Community Organizing

Building Movements for a More Just World

“We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers,” said Civil Rights organizer Bayard Rustin. We need people with a vision of a just world who are willing to disrupt the status quo and bring reality closer to that vision.

But how do we do that? Our churches have done countless service projects and numerous protests, but we still feel ill-equipped to make real and lasting change on the issues that matter most to us. How can we help our congregations move from the pews to public leadership grounded in our faith?

Community organizing is a practice of social change that is driven by relationships; the issues we champion are led by the people most impacted in our communities. We learn to be realistic about how power shapes our lives, identifying systemic problems and turning those problems into actionable campaigns in order to address injustices. Most importantly, it is a practice of hope as we help people reclaim their agency, grow into their potential as changemakers, and create new communities shaped by a vision of a just and joyful world for all.

This pathway isn't just theory — it's about action. You'll engage in hands-on exercises, real-world case studies, and collaborative learning with others. Session will teach the basic principles of community organizing so you can begin to apply these principles to your ministry context. Whether you are a newcomer or an experienced organizer, together we’ll discover how we can lead with our communities and make real change together.

PATHWAY SESSIONS

Session 1: Building Movements for a More Just World

How can congregations move from the pews to building prophetic power? We will explore the “ecosystem of social change” and consider the unique role of community organizing in creating a more just world. We’ll also explore the art of “relational meetings” and practice the skills that help us shift from a posture of doing for others to leading with them.

Session 2: The Purpose of Power

We know what power used to dominate and exploit looks like, but what about the power to liberate and heal? Through interactive exercises and personal reflection, we’ll consider our experiences with power in our world and how we might reimagine the purpose of power in ways that lead to collective liberation.

Session 3: Pulling Back the Curtain

Why are great ideas for improving our neighborhoods never realized while ideas that only benefit a few always seem to get approved? Answering this question requires learning to identify the invisible power structures in our communities and analyze how they can be disrupted for positive change. In this session, we’ll pull back the curtain on the hidden forces that shape our communities, the obstacles they put in our way, and the opportunities for transformation.

Session 4: How We Win

How do we take big problems and make them winnable issues? In this session, we’ll learn how to use our analysis of power to design strategic and effective campaigns. We’ll examine real-world case studies to glean the lessons we can apply to our own communities.

Session 5: Leading Teams for Collective Action

How do we reimagine our personal leadership and build teams that lead collective action? Community organizing is an invitation to a different posture of church leadership. We build teams that shift from self-study and event planning to relationship building and collective action. We spend our time differently - focused on developing people and growing the leadership capacity of others. In this session, we’ll learn about how we build and lead teams to organize their communities.

Session 6: Creating Your Leadership Plan

What is your plan to lead differently when you get home? This pathway isn’t just about giving you new ideas and language for ministry, it’s about learning practical skills that you can apply in your ministry context. In this session, we’ll work on developing personal action plans that you can implement after our time together to begin making an impact on the issues that matter most to your community.

Relentlessly Communing

Cultivating Communities of Resistance in the Face of Evil

How do we cultivate communities of care? What truths must we face? What values must we cultivate? As we navigate the chaos, violence, and cruelty of white supremacy being catalyzed and weaponized in this civic moment, cultivating community is critical. Building on our collective practice, this pathway will invite participants to ground and connect, surface movement lessons that assist us in making sense of this moment and face the now, and resource ourselves for the work of imagining an alternative reality even as we navigate catastrophe. Because doing any of this requires moving beyond pure rationality, this pathway will engage practices that connect people to themselves and each other, to movements of resistance, and soul strengthening resources.

The practices we support may include convening in smaller caucuses during our pathway. Doing so will allow us to draw on the unique experiences and expertises of our diverse leadership team to support dialogue and engagement that attends to the distinct challenges and needs that manifest given our various racial and ethnic identities, as well as or aspects of our identities and social locations.

The cruelties of this moment are not new. Neither are movements in which, as so many have taught us, the building of worlds and the joy that comes from caring for one another as we move through despite and nonetheless. This sensibility will ground us as we journey through the week together.

PATHWAY SESSIONS

Session 1: Grounding, Assessing, Connecting

The pathway will begin with a time to ground in place and with people. We’ll ask one another “who are you?” and “who do you bring with you” on this journey we will co-create? We’ll identify the shared needs, hopes, worries we bring to and have for this space.

Session 2: Visualizing Resistance

Carrying a question with us from our own context, we will journey together in a walking exploration of downtown to engage with murals created by communities in Grand Rapids. Read more about the murals. Please note this session will take place off-site and may require additonal costs for public transportation.

Session 3: Locating Ourselves and Our Movements

What have our movements done well and what do we need to learn about what we’ve needed to do differently? In this session we’ll lean into the creative tension that exists in trying to learn from what hasn’t work, without regressing or forgetting we’re in a pattern collectively that repeats over-and-against our movements.

