By 2022, Justin Jones had been arrested 18 times for activities related to civil disobedience and was banned from the grounds of the Tennessee State Capitol. One of these activities concerned the removal of what he labeled “Idols of White Supremacy,” such as the statue of a KKK Grand Wizard erected in the capitol in 1978.
At a protest regarding the statue, Jones said, “If we cannot remove this overt symbol of White Supremacy…then how can we remove the more sophisticated and subtle policies of White Supremacy that this statue represents?”
These days, some of the same troopers who took him to court for his activism regularly hold the Capitol door open for him and say, “Welcome, Representative.” “That is the power of the Spirit,” Jones told an audience on Friday at the “Compassion and Justice Conference” hosted by Fellowship Southwest in Dallas, Texas.
In April 2023, at 28, Justin was appointed by the Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County as the State Representative for Tennessee’s 52nd District. The 52nd is the most diverse district in the Volunteer State.
His predecessor had been democratically elected by the people of the district in January of that year but was removed for disrupting congressional proceedings during gun-control protests in the wake of the Covenant School Shooting. That predecessor was himself.
Two other representatives, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson, also participated in the gun-control protests on the House floor. Only Pearson and Jones, two Black men, were expelled by the Republican-led body. Johnson, a white woman, survived expulsion attempts.
Jones, who has studied theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School, told audience members at the Compassion and Justice Conference he believes the South is poised for a movement of “resurrection.” He contrasted this movement with the insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“The difference between a resurrection and an insurrection is that an insurrection is about trying to bring back what was,” he said. “We often hear in our southern states, ‘The South will rise again.’ That is an insurrection. It’s about something rising up again. We [also] hear ‘Make America great again.’ It’s about the mythology of what was, instead of God’s prophetic vision of what can be.”
According to Jones, this prophetic vision includes fully becoming a multiracial, multiethnic democracy that uplifts the marginalized.
“We must offer a counter-narrative,” he said, “rooted in the resurrection.” This counter-narrative says, “The South will not rise again. The South will rise anew.”
Compassion and Justice conference attendees heard from other keynote speakers throughout the weekend.
Mariah Humphries, the Executive Director of the Center for Formation, Justice and Peace, spoke on issues related to justice for Native and Indigenous people. When asked in a question-and-answer time what issue she would have Christians focus on if given a choice, she answered with the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Highlighting the intersectionality of the issue with other areas of concern, Humphries spoke about “man camps,” transient communities consisting primarily of men in areas where resources are being extracted from the earth. In addition to being a tribal sovereignty issue, these “man camps” also represent a threat to Indigenous women.
According to the Bureau of Justice, Humphries said, “When man camps are near or overlap with Native American reservations, they are strongly correlated with higher rates of violence and sex trafficking against Native American women.”
Dr. Cláudio Carvalhaes, professor of worship at Union Theological Seminary in New York, used his keynote to connect the conference theme of compassion to the ways many people approach immigration.
Carvalhaes asked conference-goers, “Why do we not have compassion?” He speculated that the answer lies in the fact that we “don’t know what to do with our own pain.”
He went on to explain that the only thing many of us know what to do with our pain is to “project our own pain onto somebody else, into people who are more vulnerable, like immigrants. We put it on them. And [we feel that] to get rid of them, we will get rid of our own pain.”
On Saturday, Jeremy Everett, Executive Director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty (Baylor Collaborative), called on attendees to commit their lives to “hunger-free living.” One element of this commitment includes community organizing.
Everett presented a template for community organizing by telling the story of the Meals-to-You (MTY) program, which the Baylor Collaborative began as a small demonstration project in 2019. The goal of the project was to determine whether it was feasible to deliver meals to children in rural areas without access to traditional summer meal programs in the summer.
After testing the program in East and West Texas, the United States Department of Agriculture asked Everett to scale the program up nationwide during school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time the program began, 270,000 children had signed up.
According to Everett, the program’s success was a testament to multi-sectoral collaboration between the federal government, private sector, and local communities. “What it showed us,” he said, “is that collaboration is possible and that the only way we can solve these big social issues is working together.”
Sandra Maria Van Opstal, Executive Director of Chasing Justice, closed out the conference by describing how our distorted narratives, discriminatory policies, and problems with discipleship have perpetuated injustice.
Speaking about how the American Church has self-segregated itself among more than just racial lines, Van Opstal narrated the contours of the church-growth movement that became prominent in the 1980s. She described the “homogenous unit principle” as a “missiological idea that suggests that church planting methods are more effective when they are focused on people with common characteristics.”
Van Opstal added: “Basically, ‘birds of a feather flock together.’ That’s why we have youth ministries and children’s ministries and motorcycle ministries and MOPS [mothers of preschoolers] and all these different ministries. Because if you can find people with common characteristics, it’s easier to get them in the door. And [the idea is] once you get them in the door, you can disciple them in the way of Jesus.”
The problem, according to Van Opstal, is that the homogenous unit principle “is not the way of Jesus. So structurally and systemically, we have taught people to practice biases.”
She described how attempts by the church at “racial reconciliation” and “racial justice” in successive decades were all undermined by how Christians had been discipled for years to segregate themselves.
She ended her talk by challenging listeners to interrogate the narratives they have been taught, “because those narratives turn into policies.”
This is the second year of the “Compassion and Justice Conference,” which was held at Life in Deep Ellum. The church describes itself as “a cultural center built for the artistic, social, economic and spiritual benefit of Deep Ellum and urban Dallas.”
Fellowship Southwest is a network of Christians that focuses on crossing borders. It focuses largely on issues of justice and immigration in the Southwest border states of the U.S., as well as Oklahoma.
More about Fellowship Southwest’s work can be found here.
Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
