And we are just about ready to start.

it is now nine o'clock and I am your tech host.

I'm, there we go. My name is Sarah Gibb Millspaugh.

I'm on the Pacific Western Regional staff, and I'm based out in San Diego,

California. And I have,

the privilege of working on our UUA Safe Congregations team and

being on the team that helped organize this event.

And I also have the wonderful privilege of being the primary contact on UUA

regional staff for the UU congregation of Phoenix and

to witness

Reverend Christine Dance and the soon to be Reverend Brigitta Vieyra,

um,

and their congregation's really loving and powerful

response to very difficult targeting of their

community, by, by white nationalists. So,

I am incredibly grateful to

Reverend Christine and to Brigitta for sharing their time and their wisdom and

experience with us today.

If you have any tech problems during the session

feel free to chat me and I will work on helping you

resolve them. Thank you,

and welcome to our wonderful hosts.

Welcome, everyone. We are so glad you are here. There's

just enough of us in this space that we can get to know each other.

I know that a number of you named yourself when you came in,

but if you'd be willing to put it in the, the, chat who you are,

where you're from, and

if by any chance you are looking for anything in particular out of this so that

we can make sure that we can, we can do that for you.

And we're gonna go ahead, we do have a,

we've got a PowerPoint and we're gonna go ahead and introduce ourselves and

start this off. Please feel free to use the chat with questions as we go along.

And we're gonna have a section at the end for questions that you've

got. So, as, Sarah said,

I am the Reverend Christine Dance. I use she and her pronouns.

I've got long brown hair.

I am in my office at the congregation now with stoles behind me.

I'm wearing a blue flowered dress. And

I am proud to serve this congregation.

I have been here for about four and a half years now.

You may know this congregation as the

previous home for Reverend Susan Frederick Gray. We are very proud,

to have had her as the minister here,

and I'm very proud to be following in her footsteps. Brigitta,

Thank you. Good to be here. Beloveds, can you see the screen?

Just gimme a thumbs up. Awesome. Great. Okay.

I am proud to serve alongside Reverend Christine Dance as the

ministerial intern. I use she her pronouns.

I am a petite,

femme woman in my mid thirties with long brown hair

and a blurred background. And before this,

interestingly,

I served as a intern with Showing up for Racial Justice or

SURJ faith,

where for the past year and a half I've been working with faith communities

of all sizes across lots of traditions, on how to keep one another safe,

their community safety for all toolkit,

everything from how do we deal with vandalism,

to what do we do with an unhoused person comes to our community that

does not involve policing.

So that's what I did before I arrived here in Phoenix. Let's get started.

I will just say that how lucky were we that and how

fortuitous that the intern that joined our congregation had this

wise and expansive experience in SURJ.

We are not usually of a faith that believes in predestination,

but there certainly is things that we can say we're gra we have

gratitude for,

and Brigitta's wide range of experience coming into this congregation has

been a huge help. These are the banners that are outside of our,

our congregation's building. These are

very clearly stating what we believe,

also reasons why we are targeted. But I also wanna draw to you the,

our mission

because it very much as much informs how we have responded to this.

We are a mission driven congregation,

and our mission is to be a spiritual community for our time,

theologically diverse, radically inclusive,

and justice centered.

And I really think that radically inclusive and the justice centered piece

have helped drive how we respond to the situations that have happened.

Thank you, Christine. So what are we going to be doing in our time together?

First, we're gonna give you an overview since this is a case study,

the timeline,

the incidents that sort of gives you an idea of the kind of climate that we're

in, in these facing, these threats.

Then we're gonna share with you the creative framework that we have used so that

we are responding with faith, not reacting from fear.

We call it our flocking framework.

We're also gonna connect it to how it is tied to our UU values in the world.

The bulk of our time, though,

is gonna be sharing really practically our analysis,

some of the key learnings and insights we've had. And of course,

we're gonna leave a significant amount of time to do some Q and A

and also hear some of what's been on your heart and in your mind too,

so we can collectively flock together in finding a way forward.

Let's begin.

Hey,

so I'm gonna walk you through the series of in incidents that

we've had

and I want to make sure as you are hearing them.

I wanna caution you from saying, oh, that wouldn't happen here.

That's because it's Phoenix or it's Arizona.

We do know there's congregations that are experiencing this all over.

And you'll see that it started with one thing,

but then it snowballs. And I do think that,

that anyone can experience this. And,

so I, I will walk you through the series of them.

It all started on April,

April of 2021. We had been worshiping outside for,

since we had come back from the pandemic.

This was our first Sunday back in the sanctuary.

Um,

and this gentleman who is known as a white

supremacist, anti masker,

Christian nationalist, all of those things in the area,

he, he does target different organizations. We did not know this at the time.

He showed up.

And luckily our greeters handled him very,

very quickly. He did not want to wear a mask, and we were still masking.

So, they, our ushers went and got me.

I came and got him. He and I moved him outside.

He was filming himself the entire time.

he started with his verbal assaults,

starting with masking.

Then he started moving to the immigrant banners

that we had and then started moving into our

LGBTQ banners.

It is important to note that I was the one mostly interacting with him in the

front. I had a couple congregants nearby me. I had my wife

nearby watching. And seeing how this was going to escalate,

as a queer person.

