As our hearts ache, again, following another attack, many of us feel heartbroken, stunned, or outraged in the face of another atrocity. What can we do? How can we help? ​Those of us who are far away feel challenged, again, to know how best to encourage, support, and enact care. Though you can't change the circumstances that have already happened, you can add good into the world going forward. 

Here are several practices ICTG staff, directors, advisors, and colleagues have found most useful following human-caused disasters that occur far away: 

Spread love locally

• Gather together for prayer, singing, and lighting candles
• Spend the hours and days ahead expressing love to your loved ones
• Reach out to your neighbors with acts of goodness and kindness
• Extend acts of care to strangers you meet this week
• Give gifts locally, in honor of those who have been impacted by tragedy far away

 
Spread love throughout the country and the world

• Call a loved one or an old friend you haven't talked to in awhile to share how much you still care
• Gather with family and friends to create preparedness kits or to create care kits for a nonprofit that collects them and distributes them in immediate response to events like this one (find examples at NVOAD)
• Make a donation to your favorite nonprofit in honor of those who have died. ICTG and other faith-based denomination relief agencies use your monies to support local churches and communities most directly impacted. Rather than sending things, give to your denomination's relief agency and make a greater impact. (If you don't know if your denomination has a relief agency, now is a great time to find out.) 
• Get educated. ICTG makes resources and training available online for ordained and lay ministers to access anywhere they have internet service, like resource guides for ministers, youth ministers, and spiritual directors, and congregational assessment guides and response go lists. Also, your donations help to subsidize the costs of these aids for low-income church and ministry leaders who look for them in the hours, days, and weeks after a tragedy like this one. 

With these acts you get involved in countering terror locally and globally. These acts make a great difference.

Thank you for being a blessing. 

Rev. Dr. Kate Wiebe serves as ICTG's Executive Director. With nearly twenty years experience in providing congregational care, pastoral counseling, and disaster response ministry, she's passionate and hopeful about congregations expanding their capacities to be catalysts for healing in a troubled world. 

Does your community have an active clergy collective or ministerial alliance? 

Too often I hear about how "we used to have a ministerial alliance, but people just stopped meeting together after awhile." Amid the many responsibilities of ordained and lay leaders in churches, it can be hard to maintain healthy colleague relationships with fellow leaders in the community. Yet, these relationships prove critical during community-wide crises. This weekend, the ordained and lay leaders of Charlottesville, VA, knew they could easily communicate with one another and respond in joint effort at a moment's notice. ​

(Once again) We interrupt this regularly scheduled broadcast…

Folk down south told her when she was little, “Your nose got the strongest memory.”

Blackness covered the sun, the street sizzled, and the Brick City crumbled under her six-year-old feet. Ten hours earlier, Lil’ Ol’ Grandma was sittin in a dirt patch in front of Hayes Homes playin jax with her baby sister, Mae. Mae was known round town for her smarts. She skipped kindergarten so the two sisters would be in the same class next year.

But storm clouds was coming.

Mae bounced the opal green ball, but before she could sweep the jax from the dusty earth, she saw Mr. John out the corner of her eye. They was draggin him in the 4th precinct. Looked like the sack potatoes, Big Momma used to pick down south in Georgia.

Thunder rolled. Crowds gathered. People shouted. A steady downpour of pent up rage.

As tears fell from Momma’s eyes and sizzled on the street, she turned to Lil’ Ol’ Grandma and shouted, “Y’all girls run home and don't let nothing happen to Mae.” Ten steps away from their mother’s arms, lightning leapt from the concrete.

The dungeon shook. Glass shattered. People running.

With fire jumping from building-to-building, Lil’ Ol’ Grandma could only squint in the toxic plume. The inside of her throat began to sweat as the fog-like smoke settled in her lungs. She reached out for her baby sister, but Mae already drifted away. Out of the corner of her eye the opal green ball floated down the sizzling street like the bottles bobbing in Newark Bay. 10 steps away, Mae lay lifeless with a shard of glass jutting from her neck.

Since that night in ’67, Ol’ Grandma never been right.

It’s ten till 12 in Baltimore and Lil’ Lucy just started dreaming when she’s startled out of hope, “I remember. I remember…” All night long, Ol’ Grandma sat before that cracked TV screen.

This story would change if we could see ‪#‎lillucy‬.

We now return to our regularly scheduled broadcast.
‪#‎onceyouseeyoucannotnotsee‬ ‪#‎fearlessdialogues‬

We interrupt this regularly scheduled broadcast…

As curfew falls on this Baltimore city street, day-old ashes gather on her apartment windowsill. Yesterday riots canceled school, and nixed her two free meals, so at ten till 10 only nervous energy fills Lil’ Lucy’s empty belly.

But the dreams are charred in the Comeback City…

All day long, Mr. Freddie’s face kept flickering and flashing on the cracked TV screen. In her 6-year-old mind, he was a ghost. Lil’ Lucy remembered, Mr. Freddie passing her at the busstop. 

