On Futures, George Floyd, and Resilience
Photo by Nicole Baster on Unsplash
This post originally appeared on Rev. Dr. Mihee Kim-Kort’s Substack, “Undisciplined Versions”
I was in the Twin Cities, specifically Minneapolis, for 2 days to be with Church Anew folk to think/strategize about its work and its journey. Led by pilot, pastor, social entrepreneur Cameron Trimble we worked through a Futures Lab as a way to imagine the possibilities for Church Anew as an organization.
Futures Lab, as I now understand it, is a commitment to imagining what could be, reaching beyond the limits of the present world:
Many congregations today tell themselves stories about their future…These stories shape how we see the present, and how we invest our time, talent and resources now.
Making conscious these stories that we tell ourselves about the futures we are betting on then gives us the power to act creatively rather than be reactive to impacts or beholden to the strategies designed by those who have historically had the resources and power to colonize the future.
It asks questions like: What kind of world would we build if we started from justice? From joy? From survival and song? It asks us to imagine a story about the future and how that might shape us today. I took several pages of notes as it seems a number of communities I’m a part of right now are entering a time of strategic discernment. For example, First Presbyterian has started the conversation for this year (and I’m the pastoral liaison).
Future Labs wasn’t a lecture… more of a workshop. We named the dominant models shaping the church today—the inherited assumptions, the pull toward nostalgia, the weight of scarcity. And then we started imagining otherwise. We imagined a future of the world in 2070. Positive and negative. We imagined a future of spirituality in the world in 2070. Positive and negative. We imagined what we would want for spirituality and church in that year. Mostly, hopeful.
Then we worked on the assumptions that limit our imagination and responded to scenarios in 2070 (1 billion people in the world, no public schools or church buildings, climate change forcing migration for everyone, no nation-state borders) that opened up the possibilities of what we might do and be.
Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash
My brain was firing around mobile altars and shrines, pilgrimage as a continuous way of life, liturgies that used bodily movement and ordinary artifacts, rituals around bread and soil and the earth, spaces for ongoing healing and caring, and a flattening and dehierarchalizing of community.
Read more in this powerful article from 2024 that highlights how George Floyd Square in Minneapolis remains a sacred and contested community space four years after Floyd’s murder, embodying both ongoing grief and resilient hope for racial justice and transformation.
And then: what if congregations were less about membership and more about movement? What if success wasn’t measured by budgets and buildings but by impact, connection, and healing? These conversations brought on a lot of wrestling but also laughter, a little resistance, and moments of deep silence. We drew on diagrams. We told stories. We played with Legos and colorful pipe cleaners. We mapped out the organization’s “edges,” those liminal spaces where change already flickers. By the afternoon, the air felt charged for me. We weren’t solving anything. But we were rehearsing new ways of seeing. Naming what is. Naming what could be. It felt like holy work.
At the end of the full-day of conversation, of dreaming and learning on Monday, I went with (new) friend, Tyler, to the George Floyd Square. I realized, although I had visited the Twin Cities several times in the last couple of years, I had never gone before. I’m so grateful that Tyler offered to take me there.
We parked and walked first through the Say Their Names Cemetery - an art installation. It is a quiet, open space lined with simple headstones— cardboard, plastic, paper— bearing the names of Black lives lost to police violence. Each marker stood as both memorial and protest, weather-worn but unmistakably present, insisting on being seen. The air was still, reverent, as we moved slowly among the names, the weight of collective loss pressing in with every step. I felt past, present, future transposed— layered like transparencies, each moment visible through the others, impossible to separate from time and space.
We then walked over to George Perry Floyd Square, a block that is now without the barricades that had stopped traffic for so long. Cars drive freely over the long list of names written on the street. The square is not large— just an intersection, really— but you can feel how the space holds both grief and insistence. It feels like a moment frozen in time… once more the air was still like it hadn’t moved since 2020. But there’s still life. There are signs posted— ”You are entering a sacred space”— and murals blooming across walls and pavement. Across the street is a gas station named People’s Way with signs and benches, and the posting of the original 24 Demands. It is, in every way, a place made by the people who needed it, who still need it.
The square is filled with memory— of George Floyd, of others, of uprising, of long histories that didn't start or end in that one horrific moment. It’s also… a space of unfolding. Makeshift gardens. Sculptures welded from protest debris. Notes from children. Pictures, photos, t-shirts, ribbons. The presence of absence. The insistence of presence. Of life and breath.
It struck me after reflecting on comments from the two Black leaders in the Church Anew Futures Lab conversation that past, present, and future are not linear or progressive but in many ways co-exist simultaneously. Thinking about the future always happens alongside attending to the past and holding the present.
We had our PRIDE ecumenical service on Sunday, and during the Children’s Time, our friend Smith handed out trinkets to all of us present as a reminder of joy and community. I was given this clear strawberry. It was in my bag, and I remembered, and felt compelled to give it as an offering at this memorial.
And then also for people who live in diaspora, for minoritized and indigenous communities in the U.S., the scenarios of 2070 have often already been realized or experienced in terms of catastrophe, war, violence, death, and loss (both the experience, aftermath, and ongoing haunting). The George Floyd Square is an expression of futuring, (afro-futuring) here in realtime, of surviving, of resilience, something so many of us and our communities have known and enacted for some time. Realtime isn’t a single moment, a singular moment, or existence, maybe it’s kairos, a convergence, an alternative universe, an in-breaking, a thin place, a thin time.
George Floyd Square transported me. It’s a portal. Maybe the futures we are trying to imagine and write and respond to are already here in so many of the spaces we think are simply memorials, and that we take for granted (or forgotten). Maybe Futures Lab isn't a place you go. Maybe it's something you practice, like reading what your kids are reading, or walking slowly through a square that once held fire. Maybe it’s something that’s all around us already. Maybe it starts with standing still long enough to listen to the ground, to see what blooms there. And then planting flowers in boxes anyway, and watering them regularly, and waiting, and sitting with others to keep talking and healing. Maybe healing doesn’t look the way we think it should and it comes from places like art, poetry, and graffiti. Maybe what we need from these futures is not just another story but the otherwise possibility of multiple stories, multiple worlds, and the reminder that to survive… we need the basics… food, water, flowers, a hand… and we need everyone.
“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
