Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ypat20 Journal of Pastoral Theology ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypat20 Building Our Power to Care for the World: Integrating Pastoral Theology, Mental Health, and Community Organizing Nicholas A. Grier To cite this article: Nicholas A. Grier (2020): Building Our Power to Care for the World: Integrating Pastoral Theology, Mental Health, and Community Organizing, Journal of Pastoral Theology, DOI: 10.1080/10649867.2020.1827765 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10649867.2020.1827765 Published online: 23 Nov 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 9 View related articles View Crossmark data
Building Our Power to Care for the World: Integrating Pastoral Theology, Mental Health, and Community Organizing Nicholas A. Grier Practical Theology, Spiritual Care, and Counseling, Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, CA, USA ABSTRACT This article presents a roadmap for pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, mental health professionals, and the community-atlarge to integrate community organizing with the resources of pastoral theology, spiritual care, and mental health to creatively and constructively transform the world. It argues that such an integration presents life-giving opportunities for justice and healing-oriented social revolution. To accomplish these ends, pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals must take seriously community organizing’s goal of organizing people and organizing money to care for the world. KEYWORDS Community organizing; mental health; spiritual care; pastoral theology; practical theology; counseling The Power of Community The scene is set. Members of the community have traveled from their respective communities and gathered for conversation. Some are sitting, others standing, and still others are checking in for the start of the Coloring Mental Health Collective (CMHC) conference. They are a community representing health care organizations, faith communities, counseling centers, community centers, high schools, colleges, seminaries, graduate schools, and other organizations. They are mental health professionals, clergy, nurses, high school and college students, seminarians, graduate students, faculty members, socialjustice activists, community organizers, musicians, and artists. The conference starts with music as Andre Dennis serenades the gathered community with his creative musical flow. Music captures their souls as some sway in their seats to the rhythm of the music. I make a note to myself that music is powerful and is creatively fueling the beginning of our time together. There seems to be tremendous energy, passion, and anticipation in the room as Black, Brown, Asian, Asian American and White people gather to discuss the mental and spiritual health of Black and Brown people. Accepted as our authentic selves, the community gathers to the rhythm of love and passion fueled by our collective pursuits of justice, healing, and liberation. From the judgement of my naked eye, the youngest community member seems to be about fifteen-years-old and the oldest perhaps in their seventies. We are stronger because of our intergenerational mix. The presence of youth seems to fuel our time together. In this moment, I remember Leah Gunning Francis’ plea that we should build relationships with young © Society for Pastoral Theology 2020 CONTACT Nicholas A. Grier [email protected] 97209, Portland, USA JOURNAL OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY https://doi.org/10.1080/10649867.2020.1827765
people in our social-justice movements.1 The gathered community is now ready to begin our two-day journey together as we recognize the power of community. This article considers the possibilities of integrating pastoral theology, mental health, and community organizing while reflecting on a session I facilitated at the 2018 Chicago Coloring Mental Health Collective conference at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, IL. It argues that there are new opportunities for the survival and flourishing of Black and Brown communities when we integrate explicitly theories and practices of pastoral theology, mental health, and community organizing. I remember conversations with James N. Poling during my graduate school years at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and hearing him declare that evil is the abuse of power. Power within itself is not bad. However, the abuse of power is harmful. When pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals don’t integrate critical reflection on the need to build power in community, particularly for the most vulnerable, marginalized, and oppressed among us, we miss opportunities for our justice and healing-oriented work to gain traction on the ground in the communities where people live. Saul Alinsky points out that ‘[p]ower is the very essence, the dynamo of life.’ 2 Our pursuits of justice and healing are void without integrating the work of building power to get things done in the world. Alinsky quotes Pascal who declares that ‘Justice without power is impotent; power without justice is tyranny.’ 3 Alinsky also references St. Ignatius, who declared: ‘To do a thing well a man needs power and competence.’ 4 Scholars in pastoral theology and in the mental health professions are competent at caring deeply for people’s lives. However, what is missing, in most cases, is the process of helping students and therapists-in-training learn the skills necessary to build power with the community to lead liberating and therapeutic change in the world. Alinsky states, ‘It is impossible to conceive of a world devoid of power; the only choice of concepts is between organized and unorganized power.’ 