The attacks about the anti-gay stuff landed differently with me.

That was the one point where I got kind of a little bit like, okay,

you need to, you need to go, you need to leave.

And I was most upset that he was filming the whole thing.

I knew he wanted to turn it into something escalated.

I was very sure that I didn't. But I,

I just hated the recording,

and I knew that that was going to have some legs afterwards.

We did, in this case, we asked him to leave,

but it wasn't until we called the police that he voluntarily left.

He had parked in a separate parking lot.

He knew exactly how much time he had. He did not want to get caught.

We do not believe he was armed. His sole purpose was to harass,

us and to get film for his video.

That video went on his three different accounts,

a number of different,

he had several thousand different followers on that.

And,

and of course we got some emails.

We got some Facebook messages out of that.

And we found out who he was through one of the partners that we'll talk about

later, there are white,

anti-white supremacist watch groups who are watching online spaces.

And they notified us that this was up, who he was,

how many followers he had.

And then we started getting the picture of what it was that we were,

we were looking at.

I would say that the week that that happened,

that was about 40 hours of work of mine to do the

research into this, figuring out who he was,

connecting with other folks who had experience and starting to build the

network that,

that was going to serve us for the next year and a half.

The most notable thing that happened in this is,

as I was warning our fellow progressive congregations

at an interfaith event, I,

I was approached by a gentleman who said he was from the Jewish Community

Resource Center, who does, who helps hi, the congreg,

the synagogues of the Jewish faith.

and he turned to me and he said, I'm so sorry this happened to you.

And I just wanna tell you how humbling that was, that,

that someone helping Jewish synagogues who are targeted on a regular

basis would show that solidarity and support for us.

And it also helped put into context,

how we are entering that world that they have been living in in a long time.

Let me fast forward a few months.

Maybe four or five months later,

someone who we assume probably saw that initial post,

sent a drone over our campus to

especially center in on the banners.

But it happened to be at 2:30 when one of our two schools

was letting out.

So there were families and children in the parking lot.

They zeroed in on the children's faces,

they ch zeroed in on the families and called

all of them, all of the terrible names. All about pedophilia,

all about grooming, all about those types of things.

This person was never on our campus.

They were doing it from a drone across across the way.

This video also went out onto

the internet. And as you can imagine,

the school parents, administrators,

teachers were incredibly alarmed. There was a lot of,

it's one thing that the school that the, the church was con was targeted.

It was a very different thing when the schools and the children were as well.

So this was when we needed to figure out, okay, who is this person? What,

what else are we doing? And they took a greater

interest in their own safety, which we had already been doing.

Third incident,

we started get, it started with an email on a day to

our director of children's ministry that said, repent.

Then we started seeing some one star Google reviews.

We started seeing some Facebook messages. And,

we turned to our alt-right

contacts, the folks who were watching the, the web.

And we had found out that there had been an edit of that

original video of that gentleman who was at our congregation.

It was about a one minute edit,

but it was posted on a page called Angry Patriots that

had 60,000 followers.

And people from all across the country

started sending us all kinds of harassment.

The emails, the Googles, the Facebook messages, some people came and,

and took down our banners to be clear. That had happened at other times,

related to this. It could have been anyone who's seen any of those posts.

And the most, for me personally,

I got a voicemail onto my, onto my,

my work recording.

So that,

of somebody wishing the congregation harm and then actually wishing

for me to die.

So that it was an absolutely vile voicemail. The,

the tone of it, was,

was just, just vile is the only word that I can imagine.

It happened while I was at home. My wife was there,

and that escalated something on a very personal level for me. And I,

I had what can only be described as a trauma response from it.

That where all of a sudden,

now I understand this on a personal level of how that I

might be in danger. And I know that Brigitta had,

was just starting as our intern and also was kind of in

the, what the actual

situation did I just walk into and am I safe here? So that,

that changed things an awful lot. Because it,

it did make it, it made it very personal. There,

this was a point where we said also, we need to get more support,

and the ministers can't be doing all of all of this work.

And we'll talk about that in a little bit more.

The next incident was really

just knowing that it was spreading across Arizona.

This was more targeting the UU congregation in Tucson,

and their work that they've done on the border of,

of helping immigrants to

not die as they're crossing into the border,

but they had a picture of our congregation as well.

These folks don't really care what is true.

They don't necessarily do a lot of research on this.

They just want as much inflammatory things as possible.

So they had pictures of our banner on that as well.

And we noticed that as,

so the first one was an anti masking.

The next one was, but it morphed into anti,

anti-gay and anti-immigrant.

The next one was very much about anti LGBTQ.

This one was more anti-immigration, but they are all in the same networks.

They're all in the same, all coming from the same folks. So,

uh,

we were aware of that and it was a good opportunity to take what we had learned

and the resources we had built and share that with the,

the Tucson congregation. So

in addition, our banners have been taken.

We have put up signs that basically say, go ahead,

take our banners. We're gonna, every time you do, we're making a donation here,

and we'll just make more. We've got extras in our offices.

But it has created a sense over,

the last year and a half of just waiting for the next attack to happen.

And I think it's also important to say that all of our safety plans

before we went away for the pandemic, were about our physical safety,

mostly looking at active shooter.

