Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Call with Ben McBride.

Pastor Ben McBride is a national leader in police-community trust building, gun violence prevention, and training in equity, diversity and inclusion. In 2008, he relocated his family to an Oakland neighborhood called the “Kill Zone” to better understand and respond firsthand to the epidemic of gun violence. He helped re-launch Oakland’s Operation Ceasefire, a data-driven violence reduction strategy, which contributed heavily to a 50% reduction in homicides over five years. Ben’s work around police/community trust-building and gun violence prevention includes training more than 100 law enforcement departments & executives. He serves as the Co-Director of PICO California, a multi-racial inter-faith network that is the largest grassroots community organization in the state of California. Motivated by various prophetic traditions, PICO uses a relationship-based organizing model to build a Beloved Community/just society where everyone belongs.

Below are some of the nuggets from the call that stood out for me ...

• "There is a false choice that's being put in front of a lot of us -- that the only way to find safety, to find security, to thrive is to be segregated from people who are different from you. ... Our safety is actually found in our integration. It's found in our ability not to just see ourselves and the people like us, but to see those who oftentimes are most different from us.  And the process that we go through to be able to see their humanity, to see their divinity, actually begins to change us and helps us access new and deeper versions of ourselves."
• I grew up in a spiritual community with a very small circle of who belonged. This didn't come from a place of hatred, just of fear. As a youth pastor, I started to notice that the things we were doing inside the four walls of our buildings were not having an impact outside those walls. I was seeing homicides, and every day people dying at the hands of guns. And, in a way, the work I was doing inside was closing my eyes to what was going on outside.
• So I moved with my family into an area where the majority of gun violence was happening so we could close our proximity. I thought I was going in to change them, and I didn’t realize that the neighborhood I was coming in to was going to change me. To be in deep relationship with them, to hold their experience--that created in me a wider circle of concern and compassion.
• "I started off initially working for a non-profit organization. I stopped pastoring when I moved into the “kill zone” and I started working in a service related, non-profit  organization that was really about trying to get emergency resources to under-resourced families across our city--immigrant families, people who had been left behind by our society and economic system. And so, I was showing up with a lot of resources from this organization. But oftentimes, what I would find is that, I’d come into neighborhoods and I would assume that the people needed the resources because they were living in food deserts or because there was crime and gun violence that was happening and people would teach me that people needed much more, and sometimes they didn't even want my physical resources. They were looking for something very different. ... [T]he neighborhood didn't need someone to come down and save it. It wasn't necessarily the phone or the emergency resources I was bringing but it was the relationship. ... [I]t's like those kinds of stories and those kinds of patterns that changed me. It was about learning how to actually BE a different way, see people differently, and I'm continually going through the ongoing experiences of learning to follow people who have been tutors in our community."
• We need to move from the question of “What do we need to do,” to rather, “Who do we need to become?” One of the invitations is to unlock a deeper way of being human. "Yes, we need to pass laws to make society more just. Yes, we need to have resources flow a lot more so that people have what they need, but I also think what I'm continually learning is there's another resource we need, which is about unlocking our ability to see each other. And that opens up a whole treasure chest of things that also serve us well."
• "I think that we have to begin to move ourselves out of our comfort zones and begin to have the kinds of encounters that are necessary to disrupt us and create the space for reimagination. ... We don't learn how to tie our shoes in extreme ways. We learn through practice. We learn through simplicity. We learn one step at a time and so I think when we are trying to build our capacity to see each other differently, it's thinking about, so what are the small kinds of encounters that I can adopt as a practice. ... Instead of me trying to go and take over and accomplish everything that I want to accomplish in that space, I simply go. I participate. I close up my proximity a little bit more and I'm paying more attention with myself around…'Where am I disrupted in this encounter? Where am I questioning why things are running a certain way? Or, where am I looking for the ways that I might be judgmental or less curious in the space where I am?'"
• After we have those practices, then we can broaden. We’re not going to bring our way into other people’s circles, but we are going in to change ourselves. We have to spend a lot of time sitting with the practice of others who are different than us.
• "The more that we're able to move from difference as deficient to just difference as difference, then it will really help us get that wider circle of deeper appreciation, wider circle of humanity. And I really believe that when we have that, we'll also be more faithful to the earth, to the planet, to the cosmos, and all that is around us."
• "this is not the call for all of us, but some of us are going to have to actually help people who have landed in a very dangerous place or relationship to our other sisters, brothers and relatives on the planet. We're going to have to go back and help them do some of the work to heal where they got broken much earlier in their story that has landed them in a very toxic and destructive place. Now, that's not the call for everyone, but it is the call for some of us."