But this was not a dream. Ol’ Grandma sat transfixed before the cracked screen, and every ten minutes she’d cry out, “I remember. I remember…” Momma’s desperate eyes searched the shadows beyond the paned glass and prayed softly that her only son could dodge the armament and make it home alive from the nightshift. 

In this waking nightmare, Lil’ Lucy curled up on the threadbare couch, pressed her eyes together tightly and imagined a bright sunny morning with a smile on her mother’s face.

This story would change if we could see #lillucy. 

We now return to our regularly scheduled broadcast….

#onceyouseeyoucannotnotsee #fearlessdialogues

ICTG Advisor Rev. Dr. Gregory Ellison, II, is an ordained Baptist minister and Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University.  He is the founder of Fearless Dialogues, and author of Cut Dead, But Still Alive. 

I recently got back from a trip to Sao Paulo Brazil as part of the Fearless Dialogues programs. While we were there, our schedule was extremely packed, and I was late getting to our last meeting, on the last night. The meeting started at 8:30pm of a day that had started more than twelve hours previously, and all that I knew was that if was with a pastor who also did street art. So, I took my time on the way back from the store from a supply run. When I, finally, got into the room for the meeting, however, the room felt charged and alive. On the other end of the table, sat a heavily tattooed man with tremendously kind eyes, and he was pouring out a piece of himself into a room filled with a small collection of strangers from a different continent. This is the kind of scenario that Fearless Dialogues creates.

At its core, Fearless Dialogues is part therapeutic technique and part community organizing framework. It developed out of Dr. Gregory Ellison’s book Cut Dead But Still Alive and his experience working with people who felt their marginalization as not being fully seen. Generally, Fearless Dialogue events get together a diverse group of people who share something in common – a shared living space, shared cause, or shared belief – and leads them to see those who are often left unseen, to see each other, whether mayor, teacher, or drug dealer, as assets for building the community, and to see their own innate giftedness. This has been done with over 5,000 people in over thirty cities around the world including Nashville, Atlanta, Ferguson, and Sao Paulo.

I personally have seen it work in two different directions. I was part of the team that put on Fearless Dialogues in Nashville, Tennessee. In that instance, it was about bringing together a community that was experiencing significant marginalization to see potential in one another for rebuilding. I helped facilitate a Fearless Dialogues event with the Emory University Board of Directors. That was a much different scenario more focused on guiding people who live in a privileged position to see those who often go unseen and see an individual role for themselves in pushing back against marginalization.

Healing is deeply embedded in what Fearless Dialogues is. Coming out of Dr. Ellison’s work, one of the core messages is that marginalization is deeply traumatic. Going through life being unseen can cut someone to death – though they still live. Thus, in Fearless Dialogues, part of what happens is bringing those who are often unseen into a community that does see and helping them find their gifts for making a difference in the three feet around them. Equally, for people often doing the unseeing, Fearless Dialogues is a call to take part in a healing process – to see the harm that has been done and see a role in participating in healing. 

In Sao Paulo, we had a chance to see both sides of the process. Early in the trip, there was a more formal Fearless Dialogues session held with some seminary students at a major university in Sao Paulo. The school of theology is undergoing some internal struggles between Liberationist and more fundamentalist theologians. As a nation, Brazil also struggles with race. While there are more people of African descent living in Brazil than any other place on the globe outside of Africa, few People of Color make it into higher education, and, certainly, there were few People of Color in attendance in the seminary classroom that evening. Therefore, the session was much more about learning to see the unseen and finding a role in ending lack of sight, and I saw a small version of this take place in a small group that I participated with. Besides me and one other American colleague, there were four Brazilian pastors in training. Three were outspoken, well in command of themselves, and radiated confidence. The fourth was quieter, visibly more awkward, and retiring. He shared that he often feels the need to withdraw due to lack of confidence. Within his seminary community, he often feels unseen, yet he had an important skill for the conversation. He spoke English, so he was the life line for the two Americans and the glue that held the conversation together. From this shifted dynamic, an honest and deeply sharing took place that altered the landscape of sightedness – at least in that moment.

Yet, it was in the less formal dialogue at 8:30pm at the end of a long week that really stands out for me. The kind eyed and tattooed pastor was at wit’s end. In caring with people living in extreme poverty and drug addiction – coming out of his own struggles addiction, he had run dry. Whether he found in the room of five Americans and a translator six sets of eyes that saw him, or whether he commanded our attention by the force of what he was sharing, it is impossible for me to know. However, I do know that I was deeply affected by what he shared, and I shared back what encouragement I could. It is that connection that is the essence of Fearless Dialogues for me. That we can all find strength in each other, when we actually see who is around us.

Rev. Dr. Gregory Ellison, II, is an ordained Baptist minister and assistant professor of pastoral care and counseling at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University.  He is an ICTG Advisor, the founder of Fearless Dialogues, and author of Cut Dead, But Still Alive.