Building Up a New World: Congregational Organizing for Transformative Impact

The church is an organizing body. No matter how big or small the membership roll, no matter a rural or urban setting, churches organize people. So what might happen if churches organized (more) effectively for community impact, for policy reform, for justice?

Building Up a New World explores possible—and practical—answer to this critical question from culturally diverse perspectives. Written by community organizers, ministers, healers, and resisters, Building Up a New World is the guiding fire that congregations needs to rise up for such a time as this. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pilgrim Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780829800432

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

The Building of This Book

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We are building up a new world,

Builders must be strong.¹

ORGANIZING FOUNDATIONS: AN ORIGIN STORY

In another lifetime, formerly known as November 2019, we, Anne Dunlap and Vahisha Hasan, were invited by the United Church of Christ to curate and co-edit a book that would provide tools for congregational organizing. We were both honored and excited about this opportunity. To be clear, we were excited because we love each other, and we appreciate any excuse to sojourn together. And because, in a time of rising white Christian supremacist violence and ever-deeper investment in oppressive structures by white—most often Christian—power and wealth, this project offered an opportunity to move the Christian masses towards a different vision, to call people of the pews to put their faith into action.

In our experience and assessment of the church we, as long-time organizers, have observed that the church is often good at advocacy, but not actually good at organizing to build power or to change structures and systems, including our own denominations. We will do a voter registration drive but won’t challenge legislation stripping people of voter rights; we will hold a charity drive but won’t address systems that cause perpetual need; we will do book studies and have committee hearings on issue after issue, but not make the needed structural changes that create the conditions for justice; we will hang up a Black Lives Matter banner but won’t consider abolition or giving to national bailout funds; we will choose not to rock the boat rather than challenge congregations to do transformative organizing work. This transformative shift to organizing towards collective transformation of systems that historically oppress is within us as individuals and communities.

Please note, by church we mean people in the pews, not just the preaching or recognized leading people. We want pew people to locate yourselves in this book and see yourselves as capable agents of change already within a powerbase that can be a part of impactful social change. So many of our faith rooted organizing experiences are only about organizing the pastor and leadership. Which is important, and also insufficient, if the people they lead only move at the leaders’ event/campaign-based prompting and not from the depths of the pew people’s own call to the rich discipleship of generative social change. Church hierarchy can be fruitful, but it is also often stifling, as is the complicated nature of hierarchies.

Anyhoohow (Vahisha’s mother’s language), we began working in January 2020, living in shared docs and spreadsheets and dreaming and scheming with our other favorite human, Rev. Tracy Howe. We began by framing our content addressing our assessment above and asking the questions: what are the tools, skills, and practices congregations need to move like organizers? We began sketching out chapters that would offer structural analysis and organizing frameworks for congregations and discussing the organizing practices and models we wanted to focus on. We began identifying the super dope folks we knew who were actively organizing across a broad spectrum of how faith shows up in the world. We were grateful and humbled by the responses from amazing organizers who saw the potential good of our shared effort, and many emails, Zooms, and contracts later, we had the beginning outline of an amazing book filled with amazing places of learning from beyond-amazing contributors.

Then COVID. (March 11, 2020)

Then Ahmaud Arbery. (February 23, 2020)

Then Breonna Taylor. (March 13, 2020)

Then George Floyd. (May 25, 2020)

Then the Summer of Uprisings for Black Life. (Summer 2020)

Then the US Presidential election (November 3, 2020)

Then the January Insurrection (January 6, 2021)

And then vaccines.

And then variants.

And then …

And then …

Our lives forever changed.

COVID became the overarching theme of, well, everything.

These Black lives became the name and face of the ongoing rallying cry of Black Lives Matter!

Globally it felt like the world erupted. Over and over again. This new global context impacted everything about this book. Every person with any level of involvement in this book was actively involved in trying to survive COVID, mourning beloveds who didn’t, and protesting, resisting, advocating, and organizing around the mattering of these particular and all Black lives.

We name this context, this origin story, because this book was not born in a vacuum, and indeed organizing does not happen in a vacuum. Organizing, and this book offering congregational tools for organizing, are responses to material conditions that impact our lives, our loves, our breath, our bodies. And we used the organizing skills we have, and that we were learning from our contributors, to build this book in this historical moment.

