Coming soon.

 Bishop LaTrelle Easterling​: Beloved of God, I could not be more pleased about today's episode of Thursdays at the Table, where we engage in conversations centered in justice, liberation, and God's unconditional love. Today I welcome two world-renowned pastors, authors, but most importantly, two committed disciples of Jesus Christ. Pastors Juanita and Rudy Rasmus co-led St. John's United Methodist Church in downtown Houston, Texas. They began their ministry in 1992 with nine members, and through their faithful leadership, it has expanded to over 9,000. They co-founded the Bread of Life Ministry, where they distribute over nine tons of fresh food weekly to those experiencing food insecurity. Through generous contributions from individuals such as the Knowles family, they formed the Temenos Community Development Corporation to address homelessness in their community. There's so much more I could talk about. I could spend the entire podcast just listing for you the great ministries that they've been involved in, but I want you to note that they are also authors of several books, including Learning to Be: Finding Your Center After the Bottom Falls Out by Pastor Juanita Rasmus, and I'm Black. I'm Christian. I'm Methodist. by Pastor Rudy Rasmus.  Beloved, welcome to the table.
Pastor Rudy Rasmus: Hey, good morning, Bishop.
Pastor Juanita Rasmus: Thank you for having us. Great morning. Great morning. Glad to be here.
Bishop LaTrelle: Thank you, again. I am simply thrilled, and I'm going to try not to be starstruck as I am engaging in this wonderful podcast with you. I want to get to the deepest things we know. Coffee or tea?
Pastor Juanita: Tea.
Pastor Rudy: Coffee.
Bishop LaTrelle: See. All right, my brother. I enjoy a nice cup of tea sometimes, especially with crisp mornings like this, but, oh, I love my coffee. Caffe or decaf?
Pastor Rudy: Caffeinated.
Pastor Juanita: Decaf all the way.
Bishop LaTrelle: All right. See, now look at that. Look, again, isn't it good when brothers and sisters can dwell together in unity amidst their diversity? I love it. I love it. I love it. Often the cup that I have at the table with me represents in some way the guests that I have the privilege to interview. When I thought of you, I couldn't think of anything deeper than love. The cup says today, “I give you a new commandment. Love each other just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other. This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.” I believe that's how you are serving in the world and how your ministry has been so blessed.
Keeping right in that vein, again, talking about the number of ministries that you're a part of, the number of individuals who have passed through St. John's or the other opportunities you've had to serve, how do you remain humble servants of God amidst your celebrity?
Pastor Juanita: That's a good question. I don't think we consider ourselves celebrities. That's the first part. Golly, the work we started at St. John's was boots-on-the-ground work. You have a picture of what that looked like. On any given Sunday, the plumbing could back up in the men's restroom or the women's. If it was in the women's, I'd go in, unplug it, with the plunger, and then wash my hands and go preach. Our ministry has always pretty much looked like that. What would you say, Rudy?
Pastor Rudy: My mentor, when we first started ministry, I guess he had a sense that this would work out. What he (God) told me was, don't ever read your press clippings and believe them. I think from that, what he was really saying is really consciously practice some intentional humility, regardless to how good things appear to be. I think if he could even look back at this point, he would say, man, you really did practice intentional humility consistently. It worked out.
Bishop LaTrelle: Amen. Amen.
Even though we laugh as I ask that question, I asked it intentionally because so many see where your lives have taken you, the circles that you walk in, and the opportunities that you've earned. They may be seduced by what they consider to be celebrity. I know from the number of years that I've known you and being in your presence and talking with you that it isn't about celebrity for you. What is the center of your calling?
Pastor Rudy: First of all, I want to say what people don't see are the scars under the wardrobe. Anything that we have has come with a price. What folk are not always really aware of is how high the cost is for what appears to be success. This has been 31 years of ministry. We have seen thousands of people come and go, mostly go. I think in the midst of all of that, the one thing that I think I'm always drawn back to is, whenever I see someone's life that might even appear glamorous, my real question for them is, man, how much does that cost? Would you invest that again? That's the other side of it. You mentioned something, Bishop, that I just want to want to touch on. That is, when I think about the lives that have come through and the circles that we have been a part of just as a result of doing ministry, I think the one common denominator for Juanita and I in all of those circles is we realized that all of those folk, regardless of how wealthy, famous or otherwise, or even infamous they might have been -- they all needed a pastor. That's where we found ourselves actually being people's pastors who never figured that they would need one and ultimately discovered one day that some people really cared about.
Pastor Juanita: When you ask us about what keeps us grounded and what's at the center for me, I'm a contemplative, and I've come to realize that in ministry that I am a person who needs quality time and prayer. For me, that is both the discipline of prayer, where I know that every day I'm going to set some time aside in the morning. For me, mornings is best for me that way. For me, the center is constant communication with God. I loved it when people were wearing the Bluetooth. Now they're doing the iPods in their ears. Right? You see people walking around, they're talking, and you're thinking to yourself, who are they talking to?
For me, that's the model of the life I want to live. That is that I am in constant communication with God. I'm asking God, okay, what's the next step? What is it that you're inviting me to do here? Who are you inviting me to be here? I think one of the things that's worked so really well for Rudy and I, as a couple in ministry, is that when we first started in ministry, we were in business together before. We had a sense about each other's strengths. Right? Whenever the work list came together, we tore it in half along the strength lines. He got his strength stuff and I got my strength stuff. His is in front of the room, often in terms of moving the mission forward, casting vision.
Mine is in the back room where we're praying, okay, God, show us the way. For us, that's how it's worked. That's what centers us. I'm just so grateful that we have that partnership where he's the yin and I'm the yang, or when I need to be the yin and he needs to be the yang, that we're there. I think the key in this relationship, because our ministry has been so much a part of our relationship, idea that God is at the center. Good, bad, or indifferent. When I like what Rudy says, God's at the center. When I don't like what he says, God's at the center. You get to this place where you're saying, okay, God, show us the way. I don't have to win. Show me the way. Put us on the same page with where you want us to go as leaders, as a couple, as parents, and all the different roles that we play. Yes, keeping grounded in the ways that are life-giving for the individual, grounded in the presence of God. Rudy loves the beach. We have to go to the beach on a regular basis, because that's where he taps into the power and the magnificence of God. We have to stay connected in the ways that keep us individually and neutrally connected.
Bishop LaTrelle: I'm so glad you expounded on that, that way because for me, part of one of the -- I don't know that it's a temptation. I think it's a side effect of being in ministry, is that we often forget we're still disciples. Right?
Pastor Juanita: Exactly.
Bishop LaTrelle: We still need our spiritual nurture. We've not somehow arrived, right? We're there, all right, wherever there is, and we're just trying to bring these other folk along. I often think that -- and we'll talk about the trauma and burnout that we know clergy are experiencing. We'll talk about that a little later. I think some of that is because we don't continue to have that contemplative prayer. We don't stay connected. I think early in our ministries, I know most of us are on our knees continually because we don't know necessarily what we're doing. We have not had good experiences. I think sometimes after we've got some years under our belt, then we begin to forget to have those disciplines, those spiritual disciplines that you talk about. I'm glad to hear you say that.
Pastor Juanita: Could I say also that sometimes I don't know if it's a forgetting or if it's a prioritizing. I have this belief, and that is that many of us get called to ministry, and we think it's our gift. The reality is it's our woundedness that drives us, just as the disciples. How many of your friends, when they see you, they come running and take off their clothes like the disciple did, right? [See John 21:7, when Peter is out in a boat fishing, sees the risen Christ on the seashore, and throws off his clothese to run to him.]
Bishop LaTrelle: Right.
Pastor Juanita: We have this need to be healed. What happens is sometimes we let other people prioritize our time. We let the demands prioritize our time. Right. We stop putting ourself on the calendar. We stop putting ourself on the agenda. When I say ourself, we stop putting the prayer time where it's written on the calendar or the meditation time where it's written on the calendar. Slowly but surely, we get on the back burner, and we burn up.
Bishop LaTrelle: I am going to stay centered there. I said we'd come back to it, but your eloquent responses about woundedness and that, I think we're going to continue to investigate. I saw a quote recently, again from Henri Nouwen, that talks about how we take that woundedness and use it in service to others, how we take that woundedness and allow God to use it. What came to my mind was, how do we move from victim to vessel? All right. Can you speak to that? Because I know that you've had some profound experiences of woundedness. You've gone through a serious season of healing. How have you both been honest with yourself about those wounds, but then use those wounds to be a blessing to others?
Pastor Juanita: Rudy, do you want to start?
Pastor Rudy: That's good. I like that. I think if I look back over the last 30 years and reflect on, one, just how many times I have been wounded, and then even reflect on how much woundedness I brought to this work, then I'm sort of reminded of, one, that Nouwen sort of reflection around the healer that's wounded. I think, Juanita mentioned it, in essence, it's our pain and not our gifts that land us often in this work. I think my awkwardness and my quirkiness, my tendency towards dissociating my childhood trauma, I think all of those things lended to a common ground with just a lot of people. I was reflecting when you and Juanita were talking about what centers us.
I think in process what I've learned from Juanita is the need for that centeredness. I have not been a person of profound intentional quiet time and prayer. I am a person who has really thrived in the town square and in the midst of a crowd. What I also see from my own life and in reflecting now, is if I could do one thing over again, I would have stopped more frequently, taken more time for reflection, and probably yielded more devotion towards God. I have leaned a lot over the years on my skill set, and occasionally I would default to God when I'd really get in trouble. Subsequently, Juanita would have to pray us out of situations. That has been our cycle. I think I've lived long enough now to reflect on that, to see maybe if I would pray a little more, she wouldn't have to pray us out of so many situations.
Bishop LaTrelle: I love the honesty. I love the vulnerability. I love it.
Pastor Juanita: As you're talking about woundedness, I think a recommendation that I would make to every person in leadership, whether they're in leadership in ministry or leadership in the world, and the reality is you're leading yourself. You're not leading anybody else. Right? Have a good therapist. The Scripture says, a wise person will seek counsel. Often as leaders in the church, we get thrown into that seat and we've not been trained for that. Get a good therapist, someone that you can talk to. The reality is that I love psychology. I've taken some classes along the way and there's this family theory system that says that we recreate the same chaos that we grew up with in our childhood in our workplaces.
Bishop LaTrelle: That's right. That's right.
Pastor Juanita: I think it's Bowen's Family Theory. The reality is, if I know, and here's the key, we often don't know the impact of our childhood trauma. There is a model called Johari's Window, and it's a four-pane window. One of the panes in that window is the me I see. The other pane is the me I don't want you to see. Then there's the pane that's the me everybody sees. The fourth pane is the me only God sees.
Bishop LaTrelle: God sees. Yes.
Pastor Juanita: We are often operating in those three panes, and those three panes are all skewed perceptions. We bring these wounded selves, parts of us we see, parts of us we don't see, parts of us we're trying to hide. We bring all of that to bear on ministry. The pressures of ministry, the challenges of meetings and demands, and your cousin, the one that molested you, shows up and they're over the board of trustees. It's not the literal cousin, but everything about how that person functions, your five-year-old self is going, oh my God, they're out to get me again.
The necessity of a therapist, then secondly, the necessity of a spiritual director or a spiritual companion. I've had both. I have a good friend. I have several friends who've been spiritual companions for me, but I also have had spiritual directors along the way. We need places that are safe so we can say, am I losing my mind? Is this real? Or am I making this up? We need people who can say, now, I see a pattern with you. I love that about my therapist. She'll say to me, now, Juanita, I believe we talked about something along these lines about six weeks ago.
Pastor Rudy: That's right.
Pastor Juanita: You're going, oh, and I didn't deal with it, huh?
Pastor Rudy: Right.
Bishop LaTrelle: Right. Somebody who will tell you the truth. Thank you so much, Pastor Juanita, for saying that. Everyone who has worked with me, everyone who I serve in these two conferences, I've said repeatedly that we need a therapist, a coach, and a good friend that's not United Methodist that we can call and scream into the phone and say, this district superintendent, this bishop, this person, somebody who's disconnected. We don't have to worry about it showing up what we've shared. You have underlined what I've been saying since I arrived here. Thank you for punctuating that point, because it's real. It's real.
Pastor Juanita: It is real.
Bishop LaTrelle: Especially we need to continue in the Black church to disabuse ourselves of this notion, again, that we can simply pray everything away. Prayer is extremely important. Prayer is the center of who we are. You've talked about that. We need that contemplative, disciplined prayer life. God has gifted psychologists and therapists to walk alongside us and help us to become exactly who God desires us to become. Again, so that we can understand that fourth pane in that window that you talked about.
Pastor Juanita: That's right.
Bishop LaTrelle: Amen. Pivoting to the Black church, Pastor Rudy, I love in your book, your book, I'm Black. I'm Christian. I'm Methodist. you say I'm Methodist for now. That's what you said, for now. You make me think about the comedian Katt Williams. When he was doing a critique of Hillary Clinton's campaign, he said the mistake she made was presuming that she had the Black vote “off top.” Okay, remember, he said, off top. You just think you're going to get that off top. You took us for granted is what she's saying. I often feel like from my own experience, but also what I'm hearing, that we as African-Americans think this United Methodist Church is taking us for granted because we've always been here and during this season of disaffiliation, many of us are not leaving. Talk to me about what you meant when you said, I'm Methodist for now.
Pastor Rudy: I think Katt Williams hit the nail on the head. Let's say the Black Methodist vote has been taken for granted for 60 years or so. Whereas the intention of even the merger might have been rooted in some really just principles, I think along the way, the challenges with who our identities are as a community were somehow lost in the shuffle. When I think about even now, May 28th, Juanita and I rewired. We moved from full-time active ministry to what we call sort of emeritus positions, but down the street. What we also had to contemplate, it was a season in the Texas conference where churches were given literally the freedom to walk away, to walk away without necessarily cost. As a community, we had to come together and to decide, why were we Methodist? Why would we stay? In final analysis, Juanita and I realized that in spite of the flaws of institutional process, this denomination offered an opportunity to lay people with no experience in ministry and limited experience in church leadership an opportunity to serve collectively a community that in many ways had no idea what Methodism was. We found those parameters acceptable enough to fight for change. I think it's the changes that probably needed to occur that brought us to this place. Have those changes occurred completely? They haven't.
St. John's, the church where we served for many years, is an open and affirming community. One of the few African-American communities in the country that says, okay, the LGBTQIA community, you're cool here. Matter of fact, you can even find your place on the pew and you can find your place in leadership. That was uniquely profound. When we think about the parameters that I think our denomination is moving towards, we saw the potential for a more inclusive experience for everyone. Has that happened yet? Not yet. The young leader that followed us, Pastor Tiffany Tarrant, started here when she was seven-years-old. She's 38 years old now. I like to say we sent her to seminary at a good Methodist school at Perkins.
Bishop LaTrelle: Amen.
Pastor Rudy: Right. She got an MD out there. She has moved through the process of ordination. She has followed all of the denominational rules. She has, since our departure, Bishop, has grown revenue and attendance. I think there's a word that I think we should use at this point of the conversation, and it's continuity. Sort of a connection with who we were, but the freedom to be and become who the Creator is really choosing for this community to be and become. In my 67-year-old self, I'm a consummate boomer, but I am probably the world's oldest millennial.
Bishop LaTrelle: All right now. All right. I feel you on that one. All right.
Pastor Rudy: Yes.
Bishop LaTrelle: I'm on that bubble. I'm on the bubble. I am. I was born in 64, so I'm on that bubble. I don't like being called a boomer. I don't like it. I'm on that bubble.
Pastor Rudy: You’re on that bubble. Right. I think in the midst of it, we have an opportunity to dream and create a future for our denomination, for our churches, and for our community. The challenge will be, will the need for institutional survival allow the kinds of freedom needed to morph into that vision for the future? That's where we land.
Bishop LaTrelle: Yes. You remind me of someone that I know we both revere, Richard Rohr, and those Ms that he talks about – those five M’s (human, movement, machine, monument, memory). We're stuck right now in that monument phase, and we've lost the core of the movement. What you're talking about is getting us back to the movement, which was always inclusive, but always kept the beloved community and the kingdom of God at the center. Working toward that, and that's outward-focused, not inwardly focused. Again, survival of the institution. You've hit something profound, but I just have to stop and mark a moment. I have to mark a moment because I carry a little bit of PTSD in me.
From General Conference 2012, we were talking about, again, this tension we've been in around what the discipline says, what many of us hope it will be evolved to say. I stood on the floor and talked about how -- someone had said the only churches that were growing were our more traditional conservative churches. I, as a delegate, went to the floor and said, that is not true, and I started naming the churches that were growing that were open and affirming, and I named St. John's. Someone came to the microphone immediately after me and took me to task and said, don't you say that about St. John's. St. John's is not -- I want my moment of vindication that you have said St. John's has been welcoming and affirming, because I know that to be true. I know that this love revolution that you've led has been inclusive and has been welcoming of all.
Pastor Rudy: Absolutely. I'm going to give you a stat. 30,000 people have joined this church in the last 30 years, walked down the aisle, committed their lives to Christ. Committed their hearts and work to this faith community. What we know is maybe 10,000 of those 30,000 left because of our position on inclusivity.
Bishop LaTrelle: My Lord.
Pastor Rudy: Yes. What I like to do is use an analogy of an emergency room. If you are sick enough, you want to find a place where somebody is skilled enough to lead your body to a better place. Often we find those places being an emergency room. Walk into the emergency room, we don't care what the art looks like on the wall. We don't care what the quality of the furniture is. What we want to know is if there's somebody in there who cares enough to help me feel better. As an emergency room, we have been that here at St. John's for many, many years. As an emergency room, people have walked in, they said, oh man, I needed to be here. I love y'all. Thank y'all for what y'all doing. Then Bishop, damn this thing. You start looking around and you say, hold on, that picture on the wall right there is crooked. I don't like that. Hold on. Wait, this furniture look like -- hold on, this is not the kind of furniture I'm accustomed to sitting on. Who is this in the chair next to me in this emergency room? That person is not from my community, not from my neighborhood. We are not in the same socioeconomic group. I cannot sit here in this emergency room because I'm feeling good enough now to look around and see that I might need to be somewhere else. Now, we have seen that over and over again.
We've seen people walk down the aisle and say, Pastor Juanita, Pastor Rudy, I love you. I love this place. I'm so glad I found y'all. Thank y'all. Then you start looking around and you see, uh-oh, uh-oh, was he here the whole time? Hold on. This is a good one. Were they here the whole time?
Bishop LaTrelle: Were they? That's right. Were they here the whole time?
​Pastor Rudy: Were they here the whole time? Then, as that vision begins to heal, our delineations and our preferences also start to manifest. One thing we have learned, though, is the power of, one, committing to a missional focus. Our missional focus from the very beginning was tearing down the walls of classism, sexism, and racism and building bridges of hope, love, and universal recovery. I'm telling you, there have been times, Bishop, where the desire to negotiate that for the sake of institutional survival had creeped in. At a point, we would say, maybe if we could just move just a little more to the right, just maybe we could make that particular group of donors a little more comfortable.
Bishop LaTrelle: There you go.
​Pastor Rudy: Then, each time, we would get together and we would say, but that's not being honest. That's not being integral to who we are as an institution. Really, it's not how we view Jesus's principles around love and acceptance. At the end of the day, we defaulted to what we know, what we feel is how Jesus loves. From there, we have made the decision repeatedly to pay the cost for that love.
Bishop LaTrelle: All right. Again, willing to pay the cost. You talked about looking at persons where they are now, the wounds that they carry, the cost that they paid, would they invest that again? What I think I hear you saying is you would invest that all over again.
Pastor Rudy: All over again. In our six months away from, and we've committed to really stay out of our faith community for six months to a year to give new leadership a chance to really establish their leadership here. In the midst of that, we would bump into people every now and then who will see us and say, oh, y'all, looking good. How the hell you think I'm supposed to be looking? Broke down? Like, what? In the midst of it. I said that to say, people, in many cases, feel as though they have done you a favor with their presence when in actuality, our individual missions as followers of Jesus should be to make our presence the literal manifestation of Jesus's love wherever we find ourselves. I don't know, man. I'm still trying to figure this out.
Bishop LaTrelle: Amen. Now, Pastor Juanita, Pastor Rudy talked about that tension that I think all faith communities go through in terms of this temporal need to keep the lights on, the doors open, the heat or the air flowing, whatever the season might require, but also staying centered, again, in who we know God through Christ to be in our work. There's a quote that says, when a church does what it's supposed to do as a church, it transforms not only the lives of its members but the life of their culture as well. How were you able to keep St. John's focus so outwardly manifested? All of the work that's being done, whether it's through Bread of Life, whether it's through the Temenos housing facility is so richly outwardly focused. How were you able to bring the congregation along with you in that work?
Pastor Juanita: I think there's been two things, and this really probably just boils down to one. First of all, the work we've done at St. John's has all been rooted in Matthew 25:35, “when I was hungry, you fed me. When I was sick and in prison, you came to see about me.” Literally every need that's represented in that passage, St. John's has manifested a ministry to fulfill that work. The second thing is you have to keep the vision before the people. You have to keep telling them, this is what we're about. This is where we're going. This is what we're doing. It's just like any other corporate entity that buys advertisements. It's so you won't forget their product. Right?
Bishop LaTrelle: That's right.
Pastor Juanita: We've had to do that because otherwise people get so easily distracted and they begin to think it's all about me, versus saying, I am called to meet the needs of the least of these. Bottom line is we came from the Word, we keep going back to the Word, and we constantly keep the vision before the people.
Bishop LaTrelle: Amen. What would you say to those who know of your ministry and say, well, yes, that's easy to do when you have Bey and others who stop by and just drop a little something, something in the offering plate? What would you say to them about before you had those relationships and yet you were doing transformative ministry?
Pastor Juanita: Here's the thing, and I'm going to give my perspective and I'll let Rudy give his. Here's what I would say. First of all, when there is a vision that people can attach their interest to, a vision that's in alignment with who they are at core, it's easy for people to want to be a part of that. If nobody knows your mission, if nobody knows your vision, then they can't hook up to it. The reality is, when we started this work, we started it with a credit card and every Sunday we would pay off the credit card bills.
Bishop LaTrelle: My lord.
Pastor Juanita: There's a history to everything. The key is you got to have a vision and if you don't keep telling people the vision, they don't know what the heck you're doing. Rudy?
Pastor Rudy: Yes. I would say I tell preachers all the time, pray for the babies. You never know, one day, one of them might grow up to be Beyonce.
Bishop LaTrelle: My Lord. My Lord, indeed.
Pastor Rudy: Watch this. Pray for the babies, one day, one of them might grow up to be Rudy. Pray for the baby, one day, one of them might grow up to be LaTrelle.
Bishop LaTrelle: Say so.
Pastor Rudy: Pray for the babies. Jesus said, “hey, let the children come to me.” When we think about the broader mission of our faith communities, we know that occasionally there will be one who will just emerge out of that crowd, let's say, as a successful product of that community. Now, what does it really say though? It says that if we are faithful over a few things, people, situations, opportunities, then what happens to that moment when the creator says, you know what? You've been faithful here. I know I can trust you with this next opportunity.
If I can tell you the truth, we have literally been consistent with 50 people. We were consistent with 500 people, and we were consistent with 5,000 people. We didn't one day reach a certain number and because our income and our status in the community shifted, more people -- I tell people all the time, I'm an overnight success in 31 years.
Bishop LaTrelle: There you go. All right.
Pastor Rudy: Hey, Bishop, I remember 10 years when folk wouldn't even speak to me. I'm a baseball cap wearing, blue jean wearing, T-shirt, tennis shoe wearing, they said, hold up, you didn't fit none of the criteria that we believe. Now, I can walk show up in my drawers and people say, hey, Pastor Rudy.
Bishop LaTrelle: He's here. He's here. He's in the building.
Pastor Rudy: Yes.
Bishop LaTrelle: He's in the building. You had to get there. That's all right. We tell the whole truth at Thursdays at the Table. We keep it real. It's all good.
Pastor Rudy: You keep it real.
Bishop LaTrelle: Now, speaking of which, many know the story of your goatee, but not everyone does. For the benefit of those who are not knowledgeable, help us understand the goatee.
Pastor Rudy: I was on the beach once. My daughters were little girls and they were getting their hair braided. The sister that was braiding my daughter's hair, I had a beard at the time, they called me Father Rudy. They called me Father Rudy because I was drinking beer on the beach. They said, Father Rudy, can we braid your beard? I said, sure. I'm telling you, Bishop, she braided my beard and as I walked around, I realized, man, people judge me based on my facial hair. Then I said, okay, so you're going to judge me based on my facial hair. That means I get a chance to see who you are before you really get a chance to see who I am.
Bishop LaTrelle: All right.
Pastor Rudy: All right, and it became like a filter, a judgment filter. It was the dark onus thing. People who were open and willing to accept me and to embrace me just with the piercings and all of that stuff. It was just something about those folks that they were ready to take the next step in relationship. The folk who were a little more resistant, I realized I had a little more work to do on them. It's not that I would reject that person's lack of willingness to accept my personhood. I would approach that person based on how I saw their fear manifest around my difference. That's all it is. It's just people don't know who you are, don't know your heart. They're going to basically base their initial assessment of you based on how they have assigned criteria to some stuff.
Bishop LaTrelle: That's right.
Pastor Rudy: It has been a wonderful tool. All over the world, I have met friends and evoked fear and it has been one fun ride. I ain't lying. It's been fun.
Bishop LaTrelle: You point to something that-- oh, go ahead Pastor Juanita.
Pastor Juanita: No, no, I was just responding to him.
Bishop LaTrelle: You speak to something profound because the place where of course we ought to have the least judgment, the body of Christ, is often where we have the most judgment. I recall when I was still pastoring in the local church, and I showed up one Sunday in jeans, okay, a T-shirt. Folks thought I was going to change before I went into the pulpit. I did not, because it was part of the sermon. It was a sign act if you will. It was part of the sermon. The folk humored me and whatnot, but one lady came up to me, one of our senior saints of the church came up to me. She said, now, Pastor, that was nice. Don't do that next Sunday. Okay? Don't do that next Sunday. You really are hitting on something.
It isn't just the folk beyond the walls of the church where we see that judgment. It's too often embedded in who we are as the people of Christ, which then affects our ability to build these relationships, to build these bridges. I know you talk about in your book, breaking through these stained glass windows that not only have obscured our vision, kept us blind to some things, but also don't allow people to look in. We've talked about what the church needs to do to ensure it's not taking the Black church for granted. We've even talked about LGBTQIA inclusivity. How must we be relevant to be able to be in deeper relationship with our young people? That group that everybody claims they want, but I'm not sure is willing to do what's necessary to really form relationships with.
Pastor Rudy: Yes. My dissertation focused on the intersection of Black millennials and institutional religions. I think in that, what we should begin to do is look at gathering imperatives in a more flexible way. We should think about how the expression of people coming together can differ from Sunday morning at 10:00 or 11:00 to any day of the week, any time of the day, and what that contextual experience resembles. Sometimes the goal is fellowship, sometimes the goal is instruction, sometimes the goal is support. Anytime we're together between instruction, support, and fellowship, we can manifest the body of Christ.
What I have found in many of my millennial colleagues is that they have found it in yoga classes, they have found that fellowship and even instruction in yoga classes. They have found that fellowship, that support, that instruction at brunch. We have to begin to look beyond the traditional framework of the hour. Now, Bishop, something else we've got to do, and that is we've got to take a look at our assets, evaluate what we consider an asset even our locations, even our buildings, and determine how we are utilizing those structures, those buildings, those assets for the ultimate mission. Sometimes it requires taking a little risk. I'm going to give you a case in point.
Here we have taken the sanctuary and we realized that there are four, or five days a week that sanctuary doesn't get used, we have given the sanctuary a name. We call it the We Serve Theater. Now we have gone to the marketplace and we have established a partnership with a bookstore, a bookstore of color. That bookstore now, when they host their author talks, they host their author talks in our room. Now, when people come into that room, in many cases, it's the first time they've been in a church without feeling judgment in their lives. They come into the room, they sit, they listen to the author, they look around. I don't necessarily recommend this for churches in the Baltimore-Washington Conference, but we sell a little wine at ours. The monetary benefit of that wine plus the liberation of the spirit as a result of that consumption is just something else. I'll give you a case in point. Last week, Jada Pinkett Smith came through to do a book talk.
Bishop LaTrelle: That's right.
Pastor Rudy: First thing she said was, regardless of why y'all think I'm here, I'm not here to talk about Tupac or Will. I'm here to talk about how Broken Jada is putting her life back together.
Bishop LaTrelle: Amen. Amen.
Pastor Rudy: All right? 500 people who paid $40 a piece to hear her say that benefited the room.
Pastor Juanita: That's right.
Pastor Rudy: Okay?
Bishop LaTrelle: Yes.
Pastor Rudy: Found themselves in a place of acceptance. Got inspired in the process. I guarantee you, somebody in that group came back that next Sunday to take a closer look.
Bishop LaTrelle: Amen. Amen. Again, by being communally focused in the right way, in a relevant way, you not only serve the community, you're furthering the Word of God. Because again, that's why Christ's body was broken, that we might be made whole - that we might be made whole. It's a both/and. You were able to do a both/and. That's the beauty, I think, of when we really do live our faith. That's the beauty. It isn't either/or. It's both/and.
Pastor Rudy: That's right.
Bishop LaTrelle: That's beautiful. That's absolutely beautiful. I'm just going to say, for those in the Baltimore-Washington and Peninsula-Delaware Conferences who heard what Pastor Rudy just said, Bishop's going to tell you some things I oversee and some things I overlook. All right? All right? Come on now. Praise be to God. Praise be to God. You talked about praying for the babies. You make me think of that song, “Somebody prayed for me, had me on their mind. Took the time to pray for me. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. I'm so glad they prayed for me.” I'm so glad somebody prayed for Juanita and somebody prayed for Rudy, because your lives have become a blessing and a balm for so many.
You model, through your marriage, through your ministry, and through your mission, what it is to be committed servants of Jesus the Christ. I count it an honor and a privilege to have been able to be in this conversation with you.
Pastor Juanita: Thank you for having us.
Pastor Rudy: A blessing being with you too, Bishop. I love you and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Pastor Juanita: Don't even try.
Bishop LaTrelle: Amen. Amen. Amen. The feeling is mutual. Amen.
 

