Mobilization, Organizing, and the Christian Use of Power

LOVE MADE SOCIAL — COLUMN 14 OF 16
The historical record provides examples across the ideological spectrum: abolitionists, Black churches, civil-rights organizers, evangelical reformers, the Christian Right, and congregation-based organizations all demonstrate that moral conviction acquires public consequence through organized capacity. A large crowd is not necessarily an organized community, a successful campaign is not necessarily a faithful one, and a just goal does not automatically make every tactic just. Christian social action therefore requires careful distinctions among mobilization, organizing, and formation. Without them, churches may use people without developing them, pursue victories without building durable institutions, or adopt methods that reproduce the domination they oppose.

Mobilization gathers people around a defined issue or event. A march, petition, election, emergency response, fundraising appeal, or public meeting may mobilize thousands quickly, and such action can be necessary when crises demand attention or institutions will not respond without visible pressure. Mobilization demonstrates support and concentrates energy, but it can treat people primarily as participants in an agenda determined elsewhere. People are asked to appear, sign, donate, vote, or share a message, and when the campaign ends, relationships and capacity may disappear. Mobilization can win a moment without building people capable of identifying future problems, exercising judgment, or sustaining institutions. Its strength is speed and scale; its limitation is that participation alone does not establish shared leadership.

Organizing develops people capable of sustained collective action. It builds relationships, identifies leaders, studies institutions, chooses issues, raises money, creates decision-making structures, negotiates, applies pressure, evaluates outcomes, and develops successors. Organizing asks not only how many people attended, but who learned to lead, who understands the budget, who can meet with decision-makers, and who can sustain the work when professional organizers leave.¹ Organization converts isolated concern into durable power, yet Christian formation asks a further question about the kind of people and community being created through the work. A campaign may be strategically effective while forming participants in contempt, dishonesty, fear, or ideological certainty. Formation therefore evaluates both ends and means, asking whether the issue is just, the evidence reliable, the tactics truthful, the opponents dehumanized, and affected people genuinely represented.

These distinctions describe functions that can overlap. A march can recruit future leaders, a negotiating team can need mass participation, and prayer can prepare people for difficult public action. The question is whether each activity connects immediate action to growing judgment and responsibility. Counting attendance matters, but so does asking who helped decide why the gathering occurred and what happens afterward.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott illustrates the difference between a dramatic protest and organized capacity. Its endurance depended not only upon the moral force of refusing segregated buses, but also upon churches, neighborhood relationships, carpools, dispatch systems, fundraising, volunteer drivers, mass meetings, legal strategy, and leaders able to sustain participation for more than a year. Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council helped initiate the boycott and supported its daily work, including transportation, communication, and mass meetings.² Their contribution reminds us that public leadership rests upon labor that prominent speakers do not perform alone. The public boycott was visible, but the less visible organization made persistence possible. Moral witness became effective because a community developed the logistical and relational capacity to bear the cost of action.

Mobilization gathers participation, organizing develops capacity, and Christian formation shapes character, allegiance, and moral judgment. Faithful social action may need all three, because urgent action without organization dissipates, organization without formation can become manipulative, and formation without practical capacity may remain morally serious but socially ineffective.

Power is often imagined as a possession held only by governments, corporations, or wealthy institutions. Community organizing emphasizes that power is relational because institutions depend upon workers, customers, voters, legitimacy, public cooperation, and economic exchange. People who appear powerless may acquire influence by acting together around the dependencies that institutions cannot easily escape.³ A landlord may ignore an isolated tenant but respond to an organized association; a corporation may dismiss individual complaints but negotiate when workers, customers, investors, and public officials act together. A government may neglect a neighborhood until residents develop leaders, data, votes, alliances, and public pressure. Power is the capacity to influence decisions and secure change. Refusing to build that capacity can leave vulnerable people dependent upon the goodwill of institutions that benefit from the status quo.

Jesus gives this capacity a demanding moral direction. In Mark 10:42–45, he contrasts rulers who lord authority over others with leadership expressed through service. The passage challenges domination without relieving disciples of responsibility. Christian leaders should ask whether their authority increases other people’s ability to speak, decide, and act, or makes everyone dependent upon their approval. A leader’s willingness to develop successors tests the claim to serve.

Some Christians fear that applying pressure contradicts love. Persuasion should normally be attempted, but persuasion alone may fail when an institution benefits from injustice or can ignore those it harms. Biblical prophets do not merely offer private advice. Workers may strike, residents may protest, churches may withdraw investments, and citizens may organize votes without abandoning Christian love.⁴ The moral question concerns the purpose and manner of pressure. Christian pressure should be truthful, proportionate, accountable, and directed toward change rather than humiliation. It should leave open the possibility of repentance, distinguish wrongdoing from the ultimate worth of the wrongdoer, and refuse to make another person’s destruction the final meaning of victory.

