Faith and Justice Together

Pastor Josh Williams—Lead Pastor of Elm City Vineyard Church in New Haven and Yale alumnus—traces the arc of a life shaped by faith, justice, and nonviolence. From growing up as a Black boy in lily-white Iowa, sustained by his mother's readings of scripture and Civil Rights history, to his undergraduate years at Yale founding a Bible study called Christians for Social Justice, to a transformative semester in Australia that broke open his understanding of how evil operates at a systemic scale—Williams maps the integration of personal faith and public action that has defined his pastoral vocation. He reflects on the names that marked a new era: Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Freddie Gray—and how those names drew him deeper into Kingian nonviolence as a living practice, not just a philosophy. He describes the church's active nonviolence campaign against gun violence in New Haven, public liturgies for the slain, and the ongoing challenge of sustaining beloved community across lines of difference. A conversation for anyone asking whether love can be a force capable of confronting not just personal sin, but systemic evil.

Highlights

1. "My mom grew up reading me the Bible and African American history, specifically history from the Civil Rights Movement—names peppered those readings like Moses and Martin. Diane and Deborah. Rosa and Rahab. James and James. John and John. One of those names was a bit different: Jesus. And this was a name that was a red line through it all."
2. "I came back to Yale alive in a way I don't know how to describe—with this integrated commitment for faith and justice, an integrated commitment about a love that would do work on me, but also could do work on systems."
3. "I became the pastor of the church that I currently lead the same weekend of Mike Brown's killing. It felt like a different kind of gun went off in that time—a gun that marked the race of how fast violence would spread, how fast conflict would fester."
4. "In the civil rights movement, 'us and them' was replaced with 'us and temporary enemies'—not forever enemies. Folks who could, through the help of God, sometime become part of the beloved family, the beloved community."
5. "I don't think it's flight or fight, but face—can you face something, and can you do that with peace?"

About the Guest

Josh Williams is the Lead Pastor of the Elm City Vineyard Church in New Haven, CT and Associate National Director of Evangelism and Justice for VineyardUSA. He endeavors to create a church culture where the Spirit has permission to give people lives that look more and more like Jesus—pursued over the years as a pastor at ECV, a student at Yale, and a neighbor in New Haven. He is deeply committed to Kingian nonviolence and leads ECV's nonviolence ministry working toward the end of gun violence in New Haven and providing compassionate outreach when it happens.

Faith and Identity: Growing Up Black in Iowa

• Josh Williams grew up in a predominantly white Iowa, sustained by his mother's practice of reading the Bible alongside African American history and Civil Rights Movement narratives, weaving together figures like Moses and Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Rahab.
• The person of Jesus emerged as the throughline connecting scripture and history, giving Williams "some kind of power, some kind of resonance" during years marked by bullying and racial isolation.

Faith and Justice at Yale: Christians for Social Justice

• Williams enrolled at Yale University (Morse College, Class of 2008), where he co-founded a Bible study group called Salt to the Earth / Christians for Social Justice, which grew from an email thread into a community grounded in weekly scripture reading at Dwight Hall.
• The group engaged in activism around Yale's divestment from companies linked to the Darfur genocide in Sudan, workers' rights campaigns with Local 34 and 35, and responses to Islamophobia, homophobia, and racism on campus.
• Williams describes the exhaustion of activist culture at Yale: "A hustle to be the most confident person in the room, even though you know there's nothing to justify that confidence."

Australia and the Integration of Faith and Justice

• A semester in Australia upended Williams's assumption that moral progress moves linearly through time—he discovered that Australian colonialism and enslavement continued well into the twentieth century, decades after abolition movements elsewhere.
• Reading C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters at the same time catalyzed a new theological insight: "Maybe it's not just a person's soul you could take, but also the soul of a nation, the soul of a people."
• "An integration took place in me then, and I realized that faith and justice could go together in the most public and the most personal ways—that love could not just defeat a religious and personal definition of sin, but it could defeat evil itself."

