Navigating faith and politics. Many
don't want to do it, but we need to. So that's what we're
addressing with Minneapolis pastor Tyler Sitte
on this episode of Compass.
You're listening to Compass, finding spirituality in the everyday.
My name is Ryan Dunn. It's mid-February
2026. Minneapolis and
Minnesota have been prevalent in the news as of late.
In case you're listening down the proverbial road of
time, that's because of heavy Border Patrol
and Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence in
the area. Their tactics have been aggressive,
to say the least, lethal in the worst cases, as we
will talk about in the cases of Renee Goode and Alex Pretty,
who were killed by Border Patrol and ICE agents. Our
conversation with Reverend Tyler Sitte makes it clear that
this presence impacts all of life across
the area. And while these actions are inspiring
fear and distrust, Reverend Tyler Sit offers some
other inspiring perspectives. He's going to share how
the crisis has reshaped his pastoral practices,
how it has increased community mobilization,
and how it's highlighted the spiritual resilience of
individuals coming together in response to violence and
fear. We're going to get into navigating political tensions
while remaining rooted in faith, sharing stories
of hope amidst adversity, and the role of the church in fostering
connection and support for immigrant communities. Who
is Reverend Tyler Sitte? Well, you may remember him from episode
60 of this podcast released in May of
2021. Holy cow, 5 years. He talked with us then about
how worship "Prayer and Meditation Interrupt the
World's Cycles of Brokenness." That was in the wake of the release
of his book, "Staying Awake: The Gospel for Changemakers."
Tyler was then and is now the planting
pastor of New City Church in Minneapolis.
He's a second-generation Chinese American, and he
focuses a lot of his work on justice for all
people. Community, and inclusion. There's
much to be discussed here. You might want to listen for how the church
can engage in politics without partisanship
and how isolation is not the answer
to our human issues. So let's go. Reverend
Tyler Sitte on Compass.
Reverend Tyler, 2026 has probably,
well, reshaped your practice of ministry thus
far versus what it may have looked like in 2025. 25 or days
earlier. So can you tell us a little bit about how the
recent demonstrations in Minneapolis, how the ICE occupation
in Minneapolis, how all that has affected the
life of your church? Oh, gosh, yeah.
Operation MetroSurge has changed functionally
every aspect of our church life together. It's changed
our worship, small groups, administration,
building use, pastoral care, community engagement. Every
aspect of our life together has been affected.
You know, cut to a couple Sundays ago when there was a raid
happening 2 blocks away from church, and we
couldn't start our worship service because half of the
congregation was going out to make sure that our neighbors were going to be
taken care of. So yeah, like, literally,
logistically, it's, it's affected every aspect of our church,
much less the spiritual and emotional impacts of having
so much fear in the streets and so much cautiousness and
lack of feeling like we can walk down the street in
safety. So yeah, it's affected the body of Christ.
Absolutely. How about your practice as a
pastor? Do you feel that
the shape of your ministry, the demands of your
ministry is maybe a better way to put it, have been altered by all this?
Yes, so as a pastor, the main
way that I approach my work, how I envision being a pastor,
is to set people up to bless each other. And that's always the
case in any ministry season. I am always trying to set people up to bless
each other. Because, as you know, in the United Methodist
system, we have an itinerancy, and I want to make sure that
I'm building up a community that will sustain itself even after
I'm appointed elsewhere. And that's just kind of healthy
organizational development anyway. Ways. So everything has kind of
went on hyperdrive because now the ways that people
need support for each other is exponentially
increased because of— because of Operation Metro
Surge. So for example, there are folks at New City
Church who aren't leaving their homes unless they're
accompanied by a white community member. So
logistically, that just presents an whole new level
of organization to figure out how people can get grocery store—
go to the grocery store, go to the DMV, or go to places
where they have to go to, go to the dentist. I'm also seeing
a lot more food scarcity because people are unwilling to
leave their homes, and so rightfully so. So, you know, we
partner with organizations to do food shares every week through
Walker Church, and which is another church that partners in the building, through Sisters
Camelot. And that food share used to have 100 to 300 people
coming to it every week, and lately Lately, it's been 6 people
coming to it. So the entire operation
has had to now change to a delivery operation
and a decentralized food distribution model,
which means, you know, 5 times as many volunteers are
needed, capacity is needed to be able to pack this food.