And all of these were online,

and they weren't necessarily centered in Phoenix.

One of the things that I wanted to say is the person that made the phone call to

me was in New York State. It was a burner phone.

We weren't able to trace it.

There were other people who were saying terrible things from Pennsylvania.

We had some Massachusetts, we had Texas, we had California,

so we could see where they were. Very few of them were in Phoenix.

And the other piece that I will just name on the threat of this was not

just what was happening,

but who was seeing it and who would be doing something next.

Uh,

just knowing how the wide range of people that were

seeing all of these, was,

a pretty helpless and, vulnerable place to be.

So I think that kind of covers the incidents a bit. Brigitta,

anything that you wanna add?

No, but before we get to the flocking framework, right? So it's like,

here's all the chaos and confusion. What, how did we reply?

I thought I had a grounding exercise. And you

Did. It was right before.

It's right before. Let me go back. There we go.

I hit too many. I think this is a good place to just take a moment to breathe,

to land back in our bodies. A lot of what we shared

can feel alarming and scary.

So we're gonna take a moment to breathe together.

So I'm gonna lead a small grounding practice. We're gonna box breathe.

So how this works is we are going to inhale for the count of four.

Hold our breath for the count of four, exhale and hold.

And I will lead it with you. So be here in your body.

You can soften your gaze or close your eyes.

Whatever feels right for you in this moment.

All of how you are feeling belongs and is held in a web

of compassion and care for you are not alone.

Together. We're going to breathe in 2, 3, 4.

Hold, 2, 3, 4.

Exhale, 2, 3, 4.

Hold, 2, 3, 4.

Inhale, 2, 3, 4.

Hold, 2, 3, 4.

Exhale, 2, 3, 4.

Hold, 2, 3, 4.

We'll do it again. Inhale.

Hold.

Exhale.

Hold.

Now.

I invite you to just let your breath carry you and hold you,

sustain you

invite you to come back to this space,

hopefully more grounded

present to what we can do together there.

Okay, so the flocking framework,

a lot of what we talked about, grappling with the violence of these times,

be it the threat,

real or perceived to our sense of safety can be so very scary.

So for this reason,

the UU congregation of Phoenix learned that any community safety plan

needed to be very aware of how fear impacts our

brains as well as our bodies.

So we started having a conversation in our congregation,

even during our worship time together.

We talked about fear-based responses and normalized and named

what was happening in our congregation, the anxiety and stress.

And together we shared how stress and anxiety is unique,

but also a very normal response.

The way that our body is telling us, alert, alert,

there is something in my environment that is trying to hurt us,

and I'm trying to find a way to keep us safe.

So we talked about the foremost common ways in which we were noticing our

staff and our fellow congregants and grappling with these

threats, what we were seeing in the ecosystem,

so that we could have a more informed conversation of how to respond and not

react.

So we talked about fight responses that one of the protectors many of us have

is known as a fight response.

We know that we're in a fight response response when our bodies are trying to

gear into action and want to fight. The thing that feels so scary,

many of our folks in our community got really angry,

wanted to yell, scream,

or attack those comments on Google or Facebook.

And if we listen to that fighter and pay attention underneath that trauma

response, we heard someone in love saying,

I'm not going to let you hurt me or my friends.

So every time we had a community member who wanted to stand outside, right?

We understood like, oh, that's a fight response. Okay.

They are trying to protect us. Flight.

We also saw this protector part come out in our community,

which is sometimes when there's a threat of safety,

our bodies want to run away from the thing that feels so scary. So where,

when we're winner in flight, some of us try to escape, feel fidgety,

or try to avoid whatever it is that makes us feel anxious or afraid.

And when we took moments to honor that flight response,

we often heard in our community, it's sounding like this. Yikes,

I need to get out of here fast.

There were folks who didn't want to come to work or church, right?

Who felt very nervous and afraid, particularly during moments of pride,

celebrations as well.

We also saw freeze response. I definitely had one of these.

One of the ways that our brains and bodies try to protect us is freeze.

This is when our body tries to protect us by shutting down to

try to block the threat that feels so scary.

The mind can go blank, can become hard to think.

It might be hard to talk.

We might want to hide or try to be alone.

The freeze protector in us is really trying to do one thing.

When we listen with love, it'll often say, if I don't move,

maybe this scary thing won't know that I am here.

And of course, we also saw fawn, this was very common in our community too,

this protector of fawn.

A fawn response is when we try to appease or please that scary

thing to make it less overwhelming,

we try to not be the target by becoming its friend in some way.

Even if we know it might not be the right thing to do,

we might over apologize for something we didn't actually mess up about.

We might not say what we really think or feel because it's too scary.

The fawn parts of us and the fawn people in our community are just trying

to get everyone to get along for us,

that sounded like folks saying Maybe we should take down our banners.

I don't know. Maybe we should make ourself less of a target. Right?

So it was a very normal,

we had that big conversation with folks about what this was looking like.

And if I can just interject here, Brigitta before,

because what was fascinating is I was in flight.

I just didn't wanna do the work. I just, I, my,

I actually was having a traumatic response and just couldn't,

I just couldn't process for a little bit. Brigitta was in,

like just the freeze place. Mm-hmm. And just I, how do we do this?

