Kathleen Norris - Amazing Grace
Hagar’s Kin advocates for justice for adults damaged by sexual misconduct because of their relationship with a faith community. This means actively challenging those forces that damage and keep individuals from flourishing and experiencing God's delight in them.
Hagar’s Kin understands entering with compassion to mean listening holy, fully, and well. Compassionate responses honor emotions, avoid the discrediting of the survivor’s voice, and seek a just outcome. We remember all stories belong to the one sharing them and we have no right to co-opt them for our own purposes.
Shalom is a Hebrew word used to describe the intention God has for all of creation to flourish. Hagar's Kin believes that God does not ignore, forget, or pretend that damage caused by sexual misconduct or harassment does not exist, but that God instead actively works to redeem those things and move all people toward new life.
Hagar’s Kin asserts that God invites us into and entrusts us with relationships that contribute to our understanding of our belovedness. When a relationship damages this understanding we work to restore appropriate intimacy and courage vulnerability.
Hagar's Kin knows that the world contains both beauty and brokenness, evil and grace; and that they are tightly woven. We seek to name this interweaving and use its complexity as part of the work of healing.
Invite, encourage, and support the healing of adults damaged by sexual misconduct or harassment because of their relationship to a community of faith.
Invite adults feeling separated from God because their experience of sexual misconduct or harassment within a faith community to reclaim their belovedness and live into a new shalom for themselves, family, friends, and faith community.
Invite, embolden, and create with willing faith communities policies and practices that balance courage and compassion so as to limit instances of, intervene in, and invite healing when sexual misconduct or harassment is experienced by adults.
Rigorously engage the theological, biblical, organizational, systemic, and social assumptions upon which current policy for, and the practice of addressing, adult sexual misconduct and harassment in faith communities are based.
Shed light upon the danger and difficulty of living a courageous, passionate, and faithful life and support those that wish to do so.
Those who do the work of Hagar’s Kin are aware it is just one of God’s many attempts to realign the creation’s behavior with God’s desire for all of life. The five statements above with its guiding values are used to shape Hagar’s Kin current priorities, engage in current work, and evaluate past work.
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