Podcast Episode: Faith-Based Community Service
In the latest episode of our Sounds of Faith podcast, we speak with leaders from three of our community partners—DurhamCares, Durham Congregations in Action, and Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham—about faith-based community service.
Photo above: A vigil for people killed in Durham, organized by Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham (courtesy of RCND).
As part of Duke University, Duke Chapel is located in Durham, North Carolina. It’s a home city that has much to celebrate as a growing community with a vibrant cultural scene as well as a reputation for technological innovation. But, like most cities, Durham wrestles with homelessness, economic inequality, a history of racial injustice, mental health care, and other challenges. Duke Chapel seeks to do its part in addressing these issues by partnering with nonprofits—many of them faith-based—who work for the welfare of Durham. The guests in this episode are:
- The Rev. Reynolds Chapman, executive director of DurhamCares
- The Rev. Breana van Velzen, executive director of Durham Congregations in Action
- The Rev. Ben Haas, director of the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham
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transcript
James Todd: Welcome to Sounds Of Faith, a podcast exploring traditions of faith, sacred music, and spoken word here at Duke University Chapel. As part of Duke University, Duke Chapel is located in Durham, North Carolina. It's a home city that has much to celebrate as a growing community with a vibrant cultural scene as well as a reputation for technological innovation. But like most cities, it wrestles with homelessness, economic inequality, a history of racial injustice, mental health care, and many other challenges. Duke Chapel seeks to do its part in addressing these issues by partnering with nonprofits, many of them faith-based who work for the welfare of Durham. I am James Todd, communications director here at Duke Chapel, and joining me today are leaders from three of those longstanding community partners to talk about faith-based community service. The Reverend Reynolds Chapman is Executive Director of Term Cares. Welcome Reynolds.
Reverend Reynolds Chapman: Thank you. Good to be here.
James: The Reverend Breana van Velzen, executive Director of Durham Congregations in Action. Welcome Bree.
Reverend Breana van Velzen: Thank you, James. Good to be here.
James: The Reverend Ben Haass is Director of the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham. Welcome, Ben.
Reverend Ben Haass: Thank you. Also good to be here.
James: Wonderful. We're all glad to be here. It's the start of 2026. So I wanted to start with something of a kind of New Year's resolution type question, which is your organizations are deeply embedded in the communities here in Durham, and so as you get a fresh start on the year, what areas of concern are you particularly paying attention to as an organization. And so Reverend Breana, if we start with you and Durham congregations in action, what's your 2026 outlook in our community?
Breana: This is a year for strategic planning for us. So we're going to be focusing a lot on listening to our community, especially as things have shifted a lot in the last year. It seems like a really good time for us to do a lot of listening. But for right now, we're continuing to work on building relationships between especially folks who have struggled historically together or currently struggling in building community being there for our immigrant neighbors in the ways they ask us to be and really, really focusing on food security. A lot of our elders and people who are more marginalized or have less resources are now having more reduced resources than they did before. And so we are really trying to step up and make sure our faith communities are stepping up to help out and they are.
James: Good. When you talk about listening, what are some of the questions you're going to be asking people in the community?
Breana: We like to ask in your congregation where do you see the most need in your neighbors, in your neighborhood? Where are their strengths? Where are you most proud of in your neighborhood? What are you all doing to take care of each other? What do you need from us or the city or the county? How do you want to see people build community together? What should folks in our community who work together be focusing on together?
James: That's great. I hope we get to come back to that that community service is not necessarily just identifying a problem and then "fixing it" but identifying strengths and highlighting them.
Breana: Exactly. It's togetherness.
James: Yes. I love it.
Ben: Awesome.
James: Reynolds, what about Durham Cares a new year. Where is your focus going to be?
Reynolds: I see a lot of overlap similar to what Breana shared. I think collaboration. If you ask somebody what the major priorities are for Durham you're going to get most of the same answers.
James: What are those answers?
Reynolds: Affordable housing, immigration, food insecurity. Our organization has some ways that we are seeking to address those. One of the things that makes our kind of focus unique this year is we want to bring together and come alongside organizations that are already doing that work. And so DCIA is one of them. I think kind of working against the disconnect that we see in Durham and bringing together the togetherness that we want to see in Durham. Collaboration around those different things it is a big part of what we want to do this year.
