Our Trip to Southern Lights 2025

Diagnosing Our Past and Present Challenges

As I wrote last week, this past weekend we traveled to St. Simons Island, Georgia to attend the Southern Lights conference. I had no idea what to expect but knew that it was organized by Diana Butler Bass and Brian McClaren and that Robert P. (Robbie) Jones was one of the speakers.

We used to vacation on Jekyll Island, just a little south of there (we visited Friday morning) and it seemed good to return to the area. After we had our reservations and flight info, we learned the weather here in Denver was going to be bone-chillingly cold, so that was an unplanned bonus.

There were something like 700 people there with another 300 participating virtually. Surprisingly, we were close to the median age of the crowd. Some folks had been attending for two decades. From conversations over meals, these were all people of faith, predominantly in mainline churches, and left of center politically.

I got to meet two people who subscribe to this SubStack: Holly Berkley Fletcher and Tim Kerr (they are both younger than the median age). Holly writes the Zebra Without Stripes SubStack. Tim works with the Wild Goose Festival.

The format of the sessions was interesting. First, a speaker would share for about 30 minutes. Then Ken Medema would improvise a song around the themes of the speaker’s address. This was followed by Q&A with the audience. After a couple of speakers, the participants would sit down on couches and dialogue over what they had said and heard.¹

Diana Butler Bass² was first up on Friday afternoon. As a historian, she argued that American society since the turn of the 20th century has been characterized by core cultural themes that are then punctured by a societal disruption. A theme of increased safety of the progressive movement was disrupted by the dropping of the atomic bomb. The next theme focused on security, with the Soviet Union as the foil. That was disrupted by 9/11. The next period was surveillance, characterized by distrust and observation. January 6, 2021 marked the end of that period. So we are now in something new and in a liminal space before the next shared theme emerges. Perhaps the next phase will be a culture of connection. I talked with her about how the weakened version of the prior themes still remain. For example, the Trump administration’s view of immigration is characterized by outlandish appeals to safety and security and the failure of surveillance.

Ken Medema improvising a song after Diana’s talk

Brian’s talk focused on the importance of adequately diagnosing the symptoms we’re experiencing and how we need to engage in differential diagnoses to determine the root causes of the conditions that are presenting themselves. He opened with a story about his son’s medical diagnosis and why even when the news was troubling, it was better to have an appropriate plan of treatment than not to know. He connected themes of environmental devastation, climate change, overconsumption, and technology. He called for us to have a better understanding and clearer story to name our current experiences and path forward.³

Robbie Jones was the after-dinner speaker. He addressed themes in his two most recent books, White Too Long and The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy. I was prepared for lots of charts and tables since he is the former CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute. What we got instead was personal reflection and a challenge. He argued that we have been given “the sacred gift of white discomfort”, that to truly wrestle with the ways in which we’ve been complicit in “a failed apartheid state”. He spoke of the Live Oaks on the conference grounds which are old enough to have been here when the slave quarters were occupied on the then-plantation. He asked “how can we deal with being the beneficiaries of such lies?”

On Saturday, we heard from Dante Stewart and Jacqui Lewis, both persons of color. Jacqui said it was their “nice white people tour”. He is a writer and she is the pastor at Middle Collegiate Church in Manhattan. For whatever reason, I didn’t take notes on Saturday, hoping I’d remember important themes. Thankfully, Holly Fletcher did and wrote about it on her SubStack today.

All the speakers were outstanding, including Diana and Brian themselves. But I was most moved by Rev. Jacqui Lewis and author Danté Stewart, whose presence with us increased our racial diversity by, well, two people. And Danté, who is only 32, lowered our average age by a smidge. Rev. Lewis joked that they were on the “nice white people tour.” She admitted it’s not always a comfortable tour to be on, but she felt called to it because “we are not going to fix what’s broken in silos.”

But Danté’s words really hit their mark, given the headspace I’ve been in. He spoke to the tension between staying and going, between finding home and making it, of thinking of home “as a question and not an answer.”

“There’s nothing wrong with running,” he said. “But there’s something sacred about being where you’re at.” Blacks who stayed in the South, and still do, as he does, “find a way to dig deep…to find a way through what we have to face.”²

He read one of his beautiful poems entitled, “You Get to Be Alive.” I can’t begin to do it justice—I was too mesmerized to take notes—but the message I took away was that we shape our worlds even as they break our hearts. We belong to our worlds even after they do.

The conference concluded Sunday morning with a screening of a documentary about a Colossians Forum project that brought together a group of Grand Rapids clergy in a long-term experience of community that had me thinking of books Scott Peck wrote years ago. We closed with communion and lunch and then went our separate ways.

During Robbie’s talk, I found myself thinking about Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory as well as Amanda Tyler’s How to End Christian Nationalism. Alberta’s book documents the myriad ways in which White Christian Nationalism has infiltrated evangelical congregations and hard it is to dislodge it. is to “organize for change”. It struck me that it will be hard to actively confront our history, as Robbie calls for, within the church.

But maybe, just maybe, a bunch of white haired senior citizens can create change outside the congregation with the hope of eventually bringing it back inside. The conversations around the tables at meals made me believe that this might be just the treatment our condition requires.

1. This is the same format I saw at the Evolving Faith conferences in 2018 and 2019, also managed by Chaffee Productions.

2. I met Diana as participants in a grant consultation in Stowe, Vermont in the early 1990s.

3. I just read Hartmut Rosa’s Democracy Needs Religion (it’s only 66 pages long) which addresses some similar themes. I’ll write about Rosa’s book on Monday.