Rooted in our faith and Methodist heritage, Faith-Rooted Community Organising (FRCO) involves building connections, gathering people and using our collective power to act for justice, change and transformation in our churches and communities.
How does FRCO work?
FRCO helps us to learn how to follow Jesus in our everyday lives.
Community Organising is a way of working with others that developed in and from grass roots communities. Community Organisers collaborate alongside others, encouraging people to use their gifts and skills and developing local leaders.
FRCO tries to make the world a better place, much like community engagement and development.
But Faith-Rooted Community Organising has a distinctive focus on:
- Listening deeply to one another
- Building connections to discover shared hopes and concerns
- Recognising and using our power and resources for good
- Collectively acting to bring about change
- Living our faith in public life with courage and compassion.
FRCO practices will help us to:
- develop existing churches
- establish new Christian communities (New Places for New People)
- Gain the skills needed to be a Justice-seeking Church
What exactly is Community Organising?
A community is a space where people gather together, this could include workplaces, neighbourhoods, social spaces, worshipping communities and online gatherings.
The word organising describes the intentional listening to each other, finding out our shared concerns and then working together for change.
The term 'community organising' honours the grassroots communities that began this way of working, who were often those with less access to wealth or status.
Why call it ‘Faith-Rooted’ Community Organising?
We might be more familiar with community organising in relation to social justice, where different organisations work together for the common good (sometimes called neighbourhood organising, or broad-based organising), but there is a long history of it being effectively used for congregational development.
All community organising is rooted in a particular perspective or worldview, whether that is acknowledged or not.
We are using the term ‘Faith Rooted Community Organising’ because the way we work is rooted in our Christian faith and Methodist heritage.
Drawing on these roots in our community organising strengthens and enriches us as individuals, as congregations, and in how we engage with others in our communities.
How does FRCO understand ‘leadership’ and ‘power’?
Leadership: FRCO involves a commitment to developing collaborative leadership from within local communities. Community Organisers do not direct or control the actions of people; they work alongside others, encouraging them to use their God given gifts and skills.
Power: We recognise that all power comes from God, but that in human hands, it can be used well or misused. FRCO provides us with the tools to recognise the power and resources we and others have and to use our collective power, in solidarity with others, to challenge injustice and act for change.
We see resonances in the way Jesus developed servant leadership amongst the disciples, spoke honestly and openly about power and how it can be used and misused, and made intentional decisions around how to spend his time and who to spend it with.
How is this different from other models of Community Development or Community Engagement?
There are many ways of working with people in communities to seek justice and create change, and some share similar values with community organising.
Community Development is a wide ranging term. Asset Based Community Development (sometimes just called ABCD) is a way of working that begins, not by identifying need, but by mapping the assets within a community; starting with what is strong rather than what is wrong. Many communities already see themselves in this way – it is often those from ‘outside’ who need to shift their perspective and to listen and learn from lived and living experience within the wider community.
Both ABCD and Community Organising encourage us to resist the language of deprivation and needs-meeting. Both remind us to put ‘people before programmes’ and recognise the importance of building relationships and creating opportunities for people to use and develop their gifts, skills and experience so that the whole community can flourish. ABCD, like community organising, seeks to find and develop local contextual leadership.
Community Organising has a particular focus on the importance of power. This includes learning to see how power is held and used by individuals (including ourselves), and within organisations and social groups, in visible, and in less visible ways.
As people of Christian faith, we recognise that all power comes from God, but that as human beings, we can use and share power well, or misuse it. The misuse of power is at the heart of exclusion, injustice and inequality and so our responses need to be attentive to power in all its forms.
Whilst we hope for and work towards the flourishing of all, we recognise that there are barriers and challenges which prevent flourishing, often through systemic injustice because of our flawed, imperfect human nature. Community Organising seeks to build relationship to gather people to use their collective power to seek change and transformation.
Is this different to justice seeking through activism or protest?
In the Justice-seeking Church report, the Church recognises and names many ways in which Methodists are involved in acting for justice alongside some of the potential and challenges for each.
FRCO practices can help us to discern which is the best action for us to take in response to an issue we are concerned about.
The priority in FRCO is to be relational; to speak directly with the person who has the power to bring about change. In reality, we know that often, there are many challenges to reaching this point.
So, it may be that a group discerns that the best action to take is to engage in visible activism, or a creative prophetic act of public witness (craftivism, for example), and then reflects on that action to see what the impact was and what their next step might be.