Aaron K. Stauffer, author of Listening to the Spirit: The Radical Social Gospel, Sacred Value, and Broad-based Community Organizing and co-editor with Gary Dorrien and Charlene Sinclair of Organizing Visions: Social Ethics and Broad-based Solidarity Activism, is the associate presbyter of congregational vitality for the Heartland Presbytery in Missouri and Kansas.
Posts By This Author
What the History of the ‘Social Gospel’ Can Teach Us Today
How congregations can keep acting on what matters.
THE CHURCH ADULT education class was stuck. After five weeks of exploring the immigration crisis with legal and advocacy organizations, they invited me to help them discern where and how to act. But they were foundering. A subset of the group had been working with the congregation on immigration issues for many months. “Why haven’t the changes we pushed for come to fruition?” they asked me. “How can we make a difference?”
Congregations are often unclear on how they can act effectively in public during our dangerous and unpredictable times. In my teaching and practice of congregation-based community organizing, I’ve learned that one reason for this is because the issues dictate the strategy. Too often, faith leaders present the crisis around a particular justice issue as more pressing than the sacred values we hold and that motivate our faithful action.
Theologies of Fear
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Two years ago I sat in a room crowded with 300 angry people and 700 more outside shouting, as I nervously whispered, “I’ve never been in a room where I’ve felt so much white Christian rage.” My colleague, a pastor from Pulaski, Tenn., nodded as I straightened up in my chair.
The crowd had come from surrounding states to this small community forum in Manchester, Tenn. They came to protest the forum’s concern for hate crimes against Muslims. National Islamophobic groups had bussed protestors in from hundreds of miles away, carrying messages and signs based on an ideology — some might say, theology — of bigotry. And they were truly angry, flashing their handguns and shouting down panelists. This was in the summer of 2013, but the memory still reminds me, why I moved to Tennessee to work on an interfaith public education effort to end anti-Muslim sentiment.
To be clear, these weren’t people who wanted to discuss the complexities of interfaith engagement while holding true to our particular faith claims. There are many people in this country who want to talk, for instance, about what interfaith relations mean for evangelism, or why a small number of Muslims today are turning to terrorism, without generalizing the Muslim community or wanting to see harm done to them. These were not the people at the forum, however. One thing alone had brought them to Manchester: fear.