Phil Campbell met Allyn Maxfield-Steele in 2012 when Maxfield-Steele came to Juneau, Alaska, for a seminary internship. Campbell ministered at Northern Light United Church there and he supervised Maxfield-Steele in his internship.
Maxfield-Steele was 30 when he arrived, uncertain yet of what lay ahead. “He didn’t have a precise sense of vocational direction or a clear sense of the kind of contribution he wanted to make to the world,” Campbell recalled. “He was still trying to figure out how the pieces fit together.”
That last part: tinkering with how the pieces interlock? Still true.
Though impactful in his every endeavor, Maxfield-Steele has never ceased puzzling over how it all fits together. His work has propelled him hither and yon: Upstate South Carolina, Thailand, Alaska, rural Middle Tennessee, the Appalachian hills. Each unique; each offering further guidance.
Maxfield-Steele speaks of seasons – that season in Thailand, the season of convergence, another of organizing in the South. He’s an ordained Disciples of Christ minister and, for the past nine years, has served as co-director of the Highlander Research and Education Center in the hills of East Tennessee.
He now enters a new season, having left Highlander at the end of March. What, specifically, comes next is to be determined. But it’s a good bet it’ll involve gathering with folks to explore shared values, to ask, in his words, “What are we going to say ‘no’ to in order to say ‘yes’ to a future that we can thrive in?”
“He just has a real talent for connecting – for knowing how and where to connect with people,” Campbell said, “for finding common ground.” He discerned in Maxfield-Steele in those days in Alaska a receptiveness to continue “to learn and grow and to take what he could from each of us, and then be able to discard the chaff.”
And he’s expressed himself in his own particular idiom.
“He’s real,” Campbell attests. “What you see is who he is.”
Set Up
Maxfield-Steele was born in Texas. His father was a therapist in the Air Force; his mother taught high school and community college literature. The family lived in Germany, returned to Texas, then, upon his dad’s retirement, settled in the Piedmont region of North Carolina to be close to extended family.
Guiding principles in the family were to do right by your neighbor, do right by God. “That was very central,” Maxfield-Steele said.
He attended Wofford College, a liberal arts school in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for undergraduate studies. There, he took a Christian theology class under a professor who introduced him to a wide range of thinkers and helped situate their teachings in a contemporary context.
“I got to learn a lot from what different people could articulate about how to apply the mystery of mysteries inherent in faith and spirituality in real life,” he said. Gospel teachings resonated in a social-justice context, in the plight of those who are marginalized.
A study-abroad program in northeast Thailand run by a people’s movement of that region further galvanized those connections and allowed him to see the world through a wider lens. He met and worked with people with whom he remains “in very tight relationship.” A formative time.
After graduation, Maxfield-Steele taught for four years at a private school in Spartanburg, then took a position in Wofford’s campus ministry office doing community outreach, addressing social and environmental issues.
In those years, he lived in Glendale, a neighborhood that had once been a textile village and was now being targeted for riverfront redevelopment – redevelopment that was likely not in the best interests of families who’d lived there for generations. He immersed himself in the community, hanging out on porches, absorbing the repercussions of the decline of an industry, asking folks how they felt about their lives, and urging them to share their ambitions.
Kierra Sims-Drake was a student of Maxfield-Steele’s at Wofford at the time, and he served as coordinator of her scholarship program. She was drawn to his skill in crafting stories rooted in history, encouraging his students to think about, she said, “What is our place in society? What is our role in trying to write this history?”
He also got Sims-Drake involved in Glendale, through what she later came to realize was “a set up.”
A conservation group was hosting a donor-only dinner on a bridge in Glendale to raise money for the development project. Maxfield-Steele suggested Sims-Drake volunteer at the event.
“And at the end of this dinner, I was, like, ‘I’m pissed off,” she said. “‘These rich people can come and sit on this bridge for two hours and talk about environmental issues and go home, and the community is just left with nothing?’”
“Kierra, do you want to do more about this?” Maxfield-Steele asked her. Her response: the launch of an organization called Glendale Community Action. He had helped her see the contradictions in a development project that excluded the community from being in the driver’s seat of its own future.
“To this day, we laugh about it,” she said. “He set me up in the best way.”
In 2009, Maxfield-Steele took her to Highlander, where she participated in Seeds of Fire. In 2014, she returned as a staff member, overseeing that program.
‘From What They’ve Inherited to What They Deserve’
Somewhere along the way, a mentor suggested Maxfield-Steele should consider seminary. In 2011, he entered Vanderbilt University Divinity School, in large measure because he wanted to participate in the “strong racial-justice and theology and ethics conversation” emanating from the school.
His time there afforded him the Alaska experience and an opportunity to minister at a small church in rural Middle Tennessee.
He met his wife, Erin Maxfield-Steele, while at Vanderbilt. She now serves as priest-in-charge at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Sylva, in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where they live with their two kids, Ursa and Ellis.
