Power to the People: Tools to get out the CrossLeft Voice

I love Stu's idea of a special CrossLeft section to promote the "balanced voice," or even the true voice of the Christian call for the values of the Kingdom of Heaven -- where Christians like you can find easy ways to share your own version of how a Christian reacts to current events, in light of each political moment. The Progressive Christian voice is valuable not only for shouting down the heresies of Pat Robertson and the offensive gesture of the Bush Fish, but also for holding up the sacred value of individuals and communities against the daily political onslaught of the politics of consumerism, selfishness, and torture.

A vision is coming to mind: Maybe the best way would be to dedicate part of the forums section to "CrossLeft Active Lobbies," where subject by subject we have all the current action alerts, letters to send one's congressman, calls for action, calls for volunteers, subjects upon which progressive clergy are writing letters to the editor.

We get hundreds of visitors a day at this site, many of them dedicated clergy who are writing letters to the editor and sermons and emails to friends, or reading other blogs and forums and articles online, of which they could cut and paste a few paragraphs, from which others could share their idea.

Ideally, the active use of such a forum would automatically generate a repository of theological perspectives, political points, personal stories, and punchy quotations, from which any journalist, essayist, political speech writer, sermon writer, or lobbyist could instantly pull a great deal of their material.

It seems clear to me how valuable such a forum could be for anyone who wanted to take action -- go to the Crossleft forums, and *poof*! a hundred letters to send your Congressmen, a hundred talking points for your sermons, a hundred subjects for a letter to the editor, abundant information on which journalists are currently writing about the political/religious perspective on the environment/racism/gay issues and how to contact them.

Seems like there are two parts of this that need to be organized:

1. We need a single individual, who is called towards political work for Christ, to spearhead such a project. The individual would start by accumulating information for the forums:
   • listing the major topics that we're interested in lobbying about as a community
   • posting the calls to action and letters to send congressmen from all the denominational news services
   • posting links or good slices of articles from the news pages relevant to each topic
   • linking the forum to each of the topics from our "motivation" pages (see the left-hand sidebar), where blog posts are stored for the following topics: peace, poverty, racism, social justice, the environment
   • talking to our contacts at the Religion News Service to find out who the journalists are who are currently writing about a given set of issues
2. Let's get our readers actively involved. We have a strange sort of bulletin board here at CrossLeft in that we have hundreds of readers every day, but only a small core of folks who blog, post to forums, and comment. I'm consistently touched, when reading the self-descriptions of new subscribers at CrossLeft, by their geographical and denominational diversity and the powerful terms in which they describe their faith. But I want to know what we could do here at the site to enlist their energy and feeling to the kind of purposeful information-building strategy Stu is talking about here.
   Readers, any ideas? Would you, as politically aware individuals and clergy, find such a forum valuable for your personal lobbying efforts? Would you be willing to show off your own information, thoughts, letters, sermons, conversations?