Dear Revolutionaries: A Field Guide for a World beyond the Church

By Lenny Duncan

When Lenny Duncan wrote Dear Church in 2018, they had a vision for a church that could and would reform itself into something new. After four years, a pandemic, a global uprising for racial equity, and what Duncan describes as "the death of the republic" on January 6, 2021, we now live in a vastly different landscape than the one Duncan wrote about previously.

Lenny now contends that we no longer need a reformation--we need a revolution. Dear Revolutionaries is a handbook for a new generation that sees, clear-eyed, the series of catastrophes we have inherited, the road that lies ahead, and the improbability of victory, yet are still ready to build the tomorrow we so desperately want to be born in this world. The institutional church is concerned with reviving itself. God is concerned with reviving the community within and beyond the walls of the church. Dear Revolutionaries is a book for the community who is ready to rise up and build something new from the ashes.

Casting a vision for a new spiritual future led by the people, Dear Revolutionaries offers a series of peace-building practices that will give readers the tools to build, guide, and care for spiritual community in a world beyond the church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781506479071

Book preview

Praise for Lenny Duncan

Rev. Lenny Duncan is a voice calling in the wilderness.

—Nadia Bolz-Weber, pastor and New York Times–bestselling author of Shameless: A Sexual Reformation

Duncan speaks loudly and clearly, cutting through the cacophonous noise of cheap love and cheap grace.

—The Christian Century

Fierce in both [their] criticism of America’s institutions and [their] love for its people.

—Publishers Weekly, starred review of United States of Grace

You will be inspired by Duncan’s strength but also jolted by [their] anger that the odds are so heavily stacked against all who are trapped by oppression and injustice. This is the work of a truly gifted writer.

—Tom Gjelten, religion correspondent, NPR News

Lenny Duncan’s prose has the momentum and pull of a powerful river. . . . Simply put, Lenny Duncan is telling the truth; we’d best take heed.

—Marya Hornbacher, New York Times–bestselling author of Madness

Dear Revolutionaries

Dear Revolutionaries

A Field Guide for a World beyond the Church

Lenny Duncan

Broadleaf Books

Minneapolis

DEAR REVOLUTIONARIES

A Field Guide for a World beyond the Church

Copyright © 2023 Lenny Duncan. Printed by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief ­quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Cover design: 1517 Media

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-7906-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-7907-1

These words are for those I have failed. Kevin Peterson, Jenoah Donald, and June T-Rex Knightly, and all those who fell on my watch. The church forgets, but I will ­never forget. You are all the closest I have ever come to ­encountering, Christ, and I am not worthy to untie the thong of your sandals. We know this because I am alive.

Contents

Preface

1. A World Beyond the Church

2. There Is No Two-Day Training or Book Club for This Shit

3. Witnesses > Prophets

4. Are You Alive?

5. Aces in Places

6. Ancestral Work

7. Waging Peace

8. The Complex Simplicity of the Art of Neighboring

Acknowledgments

Preface: A Field Guide Born from the Pain and the Victories of the People

Dear Revolutionary: it’s time to prepare for a world beyond the church.

I write this to you after almost two years of caring for Black leaders, organizers, activists, fellow faith leaders, and community leaders in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by the police officer Derek Chauvin.

If there is anything I want you to take away from this book, from this field guide written in Black blood, it’s the very first sentence. It bears repeating. It’s the entire message of this book:

Dear Revolutionary: it’s time to prepare for a world beyond the church.

This book is meant to take the already faithful and prepare them for a vastly different landscape than the one I wrote about in Dear Church. By already faithful, I mean those of us who are resisting the shadow spreading across our world. Those who realized in some bit of horror that following God in this world, in this time, in this country, may actually mean the risk of life, limb, reputation, and psyche.

In fact, since the publication of Dear Church, we have slid past many of my worst-case scenarios. The republic died stillborn on the steps of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

I’m not supposed to tell you that. I’m supposed to remix my first book into a rousing speech about why you need to come back to the church and save her from her poor leadership and subsequent fate. That is what a dying predator always says when fresh meat comes wandering by.

I wrote Dear Church in language that church councils, pastors, and it is my still-fervent prayer, bishops, could hear. It’s hard to explain to people who have invested generations into an endeavor that it has failed. I’m going to say something now that will cause many to tell you not to read this book. For that, I am sorry. I am sorry for my own complicity in this system because truth is commoditized, sold, repackaged, then sanitized. I worked hard as a writer to have the freedom to say these words:

Every major American mainline denomination failed us at a critical time in salvation history. Every leader. Every bishop. Every pastor.

Including me.

It is my fervent belief that this utter failure is a sign that the institutional church is no longer God’s or the Divine’s primary chosen vessel on Earth. Whether the institutional church truly is no longer God’s chosen vessel, or whether the age in which Christ is revealed most clearly through the church is over, the effect is the same on the ground.

I write these words to prepare a generation that sees, clear-eyed, the series of catastrophes we have inherited, the road that lies ahead, the improbability of victory, and is still ready to build the tomorrow we so desperately want to be born in this world. For too long, we have been told that our tomorrow has come too soon. That the people aren’t ready to see a new day dawn. Even the entire social paradigm in which we educate, train, and send leaders out into the world is based on the premise that giving you power is the worst thing that could happen. In seminary, although not on the syllabus, certainly in the air was this notion that the people were the problem. If only they would listen, or show up, or give more. I was taught that I couldn’t trust you with your own keys to your own salvation. That if I presented you with the same tools, learnings, and guidance I had received not only to navigate scripture but also build community, you would misuse them. I was told that you were defeated, dejected, or recalcitrant. I was told that I may be one of the last of the final generation of paid professional ministers. I don’t think the church has told you all of this. Why would they? But mainline ­denominations aren’t putting Black, Queer, Brown, and ­Indigenous leaders in clearly dangerous settings for them; they seem to almost intuitively block all progress of any innovative, shifting, or emerging faith community.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the uprisings, and the attack on the peaceful transition of power in the United States all happened—and what was the direction we were given by our leadership as they hid in their homes?

While you watched the world burn, the church told you to abstain from the holy meal. Despite knowing that Christians, for thousands of years, had simple table gatherings like this. Not because it isn’t good for you. Not that communion at home while reading Scripture with friends and loved ones during tough times is holy. That is what the first disciples of Christ did. Yet they discouraged online communion.

That decision only serves one subset of people in the church, and it’s more about their gainful employment over the course of the next fifteen years: clergy, pastors, bishops, deacons—paid professional clergy. Me. My ilk. At the greatest time of human need that I have ever witnessed in this republic’s history, all the clergy were worried about was the survival of the institution of the church. Keeping their church’s programming going. The efficacy of online communion.

Meanwhile, I was on the ground in Portland, Oregon, watching my peers be shot, tear-gassed, and kidnapped by the state—while fighting literal self-declared fascists who are currently, still, pursuing a white ethnostate. Also, don’t forget an overzealous local police force. And one standard issue: a clueless neoliberal mayor.

This isn’t a