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: Beloved of God, welcome to Thursdays at the Table, where we engage in conversations centered in justice, liberation, and God's unconditional love. Today, I have the privilege to welcome to this table two gifted and extraordinary colleagues who I'm just so honored to be in relationship and ministry with. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde is the diocesan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., a diocese that includes the District of Columbia and portions of Maryland in contiguous relationship thereto.
She was consecrated the ninth bishop of Washington, D.C., in 2011. She and I share the distinction of being the first females to lead the areas where we are now serving. She's the author of several books, the latest of which is How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith. If you've not read this, I commend it to your reading. It's a wonderful book. Bishop Budde is married and has two children. Sons, I believe. Again, something else she and I share.
Then, I’m so grateful to be able to welcome to the table, Bishop Leila Ortiz. She is the bishop of the Metropolitan Washington, D.C., Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which includes conferences in the District of Columbia, portions of Virginia and Maryland. She was elected in 2019. She is an alumna of the Lewis Center of Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary and the author of numerous articles. She's co-authored a chapter entitled Pentecostal Latinas: Engendering Selves in Storefront Congregations, which is found in Faith on the Avenue: Religion on a City Street.
Bishop Ortiz recently got married, congratulations, and is the mother of two daughters. She refers to herself as Luthercostal because of her upbringing in the Pentecostal Church, and now her ministry again within the Lutheran faith. My beautiful, bold, brave, brilliant, beloved sisters, here we are. Here we finally are. I could not be more excited. I've wanted us to come together in conversation since 2019 when Bishop Ortiz was installed. We have been together. As the young people say, we've been out in those streets together. We have marched together. We have prayed together.
We've stood as witnesses against injustice together and so, again, thrilled to be able to be in conversation with you. The thought that we three women, two of whom are women of color, would be in leadership in the center of power of these United States of America is both amazing and inspiring. Now, I want us to get to the deepest things that we know. Bishops, coffee or tea?
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde: Coffee for me. Thanks.
Bishop Leila Ortiz: Tea for me.
Bishop Easterling: All right, all right. I have to confess. I'm often a coffee person, but I'm just getting over a respiratory infection. Today, I have tea in this mug. Caffeinated or decaf?
Bishop Budde: This time of day, for me, it's decaf.
Bishop Easterling: Okay.
Bishop Ortiz: For me, usually always caffeinated.
[crosstalk]
Bishop Easterling: I'm telling you, Bishop Ortiz, I'm with you. I need leaded every day, all day, all times. The mug that I select often has a meaning that corresponds to the podcast that we're taping that day. Today's simply says "blessed" because I'm blessed. I'm blessed to know you. I'm blessed to serve with you. I'm blessed to watch the powerful ways that you are leading in these times.
Bishop Budde, I want to start with something that comes to us from your book. Again, how we learn to be brave. You quote Howard Thurman concerning the spiritual strength required to accept an unchosen fate as one's destiny. We've come to leadership at a time that nobody could have predicted, we could not escape, and for which there is no script other than the Word of God. What have you learned or are you learning as we've had to lead through these complex times?
Bishop Budde: Well, first of all, Bishop LaTrelle, thank you for allowing me to be part of this amazing trinity of women. It's a great joy to see you both on my screen and to be part of this reflective and important conversation. The operative description is "are learning." I don't think we're out of anything yet. I would say that I am learning daily that the foundational practices and disciplines of faith are deeply challenged in times like this and are, therefore, all the more necessary. For me, personally, I have waxed and waned in my practices and in my confidence and in my understanding of everything.
What I come back to like middle C on the piano are the things that I have been taught and learned and have counted on in days past, right? It's like just hang on to what God has promised, hang on to what hope looks like in challenging times, and also perhaps not to take too seriously my emotional state or even my opinions on any given day, to trust that the reality that I'm swimming in is bigger than all of that.
It's not that that's not important data, but they may not be the most important data points in terms of understanding how best to navigate. I guess it's a dead reckoning to sum it up that just taking everything that I've got, plus an openness to what I might learn from the people around me or the situations as I change and keep on taking the next faithful step.
Bishop Easterling: Amen.
Bishop Budde: That's what I'm doing. It's some of what I'm learning.
Bishop Easterling: That's a phrase that I have come to use often. Let us just continue to take the next faithful step. We don't have to see a mile down the road. We certainly can never see around the corner, right? If we take the next faithful step, we can know that God is with us and that we are leaning into that to which we have been called. Thank you.
Bishop Budde: Even when I don't feel it, right? Even when I don't feel it. I believe in God even when God is silent. I believe even when, and then when grace meets me, I can go a long way on that. I can go a long way. Just a little bit of faith.
Bishop Easterling: People in this conference know that I'm sitting here wanting to burst out in Mark Miller's song. "I Believe in the Sun”. “I believe in the sun even when it's not shining," right? Yes, we believe in God even when God is silent. Amen. Bishop Ortiz, share with us what you are learning as we continue in these, again, complex times.
Bishop Ortiz: Well, I also want to say thank you for the invitation. This is a very exciting conversation and one that I crave all the time just to be in space with like-minded leaders who are still inspired by God's grace and the move of the Holy Spirit. This is a huge gift. Thank you for inviting me into this conversation. I think I've been serving now for four years. I'm in year five and just had an anniversary.
Every year, I tend to write something to share with the synod where I'm at, what I'm thinking. I realized looking back that I had a whole lot of things that I thought I knew about myself, about the church, about the world. Then looking back, it's like, "Aw, that was cute. That's so nice that she thought those things." There's so much more, right? I think that while it's been quite difficult, it's also been quite holy.
The verse that is always consistent for me is in Romans, this, "Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." I think that's what I've been learning that I am in consistent renewal of my mind in what I thought I knew and into what God is actually inviting us into. I thought that I could lean on my skills and resources. I thought that I had every single idea that was incredible and amazing. I thought I, I, I, right? Really, it's never been about me, me, me, right? It's never really even been about us and our skills and our abilities.
It's all about God and how Jesus and the Holy Spirit are inviting us into newness of life. What does that mean? This renewal of my mind has been something that has been a grace point for me because I don't have to rely on saying, "Yes, I know this, I know this, I know that." I know enough. God knows it all, right? God uses what God does and invites us into some really interesting spaces in this journey. I think that's what I'm learning and leaning into -- that there is an invitation and a grace in the renewing of our minds.
Bishop Easterling: Absolutely, thank you. I'm going to follow up on something in just a moment because you've now named a Scripture that is grounding you and you keep coming back to that Romans passage. What I think I learned is that to trust the wisdom that those elders and mothers had poured into me and that is to keep the main thing, the main thing. What do I mean by that? Even as leaders, especially as leaders, we must always have our own deep faith practices. We must constantly be in prayer ourselves, in study, that we have to remember we're disciples on the road even as we lead.
I feel like, in some ways, those who began to feel the most lost during the pandemic and during some of what we've come through are those who were only engaging in those practices in preparation for something else, in preparation for preaching, in preparation for leading something, but not remembering that we too are spiritual beings who need to continue to have that connection, that we're branches connected, or we're on the vine connected, and also that we are always called to community.
One of the things that I lament so much about our Western spirituality is often it's reduced to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Now, of course, that's important, right? At some point, we all have to have that moment of conversion. In our Wesleyan polity, we talk about the heart strangely warmed. We all need to have that, but that's only the beginning. I think the pandemic has reminded us how much we need community.
If it's only a personal relationship or if it's only the local church being inwardly focused, that's not enough. The pandemic reminded us how much we need and must rely on one another. Just, for me, not to let go of that wisdom, that mother wit, that, again, those who I looked up to and have helped me along my journey into ministry instilled in me, but sometimes folks will sort of -- or time might beat it out of you, might try to say, "Ah, that's not that important." No, it is.
We have to keep the main thing, the main thing. When we don't at moments of crisis, at moments of struggle, at moments of deep challenge, it will evidence itself that we've lost that footing and that grounding. That's part of what I am learning as I come through and lead through this season. Now, Bishop Ortiz referenced the Romans passage. Bishop Budde, I'm going to share the Scripture that continues to ground me, and then I'm going to come to you and ask you, is there a particular Scripture that you look to?
I look to that Jeremiah passage [Jer. 12:5], "If you have raced with men on foot and they have wearied thee, how will you compete with horses? If you stumble in a safe place, how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?" because I feel like we have to be able and adept at leading in chaos, in confusion, leading against those who are comfortable with the status quo who don't want to be risk-taking.
Our denomination is going through schism, so having to lead right now in the midst of schism. If I'm only able to lead in safe spaces or when things are calm, then I'm not able to really lean into the breadth and depth, the complexity of leadership. It will, quite frankly, be a failure of leadership in these conferences again that I have the privilege to serve. I come back to that Jeremiah passage. Bishop Budde, what Scripture grounds you?
Bishop Budde: Great passages, both mine and it has been for most of my ordained life, it has not changed, is the story of Jesus and the loaves and the fish, the miracle of the loaves and the fish. I experience it in many different facets. The main piece that I feel is my foundational relationship to Christ is the imperative to offer what I have and offer it and offer it in full knowledge that it's not going to be enough, that that's not a reason not to make the offering.
Sometimes I make the offering and the miracle is, as the Scripture says, that somehow enough is made or even an abundance is made or the miracle of communal sharing. Other times, it's not enough and I fail, or the effort is not fruitful, and yet I've learned even then that the offering and the obedience of offering is what I commit to. Sometimes I have my greatest learnings and my greatest growth as a leader when I fail or when there's no miracle to meet me in the middle.
Other times, it's always a reminder. I suppose it's not in my hands. I'm not driving this thing. I'm making my offering and inviting others to be brave and to do the same. I was thinking about this the other day because it just occurred to me two days ago as I was praying about this that I had forgotten that in all four versions, the disciples and Jesus are exhausted.
[laughter]
Bishop Budde: They were exhausted before the day started, right? "Go away to a quiet place and pray with me," He says, right? All the crowds come, right? Even when you're at the end of everything you got, sometimes, not always, but sometimes just give me what you have and we'll make something of it.
Bishop Easterling: That's beautiful. Now, you used an F-word in your response, an F-word that often, I think, leaders are afraid of and that's "failure."
Bishop Budde: Failure, oh yes.
Bishop Easterling: You used that F-word. I tell you, part of my ethos as a leader is that if we're never failing -- and I'm talking about from the pew again to the episcopacy. If we're not failing at some point, we're not trying hard enough. We're not doing enough. We're safe. We're not risk-taking. I certainly understand from her response, from Bishop Budde's response, that she's not afraid of failure. Bishop Ortiz --
Bishop Budde: Well, I wouldn't say I'm not afraid of failure.
Bishop Easterling: Okay, all right.
Bishop Budde: I would say that I have accepted that it comes with the terrain.
Bishop Easterling: Okay, all right. Not being so careful that you're always trying to avoid failure.
Bishop Budde: I'm not going to allow the fear of failure to stop me. That is true.
Bishop Easterling: There we go. Does that resonate with you, Bishop Ortiz?
Bishop Ortiz: Yes, I just try to fail fast and move to the next thing.
I learned that from a colleague that worked with me before and he was always like, "We're going to fail. This is going to happen." The hope is that you just fail fast and move on, right? Take what you've learned from that experience and lean into another risk, right? Lean into another possibility that can actually land well and come alive in ways that are helpful. Failure, my goodness, that's one of my greatest fears. In this point, it's just unavoidable. It's inevitable, right?
Bishop Easterling: Right.
Bishop Ortiz: How do we lead? Thankfully, I try not to fail very often, but when I do, man, is it bad? It's like, "Oh, everyone saw this one," or at least I feel as if that's the case.
Bishop Budde: My experience has been that when I fail or when I watch others work through what they would consider to be a colossal failure, and I've had several, that what matters most is how I respond after that. Actually, that response matters more in the long run than the event itself in terms of how people remember it. I try to think of that when I am on the other side of something that I have to really come to terms with that. I think people want to know how we respond.
Bishop Easterling: Yes. Absolutely.
Bishop Budde: Even just a deep disappointment, it doesn't necessarily have to be a failure per se or personal failure, but something that didn't work out or the things that you regret. It not only gives the others permission to do the same, but also I think their ability to trust us is increased when they know we can come around and acknowledge.
Bishop Easterling: That's right.
Bishop Budde: Make restitution. As they say in the 12 Steps, make restitution.
Bishop Easterling: Absolutely. For me, I think that I learned the most when something has failed. If everything always goes to plan, if everything always goes right, and someone were to ask me, "How did you do that?" I don't know that I can explain it as well as when something failed and then we had to make correction, then we had to figure out where we had been wrong in our assessment or in our planning, overcame that, and then we're able to achieve the goal.
Now, I can say, "Oh, here's what happened." For me, failure becomes a valuable crucible out of which there's deep learning, deep understanding, and, again, a teachable moment. It becomes a teachable moment. Again, speaking of failure or disappointment. Every day, there seems to be another article about the decline or the demise of denominational affiliations and dwindling church attendance. Are either of you daunted by that perpetual publishing of where our denominations are or even where spirituality is here in the United States?
Bishop Ortiz: Daunted. I think I've had some time to observe from this perspective. Where are our congregations and where is the spirituality of the church and the people now? I, again, lean on our theology. We are people of death and resurrection. There is something to be said about what is causing this particular decline. Is it just the churches that are dying? What was dying before that?
What was happening in the space before that? What was happening in the heart and in the spirit and in the minds of the people where outreach wasn't necessarily a priority where evangelism -- well, what do you say? Evangelism. What are we going to say about Jesus? What are we going to say if maybe we've never really known Jesus? Maybe we've known about Jesus, but we haven't necessarily known Jesus. How do we speak about someone that we do not know?
Therefore, how do we grow in our faith and in our spirits and in number if we have not engaged or built a relationship with the one who calls us, right? Daunted, yes, it's a whole lot of work and it's painful and it's really difficult to reimagine and to be in the process of death for the sake and hope of resurrection that maybe life will come in a brand new way. Maybe church will happen in a completely new and life-giving way that can no longer look as it did, which I find beautiful and necessary and essential.
It's where we are and I think, in some cases, where we're headed. Because of what I've observed and what I see and how difficult it is for us to talk about Jesus, I'm not surprised. While daunted, I'm not necessarily surprised or shocked by the decline because there's a fear of preaching the Gospel and being associated with Christian nationalism, for instance. There's a fear of being misunderstood.
There's a fear of losing relationships because of what I say and what you might believe. There's this fear, this polarization that doesn't allow for us to be authentic in our faith. When we're not authentic and audacious in our faith, then we don't have evangelism. We don't have outreach and we don't have a living spirit that inspires contagion, right? It's really hard. It's really painful. It's very difficult, especially because Jesus is enough, more than enough.
Bishop Easterling: Amen.
Bishop Ortiz: Jesus is the lover of our souls, the one who sets us free. The fact that we are afraid to share that news saddens my spirit. It saddens my heart knowing that society and culture has made it so that, for lack of a better word, I think even as Americans, we have been seduced by culture and society to the point of forgetting that our identity is not by color, "color" meaning political color of partisanship, but our identity should be in Christ, right?
Bishop Easterling: Indeed, indeed. Long before we take on other markers of identity, Republican, Democrat, progressive, liberal, gay, straight, our identity should be in Christ. I'm going to follow up with you on something in a moment, but I want to offer Bishop Budde an opportunity, if she feels led to, to also weigh in on that, the bad news that's published all the time and if that daunts you at all in your leadership.
Bishop Budde: Thanks. I'm certainly sobered by it and I came into the episcopate. I've been at this now for 12 years. I came into it with a clear determination that that was what I wanted to focus on, which was how to help because I believe, as I do for both the Lutheran and the Methodist Church, that the Episcopal Church has a particular role to play on the spectrum of Christianity. I want us to occupy that space with as much strength and confidence and joy and compelling mission as we possibly can.
I'm sober that it's been as challenging as it has been deeply curious. Leila, all the things you said, I could really understand. I am curious how it's going to play out and what I can do from my place now. How I can lead in such a way that we can face the future, whatever it is, if it is a death-and-resurrection cycle? Is it a revitalization cycle? Is it a learning? I think there's a whole spectrum of ways we might find a way to share what has been entrusted to us in such a way that people find value in their lives and in their walk of God.
We can do that. That's what I try to focus on. You were talking earlier about the main thing. That's my main thing, right? There are probably reasons why some of our churches aren't growing. In fact, I could name them for you, but I'm not sure that's helpful. I'm trying to just say, "Okay, what can we do and where are the signs of life?" That's what I'm also focusing on right now. Where is the spirit moving and how can I do whatever I can to amplify and strengthen that in the years I have left? That's what I can do.
Bishop Easterling: Oh, we don't want to hear that in the years you have left. We don't even want to focus on that. All right. You can't leave till I leave. You can't leave until--
Bishop Budde: I'm not talking about leaving. I'm just talking about mortality.
Bishop Easterling: Amen. All right, all right. There we go. Bishop Ortiz, you said maybe we've never really known Jesus. When you said that, you took me back to my days as a district superintendent. In the Methodist Church, there's a bishop, but then there's the one who superintends that is called a district superintendent and has a cohort of churches that they bring leadership to. I remember my worst day as a district superintendent.
I was leading a church conference and people knew this question was coming. Everyone knew. Every church conference was structured in the same way to begin with. They knew that I was going to be asking people to offer testimony about their personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Just get up and talk about your personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I was never more disappointed than when people rose to talk to me about their relationship with their cats, their dog, their grandchildren. Very few people could talk to me and offer testimony about their relationship, their understanding of a relationship.
Now, as I said before, that's just a starting point. We branch off from there into community because I firmly believe that we are always called to community. That Acts 2 chapter about holding everything in common and our mission in ministry coming through community. If you don't know Jesus for yourself as my ancestors would say, if you don't know that that you know that you know who Christ is, where's your grounding? What is happening in our local churches that we're not ensuring that people have met Christ? What's happening that people can't articulate a relationship with Christ over against a cat, a dog, or a beautiful grandchild?
Bishop Ortiz: My perspective, I come from the Pentecostal Church, right? When I was growing up, I was in church six days a week. We had prayer night, youth night, adult night, women night, men's night. We were in community pretty much 24/7, which was extremely formative, not only as community, but I didn't have a choice but to get to know Jesus or for Jesus to come to me on a consistent basis. The structures that we have and the ways that we function today is that we have worship on Sunday for an hour. Together for an hour, the sermon is relatively between 10 and 12 minutes. People feel very much comforted by that hour. They're sent. There's a check, "Oh, we did church on Sunday, and I'll see you next week," right?
Bishop Easterling: Right.
Bishop Ortiz: The reality is that there's nothing that we do in life for an hour a week that is sustainable. We can't eat for one hour a week. We can't exercise for one hour a week and see a difference. It's not enough time because we're competing with society and we're competing with soccer and we're competing with all the extracurriculars and all the demands of our society for the sake of success or for the sake of whatever it may be.
We don't necessarily give Christ a priority in our lives or the time to get to know Him, right? To build a relationship, you need time, right? I think that that's one element. It's not everything, but I think there is something to do with the expectations of our worship space, and that there's something in our minds that says that our worship is limited to Sunday morning for an hour and hasn't expanded beyond that, beyond that space.
Also, at least in our tradition, we had the large and small catechism. The expectation was that we would go to church on Sunday for the Eucharist and for the Word. Then the rest of the week, you are engaging your discipleship around the table with your family, right? The Christian formation wasn't the church's responsibility. It was the family's responsibility. All of that has shifted quite significantly. At this point, I remember. I had a choice when I was a kid whether to do soccer or some kind of sport or go to church. I rather go to church and be part of the liturgical dance team.
Bishop Easterling: Amen.
Bishop Ortiz: Today, that's not even a debate, right?
Bishop Easterling: Right. In many homes, it's not. You talk about, again, that formation. I had the privilege of preaching at Chautauqua this summer. In one of the sermons, I was quoting from a book called Becoming Friends. It talked about how even our worship has become entertainment because we are such a consumerist society and we're accustomed to being entertained. The moment we don't like something, we can swipe up or swipe left. We can change the channel. We rid ourselves of anything we don't like.
Unfortunately, it tells us that Sunday morning worship has capitulated to that as well. Rather than becoming a place where we're challenged, where we're stretched, where we're forced to be cloaked in humility, and get to know Christ and God for who they are that, again, sermons are safe. Sermons are safe and are entertaining. I think, for me, that's part of why we've lost that connectivity. Bishop Budde, I don't know if this resonates with anything you've experienced.
Bishop Budde: I'm really taking in what both of you have said. I feel the responsibility of seeking out, in the culture we live in now, ways to embody and communicate the love of God in Christ and recognizing that much of what we've inherited does not speak to the wider society. The people for whom it does speak, it speaks very powerfully. I'm not an iconoclast. I'm not just trying to crash things down, but I am deeply curious about what is speaking and what does resonate and where Christ is in that.
I try really hard in my better days. I'm not always at my best, but I try really hard to be open to whatever that might be and also to learn from the parts of the Christian community writ large that are better at this than we are in the Episcopal Church and just pay attention. I just did a whole study this summer on really, what are the offerings that other churches, other denominations, traditions are offering that seem to be really proving helpful in encouraging people on a path of relationship with Christ. Just learn and try and not because-- like as you were saying though, if we don't start there, I really want to live into that difficult space for as best I can to learn what I can and to learn from people who are experiencing fruitfulness. That's what I would say.
Bishop Easterling: As we're all trying to do this, understanding that we're serving in contexts that are very diverse, I know that from the outside looking in at one of the conferences I lead, I had the impression that it was of one mind about being very open and inclusive about being welcoming to all people. I got here and found out, that was not the case.
I think, again, even some of the literature that's been published recently about the dichotomy between sometimes clergy and those in the pew, those who are clergy often are more progressive than those that they're leading in the pew. How are you leading and trying to seek unity across the diversity of your mission fields? For me, I'm always seeking ways to do that that don't diminish anybody because I don't know about you, but I want everybody at the table. We are not the beloved community of God if we're all identifying as progressive or if we're all traditionalists. How do we lead and yet lift unity across that kind of diversity?
Bishop Ortiz: I think about this all the time because my synod covers some of Maryland, some of Virginia, and D.C. proper. One of the things that I've had to believe time and time again, realize, talk about renewing my mind, is that I'm not just called to those who agree with me. I'm called to everyone. The same is true of everyone. Everyone is called to everyone, not just to those who agree with them or look like them or have the same experiences.
I think what is true for everyone is that we need to be told the truth and we need to tell the truth. I think that's been a really difficult thing in our context, in our season, in this time to tell the truth, and not only tell the truth but tell the whole story. I say that to say there are times and seasons I do this myself, where I lean heavy on the law and everything that's going wrong with the church, with the world, with life. It's just really, really heavy. This is the worst, but that's not the whole story.
Bishop Easterling: Amen.
Bishop Ortiz: There's so much more life and beauty and excitement and joy that is happening all at the same time. Then I encounter seasons. It's not usually me. It's other people who are very, very high on the really awesome things that are happening and this is what we're doing. "I feel so good about myself and I'm amazing and this is an amazing church and amazing world. Oh, my God," all these things.
That's not the whole truth. That's not the whole story. I think my call and the hardest work that I've had to do as a leader is to tell the truth and tell the whole story, especially when we're leaning one way or the other. For the sake of life itself, for the sake of justice, for the sake of the gospel, we need to tell the truth. I don't lean on telling the truth, especially hard truths, like a bully. I don't think bullies are effective.
Bishop Easterling: Right. That's right.
Bishop Ortiz: It doesn't work and it's not faithful, right?
Bishop Easterling: Right.
Bishop Ortiz: If you tell the truth in a way that is invitational like, "Did you know this? Had you considered this?" so that, as Bishop Budde was saying, this curiosity piece, how do we turn judgments into curiosity?
Bishop Easterling: Because it's always better, right?
Bishop Ortiz: Yes, because we're defensive. We're always like, "Wait. If you come at me, I already know what I'm going to say." Well, that's not where we're at. We're going to turn judgment into curiosity even with the question, "What's going on here and why are we here? Why is this happening? How might we be complicit in this reality?" When I say "we," I mean we, even me.
Bishop Easterling: You mean we. That's right, that's right. Yes, tell the truth. Another one of my euphemisms. Those who work with me would tell you, I always say, "Tell the whole truth." Tell the whole truth and we have to tell it in love. In that love, the love of God, and the love of Jesus Christ, if we're convicted by it, for me, that is the unifying element, and the ground at the foot of the cross is leveled. I don't care who we are, we're convicted by that and called to something beyond ourselves that is supposed to be for the good of the body. Not just for the good of LaTrelle or those that LaTrelle likes, but it's for the good of everybody, which means, guess what? Sometimes LaTrelle's not going to get what she wants-
Bishop Ortiz: That's right.
Bishop Easterling: -or what she'd even hoped for, but it's about being able to think beyond my own desires, needs, wants to the community. Bishop Budde, I'm going to let you jump in here because we've only got about six minutes left, believe it or not, and I want us to touch on an important topic before we have to conclude.
Bishop Budde: I'll just briefly say that one of the things that -- Two things. One, genuine interest in another human being and who they are and what their lives are like go a long way in bridging other differences and spending time with people and letting them know that you care, that you really, really care, and that you believe that God cares and that there is, in fact, something greater that unites us, whatever it is that might be dividing us.
Now, that said, in a time like ours, there's also a need for clarity. Someone said to me very early in my episcopate that I'm serving no one if I pretend not to be clear about something I am, in fact, clear about for the sake of relationship. If I'm actually clear about something, I'm not going to patronize you by pretending I'm not so that we can stay in relationship. I'm going to be clear, and yet also open to you as a person whose clarity might be in very different directions.
Bishop Easterling: Right, I like that. I'm not going to pretend to be--
Bishop Budde: Me too. The other thing is if I'm not clear about something, I'm not going to pretend that I am. I'm going to live in that ambiguity with you. That was very helpful in the early days of our conversations about the presence of LGBTQ+ persons in the church and my position as I was coming into this diocese. I'll debate a lot of things with you, but that's not what I'm going to debate with you.
Bishop Easterling: Amen. I remember reading it and hearing of you taking that stand. That has encouraged me to be able to stand firm in my belief that all people are beloved of God and called of God as you said, but also have enough convicted humility to still be able to be in conversation and to love those who don't share that. I want to make sure we have some time before we conclude to talk about what it's like to be women in ministry even as there's still some who resist that understanding.
Not too long ago, I got a letter from a gentleman in one of the churches that I had been invited to come preaching. He took it upon himself to remind me that women were not supposed to be in leadership [laughs] over men in the church. Now, mind you, this denomination has been ordaining women for over 50 years as two of our denominations have. One is on the precipice of that. Do you still expend any time or energy defending your call to consecration and what word of encouragement would you give for some women who are wrestling with call?
Bishop Ortiz: Do I still wrestle with that? There is some wrestling. I'm also the first woman to be called as bishop in our synod-
Bishop Easterling: Oh, I didn't know that. Thank you.
Bishop Ortiz: -and happened to be a woman of color, Latina, and happened not to be cradle Lutheran. I had a whole lot of things come against me. Yet, there's this term that I've heard a lot in this culture, in white culture, is that you have really big shoes to fill, right? That never sat well with me, especially when it came to ministry, because God didn't call me to fill someone else's shoes. God called me to walk in mine, right? When people try to compare me or ask me, "Why don't you do things like your predecessor?" well, because God called this person with this skin and this gender and this humanity to serve in this role.
It's more about people aren't so brave and so bold have yet to come to me and say, "Well, you shouldn't be," but there is something that is very like, "Well, we should do things like before." Well, could it be that we're not called to compare our ministries or the ways in which our call takes on life to another human being, whether they're male, female, whoever they may be, but that God called us in our skin.
Bishop Easterling: Absolutely.
Bishop Ortiz: My skin happens to be brown and female. What does it mean for me as a woman? What does it mean for anyone who's listening in your skin for you to show up because you have been the one that's been called for such a time as this?
Bishop Easterling: Amen.
Bishop Ortiz: Not the fire or the one next to us, but you.
Bishop Easterling: Bishop Budde, thank you. Thank you, Bishop Ortiz.
Bishop Budde: Very well said. Thank you. Personally, no, I don't struggle anymore with the validity of the call. I think, generationally speaking, I'm in my 60s. Generationally, I see very different kinds of questions that women are asking coming into the ordained life. I feel that the women coming up behind me are asking their own questions about gender and vocation. I want to listen to them and to honor them because I feel like there's just some really interesting conversations happening around role and gender identity, sexuality, all of those things.
I was blessed to have a pretty easy go of it in terms of my own ordination because of the struggles of other women. I'm trying to do my part for others to make sure that others have a door open. I'm also seeing, and this is something that you were getting at earlier, Leila, that people are redefining the role. I'm seeing that. Sometimes it's a struggle for me and I have to listen and learn and grow.
Bishop Easterling: Right. Well, for me, I think it's us just, again, being who we are, showing up in the places and spaces that God has given us the opportunity to do so. I think that is an encouragement and gives hope to those who are struggling and wrestling with their call. I also often remind people. Humanity may be confused, God is not. If God is calling you, then lean in, mean it.
My sisters, I can't believe that we've come to the end of our time together. Just being in conversation with you gives me hope. I'm sure it will give hope to those who listen to this podcast. Again, I will be forever grateful that I began my episcopal leadership, having the privilege to serve with two phenomenal women such as you. Thank you for this opportunity to be in conversation. I'm sure it won't be our last. I'm sure we'll see each other in those streets again. Again, thank you so very much.
Bishop Budde: Thank you.
Bishop Ortiz: Thank you.
Bishop Budde: A great joy. Thank you for your ministry.
Bishop Easterling: Thank you.
 

