Deon K. Johnson: As America marks its 250th year, the church has a crucial role to play in accurately telling the nation’s story (long version)

Fifteen-minute read. A shorter version of this interview is also available. 

As an 11-year-old in Barbados, Deon K. Johnson — now the Rt. Rev. Deon K. Johnson — felt drawn to a sacramental life.

“Our parish church was always open, and it was just down the street from my school, so I was that kid after school who would find myself in the church standing behind the altar and acting what I saw on Sunday morning, so it kind of began there,” Johnson said.

A sense of call solidified during the process of confirmation, but Johnson still resisted for years, only to be encouraged forward by a village of advisers.

Since becoming the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri during COVID, Johnson’s ministry has come to include a practice of writing daily prayers that he shares through social media. And, as the diocese’s first bishop who is Black, openly gay and an immigrant, he has recently spoken publicly, including with NPR, about a traumatic year for his family. In 2024, his husband, who was born in Mexico but came to the U.S. as a young child, was separated from Johnson and their son and daughter as part of the federal immigration crackdown.

Johnson spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Aleta Payne about his ministry, life and family, as well as the crucial role the church can play as America’s 250th birthday is observed. The following is an edited transcript.

Faith & Leadership: Would you tell us about your call story?

Deon K. Johnson: Confirmation in Barbados takes about a year, because what they really want you to do is to make sure that this is what you’re committing yourself to but [also] to find out what your place in ministry looks like.

The priest at the time insisted that we had to go and be engaged in every single ministry of the church, because he really wanted us to figure out, Where’s your place in this faith community? I was an impetuous child that looked at them and said, “I want your job.” But in many ways, I also resisted answering this call.

It’s biblical in some ways. God calls, we say, “Yeah, yeah, not me,” and God wins.

That’s what’s happened in my life. I immigrated to the United States when I was about 14 and continued to just say, “Hey, church is important to me, but I’ll go get a job out in the world, and at some point I will think about this whole ordination thing.”

I went off to college, and it was there that I finally began to come out to myself. At that time in the late ’90s, early 2000s, we had controversy going on around banning gay marriage and everything, and the church was also continuing to wrestle with all of that.

I said to myself, “Surely this church does not want me.” Yet my priest at the time kept saying to me, “You need to consider going to seminary. I think that God’s calling you to something.” And I kept saying to her, “Thank you, but if God wants me to do this, God will figure it out.”

Her way of letting God figure it out is that she talked to the bishop, and she set up an appointment for me and told me, “Oh, by the way, you’re meeting with the bishop next Wednesday.”

In the back of my mind, I thought, “He’s going to say no, and I’ll just continue with how things are going.”

Strangely enough, I get to that meeting, and he said, “I see a calling.”

I’m like, “What are you talking about?”

F&L: Still trying to talk yourself out of this.

DKJ: I kept trying to talk myself out of it, every step, and at every step someone showed up and said to me, “No, this is what you need to be doing.”

I developed this practice that if people say the same thing to me independently three times, I need to pay closer attention to it. That has served me well throughout my ministry and throughout my life.

When it came time for ordination, I kept going, “OK, God, what do you want? You tell me.” And at every step people have stepped in and said to me, “We really see this in you.” Even when I fight it, they’re able to see it sometimes.

The same thing is true when I became a bishop. There’s a really funny story about allowing my name to go forward to be bishop. I had been in a previous search, and I had said to myself, “Yeah, no, I don’t want to go through that process ever again.”

[Then] one of my friends called me up and said, “Have you seen the profile for the diocese in Missouri?” Another calls me up and says, “Have you looked at Missouri?” I said, “I looked at it. The deadline is too soon. I do not have time to write the essays and fill out the application, because it’s a tedious process. Maybe if they extend the deadline.”

The next week she calls me up and says, “I’m holding you to what you said. Look online. They just extended the deadline until the end of the month.”

I filled out the application, sent all the things in, and this is how it ended. The gift is I’ve had people who at every step have said to me, “You need to respond to this.” It was ironic, coming from a village [in Barbados]; in the village, you think of what’s best for the community rather than what’s just best for me. It really is a community who discerns. It takes a community — it takes a village — to help us actually discern our call, especially when we’re trying, like Jonah, to run away from our call.

F&L: Your family has a history of immigration. You are from Barbados; your husband is from Mexico. You all have gone through a time of trial in this moment of a crackdown on people who have come here as immigrants. Can you talk about your family’s experience?

DKJ: This is a very difficult season no matter where you come from. It is focused on folks coming from the Latin American, Spanish-speaking countries, but it’s affecting everybody.

I am an immigrant, my parents are immigrants, I’m married to an immigrant, and this is our lived reality. With my husband, I have to repeat this often: We were doing everything right. He was brought here as a child, he was approved for DACA, was working, doing all the things, aspiring to that American dream.

We got married, and we filled out all the paperwork. I have advanced degrees, and I can barely get through figuring out the paperwork in English. We’ve done all the paperwork, and everything was filed, and we got a letter saying that we needed to go to Juárez in Mexico for our interview at the U.S. Consulate.

