By Andy Hale
This week on the CBF Podcast Conversation, Andy Hale welcomes Kelley Nikondeha to discuss her new book, Jubilee Economics: A Roadmap to Reform. A writer, liberation theologian and co-director of Communities of Hope in Burundi, Kelley brings together biblical scholarship, global experience and practical theology to recover one of Scripture’s most compelling—and often overlooked—visions for economic life. Rather than treating Jubilee as an ancient ideal or symbolic metaphor, she invites listeners to see it as God’s ongoing blueprint for release, restoration and shared flourishing.
Drawing from both the biblical witness and her years living and working in Burundi, Kelley explores how practices of communal care, shared resources and economic interdependence challenge the assumptions many Western Christians have inherited about wealth, ownership and success. Together, Andy and Kelley discuss debt, land, truth-telling, prophetic imagination and the church’s role in confronting systems that allow inequality to become entrenched. Throughout the conversation, Jubilee emerges not simply as an Old Testament law, but as a way of imagining God’s economy in the present.
For pastors, church leaders, and anyone wrestling with questions of justice and discipleship, this episode offers a hopeful invitation to rethink what faithfulness looks like in our economic lives. Rather than leaving listeners overwhelmed by the scale of injustice, Kelley points toward the small but powerful ways congregations can begin “rehearsing Jubilee” today—becoming communities where another way of living together is not only imagined, but practiced.
Find the episode here.
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- The Baptist House of Studies at Union Presbyterian Seminary: Exists by God’s grace to educate, inspire, and support generations of bold, faithful servant leaders as they seek actively to participate in God’s mission in the world.
- Community Transformation Center: Through educational opportunities, community conversations, and research initiatives in collaboration with universities and local leaders, PBACTC is at the forefront of integrating spiritual care into holistic community development.
- Creation Justice Ministries: Creation Justice Ministries equips churches to turn conviction into faithful action with Scripture-based resources, worship guides, and community support to pursue environmental justice and care for God’s creation.
- Dawnings: Through prayerful discernment, storytelling, and collaborative visioning, Dawnings helps churches rediscover their calling and imagine their next chapter—guided by trained facilitators and grounded in God’s ongoing story.
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Andy Hale is the creator and host of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Podcast. Hale is the Associate Executive Coordinator of CBF North Carolina. He’s also served as CBF’s Church Start Specialist, the founding pastor of Mosaic Church of Clayton, and the senior pastor of University Baptist Church of Baton Rouge. Follow on Twitter @haleandy.