James: Great. And Ben, what about religious coalition for Nonviolent Durham? What are you looking at for this year?
Ben: For us beginning is always beginning again. We're 33 years old and a lot of the practices we do are things that we've done time and time over again one life at a time. Things like holding vigil after a neighbor is killed by a neighbor or welcoming someone home from 20 or 30 years in prison. So those stories are always making themselves anew. We certainly entered 2026 with a spate of violence in our city, which draws our attention to that. But I think maybe some of the unique things of this moment for us are realizing the ways that the strengths we've built. And bringing neighbors alongside each one another one life at a time in the face of harm and suffering. We feel those things kind of rising to the moment in a certain way. In a moment where we're looking at a lot of the systems of care that we built and our culture being eroded or dismantled, those things that we can only do for each other. Like sharing grief and sharing community and really building one other up as in the spirit. Those things are really what we're good at are seeming really timely in this year.
James: Yes, absolutely. Again, something else that you mentioned from your work is neighbors harming neighbors which is to say that it is not always good guys and bad guys in this kind of work.
Ben: Precisely. Yes.
James: I hope we get to talk more about that and it may come up. The next question I want to ask is about the role that faith plays in each of your organizations. So what if we start with religious coalition for not, it's there in the title Religious Coalition for Non-Violent Durham. So can you talk about the faith angle?
Ben: True. I think for us I see it maybe operating two ways. One is that's who we're of and from. We started as a religious coalition imagining a less violent Durham, but that really was like people of faith wanting to be of use and feeling too distant and too separate from the violence they saw happening in their community and starting to ask questions and work out practices that would be faithful ways of showing up. Not just for them but that would be received as faithful from the communities that they wanted to care about. So being that bridge for people and communities of faith into situations of violence, which frankly, often they feel distant from. Like as communities are parishioners. The other is, I think we offer something of use to communities of faith by providing that space by being able to build one life at a time or one small group at a time, a space where it feels more possible or comfortable or imaginative to come along someone who just been incarcerated for most of your adult life. That's not an experience many people have, but we're able to learn how to do that in partnership to make it faithful and possible. Just that sense of overwhelm that I think all of us feel when we think about a neighbor who's killed a neighbor. And how do I be present to that reality that I can't really imagine, but is calling my response. I think we found a way to be that those bridge makers for people whose faith is calling them to do things that really challenge our faith and really ask us to live into the deep end of those commitments.
James: That's great. How about you Reynolds for Durham Cares? What is the kind of faith foundation of the organization? How does it shape your work?
Reynolds: One of the things I think about when I think about that question is we really would not be where we are without religious coalition and DCIA. They really, in many ways were forerunners because we started in 2008 and they've been around for a really long time. So I think this is just a great moment just to kind of reflect on the work that the coalition and DCIA had been doing already within the faith community before Durham Cares came into the picture. We were started out of a Bible study on the story of the Good Samaritan. A faith community studying scripture a story of somebody who has been oppressed and fallen into the ditch and is suffering and unlikely person helping that person and a story told by Jesus about that. So that was the inspiration for derm care. So since then, that has been at the forefront of who we are and what we do, that story. We have also integrated it into our identity. We have values that shape who Durham Cares is. And it's important to us that the first value of Durham Cares is a person, not an abstract concept, but it's Jesus. Our first value is that we're motivated and guided by the life and work of Jesus Christ. Everything that we do from the development of our programs to our partnerships in the community we want it to be shaped by who Jesus was and what he taught and what he did. I think it's a aspiration because Durham cares is never going to be fully like Jesus. But that Jesus is the model for who we want to be. I think our work with the faith community, we work with the whole faith community and we get reshaped constantly by different faith communities that remind us of that identity of Christ.
James: I'm imagining that Bible study of people saying, you know what, what if we did this? Like, what if we went out and did what Jesus is telling us to here. That's great. Reverend Breana, what about Durham Congregations In Action. Congregations.