We went to the interview, and the interviewer said to my husband, “You’ve not lived in Mexico for a very long time. I think you need to spend some time there. You may not be going to the United States for a year.”

[Previously] everything had been approved. All of his background checks and everything said, “Here is a model person with children, family, trying to do all the right things.”

The response was, “You’re going to have to stay here for a year.”

We had to quickly figure out going from two incomes to one, [from] having one household to two, taking care of kids, distance. We had to try to figure out how to navigate all of that.

I recognized the privilege that I had in being able to afford to do two households, to be able to get on a plane and all that. A lot of our immigrant siblings don’t have that privilege. There was a lady behind us [at the consulate] from Oklahoma who had driven through a snowstorm to go for her interview, had just had a baby months earlier, and who was told, “You have to stay in Mexico for three years.” Can you imagine having a newborn that you’re not going to see until that baby is three years old? This is how our system is working.

It was a very difficult year for both of us, him being in a place where he had never lived for a significant portion of his life and us on the other side trying to navigate.

At the end of the year, he had to do all of the things [at the consulate] over again. The person who interviewed him said, “Why did you take a year to come for your interview?” He said, “Your colleague told me that I had to stay in the country for a year.” She looked at all of this paperwork and said, “That makes no sense.”

I have to keep emphasizing, I recognize the privilege that I have in being able to do what we did. I think often of folks who don’t have that privilege, whose spouse or son, daughter, brother, sister is in a country where a lot of them have no connection. What’s worse is the family that’s left behind isn’t able to actually go and spend time with those people who have been detained or deported. It was and continues to be something that I’ve been passionate and feel strongly about, just because this isn’t who we should be as a nation.

F&L: You had shared this story within the diocese as it was happening, but it was not widely known.

DKJ: I shared with the clergy. I had to go visit all the congregations of the diocese, and I still have to live out my vocation. I can’t stop being bishop for a year. I shared it with the clergy and with the instructions, “I ask you to pray for us. Please do not share this publicly.”

I didn’t want to put my husband in jeopardy of any kind during that time, and I also didn’t want to show up [and] the whole congregation to be, “Oh, we’re so sorry,” to kind of reignite the whole thing. It was helpful to me to have the clergy know but not share with everybody else. It was quasi-public, but not quite [public].

F&L: Since it has become more public, what has been the response?

DKJ: I’ve had people who reached out to both of us, sharing similar stories, or saying, “I didn’t quite understand that this is how the system works.”

I had somebody send me a message on social media saying, “If you all had just followed the process, none of this would have happened.” I had to respond by saying, “Do you honestly think that as a bishop I’m going to break the law to try to make this happen? Think about what you’re saying.”

I unfortunately read some of the comments on the NPR story, and some people [said], “They were just trying to game the system.” It’s kind of like I get the narrative that you want this to be, but the reality is very different than what you expect, not only the financial cost to families having to go through green card processes but the emotional toll that it takes.

We are still living with, if he is out driving somewhere, the possibility that he could just be picked up for no other reason than having a broken taillight or a flat tire or something. Who knows? That’s just the reality of living in this season in the life of this nation.

F&L: The way I became aware of your ministry is the daily prayers you write and share on social media. Could you talk about those?

DKJ: I became a bishop in the middle of COVID. I decided, “Let me just put out a prayer in the morning,” and I would pull a hymn or something that was meaningful to me or gave me comfort, just as a way of saying to people, “Look, this is happening, but we can still be deeply grounded.”

Every morning I’d start off finding a prayer from somewhere and just putting it out. Then I said, “This isn’t too bad. Let’s see if I can write a prayer occasionally.” So, I started writing. Occasionally, I would put out one or two among the others, and people were responding to the ones that I wrote more than the ones I was finding and sharing.

It continued to evolve, and I thought, “I’m just going to do this through COVID. I will just continue to write a prayer.” Once COVID is behind us, I would stop and continue doing the things that I was doing.

COVID came to an end, and I stopped for about a month. My inbox got flooded by people, “We didn’t get any prayer. We’re looking forward to your prayer.”

It now has become a part of my daily spiritual practice. A lot of the times the prayer that I’m writing is the prayer that I need to hear or the prayer that I need to be praying.

People will say to me, “Do you sit down and plan out a month’s worth of prayers or something like that?” Nope. Part of my routine has been getting up in the morning to get our son out to school. In the quiet between waking him up and him going to get dressed, I would sit, read the news, and something — like a word, a phrase, an image, something [while] reading the news or staring outside, looking out the window — would spark a prayer. That just continued.

I was on vacation last week, for instance, and we decided to go on a cruise, so I suspect that this week’s set of prayers is going to have a lot of water imagery. The prayer this morning was about a lighthouse because we sailed past a lighthouse. They’re whatever’s happening, sometimes what I’m feeling in response to what’s going on.

I love to write, so it’s a way for me to continue to write, to do something creative, because a lot of my time as a bishop is so challenging. [This is] some time to have a creative outlet. It has become now a foundational part of my own spirituality to write these prayers in the morning. It feels odd when I don’t.

