by Stephanie Cooper and Brett Harris
These past few weeks have been overwhelming and exhausting. Just like you, just like your church, organizations like the Alliance are overwhelmed by the onslaught of injustice unleashed by the Trump administration. And that is their intent. This administration’s tactic is to “flood the zone.” It’s to overwhelm people like you and organizations like ours. When so many rights are being threatened, when so many lives are at stake, how do we address it all? How can we address it all in meaningful ways? And if we can’t, how can we choose which injustices to direct our energy toward?
That’s what they want.
They want us to be in a state of overwhelm so that we cannot create. So that we do not have time (or take time) to think outside of the box. So that we are constantly on the defensive and too exhausted by the end of each day to strategize, organize, and create the more just world we all want to build. It’s an attempt to make us scramble in trying to address it all and end up doing nothing well at all.
But we at the Alliance of Baptists refuse to succumb to the overwhelm this administration desires for organizations and people like us.
We remember what we have promised to each other, to our neighbors, and to God in our covenant:
We at the Alliance are committed to affirming the dignity of all people, embracing every identity, and creating spaces of belonging. We are committed to confessing our role in systemic injustice and dismantling white supremacy, patriarchy, and abusive power. We are committed to nurturing spiritual formation, practicing shared leadership, and upholding religious liberty. We are committed to honoring creation, pursuing justice, and working for sustainability. We are committed to listening to silenced voices, offering refuge, and breaking down barriers.
This onslaught of overwhelm will not change our commitment.
But it is challenging us to consider how, where, and in what ways we will respond. It is forcing us to consider our words and actions in light of our covenant and to discern how best we will continue to live it out.
We remain committed to our pursuit of antiracism within the Church and to finding ways to help our congregational partners find ways to incorporate antiracist learning into their collective lives. That is our current task, and we will continue to dig deep into that work, especially as we know the current administration leaves nothing to the imagination in regards to their desire to dismantle and disrupt all efforts toward a more inclusive, equitable, and just society.
And we remain dependent upon our partnerships, domestically and internationally. We will lean on their understanding, insight, and the resources they have cultivated and created as they address the injustices of this administration from their context. We are partners in mission for this very reason. We are not experts in everything, but when we band together with our partners and lean on one another’s expertise, we can cover the ground much better. As the saying goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
To that end, if you are looking for resources about immigration, we point you to our partners at the Latin America Working Group. If you are interested in combating Christian Nationalism, we point you to our partners at BJC, who have done deep work on this front. If you are looking for resources on how to protect our trans and nonbinary siblings, check out what’s going on at AWAB. When you are overwhelmed by the attacks on the earth, find resources from Creation Justice Ministries.
We lean into these partnerships because we know when we work together, we are stronger. You can find a full list of our partners here.
And, if you come across resources in your work or congregation that would be helpful to folx across the Alliance, please share links to them in our public Facebook group, “We Are the Alliance of Baptists.”
Stay strong, friends. Stay woke (and we mean that). Dig into your own passions and creative outlets and let’s forge a more beautiful and exemplary world than the one the Empire is laying out for us to adopt. With God’s help.
Recent Comments