Under-Connected: Building Relational Power, Solidarity, and Developing Leaders in Broad-Based Community Organizing

Abstract

Many pastors, faith leaders, and community organizers are isolated and under-connected to communities of praxis that can accompany them as they go about their social change work, helping them to ground their organizing in their faith lives. There is a crisis of leadership development and training. This paper argues for a rethinking of leadership development as grounded in conceptions of relational power, value-based organizing, and deep solidarity. Leaders, it is often said, are those who have followers. This definition takes for granted models of leadership that were first developed in the 1940s in Alinsky-style networks and adapted in the 1980s and 1990s in the neo-Alinskyite movement. This article extends this approach to home in on what leadership development amounts to in broad-based community organizing so as to help congregations and faith leaders see how community organizing can be an enactment and expression of their faith lives. Organizing strategies of leadership development can sit at the heart of congregational development. Developing leaders is about transformative critical reflection on premises of meaning schema. Leadership development is connected to leaders developing in the sense of exploring new ways of seeing the world and acting on them. By refocusing the organizing strategy of leadership development around relational power and deep solidarity, pastors, faith leaders, and community organizers can build stronger institutions.

1. Introduction

“This is the basic difference between a leader and the organizer”, Saul Alinsky, that notorious organizer, agitator, and provocateur, once wrote in Rules for Radicals. “The leader goes on to build power to fulfill his desires, to hold and wield the power for purposes both social and personal. He wants power himself. The organizer finds his goal in creation of power for others to use.” (Alinsky 1971, p. 80). In the Alinskyite and neo-Alinskyite tradition of community organizing—what I will call broad-based community organizing (BBCO)—organizers identify and develop leaders.1 “One of the most important tasks of the organizer, in addition to identifying these natural leaders and working with them, is working for their actual development so that they become recognized by their following as leaders in more than one limited sphere.” (Alinsky 1989, p. 74). Broad-based community organizing is perhaps the most widely used form of political practice by religious institutions today.2 Local affiliates, what Alinsky called “people’s organizations”, are typically part of national networks that train organizers, share resources, and collaborate on certain political actions. In all this work, building peoples’ organizations begins by identifying and developing leaders.

It is not surprising, then, that the critiques of BBCO have aimed right for this central concept of leadership. Over the years, the neo-Alinskyite tradition has been critiqued as an androcentric, heterosexist, Christian, and white-dominated style of reformist organizing.3 Several of the four largest national networks of BBCO (Faith in Action (previously PICO), The Gamaliel Foundation, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), and The Direct Action Resource and Training Network (DART)) have engaged in concentrated revisioning of their organizing styles around race, power, and gender.4 These revisions of strategy and style have come with changes to definitions of leadership to a more relational approach (see Stauffer 2024a; Speer and Han 2018, pp. 745–58). The field is moving toward an understanding that leaders are not only those who have followers but also those who hold and wield relational power.

At the heart of this conceptual debate on leadership in BBCO is not only a question of what defines a leader but also how leaders develop. This is a crucial difference, because organizing is a specific social practice: as there is a difference between mobilizing and organizing, so there is a difference between leadership identification and leadership development.5 Developing leaders is a core aspect of the social practice of organizing, and it calls for clarity on how leaders develop and what development amounts to. Yet, there is little in the BBCO literature that addresses these questions. The first section of this essay explores three promising but ultimately unsatisfying approaches: one explores how organizing develops the moral agency of religious activists; a second explores how leadership is about “earned entitlement to deference” from one’s peers; and a final approach considers how organizations develop strategic capacity for power by developing leaders who are independent, committed, and flexible. All of these accounts have different aims than exploring the how of leadership development, especially in terms of congregational leaders.

Leadership development calls for pedagogical clarity, because leadership development does not just happen. It takes the introduction of peer relationships and acquisition of knowledge, particularly regarding relational power and deep solidarity, in learning environments that focus critical reflection on premises of meaning schema. Even with this careful intentionality, its outcome is indeterminate. The second section of the paper explores a particular case that attempts to facilitate such experiences through insights gained from transformative and critical pedagogies. The relevant case is a leadership training program I helped design with the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University: Solidarity Circles.6 I explore the facilitation and program design of Solidarity Circles to extrapolate larger lessons for leadership development. These insights help to offer an initial outline of one understanding of leadership development and its proper role in BBCO and congregational settings.

