Organised Prophets – the Divine and Human Partnership

Ryan Sirmons kicks off a series of blogs for 2026 where we explore our theme for the year, ‘Reimagining the Prophetic’.

‘God is in need of human beings’, the rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote. I imagine it would be so much easier for God to just act and, Bam! Job done. Perhaps that is what happened on the Cross on the first Good Friday. Yet God’s pattern of action has continued to rely on human beings. Even in the sharing of the salvific work of the resurrection, God did not divinely implant the knowledge in human brains nor use the heavenly host to go and tell the whole world. God used human beings. We are still sharing that good news today.

The art of social change known as ‘Community Organising’ offer tools that aide our sharing of God’s prophetic good news. By learning those practices, you may be able to recognise God’s call on your life to share the prophetic good news of the living God, a sharing that works with people to realise God’s goodness in their midst.

Good community organising is rooted in people and place. It is people working to build enough power to get something done, together. In this sense it is not dissimilar from what any organisation does to build power to make a product or build capital or anything else. But what makes community organising so different is that it is, fundamentally, about people and place. A good campaign does not exist merely because it is a morally right campaign. There are too many of those causes to count. Instead, it starts where God does: with people, in their places, who are crying out, lifting up to God what needs doing.

It starts with the Marys of the world. By all accounts Mary the mother of Jesus was a teenage unwed mother. Yet she sings out to the world that proclamation of the Annunciation, the Magnificat, a firm faith that God has ‘filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty’ (Luke 1.53). An unwed teenage mother calling out social justice issues? No surprise there. Yet her words are the guidance every individual, church, business leader, and politician should heed today. Her words have been sung on parched lips and out of empty stomachs. They have filled angry and ignored bodies, resounding with the prophetic proclamation that God does, indeed, have a preference for the poor. They have echoed in the hearts of people who organise together to realise God’s prophetic promises.

God is faithful. Throughout history when people cry out, God sends them a prophet, who hears these prayers and gives them the sanctity of a holy voice that calls them to organise. Who is sent? In the past, God has sent John the Baptist, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha, and many others, including thousands whose names are not recorded.

Today? It might be you. When we prioritise one-to-one meetings, gathering people in listening sessions, and imagine together what God is calling a people and a place into – all actions a perfectly ordinary church can take – we are saying to ourselves, our community, and our God that we, too, want to hear the prayers of the people. We want to know, with God, what is keeping people up at night? What is crushing them? What is making them fear for the future of themselves and their families? What is calling them to cry out? When we listen, we take God’s call upon our ministry seriously. When we heed God’s call, we organise with those same praying people to identify and act on the common issues perpetuating pain, hurt, shame, and anger across people and place. If we do not do it, know this: someone will. Pain and anger do not sit in silence forever. Such is the drive of resurgent Christian nationalism, for example.

In one of his earlier books, The Earth is the Lord’s (1950), Rabbi Heschel explained why God needs us (the text uses masculine language for humankind): ‘The meaning of man’s life lies in his perfecting the universe. He has to distinguish, gather, and redeem the sparks of holiness scattered throughout the darkness of the world. This service is the motive of all precepts and good deeds. Man holds the key that can unlock the chains fettering the Redeemer.’

We need God. God, through grace, can do what we cannot. But good relational organising reminds us that God has made it clear that God needs human beings too. Even God’s salvific act comes through the human Jesus! So needing human beings – us – does not mean that God is not acting. Quite the opposite! It means that God calls up prophets, including churches, to answer the cry of the people and ‘unlock the chains fettering the Redeemer’. This is how God has acted throughout history.

God works with us. We are participants in the reconciliation of the earth with God. If you are doing ministry, you are called by God to share in the prophetic work of God amongst people and place. You might think you cannot possibly be the person – but look at John the Baptist, Mary, Paul, or Peter! God does not call the ones who are socially acceptable to confront what Paul called ‘the god of this age’ (2 Cor 4.4), the gods who corrupt our hopes and justify our oppression. These gods lurk in every beating heart, every prayer, and every meeting, holding us back from fulfilling our calling to serve Christ with everything we are, preventing us from looking for those divine sparks scattered through the world and bringing them together.

Know this: if the people in your place are crying out, then within their cry, God is calling you. There is plenty of be afraid of, and we may not think building power with people and place is ours to do. The tools of organising equip your ministry for that work, though. God calls everyone, fallible as we are, to listen, listen, and listen again: then organise, and then act. God still seems to need human beings. And when we respond, realising too that we need God, we find the voice that God gave Mary, in her astonishment, to ‘tell out my soul’. And then we listen, organise, and act, together. Thanks be to God.

The Rev’d Ryan Sirmons is a United Reformed Church minister serving a pastorate in Newcastle upon Tyne and a member of the Tyne and Wear Citizens leadership team. He is a former lead organiser with the Industrial Areas Foundation. Email minister@stjurc.org.uk.