Audrey deCoursey

Beatitudes Society Chapter Member (GTU) and 2007 Fellow (California Interfaith Power & Light)

During the Christmas vacation this year (one semester into membership in my school's new Beatitudes Society chapter), I asked my family what the word prophet means to them. Representing faiths across the spectrum, most responded that it means someone who can tell the future, a divination artist, a fortune-teller. My Muslim cousin said a prophet is someone inspired by God, a figure essential to make a faith system a religion.

Through the Beatitudes Society, I have been exploring other meanings of the word, prophet.

Out of my faith rooted in the historically pacifist Church of the Brethren, I have been an activist as long as I've been me. Without even thinking of Jeremiah or Amos, Isaiah or the Syro-Phoenician woman, I grew up naming and resisting the webs of social sins that have plagued people since before slavery in Egypt. My seminary, PSR, gave me language to start calling myself prophetic for doing what I love. My Beatitudes Society has given me fellowship to connect me into the prophetic movement.

At the GTU chapter, we share communion: blessed meals to feed our bodies, blessed conversations to feed our souls. We learn from Sara Miles about one San Francisco church's mission of feeding the hungry, from Rev. Anne Howard about the layers of meaning in Matthew's Beatitudes, from Jessica Brown about the work of interfaith witness to the plague of global climate change. As we gather, we share stories along with our bread (pizza dough) and cup (wine or grape juice), stories of the specific stones our friends are laying on the growing road of this prophetic Christian movement.

This summer, my involvement with the Beatitudes Society has evolved into a two-month fellowship interning with one of the organizations we learned about during the year, California Interfaith Power and Light. Here, I am practicing my role as emerging faith leader by representing CIPL, the prophetic response to global warming, speaking up to congregants, to communities, and to congressional representatives about the moral mandate for concrete steps toward humanity's sustainable relationship with creation.

Working with CIPL is meaningful in itself, but working here through the Beatitudes Society allows me a perspective of how this interfaith environmental work fits in to the wider prophetic movement. It empowers me to know that we are not interested in being the prophets who can say what the future will be, but prophets who can say what the future might be, as long as we move together.

Strengthening the progressive Christian network for justice, compassion, & peace