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The drag show has just started. I feel my husband’s hand in mine. I chose a mesh top deliberately. After doing church in the morning, then changing into a clerical collar for Pride, I wanted something a little more free.
“Excuse me.” I turn. A woman is looking at me with this expression I can’t place. “You’re that priest from Pride, right? The one who was blessing people?”
My throat goes dry. Because, yes, a few hours ago, armed with as much biodegradable glitter as the RE supply closet contained, we spent hours blessing anyone who needed it. Saying to each person:
You are beloved. You are made of the same stuff as the stars, which means you belong in this universe, and you deserve to shine.
Now I’m here in mesh and kinda trying to disappear into the crowd.
“Are you like, a real priest?”
“I’m a real minister, yeah.”
“I watched you today,” she continues, eyeing me with quiet doubt. “I was trying to figure out if you were for real. But the way you looked at those kids—it was like you could see right into their souls. You were just emanating love for them.”
My clerical collar is draped over the bedroom chair at home. But I might as well be wearing it to the club, because there is no off-duty when it comes to community, not really.
Even when you can’t figure out what exactly you should say or do.
Community Organizing 201 is about strategy and tactics, power analysis and policy change, about building coalitions and making lasting social change.
But I’m a 101 person. Community Organizing 101 isn’t about mass mobilization. It’s about moments like I had standing in a bar, where you find yourself between worlds, holding all of who you are, letting other people witness what that looks like, and doing the same for them. And together, imperfectly, fumbling towards a belonging that is our birthright.
Belonging is where community organizing begins, ends, and spirals back to, again and again.
At the bar, I stand clutching my drink, stumbling to figure out what the hell to say. My husband, who is used to my social inadequacies, introduces himself. This prompts me to remember what to do next.
“My name’s Sean,” I say. “What’s yours?”
It’s so small, but it changes everything.
When I know your name, conversations start to deepen. I might get to hear what you like to do, what makes your heart race with excitement. As trust builds, I might get the privilege of learning where you’re really from—not just the ZIP code, but who shaped you, what broke you open, what put you back together.
I might hear the raw edges of your pain, which always leads to glimpses of the powers hiding inside each of us—that might just change everything, as Reggie Joiner, Kristen Ivy, and Virginia Ward write in It’s Personal: Five Questions You Should Answer to Give Every Kid Hope.
When you take someone’s grief and mix it with their power, adding their deepest passions, and then give it time, you start to assemble family. And, as Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen reminds us, “We fight like hell for family.”
That’s why you can’t organize strangers, because strangers don’t bleed for each other. But people who know each other’s names, have heard each other’s stories, and seen each other’s scars and gifts? They do.
And how can we become family if I don’t even know your name?
So, “My name’s Sean. Can I learn your name?” So we might cast off our strangerness, just a little, as Henri Nouwen suggests. The pain of the world needs us to fight like family.
The Natural Progression
I’ve lived in Fort Collins, Colorado, for a decade now, and it’s only in the past four years that I’ve felt the years of showing up finally start to bear fruit.
Six years of appearing at the gay bars and community meetings in my clerical collar. Showing up for vigils. Accepting coffee invites. Making new connections and then having them move away, burn out, or blow up.
Now when I show up at a Pride event in my collar, and someone’s religious trauma gets activated, and I can see them eyeing me with suspicion like I am the world’s worst undercover homophobe, someone else will step in and introduce me to them: “This is Sean. He’s from that good church—what is it? Unity? United? It’s that gay church.”
Over time, in the long arc of showing up, you will find that slowly, awkwardly, you are weaving a network of contacts that will transform through coffee dates and meal trains and rides to the airport into something you never expected.
It can’t be rushed or manufactured. It can’t be strategized into existence. It can only be grown.
As the late, great Grace Lee Boggs reminds us: “Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.”
Your power isn’t in your follower count—it’s in who will take your call at 10 p.m. Who trusts you enough to say “yes” before they know what you’re asking.
Back to the bar. As we finish our introductions, the drag show host introduces the next performer. Krisa Gonna, a Brazilian goddess, glides on stage. And I’m overcome, just a little.
I’m remembering the first time I went to Pride—which my UU church took me to, by the way—where I felt my queer loneliness lessen just a little. And I remember the first time I met Krisa. We negotiated for her to perform during worship, in what was meant to be a one-time gig that she would never have taken if she hadn’t heard rumors of what our church was really about in the community.
Her performance at worship caused a chain reaction. Months later, I asked if we could put on a drag nativity pageant together. Our sanctuary was filled over two nights with 700 people for the opening of A Drag Christmas Spectacular. Congregants, neighbors, queer families from Wyoming and Texas. I watched the cast become family. They thanked me and the church for allowing them to do this, because they never thought of their art as sacred.
When we did it again the next year, the performers, a bit more trusting, opened up about the challenges of their lives, of rent hikes, and medical bills, and the cost of their art. One of them said, “Can your church do something to help drag performers who are struggling?”
So how could we not start a mutual aid fund (FierceTogether.org), which we launched in the fall of 2025 to support our Northern Colorado Drag Community because we are fierce together? We’ve distributed over $2,000 so far with more to come.
People Join People, Not Ideas
Standing in that bar, watching Krisa perform, I look around the gathering of sweaty humans and feel something I recognize—the experience of worship, just by another name. And I have the strangest thought: I think this is why people go to Trump rallies.
I’m going to ask you to hold some complexity with me. I am not equating a drag show with a Trump rally.
But I’m asking a more human question, not about how they arrive at the feelings, but the longing that drives them.
Look at a Trump rally. It’s not a policy briefing, it’s a revival meeting. People wearing the same hats, chanting the same chants, feeling like they’re part of something bigger than their own loneliness. They’ve built a culture where showing up angry feels like coming home.
Scot Nakagawa at the 22nd Century Initiative notes that when factories closed and jobs disappeared, it wasn’t just paychecks that vanished, whole communities fell apart. The places where people used to gather, the shared rituals that made them feel like they mattered—gone.
Into that emptiness stepped authoritarians. They didn’t lead with policy papers or five-point plans but with something much more powerful: “You belong here.” They turned politics into family reunion, complete with inside jokes, shared enemies, and the warm feeling that you’ve finally found your way home.
Sometimes, we progressive and religious liberals forget that people don’t join a cause. People join people. Not ideas. Not institutions. Not issues. People join people.
What authoritarians do well is create the cultural practices of belonging for their people.
We, as progressives, rightly criticize the version of belonging that is being offered. But sometimes we forget that all the right ideas and plans won’t make you feel less alone. We need to build a culture and an experience that can and does.
People don’t want to be convinced, they want to feel claimed by a “we” that doesn’t dissolve who they are but magnifies it in a shared power.
What is a UU theology of organizing? I’m not totally sure. But I’m pretty sure it begins and ends in attempting an embrace of belonging that is bigger and more powerful than fear.
Krisa’s number ends. The crowd erupts. I whip out my phone and text her, “That was phenomenal.” She texts back, “Thank you … Are you able to come to my drag brunch on Sunday to raise some more money for the fund?”
I just chuckle.
We’re not strangers anymore, so I say, “Yes. If it’s after church.”
Putting my faith in the small acts of showing up, building a culture that tries to make belonging real, not just proclaimed.
Because the pain of the world needs us to fight like family.
So, “My name’s Sean. What’s yours?”
Adapted with permission from the Sophia Lyon Fahs Lecture presented at General Assembly 2025.