A threshold is not a simple boundary; 

It is … a real frontier that cannot be crossed without 

the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.

 This is one reason such vital crossings were often clothed in ritual. 

 John O’Donohue, To Bless The Space Between Us

If the poet philosopher John O’Donohue were still alive, maybe he would have written an updated version of his life-saving book To Bless the Space Between Us. Maybe that revised edition would include the blessing I was searching for last month. 

Four close friends and I—all of us middle-aged, cis-gender, straight, women—needed a ritual to bless our much younger friend, May, who would soon be on her way to Thailand for a series of gender affirmation surgeries. 

This was May’s threshold, but it was ours as well. 

A threshold is a place of letting go of an old identity and waiting on a new identity to emerge. It is a liminal moment when the sacred is being born in us, a time of unravelling and slowly reknitting back together.

We wanted May to feel our support as she crossed her threshold, following through on years of discerning this path. We wanted May and her partner, Ann, to know that a support squad of Aunties was walking beside them on what is often a lonely journey.  If their spirits waned as they crossed miles, time zones, quarantines, and language barriers, perhaps they would hear the echo of us cheering “we listen to your heart’s desire and we respond with love and joy!” 

My robust bookshelves and nook-and-cranny internet searches did not turn up such a blessing for this particular life threshold, so we patched one together ourselves, borrowing from some contemporary Jewish blessings and a few faith-based LGBTQ+ websites.

READ: Liturgy for Flag Removers

As we did so, I realized why thresholds need rituals. Over the course of three decades of friendship, this group of women circled up to bless pregnancies, celebrate births and weddings, and grieve the deaths of parents, a spouse, and a child. Standing with one another at the personal thresholds of life and death is something we know how to do deep in our bones. 

Standing in solidarity at a cultural threshold is not as familiar. As we gathered up our loving energy to strengthen May and Ann, we named out loud our hopes that the unjust treatment of trans people will end. We named the interconnected ways race, class, ethnicity, and immigrant status compound those injustices. We stood together in a liminal moment — touching the sacred born anew, as former beliefs about rigid gender binaries give way to rewoven understandings of God’s unfolding creation.  We affirmed the cultural journey we are on as a people of God creating a more loving and inclusive world.

Because our love is deeply rooted in having watched May grow up, this was more than just a performance for Pride Month. It was a micro-community of prayer and action taking one more step across a threshold of initiation into the slow and necessary work of creating a more hospitable world for all people. 

We spoke out loud words that remind us who we are and what we want to fight for, like these:

On this day, we commit and recommit to creating a world where all people of all genders know acceptance, love, equity, and justice. 

We commit and recommit to living with compassion, caring for all of humanity and the earth.

We commit and recommit to the healing work of critically evaluating the stories we inherited and revising the stories we live by, so that every person will know, no matter their gender or sexuality, that they are loved and valued.

Thresholds need rituals because rituals slow us down. They name a new or still-emerging reality. O’Donohue reminds us that a great complexity of emotions awakens at thresholds: confusion, fear, awe, grief, hope. It is good to take our time, to feel all the varieties of aliveness. At the threshold, we can focus our complete attention, listen inwardly until we hear more clearly the outward call.  

If you have created a ritual for social change or a blessing at a public threshold, please share it with the world. Let the people see micro-communities of prayer and action on the move, following the Spirit to a place of ever more radical love. As these threshold moments become visible, they are no longer rare or weird. They usher in a new normal. This is one way we change the world.

Bryan and I took a friend up on her offer, leading a study on conflict resolution at a white church during the weeks leading up to and through the presidential election.

The potential for conflict in our town of Lynchburg, Virginia is immense. Deeply seated racialized trauma lives side-by-side with vocal white Christian nationalism. The river that flows through our town once carried the raw materials of capitalism in the form of tobacco and cotton. Our quaint hillside cemetery holds the remains of Confederate soldiers alongside the enslaved people whose stolen labor grew those crops and formed the bricks of our trendy downtown lofts. The residue of these deep disparities lives on in our public schools, our police department, our jails, our segregated neighborhoods, and the armed militias of neighboring counties. 