Love of enemies does not require protecting opponents from the consequences of injustice. It requires resisting the desire to convert punishment, public shame, or political defeat into an end in itself. Christian action may expose, litigate, protest, boycott, organize, and restrain, but its methods should remain ordered toward truth, protection, repentance, and repair. Reconciliation cannot require vulnerable people to restore trust before trustworthy conduct exists, waive accountability, or remain exposed to abuse. Nor should leaders demand sacrifices from others that those people have had no meaningful voice in choosing. Assessing pressure includes asking who bears its risks and whether protection has been arranged for them.

Means form movements. Deception, humiliation, fear, and dehumanization may produce temporary victories, yet they also train participants and leaders. A campaign that wins through lies develops people skilled in lying; a movement that treats dissent as betrayal becomes authoritarian. An organization that uses people instrumentally will struggle to create participatory institutions after victory. The society a movement seeks is already being rehearsed in its internal life. Means and ends are not identical, but they are connected because habits formed in struggle become habits carried into governance. Christian social action must therefore resist excusing its own misconduct on the ground that the cause is righteous.⁵

Accountability needs procedures as well as intentions: accessible financial reports, clear decision rules, disclosed conflicts of interest, opportunities to challenge leaders, and regular opportunities to replace them. Affected people need authority over priorities, not merely invitations to tell moving stories. Meeting times, transportation, childcare, and interpretation can determine whose participation is possible. These arrangements help test whether a movement shares power or concentrates it behind the language of inclusion.

Negotiation and compromise also require moral discernment. Public life brings together people with different interests who must often reach partial agreements. Compromise becomes unjust when it sacrifices fundamental dignity, conceals serious harm, or abandons persons whose interests negotiators were entrusted to represent. Refusing all compromise may preserve a sense of moral purity while leaving actual people exposed to preventable harm. Christian prudence asks which principle is nonnegotiable, which strategy is adaptable, what partial gain reduces harm, who bears the cost of delay, who authorized the negotiators, and what accountability follows the agreement. Prudence is the discipline of pursuing the good within real conditions without confusing partial success with final justice.⁶

Shared work also requires respecting neighbors who do not share Christian convictions. Christians can explain their commitments while negotiating public goals with Jewish, Muslim, secular, and other partners as equals. No coalition partner should have to accept Christian theology to exercise an equal voice. Calling a campaign Christian does not establish its justice; its claims and consequences remain open to scrutiny. Cooperation requires listening, reciprocal obligations, and agreements that partners can assess within their own traditions.

Injustice should produce anger because anger recognizes that something valuable has been violated. Anger can also become hatred, indiscriminate blame, or attachment to the pleasure of defeating enemies. Organizing disciplines anger by converting outrage into research, leadership, strategy, negotiation, and durable institutions, while Christian formation asks whether anger remains directed toward protection and repair.

Formation must also include the freedom to discover that one’s own side is mistaken. Leaders should distinguish verified facts from assumptions, correct inaccurate claims publicly, and seek out people whose experience challenges the campaign’s preferred account. Confession has institutional meaning when an organization can acknowledge whom it has harmed and change its practices. Otherwise, theological language can shield the movement from the very examination it demands of its opponents. Faithfulness includes receiving correction without treating every criticism as hostility. The capacity to revise a strategy in light of evidence protects both the integrity of the work and the neighbors it intends to serve.

Victory also begins a new responsibility. An agreement needs named obligations, deadlines, public reporting, and a way for affected people to identify failures. Otherwise, a celebrated promise can leave everyday conditions unchanged. Movements should evaluate whether harm decreased, whose circumstances improved, and who remains excluded. Prayer, rest, and shared responsibility help sustain people whose worth must never depend upon permanent crisis or uninterrupted usefulness.

A distinctly Christian use of power is therefore capable of confrontation without domination. It tells the truth, develops collective capacity, applies proportionate pressure, negotiates, protects vulnerable persons, forms leaders, accepts accountability, refuses dehumanization, and seeks repair. Mobilization gathers people, organizing develops people, and Christian formation teaches them how to use power without becoming captive to it.

Endnotes

1. Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
2. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958); The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, “Montgomery Bus Boycott” and “Women’s Political Council (WPC) of Montgomery,” https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/montgomery-bus-boycott and https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/womens-political-council-wpc-montgomery.
3. Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971).
4. Exodus 5:1–23; Nehemiah 5:1–13; Acts 16:35–40; Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). These passages and King’s argument provide distinct examples of confrontation and public accountability, rather than a single prescription for every contemporary tactic.
5. Matthew 5:43–48; Romans 12:14–21; John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994).
6. Luke Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2019).