5 The question, then, becomes: Are we (teachers, leaders, and therapists) taking seriously the task of organizing power so that we can cultivate justice and healing-oriented change in the world? Or are we doing our work just hoping that someone will come along to do the work of organizing power so that our work will gain traction on the ground? Reflecting further on power, Alinsky states, ‘Power must be understood for what it is, for the part it plays in every area of our life . . . To know power and not fear it is essential to its constructive use and control. In short, life without power is death; a world without power would be a ghostly wasteland, a dead planet!’ 6Mike Miller puts it succinctly in stating that power is ‘the ability to act effectively in the world.’ 7 Kristina Smock quoted a power-based community organizer who stated: ‘If you don’t have power you cannot create change. It’s not that the system isn’t working, it’s that the system is predicated on power.’ 8 This article invites pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals to see the role that power (or the lack of it) plays in the lives of those we are called to care and serve. Without power, the possibilities for life-giving systemic, cultural, and institutional transformation are limited. With power, we can lead revolutionary change toward a more just and healed world. A Need to Build Power Why bother integrating community organizing’s emphasis on building power with theories and practices of pastoral theology and mental health? For one, people are too often 2 N. A. GRIER
isolated and disconnected from loving community. Further, even those who are connected to community might not be connected with life-giving communities committed to healing and social-justice transformation. There is, therefore, a need for pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals to do the work of organizing people and organizing money to confront and dismantle unjust systems of power. Just as important, pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals should engage in community-organizing work to acknowledge and fortify existing lifegiving and just systems of power, and engage in the work of continuously imagining and re-imagining new ones that can cultivate the survival, healing, liberation, and flourishing of the most vulnerable and marginalized. Miller points out that ‘in historically powerless, or relatively powerless communities[,] there is little experience with large, complex, organizations that confront institutional power.’ 9 In this sense, pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals can do the work of equipping individuals, families, and communities with resources to organize themselves to confront and dismantle oppressive institutions, systems, and cultures. This type of integrated work by pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, mental health professionals, and community organizers has yet to be tapped into fully and is ripe with opportunities for nurturing justice and healing-oriented revolution. To make clear my deeply held-sentiments: We can no longer afford to write, teach, and develop theories of care and counseling, and practice counseling, without giving significant attention to the process of building power in communities that have been denied systemic, cultural, and institutional power. Seeing the World as It Is To transform the world, we must first see it as it is. This is a principal embraced by community organizers.10 Alinsky points out that the basic requirement for the understanding of the politics of change is to recognize the world as it is. We must work with it on its terms if we are to change it to the kind of world we would like it to be. We must first see the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.11 This means that pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals must be in the trenches talking with people in our communities and feeling life as they feel it. Seeing the world as it is means that we must see and understand the ways that the systemically and institutionally marginalized, vulnerable, and powerless experience life. We must prioritize developing and participating in strategies that help those without systemic and institutional power to reflect critically, constructively, and creatively on their lives and build their power in the context of life-giving community. I saw a glimpse of the world as it is at the 2018 Coloring Mental Health Collective Chicago conference. The name of my session at the 2018 Chicago Coloring Mental Health Collective conference was ‘Building Our Power to Care for the World.’ I intended for this session to be more of a didactic and dialogical experience. However, as the session proceeded, it quickly became apparent that participants wanted to share passionately about their life experiences. My presentation started with me asking the group, ‘Is the mental health of Black and Brown people important to you? If so, Why?’ After more than one person passionately took extended amounts of time sharing their experiences, JOURNAL OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY 3