Session 4: Sundering  Community: Severing White Christian Nationalism's Grip on Christianity

Digging into the genealogy of white supremacy in U.S.-American Christianity, this session will consider how weakening the communal fabric of the nation has created the conditions for this current political moment. We will excavate practices, postures, public/private behaviors we in church(es) need to interrogate and explore what we are called to do in  response.

Session 5: Spheres of Connection and Naming Our Resources

As we become clear in our call at this time, how do we uncover our resources to move us toward impact? What is the coalition-building required to strengthen our (counter) force and to what end? In this session we will articulate how, when, where and with whom our communities are galvanizing, and where we feel challenged about the how of this movement.

Session 6: Leaving with Intention and Connection

Our closing session will focus on leaving with clarity about the relationships and connections that hold us and those to whom we are committed to being beholden.

Preaching and Proclamation Amid Communal Trauma

The role of preaching and proclamation in the face of traumatic overwhelm.

Unfortunately, traumatic realities or events do not send save-the-date cards or line up one at a time, patiently waiting for their turn to make their presence known.

Whether due to violence, natural disasters, political anxieties, public health crises, traumatic loss, the climate crisis, and/or oppression based on race, sex, country of origin, or gender identity (among other realities), our communities are living through trauma-soaked times. In the face of so many converging traumatic realities, communities and faith leaders can feel overwhelmed, helpless, or even stuck. What are we to say in times such as these? How might we proclaim Good News that is not dishonest or disingenuous in times such as these?

In this pathway we will explore the work of proclamation and the role of the preacher/proclaimer amid traumatic reality and overwhelm. This pathway is for anyone who finds themselves called upon to respond in or beyond the pulpit when words are hard to find.

We will begin by exploring our present moment, seeking to give language to what is happening, especially considering the impact of trauma on individuals and communities. With language in place, we will then consider our theological preaching response, a reframed understanding of “health” or “healing,” and the role of the proclaimer, particularly as they walk amid the chaos of communal trauma while bearing their own burdens. We will also have an opportunity to be in conversation with leaders who have journeyed with communities through such traumatic realities as well as work on a proclamation/sermon that will be shared with the group.

This pathway seeks to help all those who are called upon to proclaim Good News amid traumatic times in and beyond the pulpit space. Our hope is that each participant will bring their experiences, insights, and diverse contextual settings into the space so that we may all learn from one another.

PATHWAY SESSIONS

Session 1: Locating Ourselves Amid Trauma and Overwhelm

In this session, we will take stock of our current times and offer language to describe what is happening in our world and communities. In the course of this conversation, we will explore the nature of trauma and how it impacts individuals and communities as we think about how we might best respond.

Session 2: Responding Faithfully to Trauma-Soaked Times

In this session, we will build on our understanding of the impact of trauma and consider how preachers and proclaimers might faithfully respond. Looking to guides and warnings from faith traditions, liturgical resources, and biblical texts, we will discern how our theological resources might enable a faithful and helpful preaching response.

Session 3: Reframing "Health" and "Healing" Amid Traumatic Overwhelm

One of the signatures or traumatic overwhelm is the ways it leads communities and faith leaders to feel stuck or inadequate to respond. Leaning on insights from trauma studies and biblical models, we will seek to reframe "health" and "healing" in ways that might be more faithful and productive for our preaching and proclamation. We will especially consider the long view of trauma response and recovery as people offer support and proclamation over time amid traumatized communities.

Session 4: Experiential Encounters

In this session, we will have the chance to be in conversation with community and faith leaders who have journeyed with their communities through traumatic events and realities. This will be an opportunity to learn from the wisdom of others as well as wrestle with these questions in conversation with a variety of contexts. In this session, we will also have time for writing and workshopping a short proclamation. Please note this session will take place off-site and may require additional costs for public transportation. 

Session 5: (Re)Locating Ourselves for the Journey

In this session we will explore how preachers and public proclaimers who are experiencing these traumatic realities alongside their communities might understand their role. We will consider how we might position ourselves as proclaimers in relation to the communities in ways that might best support the community and be sustainable for our ministries.

Session 6: Gleaning, Sharing, and Bringing it Home

In this session, participants will have an opportunity to intentionally reflect on what is most helpful and insightful for their context as well as what concerns and questions remain. In this session, participants will also have an opportunity to share a brief act of proclamation and receive feedback and encouragement for their ongoing work.

Art as Resistance

An awakened imagination is the most dangerous thing to the empire.

The role of the artist in activating imagination is modeled by some of our most stubborn prophets. Consider Jeremiah's smashed pottery performance piece at the Potsherd Gate or the way the poet Isaiah painted with lavish words and rich vision. Their imaginations fueled their passion, their clarity and their ability to see an alternative future in the midst a death-dealing reality.