We had some congregants who were definitely in fight place and

with both of us in freeze and flight. That wasn't,

we couldn't really handle that. And then the fawners

were also wanting, different reactions.

So just acknowledging that how these worked within the

infrastructure. We were all having our own reactions to this,

and whoever was having the reaction, thought that was the right reaction,

and didn't understand anyone else's reaction. Mm-hmm. So, and in,

and to be clear, I don't think some of us understood our reactions until later.

We couldn't necessarily name what we were doing in the moment as well.

I will definitely say that that was true for myself. It was kind of like,

why can't I, why can't I function right now? I don't understand this.

Mm-hmm. So thank you for that interjection.

Yeah. Thanks, Christine. The other thing that's interesting to know is just,

we'll get into this a little bit later,

but oftentimes our greeters or ushers tend to

be the people who like to warm and welcome and befriend folks.

And so their anxiety went up a lot, right? Because it's, if someone comes in,

I want to befriend them, right? And folks are like, oh,

we're just gonna make our ushers and greeters do this work,

which is in direct contradiction to their, like, the way they are in the world.

So we talked about it openly with folks and had them think about not only what

their response is, but normalizing it, not judging it, not shaming it,

and then saying, what would happen if we trusted this?

What would that look like? Well,

it turns out what fifth way emerged for us in Phoenix,

and that is the flock.

We found another response that was a collective way to respond,

which was flocking. So when we flock as a people of faith,

our fears feel less overwhelming.

Our anxiety goes down because we find that we're not alone

in these responses that we're having.

We flock together when we talk about the scary hard things together.

And in doing so,

we find new creative solutions of how to care and not just survive,

but actually thrive.

We learn how to trust our protector tendencies and talk about them

so that we move from fear-based responses to faith-based responses.

And in that, the questions people were asking started to change.

Folks stopped asking Christine and I or a safe congregation team,

Hey, am I safe? And instead they started asking, Hey,

how do we keep one another safe? Which shifted the responsibility.

Yeah.

We also started realizing that when we outsourced our sense of safety and

involved policing,

it actually wasn't a flock response outsourcing our power.

They nothing happened. We'll talk a little bit about that later too.

But we decided how do we share our power and trust one another instead of

outsourcing it?

We also noticed that we were better when we invited multiple perspectives in

that there was actually a much stronger response that was proactive,

not just reactive,

when we started practicing discernment around risk and didn't just say there's

one subject matter expert or one right way. But what do each of us,

what are all of our vantage points? And how is that important?

And also invited stronger conversations about nuanced conversations

around safety,

who feel safe and the difference between safety and comfort.

So,

the other thing too that I found with this flocking model is that it

really allowed us to center our theology as UUs to

really say we're gonna weave love through everything we do.

And really committing ourselves to what does safety look like?

If it's justice based, what does it look like? If it's anti-racist,

what does it look like? If it is also anti ableist, right?

What are some of the things,

what would a safety really look like if we're committed to those things?

So we had bigger conversations, who or what is being protected, right?

Um,

and also how do we put new things in which we're not doing policing logics in

which we're self surveilling one another.

We're going to record how are we getting consent, right?

Where are we putting those things? So,

it didn't take us long to figure out that the liberatory charge of our faith to

really center covenant and commitment, not comfort.

That that was the binding fabric we needed to respond as a people of faith

towards collective liberation. And we weren't alone.

We were flocking outside our community too. Christine,

I'm gonna let you

Introduce these. Yeah. So this was,

this is the big learning on this. I think a lot of times,

we and I, and defining we, sometimes it's Unitarian Universalist,

I would say often it's, if,

if you are a predominantly white congregation like we are,

it's often us as white people. It's often us who are,

might be educated. And it's like, I need to take control of this.

We feel like we need to do this on our own. And the truth is,

there is no way we could do this on our own. We did not have the resources.

And the biggest thing that's come out of this is the partnerships that

we have built.

And the folks that we have surrounding us on this,

none of this costs anything. By the way, for those of you saying that we,

who we've got, the first one is who I,

who I told you the Jewish Community Relations Council. We are,

we are blessed in Phoenix that there is a,

a Jewish organization that is working for the safety of all

Jewish organizations in the city, in the area. They,

that is synagogues, that's community centers. That's whatever it might be.

They have an ex FBI person who is

devoted to helping them flock,

helping them pull all of their resources together, being a resource for them.

And then he has been an incredible ally. And I just, again,

especially in these times,

want to say how humbling that has been for us. The,

the synagogues that have

safety concerns that we will probably never experience in

the same way and on an ongoing basis had so much information,

and, and richness.

And the generosity that they showed us in sharing resources and saying,

how can we help keep everyone safe? Was, was,

was absolutely humbling and amazing.

And of course then they connected us to a whole bunch of other folks.

I want to talk about the informant. This has become a, a key ally for us.

But I do want to talk about in the online land that there are people

who are surfing alt-right online spaces,

looking for the threats and notifying people.

So we first became aware of who that person,

that first person was because they saw the video and they call,

they reached out to us by our website and say,

Hey, we know who this person was, who was at your congregation.

There's a video up, you know, here's the information. And

we had gotten in touch with three different ones. But Nick Martin, who's a,

who is in the, who is the informant

has become our main one. And he has not only helped us

navigate who's out there, what their relative threats are,

who they're connected with. You know,

these folks are really more Nazi oriented.