These disparities were never far from our minds when Brian and I began gathering regularly at the sunny deck of the Depot Grille, shortly after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Baltimore. We sought each other back in those earlier days of racial unrest, wondering how we might build a relational infrastructure—one that could sustain us as agents of hope in the racial discontent that was then rumbling just under the surface of our daily lives.

We knew then that our humanity was tangled up together: Our ancestors, our histories, and our shared faith called us to pay attention to the possibility of friendship as a balm to the deep and tragic wound of enslavement and its ever-present aftermath. We started small, sharing meals, and listening deeply to one another’s griefs, fears, and loves. 

Over a few years, we discovered one another’s quirks and uncovered subtle ways we wander from the labels—progressive, liberal, evangelical, feminist—used to describe us. Defying unwritten rules, we learned to trust, question, disagree, and express gratitude for one another from our very different corners of Christianity. 

Thankfully, our friendship is neither unique nor unusual. Thankfully, people like us regularly cross racial and theological divides all the time to explore shared values and companionship, quietly out of the limelight. 

In addition to pleasure, these friendships have purpose: it is part of our vocations as Christians to lead lifestyles that transform conflict into energy for good. So, when a mutual friend asked Brian and me to help her address systemic racism at her mostly white, mostly upper middle class church, we didn’t say no. 

Why did this feel risky? Christians in this town can easily trace their generations back to slaveholders and enslaved people alike. Like most towns across the US, congregations here hold the pickup truck driving, flag-wielding members of the pre-election Sunday Trump Trains as well as the people of all races who show up at Black Lives Matters rallies. It felt risky because it is much easier to keep our noses to the grindstone, doing the work before us, instead of opening to the “work our souls must have,” an evocative phrase used by the late Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Canon to talk about the deep purpose to which God calls us. 

We titled the course “Together in Love: Christian Tools for Times Like These” because, sadly, we knew a course addressing systemic racism head-on would bring out only those already committed to working for racial justice. As it turned out, we attracted those already committed folks anyway: people in the fields of law, higher education, counseling and other helping professions. It turns out the already-committed were hungry to immerse themselves in a refresher course on why Christians should be at the forefront of peace and justice.

READ: Midwives of a New World

Over our weeks together, we focused on four disciplines my co-authors and I write about in the book Another Way: Living and Leading Change on Purposes * (co-authored by Stephen Lewis and Matthew Wesley Williams). The disciplines, summarized in the acronym C.A.R.E., directed us each week to: 

-Create hospitable space, where people slow down, listen generously to one another, withhold judgment and turn to wonder when perspectives clash. 

-Ask self-awakening questions, practicing the art of holy listening, without an agenda, as if we expect the Holy One to appear in the face of our neighbor.

-Reflect theologically and critically together, lifting up scripture we know by heart, and re-examining it in light of our current cultural context and systems of power and privilege. 

-Enact the next most faithful step, each week trying out one new practice of conflict resolution in our interactions with friends, families, neighbors with whom we hold differing values. 

Community grew. Each week, the space between us thickened. Tears flowed as people shared the interpersonal difficulties the heightened atmosphere of conflict was wreaking in our daily lives. In the midst of the social isolation of the pandemic, we welcomed the simple warmth of a circle of sharing as each Wednesday evening Zoom call rolled around.

When invited, the prayers, practices and scriptures that tacitly guide everyday actions around conflict resolution bubbled up. We pulled them out to examine them more closely.

Remember when the stones fell from everyone’s hands, as one simple question de-escalated a would-be execution? Remember when Jesus turned the tables in the temple to call attention to injustice? Remember the central claim to love one’s neighbor, repeated over and over in multiple iterations throughout the Judeo-Christian sacred texts? Then there is the prayer on page 824 of the Book of Common prayer. The Beatitudes. The Breath Prayer. The list went on. 

Soon we could envision a toolbox, collaboratively filled with ancient practices that could be pulled out today, tomorrow and in the weeks ahead, as winners and losers meet over holiday tables and family Zoom calls. 

