2023 LAMA Summit
LAMA Summit participants at Love of Christ Lutheran Church
LAMA Liaisons, board members, and community members gathered at Love of Christ Lutheran Church on Saturday, November 4th, for our fourth annual (third, in-person) LAMA Summit! We had an opportunity to connect in person, worship, engage in discussion, and together, send personal invitations to our legislators.
Advocacy as a Spiritual Practice
The theme of the 2023 Summit was Advocacy as a Spiritual Practice. Pastor Sarah Stadler from Esperanza Lutheran Church facilitated our exploration of this theme. Together the group defined spiritual practices as activities that draw us closer to God in our own ways, such as singing, praying, meditating, reading the Bible, and being in community. We then brainstormed different ways that we can make advocacy one of these practices. Everyone in LAMA’s community has been called to advocacy out of love for our neighbors, but this exercise helped to elevated the action of advocacy from a task of service to a way to connect with God.
Some of the the ways we plan to turn advocacy into a spiritual practice include empowering vulnerable community members to join us and advocate with their own voices, scheduling advocacy in our routines, and praying over the causes and people for which we advocate.
Pastor Sarah then led us in a story circle, focusing on the questions, “Where have you encountered God while doing advocacy?,” “How does advocacy deepen your relationship with God?,” and “How does your relationship with God move you to advocacy?”
Participants shared stories about the ways scripture inspires their advocacy, bring motivated to advocacy by God’s liberating grace, working in community, attending protests, and speaking to representatives.
Policy Priorities
In addition to group activities, LAMA staff also updated the gathering on LAMA’s recent work.
Hunger Advocacy Fellow Autumn Byars introduced our policy priorities for the upcoming year. In addition to partnering with Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest on their work with housing and homelessness, our priorities are:
Hunger & Food Insecurity
Voting & Civic Engagement
Water as a Resource
Find out more about these policy areas by reading our blog post!
Lunch & Invitation Writing
The summit wouldn’t have been a true Lutheran gathering unless we had food! After our worship and discussions, we ate lunch together. While sharing food, attendees had the opportunity to visit with new friends and catch up with old ones, as well as brainstorm the next advocacy steps they wanted to take. During lunch, director Solveig Muus also led us in a letter writing activity.
Everyone wrote three notes, one to each of their state representatives and to their state senator, inviting them to join us at Lutheran Day at the Legislature on January 18th. We encouraged them to join us for remarks and lunch, in addition to individual meetings regarding our policy focuses. By writing these invitations, we have officially kicked off the preparation period for Lutheran Day at the Legislature 2024! If you haven’t registered to join us yet, you can do so here. We all had fun comparing our legislators, finding out who lived in the same districts, and what information had changed since the recent redistricting.
All in all, the 2023 LAMA Summit turned out to be our best one yet! Our community had an insightful, productive, fun time together. We hope to see you in a year at our next Summit!
If you missed out on this year’s summit, you can find a recording of the livestream here: 2023 LAMA Summit Live Stream
Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in the LAMA Summit this year. Thank you to Pastor Sarah for facilitating our discussions, planning worship, and for her wonderful piano skills! Thank you to Mark Engel and Pastor Brian Weinberger for addressing the gathering. Special thanks to Solveig Muus for her hard work planning this event, and to Pastor Nanette and the team at Love of Christ Lutheran Church for hosting us this year!