Nonviolence, the Civil Rights Movement, and Kingian Practice

• Williams became deeply formed by the history of Kingian nonviolence, and describes the movement not as King-centered but as a broad coalition of the Black church, young people, white liberals, and a growing multiethnic partnership—a model he believes can be renewed.
• He recounts the stories of John Lewis and James Bevel discovering nonviolence as a way of life through James Lawson's workshops, and of Viola Liuzzo, an ordinary Chicago housewife who answered King's call to march in Selma and was killed by the KKK on the road back to Montgomery.
• Williams leads Elm City Vineyard's nonviolence ministry and facilitates study groups across the country rooted in the 10 Commandments of Nonviolence: "I'm willing to commit to these commandments for this season of my life or these campaigns—I think that becomes extremely powerful."

Gun Violence and Public Liturgy in New Haven

• Williams became Lead Pastor of Elm City Vineyard on the same weekend as Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson, and describes that moment as marking a new urgency: schools in New Haven mark their years by who was lost—"This year it was Kiran, this year it was Deja."
• ECV organizes public liturgies for those killed by gun violence, campaigns against ghost guns, and mental health outreach—including events like "Jump for Joy," a celebration at a trampoline park for at-risk youth from schools affected by homicides, held in a month with no killings.
• "In our invitation that we give to family that gather and community members: we are our neighbor's keeper, and we who remain, remain to bring peace to our city and to our world."

Sustaining the Work: Historical Mentors and Self-Knowledge

• Williams points to historical mentors as a key resource for sustaining the work, including the story of Dr. King's night of doubt after his house was bombed—and how King called Mahalia Jackson to sing Precious Lord, Take My Hand as a practice of staying in the struggle.
• He offers a candid reckoning with his own ego: noticing during his Yale years that he wanted recognition for activist work—"If I'm doing work and noticing where the YDN camera is in the room, something is sick with my soul."

Faith, Meaning, and Difference

• When asked whether his sense of meaning depends on Christian belief, Williams answers with honesty: "If someone told me right now God isn't real—I think I'd just want to keep living this life. I find it meaningful enough."
• He argues that Christianity holds no exclusive claim on meaning or forgiveness, describing a conversation with a practitioner of Haitian Vodou: "I don't know what 'Christian forgiveness' is. I just think it's forgiveness."

Nonviolence and Interfaith Coalition-Building

• Williams addresses the challenge of practicing nonviolence in a movement landscape shaped by distrust, distinguishing between movements with transparent nonviolent commitments and those that claim nonviolence while practicing otherwise.
• He credits New Haven activist Ki Matos as an exemplary nonviolent movement leader, and reflects on the coalition work that helped rename Yale's Calhoun College to Grace Hopper College.

Transcript

Josh Williams: When you're asked to tell your own story, it's either good news — because you should know everything, right? But then you start to tell your story and you wonder, do I know as much as I thought I did? Or at least, do I know how to tell it?

My mom raised me reading the Bible alongside African American history — specifically history from the Civil Rights Movement. Names peppered those readings like Moses and Martin, Diane and Deborah, Rosa and Rahab, James and James, John and John. Black folk name each other — it gets complicated. But one of those names was a bit different: Jesus. The person of Jesus was a red line through it all, through all those stories, through all those names.

These stories held me growing up as a Black boy in lily-white Iowa — before Barack made his way through all 99 counties for a primary victory and a general election victory. This was a different kind of Iowa, and the bullying was real. I needed those names and those stories to have some kind of power, some kind of resonance, and I felt that Jesus did.

By the time I graduated high school, I wanted to get as far from Iowa as possible. I thought: what would be a hard place to get into? So I picked Yale. It worked — no one from home really came to the East Coast, which was good news. Then something called Facebook started, and that was a whole different story.

I was in Morse College, and I was unsure where I fit among all the different brands of Christianity on campus and off. I became part of a little Bible study called Salt to the Earth — Christians for Social Justice. A few of us had emailed a listserv the summer before we got to Yale. We heard back from someone who said, "I just graduated, so you're on your own — but there are three other people asking the same question. I'll connect you." So she connected us, and we formed the group ourselves.