CRUCIAL BUILDING PRACTICES: HOW WE BUILT THIS BOOK

We, Anne and Vahisha, are organizers with seventy years combined—and counting!—of organizing experience towards racial justice, economic justice, immigration, LGBTQ liberation, indigenous self-determination, abolition of police, prisons, and the death penalty … the list goes on. In faith spaces and beyond faith spaces. In the streets, in the halls of power, in our classrooms, from our pulpits, around kitchen tables. Through political education, healing work, campaigns, direct actions, and more.

Our friendship began in January 2017, when Anne was in Vahisha’s hometown, Charlotte, North Carolina, representing Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) with United Methodist Women to protest the horrible anti-trans House Bill 2—the infamous bathroom bill that Vahisha was organizing against. The first time we met in person during that trip was actually in the Charlotte Douglas Airport, when we protested the Muslim travel ban together (and almost got arrested), right after THE inauguration. We connected deeply over those days and began finding ways to work together. Anne invited Vahisha to co-facilitate a campaign of SURJ-Faith, which Anne coordinates, to equip and support congregations to divest from policing. Anne accepted the invitation to write devotionals for Vahisha’s three-volume series, Resipiscence: A Lenten Devotional for Dismantling White Supremacy, co-edited by Nichola Torbett, one of the contributors to this current book. Then we again conspired for positive social change together, beginning in the summer of 2019, as ongoing cohort members of Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative.

Having this depth of friendship, camaraderie, and organizing experience together was invaluable not only because relationships are crucial in organizing, but also because we became a pastoral team that was now shepherding the contributors of the book—and ourselves!—in the context of global crisis. We held so much space for pastoral care of each other and our writers because individually and collectively we were all navigating the absolute most. The most being and including a global response to the pandemic, an exponential rise in anti-Asian and antisemitic hate crimes, a ramping up of targeting immigrants and asylum seekers, the brutal murdering of Black life, attacks on trans beloveds, and ongoing state violence against Indigenous land and water protectors. People in our lives were dying, and losing their jobs, and housing insecure, and not necessarily safe at home. Others didn’t have the access to resources they needed for a virtual world fully in quarantine. Our mental and physical health suffered. We couldn’t get to our loved ones and were confronted with the need to adjust our lives in previously unimaginable ways. All while we fought on the systemic battlefields of classism, racism, xenophobia, ableism, homophobia, and interpersonal conflicts created by people just being plain awful in their fear and scarcity of mindset, action, and inaction.

This shepherding became part of the ethos you will find in this book: How do we hold each other while we do this challenging work? How do we face the challenges within our own lives and bodies while we face the challenges in our communities? Every Thursday for over two years, Anne, Vahisha, and often Tracy, met for an hour or more. We thought we were just going to strategize editing and publishing, and while that did happen, we also prayed and cried and laughed our way through two years of personal, global, pandemic, and political rollercoasters of ups and downs. We discovered we needed to crip the timeline multiple times, for our writers and for us—learning from our chapter how to center disability justice and healing and wellness in ways we truly needed to pause and process and honor. Vahisha was typically in pajamas and often horizontal. Anne’s partner and cat made many encouraging appearances. And Tracy often showed up with the most remarkable child and a picturesque backdrop that helped us breathe through all of the things. This is how we made it through together, and how we pray you all make it through, how we all make it through, together.

As you can tell, nothing about this curating and editing process went quite as we thought it would. Nevertheless, we did come through to the other side and are proud of what is offered here. We’re proud of how intentional we were about choosing contributors who have lived, deep organizing experience in the areas we asked them to write about. We’re proud of how we’re offering tools to congregations that some might consider pretty radical, but that address necessary work for getting us free from oppression. We’re proud of taking the time to get our biblical power analysis right by addressing antisemitic biblical interpretation in the editing process—that could’ve almost become a whole other book! And we’re proud of how we centered our contributors’ voices and experiences; we were surprised at how consistently we needed to invite people into liberating their voices and telling their stories and to remind them that their voices and stories mattered, framed by their wisdom and life experiences. This makes us wonder how many people sitting in congregations are not lifting their voices because somewhere along the way they were sent messages telling them that what they experienced and had to say were not valuable and sacred. It was a joy to experience these contributors as they experienced validation and support, and we have been intentional about allowing the voices of these contributors to shine through. We find joy in hoping this same valuing of life and voice can come forth as congregations shift to organizing as much or more than they are programming.