I decided that, perhaps, a better use of our time together would be to make space for our collective stories to emerge more fully in the room. It was clear that the gathered community wanted to tell their stories. After all, the theme of the 2018 conference was ‘Telling Our Untold and Unacknowledged Stories: Reflections from Black and Brown Bodies.’ I decided to hold space for people in the room to share their stories instead of silencing and ignoring their stories. Participants in the room shared passionately and thoughtfully in response to the question, ‘Is the mental health of Black and Brown people important to you? If so, why?’ A number of themes emerged from their responses, including systemic oppression, trauma, the mental health of youth, the stigma of talking about mental health in Black and Brown communities, sexism, the connection between mental health and physical health, the lack of teaching about social and emotional intelligence in schools, sexism in the Black church, and the importance of recognizing and honoring Black female beauty. While my initial plan was to present the material that is offered in the subsequent pages of this article, I could not find it in me to move on from the passionate discussion that took place in the room because there was collective energy pointing us to the reality that they needed space to process their life experiences and express themselves in the context of our gathered community. A next step would be to help this community identify and choose ‘first issues’ that it wants to work on, which are immediate, specific, and winnable. At the moment, Coloring Mental Health Collective is in the process of helping this community identify and choose ‘first issues.’ Once these first issues are chosen, we will engage the community in the work of organizing people and money to lead lifegiving change focused on the ‘first issues.’ Creating the World as It Should Be: The Promise of Integrating Pastoral Theology, Mental Health, and Community Organizing Seeing and engaging the world as it is, it is important for pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals to engage in the work of creating the world as it should be. While the previous section reflected on responses from Coloring Mental Health Collective conference participants, this section engages in reflection on the possibilities for transformation that is possible by integrating pastoral theology, mental health, and community organizing. Using an integrated approach that links pastoral theology, mental health, and community organizing provides significant opportunities for social transformation. The ultimate goal of our work as pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals should be to transform the world so that the work of justice and healing can occur, especially for the most vulnerable and marginalized. Yet, we must also wrestle with the question: ‘What transforms the world?’ This is the primary question that captivates my attention and drives the passion for this article. It is my conviction that power, tools for social analysis, and commitments to justice and healing lead to lifegiving social revolution. For life-giving social revolution is to occur, we must commit urgently to the process of helping marginalized and vulnerable communities – and those committed to justice and healing – build their power in the world so that our theories and practices of care and justice will have traction in communities throughout the world. Pastoral theologians, 4 N. A. GRIER
spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals can creatively and constructively participate in and lead social revolution if we dedicate significant energy to building power in the community. Building power in the community takes strategy, time, energy, and focus. Yet, when we ignore the process of building power, our work remains on the margins of society. Remaining on the margins of society is particularly detrimental when we realize that communities can benefit from the contributions of pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals. While the world may not be fully aware of all that pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals have to offer, we have a responsibility to listen deeply to the experiences of people in the community and to act in concert with them to lead positive change. In this sense, community organizing and its process of building power must be considered as a central focus and critically important as part of our work. I want to take a moment to explain what I see as the incredible contributions of pastoral theology, mental health, and community organizing for our collective work of cultivating justice and healing throughout the United States and larger world. Pastoral theology, as the theory of spiritual care and counseling, helps us reflect deeply on people’s experiences in the world with the goal of caring for souls – it helps us care for the deepest parts of a person’s and a community’s lived experiences. By reflecting deeply on theological, psychological, and cultural dimensions of life, pastoral theologians help us reflect deeply on human experience and offer proposed new practices for the transformation of the world. Pastoral theology helps us reflect on systems and cultures and cultivate spaces for people to reflect deeply on meaning and purpose and the ways that communities make meaning of their lives. To this point, I remember my experiences studying at the Northwestern University Family Institute to fulfill an academic requirement for my clinical license. While my other classes at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and the Center for Religion and Psychotherapy of Chicago seamlessly integrated reflection on psychological and spiritual experience, I noticed that classes I took at the Northwestern University Family Institute had a different tone. In the clinical classes I took at Northwestern, I noticed that my colleagues (who were studying to be marriage and family therapists and professional counselors) were skilled at understanding the psychological functions of a client’s experience. However, they did not seem to be as skilled in helping clients reflect on their questions of meaning and purpose. It was quite a fascinating observation. My colleagues were bright and amazing! Yet, I noticed that those of us who were studying as therapists and theologians seemed to be more comfortable and better equipped to reflect on clients’ questions about meaning and purpose. This experience points to a significant contribution of pastoral theology – it provides resources for individuals, families, and communities to reflect deeply, creatively, and constructively on experience and on the meaning and purpose they make of their lives while engaging in thoughtful and sophisticated analysis of culture and the social environment. This combination of reflecting deeply on meaning, purpose, and social analysis to care for souls offers significant opportunities for social transformation. How, then, does mental health strengthen our ability to cultivate life-giving transformation? There are at least four contributions that mental health offers to pursuits of justice and healing-oriented social revolution: (1) Caring about the activity that occurs in people’s minds; (2) Cultivating healthy ways of processing life experiences; (3) Making life-giving JOURNAL OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY 5
