3e Center for Peacemaking & Justice

I am a multi-vocational pastor with Williamsburg Christian Church, founder of 3e Restoration Inc, clinical trauma professional, ethnographer, community organizer, published writer, and TEDx alum. I am also an adjunct professor at Regent University and Rochester University where I teach courses in philosophy, ethics, christian history, theology, leadership, and ethnography. I received my B.S. in Ministry/Bible at Amridge University and a Masters of Religious Education in Missional Leadership (MREML) from Rochester University. Currently I am a candidate for the Doctorate of Ministry in Contextual Theology at Northern Seminary where I am exploring how an ancient near eastern framework of hospitality can become an essential ecclesial posture if a faith community is to embrace the socially displaced in a racialized cultural system.

Racialized cultural systems-making practices are a root cause for the social displacement of minority people groups and ethnic/racial trauma throughout the United States and Western Hemisphere. The 3e Center equips, empowers, and encourages socially displaced neighbors for transformation and healing at community levels, combining scientific understanding with a sophisticated theory of change. 3e utilizes ethnographic research, trauma-informed curriculum, training, and community development. The Center will perform extensive ethnographic research substantiating this thesis. Based upon the nature of the findings, contextualized and structured community-based practices will be developed to further the work of uncovering racialized systemic barriers, promote peace-making practices of equality and equity between minority and majority peoples grounded in the ancient near eastern philosophy of hospitality, and establish concrete next steps toward healing racial/ethnic trauma. We will utilize an evidence-based relational framework and trauma-informed curriculum guided by a pedagogy of situated learning theory specific to the 3e Center. 

The characteristics and causes of social displacement globally are complex and varied due to each country's economic and political history. Solutions are also very complex. Homelessness is the result of a series of economic and social factors in the labor market, in housing policies, in social security, in education, in physical and mental healthcare and training policies and in the changes in family structure. Poverty is a principal reason which strangely afflicts even the most prosperous countries in the world. 3e Restoration proposes to address this myriad of characteristics with a foundation of solid theory and science.

3e Restoration currently works both in small cities and in major metropolitan areas, for example, Williamsburg Virginia, Dallas Texas, San Francisco California. For example, in Dallas, the city government has noted that homelessness affects the entire Dallas community, not just the persons who experience homelessness over the course of the year. More than 300,000 Dallas residents live in poverty and almost 600,000 live are housing distressed. Like many U.S. cities, Dallas also lacks affordable housing.   Globally, it’s estimated that no less than 150 million people, or about 2 percent of the world’s population, are socially displaced.

The 3e Center trains faith communities to relationally and empathetically embrace socially displaced neighbors with a trauma-informed, evidence-based relational framework and curriculum. The Center utilizes ethnographic research to uncover the specific system and institutional barriers in each locality and their connection to racialized cultural systems-making. Once discovered, the Center trains local faith communities to organize and develop city-wide efforts to address the causes, promote peace-making practice, such as communication holding spaces, and specific programs and initiatives the promote restorative justice and healing from racialized/ethnic trauma. 

For example, for formerly incarcerated neighbors a trauma-informed community-based housing initiative is formed in partnership with local businesses to promote job readiness and re-entry. Another example, for neighbors living with disabilities a day-center sponsored and hosted any a faith community where life-skills are developed and job opportunities are created. 

The faith community serves as wrap-around support for all initiatives guided by the curriculum leaning into situated learning theory and offers relational stability. The result is community-wide support strong enough to challenge laws and policies that strain equality and withhold equity for all neighbors. They uniqueness to this approach is the grassroots community, ethnographic research and trauma-informed curriculum resulting in community organizing and development. 

The 3e Center targets twelve descriptions of social displacement specific to traditionally vulnerable neighbors: 1) Houseless, 2) Insecurely housed, 3) Subsidized housing, 4) Addicted, 5) Intellectually, developmentally, physically, and medically disabled, 6) Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, 7) Marginalized minority groups, 8) Elderly widowed neighbors, 9) Domestically abused, 10) Immigrant, 11) Refugee, 12) Asylum seeker. 

Relational engagement practices are employed rather than transactional engagement practices. The Center's emphasis on hospitality in accordance to the ancient near eastern tradition is a distinctive all-encompassing understanding of how to engage 'the other' and guards the relationship from objectification, colonization, and dehumanization.

Concerning each municipality, the Center works to address the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors toward socially displaced neighbors in communities leading to broad-based cultural change. This supports increased community health and makes possible community-based practices for equality and equity between minority and majority peoples grounded in the ancient near eastern philosophy of hospitality. If cultural and systemic barriers remain unaddressed the systems that uphold social displacement will remain and future neighbors will be socially displaced with little to no way forward. 

