On the evening of June 30, the Tucson Cluster gathered for its public civic ritual. Seventy people came together as Rabbi Malcolm Cohen, Rev. Mike Wilkerson, Rev. Matthew Funke Crary, Cantor Jennifer Benrey, and Chris Tackett led the evening. Participants were surrounded by large, poster-sized versions of the texts the clergy had studied together: the Declaration of Independence, Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” and Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Together, they sang “Color Me America,” “Lift Every Voice,” and “America the Beautiful,” and raised the roof. As the evening ended, nearly everyone was asking the same question: what’s next in this multifaith setting? The Tucson Cluster is already working on an answer, a multifaith concert in the spring.
The public civic ritual is the third component of the faith250 program, and what happened in Tucson on June 30 is exactly what it is designed to produce. The singing, the texts on the walls, the questions people left with, the plans already forming for what comes next: these are the signs of a cluster that has done the work. Clergy led. Congregations showed up. And something real took place.
How do we find such events as this one described in Tucson before they happen?