Breana: I could probably copy and paste what Ben and Reynolds have said to an extent. We were started actually as a bunch of pastors and churches in downtown Durham. Said all of us are doing our best to actually live out this gospel. They've been influenced by people like Howard Thurman and the Civil Rights Movement and all kinds of things, and said let's actually like be feet on the ground and realize that they were stronger and it could make more of an impact and reach more people and be in relationship with people if they work together. Then a few years later, founded Durham Congregations In Action as an interfaith multifaith multiracial in a time when that wasn't always a good thing. A multiracial very courageously organization and have worked really hard to make sure that we've never quite lost that original mission of working together, not just to meet the needs of our community, but to sit in relationship with one another. The clergy that have been involved used to get together to have breakfast meetings and they'd pray from whatever faith that like the leader was, or they'd all pray from their respective faiths before they did any work and would have theological discussions and to this day, are still very close. We were founded 54 years ago.
James: That's great.
Breana: That's something we have an affirmation of faith that is part of the agreement that every one of our member congregations signs onto when they work with us and we recite. Because we're multi-faith we don't want to have one particular religion that is so much more privileged than others that no one gets heard. So our faith communities came together and said, these are things we all hold in common. That includes things like human dignity. We believe that to borrow from Christianity every person has the image of God. That creation is sacred. And that comes out in our affirmation as every human face is the face of God. We have values that we all agree on that come out of our faith traditions. We hold vigils and we're actually working on a vigil right now for February 19th. We also do things like, okay, well these people need food, so who can help. Electricity went out for three days. It's 2023, 2024. But it was in January. 5,000 people in Durham didn't have any electricity or food and our congregations mobilized. We had about 11 congregations and a couple community partners and businesses that we had people on the ground, people sending money, people picking up food, people making sure people had what they need. It was brilliant. And that came out of people's faith. People answered emails and phone calls at 2:00 AM to get food to people.
James: That is wonderful. In a second I want to talk about how students participate in the kind of learning and teaching dimension of your organizations. But one thing that's come up that I want to hear you all talk about is the togetherness, but also bringing together people that maybe don't otherwise sort of understand each other or Ben, you're talking about religious coalition sometimes people want to help. But the help needs to be received too. I'd love to hear both how you approach that but maybe even sort of examples of the challenges and rewards of bringing together different groups that wouldn't otherwise. And so Reynolds with Durham Cares you're working with churches for many different Christian denominations and maybe there's other examples of how you bridge differences.
Reynolds: With Durham Cares we primarily work with Christian churches. I think there's a value to that for the whole city too. One of the things I say is that's our main audience, but we also care about interfaith work. I think our collaboration with DCIA is an important to kind of bring those two things together. But unity in the body of Christ is a big part of who we are and what we do. One of the things that gets me excited is bringing together two churches, or two denominations, or two camps who don't want to touch each other with a 10 foot pool. To see that in some cases they have a lot more in common, to see in some cases they actually have big differences and there needs to be some kind of healing that happens to resist the injustice that comes from those differences. It is tricky work because I think that we have to guard against harm that could be done. We have to have a power analysis because I think sometimes, well, usually our divisions are because of power and violence done by people who have more power than others. And that happens in the church. I think doing unity work within the church has to reckon with that. But I think it matters. It's an important part of our identity as Christians is to be in relationship across differences. Like one example we have this Journey to thriving program where we have cohorts of churches who learn about their city. They spend a year kind of digging deeper. They're in a cohort model, and we have churches in those everything from like a COGIC Church to a Unitarian Universalist church who are in the same cohort together.
James: Yes. Church of God in Christ.
Reynolds: Church of God in Christ. And so we're excited to see the ways that they learn from each other. I think one of the gifts to me of being in this work is I've learned so much from my UU brothers and sisters and from my COGIC brothers and sisters. I can testify to these communities that they have so much to learn from each other.
James: Yes. Go Ben.