We need to hold information in really secure
ways because we don't want to just be distributing willy-nilly.
So yeah, it's, it's been an intense mobilization of
people, and the art of setting people up to bless each
other has been kind of
multiplied. But I also want to name that
there's been a real blessing in the
upward energy that I'm seeing at New City Church.
There are so many people, so many people coming out of the woodwork, so
many neighbors who are saying, I want to be part of the solution, I want
to show care for people, and please set my
hands to do this. And so we're seeing people who are
taking vacation time off of their regular jobs to
be able to support neighbors. We're seeing
mothers who are— who have recently given birth,
collectivizing their breast milk so that babies
of families whose mother has been detained can be taken
care of. You know, like everyone has— we're seeing retirees who
thought that the bulk of their ministry days were over,
going to schools to help supervise the drop-off
and pickup times of school buses, because drop-off and pickup time is a—
is a moment when ICE agents tend to
either detain parents or detain school staff or
teachers. So we have retirees finding a
new sense of purpose from being able to stand on a
sidewalk with a whistle So like there's this real coming
together that is beautiful to witness and something that
frankly I didn't even know was possible, but God has been good.
Yeah. Yeah. It, I appreciate you
sharing those witnesses because it begins
to paint the, the spiritual aspect of,
of a response to this. So often for those of us who are not
geographically there, are just kind of secondhand
viewing the activities or things going on in
Minnesota, there's a sense of
removal. And certainly what we witness is painted as
a picture of chaos and divisiveness.
And so it helps so much to get these ideas of the
ways in which people are coming together. When
we, when we from the church aspect
share messages coming out of Minnesota, there are some
surprising lines of comments that pop up. One
of them being that, well, those who may be,
for example, who are standing on the street corner
with a whistle are
not respecting a command like Romans 13 to
respect the authorities. Have you had verses like that
kind of thrown back at you? Have you crafted
a response to something like that? And for those who maybe
don't know, I'm sorry to interrupt, but Romans 13 says that
it's an encouragement to respect the governing authorities,
that there's this sense that they have been ordained by
God. And to go deeper into
that, well, I'll let you do that. But has that been something that
you've heard raised? Yeah.
[Speaker:ELLIE] So just to reiterate, what I'm seeing with people
standing on the sidewalk watching schools, most,
like 99% of the folks that I'm seeing are people
who are standing on a sidewalk with a whistle and
a phone, which is legal and
constitutional. So I want to be clear that,
like, a vast majority of the mobilization
is inarguably something that we are entitled to based
off of the laws and Constitution. Constitution of this land. There are some
individuals and some tactics where they're entering
a little bit of a gray area where we could enter more
conversation. But I think about folks like Alex
Petty, who was standing on a sidewalk and
an ICE officer or a Border Patrol agent shoved a woman.
And Alex Petty, as an ICU nurse, went to go help
that woman. And then And then
we know what happened next. There are 5 agents surrounded him,
emptied 10 shots into his body. He was
legally carrying. So I say
that to say that the aggression that we're seeing against the people of
Minneapolis is not proportionate to
any of the tactics going the other way. And I say this from
someone who's watching it happening on the ground and not just someone
who's part of kind of the social media sphere.
I appreciate that. The other story I wanted to name is
New City Church is doing a sermon series right now called
Bible Confident, where we're walking through the New Testament
and giving people skills to feel confident in picking up the Bible and
reading it for themselves. And the Bible is so— the Bible is so
rich and so helpful and essential, really, for moments like this.
I'm reading through the Book of Acts right now with my community,
and it's uncanny, the parallels that we're seeing in
the Book of Acts to what we're seeing on the ground here in Minneapolis.
