Faith-Rooted Organizing: Mobilizing the Church in Service to the World

With so many injustices, small and great, across the world and right at our doorstep, what are people of faith to do? Since the 1930s, organizing movements for social justice in the U.S. have largely been built on assumptions that are secular origin―such as reliance on self-interest and having a common enemy as a motivator for change. But what if Christians were to shape their organizing around the implications of the truth that God is real and Jesus is risen?Alexia Salvatierra has developed a model of social action that is rooted in the values and convictions born of faith. Together with theologian Peter Heltzel, this model of "faith-rooted organizing" offers a path to meaningful social change that takes seriously the command to love God and to love our neighbor as ourself.

Alexia Salvatierra is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. For over eleven years she was the executive director of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE). She teaches and trains people throughout the United States in the principles and methods of faith-rooted organizing.

Peter Goodwin Heltzel is associate professor of systematic theology and director of the Micah Institute at New York Theological Seminary. He serves as assistant pastor of evangelism at Park Avenue Christian Church in New York City,and is the author of Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race and American Politics and Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation.