The first thing to express here is our gratitude to Pastor Siri Stommen for her generosity by choosing to share this series that she organized for this summer. She selected the figures and the appropriate scripture readings we used
When we place side by side the lives of these Holy Disruptors in this series, a pattern begins to emerge. These people are not perfect saints, but are, rather, fierce truth-tellers.
Each stood in the face of entrenched power, whether a corrupt church, violent regimes, slave systems, or the silence that surrounds powerful oppressions. They refused to be quiet, reminding us that faith and conviction are not comfortable, but costly.
Harriet Tubman risked capture and death every time she walked enslaved people toward freedom. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with what discipleship meant in a world where Hitler ruled. Martin Luther King Jr. carried the dream of the beloved community while knowing he was marked for assassination. Oscar Romero turned from cautious silence to a prophetic cry for the poor, until a bullet struck him at the altar.
Audre Lorde, with words as sharp as light through a prism, insisted that silence never protects us. She insisted that the truth of who we are must be spoken, even when it trembles out of us. Martin Luther, hammering his theses on a church door, never imagined how wide the cracks would spread, yet he trusted that God’s truth must be proclaimed. Desmond Tutu, dancing and laughing in the shadow of apartheid’s cruelty, reminded us that joy itself can be an act of resistance.
What ties them together is not that they “won” in their lifetimes. Most did not. What ties them together is their witness that God’s image in humanity cannot be crushed, that liberation is always stirring beneath the surface. Truth cannot stay buried forever.
Their lives whisper to us: We should speak, even when silence feels safer. We may resist, even when the odds are overwhelming. We can trust each other, even when the outcome is hidden from us.
We do not need to be Bonhoeffer or Tubman, Romero or Lorde, to join this cloud of witnesses. We only need the courage, in our own place and time, to tell the truth, to live with conviction, and to believe that love is stronger than fear.
Their greatest gift is this: they help us see that history is not moved only by the powerful, but by those who risk love and justice in the face of empire.
And so the question returns to us, and it can, and we should not be intimidated to answer it: That question is "What truth is waiting to be spoken through our own lives?"
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