We hear in the Book of Acts, there are stories of women
collectivizing to make sure that the needs of the widows are met. And
I'm absolutely seeing that happening here. We're seeing
Saul, a description of Saul going door to door and taking people
out of their homes to arrest them. And that is a
tactic that ICE agents used in Saint Paul. So
we're seeing Saint Paul, ironically named after
the rebrand of Saul. This is,
you know, many of us pray for that, that,
well, that witness of Saul who becomes Paul,
who, you know, repents of this former way. Like, you
know, we so want to hear that witness coming out of this experience.
Absolutely. And, you know, we have thousands of
people joining resistance choirs who nonviolently sing
on sidewalks. And one of the songs that went viral, a
video went viral of them, was a song where the lyrics are, "It's
okay to change your mind." And just like, you know,
embracing folks saying it's okay to change your mind. And what we're seeing
in the streets of Minneapolis is that over and over again,
people who previously would not have shown up
to protests changing their mind to show up for protests or
rallies or vigils. And so we have
stories of people who said, "I've never been to any type of
politicized public gathering or any type of spiritual public
gathering. And this is my first time because I
saw what happened to Renée Goode, and it's pushing me over the edge."
Or we're seeing people who are conservative, who are really
concerned about gun rights laws and what happened to Alex Petty.
We're seeing business owners who are noticing that in the city of
Minneapolis, there are certain areas where there has been a 50 to
80% decrease of business to the— to
shops in the area. And they're seeing, like, the real
impacts, material impacts that this is having on their employees. So it's
not just kind of the stereotypical left-wing
so-and-so's who are protesting. It's
parents and children and retired clergy. Non-retired
clergy coming together saying, we don't agree
ideologically on a lot of things, but we do agree that the
aggression that we're experiencing during Operation Metro Surge is not the vision that God
has for the world. You mentioned the P word. I mean, political.
Sure. And another one of the thread of comments that we
might see when, when posting about actions such as this, or even
voicing a sense of
resistance or word of resistance against aggressive government
action like that is that The church is being
political. Have you heard that? Yeah,
I think that, of course, New City Church is kind of
in the— in a spotlight right now, particularly because we've—
we're within walking distance of where Renee Goode was murdered.
So there's been a certain amount of attention, but I want to name
that New City Church also spoke out against ICE when
Democrats were in charge, because ICE existed while Democrats were in charge.
New City Church also spoke out against police
brutality when Democrats were in charge. So
I want to name, like, there's a difference between partisanship and
being political. And so partisan means, you know,
aligning with Democrat or Republican. Partisan means you're,
you know, backing certain candidates. And New City Church
engages in none of that, intentionally engages in nothing
partisan. But to be political is to, you know, at its
root, it's about the polis, P-O-L-I-S.
It's about the shared built community that we have together.
And it's about engaging the question of how power is distributed.
And when I look at the healing stories of Jesus, of people
who were locked in graveyards and then reintroduced into
society, of what he asked of the rich young ruler,
I see Jesus negotiating power dynamics
in his society to try to shape it to look a little bit more like
the kingdom of God. And in that regard, Jesus
was inextricably political because Jesus cared about power
and society. And all of that was in
service to the gospel. All of that was in service to good
news that says that God is here for all
of creation to be in peace and joy together.
All of that in service is in service to God's saving work in the world.
With that hopeful word, have there been some
additional glimpses of maybe
not just the community in action for the good of the
world, but even, dare I say, like God
in action? Oh yeah. Yeah,
absolutely. So I want to tell two stories that
are a little intense. And so if your readers have some triggers or whatever,
just know that, you know, you can fast forward a couple minutes.
So the first story is about Alberto Castañeda
Mondragón. Who was born in Mexico, came to
Minnesota, started a business, started a construction business,
had no criminal record, was arrested by an ICE agent,
presumably because of race-based profiling, because he had no criminal
record and there would be no reason to arrest him otherwise. After arresting him,
they found that he had overstayed his visa, and so
they detained him. And hours after his arrest,
he was rushed to the hospital here in Minneapolis because of
significant damage to his skull. So the
doctors were like, "Oh my gosh, what happened to this guy?" And the ICE agent
said that he had intentionally run headfirst into a
brick wall. And the doctors were doing an examination, the
doctors were doing what they were trained to do and care for this person, and
they realized that the wounds that he had on his
skull could not have been self-inflicted. Was damage on the
right and the left side of his brain. There was damage on the front
and backside of his— I should say not brain, but skull.
