Doing Justly: an ongoing project of Tennessee Alliance for Progress
The mission of Doing Justly is to create space to nurture social transformation in Tennessee by bringing together people of faith and others who feel that moral values need to play a vital role in the public arena. Doing Justly fosters beloved and compassionate communities that embrace hope, meaning and purpose by cultivating peace, equality, social and economic justice, caring relationships, and respect for creation.
TAP started a four-week discussion called Doing Justly: Integrating Our Deepest Spiritual Beliefs Into Our Professional and Public Lives in October 2006. The meetings, which attracted 250 people from diverse faith and non-faith backgrounds, were based around two books: Michael Lerner’s The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right and Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.
Doing Justly now is an ongoing project of TAP that has three components:
Public Issue Forums on topics like faith and immigration, health care and the wealth gap.
Community-Based Small Groups that come together to offer support and do educational outreach.
The Faith Communities Outreach Program, an initiative to educate, organize, and mobilize members of religious congregations and faith-based university campuses for active progressive social justice and peace work consistent with their stated faith convictions, commitments, and values.
Harmon Wray, a tireless activist for criminal justice reform, wrote up this vision statement for the Faith Communities Outreach Program before his sudden death in July 2007. Here are Harmon’s words:
We propose to begin this effort by inviting select lay and clergy leaders or students and faculty known to the Doing Justly leadership to partner with us in strategizing how to do this in their own congregations or campuses. We envision ourselves as partners and resource persons for these indigenous congregational leaders in this effort.
This city, often called “the Buckle of the Bible Belt”, also calls itself “the Athens of the South” and is the capital city of Tennessee, historically a border state and recently a “red” state politically. Nashville, however, is politically a “blue” city. Nashville is densely churched and is dominated by conservative white and black evangelical Protestant churches, with smaller moderate Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and other religious communities. A number of evangelical or fundamentalist congregations -- black, white, or interracial -- are nondenominational. Most congregations are racially and ethnically segregated, but in recent years this has begun to change. Several Christian denominations have central, national headquarters type agencies located in Nashville -- e.g., The Southern Baptist Convention, The United Methodist Church, The National Baptist Convention of America, and The African Methodist Episcopal Church. Faith-based institutions of higher education include Trevecca Nazarene College, Belmont University (historically Southern Baptist), Lipscomb University (Churches of Christ), American Baptist College (National Baptist), Aquinas College (Catholic), and Vanderbilt University Divinity School (nondenominational).
Our committee begins this initiative with a painful realization: that in the most important social/political/moral crises or opportunities during the last several years, the overwhelmingly majority of Nashville’s (and Tennessee’s) numerous and influential faith communities have failed to take a strong stand for the principles and the communities which most of them claim to believe are central to God’s will and God’s concern. A partial list of these issues would include Tennessee’s return to executions in 2000 after a 40-year moratorium; a failed opportunity for progressive tax reform in this state with the most regressive tax system in the nation; the state’s dropping of health insurance for 170,000 mostly poor and very sick people; and -- presently -- a xenophobic and punitive movement against immigrants. In Tennessee’s state capital, these issues carry local, statewide, and national dimensions. In every case, those who have suffered the most have been the poor, the sick, the stranger, and persons of color, while those who have profited have been primarily the white, the wealthy, the healthy, and the established.
Doing Justly leaders are personally acquainted with individual clergy and lay folk in many local congregations who share Doing Justly’s commitment to living out these classic religious values on earth and in history as well as in the life to come. We propose to identify these persons, contact them individually, bring them together in small groups, and conduct listening sessions with them about their congregations and their dreams and frustrations within them. Offering our committee members as partners and as resource persons, we hope that a number of them will choose to work with us strategically to find ways to do together a kind of spiritual and moral formation in their congregations, an alternative version of theological, ethical, and even political education for some of their members. This work will likely be done in a way tailored to particular congregations within particular faith traditions, using resources and language somewhat distinctive to those individual groups, but some of it might also be done in ways that bring together individuals and small groups representing diverse faith or denominational groups. Our committee is informed by models of various sorts of lay and adult educational, training, and organizing methodologies and has ties with institutions which can be drawn on in this effort -- e.g., Highlander Folk School, the Scarritt Bennett Center, the Christian base communities in Latin America, and Sojourners community.