decisions that best positions people to survive and thrive; and (4) Improving the ways that people relate to ourselves and one another. Through devoted attention to the psychological functions of our minds, and the ways that they influence how we relate to each other, mental health professionals are well-positioned to cultivate life-giving transformation in communities. This includes embodying an empathic stance and curiosity that considers the emotional and psychological state of another person’s and another community’s worlds. Such a curiosity requires empathy and compassion – empathy enables us to feel life as another person feels it and compassion enables us to act in such a way that demonstrates we care. Mental health care also helps people process their life experiences in a healthy way. Because of the terror and trauma chronically enacted upon Black and Brown people, it takes skilled mental health professionals, clergy, and other leaders to be aware of the stressors that Black and Brown people face to help them constructively process their life experiences. One of the pieces I appreciate from the thought of Lee Butler, Jr. is his focus on the importance of acknowledging rage and creativity.12 For Butler, rage and creativity are two sides of the same coin – yet one’s rage must not remain in a state of rage. It must be cultivated so that it is used creatively to nurture liberation and healing in communities, families, and individuals. Having reflected on the contributions of pastoral theology and mental health to social transformation, it is critically important to understand the role of community organizing in our collective pursuits to lead justice and healing-oriented revolution. According to principles of community organizing, organized people plus organized money equals power. Pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals must focus on the work of building power so that communities that have historically and currently live without systemic, cultural, and institutional power can become powerful communities that lead life-giving social revolution in the world. This means doing the work of participating in and organizing communities.When the community is gathered, it can organize people and money to lead winnable change in society. When the community is gathered, it has unique opportunities to use its collective voice, influence, and skill to demand a better future. Community organizing must occur to lead change in the world. This happens by people coming together to organize themselves for the purposes of making a difference in communities. Theory without connection to organized people and organized money has no power and cannot gain traction on the ground. It will remain on library shelves and in the hallways of academia. However, when our most progressive and liberating thoughts are connected with organized people and organized money, we have the potential to lead life-giving revolutionary change for communities and groups of people that continue to be disenfranchised and marginalized. Such change happens when we take seriously the task of building powerful organizations. Miller states, Stripped to the essentials, the job of the community organizer is to help the people build a powerful organization rooted in the values of the democratic tradition and the moral, social, and economic justice teachings of the world’s great religious traditions.13 He further notes that in community organizing network workshops, participants learned ‘that building an organization was more important than any particular issue. In fact, they came to realize that this organization-building was the key to an effective struggle for justice, whatever the issue might be.’ 14 Focus on organization-building for the purpose of transforming the world shifts models of pastoral theology, spiritual 6 N. A. GRIER
care, and mental health to consider more explicitly tactics of community organizing so that theory will gain traction in communities. Pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals are equipped and positioned uniquely to integrate community organizing with our work. Miller states, The organizer’s tools are listening, challenging, thinking through, and training. Through a careful listening process the organizer learns the hopes, pains, dreams and frustrations of local leaders. Organizers use what they hear to challenge leaders to act. It is this mix of listening and challenging that gives the organizer her reputation as an ‘outside agitator.’ 