BUILDING UP: THE TOOLBOX

Our book revolves around three subject areas: Organizing Foundations offers chapters on structural analysis and key organizing building blocks. Crucial Building Practices are guiding practices we want you to center and include no matter what form your organizing takes. And in Building Up: Putting It All Together, you will find a set of blueprints for what your organizing can look like that are crucial to collective liberation and protecting our communities in this time of rising violence, and that are translatable to a variety of contexts. For example, our chapter on mutual aid comes out of immigrant experiences, but could be used to build mutual aid projects such as abortion funds or healthcare access for trans kids.

Finally, in this book, you will notice a theme that comes up consistently:

YOU ARE ALREADY ORGANIZERS.

Currently, you may only be organizing programmatic aspects of church. What would it look like to transfer those skills to organizing for transformative social change? You already know how to power map because you know exactly who to go to in order to get what you want done or not done. You know how to phone-tree to make sure folks show up to church programs, wear the designated colors or uniform, and bring whatever food or decorations or props are necessary for a successful program. You clearly know how to raise money, and you know how to run the pastor/leadership off when they are not in alignment with the direction of the church body. What we and the contributors are asking, encouraging, and demonstrating is how to shift those transferable organizational skills to build systemic change in a world full of people who need the church to meaningfully Organize Organize Organize!

Courage, people, don’t get weary,

Though the way be long.²

Dr. Vincent Harding was a brilliant and deep-hearted Black historian and freedom movement leader.³ Dr. Harding was a mentor to many, including Anne. In space after space, Dr. Harding offered a simple song he created to help us remember, in those hard times, what we are doing; to encourage us to keep going; and to remind us to stay grounded in the sacred.

The title of this book honors and reflects the urging of the song to do our part in transforming the world towards one more full of justice, compassion, love, and freedom. The song was often in Anne’s mind as we worked on this book: if we want congregations to be contributing to building a new world, what new (and old) tools, skills, and knowledge do they, do we, need?

What are we doing? We mean individually, and especially we mean collectively. What are we doing when we organize? What are we doing when we center disability justice? When we assure Indigenous self-determination? When we build mutual aid networks and put our bodies and reputations on the line and keep one another safe?

We are building up a new world. Not we because we’re the only and oh so special ones; not new because we suddenly thought of it, as if the movement for justice and freedom hasn’t been flowing for generation upon generation. No, we gathered here in this space together, joining our breath and our voices and our labor together to sing this freedom song; we the present ones, the ancestors, and the ones to come—we are wading into the river, wading deeper into the river that flows towards collective liberation—towards a new world that is new because we have found new ways of being human together, of relating to one another, the creatures, the land together, new ways that are often very old ways, recovered and re-mixed, drawing us deeper into the river, the river that, as Dr. Harding says,

moves toward a freedom that liberates the whole person and humanizes the entire society, pressing us beyond the boundaries of race, class, and nationality … this is the magnificent opening toward which the river has been moving, the great ocean of humanity’s best hope that it has always held and nurtured at the center of its own bursting life.⁴

We are building up a new world. Our most fervent prayer is that this book helps you and your congregation to deepen not only your organizing skills, but also your collective commitment to a beautiful, thriving, just, and compassionate new world.

We are building up a new world

We are building up a new world

We are building up a new world

Builders must be strong

Courage, sisters, don’t get weary

Courage, brothers, don’t get weary

Courage, people, don’t get weary

Though the way be long.

Rise, shine, give God glory

Rise, shine, give God glory

Rise, shine, give God glory

Children of the light.⁵

Notes

1. Verse 1, We Are Building Up a New World, music in the public domain (We are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder), lyrics by Vincent Harding. Used with permission of Rachel Harding and Jonathan Harding.

2. Verse 2, We Are Building Up a New World, music in the public domain (We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder), lyrics by Vincent Harding. Used with permission of Rachel Harding and Jonathan Harding.