• "When we move out of the beauty, sometimes, of our tribal identities, and we move more to a different position of being who we are that's closer to people across differences, it can make people in our tribal spaces feel suspicious of us. It can feel like we're becoming too soft or that we're doing harm to the community."
• I really feel the call for us right now is to be relatives for each other. I don’t need allies right now. I want siblings. When something is happening to my brother or sister, I show up. I show up because they ARE me.
• The solution for us to get peace doesn’t lie with the people in power. It actually lies within us to constantly negotiate the peace with each other. Big conflicts are held up by powerful people who are maintaining the status quo and we can think strategically of nonviolent ways to get them out.
• We need to breathe in our courage oxygen mask and breathe in a lot more courage than sometimes we might have, because some of the proximity that we need to close is going to require some risk. I think that us getting close to pain and injustice, and where deep “othering” is happening is going to require us to engage in some risky situations.  "To me, it's not always that we will be able to de-center power by getting close, but we will be able to inspire ourselves and inspire others to take more risky steps when we get close to pain. Then we get to model and show others that it's ok to get a little bit closer, that it's ok to challenge the status quo."
• Individual spiritual practice is key and also it’s not enough. Being in community with those with similar passions is what really gives me life. I need to be inspired. I need to see examples of hope. I try to really look for it with intention. I try to create mechanisms to hear others’ stories. We do “belonging” circles and engage in conversation about bridging and holding space together.
• It was actually my deep love for the people that I got in relationship with that brought out the boldness. It was falling in love with the young brothers who were involved in violence that actually brought out for me the willingness to engage in doing night walks. ... It's that love of the people that -- then when violence would happen, would bring up for me that “this is my sibling. I've got to show up for them,” or when I would see the police doing something wrong, because I was becoming so in love with the people that I'd say "this is not right."  And in the same way that I would stand up for my sister, my biological sister, then I would stand up for not biological sisters, but my human sisters. So I think at the root of boldness, of the boldness that we need, it actually can't be political analysis.  I think that what has to be at the root of the boldness we need has to be deep love. So if someone was asking me, “So what should we do?" I'm like, “Whatever will help you fall more in love with people across difference. Get in love with them. Don't try to get in alignment politically with them. Get more in love with them, because I still believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe.”It was my deep love that brought out the boldness…then when violence happened, I had to show up for others. Because I was becoming more in love with the people, then I had to take a stand. At the root of boldness can’t be political analysis, it has to be deep love.
• I really think the call for us in these moments is to be relatives for each other. I push on the frame of us being allies. You know, I don't need any allies. Allies, to me, are like people who show up with you, because they're like, "Oh, that bad thing is happening to you, so I'm going to show up and be your ally." I don't want to be allies. I want siblings. I want, “When something is happening to my brother or my sister, it's happening to me.” And so I show up, not because I'm being an ally or a support to them, I'm showing up because they are me. And so I just think if we can go on the journey to becoming siblings and relatives for each other rather than allies, it'll help us go so much further.
• "What is the purpose of leaving the oppressive place, in search of a promised land if we become Pharaoh on our sojourn? We will have changed everything and changed nothing. So I think how we go about resistance, I think, has to be served by the just peace, the positive peace that Dr. King has talked about, which is not about just being nice. It is about contending for justice and what is right, but it is contending for it in a way that also includes the person who we currently see or who currently sees us as enemy."
• "I think about the peace work that we engage in is, I call it "militant nonviolence," "militant peace work" -- that we wage peace instead of waging war. So there's nothing passive about it. It is very aggressive. It is very persistent, but it's rooted in love. And so I would just encourage us to find ways to really talk about peace in that positive peace way so that we can help invite more people into the way of love and the way of peace so that they don't feel like violence is the only way to respond.  And it's something that my brother, Mike, has said -- that people will go into negative tribes if they're not offered a better tribe to belong to. So I think if we can begin to expand what the tribe of peace looks like and feels like, that we can invite more people out of that."  
• "So I think that to connect these two dots -- of peace being the presence of justice and justice being the public expression of love -- it helps us to recognize that the peace that we're working towards, we have to be able to talk with people about what we mean when we say peace. We're not talking about the negative peace, the absence of tension, we're actually talking about holding tension with people in service to creating justice."

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!