Staying Awake: The Gospel for Changemakers

By Tyler Sit

Jesus asked his followers to stay awake, which begs the question: stay awake to what? Staying Awake is a practical exploration of Christianity for people who want to show up for justice and stay in the movement. Complete with stories, worksheets, poetry, illustrations, and a commitment to centering queer people of color, this book is here to support you in staying awake: to God, to the evils of oppression, and the world’s coming liberation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9780827235533

Book preview

Praise for Staying Awake

This book is so smart, so fresh, and so bursting with energy for Spirit-led justice that it makes me want a do-over at being Christian. As the author says, it is not a self-help book but a community-help book, written as much for those who have lost faith in church as for those who are just discovering what it is really all about. If you, too, want to be part of God’s sacred composting project, you will not find a better gardener for your soul than Tyler Sit.

—Barbara Brown Taylor, author of

Holy Envy and Always a Guest

"Tyler Sit and his Minneapolis-based congregation are committed to ‘doing church’ in ways that incarnate the ancient call to act justly, love mercifully, and walk humbly with God. They’ve learned how to ‘stay awake’ to a world of harsh realities and life-giving possibilities. In this book, Tyler shares what they’ve learned. As he says, ‘the church done messed up’ by falling asleep. We can ‘do church’ only by keeping our eyes open to what is and what might be. Here’s the story of a ministry forged in suffering and joy, one that provides living proof to us that even in the face of death, we have access to a power that forever makes all things new. We need a lot more ministries of this sort, and this book will help shape them."

—Parker J. Palmer, author of

Let Your Life Speak, A Hidden Wholeness, Healing the Heart of Democracy, and On the Brink of Everything

"Tyler Sit is a craftsman of care, and we are his apprentices. In Staying Awake, Sit artfully shares how he employs the tools of parable-like narratives, lived theology, and nine innovative Christian practices to catalyze change and build God’s kin-dom."

—Gregory C. Ellison II, founder of

Fearless Dialogues and associate professor of pastoral care and counseling at Candler School of Theology

Tyler Sit doesn’t just tell you what he thinks you should believe in order to be the kind of person that practices love-fueled changemaking while staying awake to what needs to be righted in the world; he pastors us through it in the pages of this book.

—Micky ScottBey Jones, director of

healing and resilience initiatives with

the Faith Matters Network

"Staying Awake is a winsome and much-needed guide for anyone seeking to follow Jesus beyond the four walls of a church. Drawing on his experience as a pastor and activist, Tyler Sit presents disciplines that help fan the flame of our faith and keep us engaged in the work of justice in sustainable and impactful ways. This is one of the most practical, thought-provoking, and frankly fun guides for living out the way of Jesus that I’ve come across. Christians everywhere need to wrestle with the lessons of this important book!"

—Brandan Robertson, founder of

the Metanoia Community and author of True Inclusion: Creating Communities of Radical Embrace

Tyler Sit is not afraid of the truth. It takes a unique level of courage and profound love for humanity to teach this intersection of radical Christian hospitality, queerness, and racial justice. This book is a holy disruption in necessary measures for this present moment and those to come.

—Gabes Torres, psychotherapist,

singer-songwriter, and organizer

"Staying Awake is the perfect antidote to death by doomscrolling. This book is brimming with practical how-tos for resisting evil, injustice, and oppression through life-giving, spirit-nurturing practices. Want to dismantle broken social, political, and economic structures? Rebuild flourishing ecosystems and communities? Tyler joyfully shows the way. I couldn’t put it down."

—Jenny Phillips, United Methodist minister

and environmental strategist

Having known Rev. Sit for almost a decade, I found that this book reflects Tyler’s character: funny and perceptive, graceful to a fault, incredibly creative and artistic, and somehow always pulling inspiration out of the avoidable failures of church and society. May we heed the call and respond with urgency…and with dancing.

—Jeremy Smith, HackingChristianity.net

"With Staying Awake, Tyler Sit—church planter, missional innovator, and now compellingly honest author—invites saints and skeptics alike to grasp Christianity from the places where Jesus could so often be found, with the minimized, marginalized, and sidelined. If we let it, this book has the power to wake up the sleepwalking church and send us out with the compassion, clarity, and mission of Jesus. For those who find themselves as guardians of the ways church has ‘always’ been done, prepare to be uncomfortable. For those who have been so wounded by the church that you wonder if you could ever go back, this book will be a balm to your soul and reintroduce you to a faith that dances, and weeps, and protests. And for those hungry for a glimpse at what the church could become, fasten your seat belt. You’re in for quite a ride!"