Ben: I'd love to pivot off Reynolds because these brought to mind this like poster on the back of the door in the UMC church where we have office space now and I'm sure it's on many church doors somewhere, but it's something like a modest proposal for peace let the Christians of the world agree to stop killing each other. I think for me, that is in this easy translation of what I think is unique about our work is like we are dealing with those human relational violent impulses that are at the core of not just the best of all our traditions have these things in their histories and our core and our families and our neighborhoods. And so I think the most potent example I can think of bringing people together for us is like we've evolved. Our most recent program that's developed is restorative justice. That revolves around very, very old, much older than us indigenous practices of communities that have learned over generations how to sit down and ask very basic questions like what happened and what was I thinking and feeling, and who's been affected by what happened? And how do we work together to make things as right as possible? And so we find that the journey we followed is leading us, yes, to bigger and bigger admissions of where we've participated in these grand systems of violence. But also to like more and more intimate encounters with each other. Where we reach for something bigger than ourselves to hold a space where we can be honest with one another.
James: When you say restorative justice, I think of sort of perpetrator and victim foregoing a standard trial. But participating in some type of mediation where they're both present.
Ben: That can look like that. A lot of our work is taking now we get the chance in Durham, thanks to a lot of great partnerships, to yes, literally take felony charges out of a court process and put them through a community authored process with a team of volunteer co-facilitators who are trained to hold that space and do that work with someone who's done harm and someone who's responsible harm for harm who have agreed to do that process. Also, restorative justice is a movement. We practice community circles every month that invite anyone from the community to come in and like practice listening and speaking intentionally together. And practice skills that has so much direct translation into like families and neighborhoods and congregations. I think we had multivalent approaches, one that we really appreciate and like want to keep holding up that this is very specific sometimes with really significant harm and sometimes it's us, with us figuring out how to deal with one another better.
James: Great. Reverend Breana, you're already talking about during congregations action has interfaith. That's so that's already built in. Do you want to talk about that more others examples of bringing together different groups.
Breana: Yes. Sometimes it looks like we have really fun picnics in May, y'all should come. We've got all the food things taken care of for everyone's religion and people are sharing music and sometimes bring their kids. But a lot of times it looks like when there is a geopolitical conflict that we normally are very local but people in our community were directly affected, violence was erupting in the community and we had clergy call and say, can you hold space for us? And so we started holding, listening and de-escalation meetings. Then the city said, Hey, can you come hold this meeting with all of these like activists and clergy and all these people involved in the decision making around this so the city can figure out what to do. And so we sat down at a table.
James: This around immigration in particular?
Breana: No, this had to do with Israel and Gaza and the conflicts that were happening. We had violence on Jewish people and violence on Muslim people in the community and so everybody was worried and scared and some people were angry. You can imagine there are a lot of feelings. And then you have people with all kinds of beliefs through their religions. So we invited everybody to come and listen and that was going pretty well difficult, but well. When we sat down in this like room with all these activists and clergy people and community leaders and some of the city council and we sat and we facilitated for something like two and a half hours and then some people are really, really upset and some people weren't listening like they should and they weren't really respecting the circle process completely, but several of them had never done one before. So it was all learning. But we all had agreed on certain norms when we started which is really helpful for that kind of work. People were trying to figure out how to trust each other. And one clergy person said, because we did values in general, but we said Bree can we actually like figure out some kind of common baseline? Because we're just all getting upset. I was like, that's a great idea. Why don't we go around like, what is your most basic sacred value that you absolutely can't negotiate? And let's start from there on some of these decisions we have to make. The first person to go was said I believe all life is sacred and then every single person in that room said, all life is sacred. That's when we started getting work done. It took us two and a half hours to get to all life is sacred. But that's what brought everyone together. Everyone was caring about life and they were doing it in different ways and they needed to be reminded that they were there for the same thing. No one wanted the people they love to be hurt and harmed. People that they don't even know to be hurt and harmed. And so we had to start from a place of love.
James: Great foundation. Very good. I want to talk now about the kind of teaching and learning dimension of your organizations. You each have longstanding relationships with Duke Chapel as community partners, and that's included students related to the Chapel and other parts of the university participating in your programs serving as part of your organization's. I want to start with religious Coalition Fernando Violent Durham. A number of the chapel scholar students recently attended a vigil for people that have been killed in Durham over the last year. I want to hear from a student and then talk about it. So, let's listen.