What we did was simple: we read the Bible every Monday in Dwight Hall. Though the group was called Christians for Social Justice, and we did some activism — which I'll get to — a lot of what we did was just sit in front of the scriptures. Passages from Isaiah: "Your hands are full of blood. Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow." From Exodus: "Do not oppress a foreigner. You yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt." And the words of Jesus: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

These words sometimes shook us more than our assigned readings for class. Sometimes they challenged us more than we expected. We didn't always know what to do next — whether it was something as simple as a summer internship, a relationship, or our career path. These words rocked us to the core. And what we were learning in class sometimes rocked the scripture to its core as well.

A lot happened in that Bible study. We also did activism together — telling Yale to divest from oil companies funding the genocide in Darfur, standing with Yale workers from Local 34 and 35 in their appeals for dignity and better bargaining agreements, and doing frontline work to support marginalized students affected by Islamophobia, homophobia, and racism. By my sophomore year, every three to four months campus life was marked by some kind of bias incident or attack — sometimes as flagrant as graffiti sprayed on the walls of the drama school, sometimes bad satire in a student publication.

The work was meaningful. It didn't save me. The work was powerful, but it was tiring. My classes and campus concerns made me wonder: did I leave Iowa just for this? To hustle for good grades? To hustle to be the most pure activist? I remember fights we would have as activists over who was willing to miss their favorite TV show to show up for a protest. Self-care is real — it's just true. There was also a hustle to be the most confident person in the room, even when there was nothing to justify that confidence. That's exhausting.

I was emptying out, and I wasn't sure God could help fill me anymore. Wouldn't God step in before I made more messes? Wouldn't God have set up the world differently? Wouldn't God not have made my experience in Iowa what it was?

Then I went to Australia.

Maybe many Yale students already knew what I learned there, but I didn't: progress across time is not linear. James Cook arrived in Australia in 1770 — 278 years after Europeans first came to America. Enslavement in Australia started in the 1840s, and by some definitions continued into the 1970s. Around 1848, when the abolitionist movement was gaining real traction and slavery was being made illegal elsewhere, enslavement was just getting started in Australia. Colonialism and enslavement did not end because of time, as if goodwill and progress simply scattered across the land. They were transported to a far-off place, and they kept going — even after being made illegal in other countries.

At the same time, I was reading C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters — this strange and brilliant book where two demons try to take a man's soul. I started to wonder: maybe it's not just a person's soul you could take, but also the soul of a nation, the soul of a people. What if these dark forces — colonialism, racism, enslavement — weren't just social justice affairs, questions about how to be just or righteous or kind, but were actually evil itself?

An integration took place in me then. I realized that faith and justice could go together in the most public and the most personal ways — that love could not just defeat a religious and personal definition of sin, but could defeat evil itself. I came back to Yale alive in a way I don't know how to describe, with this integrated commitment to faith and justice, and a new conviction that love could make a tangible difference in the lives of people — not just as a feeling, but as a force.

So what did I write about for the rest of my time at Yale? Essentially the Civil Rights Movement — people who had used love to make a difference in the world: Gandhi, Dr. King, Malcolm X, Diane Nash, Rosa Parks, Claudia Colvin, John Lewis, James Bevel. Hardly a paper went by that didn't have some kind of Jesus connection, and my professors were curious — but my grades actually got better, which I loved.

Along the way, I somehow got called to be a pastor. That's a different story for a different day. But it felt strange, if I'm honest, to be invested in racial justice and nonviolence at that time. A junior senator from Illinois announced his bid for the presidency during my junior year, and sensible people were convinced that would mean something about colorblindness, about progress, about racial harmony. Little did we know.

After graduating from Yale and from Divinity School, I tried to get close to communities that needed more power — people living outside New Haven, a neighborhood called Kensington, and the Dwight neighborhood where I worked with youth. I tried to model an integrated love: a love for God, a love for people near and far, and a love for enemies — whoever they were — because that was what I understood then. That was a privilege I didn't know I had.

I had encountered Jesus, a person who had integrated life for me. I found a purpose and I was enjoying a presence — building community with others. But then a few names would enter me into a new era of trying to find and grow peace at all costs.

