People Get Ready

JEN BAILEY PAYS attention. She recognized the paucity of healthy food choices in Nashville’s “food desert” areas and designed an interfaith toolkit to enhance the skills of food- justice organizers tackling that issue. Jen — now Rev. Bailey of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — listened to the recurring theme in her own lived experience: Faith communities can be a catalyzing source for good and are even more powerful when they work together. Bailey hasn’t yet hit 30.

Millennials have gotten serious press this year from Pew, NPR, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, and the like. Amid their diversity, these roughly 80 million people appear to share several common traits. They are global citizens who want to act and impact locally, who crave meaning, seek entrepreneurialism, prioritize people and networks over institutions, and often profess different parameters of and pathways to success than previous generations. If Bailey is emblematic of her generation in any way, we have a lot to be hopeful about.

This year, Bailey started the Faith Matters Network (FMN), a “multi-faith alliance dedicated to building the power of people of faith to transform our social and economic systems.” The group focuses on the South and Midwest because both areas are significantly impacted by economic inequality and are highly religious. That is, there is a lot of work to be done and lots of people (theoretically) committed to doing it.

In addition to connecting folks with resources and partner organizations, FMN has two main programs: faith “collaboratories” and transformational storytelling. The first is a new form of gathering “communities of praxis” to work together to tackle local challenges. The second recognizes the power of story to connect us, one to another, and to get people to pay attention.

Why try to understand a complex problem such as economic injustice? For Bailey, it’s Jesus and the hope that comes in the gospel. The U.S., one of the wealthiest nations in the world, has a 14.5 percent poverty rate, with 45.3 million people and one in five children living in poverty. In the face of this ugliness, Bailey is buoyed by the gospel’s teaching that God is on the side of the poor, the outcast, and the marginalized. Of the world’s highly developed countries, the U.S. has the largest  income inequality, and the poor are disproportionately affected by global problems such as climate change and national challenges such as access to quality education.

Recognizing this systemic failure, Bailey recalls the stories of the church mothers about “making a way out of no way.” FMN places economic and climate justice at the core of its mission and calls for a faith-led revolution to tackle these problems at the local level.

Consumer-product analysts want to know how millennials spend their money. City planners want to make their locales attractive to a young, mobile population. Faith and civic communities are paying attention to inspired and capable young people such as Bailey because they’re powerful and they’re looking to collaborate. The FMN is the product of Bailey’s fellowship with the Nathan Cummings Foundation; philanthropists are paying attention, too.

The song “People Get Ready” was inspired by the 1965 March on Washington and reflects Curtis Mayfield’s experience of growing up in a Chicago church. Two years before, 34-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. had penned this in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” a quote prominent on the “What We Do” section of the FMN website. The interfaith movement is rooted, inspired, and “glocal,” and we would all do well to pay attention to millennials such as Rev. Jen Bailey who are leading the way.