Beloved Plymouth,

We begin our journey to become more creatively maladjusted. Jesus never called us to fit neatly into the patterns of the world. In fact, the Gospel often demands that we live in holy tension with the forces that seek to dominate, dehumanize, or silence. 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once spoke of being “creatively maladjusted” to injustice, and I believe that vision is precisely what God is calling us to embrace in this season. We are living in a time when fascism and Christian nationalism are rising—distorting and co-opting the name of Jesus to justify violence, exclusion, and authoritarianism. 

These movements mask hatred and domination in religious language, but beneath it lies profound idolatry: loyalty to power instead of love; allegiance to nation over neighbor; worship of supremacy instead of the God of liberation.

As followers of Jesus, we cannot adjust ourselves to such distortions. We must remain “maladjusted”—restless and resistant in the face of lies, vigilant in guarding human dignity, and insistent on the vision of God’s beloved community. To be creatively maladjusted is not to despair or lose hope, but to imagine and live alternative ways of being: communities rooted in compassion, worship that lifts up justice, and witness that refuses to confuse empire with God’s beloved world.

Let us remain joyfully, faithfully, stubbornly maladjusted, envisioning and creating a church where love conquers fear, where justice rolls down, and where Jesus is revealed as the Liberator.

With love and resolve,

Rev. Dr. Kelle Brown