These names you will probably recognize: Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Mike Brown, Freddie Gray. You can name more. It's almost like a liturgy, a litany of sorts. These names didn't come to me as a revelation about police brutality — I remember getting the talk from my parents as a kid. I remember, as a sophomore at Yale, sitting at a common table talking about Sean Bell, who had 50 rounds fired into him at his bachelor party. That was already part of my life. But these names awakened something bigger, something more.

I remember how urgent those names felt, how urgent that time was. I became the pastor of the church I currently lead the same weekend as Mike Brown's killing. It felt like a different kind of gun went off that time — a gun that marked the pace of how fast violence would spread, how fast conflict would fester, how sharply community — especially multi-ethnic community and integrated spaces — would weaken, splinter, and become patrolled and controlled spaces where people were wondering: are we safe with one another? Will we hurt each other? How badly?

We drew new battle lines. But what was so interesting — and refreshing — to me was that I kept remembering stories from my childhood where those battle lines were drawn completely differently, even when the violence and hatred were more dangerous and more dehumanizing than what I was seeing in the present. In the Civil Rights Movement, "us and them" was replaced with "us and temporary enemies" — not forever enemies. People who could, through the help of God, someday become part of the beloved family, the beloved community. I was moved by those stories of what I would call conversion — real change.

Take John Lewis and James Bevel. Lewis went to some of James Lawson's workshops on nonviolence — Lawson being one of the grandfathers of nonviolent direct action — and he saw there was a better way, a way that felt like a way of living. He told his roommate James Bevel, who was at school to become a preacher but wasn't particularly committed to that path. Bevel went to those workshops skeptical, dissenting — and then kept going, until he said, "I think this is the way," and he joined the movement.

And there is the story of Viola Liuzzo. She was an ordinary housewife from Chicago. When the movement was faltering in Selma, Dr. King went on television and said, "People of goodwill — come to Selma, come and march." She heard that and said, "I've got to go." Her husband disagreed, but she went anyway, leaving her children. She did ordinary work: giving people rides, cooking, cleaning, organizing the movement from the back end. And they won that campaign. On the drive back from Montgomery to Selma, the KKK pulled up alongside her car and fired. The car careened off the road. They got out, looked at the body of a Black man named Leroy, covered in blood, and drove away believing they had done what they came to do. But Leroy was still alive. The blood covering him was Viola's. She had died.

These were people making enormous sacrifices to pursue a certain kind of life. In my tradition, Jesus calls that an honorable path: "There is no greater love than this — to lay down one's life for one's friends." Viola, whose own faith was pretty ambiguous, walked that out.

At our church, we began learning from and practicing nonviolence — and the timing was strange. We started the week of January 6th, the insurrection. I was thinking, come on — we're going to teach nonviolence at a multi-ethnic church the week after watching what happened at the Capitol? I'm trying to tell Black people to be nonviolent after all that? Yet we went ahead with the schedule. And what we found was that we were building real traction and momentum as we asked: could love be powerful? We decided to invest in it in an organized way.

Through that process, I learned how much Dr. King was not actually the center of the Civil Rights Movement. I know we read it that way, but this was a movement of people — the Black church, young Black people seeking freedom, white liberals willing to take direction, a growing multiethnic and multicultural coalition, and officials and leaders who were already in a tussle with the civil rights activists and realized: we're getting things done through this conflict.

That has made me wonder whether this could be a movement again. I practice it in a small way through our church. I help facilitate classes across the country for people who want to get connected to this way — the principles, the steps, the Ten Commandments of Nonviolence — and explore whether it can be a path forward. Some of those people have started their own chapters, doing work around food insecurity and racial understanding in the workplace.

In New Haven, we're running a nonviolent campaign focused on homicide. For the size of our city, the violence is out of control. You can be in a neighborhood like this one and feel completely safe, then go a few blocks down and enter a different world — where kids say it feels like someone is getting shot and killed every day, where high schools mark their years by who was lost. So we organize public liturgies for those who have been killed. We campaign against ghost guns. We provide mental health resources. We try to create a new pathway for our city.

I'll leave you with two things we do in this work. One is from a liturgy we hold at the Botanical Garden of Healing, about a mile from here. The other is from a liturgy we hold at the site where someone has been killed. The first is a reading from Revelation:

"Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city and his servants will serve him. They will see his face and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light, and they will reign forever and ever."