These folks are really more Christian nationalists. These folks are just,

they just want to create a buzz, but they, you know, aren't, aren't really

organized and nobody respects them, whatever it might be.

So for example,

when we started seeing the Google messages, the Facebook messages,

we reached out to the informant and said, something's happening.

Something's online. Can you go find it for us?

And they had it within 10 minutes. They could tell us how many followers,

how broad the reach was, all of that.

There is no way that we, as a congregation,

and nor would I recommend that have have anyone in our congregation

go and searching these alt-right spaces and try and navigate that,

that minefield. It's not healthy, it's not productive,

especially when there are resources out there,

who are doing that. We

of course have SURJ the, uh, showing up for racial justice.

And again, the fortuitousness of

Brigitta joining us just as we really needed to ramp up

our response. And they have SURJ

Faith has had an entire program about how to

keep congregation safe. You heard them speak this morning

and how to do this in a way that doesn't rely on policing.

They have the resources on that have been very, very useful.

And I want to name as well, we'll talk about it in a second.

Both the informant and SURJ had resources for Brigitta

and I in per in, in particular, for how us,

how we could lock down our personal information,

how we could make ourselves safer on our digital footprint out in the world.

Still being public, public people,

but making sure that things with our addresses weren't as easily found,

for example. And then we have a wonderful person here,

and I'm sure that many communities do. We call him Safety Dave.

Safety Dave is a, he,

he does training of safety for all kinds of organizations.

He says he is not political,

but we also know that he is very aligned with our values.

He understands that none of our safety options want to involve guns,

for example, he understands our position of, how we want to,

involve the police.

And he has collaborated with us both to do trainings

on safety as far as stop the bleed and

active shooter drills and all kinds of things,

but also looking broader and doing an entire safety analysis.

And a lot of the tools that we've got are from our partnership with,

this wonderful, wonderful human being.

And I hope each of your cities has somebody who can help with that as well.

I cannot stress enough that this

is how we are keeping ourselves safe.

If you note the police are not here.

We did for each of these incidents,

report it to the police mostly because if anything was ever

escalated,

we want to make sure that they know that there's incident reports of history

there, but on none of them,

could they do a single thing.

The all of these things fell into free speech categories.

Um

The people left before or were never on our

premises.

The laws have much more to do with physical

interactions than online ones.

And just so both because we don't want to outsource our power,

but also just really, honestly, with you all, they were not helpful.

There was nothing that they could do. So,

they know that these have happened. They know,

and they also know our stance, that we don't want the police on our,

on our grounds. They do things like close patrols.

If we hear that anything's gonna happen.

Because keeping from some people's idea of keeping

us safe is someone else's idea of feeling less safe.

And as a congregation where our mission is to be radically inclusive,

that is one of the ways that we have decided that we want police on our campus

as, as little as possible. So we will,

we will talk a little bit more about all of the conversations.

Please know that none of this happened. Like, poof, everyone agrees.

It was all happy. Everyone knew exactly what to do.

A lot of this took a lot of discussion. But these, these partners

created a lot of credibility in that as well.

We've got a good question in the chat from Sarah, which is,

when you say the police, do you mean local police or also the FBI?

Wonderful, wonderful question. We are,

I'm talking about the local police there. In our case,

Paradise Valley Police, which is the town that we are in.

We, we did talk the,

the Jewish Communities Relation Council did put us in touch with the FBI

especially and their hate crimes unit.

They actually took this seriously and provided a lot more resources for us.

They couldn't do anything about it again.

But they did have resources and were very helpful in conversations with us.

So,

but waiting for an outside source to come sweep

in and make us safe is not how this has happened

at all. It has been none of that.

There's been resources from a larger standpoint,

but they really can't do anything because of how laws are.

Thank you, Christine. All right.

We're gonna do a quick little stretch break too.

Last time we did a breath centered practice to ground us.

And now we're going to do a body centered practice.

So I invite you to do a quick scan of your body.

Notice the places where you may be carrying tension. For me,

I'm noticing it in my back, shoulders, wherever it is.

I invite you to take a loving moment and stretch it out.

Any place where you may be carrying tension or stress,

offer it some loving kindness.

I can acknowledge I see you. I hear you

now. I invite you to wiggle your toes.

Remember that you are grounded and held by a force larger than

yourself. That is secure and steady.

Now,

I invite you to find a place in your body that is feeling relaxed or calm.

Notice that there is space here for that too,

that we can be feeling elevated and return back to a center.

Invite you to take one deep breath in

and one back out.

Okay,

so now we're gonna go into a little bit of analysis.

So we found that oftentimes our fear-based response

tended to overemphasize one particular type of safety,

and that's our physical safety,

which makes sense in our current culture. Violence is a commodity,

and so it can be very alluring to outsource our safety to an external force

instead of trusting the flock. But when we started to flock together,

we realized, wait a minute,

there's actually a lot of much larger conversation to be had other than just our

physical safety in the building that we're in.

We needed to broaden our scope and all of our community safety plans and

conversations needed to talk about safety physically,

but also digitally, and perhaps the most important that we found.

So we couldn't do any of that aligned with our values or integrity unless we

were experiencing something called psychosocial safety.

