Street Psalms trains and connects leaders around the globe to build communities of peace

In 2007, when he was a young pastor at a church plant in Salem, Oregon, the Rev. D.J. Vincent noticed that a group of unhoused people had been living in Cascades Gateway Park. He and his parishioners wanted to do something to help them out and settled on a simple idea: They’d host a potluck.

That impulse to share a single meal started a ministry that has grown into a multimillion-dollar nonprofit called Church @ the Park. It now offers outreach services, workforce development, emergency shelter and permanent housing to the area’s unhoused population. In 2024 they served nearly 2,000 people across six locations.

As Church @ the Park evolved, so too did Vincent’s approach to ministry. From his conversations with unhoused folks at the meals, he gained a new perspective about dignity, humility and relationships. He felt he needed to change the way he was thinking about his service work; in looking for guidance he came across Street Psalms, a faith-based organization committed to developing strong community leaders.

The organization, a network of more than 40 organizations in 100 cities around the world, was formed to help create “communities in mission” that foster human flourishing in urban spaces. Street Psalms is based on “theology from below” — that is, learning alongside people at the margins rather than imposing solutions from above. This approach aligned with Vincent’s experience at the potlucks.

“Street Psalms created a bubble of belonging for us,” Vincent said. “They value connectedness and relationship, and our organizational values are the Street Psalms values. We aren’t just a place for people to get resources, but where they can find value and dignity and responsibility.”

Learning to be peacemakers

Street Psalms calls itself a “sodal” expression of the church, as opposed to a more traditional “modal” one. “Sodal” comes from the Latin “sodalitas,” meaning “companion” or “partner.” The organization uses this description to explain how it seeks to develop leaders who are embedded in vulnerable urban communities, people who are trying to enact meaningful change in their cities.

“We’re an urban monastery without walls,” said Sarah Moore, Street Psalms’ senior fellow for applied research, who came to the organization after a career as a psychology professor. “We prepare people for the challenges they face out in the real world of service.”

Forming leaders who serve communities

Thompson has been with Street Psalms since it was founded in the 1990s. The organization initially served urban youth workers in Philadelphia and was an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trust. Kris Rocke, the current executive director, had written a curriculum for World Vision, a youth mentorship organization, and he realized that the leadership skills it cultivated could be applied to anyone looking to share the “good news in hard places.” In 2023, Street Psalms officially became a religious order.

“Our charism has crystallized, especially over the past eight years,” Thompson said. “We’re committed to the formation of leaders who are serving their communities. It takes a special kind of spirituality to do this work, and we realized people weren’t getting the training they needed in a more formal seminary.”

While Street Psalms has always mentored leaders in their specific contexts, its programming and curriculum has become more formalized and refined over the years. Its nontraditional seminary is not affiliated with a denomination and does not ordain pastors for local churches. Instead, it trains people to lead communities in mission. It ordained its first cohort of leaders in 2010.

“We say we’re joyfully unaccredited,” Moore said. “While we do not believe, not at all, that this replaces formalized and accredited seminary training, we do believe that this offers the type of transformational experience that prepares leaders to serve the sodal form of the church.”

Street Psalms offers a one-year novitiate program that ends in ordination. Through daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms and practices, as well as synchronous and asynchronous classes and workshops, ordinands learn the Incarnational Framework and how to employ it in their communities. Nearly 40 people around the globe have been ordained. The organization also has a one-year fellowship program that finances specific community projects. Funded by grants from large and small benefactors, it gives all of its materials away for free.

The program is rooted in a specific hermeneutic, a way of reading the Bible that prioritizes and centers the most vulnerable people in Bible stories and parables.

“What you practice with Street Psalms is a way of reading Scripture from below, from the perspective of the marginalized,” Thompson said.

“During my formal training for my M.Div., nobody helped me see that the context of Scripture is about people who were oppressed,” she said. “It’s written to tell that story, but you very rarely hear that. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, came about during the context of the Roman Empire. When you think about it like that it gives it a new resonance.”

Learning to read with this lens prepares leaders in urban communities to ask questions of the text that might unlock new significance for its constituents and to be open to new and surprising interpretations.

“One of the big things the church doesn’t talk enough about, that Street Psalms does talk about, is violence,” Thompson said. “It’s not just physical violence, either. It can be the political thing and the pressure to pick sides.

“With Street Psalms, we want to curate the kind of conversations that don’t create enemies on the other side. I don’t know where I’d be as a preacher or as a spiritual leader if I didn’t have this framework.”