Maxfield-Steele had first visited Highlander in 2007 on the occasion of the center’s 75th anniversary, “a deeply humbling experience.”
Founded as the Highlander Folk School in 1932 by Myles Horton, Don West, and James A. Dombrowski, what is now the Highlander Research and Education Center has withstood arson, extrajudicial violence, and general antipathy to remain a forge for grassroots organizing, leadership development, and movement building.
Highlander’s initial primary focus was on labor organizing; then, beginning in the ’50s, on civil rights.
Rosa Parks came to Highlander in 1955, four months prior to declining to relinquish her seat on that Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Martin Luther King Jr. visited in 1957 for a leadership-training conference. John Lewis noted that it was there that he first sat down for a meal with white people. “I left Highlander on fire,” he once wrote.
Highlander’s strategy, Maxfield-Steele said, is built around “helping people move from what they’ve inherited to what they deserve.”
“We used to joke about making a T-shirt that would be, like, ‘Highlander: Helping people figure shit out since 1932,’ because that’s really what it is.”
“One of the bigger throughlines of Highlander is that we’ve always sought to support people in rural spaces,” he said. “Highlander has almost always been of rural communities.”
Every social movement of the past 100 years in this country, Maxfield-Steele argues, has found a home in rural America, “led by rural people, supported and nurtured by rural people, with rural sensibilities.”
He references the Battle of Blair Mountain; the Southern textile workers’ “Uprising of 1934”; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which in the ’60s traversed the South “organizing in the best and baddest ways to flip political power to serve the aims of an unfinished reconstruction.”
In recalling such movements, “I think of a rich layer of brilliant rural radicalism.”
Programs under the Highlander umbrella include the Appalachian Transition Fellowship, a program that places young people in communities to support equitable economic-development initiatives, and the People’s Advocacy Institute, which works with currently and formerly incarcerated folks throughout Mississippi.
Chantelle Fisher-Borne met Maxfield-Steele through their work together on a Highlander-supported project called the Southern Power Fund. She came to appreciate the qualities of his “servant leadership”: a warm sense of humor, authenticity, “a lot of grace and kindness.”
The Southern Power Fund convenes movement organizers to meet the challenges of leadership in “this current screwed-up era,” Fisher-Borne said. She’s seen Maxfield-Steele “model for a lot of people how you be real about how hard [this work] is and balance the despair with hope.”
“It’s like magic being in the room when he’s facilitating large groups of people towards a goal,” said Maria Rincón, who’s served as Maxfield-Steele’s executive assistant at Highlander. “It’s engaging, and it’s really about bringing out the wisdom that everyone is providing in the room.”
Preserving collective memories is a pursuit dear to Maxfield-Steele’s heart, and the mission of Highlander’s Southern Memory Workers Institute.
“He has a really wonderful knack for storytelling and connecting the importance of history to our current conditions, and to how we can build upon that for our organizing work,” Rincón said.
Boundless Imaginations
Phil Campbell shares a quote attributed to John Wesley, a religious reformer and founder of the Methodist Church: “The world is my parish” – the notion that a sequestered church life is an inconsequential one.
“If it isn’t real to the whole surrounding community,” Campbell said, “then it’s not really relevant.” He’s witnessed Maxfield-Steele embrace this spirit.
With his departure from Highlander, Maxfield-Steele will first take a breath and spend some time with his family. He’ll then begin provisioning for a new season.
He talks of helping drive “faith-driven” conversations around our relationship with the planet – central Appalachia’s “post-extraction” reality, a vision for a regenerative form of tourism, the implications of the arrival of data centers – a relationship that “echoes the way we want to be in relationship with each other. How are those values in alignment rather than at odds or in contradiction?”
He grieves the rooting of Christian nationalism in our day-to-day political reality. Too many progressive people of faith, he believes, have either experienced isolation or divested themselves from the institution-building necessary to “govern ourselves in a way that builds community, builds solidarity.”
He imagines “reanimating place-based spiritual homes,” helping people ground themselves in the many ways that we might “experience spirituality and organizing as a deeper purpose between the is and the ought, or the now and the not yet.”
“When [the Trump] administration got elected to a second term, I was, like, ‘Now is the time to lean into our strongest relationships. That is where to go.’ And so, for me, the strongest relationships are certainly family, but also friends and kin from church and movement communities in the area who want to grapple with these questions, grapple with what it really means to develop some strategy that has a long-haul view of where we are and where we want to be in the next 25 to 50, 100 years.”
“Our imaginations are boundless,” he insists, “and we ought to nurture that level of imagination that respects the myriad ways that we understand what divine is, can be, could be, and translate that into the world.”
Chantelle Fisher-Borne trusts he’ll determine where best to weather and thrive in the season ahead. “I don’t think we’re losing him in the work,” she said. “I think there’s how you make a living, and then there’s vocation and calling.” Maxfield-Steele, she’s learned, is called.
The post A Rural Calling: Allyn Maxfield-Steele appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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