Note: The community is not quite ready for launch. A few more steps need to be taken and this website needs some TLC from a volunteer elder webmaster. Photos and a few other touches are missing. See contact info. We’re running and praying as fast as we can!
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We are caretakers of God’s Garden and one of its defenders in the Nation’s Capital. Our beautiful planet home is under great threat from the collapsing climate because of the actions of inept, compromised politicians, oil-soaked corporations, and the willingness of vast numbers of citizens to be led by them. A great, primarily secular, effort is being made to counter their greed, ignorance, and shortsightedness with social activism, and yet, the climate continues to deteriorate. Hope for a safe, habitable planet for our children is fading fast. We have to ask, why are God’s people so silent? Faith communities often speak with depth and eloquence about God and our garden home but when its very existence is in question - silence!
Communities of faith far outnumber nations. The Pew Research Center tells us in 2010 there were 2.2 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims, 1 billion Hindus, nearly 500 million Buddhists, 14 million Jews, and some 450 million folks who practice other religions. Are you counting? Nearly 6 billion of the world’s 8 billion people are practicing religion.
Clearly, faith communities have the numbers and the connections with their members to wake up the earth’s people and confront the politicians and corporations who have placed us in so much jeopardy.
Great spiritual leaders have led these religious bodies, leaders like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Gandhi, King, Dalai Lama, and Pope Francis. If the 6 billion and their leaders would embrace and apply the love and justice of their faiths to God’s Garden, they could confront the powers that have put us in such great peril and assure the healing of the climate and the rescue of the planet.
I am a follower of the radical, political Jesus who said, "Follow me,” and taught us how to cast our truth and light on the dark powers with nonviolence, justice, and love. Our Followers Community follows Jesus and great prophets from other spiritual traditions.
We are an interfaith community of Followers
embarked on the rescue of our planet home.
We practice unorganized religion
in the National Capital area,
where we pray, picket, and act
on behalf of our Sister, Mother Earth.
- Unorganized religion. “The most significant religious events recounted in the Bible do not occur in ‘temples made with hands.’ The most important religion in that book is unorganized and is sometimes profoundly disruptive of organization. From Abraham to Jesus, the most important people are not priests but shepherds, soldiers, property owners, workers, housewives, queens and kings, manservants and maidservants, fishermen, prisoners, whores, even bureaucrats. The great visionary encounters did not take place in temples but in sheep pastures, in the desert, in the wilderness, on mountains, on the shores of rivers and the sea, in the middle of the sea, in prisons…. Religion, according to this view, is less to be celebrated in rituals than practiced in the world.” Wendell Berry
This is an invitation to the leaders and members of all faith communities in the National Capital area to join us for an hour or two each week in our interfaith effort to reform or expel the world’s #1 source of fossil fuel funding from our community. We have the opportunity and capacity to send a powerful message to Chase Bank and all of the world’s polluting and abusing banks and corporations: clean up your act or leave town!
Our Mother Earth “groans in travail"
In his encyclical, Laudato Sí, On Care For Our Common Home, Pope Francis provides context for the struggle of all humanity to respect and protect our Sister, Mother Earth, and to prevent the collapse of our climate. He writes:
“Praise be to you, my Lord” In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs
This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air, and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters."
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Do these words point a way for you to join others in focusing your spiritual concerns and energy on healing the climate and rescuing Mother Earth? If so, please consider walking with us a few hours each week or joining our community. Followers Community is guided in our journey by the inspiring model of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC, and two of its pastors, Gordon and Mary Cosby. Since its founding in 1948, this ecumenical faith community has been a healing presence in the Nation's Capital. Its emphasis on following the radical Jesus, on the spiritual journey, on activism, and on Kingdom over culture, has inspired faithful from all over the world. The church's spirituality, mission groups, disciplines, simple forms of prayer and worship, focus on the poor, and inspiring history, provide us with bright beacons to guide our interfaith community on our quest to be followers, not just members.
And there are many other beacons:
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. Martin Luther King Jr.
When I feed children, they call me a saint. When I ask, why are children hungry, they call me a communist. Dom Helder Cámara
Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. Cornel West
The capitalism of our time does not understand the value of the labor union, because it has forgotten the social nature of the economy, of the company. This is one of the greatest sins. Market economy: no. We say social market economy, as Saint John Paul ll taught us. Pope Francis
To clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world. Karl Barth
So, brothers and sisters,
shall we clasp our hands in prayer
... and begin the uprising?