—Mark DeVries, author of

Sustainable Youth Ministry and

cofounder of Ministry Incubators

Rev. Sit’s book is a call to creative, regenerative, and healing Christian ministry. Through poetry, cartoons, testimonies, biblical study, raw stories from the church, the streets, and the garden, he provides a vision for Christian leadership grounded in a gospel of freedom. He leads readers to a more expansive vision for an anti-racist, inclusive church. He also walks alongside the reader as they unlearn and piece together their own journey toward a life that works for the liberation of all people and the planet.

—Patrick B. Reyes, author of

Nobody Cries When We Die: God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood and senior director of

learning design at the Forum for Theological Exploration

"In his book Staying Awake, Tyler Sit invites us into a faith that is real and messy and gritty and honest. When we enter his words—and that’s what we’re invited to do: enter his words—we can’t help but experience clean air in the midst of a landscape of suffocating smog. Drawing from the truth of a radical gospel, he reminds us that we are all invited to pay attention, feel, reflect, connect, give, act, and love. May it be so, Tyler! May it be so."

—Lisa Greenwood, vice president for leadership ministry at the Texas Methodist Foundation

"In Staying Awake, Tyler Sit refashions ancient spiritual practices into fresh, radically inclusive, and transformative lived actions for those who show up and stay awake in justice spaces…and for those who want to show up and stay awake. A must-read for those striving for a better world."

—Curtiss Paul DeYoung, CEO of Minnesota Council of Churches

Copyright ©2021 by Tyler Sit

All rights reserved. For permission to reuse content, please contact

Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], www.copyright.com.

All scripture quotations unless noted otherwise are taken from the Common English Bible, copyright 2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Proofreaders: Kristen Hall-Geisler, Jenn Zaczek, and Sarah Currin

Interior book designer: Olivia Croom Hammerman

www.indigoediting.com

ChalicePress.com

Print: 9780827235526

EPUB: 9780827235533

EPDF: 9780827235540

To my parents and the people of New City Church

Contents

Praise for Staying Awake

Some Trigger Warnings

Introduction

Chapter 1: Worship

Staying Awake to Love

Chapter 2: Centering

Marginalized Voices

Staying Awake to Empire

Chapter 3: Prayer

Staying Awake to Our Lives

Chapter 4: Groups

Staying Awake to Community

Chapter 5: Sabbath

Staying Awake to Stillness

Chapter 6: Leadership Development

Staying Awake to the Movement

Chapter 7: Generosity

Staying Awake to Gratitude

Chapter 8: Planting

Staying Awake to the Future

Chapter 9: Putting It All Together

Staying Awake to Wholeness

Epilogue

Staying Awake during the George Floyd Uprising

About the Author

Some Trigger Warnings

Below is an (incomplete) list of themes that may trigger a trauma response in some of my readers. I wrote each of the chapters to be readable independent of each other, so if you need to skip a chapter, you will still be able to follow along with the rest of the book. No list can anticipate every potential trigger. If you notice a strong reaction in your body, take some deep breaths, reach out to loved ones, go outside, and so on. Traumatizing yourself with a book about following Jesus is clearly counterproductive. Please be kind to yourself!

Introduction

Police brutality

White supremacist violence

Chapter 2: Centering Marginalized Voices

Imperialism

Mass incarceration

Chapter 3: Prayer

Sexual assault

Brief mention of child sacrifice

Difficulties surrounding queer identities coming out of the closet

Chapter 5: Sabbath

Purity culture

Chapter 7: Generosity

Poverty

Introduction

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons,

becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing

of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot

rest until this happens.

—Ella Baker

On the third night of the protest, someone brought a

portable firepit—the kind you find at a hardware store next to the tiki torches—and started a fire to warm the shivering activists at the Fourth Precinct shutdown. Everyone was stressed from the day of fighting for Black bodies, and the firepit released a delicious warmth that slowly loosened us up.

Jamar Clark had been shot by a police officer three days earlier, the first death in Minneapolis in the new rise of #BlackLivesMatter activism. In a flash, people from across the city crowded to the Fourth Precinct police station, where we set up tents and water stations and made clear demands for a transparent investigation of Mr. Clark’s shooting.