The final section explores the relevance of this conception of leadership development for congregational vitality. Many participants in BBCO and Solidarity Circles are leaders in congregations. There is a deep connection between building strong BBCO affiliates and strong congregations: Good organizing builds strong churches. The same goes for Solidarity Circles—it is a program meant to positively contribute to the revitalization of Christian churches, and it does so through its strategy of leadership development by advancing relational power and deep solidarity. Organizing is about building relational power for working people’s communities, grounded in judgements of sacred value by working people. There is a relational and value-based basis to BBCO, and attitudes of sacred value sit at the heart of the social practice. In congregations, developing leaders involves the transformative work of introducing new meaning schemas regarding relational power and deep solidarity. By refocusing the organizing strategy of leadership development around relational power and deep solidarity, pastors, faith leaders, and community organizers can build stronger institutions and decentralized structures of leadership.

1.1. Three Approaches: Moral Agency, Entitled and Earned Deference, or Prisms

Leaders and leadership figure widely in the broad field of literature addressing broad-based community organizing. As I have explored elsewhere, the literature can be usefully broken up into three camps.7 There is a social theory and sociologically oriented camp (to which I would now add the socio-historical approaches, like Fisher and Betten and Austin8), a second, more theologically oriented camp, and finally a camp of religious, philosophical, and political theorists who explore BBCO as a site of grassroots democracy. Leadership is not a given important feature in all of these camps; some take it for granted, merely addressing it offhand as they turn to focus on larger conceptual questions of sovereignty and the state of democratic life.

C. Melissa Snarr’s All You That Labor explores how religious activists in the worker justice movement encounter and engage a terrain for increasing their moral agency. Moral agency is “a person’s commitment and capacity to discern and work for the needs, rights, responsibilities, and flourishing of oneself and others” (Snarr 2011, p. 6). As religious activists discern and work for personal and social goals, they expand their moral agency. Crucial here is attention to the possibilities and limits of the institutional ecology of the field of worker justice. The organizational landscape and social practice of organizing itself both encourage and frustrate the moral agency of religious activists, especially women leaders. Snarr’s explorations of how religious practices can be instrumentalized for political purposes register an important point for conversations on leadership development in congregations; that is, moral agency surpasses a simple political frame and “reveals the multiple ways religious networks, theologies, and practices can build the commitment and capacity of people to discern and ‘do something’ for the needs, rights, responsibilities, and flourishing of low-wage workers”.9 The wider frame of moral agency makes possible different moral relationships within a constituency that are grounded in “theological solidarity”, which helps to reframe the political goals of the group itself, in non-instrumental theological terms.

Snarr’s work helps us see how religious activists in the worker justice movement reframe a living wage as not merely just ethically right, but good in moral and theological terms. Because this frame is theologically freighted, it asks for different sorts of social relationships consisting of “theological solidarity” that are grounded in “the inclusive love of God”: this work “envisions participatory justice as part of God’s desire for the world”.10 Centering the moral agency of religious activists changes how organizers practice and enact their work, expanding our political repertoire, introducing new rituals, and influencing organizing strategies.

Developing moral agency, however, is different from developing leaders. Leadership, as Jeffrey Stout has argued, is a normative term (Stout 2010).11 To identify someone as a leader is to set them apart in a group and to qualify their relationships. For Stout, leadership refers to earned entitlement to deference from one’s peers and carries with it accountable authority and democratic hierarchy.12 Building on Alinsky’s understanding of native leaders, Stout illustrates how native leaders are those who, through their lives, have earned the trust and deference of others on certain matters: on legal matters, say, or moral judgements. Native leaders tend to be “partial”—rarely do we encounter leaders to whom we defer on many different matters.13 However, because people’s organizations deal with “every problem in the life of the people”, organizers seek to develop “well-rounded” leaders into those who earn the deference and authority from their peers in many different aspects of life.14

Stout notes that organizers develop leaders by selecting those who “already possess an earned entitlement to deference on some topics”. Next, the organizer seeks to “widen the range of topics” to which these leaders earn entitled deference and authority within a specific group and then expand and widen the groups.15 Organizers do this by consistently placing leaders in situations that challenge them and demand that they earn the deference and authority of their peers in ever-new contexts. This last task is “essential” for Stout because in these new contexts relational power is exercised and built, grounded in relationships of accountable authority and earned deference from one’s peers.16

