Friends, on behalf of the Board of Directors, please respond to their Engagement Questionnaire ([link removed]) to help guide their decision making in this season of change and imagination. Your feedback and voice are needed! Please respond when you are able, before July 14th. It should take around 20 minutes to complete. Thank you in advance for your input as we decide what comes next.
Respond to the Engagement Questionnaire ([link removed])


** We need to put the solid into solidarity.
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Last month, the theologian Walter Brueggeman joined the great cloud of witnesses. His name only became familiar to me in passing within the past couple of years. I subscribed to Sojourners magazine in January to help my faith survive what I knew was coming, yet, the article that inspired this message was forwarded to me by my mother. She faithfully sends me a daily devotion and article, a continuation of her ministry of motherhood.

Adam Russell Taylor wrote that Brueggeman ([link removed]) taught him “what a deepened understanding of scripture reveals about God’s heart for justice and our ability to imagine a world beyond empire.” Brueggeman’s salient writing in The Prophetic Imagination named in 1978 that “the way of his [Jesus’] ultimate criticism [of empire/royal consciousness] is his decisive solidarity with marginal people, and the accompanying vulnerability required by that solidarity.”

Friends, I know a thing or two about how vulnerable it feels to put our voices and bodies forward into vocal and visible solidarity with all our LGBTQIA+ siblings. What I know to be true is that Jesus is the solid rock. When we build on that foundation, we put the solid into solidarity in our present world through his living body: you and I.

Despair surrounds us, I feel it, too. The justice we cry for seems out of reach now. Brueggeman called us all in, writing “we need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable, but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought…” In a recorded speech from 2018, his own prophetic voice foretold that “we are now arriving at a moment when there is no more middle ground… we either sign on uncritically… or we take on this task of dangerous oddness that exposes the contradictions and performs the alternatives.”

As a broke millennial artist, my creative philosophy has always included the belief that we should start where we are with what we already have. As you may have seen, my friend and neighbor Rev. Dr. Leah Ntuala is embodying that philosophy and performing the alternative. She pastors the First Presbyterian Church of Seneca Falls, NY, where the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced over 100 years ago. Like many of us, she’s been on the phone with her representatives, protesting, and writing letters, but has reached the point where she “can no longer continue with daily life as though everything is normal, because it is not.”

So, she is walking in faith from Seneca Falls to the ICE Detention Facility in Batavia, NY. ([link removed]) I caught up with her Sunday to give her some water on the first day of her 78 mile journey, and met and walked with her a while on Monday as she passed through Canandaigua. Her march is designed “to ensure that our living, breathing Constitution holds the line — to preserve democracy … and to affirm the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. I march to take back the title ‘Christian’ from Christian nationalists.”

Follow her at @leahntuala on Instagram to see her live updates. She has had company along the way, as anyone is welcome to join her. When I saw her yesterday morning, she had pilgrims who have walked the Camino heading uphill and onward with her, talking about their experiences walking by faith with her, a novice pilgrim. She is carrying her own camping backpack which has some supplies, but people along the road have been bringing her water, juice, and sustenance, as well as their prayers and hopes.

Everyone is invited to join her for a Peaceful Protest, July 2nd at 10 AM at the Batavia Detention Center (4250 Federal Drive, Batavia, NY). She’s invited members of the House Oversight Committee to meet her there as well– they’re back in their districts this week, so we’re hoping they’ll show up. We’re also hoping her clergy status can get her entry to visit detainees, and other friends and neighbors are working away to make that possible.

She’s a great neighbor and a true Christian taking immediate action from her own imagination, and I am praying for shade and safety, as she continues her walk today. She is taking matters into her own hands to do the right thing, and leveraging her privileges to change the narrative of what being an American Christian means. Please join us in praying and taking action for the people detained, their families, and all who are living in terror in this land of the free.

In one of the excerpts the Sojourners article included, Walter Brueggeman wrote that “the imagination must come before the implementation” of prophetic action. We are in that time of imagination now, and we need to hear from you-- see the Board of Directors' Engagement Questionnaire linked above, and please respond when you're able, before July 14th.

Whether it’s a burning bush or a hungry whale, scripture is full of examples of God putting the afraid but faithful to work. I hope that you will take some time to imagine a better way to live, with Room for All, and put your faith over your fear with me. Keep speaking out, and take action as opportunities arise. Let’s be dangerously odd together, in Jesus’ name.

Yours, truly,
Mitch Leet, Associate Director (he/him/his)

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