Freedom Notes

The march ends, the crowd goes home, and Monday comes. This guide is about what a follower of Jesus does on that Monday. Andrew Wilkes, an ordained minister and the author of Freedom Notes, argues that freedom work belongs to the whole people of God and moves through ordinary gifts, not only through protest. Over one week you will build three habits from his conversation with Lisa Fields: reading Scripture with an eye for freedom, naming the gift you actually have, and putting that gift to work beside a neighbor rather than above one.

You can work through it alone in about an hour, then carry the practice through the week. A group can cover the reading and discussion in one meeting and report back at the next. Bring a notebook. Wilkes says that for him, “getting free for me has been through journals, through writing sermons, through bible study lessons.” Here the notebook is a working tool for the week, not a place to record how you feel.

Begin with an honest inventory

Before reading anything, look at the last seven days. Draw two columns. In the first, list every hour you spent on something you would call justice or freedom work: a protest, a meeting, a post, a donation. In the second, list where your actual hours went: your job, your commute, caring for family, church, errands, rest.

Do not judge either column yet. Look at how much space the second column takes. Most people find the first column short and the second column long. Keep the page. You will come back to it at the end, and the question then will be whether anything in the second column has moved into the first.

In a group, people can describe their columns in general terms or not at all. The exercise works the same either way.

Read the first words of Jesus’ ministry

Wilkes grounds the urgency of freedom in how Jesus begins. He notes that the first words we hear from Jesus call people to repent and announce that the kingdom of God is at hand. Mark 1:15 records it this way: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.”

Read the verse three times, slowly. Then work through these observations in your notebook:

• Mark gives two statements of fact and two commands. Write down which is which.
• The facts come first. What does that order suggest about where repentance gets its strength?
• “At hand” means near, arrived or arriving. Jesus says it of a kingdom, which is a reign, a rule under which people live. What would it mean for a reign to be near your street, your workplace, your bank account?

Some care is needed here. Mark 1:15 is a summary of Jesus’ preaching in Galilee. It does not hand anyone a program or a policy. What it does make clear is that Jesus treated the kingdom as a present claim on how people live, and repentance in Scripture always reaches into conduct. That is why Wilkes describes a “nearness and nowness of questions around freedom.” The verse does not wait for a better season, so neither does the reader.

Reading as a choice

Wilkes makes a second point that changes how you read every other passage. He says “we are always making a deliberate choice when we’re reading scripture,” and he urges readers toward interpretations that free rather than constrict. He ties this to the great commandment. Mark 12:30 reads, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.” Wilkes argues that “even in something as straightforward and every day as reading our Bibles, we can participate in loving the Lord with all our mind.”

Test that claim before you adopt it. A reading can only free people if it is true to the passage. If a reader wants a passage to say something and so it says it, that is not loving God with the mind. That is using the text. So the discipline has two steps, and the order matters:

1. First, ask what the passage meant to its first hearers. Who is speaking, to whom, and in what kind of writing?
2. Only then, ask whether you have been reading it in a way that leaves people stuck when the passage itself points toward release, dignity or care for the poor.

Practice both steps on Matthew 6:9-13, the Lord’s Prayer, which Wilkes describes as a resource for lament and resilience after natural disasters and community disasters too. Read it once for its original setting: Jesus is teaching disciples how to pray. Then read it again and circle every plural pronoun. “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11) is a request made by a group. Write one sentence on what changes if you have been praying it as if it were singular.

Name the gift you actually have

Lisa Fields put the question many people carry. Not everyone is good at marching or thinks it is their calling. “Everybody won’t be on social media. Everybody won’t write a op ad, but we can all do something.” Wilkes agreed and widened the map. He named business owners thinking about how to measure success by social and ecological outcomes, public interest attorneys, accountants and people with culinary gifts. When Fields mentioned accountants, he answered, “The books gotta get balanced.”

Underneath the examples is a principle. Wilkes said it is “really about a doctrine of vocation and gifts that is much more expansive than just over valorizing what a preacher does in the streets.” He connected it to the priesthood of believers. That language comes from 1 Peter 2:9, which calls the church “a royal priesthood.” Paul makes the same point about variety in Romans 12:6: “Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us.” Read Romans 12:4-8 and notice that Paul lists ordinary, unglamorous gifts such as serving, teaching, giving and showing mercy, right beside prophecy.

Now do the naming exercise. It has three steps and should take about fifteen minutes.

