished, and it would have been good news to them, but it would have been dangerous news for the rabbis. It would have been dangerous news for some of the higher ups in the in the little town that wanted to avoid Rome breathing down their neck, you know? And so I think that's an interesting way. At the end of that passage, we see that Jesus gets pushed to the end of a cliff. And there's a few other things in the story that are happening, but I now read that and think, yeah, part of the reason was probably scare him within an inch of his life, because if he keeps saying stuff like that, Rome is going to notice. And we see what Rome does. You know, we see it in neighboring Severus. They come in, they decimate the place. They take the kids as as slaves. They rape and pillage the women. They kill them, like we don't want Rome to see or know what's happening in our little hamlet. So Let's scare this guy within an inch of his life so that he will not right draw attention. These were dangerous times, even even a violent economy, right? Rome wasn't only a dangerous military. It was a dangerous economic terrain, because without debt relief, it was a kind of violence. And I think we see this in our own country, as more people are struggling with indebtedness and way, you know, so many support, so many of our social network, social underpinnings, are being questioned. It does feel like we are doing economic violence, economically to one another, and that was certainly the terrain and so into that, Jesus just lobs this grenade of we're going to talk about it. We're going to talk about the thing that you guys all carry, which is the weight of indebtedness. And I think when you think about it that way, I've talked to friends who aren't even followers of Jesus, who are like, man, if somebody sat and told me that we are going to talk seriously about the stress that my body holds because of the debt, you know, the mortgage and the student loans for my kids, and the money I owe here and here. Man, I would listen to that person, because they're talking about something that materially affects the quality of my life. And I think that's. Like, Oh man, Jesus knew exactly where people were. He knew exactly who the stress they were under, and he spoke right to it. And he says, We have to talk about debt, that is, you know. And so then you look at the Lord's Prayer where, you know they're how do we pray? Well, we pray about the food that we eat every day. Snap, benefits, hello. Does that matter to people? Price to groceries, sure, but we also pray about indebtedness. Now, I was raised Catholic, and I was taught the prayer that you for, you know, Lord, forgive us our transgressions, right? Well, transgressions is a different kind, like, like, maybe I hurt somebody's feelings, or we gossiped or whatever. But actually the root of that prayer is money debts. Lord Jesus wants us to pray that our indebtedness will be forgiven and that we will forgive the debts that other people owe us that we will break the system. If you ever have watched Game of Thrones. This is where Let's break the wheel. Right? Let's I want to be the kind of person who not only has relief from the debt I carry, but I'm the kind of person who will not entangle other people in that very cycle of indebtedness. And all of a sudden, right, like I start to see Jesus was very much an economic practitioner, talking about debt, talking about not entangling each other in debt. So, you know, like, these were not easy policies, even then, you know, a lot of the lot of the leading Jewish minds were trying to find ways around Jubilee practices. You know, how can we get out of it. And I don't think that that, you know, that wasn't what Jesus was about. He was like, No, we need to talk about money. We need to talk about debt. We need to be opting out of the system wherever we can, you know. And I think this is something that, really, you know, when Jesus says this Jubilee starts today, well, I don't think he meant he could topple Rome and Rome's economic policies, but we could start at grassroots, like we could start, you know. So I have a friend who is is, well, we have had a few friends, both here and in Burundi, who have lived with us during hard seasons in their life and and by giving them, you know, a place to live and not charging them, we have given them breathing room so that they can collect themselves before they get out. Right? Just recently, we had a conversation. One of our friends is renting a home from us, and, you know, I don't know if I can afford it anymore, so we go back to the drawing board and say, well, we don't want her to go into debt, so how do we protect her? What can we do? And we figured out a way to kind of just feel like in a phone call, it's like, Oh, tell her we can, if we do this, and we do, you know, we can do these things where she can stay in a good place, to live at a threshold that she can afford. And we've just had some things lighten up on our end so we can absorb a little, you know? I mean, like, this is not how you make money, but this is how you are neighbors to one another, right, where we are. Like, how do we make sure? Like, how do I not entangle people in debt to me? And so I think these are some of the ways we can start thinking and practicing Jubilee. And then you before you know it, you are becoming a jubilee practitioner. You are starting to see things differently.