Participants in this Pathway will be invited to collaborate theologically and creatively around the role of the artist in movements for social justice and human rights. We will engage the work of current and historical artists, particularly those with POC and LGBTQIA+ identities and their impact on movements for racial equity, civil rights and human rights.

This is pathway meant to both ground us and activate us. Participants will have the opportunity to engage in spiritual practices that will ground us and give us clarity as well as experiment with various public art-making materials and methods such as screen printing, stamping, stenciling, pasting and painting. We will make individual work as well as collaborative pieces with the opportunity to experiment with art not only as resistance and as liturgical action.

This pathway is for artists and non-artists of all kinds and is inherently meant to be accessible and empowering for every/all skill sets. What it requires is imagination and a willingness to take risks!

An additional fee of $50 for art supplies will be charged for this pathway.

PATHWAY SESSIONS

Session 1: Clarity

What is our stake? In this session we will ground ourselves in the role of the artist/creative in resistance movements and participants will engage in a practice that will bring clarity to your stake in the resistance and a way of representing it (image, symbol, word, metaphor). The concept that emerges for you will be one you work with throughout the rest of our time together - this will be your taproot. 

Session 2: Permeability

In this session we will explore the ways we’re transformed by sharing our own stories, perspectives and experiences - and encountering and engaging the stories, perspectives and experiences of others through repeated, overlapping and layered printmaking.

Session 3: Curiosity

In this session we will explore the way artists in resistance use their imaginations to disrupt the expected, transgress the status quo and paint possible futures. We will embody curiosity and playfulness to claim and expand our own imaginations using the revelatory process of batik dyeing.

Session 4: Collective Power

In this session we will explore our interdependence and collective power and will engage with community art-making practices such as mural making, guerilla art and/or screen printing. Please note this session will take place off-site and may require additonal costs for public transportation.

Session 5: Reverence

We will explore the concept of repetition as a form of reverence, for example, liturgy as chants or call & responses as protest. We will utilize stencil and spray paint as a creative form of repetition, multiplication and amplifying our visions for liberation.

Session 6: Emergence

Being embodied as artists in the resistance means honoring seasons and cycles in the work we do and the ways we learn and grow around justice and wholeness. We will explore the creative work of mad farmers, makers, outlaw gardeners and consider ways we might engage the spaces we are returning to as spaces of liberation. We will play with seeds, seed packets and creation itself as tools and teachers of resistance and emergence.

More than Good Intentions

Aligning Your Mission Ministries for Impact

Mission and justice are central to the work of the Church. Our hearts are in the right places and our intentions are good, but are we really making a difference? Why is your church engaged in the mission work that it is? Does your church have a shared understanding of that why? The stakes are too high for mission and justice work to be shallow in today’s world. It is critical for churches to honestly assess their work and impact in their communities.

This pathway is designed for any church member or leader who is engaged in mission work at their church. Perhaps your church is a Matthew 25 congregation who is yearning for more. Or maybe your mission budget is a mile deep with historical mission ministries that feel disconnected to your current community realities. Or perhaps your mission committee is spinning its wheels trying to make meaningful impact in the community.

Aligning our good intentions with transformational impact is critical for faithful mission work. This pathway will give you practical tools to unpack the needs of your community, honestly assess your resources, and imagine ways mission ministries can be more effective for those we serve.

PATHWAY SESSIONS

Session 1: Beginning with The Why

In the first session we will consider our why for mission engagement. By grounding ourselves in a collective why, communities gain clarity around why they develop ministries, invest in different missions, and create spaces of welcome.

Session 2: Moving to Impact

How do you know if your mission and justice ministries are making an impact? Traditional models of assessment aren’t designed to look beyond dollars and numbers. In this session we will unpack four categories that can be assessed and how connecting your why do these categories leads to impact.

Session 3: Collective Action

Mission projects and justice initiatives are often championed by 1-2 key leaders, while lacking broader communal buy-in. Instead of one person having a vision and determining the direction of a program, we will discuss how individuals form a collective understanding and build mutual accountability from the very beginning of a process.

Session 4: Pushing Against the Status Quo

Learning is a key ingredient for moving from assumptions to assessing impact and growth. Our learning doesn’t justify maintaining the status quo, but instead serves as a springboard for future transformation and growth.

Session 5: The Power of Story

Storytelling has the power to shape culture, interpret and understand history, and move us towards transformation and justice. Stories are critical to how we engage mission with and for our neighbors. In this session, we will exam the power of story and how stories can guide us to impactful missional engagement.

Session 6: Next Steps for Returning to our Communities

In our final session, we will consider the next steps for aligning intentions with practice for our mission and justice ministries. What are the tools you are taking home? Who are the partners you need to the table to begin to shape change? What are the learnings from the week asking of you as a leader in your community?