And we found that our need for physical safety was very much intertwined with

digital and psychosocial.

What I mean by this is it's not just where we feel safe,

both in person and online. It's also how,

but most of the time, it's the ways in which we feel about it mentally,

emotionally, and spiritually, that psychosocial safety is so important.

So any congregational safety plan that you have, oftentimes safe congregations,

teams, policies, procedures really focus on physical,

and we'd had to find more ways to build in digital safety and psychosocial

safety. We also know that flocking is a trauma respon.

We want it to be trauma informed, but trauma responsive.

But it also needed to be risk informed. So we had to get some help.

And the differences between a risk assumption and risk assessment.

We learned from Safety Dave, that there's actually a hierarchy of controls.

The things that are most effective in keeping us safe and the things that are

down to least effective. Most of the time,

our energy was spent too often on the education part,

which can you see is down towards the bottom.

We were falling into that trap of if we could just learn better ways to

deescalate, if we could just get the training,

then somehow we'd be able to keep one another safe. And while that's important,

it was also missing the way in which we need to invest our time and our energy

on these other rungs of the ladder.

I'm gonna take you through a really specific example of a time when we have

flocked before as a faith, every single one of us in this room,

we'll kind of take you through these hierarchy of controls in a more deliberate

way.

The other thing I want to remind you real quick over here is you'll often

sometimes hear this being referred to as a Swiss cheese model of safety.

So each one of these layer layers, there's gonna be holes,

and holes are hazards and risks that are beyond your control.

And the goal is that with each layer of safety you do,

you're stacking these Swiss cheese on top of one another,

and you're reducing the risk exposure that you have as a community.

And so the more layers of safety that you have,

the better it is.

It also changes it from being an individual responsibility to a collective.

One is much more robust and layered.

And we're really mostly talking about harm reduction.

So we most recently flocked as a community for health and safety

with the pandemic. So we had to remind ourselves, actually,

we do know how to do this. And we have muscle memory. And it's pretty recent.

We had to learn how to keep one another safe. When COVID happened,

the first thing we had to do was eliminate the hazard, right?

So we told one another, quarantine isolate. If you are sick, stay home.

Then we realized we actually need something more than that. So most of us,

I'm willing to say, all of us substituted the hazard.

So instead of meeting in person for work and for worship,

we pivoted and made everything online.

And then later we substituted in person to online, but also outdoor,

right? Still saying, if you're sick, stay home. That's that additional layer,

right? And then we looked at systems.

We started to engineer safety. Some folks put in ventilation systems.

Some folks changed their seating arrangements, right?

And made sure things were distanced. We also had, at that point,

a certain engineering, which was vaccinations, right?

So we started to thinking about what are our policies? And then of course,

there was the education standpoint, right?

Making sure that we had stations in our bathrooms that talked about hand

washing, encouraging folks to socially distance.

And at the very bottom, of course, was very important,

but around masking. But how we kept one another safe.

And flocked wasn't just one thing, right?

It was this layered approach to harm reduction.

So we can take that muscle memory,

things we've done and apply it to our physical, digital,

and psychosocial safety. And some of this we're already doing today, right?

We know that when we have folks working with our most vulnerable population like

children, we say, Hey, in order to be with these children,

we have certain policies in place, right? We have ratios of adults to children.

We also have background checks, which is some of that eliminate, right?

Eliminate that risk of folks to keep one another safe.

Um,

so we're going to go through some really concrete examples with Christine about how

we did this model of safety of flocking specific

to threats from the alt-right?

All righty.

Yeah. So on the eliminate category, I mean,

we already do background checks for anyone who is working with

with children, anyone who is on staff.

We are careful on our whole website and our newsletters.

We do not use anyone's personal emails or phone numbers.

We, we create an a,

a email for whatever the committee or the team is if we need

one. So that's a policy that we don't have anyone's personal information

out there. We've also done the elimination around Zoom rooms.

We have, you know, zoom hosts for worship,

to let people in individually. Other people are using passwords.

There's other ways that, you know, that, that we can do. We can do that.

So that's our elimination that we can, that we can do.

The other thing we did too, that Christine mentioned,

was for our more visible staff,

folks who were taking that prophetic risk of our faith of speaking out

on these various issues, very prophetically and loudly, was,

um,

leveraging tools around digital safety to scrub our personal

information from the internet. So things like address data.

So that was also really important and highly recommend for folks too.

Yep. So I was the substitute,

the biggest problem here was

Brigitta and I were doing most of the work, and b, before Brigitta got here,

I was doing it.

So I was the one interfacing with the harassers.

I was the one building up that network with

the informants and with the other communities.

I was talking to the FBI, I was talking, gathering information.

I was notifying other congregations in the town.

I was making sure the board knew what was going on.

It was taking a lot of my time.

And I was also the one targeted.

So I was the one who received most of the venom of that initial visitor.

When I, when I took him in inside,

I was the one that de received the death threat.

I was the one when they spout all kinds of just awful things

about women can't be ministers, and this isn't really a faith.

And all of those pieces around it, it was targeted at me.

So, and I was having a traumatic response around it.

I was not okay. After all of these, I actually needed to get some therapy.

I needed to do some somatic work.

I needed to acknowledge the impact that this was having on my body,

on my work, on my ministry, uh, on my personal life.

