Lucas Johnson

“The best community organizers know that relationships provide the deepest impetus for the lasting transformation of alienation and violence so that something truly new can be sustained. But relationship is hard to scale. Our work is rooted in a media project whose audience is deeply invested and expanding, giving us the potential to bring the impact of relationships to scale. This human aspect of culture shift is an indispensable foundation if the best policy outcomes are to have any possibility of meaningful success. We devote ourselves to this task.”

Lucas Johnson

 

Lucas is a global leader in conversations about shaping public life and building community across lines of difference. He has been shaped by his time learning from veterans of the civil rights movement in the U.S., most closely Vincent Harding and Dorothy Cotton, and by his work with human rights activists around the world, especially in Africa, Europe, and Latin America. He brings this deep experience in the lived philosophy of nonviolence, conflict transformation, and community organizing to his leadership at On Being.

For four years prior to joining our work, he served as General Secretary in Amsterdam of global operations of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, where he incubated a Beloved Communities Project in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and helped to create an Ethics of Reciprocity initiative with the United Nations. For the previous six years, he led IFOR’s Southeast and mid-Atlantic chapter in the United States. 

Lucas was born and raised partially in Germany, in a military family, before spending the later half of his childhood in Georgia (U.S.). He studied at Mercer University and Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and was ordained a minister in the American Baptist tradition at Oakhurst Baptist Church. He now resides between Amsterdam and Atlanta where he has deep relationships among his friends and queer community in both places. 


From Lucas:

My wise teachers over the years, some of whom have been guests at On Being, have always emphasized the connection between the work we do in ourselves and the work we do in the world around us. They have learned through experience that deep transformative work — for which many have risked their lives — demands, and sometimes comes out of, deep personal searching and growth. We live in this remarkable moment when the survival of our species, and of our democracies, is as dependent on what we restrain ourselves from doing as on what we choose to do. Meeting this moment requires an inward journey.

As Krista, my colleague and teacher, explains, “In this century, the question of what it means to be human has become inextricable from the question of who we will be to each other.” This understanding informs On Being’s work in the world. The deep chasms in our social and political lives show up in private, in our homes, our families, and in our bodies. We discern that our project has a role to play, despite the immensity of it all, in reintegrating all that has been fractured — work of healing.

Our strategies for public life — life together — are oriented towards the long-term creation of resilient relationships across differences and towards wholeness in lives and communities. “Gathering,” for us, is not about conferences or lectures. It’s about creating the space for relationships to form and inviting people into quiet conversation where vulnerability and uncertainty can be held.

The best community organizers know that relationships provide the deepest impetus for the lasting transformation of alienation and violence so that something truly new can be sustained, but relationship is hard to scale. Our work is rooted in a media project whose audience is deeply invested and expanding, giving us the potential to bring the impact of relationships to scale. We gather in-person in select moments and contexts and we are always convening a far-reaching community, inviting people into the conversations with themselves and each other that lasting change requires. This human aspect of culture-shift is an indispensable foundation if the best policy outcomes are to have any possibility of meaningful success. We devote ourselves to this task.

Lucas in Conversation

Here is a stunning sentence for you, written by Lyndsey Stonebridge, our guest this hour, channeling the 20th-century political thinker and journalist Hannah Arendt: “Loneliness is the bully that coerces us into giving up on democracy.” This conversation is a kind of guide to generative shared deliberations we might be having with each other and ourselves in this intensely fraught global political moment: on the human underlay that gives democracy its vigor or threatens to undo it; on the difference between facts and truth — and on the difference between violence and power. Krista interviewed Lyndsey once before, in 2017, after Hannah Arendt’s classic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, had become a belated runaway bestseller. Now Lyndsey has published her own wonderful book offering her and Arendt’s full prescient wisdom for this time. What emerges is elevating and exhilaratingly thoughtful — while also brimming with helpful, practicable words and ideas. We have, in Lyndsey’s phrase, “un-homed” ourselves. And yet we are always defined by our capacity to give birth to something new — and so to partake again and again in the deepest meaning of freedom.

Hannah Arendt’s other epic books include The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” She was born a German Jew in 1906, fled Nazi Germany and spent many years as a stateless person, and died an American citizen in 1975. This conversation with Lyndsey Stonebridge happened in January 2024, as part of a gathering of visionaries, activists, and creatives across many fields. Krista interviewed her alongside Lucas Johnson, a former leader of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation who now leads our social healing initiatives at The On Being Project.

Community organizers Rami Nashashibi and Lucas Johnson have much to teach us about using love — the most reliable muscle of human transformation — as a practical public good. Nashashibi is the founder of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, a force for social healing on Chicago’s South Side. Johnson is the newly-named executive director of The On Being Project’s Civil Conversations Project. In a world of division, they say despair is not an option — and that the work of social healing requires us to get “proximate to pain.”

“When it comes to cultural change we excessively fixate on the critical mass and underestimate the catalytic quality of the improbable few. The ‘critical yeast’ – these small, unlikely, combinations of persistent people and partnerships committed to a new quality of relationship – dwell before and behind every instance of social change that truly shifts what is possible and transformative across generations.

On a regular basis I get notes from the most unexpected places — Kazakhstan, Wichita, Uganda, Nepal, Washington, D.C. — about how the conversations of On Being have touched and lifted forward a sense of connection. On Being stirs hearts and imagination, the two indispensable sources of courage and creativity that nurture persistent patience and improbable power to transform and to heal.”

John Paul Lederach, Peacebuilder (Northern Ireland, Nepal, Colombia, U.S.)