Take One Faithful Step This Week Or, How to Keep Going in an Apocalypse
Rev. Kerri Parker, WCC Executive Director
We’ve written to you about being Chaplains to the Apocalypse and about confronting the “Big Ball of Yuck.” This week we’d like to introduce you to another idea that is keeping us going in these times. Some of you might be familiar with the idea of the next most faithful step.* In their book Another Way: Living & Leading Change on Purpose, Stephen Lewis, Matthew Wesley Williams, and Dori Grinenko Baker describe a process for enacting the next most faithful step.* Their process “Designing for Beloved Communities” has 5 steps, lightly adapted below:
Listen: Get in close proximity with the folks most directly affected.
Ideate: Imagine alternatives to status quo that help create a future you wish to inhabit.
Try something: Experiment by bringing your ideas to life, testing them in your context.
Reflect: Think and learned what happened...and what needs to happen...
Begin again.
Discernment is good and important. The reality, though, is sometimes our brains are captured by crisis and we have trouble getting to and through a multi-step process. I want to suggest an adaptation of this excellent tool for when we are overwhelmed by yuck/apocalypse, feeling stuck and even the idea of parsing next – most – faithful seems overly complicated.
take one faithful step
Take one faithful step. Just one step. It doesn’t have to be The Next Most Faithful Step (hear me say the Capital Letters). You may not have the resources on this day to determine through a careful process of discernment what is the most/best, and that is okay. The one faithful step that you can manage to take will be the best faithful step that was possible for you today. That one faithful step is more than nothing. It sets you in motion; and with you, more of us.
As we talk with leaders around Wisconsin, we hear reflected back at us the need for community care, gathering space, information sharing, network building, and resource mapping. We also hear the question: who’s going to do it? The answer is: we will. All of us. Together.
As the situation changes hourly, and the overwhelm stalks even the most resourced among us, I invite you to release the need for a long-term strategic discernment process, for perfection, for most or best. Embrace for now, for today. Council staff will begin periodically posting “What’s one faithful step you took recently?” and invite you to respond. This is a vehicle for hope and mutual accountability. It is a way for us to begin building the communities we wish to live in, with small, faithful steps regularly shared. It is a reminder that although some of this network-building work is geographically dispersed, none of us is alone. One faithful step.
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*Lewis, Stephen, Matthew Wesley Williams, and Dori Grinenko Baker. Another Way: Living and Leading Change on Purpose. St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2020, 51-165.
Image: Sometimes, when our staff gets overwhelmed, we hold a "whiteboard session" where we map out all the things we are thinking on our office whiteboard. This image is from a recent session where one of the outcomes was this column. Also included is a bit of art from a tiny office visitor (we love visitors - kids, dogs, and adults too).
