Deaconess Community,

With only a few days of 2024 left, we share our practice of what keeps us grounded in times of reckoning in hopes that you can find encouragement to hold on to your sense of purpose and positive expectation about 2025.

• We immerse ourselves in the fullest meaning of our values: faith, justice, liberation, and healing. They are not mere words, they capture the way we think, the way we live, and the way we want to be in relationship with one another and the collective.
• We actively replace anxiety and distress with rest in assurance that the future will unfold the way the Spirit both blocks and directs because the conditions for a just and free society demand a sunset of the way things have always been to make way for all things to become new. The political and spiritual turbulence is undeniably forceful but our vision, resourcefulness, and resolve to hold on to each other will overcome the chaos…again…and again.
• We trust in people fueled power and our faith that serves as eyes that see signs of progress and restoration of the whole.
• We remind ourselves that we have been prepared for this season and that we are well-equipped for the fight we know is ahead but from a position of strategic advantage, never in despair. We have been assured that the preparation will hold. The relationships we have built and sustain, whether professional or personal, are themselves preparation.
• We will stay the course in catalyzing change and seeding the future because we have listened deeply to those most cast aside and to the direction of the Holy Spirit. Our posture is to be at the intersection of where the will of the Sprit and the will of the people meet. Our strategy is set and moving in response to what we’ve heard and what we know based on our own lived experience.
• We refuse to lose sight of the work that has been done to bring us to this moment, including the achievements of our partners and community. In Missouri, we saw major wins for families and women through the passing of Prop A and Amendment 3 – raising the minimum wage, instituting guaranteed paid sick days, and ending the state’s abortion ban. These victories would not have been possible without the deliberate and diligent work of community advocates, organizers, and canvassers.

Let’s move through this season in joy and solidarity, letting our faith and the promise of a future world in which our community can freely exist, dream, and thrive be our guide.

In service to our people through the will of the Spirit,
Bethany Johnson-Javois, President & CEO
Constance Harper, Vice President, Strategic Impact & Innovation

Read the full December 2024 newsletter here.