The 3e Center uncovers and addresses both the cultural systems and family systems at work in socially displaced individuals and the cities in which they live. The Center uncovers the social science of poverty at work in ways specific to each municipality. This includes the authorizing narratives and plausibility structures at work in both systems. Inevitably, trauma plays a role in forming each system individually and culturally. The Center offers portable, memorable tools and practices both individual and communal that can address the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors at work to displace and marginalized vulnerable neighbors. 

Twenty years ago when as a business executive I met Mr. Clifford, an elderly African American man. He was a homeless veteran living with PTSD. Every day I would see him. 

Later that day I saw Mr. Clifford sitting on the curb. I approached him. I asked if I could give him food coupons. Never looking up he nodded his head yes. I asked if I could sit with him. He nodded his head. I introduced myself. He told me his. Silently we sat. He never looked at me. After a while I stood up, held out my hand and told him thank you for letting me sit. Reaching out to shake my hand he nodded his head and looked me in the eyes.

That day I discovered that people living through social displacement are not problems to solve or projects to fix, rather persons to be embraced. Twelve years later I wrote the curriculum and developed a communal relational framework so others can do the same. I founded a non-profit because the desire and need in my city was great. Today the non-profit is represented in five states and nine cities. 

Social displacement not only occurs when someone loses a dwelling place, but also when abandonment, despair and feeling out of place all come together in a loss of social and cultural identity. Social displacement is a state of being without any sense of place or effective means of orientation. It's an all-consuming displacement and a deeply traumatic experience.

I believe everyone deserves a home, but by home I mean something more than a house. A house is a building; a home is a dwelling place. A house is made of wood or brick or mud or thatch; a home is made of stories and relationships and memories. Home is a bounded place that provides both definition and openness, structure and flexibility. It is a place and space, a web of stories and symbols and rituals and relationships where a common life is cultivated and human flourishing happens. Home is a place of inhabitation where life is oriented toward a life-giving narrative where restoration is made possible in every human dimension—socially, emotionally, cognitively, spiritually and physically. We must help others secure housing but also introduce them to a web of hospitable relationships that can restore them holistically.

For twenty years I have walked with countless neighbors out of social displacement into holistic sufficiency, not as a business executive and pastor. I have organized communities to do the same, sometimes well and sometimes not. Personally, I have failed my friends living through social displacement many times. I have tried to control them and inadvertently objectified them. I have worn myself down with compassion fatigue along with those who joined me in the effort. After twelve years of failure and doing it the hard way I remembered why I began this labor of love--Mr. Clifford. Out of failure and fatigue I sought a better more human way. I lived it within my own faith community first and out of that experience, developed the curriculum and framework. My graduate and post-graduate studies along with various certifications have informed my efforts. But what has informed me the most is every single person I've known and cared for. I have performed weddings of formerly socially displaced friends and I've buried many. I have joined them in celebrating countless joys and weeping innumerable tears. My family has endured every moment, including my eleven year old. When unexpected recidivism or relapse happened with a friend and resulted in tragedy, my eleven year old has suffered too. He has lost people he loved. So yes, I am educated for the work. I am experienced to do the work. But above all, I bear the wounds and carry the joys the come with the work.

The Center was refused assistance for funding and housing two neighbors, one a transgender cancer survivor and the other an elderly African American female cancer survivor. Their history with homelessness did not qualify them for help due to inadequate written policy. One neighbor was clearly experiencing discrimination on the basis of sexuality and not having fair housing protection. Beginning with the local municipality I leaned into ethnographic research to make the case narrativizing a history of discrimination. I organized the support of several faith communities, local business leaders, and governing leaders. I led the effort to house them.We didn't stop there. Policies needed to be clarified and changed. 

Advocacy was then taken to the regional level with support from the state level. This effort lasted for months resulting in difficult conversations and debates, sometimes in front of a formal jury of peers from various local agencies within the human services sector. After a year of advocacy the policies were clarified and changed. Also, a grievance process was formally established so other controversial cases could be reviewed with integrity. 

I suffered health setbacks from this one-year fight. I sought treatment for my physical fatigue and compassion fatigue and am fully recovered. 

After burying many friends living through social displacement, I organized our city's first homeless person's memorial in conjunction with the National Homeless Person's Memorial Day. This was significant as our locality was plagued with the denial of homelessness. However, organizing an somber event with city leaders, faith leader, social services leaders, and everyday citizens garnered media attention. After the inaugural event I turned it over to a local organization with which I am unaffiliated in an effort to remove my personality and influence from the event and create a sustainable event. Sometimes events and initiatives get to closely tied to the personality that started them. I did not want this to happen to such an important event. Today an annual memorial is held that honors all in our city who died due to the effects of social displacement. 

Situated learning theory guides our system of change. Information must be experienced in the context of community where peripheral learning happens holistically--socially, physically, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually.