When Sue Hiatt – the woman who engineered the first ordinations of women to the Episcopal Church priesthood – died last spring, her many friends and former Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) colleagues moved swiftly with plans for the modest memorial eucharist Sue had requested. But the quiet, somber event Sue had envisioned never took place.

Instead, several hundred church feminists and peace-and-justice advocates showed up in Cambridge at the appointed time spoiling for a celebration and reunion. And, aided by a festive beating of drums and the conviviality of a standing-room-only crowd of allies and old friends, that’s the kind of service they created. For to remember and celebrate Sue’s life required a liturgy expansive enough to match the passion of a vocation to justice.

As her longtime friend, colleague and fellow 1974 ordinand Carter Heyward noted in the homily, Sue had all her life been at heart an organizer who saw the Episcopal Church "as a strategic location of social, economic and political power that needed to be organized and put to work on behalf of social justice." Sue lived, Heyward said, "on the basis of a tenacious faith in the capacities of her brothers and sisters, including white affluent folks like most of us here today, to help ‘make justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream,’ and in our willingness to step forward and offer ourselves as laborers in God’s harvest. In this way, Sue Hiatt was an heir of the same hope and enthusiasm that have historically shaped the great Christian movements for social justice and the irrepressible passion for justice among such great Anglican divines as F. D. Maurice, William Temple, John Hines, Verna Dozier, William Stringfellow and Desmond Tutu."

Not that Sue was always a buoyant, optimistic activist. Her friends knew all too wellSue’s tendency to a "pessimism, even at times a cynicism and anger that bordered on despair" over a "world in crisis and a church too seldom up to the task."

But Sue Hiatt never gave up the struggle. She recognized, Heyward told us, that "we have to organize! Justice doesn’t just ‘happen.’ We can’t do it alone, not as ‘heroes,’ not as Lone Rangers or Superwomen or Spidermen. We must do it together."

I probably wasn’t the only one in the congregation that high-spirited evening who wondered, "What is holding us back?" Some point to a lack of leadership at the highest levels of church governance. Indeed, many now hope that the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, will possess the needed charisma for inspiring Anglicans to activism. Certainly, last July’s announcement that Williams would succeed evangelical conservative George Carey has been a great encouragement to Anglican progressives. For one thing, Williams opposes the U.S. War against Terrorism. Williams happened to be at Trinity Wall Street when the plans crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11. A few days later he wrote, "No ‘Star Wars’ shield of missile defence could have averted last Tuesday’s atrocities. No intensive campaign to search and destroy in Afghanistan will guarantee that it will never happen again. If we fear and loathe terrorism, we have to think harder. Indiscriminate terror is the weapon of the weak, not the strong; it’s commonly what the ‘strong’ aren’t expecting, which is why they are vulnerable to it. It is the weapon of those who have nothing to lose. If we want it not to happen, we have to be asking what it means that the world has so many people in it who believe they have nothing to lose."

Williams is also a strong advocate for the full inclusion of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender people in the life of the church. "Having been closed out of relationship with the Archbishop of Canterbury during the tenure of the current Archbishop, we look forward to someone who knows us, our faith in God, and our commitment to the Church," said Michael Hopkins, President of Integrity, an organization whose mission is to be a witness of lgbt persons in the Episcopal Church and to the world.

Undoubtedly, once he takes office next January, Williams will do all he can to use his position on behalf of peace and justice. But the key service Williams could render will be to help Anglicans understand not only that justice doesn’t just happen, but also that justice is happening. Everywhere I go, I encounter people of faith doing amazing peace-and-justice work. We tell their stories in the pages of this magazine every month – and we regularly post their global witness on our website (www.thewitness.org).

But there is more that is needed. Because the organizing we all long for – the organizing that prevents the sort of depleting pessimism and despair that Sue Hiatt fought against and that makes us famished for celebration and reunion – is the kind that helps us stay connected between conferences, mobilisations and trainings so that we don’t feel like we are the only people standing up to the powers and principalities of this world and so that we can show up for one another when numbers and diversity count.

We here at The Witness want to help make this kind of organizing possible. With the generous help of the KRB Group, a San Francisco-based foundation promoting peace and justice work in the Episcopal Church, I’m pleased to announce that we are building the web infrastructure to create a new network of faith-based groups and church activists, committees and commissions and to facilitate their interaction so that they can become the force for peace and justice Sue Hiatt dreamed of.

Watch for the changes. We think Sue would approve.