First, don’t let the cross intimidate you. It doesn’t mean you have to believe what I believe before you’re welcome here. It means this is where grace found me.
Everyone has a journey. Mine has included faith, failure, recovery, hard questions, second chances, and people who were willing to sit with me before I had anything figured out. That is the spirit behind All Common Ground.
I’m a Christian, and I won’t pretend that isn’t central to who I am. But this is not a place built to pressure, corner, or convert anyone. All faiths are welcome here, and none are required. You can believe deeply, doubt honestly, question everything, or just be tired of the noise.
I didn’t set out to start a platform. I just got tired of watching people lose each other over politics, theology, headlines, and labels. I got tired of conversations where everyone was armed, and no one was listening.
All Common Ground began as a response to that ache — and to the stubborn hope that people can still sit across a table from one another with humility, honesty, and love.
I’m still figuring this out, too. But I know we need each other. And that’s enough to begin.
Eric Gajewski — Founder, All Common Ground
I haven’t always had a story I was proud to tell. There was a stretch of my life that looked fine on the outside and was falling apart underneath it — addiction took me further than I ever thought I’d go. I’ve slept without a home. I’ve sat in a jail cell. I’ve burned bridges I wish I hadn’t and pushed away people who were only trying to help. I know what it feels like to reach the end of yourself.
I also know what it feels like to be met there. Not by a sermon or a slogan, but by real people willing to sit with me in the mess, with no conditions attached. That kind of grace changed the direction of my life, and it’s the same thing I’m trying to build a table for here.
I’m a born-again Christian, though I know that phrase carries different weight depending on who’s reading it. I’m also a Christian Universalist — I believe love wins in the end, and that every person, whatever they currently believe, is worth listening to. I’m not interested in scaring anyone into faith or arguing them into a position. I’m interested in presence. In showing up, and staying.
For more than two decades I’ve worked in digital marketing, which means I’ve spent most of my career watching algorithms sort people into camps and reward whoever shouts loudest. I’ve seen up close how that machinery profits from division. All Common Ground is, in part, my answer to that — something slower, more honest, and a lot less interested in winning.
I live and do this work in the High Country of North Carolina, because I think it has to start somewhere real, with people you can actually sit across a table from.
I don’t have this all figured out. I’m still in process, same as anyone who walks through the door. But if you’ve ever felt like you didn’t quite belong — in a church, in a political camp, in the conversation happening around you — I’d like this to be a place you can exhale. There’s an open seat. Come find it.
— Eric