Every once in a while John Pavlovitz drives by the Starbucks where he was fired from his church.

He was a pastor at the time, and leadership at his North Carolina congregation didn’t appreciate his progressive views, particularly on sexuality. Pavlovitz was less concerned about keeping elders happy than he was about making the world safer for marginalized folks, so he and his church parted ways.

“I’m big on telling people to live with congruence,” he told me a few days ago. “Meaning the person they are out there in the world is not dissimilar to the person they are to those who love them.”

In the 10 years since his firing, Pavolvitz has doubled down on activism and compassion, writing books and essays and speaking out in hopes of reaching what he calls “the vast humane middle.”

Now he has a new book out—his seventh—called “Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage and Compassion When Cruelty is Trending.”

His timing couldn’t be better. The world feels scarred and scared. Wars are raging and our hearts are battered and a contentious election looms. Peace seems elusive, if not downright preposterous.

“This is the reason this book exists,” Pavlovitz writes. “To remember how much is still worth fighting for. A rapidly heating planet being swallowed up by unchecked gluttony is worth it. A fractured nation teetering precariously on the edge of implosion is worth it. An American church that is poisoned with white supremacy and devoid of Jesus is worth it. The human and civil rights rapidly evaporating around us are worth it. Already-vulnerable people driven by their leaders to the limits of what the human heart can endure are worth it.

“Most of all,” he continues, “the brave but exhausted human being staring back at you in the mirror who easily forgets how much their presence changes this place is worth it.”

Pavlovitz’s faith is woven throughout the book, but not as an excuse to stay on the sidelines and wait for fate to take its course. If anything, the opposite.

“The prevailing wisdom still seems to be that love and God and ‘someone out there’ are going to save the day,” he writes. “I wish it were that simple. I wish it were that cheap and clean a proposition: offer up some skyward prayers or make a public floodlight appeal to the heavens and wait for inevitable rescue. That’s not how this is going to work.”

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