Joshua Johnson:I think even in Luke four, as they're hearing Jesus talk, they're getting really excited about what he's saying, right? Because when you think about my debt being forgiven, yeah, that's easy, right? Because I'm thinking about myself of like, oh, that alleviates a lot of pressure. And then Jesus goes on to say, it's really not just about you, it's for all people. It's for you know, remember the Syrians? Remember the Lebanese? Like, remember everybody else that's around you? Yeah, this is also for them as well. And now I'm thinking, Oh, I actually have to forgive some debts, and it's going to be hard for me, and it's going to hurt me. And so Jubilee economics is not just a nice ideal. It's painful because I think I deserve what I have. So how do we deal with the pain and the difficulty, the hardship of sacrifice when it comes to practicing Jubilee? Well?
Kelley Nikondeha:And that was, I think, early on, when my husband and I started to wrestle with it. We were living in Burundi. And you know, that is a culture where we are, where they lend money to what to each other. Here in America, debt, or in the West, debt, is more impersonal. We tend to use banks and other mechanisms to access money. But I know in Burundi, money is very personal, and so you are actually more often than not getting money. From your uncle, your you know, your mother, you're getting money from each other, and you are really beholden to each other. And so I was like, man, if we're going to take this seriously, like, there's a lot of people just because we had access to to, like, a Western salary, we we had, we didn't have a lot, but we had more than most of our our family and our neighbors, and it was really hard to think about, are we really going to forgive those debts? What does this mean going forward? Because if every if word gets out that we forgive debts, right? But, but that is something that we had to wrestle with, you know, is let's, let's not expect these debts to be repaid. Let's try and practice this as best we can. Again, I still think there is this understanding of everything is not a one for one, you know. So there are times but, but we are. The way that we loan money when we need to is very different, you know, we tend we loan what we know we can afford to lose. You know, where we're like, okay, you know. And yet, the same time, you know, we are trying to help some, some of our friends, some of our younger folks. You know, that's a learning opportunity, but we give very gentle, you know, gentle way for them, you know, to learn. But we've had to forgive a lot of personal debts in Burundi to try and practice this and to learn. You know, what is that like? But like I said with my girlfriend just this week, it's like, oh, well, I don't want her to go into debt. So how is there any way that we collaborate because we care about each other? It rewires the way you think about how money, how many moves and that, that it's not hoarded, which is so against my American sensibilities. But I really do think we are challenged to to not hold each other in in deeper cycles of debt.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, there's a lot of things I think we've been arguing about, and especially in the United States, in the last decade or so, one around race and reparations, people are like, Well, that happened long time ago, and it wasn't my generation. So yeah, we need to pay any anything now. So that was, that was a long time ago, and these people, they weren't slaves, and so why would we pay them anything? And then we're having conversations around land. How far does it go back to? Like, restore land to owners, like, what does that look like? And who owns the lands? And how far back do we go? These are difficult questions, you know, because people have been on this land that I'm on and that you're on for a long time ago that weren't us. So how do we deal with things that are more, I don't know, like more ancient past than even the past 50 years, two generations deep. It's like more like eight generations deep, yeah.
Kelley Nikondeha:Well, that's where I feel like, again, you know, I am not an expert in, you know, in some of these things, I think, as a jubilee practitioner, I really do think the more you start in the small ways to practice, you do start to kind of rewire the way you think. Like I noticed my instinct, you know, is is different than it was 10 years ago, because you start right as you practice, you rewire the way you understand. And I've I've watched people, because I have friends in South Africa, and I have friends up in Canada and places other places well, and also friends in Israel and Palestine who are struggling with these are very real and present issues for them in ways that I feel like, in America, we're still we're not necessarily we talk about land, but I feel like, like my friends in Canada are really at a different place of having these conversations. And I've, you know, I hear like I heard a story of a woman who wonderful Mennonite community, and she recognized that she was on the land of, you know, of a tribal land. And of course, she inherited the land from her family. So, right? We're talking generations that this has been in her family, she and her aunts, I mean, but somewhere along the line, this land belonged to somebody else, and she now she didn't have kids, which made it, in a sense, easier, because she wasn't depriving them of an inheritance, so to speak. But she recognized, oh, this. This actually isn't most deeply mine to keep or to decide what happens to like, you know. So in her will, what she did was she gave the land to the tribal community, to the like, to the elders for so that when I pass on, in a sense, this land is going to go back to you, and you as tribal elders can decide how to use this land for your right and and to me, that was like, wow. That is a jubilee practitioner, right? She is it. Her own little bit of the story, her own little plot of land. She's like, okay, you know, I'm gonna live here till I die, but this, this then has to go back. And I can do that, you know? And I so, like, part of me is like, I'm more encouraged by these smaller stories, because I think when we think systemic, it's very easy to say it's too big, it's too messy, and we shut down. And once we shut down, it's like, we opt out, like, Oh, it's too big, and we don't touch it. But, but on a smaller scale, I think then we we start to see these little moves that we can be making to start to shift the ground. And I've heard stories similar to that Palestine and Israel. I've heard stories like that in South Africa where, you know, there, yeah, there's trying to remember the exact story of this family in South Africa, where it was Afrikaans family, so white family, and they recognize that, oh, like we've had this fan this land, and we have these people who've worked the land, a colored family, so they realized now, they didn't decide to give their land away because they lived off the land, and their jobs were all related to the land, but what they chose to do was they they paid differently. They, you know, because they recognized we're not going to pay them a low wage. We're actually going to pay them a real living wage, you know, like, that's something we can do. And then they decided, well, we're sending our kids to college. We're going to send we're going to pay for their kids to go to college. That is part of our way of of contributing to their family's future, is that their kids will get to go to college, just like our kids, and we will bear because we can afford it. We will pay that. So they are trying in there. I heard that story, and I thought, well, they're trying in their own way. Now that wasn't giving the land back, but they cared about the wages of the of the parents, and they cared about the future of the kids. And to me, like, Okay, this is where I say Jubilee requires us to be creative, and like Isaiah, to imagine, how can it be different, and how do I participate in that, in Jubilee ways?