Bishop Easterling: Beloved of God, welcome to another exciting edition of Thursdays at the Table, the place where we sit down and get to some of the deepest things that we know. I am so honored today that Father Gregory Joseph Boyle, an American Catholic priest of the Jesuit Order, is with us today. He is the founder and director of Homeboy Industries, the world's largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program, and the former pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Los Angeles, California.
Father Boyle has won numerous awards, including the Civic Medal of Honor from the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the California Peace Prize granted by the California Wellness Foundation. One that I find very interesting, he was named the 2007 Humanitarian of the Year by Bon Appétit magazine, and he was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in December of 2011. His published works include Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion; Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship, and his most recent publication, The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness. Father Boyle, welcome to Thursdays at the Table.
Father Gregory Boyle: Happy and honored to be with you.
Bishop Easterling: Well, thank you so much. The honor is truly mine. Now, for those who aren't familiar with the initials SJ, help orient us to what that means in terms of the way that you are situated in Catholicism.
Father Boyle: Well, I'm a Jesuit. SJ stands for Society of Jesus or Saint Ignatius of Loyola. The founder called it la Compañía de Jesús. In the 1540s, somewhere in there, was born this troop of men who wanted to reimagine a way of living as though the truth were true and stay close to the marrow of the Gospel. It was a reaction to a lot of what was going on in the church, as were the Franciscans and the Dominicans, and then the Jesuits, which is now the largest religious order in the Roman Catholic Church.
Bishop Easterling: Indeed. Thank you. You are among several of those that I revere and follow in Catholicism. Father Richard Rohr is another. I'm drawn to the wisdom, but also the authenticity of the witness that both of you exhibit and offer to the world. Thank you for that.
Father Boyle: Sure.
Bishop Easterling: When did you know that you were called into intentional set-apart ministry?
Father Boyle: Well, I was educated by the Jesuits, so I knew them. My uncle was a Jesuit. We always had Jesuits over for dinner at my parents' house and when I was growing up at my grandparents' house. It was part of the air we breathed. I always found them quite prophetic and fearless and hilarious and joyful. The combination of all those things was really attractive to me. It was like, "I'll have what they're having." That was 51 years ago that I entered the Jesuits. When you stay, you start to discover and rediscover charisms and ways of proceeding that the Jesuits embrace that, to this day, I still find myself thrilled by.
Bishop Easterling: Your story is similar to exactly what we are trying to demonstrate through Thursdays at the Table, that some of the most transformative and informing conversations that we have are those that take place at our kitchen table. That's, again, where it sounds like you were introduced. I love the way that you talk about there was joy, there was laughter. Folks don't always think about those who were in ministry as being full of laughter and joy, but it sounds like those at your dinner table exhibited that or exuded that.
Father Boyle: Yes, I think part of the measure of true and authentic discipleship, in general, is fearlessness and joy. The counter position to that, of course, is sadness and fear. Those are things you can always sniff out. You go, who is leading us? Are they fearless? Are they joyful? Then that just means that they have been able to connect to the deepest part of what our God of love is calling us to do and to be in the world. That will always issue in fearlessness and joy. If we're trembling, and we're behind locked doors, as the disciples were at that moment when Jesus somehow gets into the room --
It's funny how much that over the years, we have disparaged Thomas because he doubted, but the truth is he wasn't in that room. That's why I always liked him because he was out in the world. He wasn't trembling. He knew as much as everybody else knew, and he wasn't frightened. He, I'm going to presume, was out in the world engaged. That's why he missed out on Jesus showing up that first time. For me, it's always been a way to check in and to see if there's authenticity in how you move in kinship in the world. Those are two ways that I think are telling.
Bishop Easterling: I love that. One of the things I lament is that in the canonical books of the Bible that we have, we don't get to experience the fullness of who Christ was. I refuse to believe that Christ was somber, always so serious. I just refuse to believe that. We get a hint of it if you read some of the non-canonical books. I wish that we had a fuller understanding of how Christ was in more of his experience of a human being. Perhaps it would give us more freedom to feel like in church, in worship, as people of faith, we didn't always have to be so serious.
Father Boyle: There are more layers to that, even. I think that's such a good point because it's about being fully human, and it's about being playful, and it's about laughing, and it's about delighting. All these things that otherwise we've been saddled with and stuck with this notion that the harder thing is the better thing. No, the harder thing is just the harder thing. We think it has to be exhaustive and exhausting and arduous and difficult. Yet, it's all about joy, really.
It's not occasional joy. It's really all about joy. How do you acknowledge the beloved who is in every moment? Recognizing that we're only saved in the present moment anyway, so you might as well be anchored there delighting in the person who is in front of you. I agree with you. I think there's a richer fullness that hasn't been really afforded us by the tradition, and how over the years we just think Jesus is sour sometimes, and more serious than we are.
Bishop Easterling: It's a phrase that we started using a couple of years ago, MMFA, “Make Ministry Fun Again,” and this reminds me of that. We're just going to have to take that back. We're going to have to take that aspect that I know we can be confident in -- that was a part of who Christ was. We're going to just take that back and live into it more in ministry. Your first assignment carried you abroad. Tell us where you were and tell us how that informed and shaped your ministry, and then who you became as you continued to live out this sacred life.
Father Boyle: I was ordained in 1984. I'm not sure I would call it my first assignment, but before I came back to, I needed to do another year of theology, I asked, "Could I just go and take a break from studies and then immerse myself in a Spanish-speaking place?" I went to Bolivia. I knew some Spanish, but not enough to really do ministry. Then I ended up attaching myself to these two communities that hadn't had a priest in many, many years.
This was in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and in the hills with the Quechua Indians. It just turned my life inside out. In those days, Bolivia was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, more poor than Haiti. There was something about walking with folks in such a dire situation, and yet they were able to always honor a sense of profound community, and we're in this together. People were all locked-arms. I found it exhilarating.
Not in a way that romanticizes people's poverty, but it was a way of their faith, their dedication to each other, their kindness in the face of just the most arduous kind of living. It turned me inside out enough that I was supposed to go to Santa Clara University to be the campus minister. I begged my provincial, my superior, "Please don't send me there. Send me to the poorest place we have where I could use Spanish," and that was Dolores Mission.
Bishop Easterling: All right. I love that. You say it turned you inside out. What perspective, if any, did it give you on the way that faith was being lived out in the United States?
Father Boyle: It's odd. When you go to a third-world country, and then you're propelled back to a first-world country, it creates something that's quite dispiriting. You have something near an abhorrence for how we live in the first world. At least, initially, that's how you feel. You feel like there's something wrong in this hyper-consumeristic modality.
Anyway, pretty soon, you just want to roll up your sleeves and walk with the folks on the margins, and the easily despised, and the demonized, and the disposable. You want to stand at the margin so that they won’t get erased. Then, that's enough. Rather than shaking your fist and denouncing all sorts of other things, you just want to simply walk with people, which in the end is more compelling and actually more productive.
Bishop Easterling: Absolutely. When you were talking about, again, that “turning you inside out,” and you said, "Please don't send me there, send me to the people on the margins," you made me think about the song by Gregory Porter, Take Me to the Alley. Take me to the afflicted ones. In fact, that is where we are far more likely to encounter Christ than in some of our beautiful, ornate, stained-glass worship centers, places of worship. You took me right to that song. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it or not.
Father Boyle: No, but I will be now.
Bishop Easterling: Please, you must listen to it. It is really phenomenal. It's phenomenal. Again, in this Dolores, and am I pronouncing that right, Dolores Mission?
Father Boyle: Yes.
Bishop Easterling: Okay. This is where the ministry that I think you are now world renowned for, Homeboys Ministry, began. It makes me think about, there's that phrase, “not in my backyard,” a term associated with those who don't want programs geared toward the marginalized in their community, even if they espouse being a follower of Christ. From what I've read about how Dolores Mission was situated, the gang activity was literally already in your backyard. Did you incur any opposition when you discerned that you needed to be in ministry with these individuals who were involved in the gangs?
Father Boyle: Again, I was pastor of the poorest parish in the cities from '86 to '92. The first two years of being pastor there, the issues were all around immigration, and so there were so many undocumented in my parish. We had family separation. We had INS raids of where people worked. We had the Immigration Reform and Control Act. You had amnesty. You had a lot of immigration-related things. Then in '88, I was two years in, that's when I buried my first young person killed because of gang violence.
It was almost overnight that the gang reality became so intense. It was the beginning of the decade of death, '88 to '98, and '92 was the highest moment of gang-related to homicides. I was burying eight parishioners at one point in a three-week period, who had been gang members, who had been gunned down. In those days, we had eight gangs at war with each other just in this tiny geographic area, which was my parish, these two housing projects.
The LAPD called my parish the place of the highest concentration of gang activity in all of Los Angeles. Again, it wasn't so much a choosing to I think I'll work with gang members. It was mainly a response from a parish, do we ignore this, do we just have church on Sunday, or again, do we roll up our sleeves as opposed to burying our heads? That's what we did. We started a school, and we started a jobs program, and then we started social enterprises. Then we were off and running. Beyond the time that I was pastor, Homeboy was born in '88, and now we're 35 years at it.
Bishop Easterling: You say that it wasn't a matter of should we work with gangs. It was not ignoring what was going on right there, again, literally at your front and back door. You must be aware of how many congregations absolutely do ignore what's going on in their community and have many persons drive in too worship and then drive out again. What's actually taking place around the house of worship may or may not be a part of their everyday lives. You did something. It may not have felt so at the time, but it actually was profound and unique in the life of many faith communities.
Father Boyle: I didn't answer the first part of your question earlier, which is opposition. We've been around for 35 years, but the first 10 years were death threats, bomb threats, and hate mail, but never from gang members. Never, because we were always a sign and symbol of an exit ramp and a sign of hope always to gang members. We got these hate letters from law enforcement mainly, oddly anonymous LAPD or sheriffs, and they would just say, "We hate you. You're part of the problem. You're not part of the solution." It was kind of extraordinary.
Again, I grew up in LA in a privileged area where when the police arrived, you breathed a sigh of relief. They got the cat out of the tree. When I came to Boyle Heights, wow, I was astounded at how law enforcement treated our people. In fact, naively I went to the captain of our local station to say, "Hey, I'm not sure you know this, but they're taking gang members to the factories behind the projects, and they're beating them down for purposes of intimidation or interrogation and charging them with nothing. I thought maybe you might want to know that."
Well, trust me, he didn't want to know that. Then they ended up shooting the messenger. That was all part of the air we were breathing in the very first 10 years. I would write an op-ed piece about kids joining gangs because it's about a lethal absence of hope. Let's infuse hope to kids for whom hope is foreign. Oh, I would get hate mail and death threats left on our answering machine. That was solid for 10 years or so until our Homeboy bakery burned to the ground.
Then suddenly the LA Times had an op-ed piece or an editorial that said, "Hey, this place doesn't belong to Father Greg Boyle. It belongs to Los Angeles." They got it in an instant. The City of Los Angeles has been carrying Homeboy Industries on their shoulders since then, but the first 10 years were -- It wasn't so much NIMBYism as you were referring to because we were that community. This was where it was happening, and it was indigenous.
Nowadays, gang members drive from Montebello to Boyle Heights, but they don't live in that community. When I was pastor, all the gang members lived exactly in my parish. Now they're more of a commuter reality.
Bishop Easterling: For those who are involved in the gangs, that's interesting. I want to stop you for a moment, and I want to come back to something you said because there are going to be some who hear this and say, "Oh, that cannot be true." That there were those employed by a law enforcement agency, who were first of all crafting, sending hate mail to you, and then involved in this kind of bullying, beating, criminal activity against those who were identified as gang members.
There's this tension in our society right now that when many look at our men and women in blue, they see nothing except individuals who are always of the highest ethical order, highest moral order, and if they do anything outside of that, it is only in response to something that someone who's deemed a criminal has initiated, but you are telling me that this activity was done intentionally. Can you just unpack that a little more?
Father Boyle: Well, I do want to emphasize that that was 30 years ago.
Bishop Easterling: Of course.
Father Boyle: All pre-Rodney King. That's not to say that things haven't changed. They have.
Bishop Easterling: Sure.
Father Boyle: Do I think an LAPD would take a gang member to the factories behind the projects now and beat them down? No, I don’t. I don't think that would happen. Just because the culture has changed enough, at least at the highest levels, where there's no tolerance for that kind of thing. That wasn't the case 35, 30 years ago. It has changed, but it still hasn't changed enough because there's a notion, for example, there's the guy who escaped the jail in Pennsylvania and was on the run, somebody who had been convicted of murder, was on the run for 12 days.
They capture him, and the sheriff announces, "Our nightmare is finally over and the good guys won." Well, you could draw a straight line from that statement, and absolutely everything we would like to change in law enforcement and all the things, the coloring outside the lines that happen. Because if we think there's such a thing as good people and bad people, well, then why are we surprised that there are excessive uses of violence, for example? Because after all, they're just bad guys, or they've established themselves as bad guys because they ran, they talked back, they didn't fully cooperate.
Again, for 40 years I've walked with gang members, and I've never once met a bad person. Never. I've met wounded people, broken people, traumatized people, despondent people, deeply ill people, but I've never once met a bad person. I've never met for sure an evil person. I've never met one. I'm 70, so maybe I've got a few more years and maybe I'll meet somebody, but I never have.
Naming things correctly will really help us. I love Jesus, but he saw the guy having seizures and thought he was possessed by a demon. He wasn't. He had epilepsy, and that doesn't change how I see Jesus, of course, but it does help us to name things correctly. Mike Pence, last night on the [presidential candidate] debate, said the answer to mass shootings is to expedite executions.
He just doesn't understand what it's about. It's about guns and mental illness. You roll up your sleeves, and you try to -- The day may come when we stop punishing a wound, and we seek to heal it. The minute we decide to do that, watch what happens. We will try to walk each other home to wellness. None of us are well until all of us are well.
Bishop Easterling: Until all of us are well, absolutely.
Father Boyle: Because these horrific things happen, it's -- We're all unshakably good, and we all belong to each other, and there are no exceptions. Now we can really help people who are really stuck in despair or an illness that they never chose, it chose them. The byproduct of that effort will be fewer to no mass shootings, along with being sensible about guns.
Bishop Easterling: In your phrasing and in what you've just said, you take me right back to the kitchen table that I grew up in. My mother, she may not have phrased it just the way you did in terms of naming things correctly, but my mother would cringe and sometimes actually vocally respond when she heard people say, "Well, that child is bad. That's a bad child."
Every time that happened, I could look at my mother and see a visceral reaction. My mother had been an educator in the first part of her working life. She just recoiled at anybody naming a child as bad. She said, "There are no bad children, but if you say that to someone enough, then they will begin to live into the way that you have identified them." Again, you take me right back to the kitchen table that I grew up in, or grew up sitting at, rather.
Father Boyle: That's exactly right. That was the thing I used to always hear. I had a probation officer say, "Don't even try with that guy, Louie. He's just pure evil." You just go, "Wow." He ended up working for me, and every year we had a thing called the Homeboy Hero. We've been doing that for 25 years at our big dinner. He was the Homeboy hero one year, and the father of two beautiful autistic sons. He's so tender with them. You just go, "I don't know where people see that way where they see evil, where there's only goodness."
There's always goodness. People don't exactly see it. Complex trauma will keep you from seeing your unshakable goodness. Until you can hold the mirror up and say, "Here's who you are. You're exactly what God had in mind when God made you," and then you watch people become that truth, inhabit that truth.
Bishop Easterling: That's exactly right.
Father Boyle: … If you tell a kid he is bad enough, he'll start to believe that he is.
Bishop Easterling: Exactly, and live into it. I also love the fact that when you were talking about the individuals who lived in the community of the Dolores Mission, you said, "Our people," when you were talking again about the way that they were being treated by some of the law enforcement. "Our people," that deep identity with those who were in the community rather than seeing yourself as separate from, better than, over against, you identify as our people. What do you think that that does? What does that open up in terms of a relationship or potential for relationship?
Father Boyle: I think when you were asking me about Bolivia, and it's been so many years, but when I look back, you have nothing to bring to them especially when your language is so elementary school level. Then it's not about me bringing anything. I had a gang member in Houston after a talk I gave, and he was working with gang members now, and he pleaded with me.
He said, "How do you reach them?" Meaning gang members. I found myself telling him, "Well, for starters, stop trying to reach them. Can you be reached by them? Can you allow your heart to be altered?" If you go to the margins to make a difference, then it's about you, and it can't be, but if you go to the margins to be made different by the people there, then it's about us, and it's exquisitely mutual. I learned that a long time ago.
I don't think I've ever transformed a life in my life, but I know that transformation happens at Homeboy Industries for people, that it's the whole place and the whole culture and the whole everybody giving a dose of kindness and tenderness. I know that has transformed people, and I know that my life has been changed, but see that feels passive, but it isn't. It's the real deal. How do you allow your heart to be altered in such a way that everybody in this mutuality, everybody inhabits their own dignity and nobility together?
It's not something as a white savior that I impose in part, that I give. I've never felt that. I think Bolivia probably reminded me of how humility is so essential that I'm not bringing anything to the table, but I'm going to go to the table and to receive what's on it, speaking of kitchen table, and you're going to partake of it, and you're going to recognize the table as sumptuous, that this is plenty. I'm not going to go to the table and disparage what's on it here. Here, let me bring a casserole I made.
You can do that as well, but it's like you don't disparage the table, and you really don't fall in love with what you bring to the table … of receiving from what is on the table and from who's sitting around it. That is a profoundly Christian thing. It's not about, “let's go convert people.” You're trying to be in the world who God is: compassionate, loving, and kind. I think that's how you do it with great humility, where you allow yourself to be made different by folks who are on the margins.
Bishop Easterling: Well, I don't know if you realized at a particular moment a huge smile came over my face, and I leaned in to you because you touched on something that I was going to ask you about. Have you been accused of being this white savior who's coming in on a horse to save those individuals, most of whom I presume are people of color? Because there's a lot of rejection of that kind of assistance, that kind of, again, we're here to do something for you because, again, we're over against, but you touched on it yourself. You said, "I'm not a white savior."
You don't see yourself that way and even the authenticity with which you speak, and again, this our language, we're in this together. I'm not doing transforming. I'm perhaps more transformed than any transformation I've ever made possible. I think you've already answered my question in how you have perhaps been able to overcome that accusation and just in living out your ministry and who you are as a follower of God through Jesus Christ, not embodying that white savior mentality.
Father Boyle: No, I presume it's somewhere in there, in people's thinking, although people are always too polite to raise that, I suppose. I was against white saviorism before it became a thing. I'm aware of it. It's kind of being in a darkened, I wrote about this once, being in a darkened room and somebody has a flashlight aimed at the light switch. I will admit in my own near-burnout early years, I was trying to turn on that light switch on for gang members. Then you realize, no, you can't do that.
Everybody owns a flashlight, and everybody knows where to aim it. Then you have to be content with owning a flashlight and aiming it at the light switch. People will approach the light switch or not. It's a little bit like having a child who is an addict. If a mother of an addict could check herself into rehab for her kid, trust me, she would. That's not how it works. The kid actually has to go to the rehab.
All you can do is point to the door marked recovery and joy and life. “I hope, my child, I hope you walk through that door.” That's all you can do. You may close other doors. Say, "You can't live here until you walk through that door marked recovery." That's clear and loving. It's like that. You want people to inhabit the truth of who they are, where they discover their true selves in loving, where they know that loving is their home. They'll never be homesick if they know that.
You want folks to learn to love and let love be the only thing that they embrace, that they love being loving. When we say God is love or God is loving, we're not really saying how God is. We're saying where God is. God is in the loving. Once you discover that, then that's when the transformation happens. Because everybody in a culture, in a community, or as the great John Lewis said, we all live in the same house.
It wasn't aspirational. It wasn't one day we might all live in the same house. It was a declarative statement. We all live in the same house. He didn't make distinctions. Some people live in the basement. No. We all live in the same house. Once you establish, especially the early Christian notion of this, where it's the soul of God. In our case, a place that's safe where people can feel seen, and then they can feel cherished, that's the transformation. That no one person is the agent of -- it's the culture, it's the community.
It's this place of cherished belonging where everybody feels united, and we all move together in kinship. It doesn't allow for saviors, white, or otherwise. Everybody, obviously, which is a whole other issue in terms of our own society, that all the folks who work at Homeboy Industries are people of color and have all been to prison. I'm heartened that 70 percent of our leadership, everybody who runs the place, have come through the program now. They have a kind of ownership. The only minority there are old white guys like me.
Bishop Easterling: Again, I love this image that you paint, again expounding upon John Lewis's statement that we all live in the same house. If that is how all of us in faith communities really thought of it. … I think back to an episode that happened when I was in seminary. We were sitting in chapel and a homeless person walked in and walked up and sat on the front pew and people were repulsed. It was clear that the individual was really not welcome there, and I think that kind of thing plays itself out in all kinds of ways in our faith community. Why have we gotten so far away from this notion of all being created in the image and likeness of God, all being in the same house? I feel like we need to go to a spiritual rehab to reclaim this identity of all being of one and one.
Father Boyle: You're absolutely right. The early Christian community, they would greet each other with a big old wet kiss. Part of the reason they did it was because you only did that to your blood relatives. Then they wanted to indicate and signal, no, everybody belongs. It was their way of taking seriously what Jesus took seriously, which are four things: inclusion, non-violence, unconditional love and kindness, and compassionate acceptance.
We need to return to this, I would say, to this mystical sense. We've forgotten mysticism, and then we've just become frightened and defensive and who is in and who is out and who will be saved and who won't be. Yikes, what could be further from the God of love? My friend, Mirabai Starr, who I recommend, she's a mystic and translates mystics. She says once you claim the God of love, you fire all the other gods. It's important I think because I think firing other gods is our daily task.
It's how to keep ourselves close to the marrow of the Gospel. If we lose sight of that, then the church becomes the hall monitor, trying to keep people in line or- - The tribalism that's so pronounced in our country at the moment, I think the church needs to make amends for the ways that it's contributed to this great divide and division, and it's too bad.
Bishop Easterling: Mirabai Starr, who is a contemporary, again, of Father Richard Rohr that I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, and one of the participants in the Center for Action and Contemplation. Again, you wouldn't know this, but folks in this conference know, again, I adore Father, Richard Rohr and actually spend time in New Mexico and at that center. Again, I very much appreciate Mirabai Starr and all of our mystics.
I think you're right. That's something that we've left out of our spirituality. We've left that out of the education that we offer in our churches, and I think we're the poorer for it.
Father Boyle: Yes, absolutely. Karl Rahner, a theologian, used to say that Christians of the future will be mystics, or they won't be Christians. I think he is absolutely right. I really think it's the more we can retrieve-- Lately, I've been immersed in mystics. Jim Finley and turning to the mystics, I recommend him. He's also part of Richard Rohr and Mirabai Starr gang. It's really important, I think, because you reach back, and you find these people who were at odds, and they were at odds with the church because they felt that the church wasn't anchored enough in love.
That's the whole point of the mystical quest. The mystical quest is never, or even the moral quest, has never kept us moral. It's just kept us from each other, but the mystical quest is something that unifies us, not just with the God of love, but with each other, which is God's dream come true.
Bishop Easterling: Absolutely. You talked about something else. You talked about this lethal absence of hope. I was hoping for a little while we could talk about how our faith communities could become integral in breaking down this recidivism rate that we see individuals find themselves in activity that perhaps gets them arrested, and then some go to jail, some go to prison, they come out, and there just seems to be this cycle where before you know it, they're right back in.
How do we break this lethal absence of hope? What can those of us, again, who claim to want to follow the way of Jesus Christ, how can we be living in a way that helps to break this recidivism and speaks to this lethal absence of hope?
Father Boyle: Well, I think we disqualify ourselves so much. We just say we think that there's no way that you can be beneficially present to somebody who's a returning citizen, for example, and yet, if anybody who's the proud owner of a pulse can show up and hold the mirror up and return people to themselves and delight in people and pay attention and be astonished by the goodness, and then to reflect that back to them.
Anybody can do that, and because anybody can do that, everybody should. There's exciting movements out there. There's the one parish, one prisoner started in the Pacific Northwest. It's a way of getting parishes to connect to folks who will be returned to their community while they're locked up, and communicating with them, and then receiving them when they come out and welcoming them to the community.
There are lots of ways to do it. It has to do with intentionality, but we're invited to the margins. You can identify the poor, the powerless, the voiceless, the easily despised, the readily left out. How do we invite parishes to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop, and stand with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away?
What this does, for example, at Dolores Mission Church since 1987, every night undocumented homeless, and now not so much always undocumented, but it was in the early days, were allowed to sleep in the church. Thousands and thousands since 1987 have received resources and meals and a warm, safe place to sleep every night. Now, this is the poorest parish in Los Angeles that does this every night, seven nights a week.
What it's done for the church, the parish, it's hard to count it. It is just so powerful how it's led parishioners to feel like it looks like to live as though the truth were true. They never feel like there's some kind of disembodied church where people gather on Sundays. They feel like this is exactly what the early Christian community experienced. Even though they're poor, and they only speak Spanish, and the parishioners, a great many of them are not formally educated, they know that not with a sense of pride, still with a humble sense that this is a privilege to serve these folks and to be beneficially present. They feel like, "Yes, this is what church should look like."
Bishop Easterling: Again, coming back to the way that we name things, you began responding to my question with the phrase returning citizen. I've never heard anyone say it that way. I've heard folks say criminals recently released, parolee, those kinds of things. Returning citizen, what a different image that evokes, just in hearing that phrase, returning citizen. It reminds us that they are still citizens of this great nation and have a right to life and life abundant. Is that a phrase that is used commonly with those in the ministry of Homeboy?
Father Boyle: Yes. It's out there now. It's “returning citizen.” I don't know. Citizens sometimes I have a hard time with because sometimes people aren't citizens, but returning community members, they're returning to us. They've served their time, paid their dues, and they should not be asked to pay any more of their dues because they've already paid it. If people don't hire them, or don't rent apartments to them, or don't allow them to vote, this is wrong.
The church is responsible in a large part because we think prisons are where bad people go. The church backed this sin horse many, many centuries ago. It's bad. They could have backed another horse. Then it all becomes indictment instead of invitation. I think Jesus was only about invitation. He was always inviting people to life in fullness and abundance. My joy plus your joy complete.
We could have backed that horse, but the sin horse was worked. It kept people afraid. If I don't go to heaven, I can't miss church on Sunday, I can't miss mass because that's a mortal sin or whatever. This is maybe more Catholic than anything else. Again, did it work? Yes. It worked for me. It worked on a lot of people. Did it help? Not even a little bit. It didn't help even a little bit. The church could have embraced the thing that helped, but it didn't. It embraced the thing that worked. Not everything that works helps, but everything that helps works.
Bishop Easterling: Well, ultimately.
Father Boyle: The more the church, people of faith and worshiping communities, the more we invite people to joy rather than indict people. I think the better. It's fuller. It's why people don't go to church because they go, "Why?" Again, I think the mystical approach has more fullness to it than the approach that just says, "Cut that out."
Bishop Easterling: You stop that. Just say no. [laughter] You spoke to it a little bit. We won't go there. We won't deal with just say no. You spoke to it a little bit, but I wonder if you could be a bit more intentional. Congregations that do want to have more of an outward facing ministry really do want to try and make a difference in their community, but they're genuinely afraid of that engagement. What would you say to them?
Father Boyle: Well, all fear is born from ignorance. You want to move with some intentionality beyond the ignorance. There are two controlling principles at Homeboy. One is everybody is unshakably good, no exceptions, and we belong to each other, no exceptions. Once you embrace those profoundly Christian notions, then it propels you outside of yourself in your own congregation. It allows you to, you go, "What am I afraid of?"
Again, all harm is created by people who aren't well. How do we do what Jesus did, which was nonstop healing? Levi, the tax collector, people were grumbling because he is eating with them. All people see is sin. Jesus only talks about health and illness and getting well. That's a signal to us that we need not be afraid of the bad guy because thank goodness, there are no bad guys.
Roll up our sleeves again and try to engage in the same healing as Jesus did, where we pay attention to people, we listen to people, and we cherish people, and then suddenly you watch them inhabit their own goodness, which they didn't really believe was there.
Bishop Easterling: You speak about that in Tattoos on the Heart, one of your books. You talk about, "Jesus says you are the light of the world." You say, "I like even more what Jesus doesn't say; he does not say one day. If you are more perfect and try hard, you'll be the light. He doesn't say if you play by the rules, cross your T's, and dot your I's, then maybe you'll become light. No, he says straight out, you are the light. It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it." That's beautiful. That's profound.
Father Boyle: He also doesn't say, "Hey, everybody, look at me. I am the light of the world." No. He doesn't say, "I am the light of the world." He says, "You are." That's also important in terms of Jesus, not just ourselves. Jesus is, and so is God, is always deflecting, is always, why are you looking at me? Come on now.
Bishop Easterling: That's right. Why do you call me good? There's only one that's good, that's exactly right, but that isn't how we teach Christ, though. That really isn't how we teach Christ. Again, I think we've turned it on its head, and we've confused who Christ is so much that our worship of Christ then becomes contorted, and the way that we then, in our emulation, in our living out of Christ is also I think contorted. You talk about no need to contort yourself to be anything other than you are because you are already that light.
Father Boyle: Then the Christ in me recognizes the Christ in you, and then you go out into the world, and you can see Jesus and you can be Jesus. That invitation gets simpler rather than more complex.
Bishop Easterling:  We're back to that in a good way. I had talked about this song, and I just want to leave us with these words again from Take Me to the Alley. “Take me to the alley. Take me to the afflicted ones. Take me to the lonely ones that somehow lost their way. Let them hear me say, I am your friend, come to my table, rest here in my garden. You will find a pardon.”
Thank you so much for the work you do, Father Boyle. I think that you are inviting people to the table where they know that they can find pardon, they can find the beauty of who they are, and you really are helping to transform our world. Thank you.
Father Boyle: Thank you. Privilege being with you.

