In collaboration with Mayflower United Church of Christ and Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light (MNIPL), the Boundless Love Project gave a five-hour Mindful Direct Action Training to 37 attendees at Mayflower UCC on Saturday, January 25, 2020.
Mayflower UCC’s Associate Minister Christian Briones, Community Minister Dwight Wagenius, and Team Lead Minister Sarah Campbell, worked with other members of their congregation, Outreach Coordinator for MNIPL, Joe Meinholz, and Boundless Love Project’s Mindfulness Teacher Freeman to organize and plan the training.
Mayflower prioritizes social justice work. As efforts to stop the construction of the tar sands pipeline known as Line 3 heat up, Mayflower Ministers wanted their congregation and surrounding community to be better prepared to lovingly and nonviolently resist this project which will violate Indigenous treaty rights, pollute Minnesota’s lakes, and be a huge set-back to Minnesota’s climate protection efforts.
The proposed Line 3 is a project of Enbridge, and would run from Edmonton, Alberta, through Minnesota, crossing 227 bodies of sacred water in the process, before ending in Superior, Wisconsin, where it would be refined. All pipelines leak, and tar sands crude oil will end up in our waterways. Many of the lakes the pipeline plans to cross grow wild rice stands that Indigenous communities depend on, and wild rice stands are very sensitive to pollution.
Furthermore, a recently released report titled A Giant Step Backwards shows that the carbon pollution from Line 3 would have the impact of 50 new coal-fired power plants, and produce more carbon pollution than was released from the state of Minnesota in 2016.
“If we want a livable planet for our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, we need to stop line 3,” says Freeman. “If we don’t engage in loving, nonviolent action to protect our climate now, it will soon be too late to stop the catastrophic consequences, and the environmental turmoil that results will become the shameful legacy we pass on to our children.”
The training was led by Michelle Wenderlich who has extensive activist experience, Joe, and Freeman, who speaks from his 30+ years of activist experience. Through meditation, singing freedom songs, role playing confrontations in de-escalation lines, conversations, and activities, attendees were introduced to a variety of helpful information.
Facilitators defined direct action and civil disobedience, explained the many roles often needed to create effective direct actions, and talked about the need to establish affinity groups that would cooperatively plan and implement the action. Some of the theme they drove home include:
• The end goal of all mindful, nonviolent direct action is reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community.
• No one is our enemy. We can love the workers and managers of Enbridge, and because of our love for all life, we can still kindly and firmly tell them “no.” We lovingly engage our adversaries to transform the hearts and minds of all people, and create policies and systems that allow all people, beings, and ecosystems on our planet to be peaceful, happy, and prosperous.
• Pledges, freedom songs, and role playing help those members of our affinity group prepare to maintain the all-important nonviolent discipline while enduring verbal and physical abuse and other forms of repression.
The training included a lunch catered by Holy Land. Out of love for humanity, animals, and the environment, the lunch was vegan and all dishes were compostable. The lunch featured falafel, pita bread, baba ghanoush, hummus, and grape-leaf wraps.
A free will offering was taken for those in attendance to pay for the expenses of the training. All of the facilitators donated their time and the space was also freely offered. After expense were covered the additional $200 raised was split between the Giniw Collective, which is an Indigenous-led group, engaging in frontline nonviolent direct action to stop Line 3, and the Boundless Love Project.
All who attended were also sent a follow-up email filled with helpful resources on nonviolent direct action.
If you belong to a place of worship or activist group that would like to possibly host one of these trainings, please contact us at the Boundless Love Project. For more information about the campaign to stop Line 3, and info on how to get involved please check out the links below.
Groups Mobilized to Stop Line 3
• Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light
• MN350