Joshua Johnson:I mean, it seems like everything that you're talking about now is we're trying to wrestle with what it looks like to live Jubilee and Jubilee economics. It feels like, how do I love my neighbor as myself? It feels like another thing that Jesus says is, like, love your neighbor. This is why Jesus said to the rich young ruler, like, what are the greatest commandments of your neighbor as yourself? That's so loving our neighbor. How has that like really, truly living out the command of loving your neighbor? How does that has that changed the way that you do development work in Burundi and seeing it as maybe even just seeing that we are all connected. We're all made of the image of God. We're all like a part of this system together. Has that shifted all how you did development work?
Kelley Nikondeha:I am proud of the work that we've done over the last set of years. I'm proud because, you know, my husband is probably much more Jubilee in his imagination, and I have really learned alongside him. But yes, I mean, I think even the way he has handled the bank, like the fact that he's like, I don't care right now. I don't care about the money. What I care about is that these people are fed, and that they they know they're okay, and they know we're not gonna come after them for the money and put them out right like, Yes, we had to work. We had people we worked with in the states to get some an influx of capital, you know, to because, of course, the money has to come, and we have to deal with that side of it, but the impulse to care about each other. I think in our development work, again, we've learned so much from from Isaiah and the poetry of Isaiah. And what I believe is a companion book lamentations, where part of being human is suffering these losses and creating space to lament together. And I think when I watched my husband that day like that, he opened the gates, and he sat for hours, and he allowed himself to feel the pain with these women who had lost everything. Now we might have been losing the bank, but we weren't losing everything in the same way they were. But he allowed himself to sit with him in that and and I tell you, it rewires you. And I noticed that in so many of the the things we do in Burundi, so many of the initiatives that have been the most transformational have started with him going somewhere and crying with people and creating that space to lament, to get. Or to share that pain, and then it's like the spirit stirs something. Like we weren't planning on doing a porridge factory, but look at, I guess, I guess we're gonna do that now, because, like these surprising things are stirred in that place of lament. It's, I think Brooke Mong used to say that the lament is the seed bed of hope, that when we open ourselves up to our neighbors and their pain and the struggles of surviving, the spirit stirs things up, and then we can do some transformational things together. And so I do think we approach our work understanding that these are our neighbors, or as you know, as they would say in the Old Testament, these are our kin. They are us, and so we have to treat them that way. And I think it's, you know, I know people who work for all those wonderful NGOs, the big ones that we see publicize and that have sponsorship programs, and you know all that, and they do great work, and they, a lot of them are people we collaborate with. But I do think there's something about, I mean, Gustavo Gutierrez, the liberation theologian out of South America, had talked about, do you know the names? You know you talk about the poor, but do you know their names? And my husband and I know some of them, but my husband knows a lot more. He knows the names of these people, because they aren't just projects that we fund. These are people. And, you know, we are right now struggling. The economy in Burundi is horrible right now, and really hard to run a bank and support, you know, support people and their endeavors when the whole economy is collapsing, and recently we've had to make some decisions about whether or not we're going to lay some people off to stay viable. And I mean, I think he agonizes more than most, because he doesn't see these as people jobs that we can easily cut. He knows that each one of those people represents a family, and those families are going to be without like, he definitely thinks, you know, like, these are my neighbors. But these are, these are 40 family, 40% of the families that are part of this bank, like, like, To him, it is very personal. And I it is part of, I think, what makes the work we do deeply meaningful and special, but also on days like this, really hard, you know, because we we do everything like he's doing everything he can to figure out, well, can they work at the porridge factory, or do they have a skill set where we can move them over here and still keep them employed? But yeah, it changes the way we we work.