There are seasons when the prayer is literally “Oh God, get me through this day.” And I recognize sometimes that if I’m praying that, it’s giving other people permission to pray the same thing.

Or — we’re seeing some terrible things happen. Being able to name those things in prayer and to live in that space of not knowing how to respond is prayer unto itself. I’m hoping that, because my prayers feel real in many ways, that they give people permission to be just real with God.

F&L: We are in a fraught season as the nation marks 250 years. As you consider past, present, future, the experiences of so many, what would your message be to the church in the most expansive sense?

DKJ: I think the message for the church is that we have to be the keepers of the story. In a season where we’re attempting to erase stories or to tell the stories, as the old people say, “from a slant,” I think the church’s role, especially as we look at 250 years of the American experiment, is to be the keeper of the stories, to tell the parts of the story that are not being told.

We hear of all the things that have happened in the last 250 years, going all the way from, even earlier, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock to yesterday. There’s a lot that has happened, and unless we are able to reckon with both the past and the present, it dims the light for the future. I think the church is called into telling the story but also into naming.

In the 1928 Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church, the priest or the layperson, whoever was getting ready to baptize a baby, would lean into the godparents and say, “Name this child.”

It wasn’t just about getting the name; it was about God naming and claiming that child by name, saying, “This person belongs to God.”

In some sense, I think that is part of the role of the church right now; we have to name and claim the stories of those who are being pushed to the side. We have to be the keepers of those stories, of our Native American siblings who were displaced through genocide in our nation. We have to tell the stories of slavery and its atrocity and Reconstruction and Jim Crow and segregation. We have to tell those full stories and not just the cleaned-up versions that make it into textbooks.

I’m a firm believer that those individual stories really do make a difference in getting people to recognize that this isn’t about some event that happened. These are real people’s lives.

I’ve been doing some research on my ancestors, which, for most people of African descent who came to this country or to the Caribbean islands, etc., through enslavement, there is very little [documentation]. But the church records tell stories.

One of the stories that I found is I have a sixth-generation great-grandmother whose name was Eliza Hutchinson, who was enslaved. She went to the church to have her daughter baptized. Mind you, there was no father listed on the certificate; maybe that was the master, but she went to have her daughter baptized.

It’s the vital statistics; you’ve got the name, age, occupation, all the things, but in the margins the priest wrote, “Beautiful singing voice.” I know nothing of Eliza Hutchinson except that she had a beautiful voice to sing, but just that little snippet of my history, knowing that that’s the legacy that she had left fills out the story of what slavery was. That’s why I said that I think that the church is called to name and tell the story, especially in this season.

I think it’s the one place where we can help move this society closer to the dream of God. Unless we tell the truth about our past, we will always be entering into the future without having a full vision.

We have to name and know the trauma that slavery had both on the slaves and the enslaver. Name the trauma that our Native American siblings endured genocide. Call it genocide. When we say, “the displacement or the removal” — let’s name the thing. Let’s stop trying to make this sound as though it was, “Oh, they came and just simply moved a tent community.” There was intentional destruction and death, but until we actually are able as a nation to name those places, to recognize that the good pieces — and the bad pieces — of our history are what make us who we are, we will always be telling and living out only a part of the American dream.

F&L: Do you have any idea what your prayer on the Fourth of July will be?

DKJ: No. That was one I have been thinking about. I try to do a little bit of a reflection on the big High Holy Days. I have some little threads, but I have not woven them together yet. But I think it’s going to center something around the lines of what divides us does not define us.

I’ve been seeing the 250th anniversary all over the place, and I keep hearing about the division. I keep reminding myself, “The things that divide us really don’t define us.” If we look past our division, we are all compassionate. We all want mercy. We all want caring. We want to be seen. We want to know that our lives matter.

I think that those folks who just … Democrats that hate Republicans and Republicans who hate Democrats and independents who hate whoever they want, then we are letting the things that divide us define us, and it doesn’t need to be that way.

Someone said America is a dream, and we get to shape what that dream looks like, if we can get back to the basics of recognizing [that] the things that keep us apart really do not define who we are as a people or as a nation. So, look for that line in one of the prayers.

The last piece that I would add to all of what we’ve talked about today, as someone who came to this country from another culture, [is] a recognition that we all come from someplace else. In God’s creative diversity, we make it work, if we can see past our own shortsightedness.

For many of us, summer can be a time that invites a slower, easier pace. Kids are out of school, and the grill is fired up as days lengthen, weather warms and vacations take shape.

But this year, it seems that there is so much going wrong. Earth’s climate is changing in scary ways, the political climate is tense, the economy is challenging and our communication with each other seems ever more contentious and polarized. What does it mean for a season of ease to be upon us when it feels like the world is crashing down?

Here we sit in the reality that two things can be true. This is a hard time to be human, and we can hold space for some of the simple joys that are often reserved for summer.

A 24-hour news cycle, social media that invites doom scrolling, and algorithms that thrive on tragedy can lead us to believe that we must always be aware and alert, that we must constantly ruminate on all the things that require our action.