Building ‘communities in mission’ around the globe

Street Psalms trains leaders to love their city and seek peace in it, which entails learning how to listen to their city’s “sacred song”— the literal meaning of “psalm.”

“With the name, you have two images coming together and resonating,” Thompson said. “’Street’ says, ‘I’m here,’ ‘I’m with my community.’ And ‘Psalms’ is all the joy and lament that you find there. All the raw ways history shows up through our people.”

The organization takes different forms with all its partners; every mushroom that blooms from the network is unique. These partners do many kinds of work, from homeless outreach to after-school programs to helping survivors of domestic abuse and walking with people coming out of prison. And they’re all over the globe.

When an organization commits to following the Incarnational Framework, it becomes a “community in mission,” which in the simplest terms means that it shares the See, Do, Be, Free philosophy and can tap into a web of support when it needs help navigating challenges that can arise when doing things with people and not just for them.

“We’re kind of like the wholesalers,” Moore said. “And our partners are the retailers.”

Changing the way leaders engage with the world

In addition to the seminary, Street Psalms runs a design studio that functions as a kind of incubator for innovative social change. Partners can put their ideas through their paces before testing them out in the world.

One idea that came out of this is the Preaching Peace Initiative. At gatherings called “Tables,” partners tackle issues that pertain to their communities using the Incarnational Framework and the “theology from below” hermeneutic. Thompson visited a Table at one of Street Psalms’ partners in Kenya.

“In Nairobi there was a Preaching Peace Table with Christian pastors and Muslim clerics, and they took a common theme and discussed it from their different perspectives,” she said, adding that there had been violence between these communities in the past.

“The theme was: ‘What does it mean to love your neighbor?’ So you get in this room and you see the kind of conversation about peace. It helped foster these ideas of abundance and peacemaking and asked what it would look like for that to exist there, in that community.”

Thompson likened that work to what Vincent is doing with Church @ the Park.

“They have a clear picture of what it means to serve the most vulnerable,” she said. “They have a common language of scarcity and abundance and what it means to work across difference for the sake of the poor.”

During the early potlucks, Vincent saw problems to be solved, needs to be met, deficits to be addressed — what he regards now as classic scarcity thinking. But as he listened to the people he was serving, he learned to see differently. His perspective shifted to one of abundance and collaboration. And he understood that the community already had what it needed to flourish.

“We grew into a ministry of mutuality, where folks can find not only resources, but value and dignity,” he said. “The goal is co-creating a better reality, and we are our best selves in community, not in isolation.”

Vincent now takes all of Church @ the Park’s staff through a version of the Incarnational Framework during their training. He wants the organization to be as inclusive as possible, serving people regardless of their faith background, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other typical dividing line. More than half of the employees don’t identify as religious, but they’ve found a sense of belonging in the organization and its mission for peace and relational abundance. This kind of radical acceptance and baseline humility is what helps make Street Psalms unique.

“It’s more than a curriculum or content,” Moore said. “If you embrace the framework, it changes the way you engage with the world.”

This Easter, I am focused on a little body. It’s been a while since I’ve raised four children; I’m out of practice caring for small people. But now as I babysit my 1-year-old granddaughter, I’m back to feeding, changing diapers and wiping goo off a little face. These are tasks I’m eager and willing to do, because my granddaughter is easily lovable.

It was not as fun or easy to care for my grandmother and my parents as their bodies grew old and their minds fuzzy. Their bodies suffered — from mobility issues, incontinence, dementia, pain and other indignities of aging. Caring for them in their frailty required me to dig deeper into my love, patience and respect for them.

My experiences bring to mind the story at the heart of Alice McDermott’s “The Ninth Hour.” As a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, Sister St. Saviour and other nuns in the novel serve an Irish American neighborhood in early-20th-century Brooklyn. It is a parish of those who are poor, abandoned, shut-in, unloved, widowed, orphaned.

These Nursing Sisters practice the fully embodied resurrection love of Jesus — sometimes despite the church —  touching wounds, feeding and healing bodies, offering compassion for broken minds and hearts.

It is profoundly loving — but to Greek and Roman ears, profoundly troubling — to believe that the fullness of God can dwell in a human body. Why would the perfection of divinity deign to deal with such messiness?

Jesus knew what it was to be in pain, to be lonely and to grieve. His healing ministries tended bodies young and old, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics, lepers, and those with infirm spirits. He made it his business to touch society’s cast-asides.

