ABOUT
Bartimaeus
Cooperative
Ministries
BARTIMAEUS. The story of Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46-52) offers us an archetypal portrait of the healing journey from denial to discipleship:
Jesus gives him eyes to see and courage to follow the Way. We believe that followers of Jesus should embrace service and solidarity, and work for compassion and equity and resist all forms of oppression and violence. To do this we must heal from our personal and political blindness to realities of suffering and alienation, in order to embrace God’s horizons of justice.
COOPERATIVE. BCM was founded in 1998 as an ecumenical experiment in capacity-building for communities of faith, incubating collaborative work around liberation, nonviolence and mutual aid (we incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2001). We curate circles where persons called to radical discipleship can find support and mentoring, and promote and train in practices of ecclesial and social transformation listed below.
MINISTRIES. Learn more about our five key thematic areas:
Images + Art
Peruse photos, images and art produced by our staff and friends (including those who have served as artist-in-residence at our Bartimaeus Institutes).
Our Work: Five Key Themes
Radical is a term as unfashionable today as it was trendy in the 1960s. The notion of discipleship, meanwhile, is shrugged off in liberal church spaces and trivialized in conservative ones. So why does BCM key on this phrase? Learn more about Radical Discipleship.
We are committed to connecting faith to political and personal issues of economic justice. “Sabbath Economics” is a phrase we use as shorthand for the ancient and still compelling cosmology of “enough for all.” Since the publication of Ched’s The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics (2001) we have developed various popular education resources for use by faith communities to “read the Bible economically and the economy biblically,” and to practice household, community and social strategies of sustainability and justice.
The content formerly at sabbatheconomics.org is now in this section:
Learn more about Sabbath Economics.
At the root of anti-racism work in North America are the formidable tasks of decolonization. These should also be core commitments of contemporary Restorative Justice movements. Learn about how we frame these issues and advocate for discipleship practices in our most recent book.
The content formerly at healinghauntedhistories.org is now in this section: Learn more about Decolonization & Restorative Solidarity.
This movement is framed as an intentional ‘triple entendre’:
- To live as disciples who are fully awake to our watershed moment of social and ecological crisis under climate catastrophe;
- To recognize that the locus of our discipleship is the watershed we inhabit, which should fundamentally shape our faith and practice;
- To explore what it means to be disciples of our watershed, building literacy in and intimacy with the “book of Creation.”
We have moved all our content from the former watersheddiscipleship.org website to our Watershed Discipleship section on BCMOnline.org.
It is our conviction that the First World church can only be renewed by rediscovering its witness to God’s dream of the Peaceable Kingdom and justice for all. Historically in the U.S., people of faith have been on the forefront of struggles for social change (in our generation this has included movements for civil rights, labor solidarity, immigrant and refugee rights and disarmament). We are committed to helping animate a new generation of ecumenical leadership committed both to the gospel and to social change. Key to our pedagogy is recovering the older, wiser stories of scripture.