However, the shifting of the seasons is a reminder of God’s constancy in our lives and an invitation to a rhythm that incorporates all of reality: “As long as the earth remains, there will be planting and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.” (Genesis 8:22 NLT)

This God-ordained rhythm is an admonition that constant work is neither desirable nor productive. From the commandment to remember the Sabbath in Exodus to Jesus’ actions throughout his ministry, the invitation has always been to rest from our work.

We lose our power and effectiveness when we don’t honor this rhythm with our minds, bodies and spirits. Whatever work you are called to in the world, the long game requires strategy. And an effective strategy must include rest.

So, this summer, you can still go slower. You have a decision to make about whether you buy into the myth of urgency that is doled out by a capitalist society. You can instead stand with Audre Lorde, who in “A Burst of Light” famously writes, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

What if a part of the way you fight for the world that you envision is to honor the parts of you that need a reprieve? What if a form of resistance is being fully present with people whom you love and who bring you joy? What if the way you sustain yourself for the journey is a day in nature, soaking in sun and being screen-free?

These practices are vital for all of us, but especially for those who experience marginalization in our society, including people of color, women and LGBTQ+ folks, who often face demands to perform, provide free labor and bear the burdens of the communities they inhabit.

To affirm that we are made in the image of God is to rest in the truth that our being is not defined by our work or what we produce. As Chanequa Walker-Barnes notes in her book “Sacred Self-Care,” “Many of us have been taught that productivity is a sign of blessedness.” A commitment to doing less is a way to combat this falsehood.

In addition to stillness and a slower pace, summer offers open opportunities for play — not just for kids, but for adults too, if we would only give ourselves permission. When we are feeling fearful, unsure and worried about the state of the world, it is a courageous act to be playful.

In “Doing Theological Double Dutch: A Womanist Pedagogy of Play,” Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch offers this call to action: “Play empowers people in the face of oppression, interrupts and allows for reflection, teaches skills needed for living, and provides space for a creative and imaginative outlet to express, explore, and try things out.”

In other words, play is not idle time. Play trains us for the world, even when that world doesn’t operate in ways that encourage our thriving. Play is not a diversion from the rhythm; it’s a part of it. Play is preparation. Play is a way of being present to self and others that restores and rejuvenates.

A final benefit of a slower pace is that, simply put, our nervous systems need a break. Living and interacting in a chaotic world can leave us feeling stressed, overwhelmed and disconnected. A 2025 survey on stress conducted by the American Psychological Association found that 62% of American adults feel stress due to societal division in the U.S., with more than 75% reporting worry about the future of the country.

Add to this the realities of working, caregiving and just living. Chronic stress over time wears down our bodies, impacts our emotional well-being and increases our risk for chronic illness. In other words, when we have an opportunity to reset or downshift, we should take it.

For those who are even moderately aware, it’s probably impossible to block out all the noise and enjoy perpetual bliss until Labor Day. You don’t have to do that to let summer be summer. But you do have choices about how much energy you give to things and how you prioritize your time.

Every battle is not yours to fight. Giving yourself the opportunity for stillness, rest and play can also provide you with the clarity you need to discern the work that is yours to do.

Perhaps a slower pace will equip us with fuel for the fight, bestow us with marching orders and connect us with comrades on the journey. As we sit with the duality that this moment brings, its invitation is to choose what fills you.

Don’t tell the Rev. Luis Cortés that Esperanza is something special.

It is, of course. And he appreciates the compliment. But he doesn’t think that an institution like Esperanza, which serves the Latino community in North Philadelphia, should be special.

“A place like Esperanza should be normative. We have 30 neighborhoods in the city; there should be 30 Esperanzas,” he said. “There should be 30 places where you can participate in the arts, where you can learn about and play music, where you can experience different forms of dance, where you can learn photography, where you can learn how to add and subtract.”

Just because people are poor doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the same things that everyone needs for a good life, he said.

Founded in 1987, Esperanza seeks to help the residents of Hunting Park, a majority-Latino neighborhood, have the same opportunities that other residents of the city enjoy. It focuses on education and economic development, including affordable housing, schools, housing counseling, immigration legal services, workforce development, youth leader training, and a fully accredited branch campus, Esperanza College of Eastern University.

The organization — its name means “hope” in Spanish — has more than 600 employees and a budget of more than $70 million and is a model for other institutions across the country.

Cortés, who is a Baptist pastor, worked with Hispanic Clergy of Philadelphia to found Esperanza. He earned an M.Div. at Union Theological Seminary and a master’s degree in economic development from Southern New Hampshire University. 

In this interview, he talks to Faith & Leadership’s Sally Hicks about why he founded Esperanza and why he thinks institution building is key to social change. The following is an edited transcript.

Faith & Leadership: You have a goal of building an “opportunity community.” What do you mean by that?

Luis Cortés: Our ontology has a set of concepts and categories, and the relationships between these are fundamental. There is a Creator, and there are the created. Those are givens, as fact. So we start there. The other thing that’s given, as fact, is that all human beings are equal in God’s eyes.

If you believe that, then you must believe that we should try to provide a great opportunity for everyone to become that which God would have them become. To be in service to humanity is to assist everyone to develop to their highest potential. That’s our modus operandi.