Through his own incarnation, Jesus endured the horror of crucifixion, the agonizing death of a criminal, an outcast. But through this final physical act of sacrifice, Jesus is resurrected and promises each of us resurrection of the body, joy and eternal life.

On Easter, he overcomes death to offer new life and the love that transforms our suffering world. Our task is not to flee embodiment but to fully embrace it with the divine love that he modeled for us.

While the sisters in McDermott’s novel are not saints, they exemplify Christ’s Easter love, a sensory offering of sacrifice.

Their story is set in crumbling tenement houses, seedy bars, funeral homes and sour-smelling alleys. In the nitty-gritty of their ministry, the nuns change diapers for shut-ins, shave the faces of old men, cleanse wounds, clean up bloody vomit, birth babies in dirty apartments, and diagnose ringworm, edema and anemia. They comfort the lonely and the bereaved.

At 64, Sister St. Saviour deals with her own arthritis, swollen legs and constant need to pee. Yet she, like the other sisters, ministers to her flock daily, walking for blocks in the cold and damp New York air to serve those confined to their beds.

“It would be a different church if I were running it!” she declares at one point.

Sister St. Saviour is funny, brave, compassionate, realistic and unafraid to break rigid church rules. When a young man named Jim loses his job and commits suicide, she instructs the nuns to disguise his final act so that his body can be buried in the church cemetery. The sisters know how important care of the body is, even in death. To Sister St. Saviour, mercy is more important than church dogma.

That Jim is afforded a Christian burial comforts Annie and Sally, his widow and young daughter. The nuns give them work in the convent’s basement laundry, a place of cleanliness, structure and protection. Sally has a peaceful childhood, raised lovingly by the sisters and her mother, and eventually decides to take orders herself.

But on an overnight Pullman train from Pennsylvania Station to the order of sisters in Chicago, where she will explore her vocation, Sally encounters an ugly side to humanity, facing sexual advances and a swindler, and witnessing child abuse, fear and evil.

She knows that her vocation is being tested and wants to respond mercifully like the nuns would, but she is overwhelmed by the sights, sounds and smells of her fellow travelers. Sally can’t imagine loving people she doesn’t like or trust, people who mean to do her harm.

She is going to have to give her life to others, she realizes, “in the name of the crucified Christ and His loving mother.”

She remembers that one of the nuns, Sister Jeanne, said that “love stood before brutality in that moment on Golgotha and love was triumphant. Love applied to suffering, as Sister Illuminata put it: like a clean cloth to a seeping wound.”

The train ride reveals to Sally that she wants to offer only a sanitized love. She wants to wear a clean, starched habit and wants a clean cloth, “immaculate and pure,” to place against humanity’s wounds. She wants to pray the hours, speak softly and offer relief to a wretched world.

But she also wants, “in some equal, more furious way, not to be mocked for it; not to be fooled.” When she arrives at the station in Chicago, she tells the waiting nuns, “I’ve thought better of it.”

Like Jesus, Sally is expected to love the unlovable — and she is unable to do it. The demands of Christly love and sacrifice prove too much.

Resurrection love is not repulsed by the realities of bodies, as Sister St. Saviour knows. Rather, it continues Jesus’ work of touching the untouchable, feeding the hungry, healing the sick and caring for those cast aside by society. Such redemptive love restores human dignity and respect and believes in the resurrection of the body, even if those who offer it must sometimes endure scorn.

This Easter, how can we practice the realities of love? Not an idealistic, clean-cloth love but the earthy, embodied love of Jesus that restores and heals bodies and requires forgiveness, humility and sacrifice. Which bodies need our care? The incarnated and resurrected Christ has shown us the way.

More than 16 years ago, on the first day of my first real job in higher education, my supervisor treated me to lunch. Over grilled cheese and tomato soup, she said something that has stuck with me all this time: “I believe in you, and I want this job to be an opportunity for your growth and development, so let’s be sure to focus on that.”

I was coming out of a toxic church situation, and my new supervisor’s offer of support and mentorship gave me hope in my new role.

I am grateful for having had many wonderful mentors in my career as a pastor and higher education administrator. Their generous investment in me has inspired me to mentor others.

My first leadership mentor was my mother, who, after serving as a super church volunteer for more than 30 years, finally accepted a call to ordained ministry and served for 15 years as a senior pastor.