So one of, we, I returned to our safe congregation team and said,

how can, how can I use you all as a resource?

And they decided to name themselves the Cactus Wrens and

Cactus Wrens. If you don't know,

Arizona Cactus Wrens live in Cacti.

They build little homes there. They are both protective,

but they also will aggressively attack anyone that comes out

to get them. So they're both proactive and reactive, and they're small,

beautiful birds. Uh, so they named themselves the Cactus Wrens,

and they have three roles. And Brigitta help me on this.

It is to record,

to respond and to repair. Okay?

So I was doing the incident reports and putting 'em in a file and doing all of

that. I wanna be able to give them the information.

They can write out the incident report. They can record what's information,

what, what, what the information is so that we have it.

They can respond by figuring out what needs to be done.

Do we need to let other congregations know? Do we need to do some resource?

Do we need to talk to the police? What, what's the,

what's our response on here?

Both our protective ones and maybe our proactive ones as well.

Maybe we take a stand and, you know, write a letter to the editor, I,

whatever it might be. And then the third piece is

the repair,

which is acknowledging who might have been harmed in this

situation. How are our ushers and greeters? After that visitor came,

they were really shook. How is our minister, who was targeted?

How is our intern who just got here, how is she doing?

And, and what can we do to help, you know, help check in with her.

So we have somebody who is trauma informed on the team,

who is a therapist on the team, who is also looking at that.

It's really that three-prong approach to be doing it.

The biggest thing on that is just saying, oh,

Reverend Christine's gonna take care of it. And we're making it a communal,

that's how we're flocking together.

They know that it's the community's response to take, take care of all of us.

And we do have photo consent on bios.

And, we've got the, the real power is naming,

naming this. So we just

found out that we have less time than we think.

And I wanna make sure that we've got question.

We've got time for questions on this. We named,

we didn't minimize this. We didn't say everything's fine.

I actually got up and preached and said, I'm not fine.

And how are we going to handle this? How am I going to handle it?

How are we going to take care of each other?

So we have done plenty of engineering as well.

We have looked at our building.

We have the advantage of having somebody who has been working incredibly hard on

getting a, Homeland Security grant for us,

so that we can fortify some of the places in our building.

We are also educating. Those are the pieces that I know that you all are doing.

We're talking with the schools about how they can be safer.

We're hosting a safety summit for 40 of our people internally next

weekend. We're also talking about digital Safety Pro policies,

in our, our safe congregation,piece.

And then the personal piece, which, you know, we often think about or,

or look at, has always, you know, has been there. We do have an AED,

we've got first aid kits.

We are looking to in state monthly safety tips into our newsletter.

And do you want to talk about the community safety pledge?

Yeah.

The other thing we're talking about is that shift of outsourcing your power,

whether it be to that minister policing or safe congregation,

that we all are responsible for keeping one another safe and doing that culture

psychosocial safety change.

It's everything from if there's a spill in the bathroom floor, wipe it up.

Right? This is how we care for one another. Sso that as well,

There are some things that have been a ton of discussion.

You all might recognize these,

that we've had people who want to lock the doors,

after worship begins, one of our,

one of our parts of our mission is to be radically welcoming,

and we have decided not to do that. But there are still some people who,

who really want that. We do have cameras around.

And it's important to note that cameras don't make everyone feel safe.

There are some people who feel like they're being monitored.

We did have people saying, we need to have somebody watching the cameras

during all of worship. And they were putting staff and volunteers on it,

and they couldn't go to worship. And we were looking, it's like,

that might give us what, three seconds of notice.

What, what is this really giving us? So,

and then there's all the questions.

There's always the questions of should we be armed?

There is a question of can we have a baseball bat in the greeters area,

of physical, you know, pieces. And those are ones,

those are steps we have not taken. And we have decided not to intentionally,

but they still come up in a lot of conversation there.

So I want to just bring up, just, make aloud what Sarah get.

I think Brigitta and I screwed up.

I think we had this all timed out and thought we were gonna have 30 minutes for

questions. And, we only had an hour,

and we really wanna make sure we've got questions.

How do people feel about going into 12:10 to just make sure that we can get your

questions. Okay. I am seeing some thumbs up. I'm seeing some head nods.

Okay, good. If you've gotta leave, we totally understand.

That is the end of our, our presentation, but we,

this is where we really want you to say, okay, Christine, Brigitta give us to,

it's real. Like, how did this really work? What, I mean, we,

we've tried to be honest, like this wasn't pretty. It was pretty,

I had a pretty bad response to it. The congregations figuring it out. But,

what questions might you have? And you can put 'em in the chat,

or if you wanna unmute yourself, that's fine.

What are you curious about? How does this relate to your congregation?

Might be another thing. We're struggling with this.

Do you have any piece of advice on that?

This for me, I just wanted to say, I don't really have any questions.

But I just wanted to thank you so much. It's really eyeopening and,

you know, it's just something that's not really on our minds too much. I mean,

this happened to you, so it's really, you know, in the forefront.

And now we know we have to pay attention to this.

The worst thing that's happened to us as a Black Lives Matter sign has been

stolen a few times. And so this, this was really, really helpful.

I've been taking notes and, I'm gonna share it, you know,

with some people in our congregation. And I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for that.