This process of leadership development, as Stout has outlined it, doesn’t get off the ground if a leader doesn’t have a clarity of self-interest: a value-laden stake in the work of building democratic power for the people’s organization. This is why, for Alinsky, leaders are interested in building power for themselves and the people’s organization. They seek to wield power themselves. Mishandled, statements like this can sound like Alinsky is encouraging the development of tyrants who seek to dominate their peers. Tyrants abuse their position of authority by dominating and oppressing others (Stout 2017).17 What tyrants misunderstand, however, is that power is relational, not incremental.18 Power is a capacity to make meaningful change grounded in relationships.19 Unilateral power (power-over) permits and encourages domination. Relational power (power-with), however, is only possible by earning the entitled deference to positions of accountable authority.

Now, self-interest is not to be confused with selfishness; self-interest has to do with the value and relational basis of the social practice of organizing itself and helps leaders get clear about why they are in the fight in the first place. In other work, I have argued for supplementing self-interest talk with talk of democratic individuality.20 Democratic individuality is an achievement of selfhood in certain forms of associational life. It more clearly illustrates the social nature of the public self than “self-interest” by grounding narratives about who we are and what we are capable of in broader narratives of who we can be together and how we get there. On these connected and related points—that leadership is 1. a normative term grounded in 2. relational power—I take Stout and Alinsky to be right. I do want to push Alinsky and neo-Alinskyite understandings of leadership, however, to see the value of democratic individuality so as to highlight the relational and value basis of self-interest and the social practice of broad-based community organizing itself.

Developing leaders is an additional step beyond identifying them. As I noted above, Stout briefly addresses this. Alinsky highlights it as a crucial aspect of the work of organizing in both Reveille and Rules.21 Recently, Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa have explored in detail how organizations develop leaders through different organizing strategies, which they call “prisms” (Han et al. 2021). Prisms, in this sense, are different strategies of organizing that develop particular capacities and characteristics of organizational leaders. “Prisms” for Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa, is a term meant to “focus on a particular kind of collective power building”.22 Different prisms yield different outcomes in terms of power built, similar to how light is refracted through a prism. Here, organizations develop leaders and build collective power by developing a prism of relational power, which adopts three organizing strategies: 1. developing an independent power base, a 2. committed, yet 3. flexible cadre of leaders.23

Independent power is grounded in a people, so base-building is key, as holding an independent source of power is crucial in challenging traditional positions of political authority, which tend to be conferred through office. Adopting a relational understanding of power, these scholars then argue that organizations strategically build power by “having an ‘authentic relationship’ with an ‘organized’ base of constituents”.24 Political life is fickle and tumultuous, so cultivating an independent base that leaders are accountable to secures power that elected officials often do not have.25 Building this base grounds the vision and identity of the political fight in the constituency, not in the policy issue or campaign. This provides simultaneous commitment and flexibility that is essential for building the strategic capacity of a people’s organization.26 Commitment to the constituency enables “civic feedbacks” of the organizing practice, which are crucial in the evaluation and development of the organizations. Civic feedback demonstrates how leaders and organizations grow through evaluation, self-critique, and learning from mistakes and successes.27 For Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa, organizations that desire to build strategic capacity for power in political life would do well to adopt a prism or organizing strategy that encourages independence, commitment, and flexibility within their leadership.

Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa are the best example of political scientists who explore what leadership development amounts to, but their attention to theology and religion is largely instrumentalized in the service of political and economic ends. In my own experience and research, I have found that this “secularized” mindset only limits the political theological imagination of organizing.28 People organize to protect and fight for what they hold dear, what they hold sacred. Judgments of sacred value sit at the heart of organizing because BBCO is about building relational power for working people’s communities by working people. People organize because of relationships of deep concern and care. Attitudes of sacred value are at the heart of the organizing process and throw us into the fight in the first place. Sacred value is a term that encompasses both religious and non-religious value attitudes. While Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa’s work is the most precise in strategies for how leadership develops, Stout and Snarr help to fill out this conversation for congregations and religious organizers. In Stout’s case, as leaders go about earning the deference of their peers, they do so through decisions and actions that grant the “moral authority” to lead their peers, which involves protecting the sacred values that ground the organizing process.29 In pinpointing the moral terrain of leadership, Stout lifts up Alinsky by saying, “In democratic politics, Alinsky wrote, ‘the tradition is the terrain’”.30 The social practice of broad-based organizing depends on judgments of sacred value that are nested within social practical reasoning that is constitutive of a tradition’s moral terrain. The secularized mindset that constricts our political imagination of organizing impacts how leaders are developed in BBCO, in part because it can lead to deeming judgements of sacred value as “out of bounds” or too untamely when they can significantly contribute to building relational power of a BBCO constituency. This is the value of Snarr’s “theological solidarity” that can ground the practice of relational organizing in a wider theological framework.

