After another SCM year, I am ready to finally say goodbye to the post of National Coordinator. This is a love letter to all of you connected to the SCM…whether you are involved in the Board, Cahoots festival, local units, or helped make a resource, or supported financially. It’s been a transformational time and I want to say thank you. I am particularly grateful to you for breathing new life into my Christian faith.
When I met the SCM in 2010 at the mobilization against the G20, I was ready to say goodbye to the church. I was bitter and angry at the sexism, homophobia and the lack of justice analysis. I didn’t want to be a Christian. Good Christians were those who conformed to the capitalist status-quo, who were nice only to one another, and pitied the poor while they served in soup kitchens. I also did not relate to a God who was anthropomorphized as male, white and old. It was a God who shamed me for not upholding middle class moral codes. I wasn’t the kind of Christian who wanted to turn the other cheek, or walk another mile for my oppressor, or give them my coat. I wanted to resist oppression and to dream of an alternative that liberated me and everyone else.
Luckily and maybe fatefully, I found the SCM just at the right time. The SCM offered that alternative space for me and my waning faith. I met students, young adults and ministers who didn’t worry about dogma around lifestyle or obsessed with the immortality of the soul, but were concerned with people’s material conditions. Christian faith was for them an impetus to work for liberation and the story of Jesus and the Resurrection is a reminder of the renewal we can all experience. I learned about a God who cared about migrants, poor people, women, queer people…people we all push to the margins. I learned about a Christian faith that is inspired by the Divine that works beyond us and also the Divine within us who moves our hearts for justice and peace.
Thank you to the SCM and everyone involved for reviving and renewing my faith and for giving my sense of justice a spiritual dimension. Thank you particularly to all the friends who have kept SCM going since 1921, because of you…I can be here on this day to write these words.
Much love and solidarity,
Sarah