Rafael Vallejo, lay pastor of Queen Street East and founder of Toronto’s Protest Chaplains, speaks with police officers in front of St. James Cathedral on October 15.
It is Oct. 16, 2011. Protesters involved in the fledgling Occupy Toronto movement are meeting to plan a march through downtown, and are using a communication process called Open Space Technology (OST). The process uses agenda – free meetings and hand signals to achieve consensus.
It isn’t working.
OST is new and awkward for this first – time gathering. The Occupy Toronto group has no leaders—a deliberate decision, but one that makes it difficult to streamline the process right now. Some activists are feeling left out.
When the meeting turns into a screaming match, one member of the crowd steps forward. He is wearing a robe and stole over his blue jeans, and his voice is calm. His name is Rafael Vallejo, and he calls himself a protest chaplain. That afternoon, he marches hand in hand with one of the activists who had been threatening to leave the protest.
The Occupy movement became a worldwide phenomenon this fall. In an interview with the online show, What’s Trending, Adbusters’ senior editor Micah White called it the “American autumn” in response to the “Arab spring.” Inspired by the Arab protesters and by the acampados who staged general assemblies across Spain last May, Adbusters put out a call in July for 20,000 Americans to set up camp on Wall Street and protest against the corporate control of western democracy. Occupy Wall Street began on Sept. 17 and soon sparked imitation gatherings in hundreds of locations worldwide, including more than a dozen cities in Canada.
Vallejo, a graduate of Toronto’s Knox College, was inspired by the Occupy phenomenon. “I am beginning to be persuaded that the young people at ‘Occupy’ are doing what churches should be doing, except that they do not use Christian words,” he says. “They are acting collectively to be a conscience for civil society.”
Vallejo first heard of the Protest Chaplains from Anne Howard, whose piece Jesus on Wall Street was published in the Beatitudes Society newsletter. The chaplains Howard wrote of were Harvard Divinity School students who attended the Occupy Wall Street protests wearing white acolyte albs and carrying a cardboard cross. Their group has since grown to include leaders and students of other denominations and faiths, all com mitted to social justice and to supporting the people who are protesting corporate greed.
The Protest Chaplains idea spread to other cities nearly as quickly as the Occupy movement itself did. The group’s official blog seeks members who “can find common ground with anyone, don’t always speak Christianese, find holiness in the everyday, and have enough grit to keep their heads in chaos.” It discourages members from proselytizing: “That’s not OK. That’s not what chaplains do.”
So what do the chaplains do?
“The short answer is they do different things depending on where they are and what their context is,” says Vallejo. He got in touch with the original Protest Chaplains group the day before Occupy Toronto began and asked permission to set up a Toronto chapter. The group had a Facebook page by that night. “Sometimes you see us leading worship or prayer vigils … Other times we are teachers talking about the way of Jesus and God’s dream for the world. There have also been times that we act as contemplative leaders inviting people into the silence so they can hear what God is saying to them.”
Mainly, Vallejo says, the goal of the Protest Chaplains is to “do theology on the ground, to share the pain of the protesters… [and] to accompany them on their journey.” If that sounds a little vague, it’s in keeping with the spirit of Occupy as a whole. The movement is deliberately leaderless, agenda – free and open to all forms of activism, as long as they are non – violent and do not discriminate against any particular group. The lack of focus has frustrated some, but the majority of protesters are determined not to narrow their scope.
“We are not the 99 per cent,” one Toronto protester observed at a Nov. 5 meeting. “We are one per cent of the 99 per cent.” Other protesters wiggled their fingers in the air, an OST signal indicating agreement. As the representative voices of a multitude, the group agreed, they should not silence even a single voice.
Still, the rest of the 99 per cent—including the church—is not always comfortable with the protests.
“I think people, in general, and churches in particular, are reluctant to offer support to something that they do not quite understand,” Vallejo says. “‘Occupy’ is telling us a different narrative. It operates on a different model of organization that we are not used to… And for some people this whole thing looks scruffy on the edges! But that must be how the ochlos, the people who followed Jesus around in Mark’s gospel, must have looked like.”
Vallejo and the other Protest Chaplains are eager to continue the mission and witness they have begun in occupied cities worldwide. While they recognize that not all churches have chosen to support the movement, they encourage them to consider such political engagement a spiritual responsibility.
“God is doing a new thing in our world,” says Vallejo. “Some of us are beginning to see it!”