In the next section, I will deepen and expand on the Alinsky and neo-Alinskyite contributions to this conversation by exploring a more precise understanding of leadership development. Leadership development is very much concerned with judgements of sacred value and broader meaning schemas they contribute to, because BBCO is deeply concerned with relational power and deep solidarity. In the conclusion, I will return to these brief notes on judgements of sacred value and BBCO to highlight the upshot for Christian congregations when broad-based organizing is seen as an enactment of Christian faith. Leadership development that is grounded in critical reflection on relational power and deep solidarity is a crucial part of leadership in Christian congregations and their overall vitality, especially when vitality is understood in terms of “leader-full” communities.

1.2. Transforming Leaders

Leadership does not occur in a vacuum. The approaches that I have outlined above follow two trends that Kristina Lizardy-Hajbi identifies in her work, Unraveling Religious Leadership: firstly, scholars and practitioners draw on general approaches to leadership and adapt them to religious settings; secondly, they tend to “focus on traits, behaviors, skills, or leader-follower relations” (Lizardy-Hajbi 2024, p. 16). Lizardy-Hajbi calls for accounts of religious leadership that question this overarching frame as informed by modern (neo)colonialism. She asks us to question the deeper power relations that support such accounts of leadership and instead offers an approach of “leaderships” that highlights the “pluriversal decoloniality” that comes with embracing a broad range of leaders in religious and pastoral settings.31 Lizardy-Hajbi’s work of unraveling the colonial threads tightly woven around the concept of leadership returns us to the relationships and practices sustaining conceptions of leadership in concrete communities.

Similarly, in my case, leadership is not a concept to be uncritically embraced, but instead furthered toward particular ends that wrestle with relations of political, economic, and epistemic power. In this section, I will explore a case that grounds leadership development in relational power and deep solidarity. To extend and supplement the approaches explored in the above section, in this section I attempt to draw out from a singular program broader repercussions for strategies of leadership development in broad-based community organizing.32

I should mention that while Lizardy-Hajbi takes up power as a primary analytic in her study, her approach follows an understanding of power that is Foucauldian in genealogy. While complementary, I do not primarily engage with Foucauldian or decolonial theory—but not because I do not believe there to be a worthwhile conversation between BBCO and decolonial theory. I simply have different aims in this paper. Let me suggest, however, that Lizardy-Hajbi’s emphasis on “reweaving”—especially in drawing from Alicia Garza’s work—and the prioritizing of decolonial praxis are wonderful places to start that conversation between leadership in BBCO and decolonial theory.33

Solidarity Circles is a leadership training program and virtual peer network that I have led at the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University since 2021. Solidarity Circle participants meet monthly for 90 min over a video-based platform and engage in a facilitated discussion expanding upon a competency-based asynchronous curriculum consisting of short videos and readings. Each session includes examination of a case study developed by the participants themselves to ground and contextualize the competencies in participants’ current experience. While occasionally including non-U.S.-based participants, participants’ context is largely that of the U.S. The program lasts for 9 months, and the curriculum is grounded in four competencies. Competencies here are understood as skills, knowledge, or dispositions. They are 1. Power analysis—the curriculum provides a relational understanding of power, highlighting material and class relationships in theological and biblical interpretation; 2. The value-based community organizing skills of the relational meeting and the listening campaign; 3. Active listening—particularly pastoral and prophetic skills in active listening; and finally, 4. Storytelling as a framework for social change—in part building off of Marshall Ganz’s work on public narrative, but also including insights from narrative identity approaches to individual and group life (Ganz 2024).

There are two crucial shifts that Solidarity Circles makes in terms of how it develops leaders: the first is the centering of economic democracy to political democracy;34 the second is connecting facilitation strategies to those developed by transformative and critical pedagogy.35 These two shifts provide a constructive contribution to the leadership development of Solidarity Circles. Let me say a bit about centering economic democracy and the particular facilitation style of Solidarity Circles.