This podcast is taken from a conversation Bishop Easterling had with the Rev. Jacqui Lewis during the Next Level Speaker Series in October 2022.

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: I'm so grateful to be able to sit here and talk with my sister, my colleague, this great woman of God, and go a bit deeper, again, in this wonderful book that she wrote. [Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World] She said she made herself vulnerable in this book. Vulnerability, as we know, helps us to more deeply grasp empathy for one another. It helps us to be able to see one another, that Ubuntu that you were talking about. It takes us on a journey. I thank you for your vulnerability. Your vulnerability is our strength.
Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: Thank you, Bishop.
Bishop: Our vulnerability is someone else's strength down the road. That's why we can't be afraid to tell our story. We can't be shamed into silence. We can't be told, "Oh, don't talk about that. People will then perceive you as weak." Know the fear, the silence is the weakness. The strength is in the sharing and the vulnerability, that others might find healing.
I was very intrigued by your sharing about when you were seven years old, I believe, and the Holy Communion was coming by, and your mother, as you said, was your first pastor, all of those things for you. The deep theologian that she was said to you that this body means that God loves you, this cup means that God will never leave you. Speak into that just a bit more, please.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Thank you for that. We were Presbyterian, I would say Baptisarian. Mom and Dad were Baptist, so we're Baptisarian. We ended up in the Presbyterian church because it was around the corner and my aunt played the piano. I did not have a theological understanding, but I did have a feeling, an understanding that the Baptist church that we had gone to was, high-spirited and joyful, and I wanted some of that, but I also had this feeling, which I would now call grace, but I didn't know what it was.
I had this feeling that there was space for me as a child in this Presbyterian church. That we could dance downstairs in the basement, that we could read Scripture. We learned both gospel music and also Broadway songs. That was the container. In that space, when your parents thought you were ready for Communion, you're ready for Communion. Mom and Dad were like, "She's ready."
I'm sitting on the pew, our pew, because in that church, that's our pew. I'm sitting next to Mom. Dad was a deacon. He was serving. The plates are gold with the red velvet. Everybody knows what time that is.
The cups are glass, they're little. When you're little, you like little things. The bread is that Hawaiian bread that we now put the dip in and it's all chopped up.
Here comes the bread, my dad passes it. I'm not first on the edge of the pew, but when it gets to me, my mother whispers, "Jack." she called me Jack. "This bread means God loves you." I'm like, "Wow, okay cool." Then the bread in my mouth -- Bishop, there was this explosion of that sticky, sweet honey. There was this sensual experience of the love, your mother's smell, Jergen's lotion.
Bishop: Take us back. Take us back.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: So you can smell your mom, her soft shoulder and her voice, your ear close to her lips, and the bread's sweet, and I am in love with God. I was so like Helen Keller learning how to read, that I thought, "What? Oh, my goodness, this is so great." Quite quickly behind it comes the tray, and your fingers are just a little awkward. I remember Mom helping me get it loose, but she let me get it, and I got it. She says, "Now this cup means God will never leave you." What? It's Welch's Grape Juice to my delight.
I didn't know what was going to be in that cup. Was it grape Kool-Aid? You know what I'm talking about. You know.
Bishop: What is it? We know it was Welch's Grape Juice
Rev. Dr. Lewis: You know what I'm saying? You all weren't trying to drink the wine. I said, "Is it Kool-Aid?" "No, it's grape juice." Whoa. My mouth is puckery, my tongue is blue, and the bread is good, and I was in love. It was to me, the beginning of my calling, was the feeling of soft mother, serving father, loving God trio. They were the trio of love and in a container where we children were seen and loved and valued, and taught to read Scripture, to memorize stuff for Easter, and all that kind of stuff.
That's my theology that and also, I went to seminary, got a MDiv, did well, got some awards and what not, went and got into a PhD, all that in psych and religion. That's what I come home to. I come home to that. Not systematic theology, not anything, but God will always love you, and God will never leave you.
Bishop: That full-body, immersive, tactile, awakening all the senses experience of the divine early in life …
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Early in life.
Bishop: … gave you, again, this robust experience of God, loving your seven-year-old self and carrying that. I want to juxtapose it that, and I'm so glad you said that you took that understanding to seminary and that understanding comes back. I want to juxtapose that now against a 50-plus, 60-plus-year-old postmenopausal woman, right?
[laughter]
Bishop: Not talking about her. I'm just in general.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: It is me. That is me.
Bishop: Body that has borne children, and perhaps, again, women of color, we know that fibroids are so present in us. Many have had hysterectomies, right? Breast cancer, perhaps all of that. Juxtapose how you understood that God loved you in the totality of who you were over against what the world tries to tell us about beauty and acceptance and fitting in. What is the facade that is supposed to be love versus one that is supposed to be shamed?
Rev. Dr. Lewis: That's the whole word. That question is a whole word. I went on a journey. I went on a journey from a seven-year-old, embodied, seen, known, loved, long-legged, skinny, overbite, lot of hair, no body shame. None. Just “this is what it is.” To be honest, through getting my period very late, my little sister got hers and I was like, "What is happening to me?" I grew like seven inches one summer, so my body went through a thing. Kind of late to develop.
The sexual abuse happened around nine. That seven-year-old innocent, embodied, immersive, central love went through some tests. To where, by the time I'm 22 and I have that confidence, and I think this is about me, that would, for me, have been my lowest body time of just not understanding my own self, not understanding what sex is really about, really. Not understanding, if I can be so blunt, they should even have to really do it or enjoy it, or if I have permission to.
Bishop: Right. We know as females, often we're not given permission to enjoy this gift that God has given us of intimacy.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Unless you're going to make a baby, which I, by the way, couldn't.
Bishop: My goodness. Okay.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: A journey of infertility.
Bishop: My Lord.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: What is all this? That, I think, was a journey till I was about 45, really. It coincides with getting to New York and getting to Middle Church. I think it's not a coincidence, really, but some way of doing finishing the PhD, get a new church in which the radical love and welcome of God is my job, that I think I turned on myself. You too. You too. With your used to be flat-chested, not anymore. With your used to not have curves and do-- I did have a hysterectomy. That is my story. I did never have fibroids and then I had them and couldn't be in the pulpit, so had to take care of all that. All that stuff right around 45.
Then there is this immersion into a culture, a church culture, maybe even a New York culture of art and beauty and multi all the things. My activism took me to Albany and to D.C. and to Africa, traveling in a way that was different than being a younger person traveling. Noticing more knees, feet, arthritis, body issues, that I had to learn to love myself. I found God in myself and I love too fiercely. I found a partner at that age that I wouldn't have found at a younger age. I found joy in myself. I found joy in my girlfriends. I found joy in my loud laughter, in my red lipstick, in my red hat.
I just accepted me. That seven-year-old Jacqui came back …
Bishop: Amen.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: … Is what I'm trying to say. I regressed. I began to think about what is it like to have a grown-up relationship with a grown-up God. I realized, actually, what I wanted was a grownup relationship with my child of God.
Bishop: Amen. A grownup relationship …
Rev. Dr. Lewis:  … With the God I met as a child, who is still there.
Bishop: Right. We could park right there. We could hover right there for a minute. A grownup relationship with a grownup God. I love-- again, you talked a bit about, I call him Fabio Jesus, by the way.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Oh my goodness.
Bishop: That's Fabio Jesus-
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Oh my goodness.
Bishop: -that she was describing. All right? This Fabio Jesus. We either want to continue to worship the infant Jesus or the Fabio Jesus.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: The Fabio.
Bishop: I think we also want to then infantilize God --
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Yes, we do.
Bishop: -- and keep God at that very basic place. Again, the notion that you talk about a fierce love, and God is love.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: God is love. God is fierce.
Bishop: There we go. That's what I was about to hook up together. God is fierce, and that God wants us to tell the truth in love. One of your quotes, "Telling the truth is an act of love, an act of resistance, an act of courage. Its end is liberation, freedom, and if possible, reconciliation. But there can be no reconciliation without truth." If we're not even willing to live into this grown-up God and the truths of the things of God, talk about then how we all remain imprisoned. We all remain in this less than courageous full-bodied self.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: We're not fully who we're supposed to be. We're not fully who we're supposed to be until we get to the fierce truth. Let's just modify the word truth with fierce because I think a lot of us think we're being very, very honest. Sometimes we're being mean, but we're saying that's very, very honest. Sometimes we're being condescending and patronizing. We think that's being very, very honest. In fact, we fear the truth. The teaching about “the truth will set us free” -- there's no fear in love because perfect love casts out fear. That whole theological construct I think is real.
Look, we're human. My background is in psych and religion. That's what I studied. We're human developmentally. We are taught early, first how to love; first, how to be brave; first, how to be courageous. I can do it. I can walk, I can toddle. The whole room is like, "Go. Go, Jacqui. Look at you walking." There's a lot of love and affirmation while you are learning how to toddle, learning how to talk, learning how to be, until you get to two. You are not yet able to hear no.
We've already given you a sense of omnipotence. I cried when the bottle came.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Woo. I was wet and I dried myself. This is what children get. Then when they get to testing boundaries, we put a lot of “no” in their lives. How we survive that  depends on what the environment is like. All of us get a lot of no, and a lot of fear. I'm going to say, especially Black families end up protecting our children from the appropriately fear-filled world with some fear. I think that happens in lots of families.
Now I'm afraid, and now I'm insecure, and now I don't really love myself. We have to fight our way back to the God that loved you. We have to fight our way back to just as you are, your beloved. It's a journey. That to me is the grown-up God. The infantilized God is angels, devils. The infantilized God is the boogeyman, the big white man in the sky. Do you know what I mean?
Bishop: I do.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: The polarities.
Bishop: Yes.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: The concrete level of intellect would be yes/no, good/bad, angel/devil, boogeyman/angel. That God is either good when he's in the mood to be good, or he's not. We, psychologists and religious, would say, of course, God is real but we're also creating God all the time. We create the God of our experience because mommy might be nice, but she might withhold that if I'm not good. Daddy might be good, but when he gets home, he's going to spank me.
We're building this God of our new experiences. Please don't get mad, child, but that God might have a temper tantrum and might flood the world.
When you're little, you hear that, and you get to sing Noah, he built an arc. Also, God has a temper – he didn't use a belt, he used a storm. The disciplining could be good, could be not good, you're not sure. God loves you sometimes; might let you have a car accident; might let you not have a baby; might let you be a slave. Might, might. We were creating that God, and that God is the God of some of our childhoods because our childhoods have that kind of violence in it.
The grown-up God is the baby God who had no boundaries, who brought the people together. Angel, shepherds, all y'all come. That baby God who grew up to be a multicultural, fully loving person in Jesus, that God is the one who's a grown-up with whom we can have a grown-up relationship.
Bishop: Amen. Who loves us as we are. Again, understanding that God said to Christ right at that moment, coming up out of that water, "This is my beloved son." …
Rev. Dr. Lewis: "This is my beloved. In whom I'm well pleased."
Bishop: … "In whom I am well pleased. Listen to him." Hadn't done a thing, hadn't earned a thing.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: No.
Bishop: Hadn't healed anybody. He was just there and said, "I love him. He's my beloved. Listen to him." That's the God …
Rev. Dr. Lewis: That's the God.
Bishop: … of our salvation.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: It is.
Bishop: I want to play off this motion. There are so many places that I want to go and we can go. I want to hear more about this multicultural church. I want to hear about your multicultural family. I want to hear about so many things, but I'm going to stick right here, just one more time, with this grownup God.
One of the things I lament that is not present enough in our congregation, in our talk of God, all of this theology, is being able to ask God questions, being able to wrestle sometimes in our doubt, in our anger. People say, "You can't get angry with God." I say, "Why not? Why can't we? God can handle it." You talk sometimes in the book about your questions, your doubts, places where you went. What did Mother Theresa call it? “The dark night of the soul.”
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Right.
Bishop: You didn't use that term, but you talk about it. Talk to us about how you and that grownup God could have that kind of relationship.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Yes. Look, Bishop, quite frankly, I almost lost my faith.
Bishop: Okay.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I just did. I was 30, looking for love, looking for a place to call home, looking for a church to call home, trying to figure out who I was, depressed, working hard all the time as a young adult trying to get it together, running from my call. I was like, "Why? Where are you?"
Honestly, this is a story telling about that. I was in a breakup, and I was really depressed about it. I felt like everything that had been explained to me about how good I was supposed to be, I had failed. I found myself sitting in my bedroom taking a bunch of Tylenol. I don't think I wanted to die, but I was definitely thinking, "I'm going to take these Tylenol and this mofo is going to be really upset what I did to myself and it's going to be a lesson for him."
Bishop: I'm going to teach him a lesson by hurting myself. Understood.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: "I'll show you. One hour." I'm taking this Tylenol and I have a little bit of a stomachache. I was like, "That's kind of weird." I called him and said with my dramatic self, "I just took these Tylenol and -- " He's like, "You did what?" My stomach gurgled one time. I was like, "I got to go." I was having this feeling. My mother, my father, are going to get a phone call because my little Black behind is on this floor in this bathroom having taken some Tylenol. Oh, hell to the no.
I was like, "No." I called the emergency room, and I went to the doctor and I got my stomach pumped. I said, "Do you guys recommend therapists?" They were like, "Yes." Introduced me to this guy and I went to see his office a few days later. The first thing he said to me is, "Why are you here?" I said, "I want to live." He said, "Why'd you take the Tylenol? I said, "I was being dramatic." By the way, that's not all the time the case. If people are acting suicidal, we should really pay attention.
Bishop: Amen. Thank you.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: He said, "Well, okay, then, let's talk about live." That was the beginning of finding God in myself and finding the Jacqui that God loved already. Then, also having the relationship where I could tell the therapist the stuff I needed to say about my parenting and da, da, da, da, but also the stuff about God and to pull them together. The conversation that I wanted to have was having a real relationship with my parents and a real relationship with my God. The psychologist prescribed more home time.
I went home all the time ahead of my siblings to see my parents, and we built a new relationship. Then I think I went to seminary to build a new relationship with God. I got what I prayed for, which is not a God- - I don't think God gives one gosh-darn about whether I curse or scream or wear red lipstick or none, or pants or not. You know how we grew up?
Bishop: I do.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: You were Jezebel. You can't wear yellow. Whatever. God is too busy. They, He, all the ways we call God, is too busy to worry about my outfits. I got a relationship that I needed to keep God because I wanted to keep God.
Bishop: Amen.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I couldn't keep angry, punitive, nefarious if you didn't God, I just couldn't keep that God. The one I have, we kick it daily and I feel quite loved by God.
Bishop: Amen.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Exactly as I am.
Bishop: Amen. Exactly as she is. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I'm not saying God doesn't want me to do better --
Bishop: No, no, no. Understood.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: -- but I am fine.
Bishop: We needed to hear that. We needed that because again, that oath, that equal sign -- can't love neighbor if I don't love self. That is an equation that we all need to come to grips with. You also talk in the book, again, about love and truth and that sometimes there are hard and difficult conversations that we need to have. Your father -
Bishop: -is--
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Taking it to my father. Oh, no.
Bishop: Indeed, I was intrigued and shared with the Extended Cabinet in one of our meetings how you and your father had to have an adult conversation. For you, that conversation was rooted in love, and as I interpret it, a multi-faceted love, enough love for yourself to speak up for the love that you had for another human being, enough love for the human being that you were in love with to demand respect, and enough love for your father, if I read it correctly, to try to help open his mind and eyes to something that he was not yet ready to receive. Talk to us about that kind of fierce love.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I was afraid of my daddy. That was all of us. Tiptoeing around and was afraid. I organized my whole life to not get spankings or yelled at. I was super good. ET says, "Be good." I was super good. If you look good up in the dictionary, I was right there, sparkling with some bows and being good, but it wasn't good enough. Dad could be in a bad mood, and you weren't doing good enough. He just always had a temper. I think he did the parenting he got. Kind of tough and -- Got that.
As time went on, you outgrow spankings. I probably only got two in my life because I was good, but you also outgrow feeling like somebody can talk to you a certain way. Dad and I had two conflicts that I'm going to tell quickly. One was a time he was having a temper with my sister, and I was like, "Hey, sir, that's not helpful." One year of college psychology. "If you're going to talk to her that way, she's going to be feeling some way like, 'Girl, you need to be quiet.'"
That went inside me, at 18, as something I would never do, as the way I didn't want us to be. Over time, Bishop, I would try to confront Dad, try to care for Dad, to ask for things I needed differently -- to some success or not. When I was 45, this all was happening around that time. I'm grown, I go to church, I paid for my own PhD, and I got it. He was being stank to my John, who is now my husband, but absolutely just ridiculously stank, stank, stank, stank, stank, rude, mean -- so much so that my friends then left my graduation party.
My dad just took a big old poop and dropped it on my party, just with his personality and his mood. I was like, "No." When John left the party, I thought, "Okay, this is the day the Lord has made for us to rejoice and be--
Bishop: Be good.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Exactly.
Bishop: Let's be in it. All right.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I just went there. I wasn't loud because I didn't think I would survive that. I said, "Daddy, I really need to talk to you." I said, "Dad, my friend just left my house, not yours, my house, because you, as my guest, were so incredibly rude that -- You never let us be rude. What was happening to you?" I'd say, "What? No, no." I just basically said, "That's not okay. I love you." I do love him so much.
"I love you so much, Dad but I promise you, I’m 45 now. There's not another moment in my life, not another moment in my life, where you will treat me like a child, like I'm not in charge of myself like I don't have agency. I'm a grown woman who runs a church, who runs my life. Here's where we are today. Today, you either decide you want to be in a relationship with your grown daughter or you don't.
"If you don't, I will be sad, but I promise you, we will not have this temper. We will not have this. Then the next time I see you will be when mommy asks me to your funeral."
I meant that for my own love of my own self. I just wasn't going to do it anymore. It was the beginning of my new dad relationship, which is full of love and tenderness and humor, and respect. I am his spiritual guru.
By the way, he loves him some John. "Tell John I love him." What the? "Tell John I love him." They play pool. John refuses to play cards with my father and Daddy likes that about John. He'll say this, "You know what? That John, he seems like he's quiet, but he don't take no mess. I tell you what? He don't take no mess from nobody," and he doesn't. Daddy really respects that.
We built a new relationship. I built a new relationship with God, and I'm making a parallel there. I didn't want that relationship with disease in it, with the fear in it, with the loathing in it, with the control in it. Now, my dad, I was sick a few weeks, my dad called me every day to see how I was doing. He called me on Valentine's Day to tell me he loved me. He called John on John's surgery. We all have a relationship built on fierce love and in the fierce love, you tell the truth. Daddy tells the truth-truth. He just got diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease.
Bishop: Okay. Sorry to hear that.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Me too. He's 88. He has survived my mother's death. He has a girlfriend. His sugar, and they do shack up some.
[laughter]
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Okay. Y'all don't write to Bishop about that either.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: They do hang out and each other's houses and they're too old to get married. She takes good care of him. I am the oldest child, so I am the one who pushes him. I got him to the doctor for the diagnosis, but when I checked on him and I say, "Daddy, are you taking your medicine?" That's like four times I did that. The fifth time he said, "I don't really want to take it." Because I love him fiercely, I had to let that go because he is still grown, and he is still my father and I love him.
I said, "Okay, Daddy, it sounds like you're making some decisions. The next time when I'm home we should sit down and talk about it." I'm the one who will talk about it with like, what is this going to look like then? Grown people having a fiercely loving, honest relationship is juicy and joy and laughter and play and also tears and heartbreak. It is not cocky. It's not that. It's not fake. It's real.
Bishop: It's sincere.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I would not trade it and we would not have it. It's not for that conflict.
Bishop: Now, was it because you were in an interracial relationship that you think your father was not accepting of John in the beginning?
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Oh, yes. He was like, "This White boy…"
When we confronted him on it, then we had that makeup, then he and John got to be friends. John and I wrote this Dr. Martin Luther King study, and Daddy read it. Inside the Dr. Martin Luther King study, I told this story of him and John. We’re reading the book together and I got to – “Though John was White and Dad didn't like him at first, they're best friends now.” Dad went, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. It's not because he was White."
Really? "It's because he looks like that man down south. What color was the man down South?”  “White?”  “I just don't want you to mischaracterize it."
Bishop: Exactly.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: All right, okay. He did not want it to be on record that he didn't like John because he was White, but what's on record in this book is how much Dad and John found their way to a real relationship.
Bishop: You helped facilitate that because you spoke the truth in love.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Absolutely.
Bishop: I think part of our inability to sit down and have reconciliation around race, around what's happened in this country, part of why books are being taken out of school and we have that censorship going on is because we won't speak the truth --
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Absolutely.
Bishop: -- to one another in love. Therefore, reconciliation is and will always be elusive. You helped through your speaking boldly, taking up your space and speaking boldly to your father, setting that boundary about what needed to happen. You help facilitate that kind of conversation. Talk to us about how we need to do that in the church so that we might then help lead the world. If we can't do it in here, --
Rev. Dr. Lewis: We can't do it.
Bishop: -- how do we expect the world to be able to-- Right now, again, you said keep it in our context. In America, we are on fire.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: We are on fire.
Bishop: We are on fire right now around this issue.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: That's right. I would say three high-level things that are about that, like if you're going to execute that story, I would say one, I advocated for kind treatment. It could feel like I was like, "Just be kind to him, Daddy, and you weren't. That's what you taught us. That's what you-- " What I'm saying is that I advocated for love. I advocated not for them to go on dates and hang out and go fishing, but I advocated for the kind of love that is honor and respect of just another human being. Ubuntu. I advocated for Ubuntu.
Two, my dad was willing to stay engaged. To stay engaged. That's the part he played. My younger dad wouldn't have stayed engaged. We would still not be talking. I'm 45, and he was 62, he was ready to stay engaged because neither of us wanted to lose each other. There’s something about staying at the table, which is what you would say, Bishop.
The third piece of that, and this is really mission critical, is my husband, the White Methodist.
Bishop: Yes, Methodist.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: The White--
Bishop: Methodist.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: We're in a mixed marriage, okay?
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I'm a Presbyterian and he's a Methodist. We got all kinds of stuff with that. Different polity but the White United Methodist minister, who has been a minister since he was 18, who has worked in Appalachia, who is my partner in anti-racism, that's how we met, took his White self to see my father after we got married. Humbled himself.
Bishop: Amen.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: He took a bottle of rum; took my mother some flowers. Said, "I'm always going to love your daughter and I want to be your friend." They sat in the backyard while my mother and I cooked and had their first date that they did have, where Dad talked to John about why he was upset, what happened to him in Mississippi. John didn't act like he didn't know what the deal was, but also acted like he was curious about my father's story because he was. They began to tell stories, and they found out that they have the same father, the same kind of father.
Bishop: Exactly.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: The same kind of dynamic with their fathers. It built a bond between them. Then they found out that they both liked jazz. Then they found out that they both liked fishing. White people have a particular job to do in this racial, ethnic dynamic. Where even though, like we could say, "I didn't do slavery." We could say, "I don't know reparations." We could say, "I wasn't there." We could say, like John did, "I understand the wounding that my people have done to your people." That's a different context.
Bishop: Both caring enough, your father and your beloved, caring enough to stay engaged and to begin to have the conversation. That's all we need, is for persons to care enough to stay at the table and have the conversation. Once we have the conversation and see beyond all of our preconceived notions, see beyond all of some of the myths that we've been taught, see beyond some of the lies that are a part of the story, and get to know each other, we'll find those similarities and those commonalities.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I think that's right. I think if Daddy were here, he'd say also John came to him in love. Dad would say, he says, and I wrote in the book, John cured him of his prejudice.
Bishop: Yes, it does.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: What he's saying is he was prejudiced. Do you understand? This Black man from Mississippi has a right to be wounded. He experienced terrible things in apartheid Mississippi, but he also didn't want to stay. The people of color piece is also, do we want to be made well?
Bishop: Do we want to be made whole?
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Do we want to be made well and whole? Do we, and can we, acknowledge that if we just stay also in, I'm just so angry, and I'm just so wounded that I might not be well? I'm not saying that I have married White people, I'll be best friends with White people. I'm not saying any of that. I'm saying the transaction among us humans around race is going to kill us.
Bishop: That's right.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Our souls. Do we want to heal the world as people of faith? Then there's something for each of us to do.
Bishop: It happened a few moments ago, but it's happening again now, you're reminding me so much of my mother. You talked about your father saying, well, it wasn't that John was White, it was that John reminded me of that White --
Rev. Dr. Lewis: -- That White person.
Bishop: My mother grew up in Sylvania, Georgia.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Oh, my goodness.
Bishop: Apartheid Georgia.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Apartheid Georgia.
Bishop: Okay, and I recall one time, she had come to visit and I had the Cooking channel on, and Paula Deen started talking. My mother was in another part of the house. She came out into the hallway and said, "Who is that?"
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Oh, wow.
Bishop: Just, her posture, her place, her voice, I thought, "What is --" She said, "Who is that?" That voice -- she didn't know who Paula Deen was. When I told her it was Paula Deen, she still didn't know. She didn't know who Paula Deen was, but that voice --
Rev. Dr. Lewis: She heard that voice.
Bishop: That voice took her back to lynch mobs in Sylvania, Georgia. That voice took her back to white and black water fountains. That voice took her back to segregated schools. Just hearing that voice, and she was the same woman who in raising us, told us, "You cannot hate." Yes, there's woundedness. Yes, we need to be able to admit that. Yes, we do not have to be ignorant or in denial of the past, and there is a responsibility on both sides to say --
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I think so.
Bishop: -- and we can have the conversation.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I think so. I think that's what it is, Bishop. I think there are all kinds of strategies and tactics we need about race, right?
Bishop: Yes.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: I'm in a multi-ethnic, multiracial church, and our theology is biographical. I'm pretty sure that my Air Force-base raising, which is a whole kind of White with two Black people worlds.
Plus, my parents' Mississippi raising, which was Black and Black-Black, that they merged together for me to be the multi-ethnic girl. I am the Black girl who also is multi-ethnic. I am not mixed race, I am Black, and I have a border personality
Bishop: Border personality.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Not borderline.
Bishop: Right.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Border- -
Bishop: Get it cleared, don't get it twisted.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: A border personality, and lots of us do. Most of the African-American people in The United Methodist Church denomination do because you couldn't survive in a denomination that --
Bishop: That's right.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: There's something about curating and cultivating our border personality. What W.E.B. Du Bois calls two double consciousness.
Bishop: Consciousness. That's right.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: We curate on purpose, the border. I don't lose being Black by being John's wife. Poor baby. Poor Middle Church, every Sunday, so what got nothing to do --
Bishop: They're blessed.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: -- with race. It's like the White people that go past the White church to come to the Middle Church are going to get some race talk every Sunday. Some little bit, because that's what we're working on, so that's on the border. They're on the border with me. John and I are on the border. We wash dishes, we talk about race. You were loud in the room. What's that? It's always in the room, because it's always in the room.
Bishop: Yes, it is.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: What I think has to also happen is there also have to be safe places for caucusing. That might surprise people that I would say that, but I'm in the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural church, I'm called to it and I want to do it, but the Black women might need to go to tea, that's what I'm saying. The queer Black men needed a group. Hablamos, my Latinx people wanted a group.
When I first got to Middle, my boss then, the pastor, did not want anyone to caucus, and did not want separateness, but I think sometimes in a womanist way, you need separation for recovery. When I hang out with my Black girlfriends, that is a juicy feed for my soul. When I'm with my siblings, what we do with the music and --
I'm just saying everything isn't always going to be perfectly multi-ethnic and multi-racial, but I think it's our goal. I think on the way to it, we have way stations of Korean churches and White churches and the White church needs to make a goal of becoming the multi-ethnic future, because it has the power. I wanted to say all that so I could get to that.
Bishop: Amen.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Is that okay?
Bishop: Absolutely. I appreciate that. You've given me something because I wrestle with -- I understand the need to caucus. Sometimes I think we remain in the caucus.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Yes, we do.
Bishop: Right? We remain in the caucus.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: That's not a caucus.
Bishop: We don't come --
Rev. Dr. Lewis: That's a silo.
Bishop: There we go.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: We're working that out.
Bishop: We're working that out.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: That's a silo.
Bishop: It's all right to caucus-
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Come all out.
Bishop: - but it's not all right to silo.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Come ye out from amongst that caucus and get back the truth.
Bishop: If we give back --
Rev. Dr. Lewis: That's right.
Bishop: -- into the beloved community.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Amen.
Bishop: Struggling and wrestling, and I'm sure Middle Church has its struggles --
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Oh, my goodness
Bishop: -- wrestling as you are.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Yes, it is, but it's fun. It's fun to wrestle. We're there for a reason. We've grown because of who we are. We're not growing because we're in silos. People want the dream of coming to the Beloved Community, where the music is diverse and the people are diverse, and you get to learn from people that are different from you, is why people come. Of course, it is different, and it sometimes has conflict because we're not the same, but we are all God's chirrens [children] trying to get to the promised land.
Bishop: Did you hear that -- Chirren. You say that word all the time. We're chirren. We're chirren of God trying to get somewhere. Oh my gosh, we are so over time, but I have to do one more thing before we go to taking questions. You have so often, throughout the discussion earlier and even sitting here now, you have blessed us with names that are hard to pronounce because you are weaving into this conversation other voices. Again, I want to go back to this grown-up God that created all of us in the imago dei. All of us.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Yes.
Bishop: Which means all of us represent God. All of us have something to speak of in terms of who God is to us and whatnot. Talk to us about why it's important to have different voices in the conversation, not just, and this is a phrase that's used in seminary all the time. not just the voices of dead white men teaching us theology. Why is that important?
Rev. Dr. Lewis: It's so important because if each of us is created in God's image, then it is the multiplicity of ourselves that show us fully who God is. I see a little God in you. I see a little God in Lydia. I see a little God in our lunch table. There is a way in which we won't fully know. It's like looking at an elephant. If everything is over here, then you think it's a tail. If everything is over here, you think it's a trunk. The Indian theologist talked about elephant theology.
Bishop: That's right.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: This idea of seeing the whole of God is to have a kaleidoscope of perspectives, speaking Mujerista, speaking Korean, speaking Black liberation, speaking community-based Catholic, speaking womanist, speaking feminist, speaking agnostic. What do the doubters teach us?
Speaking Islam and teaching Buddhism, what do these Eastern theologies, philosophies have to round out our life? Speaking Tony Morrison, speaking John Coltrane, speaking The Beatles. Where is our theology being lived in the world that reminds us that everybody's a theologian? Anybody thinking and talking about God is a theologian. If we stay at the tail, we don't know all of this beautiful diversity that is God.
Bishop: Amen. Let us be curious.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Curious.
Bishop: Let us not just read the authors that look like us or think like us. Let us be challenged by the multiplicity of voices that are there for us to stretch, to grow, to maybe get angry with, and again, not run from that, but to sit there and go, "Why am I angry? What does this moment have to teach me?" Amen. I could talk to you all day long.
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Let's do it again.
Bishop: We need to.
Bishop: This is going to become part of a podcast that I've been doing called Thursdays at the Table. One of the things-- I want to have conversations that I would have sitting down at a coffee table or a breakfast table. One of the questions that I start the podcast with is coffee or tea?
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Coffee.
Bishop: Coffee. Amen. Amen. Straight up or decaf?
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Straight up.
Bishop: Amen. Amen. Little cream and sugar?
Rev. Dr. Lewis: Cream and sugar.
Bishop: All right, there we go. She's talking my language. I also often then read something from the cup. I try to use different cups that have different sayings on them, and this just so happens to be from the Annapolis district. I just want you all to know that. It says, "I give you a new commandment. Love each other just as I have loved you, so also must you love each other. This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other." That's what Reverend Doctor Jacqui is teaching us how to do, is how to love each other.
 

