A reflection preached at the Service of Evening Prayer for the University of San Francisco’s Prophetic Communities Conference
Many signs and wonders were done among the people at the hands of the apostles. They were all together in Solomon’s portico. None of the others dared to join them, but the people esteemed them. Yet more than ever, believers in the Lord, great numbers of men and women, were added to them. Thus they even carried the sick out into the streets and laid them on cots and mats so that when Peter came by, at least his shadow might fall on one or another of them. A large number of people from the towns in the vicinity of Jerusalem also gathered, bringing the sick and those disturbed by unclean spirits, and they were all cured. (Acts 5:12–16)
In this scene from Acts, wedged between stories of escalating incarceration, the Apostles are working signs and wonders; they are standing together in that spirit we call solidarity. But no one dared to join them. The verse immediately following quickly advances the carceral drama: “Then the high priest rose up and all his companions, that is the party of the Sadducees, and, filled with jealousy, laid hands upon the apostles and put them in the public jail” (Acts 5:27).
Daring to go all in with this prophetic apostolic community means following the fullness of where the Spirit leads, even when it creates tension, leads to conviction and imprisonment, or a face-off with the powers of death. At the University of San Francisco, we often reflect on the witness of the Salvadoran Martyrs. It is right for us to hold them in esteem, even if we find ourselves feeling hesitant about daring to join them. We can still be in communion. Joining them is not a prerequisite for healing, belief is the only prerequisite for healing in this biblical story, where we are told they were all cured.
For Christians, the apostles are witness to the power of God moving in and through and around them. Apostolic power of this kind is to be shared. It requires relationality, mutuality, and reciprocity. Don’t try to hoard it or lock it down; it will surprise you. When onlookers pay close attention to witnesses of great apostolic power, we come to believe that the power of God might be in those bystanders too.
A great number are added to them. I imagine they begin to walk in the world a little bit like these apostles do—as dignified humans, sharing more generously, moving without fear in the face of the authorities, claiming another power than the ones that seem to rule this world through force and death-dealing tactics.
The apostles are far from lone operators. They aren’t hanging out solo—they are “all together at Solomon’s portico.” The Greek word here is distinctive and should grab our attention. It is a compound of two words meaning “to rush along” and “in unison.” Here is the mark of people who are moving in the world in a new way. Synodality is not just sitting on a bus with an anonymous crowd. No! It is relearning the art of moving in communion. Synodality is a walking together as a people rushing along in empowered unison.
This might be another way to write the job description of a faith-based organizer—and why the vocation of organizers is so vital for the mission of the Church today! So many forces, so many unclean spirits, keep us from our own agency, within the Church and in the world. How often has the Church seemed to be on the side of policing instead of unleashing? “Follow the rules, keep the practices, get to heaven, fall in line” seem to be the normative commands.
It is the grip of this authoritarian mindset Francis is trying to loosen, with its chokehold on the people of God and their experience of discipleship. Pope Francis is inviting us to take an apostolic leap, to be added to the number and become believers, so as to experience the healing. By way of being added to the number we become a people walking together, even rushing along in unison, propelled by the Spirit. We need organizers if these endeavors are to take root in practice rather than left to abstractions of theological discourse or narrow interpretations of gatekeepers.
The vocation of an organizer is about believing in people more than in programs, campaigns, problems, or issues. The great organizers love people enough to listen, to agitate, to ask better, harder questions. God gifts us this vision of humans living in solidarity to move us closer to God and one another. We can thus imagine ourselves as we might be, as we enter into a struggle to become people who act in public. Those who share in this wide world of organizing are wonder workers!
The Church needs the signs and wonders brought forth from the hands of those who live and develop this craft of rushing along in unison, becoming a people. Pope Francis accordingly insists that the synodal path is a way of conversion. So I ask: What do we need to turn away from, as organizers, in order that we might enact the path of synodal conversion? Might we have to shake loose some of the overstated claims of ego and the elevated machismo that marked earlier generations of organizing?
At this moment in our country’s history, we stand humbled, knowing our networks and projects aren’t outside of the world we try to transform. Can we confess at last, and even own, that organizing is fundamentally vulnerable work? For what does an organizer have but her word, and a flip chart, a listening heart and convictions that we might yet become a people, acting together with courage and curiosity?!
The root of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals isn’t a seven-point plan nor a brilliant campaign. It’s the ability to listen deeply, to relate fiercely, and to believe in people. This is what the political community in Acts is witnessing to, a community where the power of God is within, and moves through, and is meant to be shared. The apostles did not have a strategic plan.
They were miracle workers—and so are community organizers who see people for who they are and who they might be; organizers bring people back to their anger so they can get free from their shame I’m saying all this because I don’t know that we preach enough or theologize enough about the depths of spirituality that organizers live. The field of organizing shares a tension with the wider church, where the question of enough vocations is ever present: how to recruit, train, develop the next generation of organizers? Where will they come from? Who will “dare to join them?” How can we hand on this love and tradition—especially at times when we might wonder if it’s dying out, not meant to last another 50 years?
We have to reclaim the good news at the heart of the mission into which we are inviting people. I think I started organizing because I wanted to learn how to change the world. Yet I found that faith-based organizing offers something much more profound. You don’t stay an organizer to change the world. You stay an organizer to learn to live in it with dignity and righteousness.
You learn how to love and exercise power well. You learn that you never walk alone. No matter how lonely you feel, there’s a God at your side and there’s a communion of saints—believers, sinners to hold you. There’s a place you belong. I think a lot about how my life got saved through community organizing. I learned how to walk in the world—in my own, actual skin—because I was introduced to the reality of self-interest, the gift of relational meetings, the tool of power analysis, and the liturgy of public action.
And I met a Jesus along the way who wouldn’t let me wallow in my own shame, but demanded that I get up and walk, be fed, and then go out to feed my sheep. “What are you going to do about it,” Jesus said in the voice I once heard of the master trainer of organizers, Mary Gonzales. This is why we dare to join and dare to stay in a church that sometimes does not see or understand us. We can’t let anyone rob us of our role in God’s Gospel or take away our baptism.
Let nothing cut you off from that. There is too much at stake. God’s people are pressing in on all sides, praying, “How long, O Lord.” They are waiting for organizers to witness that another way is on offer, a way where connecting with our anger can be part of a journey to free us from shame, where our public pain becomes the force for societal change, where we learn the church is really just a place where we learn to walk together and lean on all the grace of those who have gone before us so that we might not leave anyone behind, but walk along in the rush of the spirit, in unison.
CASEY STANTON is the co-director of Discerning Deacons, a project serving the Church by engaging Catholics in the active discernment around women and the diaconate. She most recently served as Adult Faith Formation minister at Immaculate Conception Parish in Durham, North Carolina. She holds a BA from the University of Notre Dame and a Masters of Divinity from Duke Divinity School where she graduated with a certificate in prison studies. Stanton spent a decade working in the field of faith-based organizing where she witnessed the impact of
the Catholic Campaign for Human Development as a key anchor in efforts to promote the common good and seek justice for those on the margins. She is inspired by Pope Francis’s vision for a synodal church, and believes this synod is an invitation for each of us to recognize ourselves as pilgrims walking together in equal dignity, seeking communion.
