How to Start a Sisterhood Chapter

By Chaaron Pearson, Sisterhood of Progressive Christians Co-Founder

Let’s walk hand in hand. Valerie Everett/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

Joining the Sisterhood of Progressive Christians connects you with a nationwide network of women who are looking to actively combine their faith and political leanings into ministry and action. We look to encourage, educate, and learn from one another through in-person meetings and our online communities.

Given the great value of gathering face-to-face, consider starting a chapter in your city to bring together progressive Christian women to share, grow, and serve.

First, more about us.

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.

Steps to Start a Chapter in Your Community:

1. Familiarize yourself with the Sisterhood of Progressive Christians blog (Sisterhood Chronicles) and social media presence (Facebook, Twitter). If you’re picking up what we’re putting down — this is the place for you!
2. Find a couple of other sisters who feel a similar calling to build a “local founders” group. We all have different talents that make for a successful sisterhood. Don’t let the burden of organizing fall on only one pair of shoulders.
3. Have conversations with local faith leaders to help secure a meeting location and to build an outreach network.
4. Secure a meeting location (we’ve had great luck with homes or church fellowship halls).
5. Create a social media presence specific to your location (you can/should use all Sisterhood logos — email spcsisterhoodchronicles@gmail.com for hi-res files). Invite people to join your group and also connect them with the national Sisterhood pages.
6. Publicize your meetings! Don’t stop at social media. See if you can include your meeting blurb in Sunday bulletins or on church/community announcement boards.
7. Set an agenda! We encourage meetings to begin and end with prayer and to keep the scripture as a guiding force of conversation. We all need room to share and vent — but keeping the meeting structured allows dedicated time for that conversation while keeping the focus on support, ministry, and action. For the first meeting, a round of introductions and “why you’re here” is fun and powerful. Invite speakers from other faith communities and nonprofits to speak to your members. Break up into small groups for facilitated conversations. We also strongly encourage snacks.
8. Collect names and email addresses of attendees to share info with those who don’t pay close attention to social media. Use those addresses to create a Google Group for quick communication.
9. Get your next meeting on the calendar to share in-person.
10. Invite your sisters to engage with Sisterhood of Progressive Christians on social media and to contribute to the blog (editorial guidelines here). We think in-person meetings should be local, but the movement should be national.
11. Go forth and be awesome!

Please let us know if you are starting a chapter. We want to connect with you and support you. This is not a moment — it’s a movement!