Weaving a Global Neighborhood with Rick Steves is a documentary I produced in 1998 while working for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). PBS travel host and best-selling guidebook author Rick Steves and ELCA colleague Kevin Jacobson and I visited Paupua New Guinea where Kevin served as an educator.

Weaving a Global Neighborhood with Rick Steves was used in ELCA congregations to help Lutherans understand the idea of global accompaniment. In the script, Rick and Kevin write,

“Less can be more. Here, in a culture (like Papua New Guinea) where material satisfaction is less elusive, there’s more time for God’s work and for just being human. This road may be bumpy, but then there’s more to life than increasing its speed.

While production in the USA has doubled in a generation, we work more than ever, need two incomes in a family to “make ends meet,” and are swimming in stress. Ours is a land where the hottest things in real estate are prisons for the poor and gated communities for the rich.”

After eating with new friends in PNG, I’m reminded that those of us who use spoons and forks don’t have all the answers. Here in PNG, people paint their faces differently then we do. And they know it. The world is not a pyramid with the USA on top and everyone else trying to get there. Papua New Guineans may go to the United States to study or visit congregations but they wouldn’t swap passports with us. Our world is diverse and it will stay that way. It’s a family — but a multicolored and multifaceted family.


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