15 Spiritual caregivers and mental health professionals are trained to listen deeply to the experiences of individuals, families, and communities and to challenge pathology when it arises. Another aspect of organizing is teaching, which scholars and practitioners in the fields of pastoral theology, spiritual care, and mental health are equipped and positioned uniquely to do. Miller states, Any good community organization is a school without walls. It engages people in civic life and teaches the skills to negotiate with power. However, engagement alone is not sufficient for people to place their own circumstances in an historical, sociological, political or economic context. Connecting the particular local experience to the broader issues of American democracy requires patience, insight and skill, particularly with leaders who may have high school or less formal education. And the more formally educated may have to unlearn what textbooks taught them. The experiential lessons of organizing, central as they may be, don’t inherently lead to understanding larger social structures, their role in perpetuating social problems, or the need to change them.16 Miller also quotes IAF organizer Richard Harmon who writes, Organizing is teaching . . . Obviously, not academic-type teaching, which is confined for the most part to stuffing data into people’s ears. Organizing is teaching which rests on people’s life experiences, drawing them out, developing trust, going into action, disrupting old perceptions of reality, developing group solidarity, watching the growth of confidence to continue to act, then sharing in the emotional foundation for continual questioning of the thencurrent status quo . . .17 Pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals are trained and well-equipped to listen deeply to the stories of people’s lives, develop trust, reflect and disrupt pathological perceptions of reality, question the status quo, and share in the emotional experiences of individuals, families, and communities. This positions us for promising community-organizing work. I hope it is clear now how well and uniquely positioned pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals are for engaging in community organizing and integrating community-organizing approaches into our writing, teaching, and advocacy. Now that we have explored the promise of this type of integrated work, I will say a few words about the power-based model of community organizing. A Power-Based Model of Community Organizing Reflection on a power-based model of community organizing might aid our attempts to integrate pastoral theology, mental health, and community organizing. Kristina Smock JOURNAL OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY 7
categorized five types of community organizing: (1) Power-based; (2) Community-building; (3) Civic; (4) Women-centered; and (5) Transformative.18 While all types have potential for pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals to transform society, this article focuses on the Alinsky power-based model of organizing, while maintaining a commitment to acknowledging intersectionality, particularly as it relates to maintaining commitments to liberation from the oppressive forces of racism, sexism, classism, heteronormativity and all other forms of oppression. To begin, it is helpful to grapple more deeply with reflections on the inescapable role of power in our lives. In a 2018 community organizing training in Chicago, Gerald Taylor outlined three aspects of a power framework: (1) We need power to be recognized; (2) Once we are recognized, we must argue our case at the decision-making table; and (3) There must be accountability in the public realm. Embracing this power framework means that we take seriously strategy and power to transform the world. Smock notes, ‘At the core of the power-based philosophy of organizing is the belief that urban problems stem from residents’ lack of power within the public sphere.’ 19 The free-society organizer ‘has one conviction – a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions.’ 20 Community organizers must organize people and money without having an agenda of the specific issues that they will address with the community so that community members, particularly the most vulnerable and marginalized, have power to act freely as they choose on their own terms. To this point, Smock states that community organizations ‘don’t start with a predetermined set of issues, but instead take their goals from the residents themselves. And they strive to engage residents and community members as leaders in achieving these goals.’ 21 A part of ensuring that community members can achieve their goals includes helping them build and use their collective power. Alinsky’s aim . . . is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it . . . the failure to use power for a more equitable distribution of the means of life for all people signals the end of the revolution and the start of the counterrevolution.22 I am advocating for pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals to help vulnerable and marginalized communities build their power so that justice and healing-oriented social revolution can occur. Much of what we are talking about here is about building social capital. Pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals must participate in the world in such a way that helps historically, systemically, culturally, and materially powerless communities build social capital to lead justice and healing-oriented social revolution. To make this happen, it is important ‘to develop the capacity of individual residents to engage in public action.’ 23 Our communities are better positioned to lead justice and healing-oriented social revolution when they are organized and develop continually their capacity to engage in public action. Proposed New Practices As the work of Coloring Mental Health Collective continues to evolve,24 I raise four proposed new practices for scholars, academic institutions, practitioners, and counseling centers, which draw from my reflections on the promise of integrating pastoral theology, 8 N. A. GRIER