Regarding the first point about the centering of economic democracy to political democracy, as Stout and Alinsky note, leadership is a normative concept highlighting particular capacities and forms of relationships established and nurtured within and between groups. Building on this, however, insofar as leadership is “earned”, it occurs in relationships of mutual recognition where interlocutors count in terms of self-fulfillment and in political and economic terms. Relations of mutual recognition support earned entitlement of deference. Recognition, as Nancy Fraser has explained, involves redistribution, in part because capitalism is more than a mere economy but an “institutionalized social order” that expands beyond market relations.36 Exploitation is a core concern here, but so are domination and expropriation (Dawson 2016, pp. 143–62). Relationships of earned entitlement exist in these material conditions; accountability in democratic life involves the material realities of such relationships that make up our social life. If participants do not “count” economically, epistemically, or politically, recognition is imperiled.37 Economic democracy is part and parcel of political democracy. When democracy in the economy becomes enfeebled, democracy in politics is not secure. This is a lesson that the political and economic left in the U.S. learned long ago, namely that the fight for democracy needs to be both political and economic—it needs to be about unionization and about elections.38

Solidarity Circles began as a program to meet a need identified in clergy, faith leaders, and organizers broadly. This leads to the second point regarding facilitation strategies. In the face of rising burnout and the Great Resignation during the COVID-19 pandemic, pastoral leaders felt (and continue to feel) increasingly isolated (Stauffer 2024c). To put it colloquially, pastoral leaders in congregations are over-resourced when it comes to toolkits—there is a preponderance of Bible studies or adult education classes on numerous issues available online. What cannot be readily found, however, are communities of praxis that serve to accompany leaders as they go about their social change work and that help them ground this work in their faith values. Leaders are under-connected. They are hungry for relations of deep solidarity.39 The creation of learning communities that foster relationships between adult learners to engage in critical reflection on the roots of social and economic problems they face is a pedagogical move indebted to transformative pedagogy.40 “Through reflection,” one of the founders of transformative pedagogy tells us, “we see through the habitual way that we have interpreted the experience of everyday life in order to reassess rationally the implicit claim of validity made by a previously unquestioned meaning scheme or perspective”.41 Solidarity Circles seeks to develop leaders by transforming previously held understandings about power and the material conditions that sustain the current neoliberal racial capitalist order.

The political and economic culture in the U.S. does not teach people to seek out relational power. It is more common for people to abide by the adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely, so people tend to think that power is to be avoided. The focus on relational power in Solidarity Circles is an intentional intervention in this popular conception. Similarly, broad-based community organizing offers a transformative social and political framework for leaders to see themselves as powerful political and economic agents. Lifting up this tradition of organizing and teaching the specific skills of BBCO, like the relational meeting and the listening campaign, Solidarity Circles facilitates an opportunity for participants to conceive of themselves in transformative ways. By teaching relational power, Solidarity Circles joins BBCO as an avenue in leadership development.

As coined and developed by Joerg Rieger, deep solidarity is not a moral claim—the central claim is not that leaders ought to form certain political, economic, or social relationships. It is an analytical claim that materially, politically, and even theologically, the lives of working people are more deeply connected and dependent on one another than we are led to believe.42 In the capitalocene—an age where capitalism, as an institutionalized social order, has more deeply shaped the global environmental and human order than humans or non-human creatures have—we need relationships of deep solidarity.43

In both of these interventions, transformative pedagogy helps explicate and spell out leadership development. It offers a strategy of adult learning that enables learners to transform their previously held frameworks into new ones—in regard to the conversation at hand, previously held schemes about relational power and deep solidarity. Leaders develop by critically reflecting on previously held meaning frameworks. I mean something specific by critical reflection—not mere introspection or general reflexivity. Critical reflection is deeply connected to Paulo Freire’s notion of “conscientization”: the very concept of transformation in transformative pedagogy is linked to Freire’s “conscientization”, and both share an “emancipatory potential” (Vaikousi 2020, pp. 41–56). In transformative pedagogy, “adult educators help learners identify the incongruities and contradictions that are inherent in their situation in order for them to realize what their real needs are and ‘deal with constraints which had before been perceived as given and beyond their control.’”44 What is transformed in transformative pedagogy are “meaning schemes” or “meaning perspectives”.45 Critical reflection plays a crucial role in this transformation. Through critical reflection, Solidarity Circle participants connect the social, material, and political conditions of a dilemma they face and consider how to act to transform it.46