1. Write down three things you can actually do now. Not what you hope to learn. A trade, a skill, a resource you control, a set of relationships, a kind of knowledge. Being able to read a lease carefully counts. Being able to cook for twenty people without stress counts.
2. Next to each, write who already benefits from it. Be honest if the answer is mostly you and your household.
3. Circle the one that could most easily serve someone outside your usual circle.

Wilkes’s picture for this is music. He wants people to consider “how our gifts, our aptitudes, our passions in concert with others” together “can create a symphony of freedom.” A gift used alone is not wrong. But his point is that freedom work is shared, and a gift becomes part of that work when it joins others.

Test your position before you serve

This is where good intentions most often go wrong. Speaking from his own background as the son of Black physicians in Atlanta, Wilkes warned about a habit in middle-class spaces: the person who supervises, mentors “the underprivileged,” and draws others into respectability. His answer is a change of position. “I don’t want to speak on someone’s behalf.” He wants to stand alongside people already raising their own voices. He urges believers with more resources to “always be engaged in that difficult work of self-examination and repentance,” and to honor “labor in all of its forms and shapes,” naming home health work, janitorial services and construction.

The warning applies to anyone who holds a resource someone else needs, whatever their income. Before you use the gift you circled, write answers to these:

• When I have helped people before, did I ask what they needed, or did I decide for them?
• What did deciding for them protect me from? Being corrected, sharing control, slowing down?
• Is there any kind of work I quietly look down on? Where did I learn that?

Your answers stay in your notebook. In a group, no one should be asked to read them aloud. The point is repentance before God, not a public display of it.

The week’s practice

Take the one gift you circled and one real person or group it could serve. Then carry out these steps over the next seven days.

• Day one: Contact the person or a local group you already know of and ask one question about what they need. Do not offer your solution in the first conversation.
• Days two and three: Read Mark 1:15 each morning and pray the Lord’s Prayer once, slowly, with that person or block in mind.
• Midweek: Offer your gift in the form they described, not the form you pictured. If what they need is not something you can give, ask who can, and connect them.
• End of week: Write a short freedom note: what you did, what you heard, what surprised you, and whether you stood alongside or above.

That last step borrows directly from Wilkes. He describes the goal as “writing our own notes of freedom” while staying attentive to “the cries and conditions of unfreedom in our communities.” The note is not a diary entry. It is a record that helps you see patterns over months.

When the favor is not enough

Personal habits are a starting point, not the whole of Wilkes’s argument. He also describes what he calls a royal side of the church’s work. “And by royal I mean attending to the administrative dimensions of freedom and justice.” He has in mind lasting structures such as community land trusts, credit unions and public banking. Your week of practice may reveal a need that no single favor can meet. When it does, write that down too. Then ask whether your gift could serve an institution that lasts. An accountant might keep a credit union’s books. A lawyer might help a land trust with paperwork. You do not have to build anything this week. You only need to start noticing where a structure would help more than one more favor.

Questions for discussion

1. Wilkes says Paul’s letters address specific churches with specific problems, and he argues against cookie cutter approaches. What problem in your own neighborhood would a one-size answer miss?
2. Read the two steps of reading toward freedom again. Can you think of a passage where people have read it in a way that kept others stuck? What did the passage mean in its own setting?
3. Look at your two columns from the opening inventory. What would have to change for some of the second column to count as service to God and neighbor?
4. Wilkes lists “liturgy for Sunday” alongside “organizing on Monday and Wednesday.” Where in your week do worship and work for neighbors meet, and where are they kept apart?
5. What is the practical difference between working alongside someone and working on their behalf? Is there ever a time when speaking for someone is right?
6. Wilkes says “hope is a precondition of moving towards freedom.” Do you agree? What happens to service when hope runs out?
7. After a week of the practice, what did the person you served teach you that you could not have learned by planning alone?

For anyone leading a group

The section on position touches class, money and power, and people will arrive with very different instincts. Do not let the conversation become an argument about parties or candidates. Jude 3 holds that our ultimate allegiance is to Christ and his kingdom, not to any party or politician, so keep the group on the habits and on Scripture. If someone admits they have helped from above, let that admission stand without rushing to reassure them. Make it plain from the start that no one has to share their notebook. The second meeting matters most: ask each person what they did, not what they intended, and treat a small, real step as a success.

Return to your inventory

At the end of the week, open to the two columns you drew at the start. Add a third column for the hours you spent on the practice. Look at where those hours came from. Then read your freedom note beside the inventory and decide one thing: which part of this week will you keep doing next week, with no crowd and no camera, because the kingdom is still at hand?

Wilkes points to small victories as “glimmers of hope and freedom among us, and we celebrate them.” Name one from your week, however small, and tell someone who will celebrate it with you.