​Bishop Easterling: Beloved, I am so excited today to be at the table with the Rev. Dr. Janet Wolf, who has worked as a poverty rights organizer, United Methodist pastor with urban and rural congregations, college and seminary professor, community mediator, learner, and teacher. She focuses on public theology, transformative justice, and non-violent direct action to disrupt things like the cradle-to-prison pipeline.
She's a member of the coordinating committee of the National Council of Elders and on the board of the James Lawson Institute for Research and Study of Non-violent Movements. She's the author of Practicing Resurrection: The Gospel of Mark and Radical Discipleship. Janet and her husband, Bill, have five sons and seven grandchildren. Welcome, Janet, to the table.
Janet Wolf: Thank you so much. It's a great gift to be with you.
Bishop Easterling: It's my honor. It's my honor to have you join us today. Now there are a couple of things that I like to ask at the beginning. I think they're really deep and important questions. That is, do you drink coffee or tea?
Janet: Both.
Bishop Easterling: Both.
Janet: First thing in the morning, coffee, dark roast coffee, thick coffee.
Bishop Easterling: Amen. I was going to ask if you take it cream, sugar, or straight up and you've already answered that question. You like it bold and dark in the morning.
Janet: I like it bold and dark, a little tiny bit of non-dairy creamer helps me out every now and then. In the afternoon, probably tea. If it's cold outside, hot tea. If it's hot outside, cold tea.
Bishop Easterling: Excellent. You're a both/and person.
Janet: I'm a both/and.
Bishop Easterling: I love that. I like the bot/and. I also try to have, during our conversation at the table, a mug that for me speaks to the individual that I'm going to be in conversation with and the topics that we'll be covering. The mug that I couldn't get beyond when I thought about our time together was this: “Lord, I offer my prayer as my work and my work as my prayer.”  For me, that resonates with who you are and the work that you do.
Janet: Thank you so much.
Bishop Easterling: Absolutely. I first encountered you, Janet, in person during the United Women of Faith Assembly in Orlando Florida last year. Your words were both inspiring and convicting. I wanted to converse with you since that conference. Now let us get to the deepest things we know. I learned there, and as I read your book and did some more listening to your sermons, that you are a fierce advocate of radical discipleship.
You minced no words in calling yourself and the church to account on matters of exclusion and dominance. Where did your passion for justice begin? Tell us a little bit about your story and how that conviction grew within you.
Janet: I think my parents -- we grew up in a rural Delaware community, Milltown, right near the mushroom capital of the world. Then, when I was in the fifth grade, we moved to Atlanta Georgia, which was an entirely foreign world. This was 1958. Lester Maddox is in the streets selling ax handles and Dr. King is speaking. We attended a downtown Lutheran Church. It was for me the first time that state took on flesh. It was more than showing up for church. I remember when the integration team sent notes to the churches that they would be coming.
We were downtown at Peachtree and 4th. The church had a big debate. What shall we do? Oh, my. This is going to happen. In the end, we put out this little, tiny sign that said, "All who want to worship are welcome here." Not exactly a revolutionary statement but something. The integration team comes and they walked down to the front and they are part of the service and people greet them and then they leave and people are like, "Oh, okay." We go outside and across the street is the Southern Baptist Church and they have surrounded their property so that no one can get on it.
The larger men in the congregation are threatening the civil rights workers and pushing them and making sure they don't cross the line. It was, for me, the first time a sermon came out of the pulpit and walked into the streets. It was the first time I understood that there is no neutral ground -- that not to decide is to decide, to fault with those in power. SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, came and spoke to our youth group. It was a time when the whole world opened up differently for me and called me into accountability. I think after that, there were a lot of different pieces.
For me, the next big step is, I'm trying to decide what the next big step is. The next big step is that I got married to my high school sweetheart. We had two children. Our rings said, “one in God.” I believed that. Then he left. Suddenly, I was a single mom of two little boys with three part-time jobs. I had been in the church my whole life. I had never met anybody who was divorced. I didn't even tell anybody except my sister for six months that he was gone. I just kept saying he was busy with work.
Bishop Easterling: Oh, goodness.
Janet: Because I didn't know what to do. Finally, I went to my pastor. I had taught adult Sunday school. I was part of the youth group leadership. I was on the decision-making council. I was part of a national hunger action team. When I went to my pastor hoping for consolation and comfort, he said, "Well, Janet, you're always welcome to worship here, but you're no longer an acceptable role model, so you'll need to resign from all your leadership positions."
He put into words what I was already feeling, which is even God thinks I'm not good enough. I'll never measure up. I'm not okay as I am. That was a huge moment for me. After that, I was angry with God. I was angry with all male human beings except my two children. I was angry with the church. We went to a little tiny house church that met in the garage, inside a housing project and the largest concentration of poverty in the city.
Because I had worked with the pastor, and we had taken kids who did not have dress-up clothes there because she could wear jeans and t-shirts and be noisy. They loved us back into life. They put flesh on grace. I was difficult and prickly, and they just never gave up on me.
Bishop Easterling: Those are two--
Janet: There are four stories, but I think those are two huge pieces for me.
Bishop Easterling: Absolutely. Again, you were in the crucible of either the church living the Gospel or the church living Empire. In both of those, to my mind, what you encountered when you came out of that church and saw the other gentleman across the street forming a human fence to say, "You will not come into our sanctuary." We will not be integrated in this way by this integration team. Then, also the rejection that you receive from a pastor at a church where you were providing leadership, at a church where you were a member and contributing, to then have that rejection. I can understand.
I think now that might help me understand, I was going to ask you about this quote that you opened your book with from Brueggemann. There are three quotes, actually, all of them are provocative. The one I was most intrigued with is from Walter Brueggemann. It says, "It is likely that our theological problem in the church is that our gospel is a story believed, shaped, and transmitted by the dispossessed. We are now a church of possession for which the rhetoric of the dispossessed is offensive." Again, I think that what you've shared with us already helps to answer the question of why you chose that as one of the three quotes to open the book. Would you expound upon that just a little more?
Janet: There's another piece to that, which is then, I go to this little house church, they love me, they're putting up with me, they're supporting us, and then they announce that Christmas Eve services are always inside the prison. I have gone to a large suburban church. This is not my idea of Christmas Eve, but the pastor is insistent that we cannot hear the radicality of the gospel. Even though we're in the middle of the housing project, we cannot hear it without being in a place where life is threatened. We're into the middle of the harshest systems that are battering people day after day.
It comes with this extraordinary good news, and it takes on flesh and it disrupts everything else, so I'm not thinking this is a good idea, but this is a church that loves me. I go with my two little boys, and when we get to the prison, it's on lockdown. Something has happened. I don't know what. We're stuck in the parking lot. We are a handful of people in the parking lot. I'm convinced nobody inside even knows we're there, and then even though it's Nashville, Tennessee, it starts smelling, and now we are a handful of people and we're huddled around and I'm figuring what I'm going to get out of this.
I'm going to get kids with sore throats and earaches. They're going to have to go to the doctor. I'm going to miss work. This is not my idea of Christmas Eve. I remember poinsettias, candlelight, trumpets, little kids dressed up for the pageant. Huge choirs walking in, and at one time we had a live donkey, but I'm there with the kids and we lean in to try to get the Christ candle lit and somebody hands me the Bible and says, read this, Isaiah, "The people who sat in darkness, upon them has light shined." I'm still feeling grumpy, and then one of my kids pulls on my coat and says, Mama, look, and I turn, and you can tell this is 1975. I see that in floor after floor, and cell after cell, the prison people are holding out matches and lighters to the window, so that by the time we sing Silent Night, I forget there's a chorus --  inside and out.
Bishop Easterling: Oh my God.
Janet: It was for me another moment of conversion, where I recognized both the need for community that helps me turn, to see what God is doing in the world when I would never have anticipated that, and also the power of social location. Just where we are, who we see, who we listen to, and how that shapes our hearing and our response to the Gospel. I have been going to the prison since and have found that the most profound and powerful theology happens inside prison bars because the discussion about liberation, or salvation, or forgiveness, or redemption is not theoretical. It's life and death.
Bishop Easterling: You take me now to a video that I watched of you. It's a video where you are talking about the problem with charity, and there's a part of that where you talk about your prison ministry, and how faith communities have cooperated in naming people unclean and how we scandalize people.
Janet: A fundamental failure, it seems to me, of faith communities is that we have cooperated in naming people unclean. Then the scandal becomes the folks who are in prison, or the kids who are dropping out of school, or the teens who are disconnected and hanging out there on the streets. But biblically, the scandal is the systems and the structures that relentlessly push people towards death. The scandal is not unclean. People, biblically, there's no such thing as unclean people. The scandal is the theologies that collaborate with this system of domination that renders so many human beings disposable.
Walter Wink says, we got to push and figure out how we have become kept chaplains of an unjust order. We got this shift, the standup for unclean people to the unclean systems and theologies, and ask what it is that distances us. Less than 20 percent of the people inside of prison ever get a visit from an outside person. Where's the church? What is it that we are caught up in doing if we are not hanging out with folks? I got a short amount of time, so let me hustle on, because I think there's another shift, that goes along with it, and it is the shift from charity to justice.
It is remembering what Howard Thurman said, that charity is one of the greatest forms of violence because in charity, we rob people of their identity and their vocation. In charity, my identity is someone who needs something, and my vocation is to be thankful and measure up to your needy measures. But every human being made in the image of the divine is defined as an identity as a child of God. Our vocation for each and every human being is to join God in the repair of the world. Pamela Couture would argue that when we do charity instead of justice, we simply making ourselves feel good while propping up the very systems that are killing off the folks we trying to do something about.
That's the third shift. The third shift is we got to quit thinking up programs and develop, no kidding, authentic long-term partnerships. Because those of us who have never been incarcerated will always get it wrong when we are creating programs if we are not allowing the voices of those who are hardest hit to be the loudest, most decisive voices in our decision-making.
[applause]
I met Ndume [Olatushani] in Riverbend because he was a part of our graduate theology classes, and we argue that every seminary in this country ought to have at least one class that takes place behind prison bars, where half the students are folks who cannot leave at the end of the class. Some of the most powerful theology happens behind prison walls. If you want to talk about forgiveness, freedom, liberation, if you want to begin to understand redemption, go someplace where that question is urgent, not where it's theoretical, optional, or irrelevant.
Bishop Easterling: Talk to us about how you came to that understanding of the way we've misappropriated. We have misinterpreted the Gospel, scandalizing the wrong thing and sanitizing that which should be scandal.
Janet: It's really pretty stunning that we as Christians follow one who was actually criminalized, arrested on trumped up charges by a mob, beaten and caged, and then executed in a state-sanctioned murder, and yet we are absent from the prisons unless we think we are coming in to save somebody. We are not there as learners or partners in doing theology and changing the systems. One of my friends, a brilliant artist, Ndume Olatushani, spent 20 years on Tennessee's death row for a crime he did not commit.
Bishop Easterling: My Lord.
Janet: He often said, "All those years church folks coming in trying to save my soul, hell, I didn't need anybody to save my soul. I need somebody to save my hands."
Bishop Easterling: My God.
Janet: I think that charity comforts us while we prop up the very systems we think we are doing something about. We offer backpacks to public school kids, but we don't change the public education system, which is re-segregated, which depends upon harsh punishments. Particularly if you are Black or brown, or don't speak English as your mother tongue, or have some kind of variability. Two things. Vincent Harding and Howard Thurman talk about, Jesus is born at the wall, and this is the community of wall-bruised people. When we are here, we hear the radicality of the Gospel.
But when we are over here, we become theological justifiers for the very systems that are pushing people with their backs against the wall, and I think that's right. Look at the Christmas story. The Christmas story is a radical upset of the way things are. It's not good news for the folks in power. They start killing people, and yet most of our Christmas celebrations are -- We may give charity gifts to kids in poverty, but we don't change the fundamental system that is perpetuating the poverty. John Wesley argued that it is better for the salvation of our souls to hang out with the people on the streets, with people who are impoverished than it is for us to show up in church on a Sunday morning for Communion.
He also said, "Don't build big buildings, because if you build big buildings, you will be dependent upon people with wealth." Then he says, "There goes the Gospel." Vincent Harding would argue, and Howard Thurman as well, that charity is a form of violence. It robs people of their identity and vocation instead of being a child of God, whose vocation is to join God in the repair of the world. They suddenly become someone who needs to meet our definition of needy and their vocation is to be grateful to us for whatever we have decided they need without any consultation with them.
Bishop Easterling: Theological justifiers, I love that term. Theological justifiers. One of the things that you do in the book, I believe, is to test us, to pull us out of this misshapen, misinterpreted understanding of the Gospel. You do that first by using a she pronoun for the author of the Gospel of Mark, for many that would be seen as heretical to think that a woman authored one of the Gospels, any book in the Bible perhaps, but certainly one of the Gospel books that we so rely upon that opened up this New Testament to us.
You talk about doing that because women have been silenced, dismissed, and made invisible, both in Scripture and in the world. Talk to us again about how we need to be reintroduced to the Gospel to really be able to hear what it's saying to us instead of these theological justifiers.
Janet: It's interesting when you reread the Gospel, or for me anyway, it's clear that it's directed to the church. It's not directed to non-believers; it's directed to the church. It is a reminder of how quickly we abandon our calling. Then a calling back into community so we can live into and out of this kingdom that is already among us. I think of the Methodist baptismal vow, which I love. Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil and injustice in whatever forms they present themselves? For me, that's a get-up in the morning and say yes all over again moment, because that's not easy.
Think about what we do with Easter, buying hats and new clothes and maybe having an Easter parade and Easter egg hunt. Easter is a revolutionary moment. That's frightening, it's terrifying. I don't think I realized that the women were central to the Easter story until I went to seminary. How could that happen? Having been in church my whole life, how could I not know that? Because those voices have been dismissed. I don't think I paid attention to the Matthew 15 story, and it's repeated in Mark, the story of the Canaanite Samaritan woman who changes Jesus’ theology.
She is a theologian arguing with Jesus in the street. She's a womanist. She will not be silent, she will not be sent away, and she will not give up. She will use the language of oppression to come right back and insist that what Jesus is saying is not God's will. It's this incredibly powerful example of the world around the church hollering at us, that we have fallen in short, that we have narrowed God. Twice in Matthew, Jesus is going to say, go nowhere among the Gentiles. He is never going to say that again after his encounter with this woman.
Bishop Easterling: Now you realize, you just said something again, very radical. Individuals have been brought up on charges. I mean this sincerely. This is factual. Individuals have been brought up on charges because they said that Jesus changed his theology, that this encounter with this woman caused Jesus to change. Why does that scare us so much?
Janet: I do participatory Bible study. Everybody occupies a place in the story. Not everybody can be Jesus. Not everybody can be a disciple. When I do this story with people and people sit in the place of the woman, and the only thing they can do for the first five to ten minutes is think about who am I? Why do I do what I do, say what I say? What's going on in my head, in my heart? What scares me? What gives me hope? What brings me joy? When they sit with that woman, no matter what group I work with, they hear the transformation.
The Jesus people are over there saying, “ah, I think he was just testing her faith.” Then the women come by and say, ''That wasn't what that felt like.'' He threw those words at us, spit those words at us. They were harsh, they hurt, they wounded, but I didn't give up because I know that's not God's will for my child to be outside the covenant people, outside the community of faith. It's a whole other thing, which may be too long, but I did not go to seminary to become a pastor.
I went because I was a community organizer working for justice and trying to figure out how churches could read the Bible and not do justice, not change systems, not be in poverty, not be in prisons dismantling that system. And then, somewhere along the line in seminary, when people would say, “we can't have that church,” I said, ''I've been to that church. You can't have that kind.'' It's a base Christian community, a Jesus church. I felt called to ordained ministry so that I could experiment. Is that possible? Yes, it's possible.
Bishop Easterling: Not only possible, necessary. It was necessary then, and it's necessary now. You remind me of other feminist and womanist theologians, people like Elizabeth Johnson and Joanne Terrell, who also talked about--
Janet: Oh, thank you. That’s good company to hang out with.
Bishop Easterling: Amen. You do.
Janet: I'm honored to be with you.
Bishop Easterling: Oh, thank you.
Janet: I was going to thank you for your creative courage and persistence and passion and wit and wisdom and large heart and healing hope. There are not a whole lot of bishops that I have found kinship with. I am so honored to sit with you and to say thank you for your witness. I'm grateful you have gifted my life.
Bishop Easterling: Now, it would not be appropriate for me to sit here and have to cry on this podcast, but that's what you're about to make me do. I am humbled, I'm humbled by your words, but you really do remind me of these feminists and womanist theologians because they talk about this kenosis of patriarchy, or the self-emptying of the male dominating power in favor of a new humanity, of compassionate service and mutual empowerment. Again, they talk about how we've gotten, as you said, the Easter story, the cross so wrong; that when we see that as God ordaining that kind of violence.
