Every once in a while John Pavlovitz drives by the Starbucks where he was fired from his church.
He was a pastor at the time, and leadership at his North Carolina congregation didn’t appreciate his progressive views, particularly on sexuality. Pavlovitz was less concerned about keeping elders happy than he was about making the world safer for marginalized folks, so he and his church parted ways.
“I’m big on telling people to live with congruence,” he told me a few days ago. “Meaning the person they are out there in the world is not dissimilar to the person they are to those who love them.”
In the 10 years since his firing, Pavolvitz has doubled down on activism and compassion, writing books and essays and speaking out in hopes of reaching what he calls “the vast humane middle.”
Now he has a new book out — his seventh — called “Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage and Compassion When Cruelty is Trending.”
His timing couldn’t be better. The world feels scarred and scared. Wars are raging and our hearts are battered and a contentious election looms. Peace seems elusive, if not downright preposterous.
“This is the reason this book exists,” Pavlovitz writes. “To remember how much is still worth fighting for. A rapidly heating planet being swallowed up by unchecked gluttony is worth it. A fractured nation teetering precariously on the edge of implosion is worth it. An American church that is poisoned with white supremacy and devoid of Jesus is worth it. The human and civil rights rapidly evaporating around us are worth it. Already-vulnerable people driven by their leaders to the limits of what the human heart can endure are worth it.
“Most of all,” he continues, “the brave but exhausted human being staring back at you in the mirror who easily forgets how much their presence changes this place is worth it.”
Pavlovitz’s faith is woven throughout the book, but not as an excuse to stay on the sidelines and wait for fate to take its course. If anything, the opposite.
“The prevailing wisdom still seems to be that love and God and ‘someone out there’ are going to save the day,” he writes. “I wish it were that simple. I wish it were that cheap and clean a proposition: Offer up some skyward prayers or make a public floodlight appeal to the heavens and wait for inevitable rescue. That’s not how this is going to work.”
Love won’t win on its own, he writes.
“Courageous people armed with love, fully participating in the political process and relentlessly engaging the broken systems around them, will win,” he writes. “Wherever empathetic, courageous human beings spend themselves on behalf of other people, when they keep going despite being exhausted, when they refuse to tire of doing the right thing, when they will not be shamed into silence — then love will be winning. Love isn’t some mysterious force outside of our grasp and beyond our efforts that exists apart from us. It is the tangible cause and effect of giving a damn about our families, neighbors, strangers and exercising that impulse in measurable ways. Love isn’t real until it moves from aspiration to incarnation.”
Aspiration to incarnation. I love that.
“We are not passive participants in this life,” Pavolovitz told me. “There are things that are out of our control, but there’s a great deal that we have agency over. It’s about really leaning into those things and building the kind of nation we dream of seeing. If enough of us do that, we can create a movement that is bigger than politics, bigger than religion. It’s about caring for human beings and realizing that we are one interdependent community and we are tethered together.”
He urges us to focus on two constants.
“We always have proximity and agency,” he said. “We’re always placed in an environment where there is opportunity for us to be a help, to be an encouragement, to do something. The heart of this book is this stuff we’re talking about is really only going to change when every human says, ‘What is my circle of influence, and how can I bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice?’”
The last time Pavlovitz wrote a book, “If God Is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans,” he had surgery to remove a benign brain tumor the same week his book launched. That was in 2021.
He’s healed and healthy now, and he goes days without even remembering that whole ordeal. “Worth Fighting For,” he said, is his reminder — that we can overcome dark days, but also that time is finite. That we’re mortal.
“Sometimes it’s a hug around the neck and sometimes it’s a kick in the behind,” he said. “But I’m just telling people, ‘Hey this is not a permanent place that we are inhabiting.’ There has to be an urgency to what we do. That doesn’t mean we go through the world in some sort of existential dread, but it’s saying, ‘Hey this is a beautiful existence we have. We’re part of a lineage of people who came before us. And we’re going to leave something to those who follow us.’”
All of which reminds me of an Adam Grant quote I read the other day:
“Too many people spend their lives being dutiful descendants instead of good ancestors,” the author and psychologist wrote. “The responsibility of each generation is not to please their predecessors. It’s to improve things for their offspring. It’s more important to make your children proud than your parents proud.”
Or, it turns out, your church elders.
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