This understanding then is followed by the question, what do you do with the poor? The mission work is to create a place where you provide all residents the opportunity to live a quality life. What must you provide for people to reach their ultimate goals, to be able to serve humanity better despite their economic situation and to have them feel they have a good quality of life?

This is what becomes an opportunity community, the development of all things needed for individuals to reach their potential. As an example, we built a theater and we have cultural pieces, like teaching dance, teaching music, all from a cultural perspective.

All people come from and have a culture. We have a language, we have music, and for Latines, we are in exile — we’re away from where our culture was based.

What do we do to create an opportunity community — a community that understands your class and your culture and helps you build so that you can have a great life staying here in this neighborhood or you can use what you learn here and have a great life elsewhere?

F&L: How did Esperanza begin?

LC: I was the founder of Hispanic Clergy of Philadelphia in 1981, an outgrowth of developing a field education system for Latine students at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. It was about 26 clergy from about 18 different denominational entities.

These clergy were all in the same Philadelphia neighborhood, and they had never really worked together until we organized as a field education consortium. As a group of clergy, when we would get together, like any group of highly motivated concerned citizens, we inevitably become active on challenging issues of the day.

We were getting together to discuss field education, quite mundane. And then all of a sudden, conversations shifted to, “They shot a guy here last week” or, “The police did or didn’t perform,” and we just moved in the direction of the conversations and became a civil rights organization.

During that time, Pew Charitable Trusts did a study on religious institutions, and as a result, we got funded for three years to start Esperanza and to work in clergy education. The clergy hired me to do it, with the mandate to do the clergy education and create a proactive organization, Esperanza.

In the beginning, the more we helped an individual family, the more it hurt the local church. As we helped individuals, the family moved farther away from their church, eventually joining a suburban congregation.

What we learned as a group was, it doesn’t matter if our people leave to improve their lot, as long as we create an institution that remains to assist those that stay or can’t get out.

Our philosophy became that we will work together to create Hispanic-owned-and-operated institutions. We began working on that theory of institution building where we could control the mission and agenda of our community, as opposed to the present-day external control.

We as Hispanic people in this nation have never focused on this on a large scale. We’ve never created our own institutions. What we do is we assume that we will inherit the institutions of America as we become a larger part of America. But that is not how it works. The institutions that provide for and control our neighborhoods are all managed externally: police, fire, schools, streets, most businesses.

So we decided we only wanted to create Hispanic-owned-and-operated institutions. We had enough Hispanic institutions that were doing social service, so we decided to not compete with our follow Latine agencies. We focused on education and economic development.

We wanted to do education because education is the first step and we understand institution-building as economic development.

When we first got started, it was like, “How do we help people?” Now it’s, “How do we help our institutions help people?”

F&L: How did you come to appreciate institutions in this time when there’s a lot of cynicism, a lot of distrust, a lot of anger around institutions?

LC: Since our nation’s beginning, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that it is associations and the institutions that they create that make Americas unique.

We’ve got to think positive. We serve our communities and our neighbors. So if everybody would do as well as they can at their community-serving job, whatever that is, we should be headed to a better place.

As the religious population lessens, there will have to be alternative institutions that defend the rights of the poor. Historically, the church has responded to the poor first through charity, then the development of institutions like hospitals or schools. Advocating to change unjust laws.

If that faith role dwindles, we have to figure out who or what replaces that. I see that as a major problem for the future.

F&L: In addition to the institutions, you are making change in individuals. The documentary “Esperanza: Hope for Our Cities,” for example, shows that commitment. Why do you stress self-belief, grit and confidence?

LC: I went to public school in Spanish Harlem. When I got to elementary school, they said to me, “You can be president of the United States.” And I looked around, and it’s old, it’s decrepit, it’s dirty, it’s outdated, and I’m like, “Nah, no way.”

For many people, it’s hard to self-motivate if you don’t see anyone else around you achieve success. We need our youth to “make it.” Last year, in our graduating high school class, we had MIT, two people at Carnegie Mellon, and one girl went to Wellesley, among a plethora of state colleges and universities. It is now normative.

Part of our model is we must have modern equipment. The space must be super clean. Visitors come to our place and they say, “Wow, this is so clean.” It’s a compliment. I understand. But it also says something about their expectation.

When I’m told, “Wow, this place is clean. This lab is so modern,” what are they saying? That in their preconception of economic poverty, they did not expect a first-class lab here. They did not expect, because of the economics, this place to be spotless. They do not expect your top five students to go to those schools, and you have one of the top college-graduating high schools for Hispanics. They do not expect that.

Whatever prejudice they brought in begins to be challenged, right? It’s like — look at this: MIT, Harvard, Penn. When they see that, they say, “Something special is happening.”

While there may be truth to that, it’s only special because other people won’t do it. Our team at Esperanza figured out how to do it, creating a culture of opportunity.

I believe there’s nothing that we can’t do. It’s just about how much time you have and what are your priorities. People ask me about this all the time — “How did you do it?”

Well, you find the need and fill it. And once you fill it, create an institution behind it, then find the next need and fill it. And once you fill it, create an institution that survives until it can thrive.