Reflection can focus on a number of different aspects: from the how of an action—the process by which learners seek to solve problems or accomplish tasks—to the what of the object of learning—whether or not the task is right, good, or appropriately selected. It is the why of learning that critical reflection focuses on: the premises of the learning. Only through critical reflection on premises do learners enter a space where meaning schema can be transformed. This focus on the “why” is often reiterated in BBCO circles, as organizers will seek to engage leaders’ “why” in their concern for an issue or community. Here, the facilitation strategy of critical reflection makes explicit and refines this organizing intuition. Critical reflection becomes “transformative when assumptions are found to be distorting, inauthentic, or otherwise unjustified”.47 Developing leaders involves facilitating learning experiences that make possible this transformation. Leadership development, then, is connected to leaders developing in the sense of exploring new ways of seeing the world and acting on them.

By implementing the strategy of critical reflection in Solidarity Circles, leaders are developed in peer networks. Participants gain certain competencies and acquire knowledge, yes; but they are developed principally through critical reflection on premises held regarding relational power and deep solidarity. This approach extends the conversation on leadership development started in the above section by offering a pedagogical approach and framework to situate the development of leaders in BBCO. From my own personal experience, connecting these pedagogical insights from transformative pedagogy to the tradition of BBCO is a friendly strategy. When I first started organizing for the Industrial Areas Foundation, the first two books I was given were Rules for Radicals and Pedagogy of the Poor. What Solidarity Circles does in this conversation is make explicit particular facilitation tools in order to home in on strategies of developing leaders by introducing new transformative meaning schema regarding relational power and deep solidarity.

What is more, if the tradition is the terrain, as Stout picks up from Alinsky, and the relationships can be grounded in religious and theological frameworks, as Snarr suggests, adopting explicit pedagogical approaches to leadership development like transformative pedagogy makes clearer how sacred values are at the center of the organizing practice. Judgements of value, like sacred value, sit at key choice-moments in our lives, and narratives are developed around these moments that uphold certain meaning schema. Critical reflection on these value-laden frameworks can help clarify the relational and value basis of organizing. Developing leaders in this sense, then, is about engaging leaders as whole persons who make judgments about the world and seek to protect and fight for what they hold most dear. Transformative pedagogy offers a way to engage these attitudes in the process of leadership development.

2. Conclusions

These shifts in leadership development have implications for conversations regarding religious leadership and congregational vitality. Good community organizing builds strong churches. Organizing affiliates are successful when their member constituencies are “leader-full” structures, meaning there exists a diversity of roles woven into a relational fabric that is accountable and democratic. BBCO is about working people coming together to build economic and political power for working people’s communities. At the heart of the social practice are attitudes of sacred value—people are thrown into organizing fights because people, goods, or ideals they care deeply about are threatened, violated, or destroyed. Unfortunately, attitudes of sacred value are often assumed to be divisive and to threaten the solidarity of a constituency. In this article and in other work, I have proposed that centering attitudes of sacred value can help build stronger BBCO constituencies across deep differences.48

Organizing reweaves the relationships within an organization. It helps build necessary structure that fosters relational power.49 Structure is necessary for building power, and as Alinsky and Stout have illustrated, leadership that is democratic and accountable is not dominating or oppressive but instead is a by-product of the relational power built when “native leaders” earn the entitlement of deference on certain matters from their peers. Congregations that intentionally foster this sort of leadership development, which utilizes critical reflection on relational power and deep solidarity, can build stronger teams and develop organizational cultures that are leader-full, rather than undemocratic hierarchies enshrined in offices of power.50

Solidarity Circles illustrates how congregations are hungry not only for certain competencies that equip their leadership with particular skills or knowledge in order to more adequately address the problems and dilemmas they face. More than this, congregations recognize the importance of developing leaders through concentrated attention on relational power and deep solidarity. This intentional facilitation of critical reflection on the premises of meaning-perspectives of participants addresses a gap in BBCO, namely, specificity in what developing leaders amounts to and how to successfully go about it. It is one approach among others that uniquely presents the value and relational basis of BBCO as crucial to organizing’s success and the development of leaders by transforming their understanding of relational power in networks of deep solidarity.