Good morning, it’s great to be here with you all! I am so glad your church is a part of Faith Action Network. Thanks for inviting me to speak today.

I thought I’d begin with sharing a little bit about myself and what brings me here today. My name is Brianna Dilts, I’m a regional organizer for the Eastern Washington area with Faith Action Network (FAN). We are a multi-faith network of over 165 faith communities across Washington state — including the Spokane Friends Meeting — together we advocate for a more just, sustainable, and compassionate world. We do so through state legislative advocacy, which fun fact the legislative session begins tomorrow, and this year is a short session, meaning it is only 60 days long. We have a lot to accomplish in this short time. Each year FAN adopts a legislative agenda with key advocacy areas a few which are affordable housing, healthcare, criminal justice, environmental justice, immigrant and refugee rights, and economic justice.

This will be my first legislative session with FAN, and I am excited to advocate alongside leaders of faith and conscience from across the state. I want to underscore the importance of bringing together diverse voices of faith to tell our elected officials what we care about. We all share similar values such as peace, justice, and compassion and often times faith communities are on the front lines doing work like providing shelter for families experiencing homelessness, serving meals to folks experiencing food insecurity, and many other forms of direct service. Connecting our values to the work we do and emphasizing that we want to see policies that align with our values can be moving for officials, especially when we are able to use our institutional power to say that we have a block of people that are behind us demanding the same things.

So now that you have all that information on who I am and what brings me to this work I want to share a bit about what I find most powerful and fulfilling about advocacy and organizing, and that is the power of relationships.

I attended a service here last month and at that point I was still pondering about what I wanted to talk about and something in the message struck me and inspired me to talk about relationships. The speakertalked about helping the poor and sick, specifically inviting others to the table, and it struck me that we can’t do that without building relationships with others. Charity is a staple of most religious institutions—helping the poor, the sick, and the hungry. But I would argue that there is a distinction between helping and inviting to the table.

It’s one thing to give someone food and it’s another to invite someone to dine with you at your own table.

There is a story I read, from a larger book called Going Public, where a Baltimore pastor at a church that distributed free lunches to folks in need decided to sit down and talk with one of the clients each day. He asked a man, after some initial conversation, why he didn’t have a job. And the man replied that he did indeed have a job but didn’t make enough money to eat. Very soon after he started doing this his assumptions were challenged, and his perceptions changed. The author writes “The people on the line ceased being clients of the congregation’s soup kitchen. They became names, histories, faiths, tragedies—full and complex human beings, with sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful, and sometimes frustrating stories.”

Truly, it’s building relationships that allows us to go from seeing someone as “the other” to seeing them as people, as someone whom we care about the well-being of. For people of faith, I think that a large part of that is seeing each other as children of God, though that alone does not develop a relationship, it may make us more willing to develop relationships and it is a framework that allows us to see the dignity and worth of all people. It pushes us, perhaps out of our comfort zone, to ensure that all people are treated with dignity and justice.

I think of quote that is attributed to Dr. Lila Watson, an aboriginal activist and scholar from Australia. Though the quote originated out of a collective conversation between aboriginal activists in the 1970s. Watson says:

‘If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together’.

Unless we have relationships or are ready to step into authentic relationships with others, especially with others who might be different than us, it’s hard to see our liberation as bound up together.

This distinction of “our liberation being bound up together” is so crucial because if our liberation is bound up together, I’m going to work hard and continue to work hard to ensure that you are liberated because my liberation is also at stake. Whereas, if I’m helping you and I don’t really see our liberation as being bound up together, I might be an ally but I’m not an accomplice, so to speak, which limits how far I’m willing to step up and stand up for you.

Now let’s take a step back for a second and talk about what relationships can do in terms of promoting the common good. In community organizing, we talk a lot about relational power. Power sometimes gets a bad rap, but power isn’t alone a bad thing—it’s actually pretty neutral. It is, however, how you exercise power that moves it along the axis. In the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) style of organizing there are two concepts pretty central to this relational power:

Power Over vs. Power With vs. Power for AND
The world as it is vs. the world as it should be

“The world as it is” is run by power. The “world as it should be is run by love” Love and power are actually very intertwined. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said:

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

Power WITH is what we strive for. It’s dignifying, it is not dominant and it builds relationships. Central to this power is love. Love is what makes us act, love is what pushes us to build relationships and to advocate for our fellow human beings when we witness injustice.

Romans 12 verses 10,13, 16 speak of Love in Action: “Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.” “Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality” “Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.”

As we approach Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday next week it dawned on me that King’s “Beloved Community” is related to many of these topics: of relationships, of liberation bound up together, of mutuality and of course, of love. Romans 12 verses 10, 13, 16 speak of Love in Action:

“Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.” “Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality” “Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.”

