For several years now, All Souls has been working to learn about the transformative justice approach to conflict, led by our Committee on Right Relations (CRR), outside consultants, staff, and a growing number of lay leaders. Rev. Bill Sinkford preached powerfully about transformative justice on Sunday, May 21 (you can watch it on Youtube here), offering some background on its history and how we’re approaching it at All Souls. 

At its core, according to this overview from Mia Mingus, “Transformative Justice (TJ) is a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse. At its most basic, it seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence.” As Rev. Bill preached, transformative justice affirms that we all need to develop our capacities to manage conflict: in ourselves, in our families, in our neighborhoods, and in our church. It invites us to move away from punishment as a focus for conflict resolution, replacing it with the goals of learning and right relationship. 

Based on working with us for more than a year, our three transformative justice consultants identified nine competency areas they thought could be particularly helpful for our engagement at All Souls:   

• Engaging with low-level conflict (rather than avoiding)
• Aligning with ethics and principles in conflict
• Finding your center when under stress (or triggered)
• Embodied communication
• Honestly expressing feelings and needs
• Listening and sharing with compassionate curiosity
• Receiving feedback
• Practicing boundaries
• Holding multiple truths

From January to March of this year, a group of congregants and staff met every two weeks in a Community of Practice to learn specific practices to cultivate these competencies, with the goal of disseminating many of these practices throughout the congregation. It is important to recognize that this work requires discipline over time, because we’re struggling to create a healthy conflict culture that is very different from the dominant culture. Stay tuned to this weekly bulletin and Sunday announcements for future workshops and learning opportunities–there will be many of them! In the meantime, there are helpful background resources on the church website to help continue our transformation.