Here’s one particularly interesting case of a church turning itself around, re-orienting around community support and raising political consciousness from an explicitly anti-capitalist angle. At least one of the co-pastors is on Twitter—John Thorton Jr (@johnthorntonjr)—and worth following.
Anne Helen Peterson in Buzzfeed News:
On Wednesday night at Jubilee Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a group sits around the same sort of rickety conference table you’d find in churches all over the town, the state, the country. In the cabinets behind them, there are old Baptist tracts and stacks of New Testaments with covers declaring GOOD NEWS AMERICA, GOD LOVES YOU. But no one’s reading Galatians tonight. They’re reading Karl Marx.
“Let’s go around and introduce ourselves,” says Joe Stapleton, the high school English teacher leading the class. “Names, pronouns, how you’re feeling.”
Everyone opens their handouts — a section of Marx’s Capital, with handy summaries and annotations. They work slowly through the idea of use value versus exchange value and commodity fetishism. It’s most people’s first time with the material, and it’s admittedly a slog. At one point, after a particularly theoretical passage, someone exclaimed, “What the hell did I just read?”
…
A year ago, the congregation, then called Ephesus Baptist, had dwindled from a solid membership of several hundred people in the ’90s down to just twelve regular attendees, the youngest of whom was in his fifties. The church had half a million in savings, but its demise seemed imminent. Then Georgas, the pastor at the time, had a wild idea: What if the church started over entirely and used the savings to help repay the debts of its members — and others in the community in need?
This September, Ephesus was reborn as Jubilee Baptist: a quasi-socialist, anti-burnout, anti-racist, LGBTQ-affirming church focused on debt forgiveness and worker solidarity. When I spent a week at Jubilee this October, it felt vital, and alive, in a way I have not experienced in over three decades of attending church. It doesn’t feel like a social justice club or particularly cool in any way. It just feels like a place where people genuinely care about other people — which, in the current landscape of American Christianity, can feel incredibly radical.