Where does a rupture begin – in a word, in a sentence, in silence, in a gesture? How fractured may a language be and still remain a space in which writing can take place?
The Centre for Theology and Community (CTC) hosted a participatory conference on the 19th November 2025 to listen, share, and learn about how faith-filled community organising can help weave trust in an era of populism.
The conference brought together guests from faith organisations, alongside academics from the UK, Germany, Italy, and Portugal. All participated and contributed to the first faith-filled community organising conference. The main project aims and outcomes are explored below:
1. Ongoing collaboration between delegations, building an international network of faith-based academics and practitioners, faith leaders
This outcome was achieved by creating intentional spaces throughout the conference for delegates to learn from one another, exchange practical insights, and build relationships grounded in shared values and challenges. Participants from faith organisations, practitioners and academics took part in structured presentations, facilitated discussions, and small-group exchanges that encouraged deep listening and mutual understanding. These sessions allowed guests to explore how faith communities across Europe are responding to rising social and political polarisation. Delegates also saw firsthand how faith-filled community organising can generate real change through concrete examples from campaigns rooted in faith communities to interfaith alliances addressing local inequalities.
As a result, the conference not only showcased effective faith-filled community organising models but also laid the groundwork for an ongoing international network through which faith leaders, practitioners and academics can continue learning from each other. This broad mix of participants helped strengthen ties between sectors and countries, making a strong case for sustained collaboration with faith actors. Through its participatory design, the conference achieved the outcome of long-term collaboration by ensuring that delegates left not only with knowledge but with new relationships capable of enhancing local and national cohesion across Europe.
2. Strengthened faith-rooted community organising as a model of social cohesion and civic participation, adaptable across European contexts.
This outcome was achieved by convening the first international gathering dedicated specifically to exploring the role of faith in community organising. The conference brought together faith leaders, practitioners and academics for a full day of collective reflection, enabling participants to compare approaches, share experiences, and articulate how faith traditions can inspire public engagement and civic participation. Through structured dialogue sessions, participants examined how strengthening the internal life of faith institutions – through relationship-building, leadership development, and local listening – creates the foundation for strong institutions.
Delegates contributed examples from across Europe, demonstrating how faith communities are being challenged or have adapted community organising in response to recent political and social pressures, including the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, migration debates, and the rise of right-wing populism. These contributions highlighted how faith remains both resilient and flexible, capable of addressing local needs while building bridges across differences. This shared reflection deepened collective understanding of what makes faith-filled community organising effective and transferable across diverse national and cultural contexts.
3. A published resource of insights, case studies, and reflections
The wide range of practical insights gathered during the conference is being compiled into a joint publication, offering a long-term resource for practitioners and researchers. This conference report captures the core lessons learned, the case studies shared, and the emerging questions that shape future faith-filled community organising efforts. The event and the conference report – that follows – will continue to serve as powerful tools for ongoing learning, inspiring further collaboration, and supporting the wider dissemination of faith-filled organising practices across Europe. The project’s legacy will extend well beyond the conference.
The conference demonstrated a growing appetite across Europe for deeper collaboration, shared reflection, and collective action rooted in faith and community organising. It brought together leaders and thinkers who are navigating increasingly complex social and political landscapes yet remain committed to building trust, strengthening relationships, and fostering resilient communities. The outcomes of the event, new international partnerships, a strengthened understanding of faith-rooted community organising, and a forthcoming publication mark an important step in developing a more connected and confident field of practice.
As Europe continues to face polarisation, populism, and social fragmentation, the lessons from this gathering underscore the importance of investing in faith-based civic leadership and in the community organising tools that help communities act together for the common good. The work initiated at this conference will continue to develop through ongoing collaboration, future shared projects, and a forthcoming publication that will extend these insights. Building on the energy of the event, we hope to undertake a research project in each participating country (and maybe others) to gather case studies of effective practice and co-create the first Faith-Filled Community Organising toolkit and resource library.
This research is both relevant and urgent. Across all the countries represented, faith communities are navigating rising polarisation, the spread of populist narratives, and increasing pressure on democratic culture. At the same time, they hold trusted relationships, moral authority, and a commitment to the common good, that positions them uniquely to bridge divides. A research project may offer timely guidance to faith leaders, practitioners and policymakers who are seeking constructive, hopeful ways to strengthen civic life in the current context. Insights could speak directly to challenges unfolding now and will help shape a proactive rather than reactive response.
This may allow not only to understand the unique challenges and strengths within each context, but also to produce shared resources that can be used across countries and promoted as a constructive counter-narrative to populism.
With the programme Sprachbrüche, the Museum der Migration Wien (MUSMIG) launched an initial exploration of these and related questions in late October and early November 2025. In the coming year, this thematic focus will be continued and expanded in greater depth.