mental health, and community organizing: (1) Scholars in pastoral theology and the mental health fields should integrate community organizing in their writings. This is an intentional attempt to think deeply about ways that pastoral theologians can care for people’s mental and spiritual health by reflecting on and developing theory that will help the oppressed organize themselves – taking seriously the practical tools necessary for organizing people and organizing money – for their own survival, healing, liberation, and flourishing; (2) Seminaries, theological schools, and other graduate programs should create programs and degrees that integrate theological education with mental health and community-organizing training. Community organizing is often a missing piece for seminarians and graduate school students once they graduate from their academic programs. It is helpful for students to learn theories and practices in their particular fields. However, if students are not equipped with tools to help communities organize themselves for positive change, the resources that students gain from their seminary and graduate school programs miss opportunities to interact with the public. When seminaries, theological schools, and other graduate programs don’t integrate community organizing into their curriculum, they, ultimately, miss opportunities for their work to be used optimally for the good of society; (3) Spiritual caregivers and mental health practitioners should participate in community organizing. It is one thing to theorize about community-organizing work; it is another to participate in it. Spiritual caregivers and mental health professionals can learn significantly by engaging with the community in community-organizing work. Similarly, spiritual caregivers and mental health professionals have much to contribute to the work of community organizing; and (4) Counseling centers should invest in community-organizing work. When counseling centers engage in the work of community organizing, they have a better grasp of the larger issues facing society. Additionally, when counseling centers invest in the work of community organizing, they are equipped uniquely to focus the scope of their clinical practice and training on caring deeply for the larger systemic, cultural, and institutional issues, which necessarily affect the lives of their clients. Such engagement also helps counseling centers shape their clinical supervision around issues in the community that are affecting clients. Implied in all four of the above recommendations is that individuals, families, and communities must be supported to reflect critically, creatively, and continuously on their life experiences, the nuances of oppression, and the role that systemic, cultural, and institutional power play in their lives. From such reflection, communities, particularly the most vulnerable and marginalized, can be supported to build their power to affect positive change so that justice and healing will occur in communities throughout the world. Let renewed commitments to justice and healing-oriented social revolution commence. Notes 1. Francis, Ferguson and Faith, 162. 2. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 51. 3. Ibid., 52. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 52–3. 7. Miller, Community Organizing, 3. 8. Smock, Democracy in Action, 14. JOURNAL OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY 9
9. Miller, Community Organizing, 4. 10. Qualitative research, such as ethnography or phenomenology, also requires the researcher to see the world as it is. Yet, for the purposes of this article, I focus on the work and literature of community organizing as a way to help scholars and practitioners think about strategies for helping marginalized and vulnerable communities build their power to nurture justice and healing-oriented social revolution. 11. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 12. 12. Butler, Jr., Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls. 13. Miller, Community Organizing, 3. 14. Ibid., 5. 15. Ibid., 5–6. 16. Ibid., 39. 17. Ibid., 40. 18. Smock, Democracy in Action, 13. 19. Ibid., 14. 20. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 11. 21. Smock, Democracy in Action, 12. 22. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 10. 23. Smock, Democracy in Action, 65. 24. It is important to acknowledge the work of other pastoral theologians engaged in the work of community organizing. In addition to Coloring Mental Health Collective, Fearless Dialogues, an organization founded by artist and pastoral theologian Gregory C. Ellison II, facilitates grassroots conversations with unlikely partners so that community members are seen, heard, and supported to participate in meaningful and positive change. Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Notes on contributor Nicholas A. Grier, Ph.D., L.P.C. is an Assistant Professor of Practical Theology, Spiritual Care, and Counseling at Claremont School of Theology (Claremont, CA and Salem, OR). He is also a counselor at The Bishop Wellness Center at Willamette University and founder of Coloring Mental Health Collective, a community-focused organization that advocates and organizes for the mental health of Black and Brown people. Bibliography Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. Butler, Jr. Lee H. Liberating Our Dignity, Saving Our Souls: A New Theory of African, American Identify Formation. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006. Francis, Leah Gunning. Fergusson and Faith: Sparking Leadership and Awakening Community. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2015. Lartey, Emmaneul L. Pastoral Theology in an Intercultural World. Werrington: Epworth Press, 2006. Miller, Mike. Community Organizing: A Brief Introduction. Milwaukee: Euclid Avenue Press, 2012. Poling, James. Deliver Us From Evil: Resisting Racial and Gender Oppression. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. Smock, Kristina. Democracy in Action: Community Organizing and Urban Change. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 10 N. A. GRIER