As the nation’s political divisiveness limps along in a perpetually severed state, pastors of different beliefs seem to have found a speck of commonality. It’s not in doctrine or religiosity but in like-minded unity.

A few recent events in Colorado Springs underscore how faith groups with varying missions are embracing the concept of strength in numbers.

Those range from the 20th anniversary celebration of Merge Pastors, an evangelical Christian group that includes pastors from 100 churches of numerous Protestant denominations, to an online training session for pastors and by pastors who were arrested last month for protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Minnesota, to this weekend’s “Confronting Antisemitism” conference that’s calling on Christian churches to oppose discrimination against Jews.

The events are distinct and not to be compared but rather demonstrate how religious groups are reacting to ongoing tension and religious leaders view their role in helping society move beyond dissention and into collectiveness.

 The Merge

Two decades after three clergymen founded Merge Pastors, a spiritual support group in Colorado Springs for leaders of all evangelical Christian denominations, members say it’s still a hard job, and they still need to hold each other up for buoyancy.

“The Merge is like a family of pastors,” said the Rev. Kelly Williams, co-founder and senior pastor of Vanguard Church and one of the founders of the group shortened to The Merge. “It has been a tremendous encouragement in my life for the past 20 years,”

The name came from the construction work that was happening in 2006 around the Woodmen exit on Interstate 25 and continues to be pertinent, he said last week at the group’s 20th anniversary celebration at his church headquarters on North Academy Boulevard.

“To get off Woodmen and onto I-25, you had to slow down and eventually blend into one,” Williams said.

That’s the concept of The Merge.

Because even though the organization has active pastors representing more than 100 diverse churches and ministries and includes a mailing list of 335 churches, members are able to set aside differences in denomination, doctrine, worship style and even politics in a show of solidarity and oneness.

They’re a mix of White, Black and Brown evangelical Christian leaders, and Williams says the racial diversity adds deeper richness and understanding.

At each meeting, which churches rotate hosting, attendees listen to each other’s challenges and successes, sing Christian worship songs and pray over one another for the sake of their lives, marriages, families and work in ministry.

“The Merge focuses on the fellowship and encouragement piece, with the primary focus of creating a safe space for pastors to come together,” said Dean Hawk, who founded the nondenominational Rock Family Church off Woodmen Road and Rangewood Drive nearly 22 years ago and since 2018 has been director of The Merge.

“If they’re going through a trial or difficulty, it’s hard for pastors to go to people in their church and say, ‘I’m struggling.’  It’s hard for them to be vulnerable to their own church members,” he said. “We encourage them to uplift one another and be a support.”

The concept, Williams said, is to provide an avenue that fosters “ministering to the pastor who is ministering to the people.”

In a society where individualism is praised and preferred, a community of pastors that lends personal and professional assistance is valuable, said Candice Covak, family and students pastor at Vanguard Church.

“This idea of we’re going to do all aspects of life alone breaks us, and we end up empty and depleted,” she said. “The Merge pushes against it and says we’re all one. Let’s be a people united.”

The Merge pastors have each other’s back in many ways, Hawk said. During the pandemic, some members pitched in financially to help one pastor overcome the hardship of closing the church’s day care and mortgage payments having lapsed for a few months.

When the COVID-19 pandemic dug in, The Merge pastors hosted a pray walk in downtown Colorado Springs. “It was a powerful time,” Williams said.

Many involved with the group rally their congregations to participate in semiannual citywide cleanups orchestrated by the Christian nonprofit COSILoveYou.

They also assist pastors planting new churches in the region. “When new pastors come to town, they’re typically blown away by the receptivity,” Hawk said.

Meeting and becoming friends with other pastors in the community has been a source of spiritual and emotional nourishment for Gwendolyn Henderson, senior pastor of Genesis Church of the Nazarene and member of The Merge for the past three years.

“They understand. Sometimes you don’t even have to say anything, and they get it,” she said.

The pressures of leading a congregation can feel like a heavy burden, Henderson said, and when she realized she needed a sabbatical, The Merge pastors “put their arms around me and gave me love. Then they followed up and asked about how it went. It was so encouraging.”

Nationwide, pastoral leadership burnout grew to what some considered an alarming rate during the pandemic. A Barna poll in March 2022 showed about two in five senior pastors of Protestant churches said they had seriously considered quitting ministry altogether. That sentiment declined in a December 2025 poll to about one in four pastors saying they had seriously contemplated quitting.

Barna’s research concluded that “pastors who experience stronger relational support are significantly less likely to consider leaving ministry.”

Williams believes The Merge model of not focusing on what pastors do in their jobs but “who we are while we do what we do” has “protected the sanity and purity of many pastoral leaders in our city,” he said.

“It’s not about how to grow a church or best practices but how to be a human being while still being a pastor,” Williams said. “It is harder than you might think.”

Opposition with social justice lens

On Jan. 23, local police arrested 99 clergy at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport while they protested outside in subzero temperatures over the surge of federal immigration enforcement activity in their community.

