The Courage to Enter the Arena

Remarks to a high school church camp

This is a lightly edited version of a talk I gave to about 100 teenagers at a high school church camp last week. I’m not a preacher, I’m an organizer. But I tried to use this chance to share the connection between faith and organizing, and some basic tips on how to get started. Which I thought was worthwhile to post here. The scripture passage was Numbers 27: 1-11

Sunset at the vespers area of Camp Crystal. Frankfort, MI

First things first: I’m not a preacher. I’m not a pastor. I’m a community organizer. We can talk about what that means after this, but I’m also a Christian. In fact, I’m Catholic and I’m married to a protestant pastor. So I do talk about scripture quite a bit, and I take this stuff seriously.

What I like about the passage we just heard are a couple of things. First, the authority, the ability to set the rules for society, does not lie with Moses, despite the fact that he is the unquestioned leader. Despite that, he doesn’t decide what is write and wrong. Justice doesn’t come from him. It comes from God. God decides what’s right and wrong.

But God can’t create justice in the world alone. In this story, the daughters of Zelophehad facilitate the bringing about of God’s justice here on Earth, in their own community. And in their own lives. And not in some long distant future. It’s not something we’re hoping and praying for. It’s something that we’re creating, right now. Together with God.

My job, as a community organizer, is a lot like all of our jobs as Christians, as followers of Christ. And that is to work hand in hand with God to build the kingdom of God on Earth. Not in the future, not when we’re old and gray. Right here and right now.

But to do that we need power. We know God has power. And Moses had power, he was the leader of the people. But ordinary people, young people like you, regular everyday people like me? It’s rare that we have power. Often we are afraid to seek power. We are told that power corrupts, that we are not supposed to want power. That only bad people want to be powerful. But do you know who is telling us this? It’s people who already have power. And a lot of them are bad people!

Power is not a good thing or a bad thing. There is no moral value assigned to power in and of itself. Power is simply the ability to bring about what we want in the world. And what WE want is a world that reflects God’s teachings, Christ’s teachings, and God’s will. So our job is to build the power necessary to enact God’s will. And there’s some urgency. There’s some urgency attached to this because people are suffering. Right here and right now. Just a couple of miles from here I could take you to a place where there are hundreds of people living in tents and in their cars, hidden in the woods. I don’t suspect that the people living in the multi-million dollar homes right next door to us (this camp is on Crystal Lake in Frankfort, MI. Ground zero for gentriVacation) have any idea about them. I work with churches right here in Benzie county that serve hundreds of people at their food pantries every week. People that are going hungry. People that don’t have a roof over their head.

Raise your hand if you think everyone should have a roof over their head, a decent place to live. Raise your hand if you think that everyone should have enough to eat. Raise your hand if you think that everyone should be able to go to the doctor when they get hurt or get sick. Good! You all agree with the vast, vast majority of Americans. And yet! We live in a society where these things do not exist! Not everyone can go to the doctor when they need to, not everyone can afford a place to live. And many people are going hungry.

So why is that the case? Why does our society not reflect our values? It has to do with power. It has to do with something we call the arena, and who is in it.

We, as people of faith, as people that have these closely held values, have retreated from the arena. The arena is the place where the rules that govern our society are contested and decided. In the past, people of faith fought and won a lot of wonderful things in the arena. The leaders of the civil rights movement made it their business to be in the arena. But over several decades many of us have made a conscious or unconscious decision to step out of the arena. To retreat into a faith that has less and less to do with the world around us.

And so stepping back in to the arena will be a choice. It will be a choice that you will have to make. You will have to make a choice to build power. You will have to make a choice to create God’s kingdom on earth. This doesn’t just happen. At some point in your life, you will have to decide whether you want power or whether you want to be weak. Now I happen to believe that God does not want weak followers. God does not want followers who sit around and let things happen to them. God wants us, his followers, to have the power to do his will in the world.

But it’s not easy. Building power, building God’s kingdom on earth, is not easy. When I first became a community organizer I was working out of a Catholic church on the west side of Detroit. And we were trying to get the city to re-open the library branch that was right next to the church. Because kids would get out of school and they needed somewhere to go until their parents got off of work, or for whatever reason. They needed a safe place to be. So we needed this library. But the city was gonna close it down.

So we fought. We went down to their meetings in big church buses. We had a picket line on the street in front of the library. We got the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press to come out and write stories about it. And finally the library commission voted to re-open that library. A big win right? We were happy. And then, just a few months later the entire city of Detroit went bankrupt. And they shut down every single library branch in the city, except the big one downtown. So it’s hard. Sometimes you lose. But the lesson of that library fight, the lesson I learned with those people, was not that it was pointless. Not that we should just give up. The lesson was that we thought we had enough power to win but we didn’t. We needed more. We need to organize outside of our one little neighborhood in the city.