Joshua Johnson:That's a huge thing. To know people's names, know their families. That then changes the way that you do business. We live, at least in the West, we live in a machine that really is about production and and more money for for the top and for the for corporations. How can we start to as individuals in the western empire actually then start to practice some of these Jubilee practices and economics when we're part of the machine. Is there a way for us to be faithful and human, even when the machine is trying to run us to the ground. Right?
Kelley Nikondeha:I'd say I'm sorry that I'm going to say something political, but as a liberation theologian, I think you kind of expect that that's coming. But I do think our first vocation is to survive. I think we often forget that, because in the West, we assume that we're all going to survive this. But you know, in most of the world, it's not, it's not a given that you're going to survive. That's, yeah, Claude used to say, that's why we have so many kids, is because we know a lot of them aren't going to make it. So you you know you have as many as you can, but you know, surviving is getting harder, and I think as we work, you know, to survive and to care about each other, I think we have to start recognizing that that survival happens with one another, you know, like we have to be looking out, not just for ourselves, as Americans have been trained to do, but to look out for our communities, our neighborhoods, and so for me, That has changed the way that I vote. So I grew up in a Republican household in Southern California, and I was taught by very good evangelical parents that you vote with your pocketbook in mind, and that if everybody votes with their pocketbook in mind, we end up with the best result. And it took me a long time to unlearn that and think, Wait a minute, I'm in a different social location that a lot of my neighbors and I actually have a lot of neighbors now I live in Arizona. I'm in Arizona part of the time. A lot of my neighbors here are in mixed status. Families are undocumented. They may pay into the system. With their taxes, but they're not getting any services, and they can't vote. So you start, the narrative starts to thicken when you start, Oh, but wait a minute, there are people who are always going to be left out if that's the way that I vote. And so several elections ago, I started to think, what if I voted with my neighbors in mind? And I thought more about who is advocating for the kind of policies that are going to make this a better place for me and my neighbors together, that we are going to survive this season together fundamentally changes how I think about food policy and all sorts of other things in my own like I learned my kids went to elementary school here in Arizona, and I got to know the office lady really well, and one day, I learned from her that 50% of the kids at my local, little suburban elementary school were on food assistance, and I just never I was like, what? And it totally changed the way that I engaged with my school. I was donating like crazy. I was always sending the kids to school with three times as many supplies, three times as many Valentines, like right? Because I knew you need to be they need to be able to the teachers need to be able to give this to the families who need because not all my neighbors are making it. It changed how I supported my local food bank, like, right? Because I recognized, oh, just because I'm doing okay doesn't mean all my neighbors are so, right? How do I show up, you know? So I think the how we vote and what policies we're willing to support, you know, it's not a small thing for those of us who have the ability to vote, to think about our neighbors. You know, I was very concerned about all the things happening with SNAP benefits. Recently, I'm not on SNAP, but I know a lot of my neighbors are, so I was paying attention because I knew it mattered to their viability, and therefore it matters to me. And so I, you know, I was like, Okay, we gotta up what we're doing for the food bank. And I've do, I need to be going to the local school and asking, you know, if I give you some, if I can give you a little bit, can you give it to the trying to think, how do I tangibly, like, in very tangible ways, show up for my neighbors. So yes, the way that I vote, but also even just things like that, like, how do these policies, how are they impinging upon the actual people in my neighborhood? And am I willing to to step in and help? I mean, I'm also out there on the streets protesting. So because I think that's another way that you show people, you know, we're in it together. You know, let's
Joshua Johnson:look and see the people around us, and that then we can, through your protest, through voting, we could actually advocate for our neighbors and the people around us and actually then do tangible things with our schools and and the people around us. So that's that is beautiful. Yeah, if you could talk to your readers and the people that would read Jubilee economics, what hope do you have for the people who read it? What hope do you have for this book?