My mother modeled inclusion; for example, she took a special interest in the youth group kids. Every year, we hosted a big Halloween party at my parents’ farm in rural Illinois, with my dad driving the hayride tractor. Mom would work the phones, organizing transportation to make sure all the kids could get there.

She frequently disrupted our church system by not only serving as a woman in a leadership role but also including other women in leadership positions.

Achieving inclusion in leadership continues to be a problem across institutions. The number of women, and particularly women of color, who reach senior leadership roles continues to be small. In higher education, a clear majority (58%) of college students are women, yet only 33% of college presidents are women. Approximately half of college students identify as a race other than white, yet 73% of college presidents identify as white.

Representation is not more abundant in the church world, and in many ways, is worse. In my own United Methodist Church, where women are widely accepted for ordination and are a clear majority of members, only 32% of clergy are women. And the church remains one of the most racially segregated institutions in the United States.

This lack of representation in senior leadership roles is a wicked problem that requires individual, institutional and systemic solutions. I’ve come to believe that one important piece of the solution on an individual level is mentoring.

All along the way, I have felt frustrated that I am not making a bigger impact — and a bit terrified that I, as a white male, will do more harm than good by seeking to mentor people with identities different from mine. It puts a knot in my stomach to write publicly about my intentions in this area where I have so much to learn, but it is starting to seem more problematic to be silent. I recognize that white men can play a key role as gatekeepers.

I’ve had successes and failures. I’m happy to say that of the 21 employees I have had the privilege of hiring, most have been women and/or people of color, and most of them are thriving in new leadership roles. One of my proudest professional accomplishments was pivoting the leadership of a church I planted to a woman who has since led that church for more than 10 years.

I’ve also made mistakes. In one instance, I pushed one mentee too hard in my eagerness to develop what I saw to be her talents. In the end, I apologized and acknowledged, “I did a bad job of listening.”

In the academic literature on leadership development for women and people of color, mentoring comes up frequently. Recent studies that center the voices of women and people of color suggest that while mentoring may be helpful, what’s needed most are people who will move beyond merely mentoring to advocacy on their behalf.

I am now convinced that mentoring and advocating for mentees is crucial to progress. I’ve found success with a particular style of mentoring I think of as “mindful mentoring.”

Mindful mentoring moves beyond simply investing in someone to identifying, addressing and dismantling the systems that lead to disparity and inequity. The starting point is awareness of who is in your sphere of influence.

One theory I find useful is Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), which attempts to describe the quality of exchange in the relationship between leaders and the people influenced by them.

It describes an in-group and an out-group. In the workplace, those in the in-group have a deep connection and high-quality relationships with the leader. Studies have shown that being in the in-group leads to higher job satisfaction, commitment, performance and innovative behavior.

Those in the out-group are under the supervision of the leader but lack the high-quality connection of the in-group, and all the outcomes previously mentioned are worse.

The first step to being a mindful mentor is awareness. I know how easy it is for a white male in a senior position to forget his privilege, and I recommend a simple exercise to help leaders be mindful of their relationships.

Take a sheet of paper and draw two large circles, one inside the other. Label the inner circle “in-group” and the outer circle “out-group.” Next, write in the in-group circle the names of the people in your sphere of leadership with whom you have a great connection.

Then fill in the out-group circle. Finally, apply the lens of gender and race to the names on the paper. Who is in your circle(s) of influence? Who is missing?

When I first tried this exercise, I was surprised and disappointed to see how many people in my inner circle looked like me. I now complete this exercise twice a year. It’s helped me be aware of who is in my in-group and to strategize about how to move women and people of color from the out-group to the in-group.

Being a mindful mentor includes doing your own work of self-awareness, striving for cultural humility, uncovering your own implicit biases, and perpetually attempting to understand why these representation disparities exist in the first place.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed at the scale and scope of the work that needs to be done, but being a mindful mentor is practicing hope by focusing on what is within your control. Be aware of your immediate context and think concretely about what you can do today to make a difference.

I have two little daughters, and my deep desire is that they will grow up in a world where their gender will not limit the leaders they can be. Currently, their primary care physician is a woman, and we have many female family friends who are medical professionals. The other day, one of my daughters asked me, “Daddy, can boys be doctors too?”

I said, “Yes, boys can choose to be doctors too.” This kind of upside-down thinking motivates me to be the best mindful mentor I can be.