There was damage all the way through from the axis
between the front and the back. And they said there's no way that a person
could self-inflict this. And now this man
who is fortunately released from hospital
has a traumatic brain injury, and he has no family around to help him
in his recovery process. But what really sticks in my heart part is
that he had a phone call with his daughter back in
Mexico, a 9-year-old girl, and he can't
remember his own daughter. The brain injury is such
that he couldn't remember that he had a daughter.
And so then she, a 9-year-old girl— a 10-year-old
girl— had to explain to him the memories that they had together,
the memory of when he taught her to dance, the relationship
that they used to have.. And it was this
rupture of family. And, and if you're familiar with traumatic
brain injuries, you know that this is not going to be a quick recovery.
So that is kind of one story of
what's happening in Minneapolis. And then as a second
story, I was contacted. So I was at church. I
was contacted by a local teacher who said, we just did a
survey of our families and 34 of these families are
facing eviction because the businesses have been struck so much
by Minneapolis that they don't have income and they can't pay
rent. And this, by the way, like, these are families that are not, like,
quote-unquote "low-income families" necessarily. These are families that
had jobs and were running—in some cases running
businesses, but they were facing eviction. 34 families.
And not 2 hours later, a donor calls me
up, a United Methodist just from throughout the connection, not anyone
who has worshiped at the church, and said, "I would like to donate
a large sum of money to support families who are facing eviction. Do
you know any families that I can get in touch with?" And I said, "In
fact, I do. In fact, I do know some families you can get in touch
with." And so, so, you know, he drove over and he pressed
a check into my hand. And he said, "I want to tell you
something." I have two adult children, and we had a family meeting
together, and we prayed together, and we decided that we were going
to spend down the children's inheritance in order to
pay for families facing eviction
because that is the legacy that we want to leave in the
world. So just to juxtapose these two stories,
like, we have people who are literally
forgetting the family, the biological family that they have because of
the violence that we're witnessing. And then on the other hand, we
have people who are rediscovering how they are family in
Christ with people that they might not have even met. And how—
and that God extends this sense of kinship and
family to all of us because all of us are children of God.
And that's the tale of two cities that I'm seeing right now. There's,
there's a Minneapolis that is
enduring deep violence, and then there's a Minneapolis that
is rediscovering what God had wanted us to remember all
along, that we belong to each other and that we should care for each other.
Yeah, I think that there are some folks, some cynical folks who could
hear that story about the donor and say, "Well, yeah, but that wasn't God moving.
That was people moving." But I just gotta name that,
like, I've been at this for— I've been at ministry for about 10 years, and
I have I've worked on a lot of projects, and I've
cared for a lot of different families in a lot of different situations, including
during the George Floyd uprisings. And this
type of coordination and mobilization
and resurrection, frankly, is only possible
because of God. Because I've seen how slow these processes can
go other times, and I've seen how many families don't get their rent paid
during crises in other times. So when I witness this, it
feels like I have a front row seat to God moving in the world. And
it's something that will permanently change my
ministry. We're recording this in the middle of February.
Supposedly things are drawing down a little bit, probably in any case,
whether that's the truth or not, things are reaching a sense
of, I don't know, rhythm within Minneapolis. Do
you get an impression that that there
will be a return to life as it was before?
Or if not, how is life
in Minneapolis going to be different in, say, a year?