The second is the invitation we offer to families and community members who gather:

"We are our neighbor's keeper, and we who remain, remain to bring peace to our city and to our world. As we prepare to part ways, turn to someone else — maybe someone you don't know — and ask them: why are you here? May God build new connections, turning strangers into family."

I'm glad you're here in this course, doing some of that work — turning strangers into family, learning what it means to have a life worth living. That's a bit of my path and my journey. Thank you.

— Q&A —

Question: Can you say more about the transformation you described — the revelation in Australia? Was it a sudden moment, or something that built over time?

Josh Williams: I definitely went with a great amount of frustration and anguish. Yale student breaks felt like a time to live again, which is actually pretty bad — what does that say about what school was? Things were hitting a breaking point by my sophomore year. I wanted something to change.

I brought a few things with me to Australia hoping they'd make a difference: my journal, the Bible, and C.S. Lewis. I think it was in a museum, looking at dates and numbers, studying things I hadn't encountered in any of my courses. The numbers were wrong — I kept thinking, this needs a different digit. Everything was so late. That grew a disturbance in me. I started to realize: this is what we do to each other. When there's difference and power, there's conquest. People knew about the abolitionist movement. They knew about the horrors of slavery. They knew what had happened to indigenous people. And yet, because it was a new land and a new opportunity, they did the exact same thing.

It was the first time I'd really connected, in a deep way, how I could look at my own mistakes and see how those same mistakes, scaled to the level of power, produce those consequences. I'm not sure exactly how the horror shifted into something like love. Maybe I'd need to go back to that journal. But I think it was simply realizing: I don't have to choose that way. I don't have to make that my story. And this love I thought was maybe powerless — if it can deal with one kind of sin, maybe it can deal with that one too. What do I have to lose? I have one life to make mean something. I wanted to make it mean something at that scale. I felt like God met me the rest of the way.

Question: How do you find the love and support for yourself when the work gets heavy, and when doubts come up?

Josh Williams: One thing I think is really valuable — and that you're doing in this course — is finding historical mentors. People whose path you can look at without needing to agree with everything. You can look at Dr. King, acknowledge he was a human being who made many mistakes, and still see how even he had moments of profound doubt.

One of the most moving stories is from after his house was bombed. His kids weren't home, but he knew: this could have been my family. He was about to quit. And in that moment he had this internal realization — not an audible voice, but a deepening — that said, don't give up. And he took that moment and said, that is when I felt truly called to this. I will die for this, because I wasn't sure in that moment if I was willing to. And he moved that into practices. Some of you may know the song "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." King would call Mahalia Jackson and say, "Could you please sing this for me?" And she would. So don't be afraid or ashamed if the way you stay in it is something as simple as a song, or a walk, or a conversation with a friend. It's usually anchored to some bigger moment of revelation.

And don't be afraid to look to the past. I was ready to go a certain trajectory after Obama's election — I'm embarrassed by this now — and it would have been completely wrong. If I'd heeded historical mentors earlier, I would have known: this is just a moment, and we need to get ready for a bigger time that needs a movement. Don't be afraid to look backward.

Question: There can be real physical danger and retaliation for those who practice nonviolence publicly. Who are the stakeholders in your New Haven work, and how do you think about safety?

Josh Williams: My church made clear to me that it feels very foolish to announce to the world that you're nonviolent. That just seems like an invitation. I had people in my congregation say, "I'm not wearing a nonviolence sticker. I'm not doing this." I came up with a line I use: if your enemy tells you to be nonviolent, don't do it. But if your friend does — if Jesus does — then you might need to have a conversation.

I think there are movements today that claim nonviolence, but you'd rarely hear them say it in the first five seconds of anything, because they don't want certain things from the past to happen again. In terms of New Haven, there's a leader named Ki Matos who I think the world of — she does exceptional nonviolent work around immigrant rights, and she was part of the coalition that helped change the name of Calhoun College to Grace Hopper College. That was largely New Haven activism, not Yale.