While various denominations have established policies regarding women’s roles, the number of women serving in religious leadership capacities has surged in recent decades.

According to research conducted by theologian Eileen Campbell-Reed, 20.7% of American clergy were women as of 2016 — up from 2.3% in 1960.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which represents 4 million members, reported in 2022 that 40% of its pastors were women. In the Assemblies of God, 27.6% of its ministers currently are women.

The Rev. Dr. Kamilah Hall Sharp, who is affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), exemplifies a growing trend among women embracing roles as congregational leaders. Even as some question whether — and how — they should lead, women like Hall Sharp are pursuing alternative pathways to their religious calling.

Hall Sharp, along with the Rev. Dr. Irie Lynne Session, co-founded The Gathering, a womanist church in Dallas. The two ordained ministers planted the church in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denomination, after determining that they could fill a void by bringing to the forefront Black women’s voices. On its website, The Gathering describes its context this way: “As more preachers, pastors and ministers of the word intentionally do the deeper exegetical work of interrogating the sacred biblical texts to raise up the muted voices of women, the theological landscape for womanism continues to expand.”

“We obviously still see women who are having to fight to be in spaces and to be affirmed in spaces,” said Hall Sharp, who also is the director of the Doctor of Ministry in Public Ministry Program at Chicago Theological Seminary. “But I also see a trend in which women are welcomed and starting to create their own tables. My church is an example of creating your own table — within a denominational setting.”

Hall Sharp, a former practicing attorney, pursued a theological degree because she felt a call to ministry. After earning her master of divinity at Memphis Theological Seminary, she moved to Texas to pursue a doctorate in biblical interpretation with a focus in Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School.

Despite her credentials, she encountered roadblocks. “In Texas, there aren’t a lot of spaces for women,” Hall Sharp said. “I struggled with finding a church home for a while.”

As a result, Hall Sharp and Session started brainstorming about creating a new space where people could experience womanist preaching. “It eventually evolved into a church. Because we’re both ordained in Disciples of Christ, it became a new church of Disciples of Christ.”

The two didn’t initially consider planting a church. “As it is for a lot of women, we started the church out of necessity,” said Hall Sharp, who co-authored the book “The Gathering, A Womanist Church: Origins, Stories, Sermons and Litanies.”

“We didn’t have support from our denomination to start the church. And even when we did get financial support, it wasn’t a lot,” she said.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which has ordained women since the 1880s, recently appointed the Rev. Teresa Hord Owens to a second term as general minister and president in the United States and Canada — the first person of color and second woman to lead the denomination — but women continue to have fewer opportunities than men, Hall Sharp said.

In her experience, she said, women are typically assigned to or hired at churches that aren’t able to pay as much. “As a result, they’re never able to really be a full-time pastor,” Hall Sharp said. “So many women in ministry have to have other jobs, because they typically don’t get the churches with all the resources.”

Hall Sharp’s experience highlights a common theme of continued inequity among women taking on leadership roles, according to Campbell-Reed, a visiting associate professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York and co-director of the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project.

“Many women are doing great, but there’s still controversy and conflict everywhere they go,” Campbell-Reed said. “We still have inequities in pay and disparities about where women can start and the extent to which they can grow. They’re still more likely to get associate roles or roles in very small churches.”

Rabbi Dr. Rachel Mikva, a professor of Jewish studies and the senior faculty fellow of the InterReligious Institute at Chicago Theological Seminary, has observed similar patterns in rabbinic roles. She noted that women are leading two of the major rabbinic seminaries. In 2020, Jewish Theological Seminary appointed Shuly Rubin Schwartz as its new chancellor — the first woman to hold the role since its founding in 1886 — and Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld became president of Hebrew College in 2018.

Those types of developments obviously have been helped by women’s movements across the United States, Mikva said. “However, it’s not without bumps. Women have been moving into rabbinic positions, but not every community was immediately ready to hire a woman to be the rabbi,” she said.

While planting The Gathering was challenging, Hall Sharp said, the rewards were worth it. She said one of the major benefits was providing other women a platform to develop. “It’s difficult to create new spaces, because you don’t necessarily get the financial support that you see others getting,” she said. “But it’s been very rewarding, because people have found a place where they can feel whole; they can come as their complete selves.”

Hall Sharp envisions a future in which women are embraced in their roles as leaders. “I hope to see more women be OK with who they are, to be able to walk authentically, and to see more spaces where they are affirmed and appreciated and their leadership is respected,” she said.