So first, I want to name for any listeners who are listening still close
to the date of recording that
Minnesotans are very skeptical about language around
a drawdown or drawback
because this is the same leadership that has
told us stories about violence in the city
that directly contradicts video evidence of that
violence. We heard that during Renee Goode. We've heard that during Alex
Predi. So while we would certainly welcome a
drawdown, we're just— everyone I know is in a posture of, "I'll believe
it when I see it," not because we don't deeply want it, but
because We've had chaos injected into
our city on every level over the past
month-plus, and it's hard to know how to move forward
from that. So that's kind of on a
meta level, but in terms of the city of Minneapolis moving
forward, you know, Mayor Frey calculated, I think it
was $250 million. The city of Minneapolis has lost
over $200 million over the course of this
surge because of the loss of business, because of
the stress that it's put on social services, school systems having to shift
to distance learning instead of having—
So I don't know exactly what it looks like to recoup
hundreds of million dollars that were bled out of the city over the course of
a month. But I do know that Minneapolis
as a cultural
fabric feels more resilient than it ever has. And I
honestly think that some of that is because of the lessons that we learned
during the uprisings 5 years ago, the George Floyd uprisings. During the
George Floyd uprisings, neighbors exchanged numbers, and
there was kind of a deeper sense of, like, how are we going to look
out for each other just on a practical level? Like, how are we going to
make sure that business our houses are safe, or that our
neighbors are safe, or that our kids are safe. And so we were able to
kind of reanimate those systems now during
the occupation, and it has allowed us
to be more resilient on a ministry level. And so
I don't know what the future of Minneapolis exactly looks like, but I do know
that we've put together systems and tools and
relationships that will allow us to be more resilient no matter what comes
down the line. Because we're in communication and in relationship
with each other, which ultimately is the deepest desire of
God, I believe. You know, just as
a side
example, so a lot of, so a lot of people are using different
apps to communicate with each other. Signal is one of the apps that we're using,
and Signal, which is an encrypted text messaging app,
has a limit of 1,000 people.
So a group, a group can't be larger than 1,000 people. For a Signal
Group. And I know, for example, the
resistance choir, the singers who are going around, is now
on their 8th Signal Group because over 7,000
people have joined together to join this effort, and they keep
making more. So it's kind of,
like, mind-blowing to even think of the scale of this. But the
ways that we've learned how to organize together and stay in touch with each
other is something that I hope continues even when we're not facing
the type of crisis that we were facing before. In
this teaching series that you're going through on Acts, how far into it are
you? Like, are several, like 15
chapters? Where are we at? Where, what's going on? So
it's a, we're doing a 90-day read through the New Testament. And so
it's, it's, we're in Acts right now, but we're just in the part
where Peter had the vision, the threefold vision of a
sheet coming down with with the different animals on it and God saying, do not
call unclean what I have determined as clean, which also
kind of feels like it resonates with some of the things that
we're seeing in the city, you know? Yeah.
Oh, what? So just one of those random serendipitous
moments. I just read that verse yesterday for a different project I
was working on. I'm going to have to go back and read again because
like Apparently, Holy Spirit's saying, like Ryan, there's still something yet to be learned
in this moment that I need to look at. God's up to.
Something. God's up to something. My reason for asking about Acts, though, is that I'm
just wondering— Acts is about the
sort of the inception of the church, the moving forward of
the church. They sometimes call it the birthing of the church. And I'm wondering
if this moment in the ways that people have come together
and really offered support to one another, if that has in
some way refreshed the way in which you
look at what the church was doing through the
Acts narrative. Oh yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it honestly, I'll just use
I statements like this experience has broken open
my anthropology. It is redefining what I
believe human, what I am now knowing that human beings are capable
of, frankly, from both directions, the, the violence and the cruelty
that human beings are capable of, as well as the
incredible peace, joy, and love that is possible through people rising
together. So yeah, I think when I used to read
Acts 2 or Acts 4, you know, those stories about
the believers shared everything and people who had land sold
the land so that all their needs could be met and they were worshiping and
joyful, I was kind of like, I'm like, "That seems like an
exaggeration." Like, there's no— there's no way. [Speaker:DAVID] Did they really sell it? [Speaker:ELLIE]
Did they really do that? Like,
what? And, you know, like, yeah, that's a nice horizon to move towards
is kind of how I thought about it. But I'm seeing it in real time
here in Minneapolis. Like, I'm seeing people live
into Acts 4 without
even necessarily deeply knowing each other. Like, there are
ways— Ryan, it's so hard to describe the feeling of like people
being in a group together. And people, a common thing
is that people are using code names in groups because there, we also know that
there are people infiltrating Signal groups and doxxing people in
the group. And so, so it's hard to describe like
people naming needs that they have. Like I have a family
who needs groceries tonight, or does anyone have a line for an
emergency dentist, that kind of thing. And they're
naming that as someone who has a code name, and then they get
10 responses from people who also have code names of people who
are sacrificially willing for, like, to meet those
needs without even seeing their face or knowing their name.
