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Dr. Jamie Goodwin
As a scholar-practitioner with Wheaton’s Humanitarian Disaster Institute, my professional experiences have oriented me to care and think about both justice in Christ’s kingdom, that is, Christians doing the right things, and the social change processes sufficient to justly pursue it, or Christians doing things rightly. My participation in the Peacebuilding Summit led me to reflect on these topics since my return. Specifically, what difference was made by our meeting together? What will it take to bring real change in the Palestinian crisis? What role might Christians play that would be of help, or at least would not cause harm?
Having read the recent John Lewis biography, Rev. Munther Isaac’s Christ in the Rubble, and the Kairos South Africa documents in the months before the Summit, my thoughts were full of stories of non-violent and not-so-violent resistance and the tensions of faithful Christian interpretations therein (‘do not resist an evil person’ Matt. 5:39). I was far from settled when I arrived in London.
Conferences are funny things because they often bring together concurrent social realities – colleagues who are both making friends and engaging sobering content together. My readings meant I arrived already consumed by the conference content. Meeting South African practitioners and scholars, like Dr. Thandi Gamedze, Rev. René August – and encountering their faces, imaginations, and ways of being in the world – put flesh on these tensions. We were immersed with them 12 hours a day with the content of the summit, and even more as we celebrated hanging out, eating and worshipping together, the koinonia-type of vibrancy that often happens when Christians gather.
For me, the methods were also concurrent and crisscrossed, sometimes in harmony, as Palestinian theologian Shadia Qubti said, and sometimes just co-existing. Our gathering didn’t just represent the difficulties of Palestine. Rather, Palestine was a concrete shared reference point for Summit participants who had also experienced large-scale suffering and were actively pursuing God’s justice. Our gathering was a space where they could huddle together and find a degree of common experience and mutual solidarity, either making sense of their past or sustaining their current struggle. During the event, keynote speakers argued for the centrality of generating theological reflections for ending the injustice. My hunch is that the aim here was one akin to John Lewis’ emphasis on ‘soul force’, that there is nothing in the world eventually more powerful than love. Similarly, Scripture teaches that we will indeed be transformed by the renewing of our minds and classicists asserted that right thinking will provoke right action. The theologians among us seemed to believe that with enough good teaching and gathering, we will come to our collective senses and end this injustice in Palestine, that one day “everyone will have been against this”. As we concluded our gathering, we experienced this collective soul force when Guna theologian, Jocabed Solano taught us to stomp and shout, ‘Huh! Huh! Huh!’ in the style of the Gunadule nation. As people of faith, we know this is how it is supposed to be, unified and beautiful, and I was captivated by these moments.
Yet the other concurrent method was just as present, one that asserted that theology and gatherings would not be enough – we needed to organize. Both young activists and seasoned leaders called for a focus on actions steps. But how to do so with such a diverse group, so many strong leaders, and so many existing commitments? In our collaborative action streams, our first few table discussions inspired rich conversations and mutual encouragement. I loved hearing from the South African participants, who recounted stories of singing worship and protest songs of freedom together and reminisced about similar process of liberation and struggle during and after the Apartheid era. As we continued these conversations, I started receiving what I call back door messages. Someone in our group was dominating the conversation (interpersonal challenges), another stressed the need to see summaries of the notes for everyone in hard copy form to use them (process preferences), and another wondered how we might adapt and create our own processes as a large group to generate ideas and map them out (leadership styles). These people were all leaders, many strangers to one another, and brought with them different aspects of their commitments back home. All of this pointed to something I had read before, that informal networks have their place in the work of social change, but groups soon must organize themselves into functional partnerships. Otherwise there will be a ‘tyranny of structurelessness’. After a successful conference, the work of this network has just begun, and with the evidence of history, the upcoming phases promise to be much more challenging both inside and outside of the group.
These ideas tie closely into my home department at Wheaton, the Humanitarian Disaster Institute, where we exist to help the church prepare and care for a disaster-filled world. Our essential question is: how do we do good, better? HDI exists at this crossroads of theology and practice, interdisciplinary by necessity, as addressing such complex problems requires many kinds of wisdom.
In my own family and church these tensions ruminate too. My sons attend a very diverse school, meanwhile the church I have belonged to for 38 years recently experienced division over both women in leadership and immigrants in our city. I hold these tensions close and wonder: How much division resides dormant within us? How are we to seek justice together in ways that are durable and sincere?
I do believe, or perhaps it is better stated, I have been convinced, that love, ‘soul force,’ is the most powerful force in the world to end any injustice, even the genocide in Palestine. At the same time, what this looks like as we collaborate is not the formation of perfect, enlightened teams and partners. More often there is a lot of rupture and repair as we theologize, gather, pray, try, disagree, fail, fight, avoid ghosting and stonewalling one another but rather say sorry, and begin again. These thousands of interactions over time, both as individuals and institutions, are practices in the ways of Jesus, and I am so grateful to have been a small part.
Humanitarian Disaster Institute
Reflection written as part of Stott Fellows 2025