About the Sisterhood

As women of faith with deep political convictions, we’ve held our spiritual and political identities close to the chest — and largely separate — expressing our beliefs and opinions mostly in the company of like-minded friends. We have a healthy anxiety about entangling the religious with the political.

So what has changed? As we think about the path forward for our country, we feel called as Christians to do everything we can to fight against racism, violence, poverty, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, able-ism, and the devastating consequences of global climate change. The religious perspectives on these issues reflected in media and culture are often in deep conflict with our own and with what we understand to be true about the life and ministry of Christ. We are convinced that we are not alone in wrestling with this.

For that reason, we are forming the Sisterhood of Progressive Christians to support and inspire one another as we work through how we can best engage on these issues personally and politically. For example, we hope to explore how we can help refugees in our community, promote interfaith understanding, and also find opportunities to engage politically in support of these beloved children of God.

The vision is to build a diverse coalition of Christian women across a wide range of denominations. We also hope to provide a spiritual outlet for women who don’t belong to any denomination, or have moved away from church attendance for various reasons.

We recognize that each participant will bring different priorities and perspectives to the table. Ideally, these differences will deepen and strengthen our faith and activism, and bring us together in an authentic way to support one another, create a safe, open, and constructive environment, and lead to opportunities for meaningful action.

We find inspiration in the words of Brene Brown in her book Daring Greatly: “When religious leaders leverage our fear and need for more certainty by extracting vulnerability from spirituality and turning faith into ‘compliance and consequences,’ rather than teaching and modeling how to wrestle with the unknown and how to embrace mystery, the entire concept of faith is bankrupt on its own terms. Faith minus vulnerability equals politics, or worse, extremism. Spiritual connection and engagement is not built on compliance, it’s the product of love, belonging, and vulnerability.”

We seek to cultivate that love, belonging, and vulnerability in a broken world. We hope you’ll join us.