F&L: You mentioned the cleanliness, and you also insist on giving Esperanza’s students and other participants the best in other ways. Why is that important?

LC: We start with the concept that we should have what any community has. If you look at most communities and the arts, for example, they have access to experiences and ways to learn; they have ways to experience music, acting, dance and painting or visual. We have to create the avenues.

First we got the theater, and then through the theater, we do dance. But we also brought the best of the region. So the Philadelphia Orchestra plays at our theater; Opera Philadelphia sings in our theater; the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra plays at our theater; Philadanco and the Philadelphia Ballet dance in our theater.

We communicated to these arts institutions, “When you come to our neighborhood, it has to be your A team.” Normally when they go to a community, they send the B and C team so they can work and practice as they serve a neighborhood project. At Esperanza, if the A team ain’t coming, you don’t come.

The artistic talent also has to give time during the week to work with students. Not just Esperanza schools, but there are about 10,000 public school children in our neighborhood. They do workshops and our community youth interact with them. After their theatrical performance, they sit and answer audience questions for 15 minutes. We have found the arts groups love these interactions as much as our residents do.

F&L: You also work on gentrification. How much of an issue is that for you?

LC: The bottom line is that urban communities near centers of our American cities where working-class Spanish-speaking people live are being dismantled by an upper middle class and above who wants their land and their housing so they can capitalize economically and culturally. It is happening everywhere.

Cities are happy with the gentrification or displacement of our neighborhoods, because it means a better tax base for the city. So when the city gains, the economically disadvantaged lose. That’s a constant struggle.

We need to build up equity in Black and brown communities. The No. 1 equity builder in Black and brown communities is not giant companies; it’s mom-and-pop commercial shops and home ownership. What we can show is, as we lose the housing, these mom-and-pop shops are destroyed.

So, the real question is, do we really want to help Black and brown people, or are we just saying we do while we actually cash in on their assets?

In America, they’re taking our neighborhoods under the guise of mixed income communities. In St. Louis, Black neighborhoods are being bought up by universities. West Philadelphia, it’s universities and science centers. North Philadelphia, it’s another university and the corporate needs. So they push people out of their long serving neighborhoods.

Today, young professionals don’t want to spend money on a car to live in the suburbs. They prefer to live in the city, not have a car. They’ll just Uber and use the money saved on transportation for restaurants and recreation, which is fine. But the economic burden falls on the economically disadvantaged, who need to move farther away to more expensive housing, losing the businesses that cater to their needs.

It’s interesting that progressive communities are the ones that gentrify Black and brown neighborhoods. It’s not the conservatives. Conservatives avoid minority communities, while progressives enjoy moving into a culturally mixed neighborhood until they extinct the original ethnic group that was there.

Progressives move in during their early professional career, purchase housing cheaply, live there for five years and make six figures on their “investment.”

It’s a real interesting dynamic where we fight the conservatives on one side and we have to fight the progressives on the other. They do have one thing in common: they’re white.

The role of the church should be different. How do we talk to progressives to say, “Listen, I know you can make money by moving into my neighborhood, but you’re hurting us. How do we really build a mixed income community?”

There’s a dynamic that’s happening in our country. San Bernardino, Phoenix, Calle Ocho in Miami, San Antonio, Philadelphia. Chicago, with three distinct Hispanic neighborhoods. They’re all under the same pressure.

F&L: How do you keep from being overwhelmed when everything you describe is extremely complex? It’s difficult. Yet almost 40 years later, you’re still hopeful.

LC: I am a minister. I believe in God. And in the end, we are all called to serve others. Despite all the problems, our job is to persevere and pursue. And persistence is the name of the game.

Brian Ide is on the road. He’s somewhere between Flagstaff and Albuquerque, headed to Amarillo and points beyond, traveling cross-country to talk about a topic that, in this moment, feels both vitally important and virtually impossible to achieve.

In his new documentary, “A Case for Love,” Ide raises the possibility that unselfish love could be a bridge across the nation’s significant social and political divides.

The topic plays out through conversations — some with people the film’s crew literally walked up to on streets across America, others with individuals and families deeply engaged in living out love through challenging situations. And there are interviews with recognizable figures such as Al Roker, the Rev. Becca Stevens and Presiding Bishop Michael Curry.

The son of a Lutheran pastor father and Catholic mother, Ide has worked in the entertainment industry for more than two decades, founding Grace-Based Films in order to start telling faith-centric stories that weren’t being told in Hollywood. He had joined the vestry as a parishioner at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills and quickly recognized that conversations about stewardship and pledging shortfalls did not play to his strengths.

“It could be a long [vestry term] — or maybe we could start telling stories and utilizing other gifts in our parish because of where we were,” Ide said he thought. “Especially back then, [what] was coming through Hollywood was centered around, if your faith was strong enough, then your football team won and your marriage was reconciled.

“We thought, ‘Who’s telling the stories about the messier, more complicated conversations, where you don’t get the big football win?’ It was born out of there.”

“A Case for Love” is Ide’s fifth film and first full-length documentary and will be showing in wide theatrical release for one day, Jan. 23. Ide spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Aleta Payne during a promotional tour. The following is an edited transcript.