And, like, that to me is the vision of what God has
for how we can live together. And frankly, like, it also showed to
me how important a local worship community
is, because we are the holders of
these rituals and traditions and practices that are
helping people to ground themselves in
the immutable love that is God, in the
midst of some really terrible things. And that immutable
love is what is enabling us to minister to people that we
may not even know. And so like it's changing
my vision of ministry because it's raising the bar of what we can
expect from the human society. And honestly, it's also showing
me a juxtaposition of just using I statements
again. Like, I am aware of how conditioned
I've been to be individualistic and
selfish by Western society, how like
my insistence on comfort and the ability to
withdraw from other people is something that that I've been conditioned
to internalize again and again and again. And it took a
crisis like this to rupture me out of
even those kind of conditioned habits and realize that life is so much
better when we can build community together. And that to me is an inbreaking of
the Holy Spirit as well. Yeah, well, tell me about that a little
bit, that sort of rupturing out and moving away from the,
I guess, isolation really is what it is. It's not so much individuality
as much as it is isolation. That's a good point.
Yeah. Painful process? Is it—
I think a lot of us fear that it's like, I'm just going to long
to be back to the way that things were before. Do you wish to go
back to the way things were before? I do not wish to go back to
the way that things were before, emphatically. I, if
anything, we're seeing truly how the way that things were
before was also an unsustainable fiction, you
know, and we have to to create a new way. So yeah, I want
to name that when I name
community, I don't necessarily mean extroversion.
So like, I'm an extrovert, but there— Minneapolis is a
famously introverted city, and there are many people at New City Church
who are intensely introverted. And sociologically, just a little peek behind
the curtain, the reason why that is, is because we have a winter that could
last from 4 to 8 months. And that means that we have to get
really good at being at home by ourselves
because Like, sometimes we're snowed in. And so,
like, yeah, introverts thrive in Minneapolis because
it's— there's space to read and there's space to really think things through and there's
whatever. But community means that we're showing up for each other based off of what
God has put into our hands to share, not we're showing up for each other
based off of extracting something that we don't have. And so
I know lots of introverts who are like, I am not
going to be doing the people-facing side of this, but I would
love to wash laundry for families who relied
on the laundromat who can't go to the laundromat now, and they're gonna do
that. Or introverts who are like, I'm not going to
be tabling at an event that has hundreds, a vigil
that has hundreds of people at it that I have to do a lot of
small talk on. But if there's just like a small handful of people
that I can go deep with or have
a contemplative conversation with, like that is what, that's what
I'm willing to give, or that's what God has given me to share.
So yeah, I think that part of what the crisis
allowed us to see is what God has put in our hands
to share and how truly it was never ours to hang on to in
the first place. So yeah, I think that that has been helpful. Even small
things, Ryan, like instead of driving home
on 26th, I'm going to drive home on Lake because Lake
has more immigrant businesses and I just want to have an extra pair of eyes
on the street just to make sure that folks are okay. You know, it's
just little, little lifestyle adjustments that's like, well, wait a
second, why weren't we doing this all along? You know, like, why weren't we
aware of which businesses are immigrant-owned businesses that we could
support? Like, of course we want to do that. That's aligned with our values. And
it just feels like kind of a fresh
air gust is moving through an open window that was closed before, you
know? Well, I appreciate you offering those
actionable items that people can do because it begins to help paint a picture
for those of us who are maybe geographically removed and yet still want
to be invested in the
processes of support and even
the processes of resistance
against what we consider to be some unjust policies and
policing. Do you have any maybe additional
advice that maybe people who are hundreds of miles away can enact in terms
of like how they might either provide provide support
to the people in Minnesota or just to
be active in this situation
abroad? Absolutely. So if you're listening, and certainly if you're listening
and you're a United Methodist, there are
immigrant ministries in your conference. There are immigrant churches
or fellowships or ministries, or there are
collaborations happening outside of shared buildings. This
is, this is a great time to start building relationships
of trust and collaboration. And the way that
I kind of think about it is like, what is the relationship that I
will be glad I've invested in regardless of what
happens with immigration enforcement? You know, like it's what is, what is the type of
networking that is just like the infrastructure that I've been meaning to get around
to? And maybe this is kind of an extra push to build
that infrastructure. So relationships are key. Relationships
are everything. The resilience that we're seeing here all hinge
on relationships, continuing to develop those
relationships with immigrant churches, immigrant ministries,
but also like that immigrant-owned business that's down the street from
your church, the immigrant-led initiatives that are in your
city. Like, you don't have to become the deepest, like,
you don't have to dedicate 40 hours a week to making this happen, you know,
like, but if you can just have a meaningful
enough connection that you— that when
they are facing something challenging, they know how to get in touch with
you. And when you are seeing something, you know how to get in touch with
them. So like, that's one piece of advice I'd have.