A lot of activists in New Haven are not oriented toward violence, but they don't organize by these principles either. And I think part of what they don't love about what I love — is that you give the playbook away. You say, this is exactly who I am and what I'm about. That's a vulnerable thing.

In terms of broader coalition safety: one of the things I love about the physicality of the nonviolence movement in the sixties is that people practiced. They role-played. When someone hits you, you cover your head. When someone is hit, you do this. They actually rehearsed it — including responding to extreme language and physical violence — and they also practiced things as concrete as: here's how you keep your head safe, here's how you call for help. The question now is: who's going to do that? Which communities have made enough of a commitment to peace that they would become bodily present in that way?

A lot of what I've seen in recent marches are coalitions that form quickly and dissolve quickly, without deep commitments to one another. I marched during the protests after George Floyd's killing, and I didn't know the people to my left or my right. I didn't know their commitments. I think there's power in marching with people whose commitments you know — and as you know from your reading, it wasn't only Christians who made those commitments in the movement. It was people who said, "I am willing to commit to these commandments for this season, for this campaign." That becomes extremely powerful.

Question: Christianity is central to your commitment — but you also often find yourself in conflict with people who claim the same faith and reach completely different conclusions. Do you experience yourselves as sharing the same religion? How do you hold that tension?

Josh Williams: That's a question I live with. I have my honest attitude about it, which is sometimes pretty bad — there are moments when I just don't want to be around certain people. And then I have what I'm trying to make my actual commitments, which I know can be annoying to people — because I'm probably not everyone's cup of tea either.

Jesus has this teaching about the log in your own eye versus the speck in your neighbor's. That's hard to hold when your neighbor is repeatedly doing something awful and calling it the best of Christianity. But there's something to be said for trying to find moments of commonality even with people you deeply disagree with.

What I do a lot of the time, honestly, is just not spend much energy on those people. There's so much work to do with people you're actually in community with — enough disagreement within communities you love to spend your energy there, rather than going to a church where you already know something will be said that's offensive, looking for a fight. And to be more transparent: as a Black Christian, some of those people don't even recognize me as part of their family anyway. In the 2008 and 2012 elections, surveys asked people whether they were "white evangelicals" — they didn't even ask people of color whether they were evangelicals. That word was reserved for white people. So I don't try to get into those conversations unless they come to me.

If people like that are my neighbors, if they're trying to talk to me, I try to find common ground solutions. I think everyone working in nonviolence has a different tolerance for engaging people who say the same things but act completely differently. There's room for disagreement there.

Question: How do you deal with the perception that some people use Christianity as a weapon — as a tool of control rather than love?

Josh Williams: Part of it is knowing some history. Take the Moral Majority movement of the eighties — if you look at some of the data and the engineering of that coalition, it's pretty clear it was built with specific political aims. That's not always true of religious movements, but sometimes you can look at how something started and see clearly what it was designed to do.

With the Civil Rights Movement, you can see the opposite: this was started by a group of pastors who, honestly, I don't think really wanted to do this. They were drawn into nonviolence somewhat against their instincts. And then they were joined by ordinary people — usually women in the church — and then by young people. There was no master engineer saying, "Let's do this in order to get the 1965 Voting Rights Act." That wasn't in anyone's wheelhouse. Versus other movements where you can look at the receipts and see that a specific piece of legislation was the whole point all along.

You can sometimes see: is this a political campaign with religious packaging, or is this a swell — something that became a movement without anyone fully knowing it would? Neither is automatically good or bad. But the Civil Rights Movement didn't know how successful it would be, or how quickly it would fade, or that some of what it accomplished might eventually be dismantled. It built over time. The Moral Majority, by contrast, was much more deliberately orchestrated as a political operation. You can usually tell the difference if you look.

Question: Was there ever a point where the competitive and status-driven values of Yale made you lose sight of what you were doing?

Josh Williams: I'm trying to decide how embarrassed to be. I'll just be honest.

