Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

This list includes resources to help your small group engage in meaningful conversations about congregational organizing and community building. Whether your community has a deep history of organizing or you're just beginning to explore this work, these books can guide your discernment. Each one invites reflection on how the Holy Spirit might be calling your congregation to live out your faith and values in the public square.

Building Up a New World: Congregational Organizing for Transformative Impact edited by Anne Dunlap and Vahisha Hasan

• The church is an organizing body. No matter how big or small the membership roll, no matter a rural or urban location, churches around the world and across generations organize people. But how to organize—effectively and justly for the transformation of the world—remains a frequently asked question. Building Up a New World, equipped with stories, practical wisdom, and diverse perspectives, can help your congregation discern just how to organize for, and alongside, marginalized groups and work toward the liberation and flourishing of all people.

Faith-Rooted Organizing: Mobilizing the Church in Service to the World by Rev. Alexia Salvatierra and Peter Heltzel

• What are we, as people of faith, to do in the face of injustice in our world? What if Christians were to shape their organizing around our faith in the Risen Christ?
• Alexia Salvatierra explores a model of social action 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.

Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resilience of Marginalized Christian Communities by Alexia Salvatierra and Brandon Wrencher

• "They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds." In this book, Alexia Salvatierra and Brandon Wrencher explore two grassroots faith movements whose witness has been overlooked in the histories of the institutional church and secular justice movements: church communities in the Global South of the late twentieth century and the hush harbors of the US antebellum South. Buried Seeds demonstrates how these two overlooked ministry models offer proven wisdom and strategies for the twenty-first-century church and contemporary social movements.

Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba

• What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.
• Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.