That kind of sacrifice is the only way we might be saved. We miss the opportunity to see it as really the culmination of Jesus' life and what empire did to him because he came with this kind of embodied counter-cultural, turn-the-world-upside-down message. That's what I see and hear in both your book, Practicing Resurrection, but also every time you speak. Tell me about how important it is, and I ask this question a lot and I'm going to keep asking it because I don't think that we've brought enough voices into our exegesis of Scripture, into our preaching. I think that's why we're, again, these justifiers of theology that you talk about: How do we need to widen the circle of voices that help us interpret Scripture?
Janet: I am convinced again that participatory Bible study helps. One of the things that I've experienced is working with the Luke 6 text. “Blessed are you who are poor for yours is now today the kingdom of God. Woe unto you who are wealthy for you have received your consolation.” If I go into any group and we have, I say let's have four churches, we'll have one very wealthy, very large, so many staff people, you got everything you need, congregation. You've got one classic Methodist congregation: not big, not little, tiny, but you know, right there and getting by but not wildly successful in either growing numbers or money.
Then you've got a storefront mission version: they're meeting maybe in a community center or something and they got a part-time pastor that also gets money from some other church. Then, you got folks just hanging out in the parking lot, harassing with this text. The task they have is to come up with three points for their sermon and a title for their sermon and a song of invitation. Inevitably, the first group, the wealthy big church group, spends so much time like, "How are we going to not alienate people? This is a really hard text." I tell them, "You cannot substitute the text. You must use these verses. You cannot put anything else in."
They want to refer to other texts, poor in spirit. It's everybody. It's not about economics. Clearly, it's about economics. When they give their report, one person comes from their group, does it fairly quickly and does it almost as an apology. We know this is hard, but okay, so here's what we're going to do. The hymn of invitation is something soft. Everybody's invited. There's no big challenge. It goes downscale. As you move down to the parking lot group, people get louder and more rowdy and it's more communal and it's more radical. Often the parking lot group starts infiltrating the other group and say, "Hey, have you read this text? This is some stuff right here." Banging on the door. Say, "Hey, hey, hey if you believe this stuff, we got to change."
The fact that that can happen in any congregation with any group of people says that even the minimal thinking about a change in social location can help us hear the Gospel -- then you magnify that by having prison ministry be redefined by people on the inside. It is not us taking anything. It is going to discover and hear the Gospel inside the prison, in circles that are led by, facilitated by, people who are caged. That changes it, or in a battered women's shelter, or in a juvenile detention center, or at a food stamp office, or out in the streets, anywhere you can find proximity and partnership. Ministry with not any version of two or four. I think the Church has substituted programs for proximity and partnership. That has nothing to do, in my mind, with the Gospel.
Bishop Easterling: Again, referring back to that video that I watched where you have the people on their feet, and you bring them to almost shouting with what you offer. You talk about that the church needs to get away from programs and get into some deep, long-term partnerships with those that they claim to want to be in ministry with. Again, often it's more like charity. It's more like, we'll write the check, we'll send the socks, as you said, we'll send the backpacks. Why do you think we resist that long-term deep partnership?
Janet: Because it would require change in systems and change in our theology. Kelly Brown Douglas, in her book, Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter , talks about this as white supremacy. It hasn't disappeared, neither has the theology that props it up, created it, perpetuates it. I think so many of us, and I was one and I continue to stumble, want to find the Gospel as simply comforting, just make me feel better because everybody's got misery in their life, without the challenge. It's a challenge -- over and over again. It's an invitation to abundant life, to live fully. We think it's less, but it's more. I think for me, that requires community.
I won't remember that. I won't honor that. I won't say yes to that every day. Unless I have a community, Bishop Kenneth Carter says this, "that will hold me and hold me accountable." That will push me and prop me up on every leaning side when things go wrong. I think Ted Myers and Walter Wink argue that every healing in the gospel is a shifting of the scandal from the person labeled unclean, unworthy, unvalued, un-whatever, to the systems.
Bishop Easterling: The system.
It's not the kids who are flunking out of school, it is the public education system that insists on one way of measuring what is of worth and limits what learning looks like. It's not folks labeled illegal aliens. Nobody is illegal.
Bishop Easterling: Amen.
Janet: It is a country that has stolen land from Mexico, and as Jim Lawson says, created this plantation capitalism that depends on low wages and workers. It's not the folks in the prison. It's a nation that has less than 5 percent of the world's population and cages more than 25 percent of the world's prisoners. You can go on and on and on, right? It's not 16,000 people a month coming home from being caged. It's congregations who have no open doors, and if they do have an open door, often they have a litmus test about how someone measures success, what success looks like to them without ever understanding what it was like to be caged.
Again, I've been going in since '75 and I always get it wrong. I remember sitting in one of our circles one day, and Frederick, who had been moved from death row to the low side. Somebody says, the prompt is one thing you're grateful for, and he says, "Grass." I'm like, "We have had a two-hour thick discussion and you're going to give thanks for dope?"
Janet: I said, "Would you like to say more?" He says, "Yes." Because when you're in this little cage on death row, and if you're lucky, they let you out for an hour a day and the floor is concrete and the wall on the top is barbed wire and everybody tries to stick their hand out through the wires to touch the grass. You can't do it, but I don't know nobody who doesn’t try.
Bishop Easterling: Who doesn't try.
Janet: Then several weeks later, Devin is on death row and he's moved to the low side, and the officers know more than I know, and they let him roll in the grass. He just laughs and he stuffs it in his mouth and in his pockets. All those years, time to touch the grass, and there it is. I just think I am broken open,, over and over again and called to account by people for whom this story is loud, raucous hope, really, really good news. For me, maybe over and over again, a challenge and an invitation to live more fully.
Bishop Easterling: First of all, I love your terminology. You continue to not call it a cell, which sounds a bit nicer. You keep calling it a cage. You remind us of what it really is, but also this notion that we can learn from the caged, that we can learn from the dispossessed, that we can learn from aspects of society that most of us, if we're honest, feel better than. I love how you talk about, again, turning the academy, if you will, upside down and saying, we can become the students and those that we would often look down our noses at, become the teachers.
Janet: Because I think that's the Gospel, right? One time I was teaching a course on evangelism, and I asked people to spend seven hours in a place where they could listen to. Where they had to have no power, weren't offering any service. They were just listening to people who were struggling to get by day after day. Like you go to a bus station, you can go to a food stamp office. This is an intensive course, and they come in the first class, and I would say that probably 35 percent of the students had completed the assignment. Why? Because church -- it's a lot to do.
I'm so overwhelmed by all the things that church requires of me. Then we read the four Gospels together, and we say, "Who did Jesus talk with? Listen to? Hang out with? Where did he spend most of his time?" The contradiction is clear between what the church spends time on, where we spend time, who we listen to, who we learn with, and who we do theology with. Jesus constantly, story after story, being with folks for whom this is life-giving, to find someone who wants to make the first last and the last first.
Bishop Easterling: This notion of time and where it's important to spend our time makes me think about the story you tell in the book about your trip to Nicaragua and your eyes were opened. The difference between working with a community rather than, again, a disembodied charity to a community. You talk about taking this long trip in a truck and by the time you got there, you all could barely walk because you'd been over such bumpy roads and in this cramped position. You said you all went from house to house. Listen, let me let you tell the rest of that story what it meant to you in terms, over again, of our capitalistic approach of just going and drop something off. Can you tell us about that?
Janet: Sure. We're going to a community that wants to build a well. They have no running water. There's a river, but it's way down the hill, and they have to carry buckets up. We go house to house. It is raining. We're in the mountains and in each house, we sit and we just listen and we drink some more coffee. I am thinking to myself, this is so ineffective. I'm trying to learn from folks in Nicaragua. Eventually people from all the houses stand around the place where the well will be. We're in the rain and we have a lot of silence and a lot of storytelling and a lot of just short, this is what I'm thinking about.
Again, I'm thinking, where's this going? Come on, we got to get things done. We go back down the mountain. Nothing has happened. We don't have a well. There's nothing that got dug and we go back down the mountain. I'm trying to figure out in this truck how to ask the question of, "Really?" We just dragged five, six people up mountain, negotiated with the congress to get through this thing, listened in the rain. As a person from the United States, I know how to get things done. They've said to me when I asked some light version of that, then who would care for the well?
Because if the well belonged to the people from the outside, if we were the ones who decided where to put it, or even gave them the right to decide where to put it, but we built it, who would care for it? We would leave. Again, this is my ongoing conversion, it happens daily. I'm confronted with the ways in which empire thinking occupies me so that I don't even imagine a different approach, even though I think I'm trying to.
I tell the story, too, about the first time I saw base Christian community and I totally missed it. I had studied it, I'd read about it. I hosted folks from base Christian communities, and I still missed when I saw it for the first time. Maybe other people are faster learners, but I find that every single day I need to be held and held accountable by folks for whom having the first last, and the last first, is really good news.
Bishop Easterling: I don't think you're a slow learner at all. I think you open yourself to learning that many in the church don't even see as necessary, don't even see as a part of our discipleship. And again, you call us to such radical discipleship. I was struck the other day by a quote from Miroslav Volf who says, "There's something deeply hypocritical about praying for a problem that you are unwilling to solve."
It seems like a lot of your life's work has been about not just sitting in the comfort of a stained-glass enclosed sanctuary, but actually getting out into the streets, getting your hands dirty, getting your feet embedded in the soil to actually make a difference to help solve some of these problems that are all around us. Why do you think that so many in the church are pacified and satisfied with offering thoughts and prayers to things like gun violence right now? That I would--
Janet: I was with the 7,000 high school and college students yesterday at the Tennessee capital. Was it yesterday? Yes. Again, because I think that doesn't require much from us. Right? We can believe that we are supportive without actually doing anything to change the system. I go back to 1975, when I'm a single mom, had three part-time jobs and two children. And, a community organizing group, largely impoverished women, invited me to testify before the Tennessee legislature on an AFDC bill. They were going to cut aid to families with dependent children.
I remember standing up and saying, "I don't think you should do that, because I don't think you should do that, because I think it's a really bad idea," and then I sat down. The women said to me, "That was so brave that you came today. Thank you, and come to the meeting on Saturday. We have childcare, it'll be great." They, like that little church, loved me into a different place. That's really where I found my voice and my vocation. It's where I understood that I had value and purpose. I think there's a hunger in our congregation for that same thing, although we don't know it.
When we're in the settled places, when we're in the places without much challenge, where we can just slide by and things are comfortable, and our worship and our Bible study and our reading keeps us in this quiet, non-threatening, non-challenging version of faith, then we just continue on that, because there's no reason to disrupt it. I think something in all of us, even when we're in that place, is hungry to find the kind of grace that explodes our imaginations, the kind of grace that transforms us. I love your vision of your conference: "Transformed Lives Transform Lives," absolutely.
I think we know the difference between a softened, cheap grace, as they say, and this loud, raucous, rowdy, shaking up the world, manifesto grace. I think another piece of that, I have one tattoo, and it's dayenu, the Hebrew word for "more than enough," part of the Passover liturgy, which people will say tonight. We'll remember as if we were the folks who were taught in oppression, who were enslaved, just as if we were, because we are. We have been liberated, that we're on this journey, and that we are, just as we are, more than enough, because God has provided more than enough.
It's a theology of abundance instead of scarcity. Many of our churches live in this theology of scarcity. There's not enough, so we've got to hold on to what we got. There's not enough, so it can't be those people, it can only be our people. There's not enough. When we are in this theology of abundance, you just keep dancing at the welcome table, because there's room for everybody. Everybody.
Bishop Easterling: Amen.
Janet: That's the good news.
Bishop Easterling: That is good news.
Janet: Do you know Dorothee Sölle? She's a German theologian. She's dead now, but I met her in Nicaragua. She said, "Every day we have to practice amazement, because the world seeks to numb us, to catch us in amnesia so we don't remember." We practice awe, very concrete awe, spiderweb-holding-raindrops awe.
Bishop Easterling: I love that.
Janet: We have to unlearn and let go, because every day we've got something that's stuck in our heads, our hearts, bodies that we need to unlearn and let go. We have to resist in order to heal, and heal in order to resist, both as individuals and communities. We resist the powers of death so that we can heal, and we heal so that we can resist, so we can remember who we are, so we can live into and out of this invitation from God about the truth about creation and all of it. Sorry, I think I--
Bishop Easterling: No, please don't be sorry. That's beautiful. Again, the imagery of dancing, the invitation to find awe, to be seekers of awe. That is so important because -- You lead me to what I was going to ask you next, as one who then has been in the trenches of this kind of justice and work toward liberation, how do you care for your soul? How do you care for yourself so that you are not overwhelmed or overcome by what you've experienced seeing people in cages, knowing individuals who have been incarcerated on false charges, children in abject poverty. Again, you've worked with Marian Wright Edelman. Talk to me about how you've cared for yourself and your soul as you are so deeply involved in this work.
Janet: I think there's two directions to that. One is, I do things like walking. When I walk, I usually have a mantra of connecting with creation and beauty and body and gratitude and just do it over and over again. Oh, creation and beauty, body still works. I'll be 75 next month.
Bishop Easterling: Amen. Amen.
Janet: Gratitude. Just deep gratitude for life. Walking, connecting with the outdoors, being in the woods by water. All of those things. Listening to music. Also, it's the circles inside the prison and people who have been informally caged. I often talk about-- I go into the prison and I'm usually grumpy because I don't have time, it's going to take forever, there might be a new guard at checkpoint, he is going to have some new rule, the folks won't be able to get out of their cages or -- The circle, blah, blah, blah. I always come out laughing and hopeful.
We have a circle on death row. We have members who have been executed. We have one member who was even served the last meal and then was not executed. One other person who went within six hours. Anyway, we have this circle. We do Thich Nhat Hanh meditation. When we sit in that circle and we offer, let us enjoy our breathing together. The power in that space changes. It shifts.
You can feel this different spirit. To be with people who bet everything on love in a world that has consigned them to death, that has said they are not worthy of life, we've trained 12 mediators on death row. We have a mediation process that's approved by the prison system so that the folks the state has condemned to death are seen as conflict transformers, mediators. They in that belly of the beast. They are who God created them to be. They're all of them. That's just such thick hope. Such fierce faith. I'm taken over and over again.
Bishop Easterling: Well, I was going to ask you where you find hope and you just told me. In the margins, in the places that again most of us don't want to go. In the places where we send those that we have scandalized. In the places that we don't even want to imagine. They're removed from our sight. Those are the places where you just said you find hope. That's amazing.
Janet: I think everyone would. I just did a retreat for Methodist churches in North Carolina and they invited me to do a retreat. I said, "Well, I don't do retreats on my own. I could bring some of my partners with me." I brought Raheem Buford, who went in at 18 and spent 26 years in a cage for an accidental shooting. I took Eric Alexander, who went at 16 and was caged for 11 years. It shifted the conversation. Meaning if you do the Mark, you can do any text but one of the most startling texts for folks is to do the Mark 5 texts. We still call it the Gerasene Demoniac even though he is no longer possessed.
It's the one where the man is freed, liberated after the community has chained him up time and time again. When he breaks free, they rechain him. It's the community that asked Jesus to leave because he's so upsetting. It's the community that's afraid of the man when he's clothed and in his right mind. You do that with someone who is set caged for 26 years, and your hearing will change. Even if you're on the outside.
Bishop Easterling: Amen.
Janet: You just imagine that voice. It will change.
Bishop Easterling: Again, your hope is in actually embodying the Gospel and making it alive for us today.
Janet: I do meditation. Sometimes in meditation, I have images. I had this one image where I was on the beach. I had chains all over me. I was all bent over and this Rastafarian guy comes marching down the beach. He's going pretty fast. He turns and looks at me and says, "Come." I'm like, "Look, I got chains. How can you just leave? I got chains." He continues to go out and then turns around and says, "Let go." I realize I'm holding on to these chains. If I let go, they fall off.
Bishop Easterling: My God.
Janet: That's a permanent one for me. I hold on to things that prevent me from embodying discipleship, that prevent me from living out of faith. You can see here, which is why I need a community that keeps saying to me, "Hey, let go."
Bishop Easterling: “Let go.” Amen. I'd like to close our time together. Again, it has been fascinating.
Janet: Oh no, that's so sad for me.
Bishop Easterling: I know. Me too. Because this has been, again, an enriching and a wonderful conversation, but as they say, all good things must come to an end. I'd like to close our time together the same way you close your book. To those who are listening to this, if you don't have a copy of it, I ask you to try to find a copy of Practicing Resurrection, The Gospel of Mark, and Radical Discipleship. You close the book quoting Dr. Emily Towns, who is herself a social ethicist, theologian, poet, and Dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, who offers this blessing and benediction of hope and freedom.
"Hope reminds us that we cannot accept the death-dealing and life-denying ways in which we have often structured our existences. All who hope in Christ have accepted a gift that will always challenge and always change us. We are set free to serve and free others with full hearts. We can do this." This conversation with you today and your life reminds us, Dr. Wolf, that we can do this. Thank you and God bless you.

