Clergy leaders and spiritual elders are the chief interpreters of the sacred traditions represented in Faith in Action’s organizing work. Through teaching, ritual, and public proclamation, they accompany our diverse communities of faith and spirituality in reflecting and acting upon our deepest commitments and convictions. Faith in Action’s National Clergy Organizing team directly supports the formation and development of these clergy and the organizers who work with them across our network. Together, in our religious, ethical, and spiritual traditions, we find the means and imperative to encounter, disrupt, re-imagine, and prophetically act out justice in the world today. The Prophetic Resistance Podcast guides much of this engagement. Our team works in partnership with Faith in Action’s national campaigns, including LIVE FREE and LA RED, to provide in-person and online trainings, facilitation, coaching, and consultation, all rooted in the movement toward liberative spiritual awakening. These trainings and resources are most directly engaged via your local Faith in Action federation.
Through the Prophetic Resistance Podcast, the Theology of Resistance Narrative Model, and many communities of Prophetic Resistance across the country, we investigate our religious and spiritual traditions of resistance, share the stories of our prophets, saints, and ancestors, cultivate theologies of liberation and resistance, and agitate each other into prophetic action.
Theology of Resistance Narrative Model
At the heart of the Prophetic Resistance Project is a dialogue about how our multiple faith practices inform our shared struggle toward Beloved Community and against injustice and dehumanization. This dialogue occurs by way of the Theology of Resistance narrative and praxis model, a multi-faith approach that propels deep reflection on religious and spiritual identity, convictions, and experiences into prophetic action.
The four key components of the Theology of Resistance model are: Encounter, Disruption, Reimagining and Action.
The model begins by asking us to identify an uncanny Encounter that breaks open a reality and demands that we see the world in a new way.
These encounters Disrupt our complacency in an unjust system and force a confrontation with our self-understanding and our God-understanding.
Disruptive encounters require that we Re-imagine our identity as moral agents in public life. For many of us, this has meant a deepened realization of the power of racism and white dominance in shaping the suffering that is at the center of so many issues we have organized around for decades. This reimagining involves not only the incorporation of a racial analysis in our work, but the commitment to racial justice as a key outcome in our campaigns and leadership formation.
Prophetic Action in public life adds moral and social power to our re-imagining. In teaching, training, preaching, public writing, and congregational organizing we proclaim a new vision for ourselves, our communities and our nation. We expose, in words and deeds, the destructive nature of Empire and declare our commitment to “fight for our freedom” from Empire, to resist it with every spiritual resource at our disposal (#empireORresistance).
This Theology of Resistance tool is used to spur theological and ethical reflection on realizing the Beloved Community and construct counter-narratives to “the Logic and Impulse of Empire” in our federations and national clergy caucuses. It also inspires the Prophetic Resistance Podcast.