My most embarrassing moment in that season was wanting to be valued and recognized by my peers — especially because a lot of activist work doesn't come with formal leadership titles. It's co-leading, all the way down. I was fine with that until I started seeing people get recognized for it. It was something as specific as secret societies — seeing this system of being valued, getting exclusive access, being elevated. And I realized: I wanted that. I wanted to be recognized for doing the crunchy, justice-oriented thing at Yale. And when I noticed I was doing work while also clocking where the Yale Daily News camera was in the room — something was sick with my soul.

That was one of my darkest seasons, because I thought by that point I had actually learned something real about Jesus and about faith. It turns out a desire for status was still in me. I had just moved it into a different field.

Question: Do you think the meaning you've found in your life depends on belief in God?

Josh Williams: I feel my life has become meaningful — which is good. There have been seasons where it wasn't: when I was being bullied, a lot of my life was about fear and survival. There were seasons like the one I just described where vanity had taken over. But when I was focused on something outside of myself — history, present, future, and in my case, faith in God — I found meaning.

I don't think meaning belongs to one religion or one person. I can't believe that. Meaning is meaning. If someone told me right now that God isn't real, that Jesus wasn't who he claimed to be — I don't think I'd have a 24-hour crisis. I think I'd want to keep living this life. I find it meaningful enough. Part of what I've come to love about it is not any single piece, but the way all the pieces together keep challenging me. I'm wired for integration. I love that about my faith.

I was in an interfaith dialogue a few weeks ago and we were discussing forgiveness. A practitioner coming from a Haitian Vodou background asked me, "You don't think you're the only ones who forgive, right?" And I said, no — I don't know what "Christian forgiveness" even is. I just think it's forgiveness. I have a way of thinking about it, but I don't think I own it.

Question: How do you cultivate spiritual depth and connection with youth in New Haven, especially young people at risk?

Josh Williams: It can range from genuinely difficult to the most meaningful thing I do. Two weeks ago we created something called Jump for Joy — there were no homicides in New Haven in February, so we celebrated by taking at-risk youth from three schools affected by homicides in the past two years to a trampoline park and gave away tickets. I would love to tell you a story about a deep and life-changing conversation. Honestly, mostly people wanted to jump on trampolines and eat pizza, and when we tried to gather everyone to talk, you could see the eyes: oh no, here comes the part we have to sit through.

In those moments I've learned that you just plant seeds. You say something that could carry peace or love, and you hope it lands somewhere later in life. And sometimes that's enough. One person made a meaningful connection — someone looked at a name on the wall we were honoring and said, "I knew that person." That felt significant. But for many of the kids, it was just a chance to have fun and be safe. And sometimes that's exactly what we're providing: a space where fewer mistakes happen, where it's more possible to live, where there's love — even if it's not directed at me, but just present in the room.

Other times, kids ask me the most extraordinary questions — existential things, passages of scripture, things they're working through privately. And you realize what's happened: they've formed a secure attachment, whether to me or to the church, and they're ready to be real. So with youth, I'm mostly waiting — waiting until they feel secure enough to open up. Until then, I just try not to be too weird or too much, so they might come back.

Young people are genuinely open. But they need time, and they need consistent presence.

Question: How do you hold onto nonviolence in a world that hasn't studied it, hasn't practiced it, and often isn't interested?

Josh Williams: Nonviolence has this unfortunate "goody two shoes" feeling to it. You don't want to be the person who corrects someone's violent metaphors at a dinner party. I hope I'm not that person.

For me, it starts with creating space for people to say: this seems hard, this seems impossible, why would anyone do this? I've had moments where the person running the event was in a debate with me about edge cases — "But what about 3 AM, when someone breaks in?" — and I realized: we need to do that. The need to survive is so deep. When you practice nonviolence, you're going against fight-or-flight — both of which involve a kind of violence, one way or another. What I teach at the church is this: it's not flight or fight, but face. Can you face something, and can you do that with peace?

We have to always be learners. One of the most valuable things we did in our weekly group was go around at the beginning and ask everyone: tell a story of conflict, violence, peace, or nonviolence from this week. Just to have community and connection. When we moved to meeting monthly, people said, "We miss this so much." So I'm trying to create more spaces where we're not even focused on activism — we're just asking: how was it to be a human this week? Where did you not manage to follow the principles? Because the answer is probably: today. And you create space where people can share that honestly.