After days of this, someone in the crowd unclipped a speaker from their backpack and started playing music with heavy bass, the kind of song with invisible hands that compel your hips to swivel. Whether it be on account of my hips or their sheer enthusiasm, some young activists I had just met pulled me into their dance circle. We danced hard, as if the choice was between the dance floor and busting car windows down Broadway Avenue. I was wearing a winter jacket and long underwear—because every activist in Minnesota knows to wear layers in November—but I got so warm that I unzipped my jacket between songs. My young friends, whom I didn’t know before the dance circle, suddenly stopped moving, their eyes wide, their mouths gaping in amazement.

"Wait, why are you dressed up like a priest?"

I looked down and realized that I’d worn my protest armor: a black clergy shirt with a white clergy collar.

I—AM—A—PASTOR! I yelled over the music.

But you’re, like, young! And you’re here! And you dance!

Funnily enough, this is not the only social justice dance gathering where I’ve heard that. Even though I have always had young, inspiring, likely-to-break-into-dance Christian leaders in my life, over the years I have learned that this was more the exception than the rule. The average North Minneapolis high schooler might not associate Christian pastor with the dancing fool at a protest.

But why? Why wouldn’t the people who follow Jesus appeal to a generation that is newly animated to change the world? After all, Jesus himself mounted public campaigns that resemble the one at which we were gathered.

Why wouldn’t the people who follow Jesus show up at places of great grief across our city? Jesus did, after all, walk miles and miles to cry with the grieving.

Why wouldn’t the people of Jesus be able to dance in community? His first miracle was, after all, to transform water into wine at a party.

The short answer is: the church done messed up.

The long answer is: the church gets choked up by the spiraling evils of homophobia (the hatred of gayness and queerness), misogyny (the hatred of women), and white supremacy (the hatred of Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color), and other wolves in church clothes, and in so doing loses its legitimacy.

In fact, the same day as the protest described above, two white men posted a video on social media of them driving to the Fourth Precinct, ski masks covering their faces, promising to do a little reverse cultural enriching. They urged people to stay white, and one of them held up a pistol to the camera and said, Yes, we are locked and loaded.¹

The video is an outrage to watch, but it didn’t get much attention from preachers in the area. Instead, many—many!—of the churches in Minneapolis were still debating whether they should let gay people into the church, and the arguments were so loud they somehow overlooked the videos of domestic terrorists. This, as a microcosm, is how the church forfeits our moral voice: when armed hate groups show up in our neighborhoods, we react with a fraction of the passion with which we argue about whether teenage girls should be able to kiss other teenage girls.

Fortunately, the community organizers at this gathering saw the video of the white supremacists while they were en route, and a member of the group confronted the masked men almost immediately, before they could do any more damage. I didn’t see it myself, but one of the young people with whom I’d been dancing could very well have been the one who stopped the white supremacists from implementing their terrible agenda. We were a united people looking out for each other.

Nonetheless, people already rattled by the death of Mr. Clark felt even more so after this threat of mass violence. There’s only so much dancing you can do when you hear that masked gunmen are on the prowl. And so our dancing became more wary. I felt my body wanting to shrink back, to merge into the darkness away from the crowd, but the firepit continued to radiate its warm invitation to come back to community. Like the ancient fire in the Bible that spiritual leaders stoked so that it was never extinguished,² that firepit cast a glow on our dancing that reminded me there is a grace that will see us through. Do not be afraid. Stay awake.

This is where Jesus comes back in—not just as a nice object lesson, but as a lifesaving conduit of Spirit.

The Spirit was in the fire and its warming;

the Spirit was in our bodies

healing ourselves through dance;

the Spirit was in the vigilant eyes

of people protecting this group;

the Spirit (I like to imagine) was in the hushed whisper inside the white supremacists’ heads, saying, This is not who I am, when they decided to leave.

We’re talking high-stakes grace here. Days later, when I wasn’t there, five protestors did get shot.³ They survived, but the city of Minneapolis was shaken out of hibernation, and it realized that there was a real—not imagined—threat among us. Hundreds of people flocked to the site after the incident, intent on showing that fear tactics wouldn’t work against the hardy Minnesota crowd. This, too, was a movement of the Spirit.

Struggling for a better world has taught me that justice requires intentionality, which is a less cringey way of saying discipline. It doesn’t take much to become outraged about the latest news headline. It takes a little more to do something about it. And it takes even more