3. Learn more about Dr. Vincent Harding at The Veterans Hope Project, Vincent Gordon Harding, https://www.veteransofhope.org/founders/vincent-gordon-harding/. Veterans of Hope is an organization founded by Dr. Harding and his wife Rosemarie Freeney Harding.

4. Dr. Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1981), xxiv.

5. We Are Building Up a New World.

SECTION I

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Organizing Foundations

1

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WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE STRUCTURE OF OPPRESSION

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ANNE DUNLAP

REFLECTION

At sixteen, I knew I would dedicate my life to justice. God laid that call on my heart at the 1986 Presbyterian Youth Triennium (an every-three-year gathering) when a young adult spoke of her work with the Sanctuary Movement in Tucson, Arizona, and was followed by a Salvadoran refugee who had fled state repression and torture. Both shared about the United States’ involvement in funding and training the Salvadoran government to crush peasant-led organizing against poor wages, land theft, and state violence.¹ My heart pounded. I wanted to live in a world where people did not have to live in that kind of fear. I wanted to be part of making that violence stop.

Ever since, for over thirty-five years, I’ve been part of movements working to build a better world. Over time, I learned that the US commitment to state violence in El Salvador was not an aberration, not a matter of changing a few policies, nor reforming a few practices. The entire US structure itself is inherently and intentionally violent and oppressive, and our bloody support of El Salvador was only one expression of that violence. As a white person, this truth was kept from me and has taken decades of unlearning—a process still ongoing.

I am immensely grateful to the Black feminist/womanist and Indigenous women activists-scholars I draw from here, and most especially all the Black, Indigenous, immigrant, QTPOC, and poor and working-class activists, organizers, and feminist, womanist, and liberation theologians in the United States, Mexico, and Central America who had patience with all my certainly fumbling questions over these decades. They continue teaching me that what we are facing is not a generally good or even benign set of institutions that just need reforms to function a little better for a few more people, but rather an entire edifice—an entire structure called white supremacy that is upheld by violent mechanisms and logics. The mechanisms are how the structure does what it does, and the logics are the reasons why the structure does what it does. These mechanisms and logics, the how and the why, run through every institution and indeed, every one of us. True liberation is dismantling that whole structure and building a new world of justice, collective care, accountability, and compassion.²

WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE STRUCTURE OF OPPRESSION

White Supremacy is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.

Betita Martinez, SNCC Organizer³

We are starting here because understanding this system, this structure—how it operates, who it benefits, how it makes meaning out of bodies and relationships—is crucial to our organizing. Without it, we miss much of what needs to be done and our organizing is thus not as effective as it could be. Without it, we do not understand that this structure of oppression does not love us, does not care about us, and so we labor under the impression that some reforms here and there that allow a few more people more access to success in this structure—that some changing of hearts and minds without changing power structures—will be sufficient to the task of collective liberation. So let us get clear about what this structure actually is in order to forge a grounding place for our organizing.

White supremacy is the structure of oppression in which the United States lives and moves and has its being and which we export around the world. White supremacy is not about interpersonal prejudices or individual acts of hate. White supremacy is about power—who has it, to what ends, and what meaning is made out of that power—and it is baked into every institution we move within: politics, education, health care, policing, you name it. Each of these interrelated institutions functions as Betita Martinez states above: for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege to the benefit of a small minority of white people.

By every institution, yes, I mean even the church, as white supremacy is also a theological construction. Theology is essentially about meaning-making, and white supremacy makes meaning out of what it means to be human and who is the Divine. White supremacy makes meaning out of people’s bodies—whose are worthy and pure and good and able (white), and whose are criminal, a threat, deserving of punishment, disposable (Black, Indigenous, immigrant, disabled, queer, poor). That theology, which developed within and is perpetuated by white Western Christianity, is the theological and moral foundation that drives white supremacy and racial capitalism. That theology runs in the veins of all our denominations, regardless of where we fall on the political spectrum.

So, if white supremacy is the structure of oppression, what does it look like, and how does it work?

THE FRUITS OF LABOR (Figure 1)

Imagine the structure of oppression as a pyramid. At the top are, to quote Martinez again, those of wealth, power, and privilege. This top portion of the pyramid is comprised of a small percentage of the population, almost entirely white, cis/straight, and Christian, yet they hold a disproportionate amount of power. In the broad center of the pyramid are the middle, professional classes, and at