Activist Theology Quotes

“I preached at First Congregational Church of Battle Creek, Michigan, in June 2017, and they shared this version of “Come Thou Fount” with me. I share it with you here as a call to action and as an invitation to the politics of resilience in an age of the tyranny of the now:

Come thou fount of every blessing, give me courage to resist.
Oh dear God they came and killed you, but at death you shook your fist.
Make me clever like the steward, make me angry like the poor,
teach me to unbind the captive, teach me to unbar the door.

O dear God, I have such power, that I never toiled to earn.
Help me wield it for liberation, may the fires of your justice burn.
Guide me God to read you truly, may your truth be named and heard,
When I read the holy scripture, help me God to hear your Word.

Moving Wind, your seed of justice, grows into a mustard tree—
it is so big, and obnoxious, is there room there, God, for me?
O my Jesus, come like leaven, infiltrate our hearts and minds
as we struggle to be human, help us to decolonize.

When the powers stand against us, when we join hands with the meek,
help us God against their fury; wield the weapons of the weak.
As we stand up to oppression, as we speak the truth to power—
Holy One, you walk beside us: we need you every hour.

While I struggle with my hatred, with my fear and bigotry:
help me Lord to join your struggle, help me dance this way with thee.
Give me prophets to confront me, give me comrades in the call!
Give me visions of that day when we will see the powers fall!”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“There is no theology without activism, and there is no activist without theology.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“Activist theology seeks to be grounded in transformative leadership, which is a critical approach to leadership grounded in Freire’s fourfold call in 1970 for critical awareness of conscientization, followed by critical reflection, critical analysis, and finally activism or critical action against the injustices of which one has become aware.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“Without story, theory is just cloaked in good ideas.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“When we take seriously the role of becoming in our own theological formation, we move from a static theological orientation to one that is situated more relationally.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“We often think about disruption in negative ways, but what if disruption becomes the condition for us to create another possible world through loving one another into our shared humanity and helping each other wake up from the shared inhumanity of what confronts us all? Waking up from the shared inhumanity is more than coming to acknowledge the greatest social violence of our time, poverty; it is also learning to love ourselves and the center of our own difference.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“We cannot escape theologies and ethics; that, too, is a struggle! Yet, honoring our theological values that animate our work and drive our social practices can help minimize the struggle by offering us places of belonging and bonding in a world that rather fragments us and damns us to the other side, where death lingers.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“Theology, as my friend Clayton Crockett writes, “is an open-ended discourse about value and meaning in an ultimate sense.” This is why theology and ethics are political and must be reframed as activism in order for us to achieve a new heaven and a new earth in these moments of tyranny.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“The ways of Jesus were never intended to be institutionalized. They were institutionalized as a result of power and control and the ways that post-Constantine Christianity can only be understood as empire religion.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“Thinking that progress will initiate peacemaking is the myth of cultural reform; instead, the work of midwifing more shalom in the world requires revolutionary love.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“We must move out of a state of confusion and into a state of revolutionary politics that does not care about what we all believe but rather cares about how we live. Perhaps protest can be focused on our shared politics, instead of the beliefs and dogmas that keep people paralyzed in fear-based theologies. Protesting the creeds doesn’t necessarily lead us into confessing the politics we want. So we need to make certain that our protests embody the politics we want to fortify. By politics, I mean our lived practices that shape our communities.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“The struggle to name anti-black sentiment and anti-queer sentiment in the early 2000s was a very isolating experience. Further, naming the way that assimilationist politics were framing the LGBTQIA movement in their fight for marriage equality over against homeless queer youth and discrimination was also part and parcel of my work of naming the ways we all capitulate to the logic of the norm, an ever-expansive fold that flattens out differences and demands that we all acquiesce to the dominant culture.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“I had long since found that church and faith communities were the place where I could understand my deepest questions that society could not answer. Church was also the place that could not hold my complexities. I have learned the hard way about church and religion and the ways that supremacy culture also manages faith communities. I have left church time and time again because the institutional church doesn’t enflesh the politics of radical difference, which I had hoped it would. Though I have left, the church won’t let me go.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“For communities of color who have experienced the impact of the infiltration of violence and drugs (in many cases funded and perpetuated by the US government), the violence of poverty, and the class wars that ensue, it’s challenging to have an imagination for collective liberation. What is most important is surviving; thriving is often not accessible. Likewise, for the dominant culture, we are not skilled in divesting from strategies that harm the least of these. The work of imagining a different future takes great skill and active participation in the practices of reparations and restorative justice to lay a solid foundation for change to materialize. Not only does this work require an active divestment from privilege and supremacy culture, but it also requires the deep internal work that can result in transformation of one’s own self.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“Activist theology is working in the hybrid space of church, academy, and movements for justice, because not only is theology the queen of the sciences, but this entanglement of these three social institutions becomes important for dismantling the hegemonic systems of white supremacy, economic supremacy, and what my colleague Rev. Alba Onofrio calls Christian supremacy. Further, this entanglement offers a new imagination for the work of collective liberation. This entanglement of these three social institutions demands new methodologies that displace the hegemony of off-cited intellectualism that silences those who are on the ground strategizing for change.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology

“Part of my interest in philosophy and theology is coming to learn the narrative landscape of the theorists and philosophers who are writing the material. There’s always a story behind people’s theory, behind people’s philosophy and theology.”
― Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Activist Theology