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: In your book After Whiteness, you talk about “people groups have always existed, but it was not until the modern colonial moment that those people were forced to think of themselves in the troubled togetherness of race, religion, and nation in a world being stolen, privatized, segmented, segregated, commoditized, and bordered.” Again, that's a lot of damage. That's a lot of damage. I first, though, want to start with this notion of Whiteness. I often teach and preach about bias, and in the work I'm doing on anti-racism, the minute I use that term, Whiteness, there are some folks that I know I've lost.
I've lost them in that moment because they can't get past the thought that I'm just talking about White people demonizing White people. First, help us understand what we mean by the philosophical construct of Whiteness.

Rev. Dr. Willie Jennings: This is always an important question. Everywhere I go, this is always the important pedagogical moment. I have to invite people, whether I'm here in the States or the UK, or Australia, wherever I am, I've got to invite them to think. Here's the problem we are in. The problem we are in is that the racial condition of the Western world that has come upon us is a condition that not all people have felt equally. From all people of color, not everyone individually, but I'm speaking global in a sense, they have entered the reality of a struggle that they're trying to negotiate.

What is that struggle? The struggle between what that racial designation is, whether it's Blackness, Asian-ness, that designation, and trying to understand who they are apart from that designation. That designation just isn't a few words. That designation is a set of stories, a set of practices that all try to capture who they are as people inside of it. Blackness, that is derogatory. Blackness, that is limiting. Blackness, that is constraining and confining and actually denying. All people, whether we're talking about Blackness or something else within the racial condition, have worked daily to separate who they are as people from that utterly complex derogatory vision.
That, in fact, dear Bishop, has little slivers of truth built on the multiple cultural realities of people who have been designated Black. What they're trying to do is that they have to try to pull out those little slivers of truth because it's really a part of them, pull it out of this derogatory thing. They've gone through this work. Some people, especially these days, are trying to say, "Look, I'm not even trying to do that. What I'm going to try to do is completely refashion what this is," and just, "I'm going to try to do a different work with Black." The folks who've been trying to pull it, they've been trying to do a different work with Black.

The point, is that they realize that there's work that has to be done to try to figure out who I am apart from the derogatory that's been placed on me that some people have internalized.I'm doing this work now. As I said earlier, not all people have felt the racial condition with that brutality and that strength. Whiteness, as I like to say, is a way of being in the world and a way of seeing the world at the same time has been presented as wholly positive. For people who have wanted to identify in ways that are wholly positive and wholly compelling, they have allowed the joining of this.

The image of Whiteness, the image of it, the practices of it, the storytelling that goes around it, and they have never found a need or desire to do that negotiation that so many of us do every day. Because it's always been seen as positive, unless somebody like you or somebody like me shows up in the room and says, "Whiteness." Then all of a sudden, because it's always been seen as wholly positive, always been seen as not only not problematic, but something to be achieved, for me to say that this is problematic, that this is deeply, deeply anti-Christian, anti-life, for me to say that, they think I'm talking about them.

Bishop: That's right.

Willie: "You said Whiteness. Are you talking about White people?" No. I'm talking about a way of being that many people, especially many people who identify as White have high inextricably to their way of being in the world, to their very bodies, to their very life. To suggest that, especially as a Christian, that you have to enter into the same process that so many other people have entered into because it's been derogatory, but for you, it's been actually affirming.

Bishop: Affirming, that's right.

Willie: That's for some people-

Bishop: It's been a currency.

Willie: -is so painful and so difficult. For many of them, they are completely unconvinced. "Why is that necessary, Dr. Jennings? Bishop, why is that necessary? Because it's felt so good. Why are you telling me that I need to do--" Many have said to me, and if we look at the history, this is the way it works, “my great-great-grandmother and my great-great-grandfather, when they came to this country from Italy or from Poland or from Ireland, they worked really hard. They worked really hard to make sure that they would erase from us any indication that being White, Anglo-Saxon American is in any way or shape different from who we actually are.”

Bishop: That's right.

Willie: They were proud of the fact. By the time they hit the third generation, we didn't know the tongue of the Old World. We didn't dress like they did in the Old World. We didn't act like they did in the Old World. We didn't carry forth the cultural practices they did in the Old World, except maybe on an occasional day in which we celebrate that.


Willie: For the most part, we are American and we are White. They're proud of the fact that they were able to erase any indication that there's a difference between this and this. Where we stand right now, especially at this moment, I'm so pleased that now at least that the idea of Whiteness is emerging as something that people can actually talk about. It is extremely painful to see because there are so many people who are being manipulated by political operatives. Who thought that there's an incredible power to use the claim that this has to happen as a way to absolutely articulate a threat to people who identify as White.

If I can show you that what people like Jennings and the bishop are saying is a threat to you, then you will vote, you'll follow, you as I say, because you understand that what they're asking you to do is painful. As far as you are concerned, they want to destroy you. When in fact --

Bishop: There it is.

Willie: -- we say over and over, "We're not --"

Bishop: There it is, want to destroy. Not only do they want to draw it out as painful; I think Christian nationalism wants to draw it out as antithetical to God.

Willie: Absolutely.

Bishop: When, in fact, that contorted image and way of being in the world and that construct is what's antithetical to the God that we just talked about a moment ago, when we were talking about the land and all of that. In their mind, at least, what they're selling is this notion of dividing, that is what's antithetical, right?

Willie: That's what makes it such an important moment for Christians in the Western world. As I've said for many years, there are too many Christians that have never gotten the memo about their baptism. They never got the memo. They never got the memo that what died in that water and what came out is precisely the separation of that from this.

Bishop: My God.

Willie: They never got that memo. They never got the memo that what it means for the old self to have been crucified, it's precisely that. They never got the memo that when Jesus spoke to Nicodemus and said, "You must be born again." Nicodemus said, "What? How is that possible?" Jesus says, "What is born of the spirit is spirit." They never got the memo that there was a new reality. Of course, we know why they didn't get the memo, because they got those bad memos that told them that Whiteness is the Gospel embodied. Becoming White is becoming Christian and becoming Christian is becoming White.

When you become a Christian, you actually join this. There are so many people who have never imagined a Christian life apart from whiteness. For them, when we talk about this, their minds, literally cannot envision what we're talking about. I've had people say that to me and I said, "Listen, you're in this church, and there are these African-American and Latinx and Asian Christians right here. Why don't you ask them? Because it's not like you have to go out and try to figure this out by yourself. You're surrounded by Christians who do this every day." While it will be painful, it is certainly not impossible if you listen.

Bishop: If you're willing to listen.

Willie: You're willing to listen. Now, if you're not willing to listen, then what you're going to do is you're going to is that shock jock on the radio who sounds a little bit Christian, you're going to listen to him or her all day long because you think that they're speaking gospel truth. All they're saying to you is, "Forget people like the bishop and Jennings. They want to make you feel bad about being White. You don't have to feel bad about being White. Feel good about being White." [laughs]

Bishop: About that social construct, that created idea, that philosophical idea of Whiteness. Amen. I come back to the question that I started that whole part of our conversation, that's a lot of damage.

Willie: Is a lot of damage.

Bishop: How do we overcome it? How do we overcome this damage that has been a part of our Christology, a part of our theology, a part of all of this for so long? How do we wrest ourselves from it?

Willie: We enter into a different set of practices, and we enter into an enacted, different understanding of what the practices are going to do. I always say to people, we want to think about the racial condition not as a state, but as an arrangement of energy acting on our bodies constantly. You're in a house, and you got the air conditioning on, but it's turned on too high, and all those vents are blowing all this cool air at you in every direction. "How do I get out of this? Because I'm cold all the time." Because, no, we just need to arrange the energy here so that it actually works to bring you into a new state of being.

What we need is a different set of practices that invite us into a different way of being, and that has to happen with, as we said earlier, the multitude. They're with us telling new stories, understanding new stories, living in new ways, new configurations of the neighborhoods and the ways we live, that daily bring us into a different reality of existence. That's what's required because we have to understand what sustains it, we don't want to think about that like it's a wall or a building. We want to think of that as like it's a bunch of hands keeping something in place using energy.

What we want to do is to change the energy, turn it around so that the energy is not turned towards sustaining what would fall apart if it was not being sustained. We turn that injury around so that it starts to build a different reality of being in the world. This means we have to get honest to see how that energy is working. Come back to my analogy. "Where are the vents? Where is this air coming from? Oh, it's coming from over there. Over there. Over there. Oh, I see." Once we start to figure that out, the possibility of change is there.

I always tell my students that because we're Christians, we believe that the creation came out of nothing. That God created out of nothing. Which means that the creation itself was not eternal. That it was not always here. Immovable, unchangeable, impenetrable. We don't believe that. We believe that because it's creation, it's always malleable. It's always changeable. Now, what does that mean? Nothing is permanent except God.

Bishop: Indeed.

Willie: Nothing is the way it has to be. Nothing.

Bishop: Has to be. Amen.

Willie: Now, for so many people because we are fighting against these things for so long, they give the impression that they're permanent, but nothing is permanent. It takes energy to sustain anything. Get a house and you know this.

Bishop: That’s right.

Willie: If you don't put the proper energy into sustaining that thing, it's going to crumble to the ground, and that house may look like it's impenetrable like it's going to be there forever, but it takes a whole lot of people to keep that thing the way it is.

Bishop: That's right.

Willie: When we recognize that nothing has to be the way it is. The question is what energies need to be brought to it to change it -- because it can change, unless it is God, and it is not God.

Bishop: It is not God. Amen.

Willie: It can't change.

Bishop: It is not God. There's a different metaphor that I had been using. I have attributed this to you. I hope I didn't dream it up. You'll correct me right now if I have pulled this out of the ether somewhere. Somewhere, I thought I heard you talking about this notion that for too long when we think about, again, this equality, again, what God intended, that too many of us have been trying to pull a seat up to a misshapen table and that what we really need to do is dismantle the table. Because what good does it do for us to pull ourselves up to a misshapen table?
We'll just now be a part of something that wasn't constructed properly in the beginning anyway, but what we need to do is dismantle and reconstruct that whole table. Now, did I dream that up or have you used that metaphor as well?

Willie: I've used something like that. The way I've talked about it is that we have to have a different vision of what it means to share.

Bishop: There we go.

Willie: To be in a shared project. As I like to say, for so many of us, we have been taught that the goal–in order to sustain the integrity and authenticity of our people–is to know our story, learn our story, carry forward our story, love our people, exhibit that love for people, and announce that love for the people. That's right. But for Christians, that's inadequate. Let me explain what I mean by that. The goal is not that I know my story, remember my story, share my story. The goal is not that I know my people and love my people. The goal is that you do, that you know my story, that you share my story, that you love my people, that you know my people. That instead of me, don't come and take my story, and sell it, but you come alongside me, and you enter my story as one of my people, and I enter your story --

Bishop: Your story.

Willie: -- and that we share one another's story, we share one another's knowledge, we share one another's love for our people, so that what our people become is the multitude.

Bishop: Back to the multitude.

Willie: This is not loss. This is expansion. Now, of course, where there's expansion, some things will fade to the background or some things will come to the foreground, but that's going to happen anyway. The point is that what comes to the foreground is that which sustains life and love. That means it is a different table.

Bishop: A different table, Amen.[laughs]
Willie: Different table. It's a completely different table. It is that coat of Joseph, the coat of many colors. It's that coat. It's the pieces here and there and everywhere, and the coat's a beautiful thing, beautiful things.

Bishop: Amen. Amen.

Willie: Because they are made up of the fragments, the pieces that have been woven together. Here's the problem, my dear sister, we have not learned this because we have not figured out what it means to be together. Let's take that word, to be, to come to a form of existence that is constituted by the togetherness. We haven't come to that yet.

Bishop: See, now, you make me think about bell hooks when she talks about, "In a world without love, the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess." Here we are right back again to this notion of possession. If I don't have love in the agape sense for you, then I will try to appropriate from you or, again, back to this notion of domination over, against, versus walking alongside appreciating your story and you appreciating mine.

Willie: Right. That's exactly right. Then allowing myself to become a perpetual learner --

Bishop: Learner.

Willie: -- and also a teacher, but a learner first. I once had a pastor, and you will certainly get a kick out of this, he was a United Methodist pastor.

Bishop: Oh, no. [laughs]

Willie: I was saying in regards to what we're talking about now, and he raised his hand in class, he was so proud of himself because he thought he just had a question that stumped the old professor. Said, "Professor, I need to understand what you're saying, but my bishop was going to put me in a church." He was very proud of the church he was going to get put in. "The church I was about to be put in, it has at least 15 or 20 different nationalities, ethnic groups who go to that church. Given what you said, which of the stories of those people should I learn?"

Bishop: Wow.

Willie: I said, "All of them."

Bishop: All of them. Amen.

Willie: He said with that in which you've talked about learning languages and so forth. "Which language should I learn? I said, "All of them." He looked at me, and he was about to say that'd be impossible, and then he said, "That would take forever." I said, "Exactly."

Bishop: Exactly.

Willie: Exactly.

Bishop: My God.

Willie: I said, "In the process, what a witness."

Bishop: That's right.

Willie: "What a witness."

Bishop: That's right.

Willie: You and the whole church we're giving the witness that to be a part of this church is to enter the long, beautiful work. Learning the stories, languages, the ways of being of my siblings here. What a witness, what a witness.

Bishop: Amen.

Willie: What would it mean to have children raised in that context where they were literally in the midst of an educational process that involved everybody, in which their own stories were being honored and other stories were being honored right alongside? Not just once a year, "This Sunday we're going to celebrate the Filipino community in this manner.” 

Bishop: And with some food. You're going to wear an outfit.

Willie: These young people see that they are actually being invited to expand who they are. That by the time they are young adults going into the world, when they step into a place, what people say is, "How do you know this? Who thought you that?" They will say, "In my church."

Bishop: My Lord.

Willie: Amen.

Bishop: Wouldn't that be such a different witness --

Willie: Oh my God.

Bishop: -- than the church has right now? My God. I'm glad you situated us in your classroom because that's where I wanted to go next. Again, in your book, After Whiteness, you say that you give a speech every year to your new students, and you say, "This is your home. If anybody tries to make you feel unwelcome, please tell me." This notion of belonging and home, I want to come at it from this vantage point for a second, though. Tyre Nichols was trying to get home. He was trying to get home. Aren't we all on a quest to get home? In this particular point in history, as a brilliant Black man living in these United States of America, does it feel like home to you?

Willie: That's a really good question, my dear sister. I understand home to be the place yet to be created. What I have always been about is to open myself to the Spirit's work of creating a place that others will call me home. That means that the narratives, the stories, and the storytellers that have constituted America as a home, I've always resisted them.

Bishop: All right.

Willie: The reason I resisted them is because that vision of home cannot bring us to life together. We need a vision of home that is built deeply inside the body of Jesus. That vision of home, a vision of home built inside the body of Jesus, allows us to see home, it's a work of redemption. A work of redemption that is at the same time a work of restoration. A work that is creating the new right in the midst of what has been given. This, for me, is, as a theologian, it comes back fundamentally to the recognition that the world is held in the hands of God and that nation-states have the terrible habit of giving the illusion that people are held in their hands.

Bishop: That's right.
Willie: That's a terrible illusion because a nation-state is a particular mapping of a desire on top of what God has actually done and is doing. God is holding the world in God's hands. What we always have to be careful of is imagining that we are sitting in what the nation-state has created rather than what God has created. I've always resisted, the word's “the home of –" [crosstalk]

Bishop: The home. Amen. Amen.

Willie: “-- the home of,” no. 

Bishop: I want to be clear, though, that when you talk about this home that is yet to be constructed, you're not talking about an eschatological next life after a while and by and by. You are talking about in this present reality, reconstructing a home through the body of Christ.

Willie: Absolutely. It means allowing ourselves to, I'm working on this now, enter a reality of dwelling. What it means to dwell. What it means to dwell is to live in a place so that, first, we restore the alignment. What do I mean by that? Restore the alignment, a God that speaks to us and speaks to the land.

Bishop: There we go. Back to the dirt. There we go.

Willie: Then a God speaks to the dirt, and then the God that brings the dirt to speak through us, so that we there with the dirt do what we were created to do, to lead the dirt and praise of God and to create a place that first hears the singing of the dirt. That singing means that we have then a healthy reality of connectivity that will then open up a healthy sense of relationality that now, because the dirt is singing through us, I must see you. Your feet touching the same ground. The historian Calvin Luther Martin, I always quote this wonderful line from his book, The Way of the Human Being.

He says that so many of those missionaries, when they came to the new worlds and they entered on indigenous land, what they did not realize is when they put their feet on that land, they were putting their feet on those people's skin. The dirt is the skin. What we need with the reality of dwelling is that we return to that reality that we are with a place face. Out of that, we start to live a life that is fundamentally together. Togetherness, as I've often tried to say to people who misunderstand when I use the word togetherness, I'm not talking about a Boy Scout camp meeting or Girl Scout camp meeting. It can be a little bit of that.

I'm talking about something far more richer and denser than just sitting around looking at each other. Recognizing that we share a life. Now, the difficulty for us is that the way our lives are configured, it denies fundamentally that sharing of a life. Because of that, our vision of home really is a vision rooted in terrible delusion.

Bishop: Exclusion. You've got me, again, right back in that Scripture, "Can these bones live?" Getting back to that dirt and breathing new life into it. That it has a fresh vision. I was going to ask you, how do we rise from our stuck-ness? Yes, that is a term. How do we rise from our stuckness? You've just described how we do it. You have just described exactly how we need to do it. In that bringing, again, that dirt, that dust, that matter back together and breathing new life into it, then we can all find our place in the body of Christ. Again, there won't be any exclusion. Our LGBTQIA brothers and sisters are a part of that. Those that we call immigrants, as if we're not all wayfarers in this land together. We're all there together. There is no other. Even though we respect each other's stories and difference, there's a unity, right?

Willie: Yes. That's what we want. That's what we want.

Bishop: Beautiful.