Kelley Nikondeha:I just hope that we are priming our imagination for a more Jubilee kind of practice, while Jubilee is a concrete set of practices, you know, it also is a set of practices that set our imagination on a different kind of trajectory, I think Isaiah does that so beautifully. When he was imagining a new city, a way, the way a city could work better, work differently, and Jubilee was absolutely part of what he was dreaming and imagining. And I think that we need more of that as we are at a place where I think a lot of some people say we are in late stage capitalism. We are right post capitalist. I mean all the again, not an economist, but we all can see that the that the economy, and I would say economies, because I know the Burundian economy, I know right now, the economy in Tanzania, I know the economy in Congo, like a lot of economies, are struggling. What is, what is going to kind of come out of the ash of what is, what is eroding now? And man, we need some Jubilee thinkers who are willing to say, let's try some different things. Let's be willing to try some different tools. I mean, back then, the tools were about loans and mass debt forgiveness and letting people free if they were indentured, and the capacity to move land around. Okay, so what are what dials and levers are we able in a modern economy to imagine differently. You know, I know some people are really looking at debt, medical debt, right? We have now, we have organizations that are doing amazing work for giving medical debt. I think conversations around to call it our credit scores and whether medical. Debt, and, you know, accrued the credit scores that are connected to medical debt, you know, should they be, you know, because that's a big part of how we do money now. Should they? Should they count? Should they not well, like these are, they certainly are not biblical in terms of, like, they didn't have credit scores back then. But the idea, the imagination that we bring to say, okay, is this a mechanism we can rethink and we can try different things to bring about more breathing room for people? Because if the big nut we have to crack is the weight of indebtedness and how that affects us as people, as neighbors, as communities, as national economies, we need a lot of different ways to imagine how to dismantle or disarm the ways that indebtedness hurts and harms us. So I want, I think Jubilee is a great place to start cracking getting a better sense of his, his historically, how we've dealt with debt, but then cracking up our imaginations for what are ways in my own life, but in my own community and people who are I mean, there's a gentleman who wrote, you know, 500 years of debt. He wrote the history of debt, and at the end of this 500 year history, what does he say? I think that old practice from the Hebrews, the Jubilee. I think that's what we need to try and he said, and I love that. He was honest. He said, it's going to be messy. It's going to be messy, but out of the ashes, he believed, kind of like creative destruction, out of out of the ashes, something different, you know, but that we maybe can't even imagine right now. That's part of the challenge. Is somebody says, Well, Kelly, what do you want to see? I don't know. I mean, in a sense, we are all still in a place where we are on the kind of on the verge of being able to actually imagine, as we see this start to not work. We can say, oh, so there has to. Can we not just re I don't want to make anything great again. I don't want to make Israel great again. I want to make America. I don't I want to imagine what is the new the better the next thing that is going to help us live better together. And I think Jubilee allows us to crack open. The challenge is to crack open our imaginations, but in very, very practical ways. So, yeah, imagine, but not just like pie in the sky, like, okay, then try it. Go out there and do it. Does it work? Why didn't it work? I mean, even say some of the debt, forgiveness for medical debt, some of it hasn't worked. Okay, why hasn't it worked? And the answer isn't, don't do it. It's now, let's do it better. Let's learn from what didn't work, because we know that debt is bad, so how do we how do we manage that? So I would love to see readers feel like, okay, I'm willing to give it a try. I'm willing to imagine differently and to not be scared. I think a lot of us are scared at the thought that the economy could be wired in a different way. We we come at it with a lot of fear, and it's like, what if we came at it with curiosity instead of fear? Like, what would it look like? You know, and that maybe some better policies, some better practices, will come out of our curiosity, as opposed to our fear.
Joshua Johnson:That's great. Well, Kelly, your book, Jubilee economics, is available anywhere books are sold, people could go and get it, wrestle with it, and start to imagine a new future and a better future. What comes next? What does it look like to actually practice these things, and how do we imagine something where we could actually survive together in a way that it doesn't look like crushing debt for everyone, but it looks like Jubilee. So Kelly, this was fantastic. Is there anywhere you'd like to point people to? How could they connect with you? What you're doing. Where would you like to point
Unknown:people to? Oh, I,
Kelley Nikondeha:actually, I stay at home with my corgis often. So you want to kind of play with my little corgis. Now I'm on Instagram, so that's kind of where I, you know, that's the platform I can kind of handle is, you know, on Instagram, I do have a website, but, you know, I'm not really kind of out there online a whole lot. I like to, like be, be here with all the books and doing all the work and working with my husband on our stuff in Burundi. But Instagram would be, probably be the best place. Perfect.
Joshua Johnson:Kelly, thank you for this conversation. It was a pleasure to have you on and let's see Jubilee. Yes, you.
