Do Love Walk

It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, the same hour when many are standing to sing. —Martin Luther King, Jr

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves. —Dali Lama

Without forgiveness, there’s no future. —Desmond Tutu

And what does the LORD require of you?
To do justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. —Jewish prophet Micah

You can disagree with another person’s opinions.You can disagree with their doctrines. You can’t disagree with their experience. —Krista Tippett

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. —Buckminster Fuller

Why is it that so many of us activist, committed to justice in the inner city, are tortured about our inner lives? What have so many of us had experiences to prove religion as something that divides more than it unites? We’re not sure why. But we’ve decided to curate a shared experience  to discover together, and to build a distinctly different future for Atlanta.  We’re cooking up a monthly happening in SW Atlanta designed by a diverse group of Atlanta Creatives to inspire integration between activism and spirituality.

Stay tuned for more details about Do-Love-Walk!  If you want to join the collective of conspirators in the planning and design stage, click here to download a PDF with some details.  Our next design session is January 6th from 8-10pm at Metro Merge, we’ll be discussing format, location, and space design, and set a target launch date.


About

The Abbey organized in the fall of 2008 on a neighborhood back porch with two commitments, exploring the way of Jesus for city folks, and seeking the growth of the community from within instead of from outside. Several of us had kids and we prayed that the girls we were raising and the girls walking the sidewalks as prostitutes would benefit together from our church's presence. Never one at the expense of the other.

We took on the language of the Abbey to communicate the historic tradition of orders of faith plopping down in the middle of a city and making "sanctuary"' for the wanderer and for the beautiful. We wanted our identity to be tied to this kind of posture and practice.

We took as our patron saint, the Good Samaritan, our Neighbor. He knew what is was like to be outside of religious groups. He was not the person the religious reader would have expected to act with God's desired compassion. And yet his "neighboring" became the exemplar in Jesus' tale told to the lawyer who wanted to be awarded life eternal for his doctrine or his behaviors.

Neighbors Abbey does not simply bring the dreams of God to SW Atlanta, we expect to learn them from neighbors who have already been participating in these ways. This is part of what it means for us to walk in Jesus' Way, its just what those early disciples and the lawyer and the neck-craning religious leaders would have run into walking along with Jesus.

Now we meet for meals, to help our neighbors, to pray, to discuss scripture, to design public performance art projects, to mentor youth, and many other things.

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Donate

If you feel connected to this dream and want to entrust us with some of your money to invest in this entrepreneurial act of faith click here for details on how to give secure donations.