Faith & Leadership: There are a lot of entry points into the conversations featured in the movie, including for people who are not from a faith background. Was that intentional?

F&L: You feature such a breadth of people. How did you find and choose them?

BI: The film itself is broken into four groups of people, and the bulk of it, probably 95% of the whole film, are these deep-dive stories of ordinary people that cover a range of topics that are woven together into seven chapters. It’s usually two, maybe three of these stories woven into a single chapter, and the chapter itself has a universal theme — so a chapter on love and loss or a chapter on being dealt a difficult hand or a chapter on answering the call.

We knew early on it was really important that the bulk of the film be about ordinary people, because we wanted it to be for ordinary people so that, hopefully, they’d be inspired or moved or motivated to do something in their own life. If they see it’s Bob and Susan doing this, then they’re like, “OK, well then I think I can do that.”

Whereas if all we had was a bunch of CEOs and Mother Teresas, it would be, “Great for them, but I’ll never do that.” So that was really intentional; that’s really the heart of the film.

There were a handful of those that we had lined up before we started the filming tour, and two of them were military. We knew that it was important for us to explore the military space and that intersection of what we assume is this community that has to face conflict and war and death sometimes, and how does that intersect with love. We were just fascinated by the power of that.

Beyond the four or five we originally had lined up, it was trusting in the Holy Spirit to start in Minneapolis and be with people. And they’re like, “You’re going to Indianapolis? Listen, you really need to meet with Tim Shaw. Let me see if I can make that happen.” And the rest of the stories ended up coming from the journey itself revealing [them].

It was this mix of being intentional and planning about having diversity in the stories but then letting the Spirit guide. I love that, because we ended up being with the people that we were supposed to be with, and they weren’t people that were chosen because they’re experts on any of these topics; they’re just people. We’re in their homes, and we’re creating a space that’s vulnerable enough and safe enough for them to open up about their particular journey.

That’s the deep-dive portion of it. Then we were fortunate enough to have access to these notable figures, and those were politicians and actors and rabbis and Muslim leaders and NGO leaders. That helps Hollywood see that they can have something to sell a ticket on, when you have these notable faces and names in there.

The third group are people on the streets. We had probably 200, 250 of those, where we just pulled over [and approached them] everywhere, from downtown Indianapolis to the Brooklyn Bridge to just a small row of farms in Pennsylvania. We would just pull over and then walk up to people and ask them about what comes to mind when they hear the words “unselfish love,” and where have they seen it in the world and where have they seen the absence. Those were probably the interviews I enjoyed the most, because of how eclectic they were, how surprising they were.

After all of that, we sat down with Bishop Curry and said, “OK, you’re the teacher. Here’s what we saw. What does this mean?” He’s just beautiful about speaking to the human condition.

F&L: What a faithful way to have set out to do this, to discover the voices you needed along the way.

BI: I would say that. Or terrifying. One of those two. I think it’s a little bit of both. But it was a trust, which I loved.

F&L: What surprised you or resonated with you from these conversations?

BI: A couple of things. This first one wouldn’t be a surprise but would be a reinforcement for me that we are way more connected than the headlines of the world want us to believe.

Most of us are trying to figure out how to take care of our families and loved ones; most of us are trying to figure out what our purpose is on this planet; most of us are trying to figure out how to be kind. And most of us find that pretty tough at times. In being with people and talking about those things, where we were on some political issue or social issue never came up. Just the human part of the dialogue came up. It reminded me and reinforced for me — and that gave me hope — that we are very much connected.

The surprise part of the journey was probably the people-on-the-street times, because we’re a crew of eight. It’s a big camera package. We have big sound equipment and all of this. When you walk up to somebody and they’re walking to the grocery store to get their lunch and you pull them aside, I think everybody’s first sense was skepticism.

The surprise of it was that as soon as they believed what we were about, then there was this lifting of spirit across the board and there was a sense of, “You want to know what I think? Nobody ever asked me what I think about that and holds that in value.”

I saw that time and time again. When that happened, they shared incredibly beautiful, vulnerable, intimate things that they probably never in a million years imagined they would tell a group of strangers on camera on their way to work.

That surprised me, not knowing what that part of the process would be like, and I think that’s probably why I enjoyed them so much.

F&L: You talked to children and to young people and gave value to their stories as well.

BI: What I loved about the young people is they don’t tell you as quickly what they think you want to hear — they tell you what they think. That gives me hope too, because we’re all born with a pretty good soul and a pretty good view of what love is and instincts of what love is. To sit with them reinforced that.

I think the next project is going to be centered around young people in some way. I think, this last handful of years, that they’re absorbing toxicity at a rate that we’re not fully aware of, and I think that they’re struggling in a variety of ways. So I want to do something to serve them.

We had a national educator see one of the screenings of the film. He was like, “Can I create a discussion guide that uses our language in schools for young people?” He created a free one for seventh through 12th graders (it’s on the website and free to download) that uses the language of young people and educators. That was a beautiful thing.

F&L: Where do you hope to go with this particular project, and what’s next for Grace-Based Films?