Agita: My name is Agita Awija. I'm an international student of Duke Divinity School. This is my first year in the MTS Master of theological studies program, and I'm one of the chapel scholars. As an international student, I think the issue is like it's uncommon for me personally because in my country in Indonesia, the gun owning ownership is prohibited. So when I saw the invitation in my newsletters, I decided to attend the VI Child. I've seen like the victims there are various in age, and I see children that become victims of the murder. I always wonder how a theology and can do more and the VI Child itself is proof that there are things that we can do.
James: That's Duke Divinity student, Agita Awija talking about her experience at a recent vigil and seeing the names of the murder victims represented on a long quilt that included the ages that really struck her. So, Reverend Ben, when you hear that kind of reaction, I'm wondering what that says to you about what people learn, the sort of teaching aspect of vigils and other programs that you do.
Ben: Some of the language that I've come to that feels the most potent and accurate without odors overstating itself around vigil is our attention is sacred. I listen to that and hear sacred attention. It's really striking here is someone who's come from across continents to land in Durham and seek out some kind of proximity and understanding what to us feels this very like local and like communal and intimate kind of experience with violence and it's relationship to our community. But there's also so much that's being spoken to in those words, in that experience that transcends any linguistic frame we could put around it. Because when we acknowledge that our neighbors are sacred and are worth our attention and that when we bring those two things together that in and of itself creates a space for the holy to reveal itself. We're in the beyond words there. I'm really moved.
James: In addition to this example, chapel scholar students participating in a vigil, you all have an ongoing relationship with the Kenan Institutes in their prison engagement initiative. Talk about how you play a part in that educational program.
Ben: With the Kenan Institute, so some of their restorative justice programming and coursework of some of those folks. In addition to this prison engagement institute, we are finding our coalition being for Duke University and Duke students. A lot of ways what it has been for congregations historically is you're asking questions, you're in space where you're grappling deeply and broadly with questions of like human injustice and violence and inequity, and we're able to provide a really direct and like safe and like accessible laboratory. So for example, we have two reentry teams of community members that are pretty much comprised of Duke prison engagement folks.
James: When you say reentry team, this is where someone leaving prison is matched with a team, with a group of volunteers that are, I don't know, guiding, assisting, supporting that person?
Ben: Agreeing to be in mutual relationship with one another for the first 15 to 18 months that that neighbor is trying to transition back into our community. We have a couple of those teams comprised of folks who are doing prison engagement work in different places across the university. But then given this opportunity to practice that very directly and like on the ground together with one neighbor at a time. I think that's been a beautiful meeting. We've also seen some folks come straight out of restorative justice coursework at Duke into our restorative Justice Durham practice and become facilitators who are working alongside our community facilitators. And so seeing those meetings and being able to like provide that space it's the possibility of partnership.
James: Love it. Reynolds. So the Durham Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope is one of the big programs of Durham Cares. I want to read a quote from a Duke Divinity School student from a couple years ago that participated, and it just kind of the same thing. Get your reaction about what kind of teaching and learning is going on. So this is Keanu Hatog[?] especially going to the stag historic site as part of the pilgrimage. She said, "I imagine myself as a 20 something year old enslaved woman looking out of the window. I had this profound moment of having the privilege of choice. So how am I going to respond? I have a responsibility to dispense my freedom to share it, to work towards a community where all people have that same freedom." So that's her reaction to being at these buildings at the stag historic[?] site, but of course was a plantation. That's the relationship imagining an enslaved person there. You've probably heard many testimonies over the years about the people that participate in the pilgrimage. What strikes you about this one or this student?
Reynolds: I think hearing that quote, after hearing Ben talk about sacred attention I think there's something sacred about encountering a place that has a story that no matter how many years it goes back. Actually using that encounter to go back into the story of the place, what happened on that ground, I think there's a sacredness to that, and that's one of the things that we try to do with the pilgrimage. The word that we often use is encounter. One of the things that strikes me about that quote is she had this encounter with the story of the violence and the oppression of slavery in our country and the racism with that. She asked herself, what does this mean for how I live my life here in Durham? I think that there's a direct correlation between how we perceive ourselves within a story and how we live our lives. I think that we're shaped by the stories that we inhabit, whether we notice or not and we have a lot of pressure telling us an untruthful history in the United States. I think it's always been the case, like the Trump administration's attacks on history is nothing new. But I think there's a very real way in which there is an attempt to silence truthful things like the history of slavery in our country. I think it's an especially important time to listen to those stories and be able to think about what does this mean for how I live my life now?