Right here in Benzie county I work with a group of churches. Some of them are mainline protestant, some of them are Catholic. Some of them are evangelical. Some of them are very liberal, some of them are very conservative. And many of them have a real mix of people, like I imagine we have here today. But their pastors, when I first started meeting with them, made a decision that they wanted to enter the arena. And the reason they made that decision is that they looked out into their pews on Sunday morning and they saw people that were hurting. People that didn’t have a place to live. People that were unable to go to the doctor. Many, many, people that were suffering from addiction, many of them. And they knew that we all had these problems in common. So we decided, together, to set aside some of the stuff we might have disagreed on. Stuff about theology or culture war stuff. And work together to improve our own local community.

And the way we did it is by training regular people, lay people, to go out and talk to their neighbors. Go out and listen to their neighbors and ask them “what are the issues you see affecting your community?”. And we did that for six months, we listened to hundreds and hundreds of people across this county. And the number one issue, we found, is housing. People simply cannot afford a place to live around here. So we decided to figure out what we could do about housing. We met with housing experts, we met with politicians, and we learned that the county government had millions of dollars from the federal government, that they were just sitting on. And they didn’t have any plans for what to do with it. So we said “why don’t you use that money to build affordable housing?”

Guess what? They didn’t just agree right away. We had to go to their county commission meeting and give them hell. And go to their coffee hours, and give them hell. And invite them to our churches and ask them what they were gonna do about housing in front of of a couple hundred people. Then come back to their next meeting and give them more hell. But eventually they voted yes. They agreed to pay to build that affordable housing and if you go into Frankfort now, right across from A&W, that’s the housing that got built.

So it’s difficult. But we can win. We can win real things, for real people, if we work together.

And here’s what I want to emphasize. Anyone can do this. I’m a professional community organizer. This is my job, and I’ve done it for many years at this point. But anyone can do it. Teenagers can do this. Ordinary people can do this. In fact we are called to do it, as people of Christ. We must do it. We must be partners in facilitating the building of God’s kingdom right here on earth. In building a world where people can live with the dignity and love they deserve, that comes from knowing that Christ resides in them. Because he resides in all of us. Every human.

Abandoned Church in Copemish, MI

Getting started is very simple. The first step is talking to people. And more importantly listening to people. And I want to emphasize this point more than anything. Talking to people that are different from you, listening to people that are different from you, is a countercultural and radical act in 2025 in America. Everyone tells you that if someone is different from you they are your enemy. You turn on the news and they tell you if you live in a big city, people in rural areas are your enemy. If you live out here they will tell you that people in Detroit are your enemy. That’s what we’re being told every day of our lives. But, if you read the Bible (and I did) the thing that Jesus does, more than anything else, is go talk with people that he’s told not to talk with! They tell Jesus “Don’t have dinner with that guy, he’s the wrong kind of guy”, and Jesus has dinner with the guy. “Don’t go in those people’s house, they’re the wrong type of people”. Jesus says “I’m gonna go in and talk with them”. Over and over again Jesus is doing this. So we have to be willing to talk with each other, even when its scary, even when there is risk involved. Especially when it’s scary and risky.

If you decide to do this, to step into the arena, to seek power, to talk with your neighbors even when it’s scary, you will need to have the three C’s that every organizer needs.

The first is commitment. We have to be committed to talking to each other even when we’re tired, even when we don’t want to, even when it’s scary. And then when you do talk with someone, you have to be committed to holding that conversation in a faithful way, to taking them, and their conversation, seriously. To taking them seriously as a person and a partner. To looking in their eyes. To caring about them as a human being, as a member of the body of Christ.

Second, you need curiosity. You are all very young! There’s a whole lot of the world you don’t know about. There’s a whole lot I don’t know about! And people are endlessly fascinating. Even people that you may think are boring, when you get them talking, they have incredible stories. We have to be curious about what makes people tick, about what gets them out of bed in the morning and what keeps them up at night. About what they care about. We must be genuinely curious. I think actually we are called by God to be genuinely curious about our neighbors and I think that’s a big part of what Jesus was doing in all those stories where he was talking to people he wasn’t supposed to.

And finally, you will need courage. The courage to say no, I will not be afraid of my neighbor, my fellow human, even when society and the world tells me to. The courage to seek out the people that are hidden, that are maybe at the edges of our society, maybe living in the woods or in a car and sit with them, break bread with them. The courage to see Christ in every single person. And to know that means something about how we should design our society. That if Jesus is in all of us, we shouldn’t let anyone sleep out in the woods in their car or on the ground. We shouldn’t let each other go hungry.

So you will need the courage to see everyone as Christ. To build a world that treats everyone like they have Christ within them. The courage to re-enter the arena, and build the kingdom on Earth. Hand in hand with our neighbors and hand in hand with God. Right here. And Right now.

Thanks.

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