Reflecting theologically in community over four weeks provided the opportunity for us to update our spiritual values and tether them to action in the world. The pastors honed the habit of sharing the task of generating new theological commitments, decentralizing action from the congregation outward.

Our journey together ended with a question: What is the connection between the small acts of neighborly love that most Christians don’t think twice about in our everyday lives—stopping by the road to help a stranded traveler, stocking the local food pantry, helping an elderly neighbor take out her trash—and the larger, necessary acts of love that look like public policy?

How do we transfer Christianity’s toolbox for conflict resolution from individuals to the collective, so that we begin to link the deep spiritual resources with those of other traditions to design a world in which no one gets left out? How does our faith help us imagine such a just and equitable world?

We ended with many questions, lingering uncertainties. But we had become clear about one thing:  a small cohort within one congregation is a good-enough starting place. A collective muscle for justice gains strength when we start small, learn to listen, and remember what we know about transforming conflict into energy for good. 

*Readers can learn more about the book here. 

Christian leaders are creating hybrid expressions of faith community in spaces that are both secular and sacred, holy and ordinary, church and marketplace these days. Innovators are working in the margins that emerge between two systems; spaces where life grows in the tension between safety and risk, comfort and creativity. Their stories inspire me.

Steven A. Chaparro is a trained architect and serves as design strategist at Visioneering Studios, Inc. But he grew up as a pastor’s kid and felt the tug of pastoral leadership, so he put his particular skills to work by re-imagining sites for ministry and engineering spaces designed to serve human flourishing. One such place is Moniker Warehouse, a co-working space in San Diego. He describes it as a “dream factory” where a church is one tenant among a lively mix of 20 artisan brands, creating jobs and becoming a community asset in one of the city’s most socially and economically underserved neighborhoods.

In Cincinnati, Rosa Lee Harden urges “emancipation from a predatory economy.” Harden had grown up in a small Mississippi town before the big-boxification of the U.S. economy. Back then, money stayed in the community, providing jobs, and supporting families in a way she describes as “neighborly.” A few years ago, she was instrumental in launching a real-time experiment in Cincinnati. Could a few people who were willing to work together to invest their dollars in neighborhood economies really make a change?

This Cincinnati experiment is growing and is one example of a movement to redefine economics from the bottom up; funding local ventures, supporting entrepreneurs, and encouraging shared learning. Initiatives such as Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) and The Parish Collective encourage planting small, place-based churches that celebrate and connect models that create beloved community. “We have what we need,” says Harden, “when we gather and put it out there.”

Marlon Hall would agree. He is an archeologist and self-described “curator of human potential.” Through his Houston-based nonprofit The Eat Gallery, Hall has helped seven budding entrepreneurs launch businesses that match health needs of underserved populations with artful food (including a nutritious green smoothie that went viral because it tasted like white chocolate).

“The food was good, but they were part of something bigger,” Hall says. Community developed; passions blossomed; people came alive to the “why” of their existence. He believes the best way to honor God is to fully develop one’s talents and skills and create opportunities for people to make meaning and money at the intersection of one’s passion. His philosophy of Christian social entrepreneurship is to go into our neighborhoods like anthropologists, with vitality that resembles the gospel.

“Eat the food. Dance the dances. Cut your hair. Become a participant observer in the culture,” he says, “Then learn what our cities and towns need and find ways to meet those context-specific needs.”

As for Alisha Lola Jones, she launched InSight Initiative, Inc, a startup that consults in the design of events that uplift people while also turning a profit. Jones is an ethnomusicologist whose academic work focuses on contemporary African-American male performances. With her sister, she created Genius for Men, a men’s empowerment conference that celebrates the stories of everyday black men who do extraordinary good in and around an underserved DC neighborhood.

Her advice to would-be entrepreneurs: “There’s going to be doubt. There’s going to be famine and fallow ground,” she says. “Those who made it big had blips along with the ascension. Risk should be part of the conversation.”

God’s spirit, set loose on the world, aches to create new life from the compost of our decaying institutions. We have what we need to create alternatives to systems that are snuffing out the life chances of the people we love and serve. And it’s these Christian social innovators and disruptors who are daring more of us to take next steps we might not have imagined before.