The basic approach for doing the kind of spiritual and moral formation and re education within congregations will be along the lines of the following model:
Expose congregational members to issues, to those most affected by current policies, and to secular or faith-based organizations working for policy change.
Encourage ongoing relationships between congregational folk and affected persons and organizations.
Work with affected persons and advocacy organizations to train congregational folk in advocacy for persons and for just policies on issues.
Move toward a model of congregational folk becoming allies in struggle with those affected persons with whom they are in relationship and with the advocacy organizations.
Infuse the process at every step with study of scripture, worship, and discussion opportunities for mutual sharing, support, and accountability -- for both educational and community-building purposes.
Doing Justly is now moving forward with the Faith Communities Outreach Project and is in the process of launching several pilot projects in select churches. Doing Justly continues to hold public forums on a bi-monthly basis on the pressing issues of our day.
(Doing Justly has been changing, and will continue to change. But its goals are still pretty close to the goals it started with. Those are outlined in the original advertisement, below.)
Rev. Judi Hoffman of Edgehill United Methodist Church,
Rev. Victor Singletary of Capitol Hill Baptist Church,
Charles Strobel of Campus for Human Development, and
Rev. James Lawson, Civil Rights Pioneer.
Who Should Attend? -- Anyone who
Is concerned about the spiritual and moral crisis facing our country
Wants to get beyond traditional right/left political dichotomies
Yearns for a major change in the direction in American society
Wants to get together with like-minded people to create a new vision for our state and our country
Believes that spiritual commitment requires political action
Believes the personal is political and the political is personal
The discussion will be in four sessions.
Meeting 1 (The Temple, 5015 Harding Road). From Prophets to Principles: Is There A Progressive Spiritual Politics and What Does It Look Like? The phrase “God’s Politics,” made famous by Jim Wallis, an internationally acclaimed author, evangelical theologian, and founder of Sojourners, a nationwide network of progressive Christians working for justice and peace, refers to the call for justice and compassion central to the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and Mohammed. In this meeting we will look at some of the teachings of these teachers, and use them as catalysts for discussing how to articulate a spiritual base for our progressive ideas that is more than a mere pasting of the word “God” on current policies. Using Jim’s book God’s Politics as our resource, our goal is to begin to articulate a set of principles to which we can refer over and again in judging the quality of our ideas and the power of our message.
Meetings 2 (Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church, 2708 Jefferson Street) and 3 (this is the new location!Parker Hall, in Belmont United Methodist Church, 2007 Acklen Ave). From Principles to Policies. Building on the work of the prior week, we shift our focus from principles to policies: implementing our spiritual principles in specific areas of concern: family, healthcare, the economy, the environment, criminal justice system, etc. Our guide for these two meetings will be Rabbi Michael Lerner’s book The Left Hand of God in which he sets forth The Spiritual Agenda for American Politics: A New Bottom Line. Our goal is not to agree with or argue against Lerner’s Agenda, but to use it as a model for articulating our own agenda for local and state politics.
Meeting 4 (Vine Street Christian Church, 4101 Harding Pike). From Policies to Politics: Enacting Our Agenda. Our seventh and eighth hours of discussion focus on action. We have our principles; we have allowed them to shape our policy choices — now what? Our goal in this final session is two-fold. First, we hope to translate some of our ideas into actionable and practical behaviors. We want to leave this meeting with a clear idea of what we can do as individuals and as a community to bring a progressive spirituality to bear on local and statewide political concerns. Second, we expect that the need for a more formal alliance of spiritually progressive persons is going to be pressing, and that we will find a way to continue our discussions and take coordinated and collective action on some of the things that concern us most.