Sprachbrüche refers to experiences lived along the fault lines of a multilingual reality. In autumn 2025, MUSMIG turned its attention intensively, for the first time, to these linguistic in-between spaces. Sprachbrüche – perhaps imagined with an open bracket: Sprach(_)Brüche – marks those moments when people, and the languages that surround them, are affected by something shifting or breaking: when the language of one’s (grand)parents begins to slip away; when a word from a childhood vocabulary is lost; or when an official lingua franca offers no expression for a feeling that can be named with precision in another tongue.
Sprachbrüche signifies both departures and disruptions: when the language in which one is attacked or marginalised is refused, and new linguistic paths are forged that allow new friendships to emerge. It also points to breakthroughs – moments in which a sentence, a single word, a line of verse transcends its own boundaries and resonates deeply.
The stories that arise from such ruptures are endless, plural and polyphonic. At the heart of Sprachbrüche lies an ethos: where something fractures and fragments, where nothing has ever been a single, seamless whole, language can act as both bridge and ladder. Rupture, separation and plurality invite us to engage creatively with the languages that surround us – even when only fragments of one language or another are available to us.
Mohammed Arfan Ashmawi and Sophie Orentlikher, he Palestinian, she Jewish, are students at the Catholic University of Applied Sciences in Aachen. As part of their master’s degree in clinical therapeutic social work, they have set themselves the task of raising awareness of the concerns of people living in Germany regarding the events in Israel and Palestine over the past two years. They asked themselves what psychosocial effects October 7 and the war in Gaza had on Jews and Palestinians in Germany, to what extent the intergenerational transmission of trauma influenced their lives in the here and now, and what role German dominant society played in the processing of pain. They dedicated their research project to these very considerations. Through in-depth biographical interviews with 15 Jewish and 15 Palestinian individuals, the participants were given a platform to share their experiences, their pain, and their stories. The approach is emancipatory in nature—instead of talking about those affected, their voices are made audible. Selective observation and examination of what has happened in Israel and Palestine is not just a problem for society as a whole since October 7, but one that extends into academic and scientific circles.
This project aims to counteract this by establishing connections between different cases without equating them, as well as breaking down the supposed binary nature of the situation, given that the Jewish and Palestinian diaspora and communities are very heterogeneous. In the course of data evaluation, guidelines for social work and the welfare system are formulated. Research shows that in an immigration country like Germany, transnational conflicts are also played out here and leave wounds behind.
In cooperation with the Alliance Foundation, Future 500 supported the project “Jewish-Muslim Initiated Flintahood”* as part of the Jewish–Muslim Solidarity Programme. The project, also funded by OFEK e.V., focuses on building networks among Jewish and Muslim women*.
Reflections and insights from the organisers
At a time marked by growing dehumanisation, a loss of empathy, and rising racism and antisemitism, a Jewish–Muslim feminist alliance sends a clear message: solidarity. Yet how can solidarity be practised in tangible ways beyond symbolic gestures, in a world shaped by contradictions and unequal power relations?
This question forms the starting point of the alliance’s work. Its aim is to learn and practise solidarity together in ways that are sustaining – both individually and collectively. The focus lies on strengthening one another and finding shared ways to counter the pervasive sense of political and social powerlessness. Solidarity is not to remain an abstract ideal, but to be actively lived and maintained.
A central prerequisite for this is the creation of spaces of encounter – spaces beyond the dominant society, free from instrumentalisation, where exchange, empowerment and mutual understanding can unfold.
At the first public networking meeting in November 2024, many participants expressed deep appreciation for this newly created space – a space in which they did not need to explain themselves and encountered genuine understanding. The momentum generated there led to a further gathering on 8 May 2025 at Kulturraum Oya in Cologne. FLINTA individuals from a wide range of backgrounds and generations came together. Some had attended the first meeting; new faces joined. Meaningful conversations emerged and interpersonal connections deepened. The exchange between communities proved particularly powerful – an act of resistance against attempts to set them against one another.
Building on these encounters, a full-day workshop on solidarity was held on 1 June 2025, led by Elif Gökpinar and Anna Feldbein (OFEK), both of whom bring extensive experience in anti-racist, antisemitism-critical and solidarity-based alliance work. Participants contributed their own perspectives, engaged in collective reflection, and developed ideas for shaping a sustainable, long-term alliance.
A quotation by Audre Lorde guided the thematic focus of the workshop:
“You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same.”
This idea – that solidarity also requires holding ambiguity and simultaneity – ran like a thread throughout the day. Through a combination of input from the facilitators and practice-oriented exercises, the often abstract notion of “solidarity” became tangible. The emphasis lay not only on conveying knowledge, but also on initiating personal reflection: solidarity cannot be learned in a single day; it is an ongoing process.
The workshop concluded with participants sharing Lebanese food and dancing two traditional dances together – a Jewish-Yemeni dance and the Kurdish Halay. Both symbolic and embodied, this shared experience marked another step towards a growing Jewish–Muslim initiated solidarity.