Community Organizing Training

Last week, I traveled to Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where the daily high temperatures were negative degrees. I went as one trainer on a team of three. My co-trainers were Rev. Sue Engh, former program director for Congregation-Based Community Organizing for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and Bishop Yehiel Curry of Metro Chicago Synod. We trained a group of 11 pastors and leaders in Northwest Minnesota Synod in community organizing.

Community organizing is a methodology for developing ordinary people into leaders who work together with others to create solutions to problems in their community that impact them most. This image shows the difference becoming organized can make.

If charity—like Zion’s food pantry—helps individual people and families endure the circumstances they’re in, organizing offers them an opportunity to change their circumstances and create justice for many more.

Take the housing justice work Zion supports. It’s an example of congregation-based community organizing. The Quad Cities Tenant Alliance (QCTA), which Beth Longlett gives leadership to, won its recent campaign for rent abatement. No longer do tenants have to pay rent when Davenport city inspectors judge their building to be unsafe.

This was a solution to part of the problem of housing injustice in our community. Previously Zion gave charity of $300 per tenant per month, often to some of our community’s least responsible landlords. Now Zion can celebrate investing that same money in holding those landlords accountable and saving tenants money that they should not have to spend.

After this rent abatement win, the QCTA’s work goes on, and in 2025, so does Zion’s commitment.

Leaders practicing the arts and disciplines of community organizing can strengthen their own congregations too. That’s what Zion has done through our listening campaigns. One-to-ones and listening are core tools of community organizing. Bishop Curry and I led those trainings in Minnesota. We at Zion can testify that congregations themselves benefit too: our relationships are stronger and we’re clearer about God’s calling to Zion here and now.

It takes guts to do community organizing. Even to be trained in community organizing. Training holds a mirror up to participants, to expose fears and inconsistencies that hold them back from being more powerful leaders.

I participated in a seven-day community organizing training  12 years ago. A trainer there told me, “You’re going to nice that church to death.” Meaning, playing it safe and being nice wasn’t going to help the congregation I was serving then to overcome the existential crisis it was in.

I’m grateful for that challenge, because these words have kept spurring me to lead more courageously, so that together we might meet our challenges with the power of faith and love.

I’m a better trainer now than I was before last week. I trained on topics I’d never trained on before. I also took risks to become a more courageous trainer. Everyone agreed, I was the toughest trainer and yet they never doubted that I was tough because I cared. Tough is not my natural mode, and nice often falls far short of real love.

So I return with new skills and new energy. I’m excited about sharing more of these tools with you, about training more at Zion and in our community, and about sending a group of Zion leaders to community organizing training this summer. It was continuing education time well-spent.

Thank you, and thanks be to God.

Pastor Clark Olson-Smith