Your Colleagues and Your Parents

Part 6: Our audience, and why we aren’t necessarily trying to create a movement

As we compile Volume One, we are also making a shift in our audience focus. Throughout our first 110 journal entries, our focus was on writing for our colleagues on the hill or in politics and government—if it resonated with grassroots activists, that was excellent, but what we set out to create was a conversation and creative outlet to reimagine politics from the inside.

In order to make Liberatus sustainable, we now want to bridge the gap between DC-life and the lives of everyday Americans, particularly those who do not claim either political party but are responsible citizens and will vote—if there are candidates worth their vote on the ballot.

Our writing guidelines advise our team to write for their colleagues and their parents. If we can bridge this divide effectively, we can build the grassroots support network necessary to make Liberatus sustainable.

However, we are not trying to grab everyone’s attention with ever-present marketing, or call them to a trendy new movement that cannot ultimately deliver on its promises to remake politics.

The peace of Christ begins on a personal level. And so our approach to building a grassroots support network will, similarly, be on a relational level as well. Political healing is not something that needs to happen “out there.” It can only begin when we begin to drop our illusions of what we think America is or could be, and accept the call to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Finally, movements cannot be manufactured—and we are not seeking to be “the next big thing.” Instead, we hope to have honest conversations about how the peace of Christ can remake us while we work in politics. Personally, I’m very excited to explore these ideas with a political community and to reflect those conversations in a beautiful, high-quality artistic manner in a print volume in order to open the door to greater grassroots participation and make the organization sustainable.

At the same time, I believe that the call to follow Christ is a universal invitation, and I do not intend to create a unique new tribe. In John 17, Jesus prayed for unity among his followers so “that the world may believe that you have sent me,” and so this is our prayer too.

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Liberatus is a community journal about wholeness in politics, because all of us are tired of dysfunction. Citizens who join us are advocates for how the peace of Christ can remake politics from the ground up.

Journal Entry #117

ISSUE 017: VISIONEERING, PART 6