And to the immigrants who are listening, or the leaders of
immigrant congregations who are listening, I think
that doing an audit of who your trusted connections
are and developing and establishing relationships with
people who are worthy of the trust that, that you could give
them is something that is, I think that immigrant populations have always had
to do, but I think now is a really good time to establish that. I
say this as the child of an immigrant who witnessed his dad also
try to make these types of survival connections all over the place. So, so shout
out to immigrants as well. So that's one thing I would name. The second
thing I would name is even if it doesn't look like Operation
Metro Surge, There is immigration
enforcement happening all over the country. People are being detained all over the
country, and people are experiencing tragedies like what I talked about
with Alberto all over the country. So I think
that it's worthwhile to get a pulse for
what's happening in your community and start some early
conversations of what it would look like if something like Operation Metro Surge
ratcheted up that, that pressure in in your own community. So
I'm really inspired by pastors who are preemptively
getting together with other pastors and saying, if our community starts looking
like Minneapolis January 2026, what are we going to
do? How— who are we going to be together, and how are we going to
support each other? So that's something that really
inspires me. And again, those are networks that are valuable,
whether it's because an ICE surge is coming or
because there was a literal winter storm
that created like physical ice that is preventing you from getting
into church. Like, so that's, that's important.
What I want to really advise people away from though,
is responses of
scarcity, distrust, or fear. I think it's really easy
in these moments to kind of get caught up in the panic of
this or to start prepping your
end of the world bunker or getting into the— and I
just, I think that that same energy applied
to relationships is going to yield much,
much more resilience than kind of doomsday
prepping or anything like that. Really investing in
connection instead of bunker prepping, I think is very—
you know what I mean? Like, this isn't the moment to write the world
off. No, no. How we
achieve, I guess, an eschatological end,
right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I don't think God wants
us to react to violence with isolation,
period. Like, I just don't think that's, that's what we see in Jesus's life or
ministry. That's not what we read in the Pauline letters. So, like,
I think that allowing this to motivate people to
lean in is, is where the Holy Spirit is leading us right
now. Tyler, thank you so much for offering that leading to us
and for sharing the stories. I appreciate so much that your
practice of ministry probably feels different and therefore a little bit chaotic right
now. So I appreciate you making the time to share the witness with
us. I'm so grateful to be on this podcast, and I'm praying for
everyone who's listening to this podcast that wherever God is leading you,
that you might feel inspired by a spirit
of peace and joy. Awesome.
Yes. Need more Reverend Tyler Sit in your life? Of course you do.
So check out episode 60 from May of 2021. I
think that episode 169 with Bishop Julius Trimble would
also be a great follow-up to this episode. In
that episode 169, we talked again about
faith, politics, and about how taking a stand and working
in compassion can be issues of faith, not issues
of partisanship. While you're listening, leave a rating
and/or review. The Compass Podcast is brought to you by United
Methodist Communications. That's all for this week. We'll be back with a new
episode in 2 weeks, so I will chat at you then. Peace.