James: The pilgrimage in particular wants to look at the history of Durham from the perspective of different communities. That we as a kind of corrective measure.
Reynolds: I think it's partly the story of Stag Bill, but we go to other parts of Durham's history and every story matters. We also make sure that undertold stories are prioritized in the pilgrimage.
James: Reverend Breana talk about with DCIA, you currently have at least one Duke student as an intern and so this is part of their education but also serving DCIA. So what does that internship look like and how do you kind of
have a teaching mission.
Breana: We have several students involved just as well. I get that has been involved with all of our organizations. We usually get one to two Divinity students each year. It's a time to teach them the very boring tasks of administration. But how good administration can lead to justice happening and good communication skills including like media skills can actually help people work together better and get the word out for when there's an action or something that needs to be done. But I think the best part about it is when students get a chance to interact directly with congregations. We often encourage our student we have an interfaith pilgrimage that Durham Cares and Duke Chapel helped us form to meet a need in the community. So students get to experience that if they intern with us in the summer and can come back and facilitate. We invite them to be part of visiting congregations and asking good questions of the clergy there to come to community meeting to help us put together some programs so that they can learn what ministry outside of the church looks like and what it looks like to find the sacred in the ordinary and walk the sacred through justice. I often make them go to Durham Cares and religious coalition meetings because those are some of the best places for them to really see some of these values in action. We spend a lot of time in reflection. They all have to go through what I call context training, which is what you're doing in place and ministry in the area where you live and where you work, and with the people who are beside you and what's visualized and invisibilized and who do we listen to. They have the privilege of getting to listen to a lot of elders in our community as part of that. Then part of their theological mentorship and education is saying, okay, well you have these experiences. How does that inform your ministry? Or how does that inform your faith? And how is that changing you? I love to read, so they have to read as well.
James: Yes.
Breana: We tie all of that together. Sometimes it's spreadsheets calling clergy and saying, Hey, is this still your phone number? So when we have a vigil or we have something like a book group or some kind of justice action, we can call our clergy and they can get the message. Sometimes it's let's sit with this family whose son has been killed by gun violence or sit with this family whose family had gone through segregation back in the day and just be with them and listen and learn and be part of that family while you're with us.
James: I imagine that this can like form ties between a student and in this city and in fact at least two of you all are Duke Divinity School alumni. That be an example there of students forming a deeper relationship with the city and maybe saying, you know what, I want to invest here, I want to live here. That's a part of the kind of long-term community relationship that's going on here. Good. I want to wrap up talking about how people can get involved. You probably have conversations all the time given your work of people saying, I really want to help, but I'm busy or I really want to help but the problems are so big, I don't know if I can make a difference. I want to hear how you respond in those conversations to people that it is on their hearts. Like I do want to be a good citizen but I'm kind of lost about what to do. Reynolds, what if we start with you in Durham Cares, how do you handle those conversations?
Reynolds: Well the best way is to sign up for a newsletter because then you'll know about everything that we have.
James: There you go.
Reynolds: It's on our webpage. Sign up for our newsletter.
James: durhamcares.org.
Reynolds: Thank you.
James: Got it.
Reynolds: I think that once you sign up you'll have invitations to go on our pilgrimage. You'll see dates for the pilgrimage the Durham Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope. We partner with a collective of churches called the Mount Level Community Partnership for Racial Justice. That is we partner with to organize an Alabama pilgrimage that's going to be happening during Holy Week this year. It's a five day pilgrimage to different sites in Alabama. That'll be an opportunity. The Journey to Thriving program that I mentioned, we're trying to open up some of the workshops for that to the rest of the community. So we're beginning to collaborate with organizations in Durham to organize campaigns, to educate about different topics. The three topics at this spring right now will be housing, food, and mass incarceration. There'll be opportunities to learn more about that through our media networks, like social media stuff and then also through events that we're going to host. The hope is that we're just going to create some space for those who are directly working on it such as religious coalition when we do work on mass incarceration, you'll hear from people who are directly involved in that about this is the state of it and this is how you can get involved and things like that.
