Sacred Conversations that Break the Impasse

What keeps you up at night? What is something currently causing worry or stress for you or a loved one? How have you been personally impacted by a community problem?

Every fall, I have the privilege of gathering in church basements, dining rooms, and coffee shops to hear people wrestle with these questions. 

When we step back from the dominant political debates and listen to the concerns of our neighbors, the red-blue partisan divide begins to say less and less about the immediate local problems that actually matter to our lives.

I work as a community organizer for an interfaith network of 24 religious congregations representing a diverse cross-section of Louisville, Ky. Our network members take time each fall to host house meetings to listen to the concerns of their neighbors and fellow congregants. The groups are typically about ten people in a room. Participants are asked to share personal stories and experiences about the problems weighing down on their lives. We often refer to these gatherings as sacred conversations.

Start with Solidarity

As I’ve learned, listening is a radical act in our current political landscape. I’m not talking about passive listening to the endless spouting of ideological opinions on the news or our social media feeds. I’m talking about real, deep listening to stories about the immediate, material problems that our neighbors face daily.

Just recently, I heard people from all across the city share their struggles about rising rent costs, family members with a mental health challenge, gun violence in their neighborhood. The details of their stories may change based on race, class, zip code, or other identity markers, but more often than not, people here are worried about many of the same things.

When we step back from the dominant political debates and listen to the concerns of our neighbors, the red-blue partisan divide begins to say less and less about the immediate local problems that actually matter to our lives. We find that most of us want the same things: good schools, economic opportunities, equitable policing, a safer city.

Truths Below the Surface

It’s a rare thing to find communal spaces that call us to vulnerably share our stories and troubles. It may be rarer still for those stories to be met with compassionate listening rather than constant argument and contention. Occasionally, participants will hear comments from their neighbors in the room that upset their own political sensibilities. A person might misidentify the source of their struggles and fall back on partisan biases. Yet more often than not, their concerns are rooted in a real struggle underneath. The point for participants is not to come to some agreement about their neighbor’s point of view but to listen deeply for the underlying humanity in whatever story they share.

Listening, of course, is not a magical antidote to the many valid disagreements about the appropriate means to achieve our shared interests. But if we approach local politics from a place of solidarity around shared experiences, priorities, and hopes, then we begin to transcend some of these habitual divisions and find common ground to work for change. 

People Power in Action

After these listening sessions, we organize people from across the city to come together annually to vote for the problem that they want to tackle in the coming year, then we form research committees to better understand the problem and search for proven solutions. Meanwhile, leaders are preparing their congregations to turn out as many people as possible for a large public “action assembly” in the spring—typically about a thousand people—where public officials will be called upon to implement the solutions we have identified. It’s the people power of hundreds of community members, all gathered in one place at one time, that forces public officials to take our demands seriously.

By following this annual process for more than thirty years, regular people of faith in Louisville have won a well-funded affordable housing trust fund, a “restorative practices” program to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, public transportation improvements, and dozens of other victories.

If all those in attendance at our annual action assembly were polled, one would find a vast spectrum of political leanings. How, then, is it possible to bring together so many people of faith around common, and ostensibly “political,” causes? The key to achieving this end is in its beginning: by starting from a place of common concern, we can discover the common-sense solutions that the vast majority of us want to see.

Cooperation Without Compromising

The challenge to functional bipartisanship in our current factional landscape is that it seems impossible to work across political differences without compromising one’s values. We draw lines in the sand—sometimes for good reason—and refuse to work with anyone whose values are so incompatible with our own. Congregation-based community organizing offers a way to work together across these divides without compromising values. It sets aside one’s professed political affiliation and begins from a place of shared experiences of injustice and shared hopes for a better community. Bridging political divides in this case does not mean falling back on empty, toothless centrism. Instead, this kind of organizing centers our shared values and provides an avenue to live them out. For people of faith, this is an approach to political life that boldly declares that God demands justice (Micah 6:8), and each of us has a role in changing the systems that perpetuate injustice.

Community organizing, at its best, assumes that those most equipped to identify, understand, and solve local problems are those who are directly impacted by those problems. It recognizes that if we don’t build collective power from the bottom up, then we will be at the mercy of power imposed from the top down. It rejects the illusion that our problems will be solved if only we vote for the right politicians every two to four years. Whoever is in office, they need to be held accountable. This will only happen when people of faith (and all people of good will) embrace their collective power and responsibility.

From Aspirations to Results

Occasionally, people of faith will misunderstand this work and assume that any attempt to influence public policy is inherently divisive, a matter of conflict, and should be avoided. Ironically, the opposite is true. The shared pursuit of justice creates a deeper sense of connection and belonging in a congregation—and between faith communities. In the face of an increasingly fragmented society (and church), congregation-based organizing gives people a way to build relationships across differences and work for common causes. Put theologically, it helps the church become what God wants us to be. Without this kind of work, the church will continue, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to fade into “an irrelevant social club with no moral or spiritual authority.”^[1]

In a divisive contemporary landscape, this hopeful portrait of broad-based unity and collective action may sound overly idealistic, aspirational. After all, democratic life is messy. Even in the best examples of faith-based organizing, there are internal tensions and external roadblocks. So yes, grassroots organizing is always an aspirational project. But $100 million for affordable housing in Louisville used to sound aspirational too; now it’s a reality that has changed the lives of thousands of families.

Changes like that were not won because benevolent politicians came along and fixed the problems for us. They were won because regular people of faith listened to one another, got organized, and built the power needed to improve their lives.

John Aden ’23 M.A.R. works as a community organizer at CLOUT (Citizens of Louisville Organized and United Together), an affiliate of the nationwide DART Network. At YDS, he was a leader with the Lutheran Student Organization. Before coming to Yale, he received an M.Div. at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where he was introduced to community organizing as a graduate fellow at the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice.