I didn’t preach yesterday, so for today’s post I decided to share with you what I said at the delegates’ assembly for the new faith-based community organization I have been a part of building for the last four years. This meeting, which happened about two weeks ago, included choosing of issues and choosing a name. We chose “SAIL,” which stands for the Southeast Alliance for Interfaith Leadership. I am so excited to help launch this organization publicly in the fall. I had the job at this meeting to talk about the “why” behind our organizing. Here’s what I said, written in partnership with our lead organizer Pat Speer.
Good evening to you all. I am so excited to be here for this assembly with so many people representing faith communities from all over southeastern Connecticut. My name is Adam Thomas. I am the pastor of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Mystic, and I’ve been on this wild ride with Pat, our organizer, and many of the other clergy for about four years now. It’s my job tonight to set the stage, to share with you the history of our budding organization, and to tell you why this organization is necessary. We’ll start with the last one first.
Why do we need to organize? We need to organize because the values we live by as people of faith are values that establish justice, center compassion, and bring abundant life for all. Each day we pit our lifegiving values against the deathdealing values of those who seek to dominate us with narratives of scarcity, of violence, of planet-killing consumption, of fear of the immigrant and stranger.
We need to organize because we know that love and community are better than cruelty and division. We know that equity and justice are better than oppression and exploitation. Materialism, narcissism, racism: The tenor and tone of the nation frighten us. They anger us. And yet, we lift up kindness and welcome and generosity and all kinds of justice: economic, environmental, and especially racial justice. We know fear and anger can stifle and inhibit. But anger can also motivate, righteous anger that fuels us to repair breaches and to stand together with one another and with God as we live out the Latin root of the word ‘value’: valeo, which means to be strong.
We find our strength in our togetherness. This is our power. Power is simply the ability to act, and when we act together, especially after we have taken time to learn one another’s stories, we find our power.
A few years ago, our faith communities, beginning with our ordained clergy, began a conversation with each other: what would it take for our values to have more impact? Our communities of faith are rightly proud about the healing work we do in the midst of all this suffering and injustice, with our food pantries, our Walks for Hunger, our drop-in centers, and the like. But our values are the values that should rule our daily lives in the world as it should be, and that should hold more sway than those lousy values of scarcity and domination. Those lousy values are loud and pushy in the public square and they take up all the oxygen. Our values of justice and compassion are weak in the public square. They need to rise above the loud, pushy values so people can claim a different and better vision of public life together.
What would it take for us to defeat those lousy values of scarcity and domination? It would take us reaching out to one another, across differences, sometimes very daunting differences. To get to know one another deeply. To invite each other to power. To build relationships of trust and mutual agency with one another.
And so here we are. Together. On the verge of creating power for the common, beautiful, possible values all of our diverse faith traditions have taught us. We have run leadership institutes and trained scores of our members as leaders. We have gathered together almost 200 of our members in 40 house meetings over the past several weeks to build relationships and hear our concerns. Tonight we will move this work forward: with a name. With a date for a founding assembly. With an agenda for action.
Before this year is done, we will launch our own, powerful, diverse organization. We will have each others’ backs. We will stand together. We will act in unison for the Common Good. We will win. And we begin tonight by uncovering our power the way we always do – one precious, sacred relationship at a time.
Where the Wind... 