James: Great. One thing I want to reflect back that's come up a few times is, helping sometimes the first step is learning. Sometimes it's like let me listen, learn, and watch and find out what's going on before I assume I know what the answer is. Reverend Breana what about you when people are saying, gosh, I'd love to help but, what do you say?
Breana: Well, I want to second. We also have a newsletter.
James: Yes
Breana: But just go to dcia.org. Find a way to get involved on social media or something. But really we encourage people to remember that there's an analogy a mentor told me a long time ago of each one of us has a spoon to bail out the ocean and sometimes that feels really awful because you can't bail out the ocean with a spoon. But each one of us has a spoon and sometimes we'll help someone else with their spoon but most of the time if we just each use our spoon we'll bail out that ocean and see there's enough of us on the planet to do that. But it's also the kind of thing of like all three of us work together a lot. Our congregations work together, our volunteers work together. That makes it so that we don't feel alone and so people might feel informed, but really, even if it's not with one of our organizations go find a place where you see people helping. Just walk out outside of off campus or even on campus, go to the Center for Reconciliation or the Center for Truth Racial Healing and Transformation or the Kenan Institute. But go somewhere where you see people congregating or the community empowerment fund where you can volunteer and start with that learning while you're trying to help. Find the sacred on and off campus. Learn the histories of where you are, make a friend with someone who's not in your generation. I think all of those are ways that we can learn and be informed and find hope really. Like really find hope. Unless we see each other as human. Not just see each other as human but to learn from each other, to know that like there's something all of us has to offer and something all of us has to learn, that's a really good place to start if you have no idea what to do.
Reynolds: Yes. Great.
Ben: That's good.
James: Reverend Ben, I want to hear from you and maybe with the twisted with the religious coalition sometimes your invitation to somebody is, I want you to meet someone leaving prison or I want you to come be with a family that just lost their son. This is not easy stuff. How does that conversation go for you?
Ben: I want to recognize that there is so much intersection listening to these different organizations that have come up in a Durham together. Speak about different modalities of how to engage similar questions. DCIA's OG behind every human face is the face of God. Like we're doing that, and I think the guys in which we're doing it and asking those hard questions is, what are the things that only we can be and do for one another? We have systems. We need to build better systems. We need to take apart some systems. We have a lot of ways of trying to supply one another's needs and like connect and like be part of one another's flourishing, but you get down to it and when something has happened that you can't fix, and when someone's life is taken a very, very long term into the darkness of like something like our prison system, there are many, many things they need and some of the things that often get ignored. Most readily are those basic human things, like someone to listen and not propose to fix. Someone to say like, you're back and it's good news. Someone to say like everything you're doing is really, really hard and I don't have a solution for it and I don't know how to fix it but I'm here. This idea of just being with, that really, really does matter. Those are the places we find hope. Those are the places we find healing. Those are the places we found accountability to one another in our community. They're often not very easy things. But they're often some of the most essential not easy things that there are to do.
James: That is great. I think let's end it on that. We've put out the call to action here and I want to say thanks to all of you for your work in long-term partnership with Duke Chapel. So the Reverend Reynolds Chapman is Executive Director of Durham Cares, which you can find on the internet, durhamcares.org. Thank you Reynolds for your service and wisdom here.
Reynolds: Thanks for having me.
James: The Reverend Breana van Velzen is Executive Director of Durham Congregations In Action dcia.org. Thank you Reverend Breana for your insights here.
Breana: Thank you.
James: The Reverend Ben Haass is Director of the Religious Coalition for Nonviolent Durham. That is nonviolentdurham.org. Thank you Reverend Ben for your time here.
Ben: Thank you.
James: This has been Sounds of Faith from Duke University Chapel. Learn more about the Chapel's mission ministry events and programs at chapel.duke.edu.
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