“Where is the protest at now?”

I texted one of our church congregants through Signal, an encrypted messaging platform, while walking around the streets of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, past shuttered grocery stores and family-owned restaurants standing under the shadow of gleaming, luxury skyscrapers. It was 7pm and the sun was setting.

She, the designated coordinator of our church’s 30-person Signal protest group, sent me a quick screenshot of her Google Maps location, and I made my way over to her quickly with a baseball cap in hand.

I heard them before I saw them. I heard horns of wind instruments, the steady beat of the drums, and tamborines jiving to “We Shall Overcome,” a gospel song and the anthem of the Civil Rights movement. I heard the impassioned cries through megaphones — “Why does the NYPD get $6 billion while our public libraries get $4 million?” — and the angry chants — “Who protects us? We protect us!" — and claps from a long line of hundreds of protestors, most of whom were members of the Democratic Socialists of America (full transparency: I, too, am a member of it).

I came to join a protest as a person with my own political convictions, but also as a representative of my church, Forefront NYC, where I serve as executive director, and where we’ve been having active conversations about race, police, and so on for the past month, but also for the past several years. I indeed found a protest, but what I didn’t expect to find was something that felt a lot like church—at least, what church could be if it lived up to its full potential.

We winded our way from South Street Seaport to City Hall, where we joined up with an occupation that had been going on for over a week. The police were amply present with their batons and stoic faces, but the first person that really caught my eye was a skinny woman carrying a large box of water bottles, handing them out one at a time to the oncoming flurry of thirsty hands. Another person emerged behind her shortly after, a shorter fella who was also handing out water bottles with a determined ferocity. The message was clear: If you come to #OccupyCityHall, you will be insistently taken care of.

The message emerged in full force as I walked past people manning tables with donated snacks, blankets, masks and hand sanitizers, hot meals, vitamins, cigarettes, USB chargers to charge your phones, and yes, water bottles.

“Donations accepted” was the sign on each table, and I didn’t see anyone ask for money. Farther in was a “People’s Library” where people could borrow and share books, a community garden, as well as a volunteer kiosk with a sign with today’s restroom locations was posted. All around me were people wearing masks and sitting or lying down on towels and mats, prepared to camp out for the night. “We take care of each other,” a cardboard sign said, stuck onto the police barricades that formed a perimeter around everyone. The perimeter was reinforced by bikes that were placed on top of barricades to make it harder for police to rush in and invade.

The verses from Acts 2, which describe the beginnings of the early church, flooded my mind:

“All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.”

People were gathered not just to protest for a better world; they were here to model what a better world looked like: One in which people extended trust to one another, shared with one another, and took care of each other without the need for a coercive, intervening force and in absence of commodified transactions. We didn’t know each other, but we took an act of faith to trust one another and build something together.

Art was everywhere, from colorful icons of George Floyd and raised BLM fists inscribed on cardboard or the cement floor, to singers flanked by instrumentalists singing freedom songs. There was an open mic in the middle where people got up to speak about the change they wanted to see, some addressing a crowd for the first time in their lives. I observed the community self-correct: One man took a megaphone and began calling out his fellow brothers, saying that he had heard instances of women organizers pushed aside by men, and asking them to do better.

At 10pm, DSA hosted a “teach-in” explaining that that EMS (emergency ambulance) budget is about to be cut by 80% through elimination of Medicaid payments, while the NYPD budget, the most expensive agency, has grown by one-third since 2010. Cutting $1 billion from its $6 billion budget would only bring it back to 2014 numbers — the year that Eric Garner was strangled to death in Staten Island by cops. What’s more, although the city speaker, Corey Johnson, has publicly committed to cutting $1 billion by July 1st (tomorrow), Politico reported that he, the mayor and city council are engaging in “fuzzy math” and are merely moving money around. For instance, “school safety agents,” aka people who wear police uniforms, will now be moved out of the NYPD budget and into the Department of Education’s. (Call and tweet your council person asap and ask them to commit to voting “no” on a budget that doesn’t include at least $1 billion in actual cuts to the NYPD, as measured by decreased weapons and headcounts; only 11 council members have pledged to do so. For more go to changenypd.org).

After 20 minutes of presentation, the organizers had us break into groups of 5-10 and discuss what we would do with the extra billions of dollars freed up from the NYPD’s budget, jotting down notes on sticky notes that were passed around. Then a representative from each group came up and placed their sticky notes on a white poster, so that we could collectively see our vision of a world where police were defunded. My group sat on the edge of a sidewalk and talked about creating jobs in local neighborhoods by hiring and training people to respond to mental health crises and domestic violence; another group discussed getting people out of homeless shelters and towards permanent affordable housing; yet another group advocated for free public transit and universal healthcare, including mental health. At the heart of all our conversations was a restorative, not a punitive, attitude towards ‘misbehavior.’

If someone is physically disrupting a subway car, maybe instead of calling 911 which will send cops to remove and restraint them with force, we should ask, “Why? Why is this person acting this way?” and see if their mental or material needs are the main reasons behind their behavior. Perhaps they need an affordable place to live and get a good night’s sleep for once; or access to mental health treatment that is too costly or inaccessible right now; or food to satiate the grumblings of their belly.

It was not all too dissimilar from what my church’s small group does when we get together every week on a Thursday night to re-imagine a better world, according to our tradition and the ways of Jesus. As a church, when we discuss an alternative model of interpreting the death and resurrection of Jesus on the cross that is not about “God punished Their Son for our sins” but about “God in solidarity with the least of us even unto death,” we are doing the work of envisioning God not as a punitive or retributive Being but a loving one that seeks to restore us to goodness and fullness of life. As Paul writes in Romans 8:

“ Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? … And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. 

To repeat: Nothing can separate us from the love of God. No sin, no misdeed, no misbehavior, no failure, no insecurity, no criminal record (violent or not) defines who we are, nor how God relates to us.

The question is: How can we build a society based on this love? As we shift our vision of God, will that start to shift our vision of society? If we shift our understanding of how God relates to our sins, how should this shift our understanding of how we relate to the sins of others? How can we create social and economic structures that treat people as beings who are infinitely loved and worthy, regardless of what they’ve done? “If you love me, feed my sheep,” as Jesus once said to Peter. Love must show up in action.

At 4:30am, the dancing began again in earnest, with people bopping and jumping to “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar, until the cops showed up half an hour later, with batons, pushing violently and pinning protesters on top of barricades, threatening to separate the bonds that had been forged in order to “clear the physical space” for the city council to convene and vote on the budget. A few people were arrested, many were badly hurt, but eventually, #OccupyCityHall prevailed and the police withdrew.

If we stand together, nothing can separate us. This I believe.

- Sarah Ngu