The Relational Meeting as a Political and Religious Practice

Broad-based community organizing (BBCO) is about organizing the relationships and values of working people for greater democratic power in their communities. The best organizers that I've known and witnessed ground their power building in their own and their fellow leaders' sacred values. It is the relational meeting—and specifically when organizers seek to agitate others—where a tension between values and power building can erupt, and where the practice can be melded to ends of domination over others. The relational meeting and agitation need to be grounded in sacred values or else the practice becomes deformed and myopic. Couched in a democratic culture and grounded in sacred values, the practice of the relational meeting can be seen as a Christian practice wherein individual Christians narrate their own experience of suffering and loss together with others as they organize for greater democratic power.