Jo's blog

Dear CrossLeft Community,

I am henceforward stepping down as Communication Director of CrossLeft.

Please feel free to contact me.

Best wishes,
Jo

(This essay was originally cross-posted on Solliciudo Rei Socialis as part of their guest blog program)
Witnessing in a crowd has a particular role to play. As when Jesus dispersed the five loaves and two fishes that fed the crowd of hundreds, sharing actually proliferates and foments grace among individuals until it affects the people around them. The miracle is that in sharing, good things actually multiply until they fill every hungry mouth.

If you believe an active group can accomplish more than individuals in isolation – that it can build up individual courage, and allow individual talents to shine – then you believe in aggregated witness.

I was Googling the words "fish emblem," hoping to find a nice seventeenth-century emblem of Jesus feeding the multitude with the five loaves and fishes for an illustration to an essay.

Google found me a few scholarly pictures of manuscripts amidst the multitude of chrome fishes for sale, to be affixed to the cars of well-meaning evangelicals across America.

And then I saw it.

THREE PLACES WHERE COOPERATION CAN HELP

1) GIRTH: no one umbrella organization exists as the obvious rallying point for all progressive Christians, and each organization, in each of its events, efforts, and campaigns can always benefit from the presence of more supporters.

2) SPECIALTY SUPPORT: each organization has certain weaknesses and strengths. The group without media expertise needs help in getting published. The established institution could benefit from advertising new voices. The small think tank needs congregations where it can send its publications.

Check it out! several folks have already responded to our call for Progressive Christians to help us to map the movement whenever they websurf by noting their finds on the easy-to-use http://del.icio.us site, using the tag "PROCHRIST" for the PROgressive CHRISTian movement.

The result, as you can see below, is a great example of the web doing what it does best -- bringing together different kinds of interest and expertise!

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Attention, all you people in your local churches, local reading groups, and medium-sized organizations!

The time has come for us to start working together. We all know it's true.

Yet while we're happy to fundraise and host conferences together, a lot of the lower-level information-sharing stuff is hard for us.

We have to have hour-long phone conversations to ask another church leader how to get into the media. We then have to call their contacts and chat. Appointments are made. A lot of coffee is spilt. A lot of friendships develop.

With leadership from every major Progressive Christian activist group represented, working groups divided to handle the brainstorming of issues, framing, and initiatives around poverty, civil rights/liberties, and war.

For three hours, these working groups of 6-12 reviewed the initiatives at play, the broader issues at stake, and the sphere of cultural activity -- from Sunday school to Fox news -- where an effective movement would have to play.

Hey ya'll! We spent a long night witnessing over beer last night at Beckett's in Berkeley. Writing you now from the nave of Holy Innocents, San Francisco, where the conversation continues!

Bob Edgar is one of our favorite people here at CrossLeft -- a lifelong advocate of civil liberties and international responsibility, a genius at getting real issues in the media.

Way to go NCC News for carrying the report in a timely and pointed fashion, and way to go, Bob Edgar, for drawing attention to the way Bush *avoided* talking about two of the greatest misfeatures of the union's current state: the poor response to Katrina, and the rise of poverty in America.