The Rev. Zachary Wilson, interim co-executive presbyter of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A.’s Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area, was among the pastors charged for misdemeanor trespassing involving blocking a road and refusing to disperse when asked by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“We were organizing against fascism before this started, so the idea of things needing to be done was already happening,” he said. “The murder of Renee Good was the galvanizing event that took people from ‘This is terrible, I don’t know what to do’ to ‘They’re killing people, we have to get out on the streets.’”

Wilson was one of four anti-ICE activists from Minnesota who presented a recent training for objectors in Colorado Springs via Zoom.

The event was sponsored by First Congregational United Church of Christ and the Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life at the University of Colorado’s campus in Colorado Springs. About 75 participants listened to the online presentation.

Wilson said he bought a clerical collar to wear on Jan. 7, the day ICE agents fatally shot Good, a former resident of Colorado Springs, after the 37-year-old mother brushed an officer with her vehicle as shown on video footage.

“Not because I like wearing one, but because when I show up in public spaces and if there’s an ICE presence, having public presence of people of faith that are supportive of our immigrant neighbors is really important.”

The airport action was held the day before another demonstrator, Alex Pretti, who worked as an emergency room nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs, was shot and killed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers.

The strategy for the airport demonstration achieved its goal, Wilson added. Organizers wanted to “get a bunch of clergy arrested on the front page of the news so people saw what was going on,” he said. “I think that was very successful.”

Some Presbyterian congregations in Minnesota also have been paying for immigrants’ rent, Wilson said, because some have lost their temporary status to remain in the U.S., which invalidates their work permit. “That puts them in tenuous circumstances as a family.”

But churches cannot sustain such assistance, he said. Some churches also have funded defense lawyers for people whom they define as “being abducted” by ICE agents, who have been charged with deporting immigrants in the country illegally.

The Rev. Jen Crow, senior minister of First Universalist Church of Minneapolis, also was at the airport when the arrests occurred.

“It has been exhausting and relentless, but I felt clear about what my faith calls me to do,” she said during the online presentation. “It’s very clear that what’s happening here is a spiritual and moral crisis. My faith calls me to the sacredness of all life, and what we’re experiencing is the antithesis of that. We’re experiencing the triple evils of racism, poverty and violence. I feel clear about figuring out ways to push back.”

What has helped pastors is “relationships in neighborhoods and across faith traditions have been key for us to act together and shore each other up,” Crow said.

That’s one way activists in Colorado Springs can prepare should mass ICE enforcement arrive in Colorado, she said. Another is for people to get ready spiritually.

“What are we resisting and trying to stop? It’s important to have an alternative world view and what’s possible.”

A positive that’s come out of the situation is “we’re leaning into a kind of way of living together. Let’s keep this going, with mutual aid and care.”

The Rev. Mallory Everhart, a United Church of Christ pastor who had worked in Colorado Springs and now in Minnesota focuses on faith-based responses to  incidents of mass violence, conflict and cultural change, said it’s hard to build coalitions in Colorado Springs because the community has a history of disagreements among some progressive churches and a conservative Christian dominance.

Aligning with organizations already in the activist arena can be a path to being in service together to “those who are most marginalized,” Everhart said.

Also, “do the thing you can do well,” she said. “You can make cookies for the revolution.”

‘Confronting  Antisemitism’

Just the title of a conference being held this past weekend at Radiant Church in northern Colorado Springs, “Confronting Antisemitism,” was enough to produce reams of antisemitic vitriol online, according to organizers from Lou Engle Ministries based in Colorado Springs. Founder Lou Engle was among the presenters at the three-day event.

Seventy percent of online comments about the conference were hateful and of an anti-Jewish nature, said Esteban Gecchelin, CEO of the ministry.

But Lou Engle said the response helped him realize how important and controversial antisemitism has become, as discrimination against Jews grows across the nation.

“Chaos is the setting for revival,” Engle, a Christian intercessor and public speaker, said to 460 attendees at the conference’s opening session Thursday. “I had no idea the rage of the comments we’d get over the name,” he said. “I realized we are touching something that’s about the end of the age.”

Engle said the event served as “a call to awaken the church and stand courageously against hatred and to reaffirm our biblical mandate to bless and defend the Jewish people.”

Christian roots incorporate Judaism, he said, as Jesus was born into a Jewish family, observed the religion’s rules and rituals, celebrated the Jewish feasts, taught in synagogues and amassed Jewish disciples as his followers.

Antisemitic incidents have been rising since the surprise attack on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas on Israel, which launched a war between Gaza and Israel and a pro-Palestinian movement nationwide.

In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League counted 9,354 reported antisemitic incidents across the U.S., representing an 893% increase in the past decade.

As a tenuous peace agreement between the factions continues with negotiations, Engle called on Christians to mobilize across America “to stand united against the antisemitic spirit.”

He asked two things of attendees in the weeks leading up to Easter, Christianity’s most holy observance marking the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and Passover, one of the most observed Jewish holidays that commemorates the Israelites’ exodus from bondage in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land of Israel.

Engle requested that people pray for an end to antisemitism and that they fast to help cleanse and unite Christians in supporting Jewish people in their midst.