And it gives us great comfort to know it might be helpful for others

in going through this. It's actually one of the ways that helps, helps us. Let,

let us, if we had to go through this, let us please help someone else, right?

Yeah. Jen, would you,

Yeah, I wanted to thank you so much for this information.

We recently, we do not have a safe congregations team.

Um,

and we recently had a disruptor come in and

started exactly, well, it wasn't filming it,

but started exactly the way that you described and the overall

response was, we got him to leave. So everything's over.

And so I appreciate you bringing that up about what

happened afterwards. It's really, really,

I want to talk to you guys more about this. So, and thank you so much.

Absolutely. We're always here to help somebody else. We, if really,

if we can help others as they're navigating this, it,

it's very empowering for us. Thank you Jen. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Sarah,

One of the things that I noticed was how, you know,

it was particularly activating and then targeting you as a lesbian.

And for people who have religious professionals or highly

visible members of their community who are from targeted communities,

do you have any specific wisdom or advice for how they can take care of their

ministers when, or their religious educators or whoever's being targeted,

in this, in this kind of venom?

Yeah. I,

I think the biggest thing is acknowledge that your,

if your minister wears any different kind of identity that, that,

that identity is in play here. Please acknowledge it,

acknowledge it to the minister, often. Acknowledge it to the congregation.

One of the things that I had said is the congregation was very proud that they

had called a, a gay minister.

But then there's more that needs to be done. I actually have different,

I have different needs and different fears on this.

The other thing that I will say is, while it was targeting in me,

my wife was also incredibly worried.

Like I have other people in my circle who this affects too.

My wor, my wife works in home construction. She didn't sign up to be get,

getting death threats. So checking in on her,

checking in on the intern. I think naming often that,

that oppressions land differently on different people gives

us all permission to feel where we, where we are.

And then I will just say that I think our board had a freeze response

and just we're like, we don't know what to do.

And even if you can have a few people who can get beyond a freeze response and

make sure that they go into caretaking, you know, it's,

it's a question of at, at a certain point, it's,

will you keep your minister from this or not? It, it is,

it's pretty critical how you can respond in a compassionate way.

Yeah. Thank you Sarah.

Thank, thank, thank you Christine. And there's one other thing I want to lift up,

which is for those of you who have not been to the UU Congregation

of Phoenix,

those banners are not visible unless you are in their parking lot.

Mm-hmm.

So they were not being targeted because they're on a main street where

somebody sees their banners and they're getting mad,

or a matter every day they were being particularly sought out.

So you might not think you're taking a big public stand with your rainbow

flag in your congregation. That's kind of off in the woods a little bit,

but it, it won't prevent targeting.

Yeah. Yes, Robin.

So, I'm just trying to think of first steps when, you know, we, our,

our deacons in particular as a group that's very concerned about this and as

president of the board,

I'm trying to think of the first step to getting to under getting them

to understand what flocking is and how to sort of introduce something.

'cause they're looking for an answer. They're looking for a, you know,

some who is going to fix this problem for us. So it's,

do you have any advice on, on that level?

Yeah.

That is a normal response and we often go to just tell me what to

do or who's gonna handle this. It is a total mindset shift,

Robin. It really, really is. Now,

I don't think it's very different than some of the other mindset shifts,

mindset shifts that we've had in our faith that we all need to take care

of each other. When it comes to, you know,

combating white supremacy culture, for example, or how we need to,

you know, together and build community.

And that is actually a critical part of our faith. It's just extending that,

having people understand that we're not doing all of this work over here.

And then safety is something totally different. It's,

it's actually the same mindset that we're doing, over.

So preaching on it, having workshops about it, Brigitta, I mean, and,

and I will say, as much as we can say this is here,

this is not embedded into everyone. This is where the leadership is,

this is where the safety team is. We're working at it, but we are still,

as you know, we still have people going just, you know, where's my baseball bat?

Um,

so it's a process like it is changing any of our mindsets. And Brigitta,

do you wanna add anything more to that?

I think this is why theological grounding is so important in all these

conversations, right? Is that we're not called to fix one another,

right? We're called to justice making, we're called to love.

And so that has helped me,

is really centering the work that we're doing in our faith,

because it shifts the conversation, right?

And then also combats, you know,

my own white tendencies to want to just fix or save, right?

But it also makes me think about as a woman,

how I've been socialized to be sort of passive with my safety too.

And so bringing, really making it,

talking about rooting it in our theology does really help kind

of reduce that anxiety. That's com compulsive, I want to fix,

I want to fix, right? And being like actually as a, there's a faith response here.

Let's talk about the faithful response. Yeah. And Aaron,

So I think it was fortuitous. I had put in the chat,

I wonder if another f that you add is fixed in my experience

is that it's actually fight, flight, fix,

right? Fix is a form of fighting,

in the sense that it is movement toward the threat as opposed

to retreating from it or freezing from it, or, you know, whatever.

Christine, I, I was,

powerfully moved when you said, my reactions were pretty bad.

And, and I hear that

and I think part of the pro part of the challenge in ministry is that,

sometimes people don't recognize our own humanness,

and I wanna applaud and appreciate your willingness to raise your humanness as a

part of this. As someone who's walked with many a colleague through this.