The Beloved Community as a concept was first coined by philosopher and theologian Josiah Royce, a founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation which King later became a part of. In 1913 Royce wrote “My life means nothing, either theoretically or practically, unless I am a member of a community.” Dr. King then expanded on and popularized the Beloved Community even more so, rooting it in love and nonviolence.

The King Center describes it further:

“the core value of the quest for Dr. King’s Beloved Community was agape love. Dr. King distinguished between three kinds of love: eros, “a sort of aesthetic or romantic love”; philia, “affection between friends” and agape, which he described as “understanding, redeeming goodwill for all,” an “overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative”…”the love of God operating in the human heart.” He said that “Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people…It begins by loving others for their sakes” and “makes no distinction between a friend and enemy; it is directed toward both…Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community.”

The Beloved Community isn’t just a theoretical ideal or optimistic hope, it was a destination where King believed we could arrive. In a 1966, article in Christian Century Magazine, Dr. King affirmed the ultimate goal inherent in the quest for the Beloved Community: “I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end of that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community”

Each year, as we take to the streets and march and reflect on Dr. King’s dream and legacy, I always feel a bit somber. We have certainly seen much change and progress since the Civil Rights Movement was at its peak, but we still have so much more work to do. I often reflect on the almost 56 years since Dr. King’s assassination (of course I haven’t been alive for most of those years, but one can still reflect on our recent history) and I regretfully think of the many ways our society has strayed or moved backwards from approaching the Beloved Community. I titled this message “Building the Beloved Community” and it’s not because I have the roadmap on how to get to King’s Beloved Community or even have the fullest understanding of it—but I do know that a foundational component of Building the Beloved Community is relationships, and understanding the power of relationships to change the world into a better place.

I am currently reading The Purpose of Power: How we come together when we fall apart by Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m not terribly far into it, but I wanted to bring some of her perspective. Garza reflects on her experience as a Black woman in America growing up in the 1980s during the conservative consensus. After many Civil Rights and Black Power leaders had either been killed or surveilled, harassed, and labeled a communist by the Federal government—much like King was — stifling and leaving somewhat of a void in leadership of the movements that shaped the 1960s and 1970s. Fast forward to today, when we have suffered through a long and dis-unifying pandemic and each year our country seems to grow more and more polarized, sometimes it kind of does feel like things are falling apart. But Garza finds hope in her community and in organizing. In her book she defines organizing as

“the process of coming together with other people who share your concerns and values to work towards a change in some kind of policy.” That coming together, “building relationships with our neighbors and others to accomplish things in the world is embedded in all of our lives: it’s part of all the things we do every day to survive, to feed ourselves, to express ourselves, to restore ourselves… It’s connecting with a purpose” (p. 47)

For her, that purpose was to find others experiencing similar things, asking similar questions, people who saw the world as it is — but it didn’t stop there— people who could also envision the world as it should (and could) be.

As people of faith, for me as a Christian, for you all as Quakers, for people across our city who may be people of faith or conscience, I believe we all see the world as it should be—a world full of the Spirit, the Divine, full of God’s love—and we work to shape the world closer to that. As I was researching and writing this message, I learned that Dr. King and Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh were friends. Their shared values of nonviolence, love, and justice led them both to a friendship that crossed the globe and led each of them to stand in solidarity with each other’s struggles for justice as they both worked towards the Beloved Community.

FAN is full of thousands of people who look at the world and see it as it should be. I feel that one of the most important jobs we staff have to do at FAN is connecting all of these people who hold that vision. These interfaith relationships I believe are so vital to our message and in standing in true solidarity, a theme that we at FAN have been focusing a lot on in the last year or so. When the world is sending such divisive messages, especially when it comes to things like politics and religion, our unified public voice across a broad coalition of classes, races, and faiths calling for justice and love for our fellow humans, is very powerful. To quote our Executive Director, Elise, “I think amazing things happen when our love for a group of people moves us to take action for justice with them. When we so care for our neighbors’ wellbeing that we are moved to take risks for them, that is countercultural in this “me first” culture, and it is transformative.”

As I close, I want to come back to the quote from Lila Watson’s group: ‘If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together’. At the basis of King’s Beloved Community is the interrelatedness of human existence. The mutuality of this experience means that “In a real sense,” he wrote, “all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

My liberation is bound up with yours. I believe that King and Watson share the same message. This is evident in a note King wrote to Cesar Chavez, who was leading farmworkers that were largely undocumented, King said, “Our separate struggles are really one—a struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity.”

Relationships. They’re our power. Obviously, there is strength in numbers…but when those individuals in a larger group — even in just a small group of people (like this group here) — see their struggles as intertwined and are working together towards justice and liberation for each other. That’s love. And as Cornell West said, “justice is what love looks like in public.” Public relationships formed around love and justice, that’s powerful.

This message was given to Spokane Friends by Brianna Dilts, representing Faith Action Network, during Sunday worship service on January 7, 2024.