👥 Freedom Church of the Poor

Dear Friends,

I hope that you are all well. I am glad we’re at the end of the week and hoping for some respite over the weekend for each of you.

Today, I wanted to tell you a little about the Freedom Church of the Poor, why I am involved, and some of what I think we can learn from it. I want to share about this not only because it is important but because we are launching this church this Sunday in partnership with the Kairos Center and the Poor People’s Campaign.

Thanks for reading and sharing with your friends we have almost hit 340 subscribers after just 14 issues. I’m very excited for the ways it is growing and you all are responding to this little newsletter.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging with these topics with me.

-Wess Daniels

Haw River Watershed (Greensboro, NC)

PS we also have a “reader response” from last week’s issue on “A Multitude of Legacies” that I really appreciated and wanted to share with you from Mike Huber (see below).

I became aware of this statement from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. a number of years ago when I first became involved with the Kairos Center and the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary. It was a kind of founding statement for a lot of the work and teaching that was taking place there and then (and now) as they ask questions like: what does it mean to build a movement organized and led by the poor as a new and unsettling force in this country in order to address the complacency and injustices we face today?

There are at least two key components underlying this idea of “a new and unsettling force.”

The first being that God is and has always been on the side of the poor and oppressed - that you cannot understand the work of God in this world or the story of the Bible apart from God’s struggle to bring an end to systems that create the conditions for poverty, violence, and detachment from God and one another.

For instance, in Leonardo Boff’s book “Jesus Christ the Liberator,” he writes that just in the Gospels alone the poor are mentioned 122 and 90 of those times are from Jesus’ own lips. As I mentioned in the newsletter titled, “Jesus Against Empire,” Jesus himself frames his entire mission in relationship to the poor and oppressed when he said he will:

Jesus follows up these statements by actually doing them throughout the rest of the Gospel accounts.

An important second part of the new and unsettling force is that it is the poor, the disinherited, and the dispossessed who are able to read and understand the Biblical accounts in a way that the rich and powerful will always fail to do - as that great theological rock group Arcade Fire sings:

The poor and marginalized are people who live under the injustices of our systems and are therefore the ones who know best how to fix the problems. It will take the poor and those in solidarity with them to finally bring about an alternative community and system because they have the most experience in how the current system works and wins (by keeping some wealthy and the rest constantly grasping for more).

The Freedom Church of the Poor is the spiritual home of this new and unsettling force. It starts from the bottom. It starts at the back of the bus, at the end of the line, it looks for the one lost sheep, knowing that is not only what God has taught us to do but where we will find God already at work.

What does it look like to create a church that starts in a place of the poor and disposed, addressing those needs, following that leadership, and then working from that place? Rather than the place of power and wealth which always seeks to sustain institutions and the status quo, the Freedom Church of the Poor is not afraid to address current issues political, economic, religious, from a theological framing that elevates and prioritizes the poor.

Today’s iteration of the Freedom Church has been meeting online since March 24 and it has met every Sunday evening online since. Each Sunday we look at a biblical text and we invite preachers, organizers, scholars, and activists who are either poor themselves or are dedicated to reading and practicing their faith in solidarity with the poor.

The result is a church service that is many-voiced, multi-faith, multi-racial, multi-class, community dealing every week with everyday issues that impact the most vulnerable in our communities.

In the opening of the Freedom Church’s mission statement you’ll see that there are the 5 interlocking injustices of the Poor People’s Campaign. These are the key “contextual” lenses we use alongside reading the Bible with the poor, and communities in the struggle right now:

As an active participant, speaker, and co-planner of these services, I can say that this iteration of the Freedom Church of the Poor is unlike anything I have every participated in on a regular basis before. It has been a boon to my spirituality in this extremely difficult and often scary time. To gather with people who are not only committed to their faith but are actively linking across the many barriers and boundaries the religion of empire sets for us is a powerful thing to participate in.

This is a response from reader Mike Huber (Quaker from Portland) based on last week’s guest article from Gwen Gosney Erickson called, “A Multitude of Legacies,” which was a part of the series on Quaker Values: Part 1: The Problem of Quaker Values & Part 2: To move Beyond Quaker Values

“Thanks for another engaging newsletter and interesting query. In the way you’ve asked the question "is it this or that,” you’ve created a dividing line that doesn’t really reflect my experience. I suspect you asked the question that way to motivate people to think about their priorities they hold around “values.” Fair enough.

The tweet at the end of your newsletter is astounding (“Life is antifragile information that travels through time using the fragility matter as it’s vehicle.”). I think that same framing is helpful for thinking about “values.” Values are orientations to reality that travel through time using the fragility of human communities as their vehicle. While 21st Century Quakers in North Carolina may have inherited the value of “Simplicity” from 17th Century Quakers in Lancashire, that value will be embodied differently. Some clever scholar might even say the value is “remixed” over time, the way an older song is incorporated into a new performance.

The religious technology of queries helps encourage this transformation. Not only is telling everyone to dress in gray “a right poor gospel,” it promotes a hollow, lifeless conformity, in which the “faithful” purchase clothes, “Of the best sort, but plain.” Asking someone, “How do you embody the value of simplicity?” encourages variety and change, while keeping “simplicity” as a way of orienting ourselves to reality.

Is this religious technology uniquely Quaker? Are Quakers reliably using this technology? Of course, this fragile human community is no less fallible than any other. Naming our failures may be important – both in calling us back to faithfulness and as a first step in making amends to those we’ve harmed. However, I don’t think it’s very interesting to create a litany of failure as an end in itself. Like wearing gray, this seems to me “a right poor gospel.”

Anyone who wants to preserve Quaker values like a fly in amber is probably an aspiring Bond villain: “You’re too late, Mr. Bond. Now I will use my petrified values as cudgel to inflict harm on society! Mwahaha!” It’s a fun image; but like most supervillains, it’s probably a caricature rather than a real portrait.

Something in me comes alive when I hear how Quakers were mindful in orienting themselves toward their reality in particular ways. I think about John Woolman opening the door of his house to find a troop of soldiers ready to commandeer his property for the night; after making them wait on the threshold while he prayed for guidance, Woolman let them stay as guests but refused to accept the payment that would make him feel complicit in the military activity. It’s not likely I will ever find myself imitating these outward actions, but I feel inspired to orient myself to reality in a way that draws some core insight from Woolman’s discernment.“

-Mike Huber

The Nurselog is my “digital garden,” a kind of personal wiki with notes and ideas of things that I am working on and/or find interesting.

This week’s note is: Reading the Bible With the Poor

Join us as we officially launch the Freedom Church of the Poor this Sunday at 6pm, live on Facebook.com.

You support this newsletter by reading it, sharing it with friends, and/or by contributing financially to the making of this newsletter, and my other ministries.

Thank you! -Wess 💚☕️