BI: For this one, Hollywood is in an enormous period of transition right now, and I think they’re trying to figure out what models are working and not working. Is it streaming? Is it not streaming? What kinds of movies do they greenlight?

For films like these, they don’t usually get significant platforms. And when they do get platforms for faith-centric movies, historically, a lot of them have been catered to big evangelical megachurch worlds.

It’s much harder in the Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran worlds to do that, so they just haven’t been given the megaphone in that way. It is really important to me to do everything we can to show the business analytics side of this, that there is an audience for these stories.

We were offered this theatrical release, which is in almost 1,000 theaters nationwide, provided by Fathom Events. (Fathom is owned by AMC, Regal and Cinemark.)

They created this company to create opportunities to add new content to midweek auditoriums and theaters, because most of their box office happens on weekends. They can now offer it to films that aren’t “The Avengers” and “Avatar” and give them opportunities like this.

The way it’ll work for us is that we’re in theaters on Jan. 23 for one day only, as most of their films are. We push all the attention toward that, and the success of the attendance and engagement with that will then dictate, “OK, does that mean that Netflix is next or Amazon is next or Peacock? What streaming opportunities? What opportunities are there for military bases?”

All of those have this tiered downstream process dictated by Hollywood. Much of that will be on the success of Jan. 23.

I try to plan for the next one, and I realize, every time I do, that I’m wrong. But I really do feel this pulling toward something that is youthful. I want to travel again and spend time with [young people] and listen for, like, “OK, what are the things that you all are talking about, and what are you not hearing, and what are you not saying?” and then mirror that with the power of storytelling, probably in a scripted movie, not in a documentary. To find something in that space is where my heart is right now.

F&L: You address head-on that some people might view this movie cynically. Bishop Curry says in the film, “Someone could say that’s naive, but sometimes what we call naivete actually are ideals we don’t want to deal with.” Could you speak to that as a filmmaker?

BI: As we were in the earliest processes of dreaming this up, I was sitting with a writer-producer friend of mine who’s done this for a long time in Hollywood, and he said, “OK, here’s the deal. You have a documentary about love. You have an older, ordained minister as the inspiration for it. The vast majority of people are going to look at that and be like, ‘I already know what that is. I don’t need to watch it.’ Or some people will be like, ‘I want that,’ but they’re going to assume that they already know what it is.

“Your job as a filmmaker is to say, ‘You thought it was this? It’s actually this.’” That drove so much of the way I went about this process, and Bishop Curry was really focused on that as well.

He says it over and over again when I’m with him, and I’ve heard him say it to many other people too, that this is not a sentimental love. He said, “What I’m talking about is not sentimentality. Unselfish love is a very different thing.”

When you hear “unselfish love,” it forces you to take a beat, because you don’t usually hear those two words together.

Sometimes jarring people can be good. There are going to be some stories that are jarring. We have some really beautiful, simple, heartwarming stories in there, and then we also have a story of a woman who was sexually trafficked from the time she was 5. We have the whole gamut in there, because different people need to hear different things, and also to remind us that these are complicated things.

All of those things drove how we go about this, so it doesn’t get written off as a churchy thing or a Valentine’s Day thing but instead is like, “No, we really need to have these conversations as a human being thing.”

We’re seeing the effect of not having these conversations, and it’s not great. Those were driving forces for us.

F&L: What haven’t I asked?

BI: I’m a hopeful person. This film is funded entirely by donors across the United States, from individuals to foundations to parishes to all kinds of people. I don’t own any of the profits from it. Bishop Curry doesn’t own any of the profits from it. The people that funded it don’t own any of the profits. They all go toward telling stories that serve people. I’d love for that to come across. Because sometimes, I think, in the cynical world that we’re living in, it’s like, “OK, is this guy hopping around all over the place trying to get people to buy his product so his product is successful and he becomes successful?”

It is important to me that people know that that’s not the driving force of why we or the people that funded this made it happen. I do like sharing that, and I think people will be surprised — I think they’ll be moved by this.

We didn’t want people to go to a theater or watch it at home for two hours, be entertained or be moved, and then go back to their life. We wanted this to instigate something; it’s part of the launch of 30 days of unselfish love. So the call people will hear in movie theaters on the 23rd, the call is, when you go home, for the next 30 days, be intentional about seeking out — every day — some act that works in your world of unselfish love and journal about that. What is the impact on you, and what did that mean to you?

There are journals on the website too. They’re beautifully designed, and they’re free; they’re downloadable. Our CFO was the one who came up with this, and he’s a very Type A, analytical, list-driven person. He started this, and he put it on his whiteboard each morning.

What he found was that by the sixth day, it became a habit. Our belief is that acts turn into habits and habits create change. We invite people to use this and then find out whatever [is next]. A lot of the NGO partners — folks that are doing really great work that have come on board, like kindness.org, dosomething.org, racial justice programs and neighborhood collaboration programs — if somebody’s moved by the faith element of this, if they’re moved by the volunteerism element of this, here are groups that do that really well.

Take this as an instigator toward action. We hope that people see that too — that this is more than just a moment in time.