Willie: We want a way in which we can actually inhabit God's desire for communion. That's what we're going for. We're going for allowing God's own desire through the spirit of God to move through us. This is how I read the biblical witness, especially the Book of Acts. What God is drawing these people who are hearing of God's son, Jesus, is into God's own desire. That's what Acts 10 is. God shows up to Peter to try to change his desire. Shows up at the height of his hunger. "I want you to desire that," that you have been shaped to not desire. That's what God is -- for so many people, they run past that story.

They run past what's present in the New Testament. They run past that struggle that it's not just God is dropping the wall between you and Gentile, and says, "Stop fighting." That's there, but God is saying so much more, "I want you to desire them." "What? I'm just going to promise I'm not going to kill him, but the desire thing, I ain't down with that God." "No, I want you to desire them." When we come to that Galatian story that Paul tells so powerfully, that Peter was enjoying the company of these Gentiles, having a good time, sharing a meal, and then some brothers came down from Jerusalem and Peter said, "Whoops, let me get back into proper form." "What are you doing, man?"

Bishop: Exactly.

Willie: "What are you doing?" "Doing what I'm supposed to do." "No, you're not." Unfortunately, we have turned that into a very sterile discussion about the law. One important fact: what's at play there is the reformation of desire that this Jewish man, made to desire, not just the Gentile, but the way the Gentile is eating and living. Without eradicating who he is -- but there, that's the struggle.

Bishop: In this commentary, this book of Acts with your commentary, which I have right here, this belief series, and we've touched on a little bit of this, but I'm going to ask a question that I want you to help me understand a bit more. Again, you're emphatic that Jesus does inaugurate a new way of speaking about God and about life, and that Jesus' resurrection means something profound and intimate for the church. And yet you ask, "Could it be that the church weakens its grasp of the resurrection precisely in its timidity to present itself to be touched by the world?" I need you to unpack that for us, for me.

Willie: Absolutely. That it is a salvation of the flesh to join flesh. What that means is that we have not heard the call to intimacy, and then it comes back to the story I just told, that it's not a question of the end game. It's just that we stop, we don't kill each other any more. Though, that's good. I want that. I do want that. "We were enemies. I promise I'm not going to lob no bombs over on your side of the fence, and you don't lob no on my side of the fence. We're cool." That's lovely. With the Gospel, the wall of partition isn't just left, it's taken down.

Bishop: Not just a ceasefire. 

Willie: The wall was taken down. That means there's now going to be intercourse going back and forth across that wall. There's going to be life together. Let's come to that image in Acts 10. That she comes down and God says to Peter, "These animals, you know what they are. I want you to kill them and eat them." Now, as I've said in the commentary, I try to point this out. In our moment, we don't hear the depth of this example. In Peter's day, like in so many other parts of the world, people are identified with their animals, my dear sister. They're identified with their animals. The people of the salmon, the people of the caribou, people of the black bear.
If I see that animal, I immediately know the various peoples that are connected to that animal. This is what I also know, that they eat that animal. That animal is imagined as a part of them. In fact, they're imagined as an animal. If I'm going to eat it knowing that I know, have known nothing about how to kill it, cook it, fix it, guess what I'm going to have to do? I'm going to have to go among those people.

Bishop: And ask, yes.

Willie: Not just ask. They're going to have to take my hands. Touched.

Bishop: All right.

Willie: They’re going to have to lead my hand, touched; move my hand; touched. They're going to show me how to cut it. Touched. They're going to show me how to prepare it. They're going to show me all the rituals around. I'm going to have to bring my body into all those rituals. They're going to have to sometimes say, "No, you're in the wrong position here. Move. Let me move your arms." Then they're going to say, "We're going to taste it now, see if it's prepared." Me, as someone who's been both theologically and aesthetically taught that you don't eat that under any -- you're telling me God saying, "No, you got to eat it now." Because that's what it means to be a part of us.

"I'm going to now put this in your mouth. Taste it. What it tastes like?" "It's a little salty." "It's not quite ready yet. Now, taste it." "That tastes pretty good. I've never tried that before. Wonderful." "You seem to be enjoying it." Yes. So glad that you now understand who we are because you're eating our food. Guess what? Our elders are going to say, 'Once you eat our food and enter our rituals of its preparation, its hunting, its care, you are saying that you wish to be a part of us.'"

Bishop: A part of us. That's right.

Willie: That's what Acts 10 is. It's bringing us into the lives of others through the reality of animality, through the reality of the animal. "I'm a part of these people." That passage that you mentioned that I wrote, it is the church allowing itself to be touched as a part of the church, becoming a learner spanning its life into the life of others, but it's also recognizing the need for the tactile side of being a disciple of the embrace, of the touch, of all that that implies, that I am a part of you. As I was saying in the company, the difficulty for us in the Western world is we have so sexualized.

Bishop: I was just about to say that. Yes. We can't get beyond the perversion of intimacy and touch, to be able to see it in it's sacredness.

Willie: We have so sexualized touch that we don't understand that touch is a wider register of communication than just sexual commodification. The reality of communicating, revelation by touch --

Bishop: That's right.

Willie: -- is completely void of us. This comes back to the reality incarnation. We know that God loves us because God has become incarnate and where we first see the love of God is actually when Mary touches her baby, when Mary washes her baby --

Bishop: My Lord.

Willie: -- when Mary brushes her baby and feeds her baby, brings her baby to the breast, that is the touch of God in being touched.

Bishop: Wow.

Willie: That we have completely lost any--

Bishop: Absolutely. We don't talk about that at all, for many reasons. There is sexism. As to why we don't talk about that deep prominence of Mary and who she is and what she represents in, as you said, that first touch with this incarnate being now. That's powerful. That is powerful. Dr. Jennings, I could talk to you forever. Unfortunately, at some point our time is going to come to a close. Before it does, I need to ask you this question. In light of all that we've just talked about, this United Methodist Church--

Willie: Lord, have mercy.

Bishop: Yes, Lord have mercy. We're in the deep throes of schism. What so many other of our brothers and sisters, our other denominations, have gone through, some see this as a time of failure, and in some ways it is; but I think all denominations, all of our brokenness in that way is a failure. They don't think anything beautiful can come out of this. I see this as a pivotal time in our history if we're willing to perhaps do something new and radical to emerge in a new way. What would you say to The United Methodist Church and this opportunity that we have that we might not lose the moment?

Willie: This is a wonderful question, my dear sister. Like so many of us who love the church, and especially those of us who know the beautiful legacy and history of The United Methodist Church who are in deep sadness over this moment for the church. I do think, as you have pointed out, that this is a marvelous opportunity. If the United Methodist Church can remember that it believes deeply in the workings of the Holy Spirit, that is where we have to return. As you know, the thing about Methodism is, I could tell my students, and I was talking about the Holy Spirit, is that the Holy Spirit always seeks to draw us into the guidance of God.

What the Scriptures do through the power of the Holy Spirit, is that they guide us to the guidance. Got that? They guide us to the guidance of God. My hope is that The United Methodist Church would remember the way it has learned to discern the working of God and to step fully into the working of God. What does that mean? It means that The United Methodist Church understood that God calls women to preach. It looked at the Scripture and allowed the Scripture to lead it to the guidance of God. It didn't ignore the Scripture, but allowed the Scripture to bring it so that it could see what God was doing in the lives of women.

Which then, allowed them to then look back at that text and all those texts that had been interpreted to say, "Women shut up," and realize, "No, that's not how the Scripture is guiding us to the guidance of God." We can see because the Scripture has taught us to see how God is guiding, how God is present, how God is affirming, how God is saying yes. I know because Methodism has this practice. It can do the same with LGBTQIA saints of God. It can see God all over our siblings, God all over them. God's speaking through them, God affirming their lives. God affirming their love and their love being present to us with our love as one love.

Bishop: That's right.

Willie: One love.

Bishop: That's right.

Willie: That what we are seeing is the same of God that is in us. In them, in the way they love one another and in the way they love with us. In their struggles, in their successes and failures, in being obedient that the spirit of God is there. Just like we saw -- “She's called to preach.” "I see problems in her life." So what? "I see problems in his life.” “He's called to preach, too.”

Bishop: Amen.

Willie: They're both called to preach. We can see that.

Bishop: That's right.

Willie: Can I deny what the Spirit is doing? Why? Because we have been taught how to discern the Spirit. The difficulty, the reason we've reached this difficulty, it gets back to where we were talking about a moment ago, because we have lost a full sense of the redemption of the flesh. As not the escape from the flesh, but the redemption of the flesh, the caressing of the flesh because we've lost that sense. So much of Western Christianity treats the body as the first problem.

Bishop: That's right.

Willie: They treat the body as the first problem. I was telling my students just today that we have the inheritors of what I call a criminal anthropology.

Bishop: My God.

Willie: That criminal anthropology means that we have misread the truth that we are sinners. We are sinners, but we are first the creatures of God created by God before we say we're sinners, which is that we're creatures of God. The problem is that we have made sin the bottom floor. It's not the bottom floor. The bottom floor is that we are creatures of God –

Bishop: That's powerful.

Willie: -- and bodies loved by God, those bodies loved by God. Because God loves those bodies, that's why that Romans passage says while we were yet in sin –

Bishop: In sin.

Willie: -- yet, and God died for us, because God touched the bottom, touches the bottom floor. We are creatures, which means the body is not to be treated as a problem –

Bishop: Amen.

Willie: -- undomesticated creature that has to be controlled, that unless it is in a perfectly culturally established vision of a heterosexual relationship, what you have is a wild thing, a wild, dangerous, problematic thing wandering the Earth like a wild dog. "You better get that thing tamed," that very image continues to deny what we honor especially within the genius of Methodism-hat the spirit of God touches the body. I've been around enough Methodists to know that every Methodist knows that the work of the Spirit is a work of election. That is the Spirit touches who the Spirit will, whether the person is ready or not, whether we think they are worthy or not. The Spirit says, "I'm not asking your opinion."

Bishop: Permission.

Willie: "This is not a vote."

Bishop: Yes, that's right.

Willie: "It wasn't a vote on whom I call or more than it's a vote on who I love, nor more it's a vote on who I inhabit and feel and whose life I affirm. This is not a vote." God said, "I choose."

Bishop: Amen.

Willie: That's the reality of Methodism, I think at this moment has to be recalled. You and I start seeing this, we are watching so many Christians coming to the realization as they did in-- it's not to say that it's a subtle matter across the Christian community because it's not, but so many Christians who came to the realization that, "I can't deny that women are called to leadership at church. I can't deny that."

Bishop: Right. That's true.

Willie: "I can't deny that these two women who love each other are blessed by God. I can't deny that God is blessing their life together. I can't deny that they are serious Christians. I cannot deny that God is present.”

Bishop: There was another movement of that in our founding of Methodism, because John Wesley did not deny that African-Americans, Black people could be elected, called, served to speak a word, to be invited to teach and to lead. We have seen that movement of the Spirit through the Word, be the guidance to the guidance to reveal the truth to us. I'll tell you what, it's an amazing day when a brilliant Baptist theologian can crack open what the Methodists need to understand about this seminal moment in time. Beloved, who are listening and watching this, I hope you don't miss this because he has given us what we need to do, what we need to be remembering, what we need to recall in this moment as we move into God's preferred future for who we are. Amen. Amen.

Willie: Bishop, you’re  preaching that. That's what we think.

Bishop: No, you're preaching.
[laughter]

Bishop: I'm just trying to say amen.

Willie: You put your finger right on it. The church is always trying to catch up, keep up. For the Spirit is trying to leave. The Spirit is like, "Come on, come on, come on."

Bishop: That's right. Exactly. "I'm waiting for you, but come on. Come on."

Willie: "Can we take a break, Spirit?" "No, come on, come on, come on."
[laughter] This is the challenge, we have to keep up, which is where the Spirit is trying to lead us.

Bishop: Amen.

Willie: If we will open ourselves to where the Spirit is leading us, we will see the power of God. We will see the power of God in ways that we have not yet seen the power of God move.

Bishop: Amen.

Willie: It requires us to say to ourselves, "I'm going where the spirit is leading." This is not a matter of me trying to control it. It's a matter of me simply watching the unfolding of God's love in what God is doing.

Bishop: Amen.

Willie: When I meet students who come, especially at my institution, they come, and they're not even sure why they're there. [laughs] They think they're there for this reason, and then once they get there, they start to sense that God actually is joining them somewhere else. That was where they thought God had stopped with them. "God, no, no, no. Keep coming." The struggle for them is to recognize that they are being led. That is a very difficult struggle as we see in the book of Acts, the way we know the Spirit, the Spirit is always asking the disciples to do something they would prefer not to do.

Bishop: Not to do. That's exactly right. We know that's when the Spirit has showed up. Because now you are asking me to do something I don't want to do.

Willie: "Can you get somebody else to do that?"
[laughter]

Bishop: Indeed.

Willie: "No, no. I want you to do it. Oh, no, no, not me."

Bishop: That from your commentary and situated in the book of Acts is how I'm going to bring us to a close. In this postscript you say, "If Acts announces a new beginning with God, then I am convinced that we have not fully entered into that newness. That newness requires a new space in which to take hold of our freedomin the Spirit. Maybe our goal should be to form a common life along the lines of Paul waiting for his day before the emperor in a house where the struggle for justice meets radical hospitality and where people from every walk of life wander into a space filled with hope, surprise, and very good news." 

Dr. Jennings, you have brought us very good news today. Thank you so much for your willingness to be in this conversation with me.

Willie: Thank you, Bishop, what a joy to spend this time with you.

Bishop: Amen and amen.

​

[music]
Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: Beloved, welcome to Thursdays at the Table. It is my honor to have as our guest today the Reverend Dr. Willie James Jennings. He is an academic, a systematic theologian, known for his contribution on liberation theologies, cultural identities, and theological anthropology. He graduated from Calvin College, received his Master of Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary, and his PhD in Religion and Ethics from Duke. He's also an ordained Baptist minister and actually served several churches in his tenure.
He's currently an associate professor of Systematic Theology and Africana studies at Yale. He's the author of the award-winning book, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. He also authored After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, which seeks to reimagine theological education. Dr. Jennings has also written a commentary on the Book of Acts for the Belief series. He is married to Joanne, and they have two wonderful daughters, Njeri and Safiya. Welcome to Thursdays at the Table, Dr. Jennings.
Dr. Willie James Jennings: I am so glad to be here with you, Bishop. What a joy. Thank you so much for this invitation.
Bishop: Indeed, the joy is mine. I often share as a part of this, because this whole concept is about, "Who do I want to sit at the table with and have conversation?" As you know, especially in our culture, when you sit at the table and you have a conversation, you're going to get to the whole truth eventually, right? You're just going to lay it all out there. That's the concept behind this. I often have a mug before me that I feel represents the kind of conversation that I hope to have with the invited guest, but also who I deem them to be. What they mean for me in the world. The mug that I chose for our conversation today says, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." A quote by Gandhi. That's how I see you. I see you as embodying the change that you hope to see in the world.
Dr. Jennings: You're too kind. Thank you so much.
Bishop: [laugh] Amen.
Dr. Jennings: That's a beautiful cup.
Bishop: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Speaking of cups, how do you fill your cup? Are you coffee or tea?
Dr. Jennings: In the mornings I'm coffee. Strong, black, nothing in it. Decaf, because at this point in my life, my doctor has told me, "You need to go decaf." Then in the afternoon, I enjoy a cup of Oolong tea, and that's what I'm having right now, a nice cup of Oolong tea.
Bishop: A cup of Oolong tea. All right. Well, I love my both and folks, amen.
Dr. Jennings: Amen.
Bishop: Well, let us then, as I say, get to the deepest things we know. You've described your younger self as being very inquisitive in general, but about scripture in particular. Now, it's been my experience that questions aren't always welcome at church. Were your questions well received?
Dr. Jennings: No, my questions were not. In part because I was such a precocious young man who had learned the fine art of how to speak gently when someone is trying to teach me or preach to me. I often asked both the obvious question but also the difficult question in public, and that's what made it so difficult. I had the habit of remembering what I heard. I would sometimes raise my hand in the Sunday school and then raise my hand in Bible study, and a few times I even tried to raise my hand at the end of the sermon.
I would raise my hand, and I would normally say something like, "Reverend, you said this. Now, this contradicts what you said last week when you said this. Help me understand what's the difference between what you said then and what you're saying now." I didn't realize at the time I'll be asking questions about the intricacies of interpretation. I'll say, "Now, where do you see that in this text?"
Bishop: How amazing. Tell me how old were you when you were having these kinds of conversations?
Dr. Jennings: I started right before my teenage years, and it went right into the heat of my teenage years. It got to the point where the poor pastor, when he saw me coming, you could see the look of dread on his face because I was going to keep asking questions. My mother and my dad and my sisters and brothers, especially my older brothers, they didn't mind me asking questions, but my poor pastor, it got to the point where he pulled my mother to the side and was really wondering about the validity of my salvation.
[laughter]
Bishop: Well, see, it should've been quite to the contrary because, first of all, the fact that you were listening, that you retained the information, even the fact that you continued to be present, although if your household was like my household, we didn't really have a choice as to whether or not we were going to church. Even when I went to college, I would come home on the weekend and my mother would say, "I hope you remember."
Dr. Jennings: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. There's no such word as choice.
Dr. Jennings: I was raised Baptist, but I tell people all the time I was raised a Calvinist. You are going to do this because God has already demanded you do this.
Bishop: Indeed.
Dr. Jennings: "You're preordained to do this." "Yes, ma'am."
Bishop: Why do you think that so many pastors, preachers actually resist questions? I've even heard some go as far as to say, "In some places to ask a question is to be challenging God." Where do you think that ethos came from in the church?
Dr. Jennings: I think it's always had at least two streams that gave it life. The one is just the classic anti-intellectualism. It's always been a part of Christianity in the Western world, that a thinking faith is always imagined as a problematic faith. For many people to ask questions and to think of thinking as a part of one's discipleship is always, for many people in the Western Christian world, been seen as a foreign, an alien element in thinking of faith. You have that strong stream that continues.
The other stream is the sheer vulnerability and the fear that often accompanies so many folks in ministry and the inability to face that fear head-on with the recognition that I don't have to always present myself as knowing everything. That I can actually present myself as a learner, continuing to learn, but that takes a different not only formation but a different way of being in the world in which you invite people into deep thinking as a fundamental part of their living in the faith and their discipleship.
Those two streams meant that I often encountered ministers in the pulpit. When they were approaching a difficult passage of scripture, when they were approaching a difficult topic, you could see them negotiating hard to avoid the difficulties. Working real hard in the way they preached, in the way they circled around and the way they danced around it, they were often afraid to jump into the deep end of it.
In many ways, they were denying God's people, precisely what God's people wanted. The space to actually speak the truth about themselves and about life. That's right there, that text. At the same time, also living inside for so many, as you know, and especially within the Black church tradition who were denied opportunity for study and for education. Part of that negotiation was also recognizing the lack that many ministers had when they climbed into that pulpit that they really did not have the tools that they needed. Some knew that and tried their best to address it. Others knew that and tried their best to conceal it. We couldn't conceal that. You can't conceal what you don't know.
Bishop: No. Eventually, it will come to the fore. It will come to the fore. Then I presume it was that kind of inquisitiveness that actually led you to a formal study of God's word. You are a professor of systematic theology. Now, some of us hear that and not quite sure exactly what that means. Help us understand what systematic theology is all about.
Dr. Jennings: I'm glad to. Systematic theology is the study of what the church thinks. Both specifically and in the practice of thinking as a Christian. Systematic theology considers what has developed in the history of the church's thinking and the practice of thinking. That is, doctrines and ways of thinking that draw on the scripture and on the way other Christians in the past and the present have articulated their life with God. Systematic theology is in fact the study of the thinking of the church. Then the facilitation of more precise thinking, more clarity in the thinking of not only the church but of the individual Christian.
Bishop: Then when we think about what the church thinks, it's doctrine, its way of thinking. When I look at scripture, when I look at the canon from Genesis to Revelation, I can't see anything except liberation. I can't see anything. Of course we start seeing the people before they became known as the Israelites, they're in bondage, but that whole story is about them being drawn out of bondage. We see this tension between bondage, liberation, being oppressed, freedom, being led to the promised land.
When I read scripture, I just can't see anything else. Yet it seems like even in the church, the way that the church has participated in oppression and whatnot that I don't know that the church has always interpreted that as God's intention for the created order. How did we begin to read hierarchies of human worth into God's creation?
Dr. Jennings: That's a wonderful question and I love the way you put that when you read, you can't see anything else but the liberative impulse of God. That God wants to have shaping of the beating of our hearts and our lives. I think that's correct. What that shows is really the way in which we who are Christian came to call this Hebrew Bible, the Bible of the people of Israel, along with a set of loose letters and other kinds of texts written by those early Jewish believers, came to call all of that the Christian Bible. The way we've come to that is because we were introduced to it all through the work of redemption in the life of this Jesus of Nazareth. That's the crucial thing.
We who are Christian we come to this thing called a Bible through the recognition that our lives have been claimed by the God of Israel. Known to us in one of their own Jesus of Nazareth, who we Christians came to understand, not simply as a prophet of God but actually God in the flesh. It's that difference, it's that fundamental difference that then means when we turn to the Bible, we are turning to try and make sense of two crucial matters. One, that this God who has redeemed us, who has shown us the light and the life and who has freed us from bondages both that we knew and bondages that we did not know. What we are coming to realize is that that God is actually the God who created us.
Now we have to understand, "Okay, the gods who my people said created me, actually is not the God who created me, it's the God of Israel." That in of itself is mind-boggling, and so part of the turning is to try to understand, "Okay, who is this God who actually--" It's like finding out who your real daddy is. "Where is from?" That we would hold to that analogy softly because God's not a guy. What's important here is that it is first of all trying to make sense of who this God is. That's why we turn.
Then the second reality that drives us is that we're trying to keep up, catch up with the reality of this redemption that has come. We have to now yield and follow the spirit of God into the life of Jesus. Then follow the life of Jesus. Now, my dear sister bishop, here's the problem for us
Bishop: All right.
Dr. Jennings: Those two tasks are massive, and Christians have always struggled to try to figure out who this God is and what does it means to follow this God-made flesh. In that process, we have and continue to make profound mistakes like creating hierarchies, like creating what we think are visions that capture what this God is about. When in point of fact, they don't capture what this God is about. We continue to make mistakes. Those mistakes should be seen in two ways. Those mistakes on the one hand are the recognition that we needed the salvation.
Bishop: Amen.
Dr. Jennings: Because we were deeply problematic people. On the one it's the recognition, on the other hand it's the recognition that we are always groping to try to create that which gives witness to not only who this God is, but who we are with this God. Hierarchies, patriarchy, forms of social life, ways of thinking that in point of fact don't give witness to a God who gives life, but gives witness to death. We are always caught up in that.
Bishop: That's amazing. Gives witness to death. When we force upon God this notion of domination, this notion of male over against female, of particular flesh coming out of a particular part of the world over against other as witness to death. When, again, in this cannon, every time we see Christ and again you remind me that I come to it through the lens of the redemption of Christ, and I receive that, I understand that, but everything about Christ is about life. Is about being generative, is about restoration. What is it about our human nature that wants to slip back into this rendering, this witness of death, rather than what has been given to us through the one that we claim as our Lord and Savior?
Dr. Jennings: We were created for communion. We were created for life together with God and with one another. The struggle we have is to enter fully into that reality of communion and not fall into isolation and fall into ways of living that make life together an option, not an absolute necessity for me to be human. The challenge we are in the midst of is entering fully into what God is calling us not only to do, but to be. To be those whose very identity is formed in communion. Which means it's an identity that glories in differences joined but not eradicated. It glories in differences joined and not eradicated.
It glories in the multiplicity of the creation that God has bestowed the grace of existence upon. It glories in being one among the many. Me being among the creation and to be together in life together is exactly what God is calling us toward. This in itself, that's not a fantasy, that's not utopia. That is the thing that establishes life. The reality for us is that we struggle, we struggle mightily. This is where the importance of understanding the life of Jesus as a boundary transgressing, a border breaking-
Bishop: That's right.
Dr. Jennings: -reality of life. As I like to say, when Jesus comes Jesus does this thing that is so important for us. Jesus gathers a crowd and that crowd that Jesus gathers, bishop, these are not friends. These are people. I think we've often run past how important the crowd is in the Gospel. If you take away the crowd in the Gospels, you're not going to have the Gospels.
In the Gospel, so the crowd gathers and the crowd is made up of everybody. Friends, enemies, lovers, former lovers, folks who would if you turned your back on them, a knife will come out of somewhere and next thing you know there'd be blood on the ground. You got enemies, you got people who have sworn that if they see that person, they will take him out. People who have been hurt and threatened and here they are. People from every station in life, the rich, the poor, the powerful and the weak. Those who work in the military and those who have felt the military boot on their neck. You have all of them and here they are shoulder to shoulder, leaning forward, straining to hear what this Jesus is saying.
Now, here's the point. Jesus wants it that way. His very life is to gather the people who would prefer never to be near each other. What happens when that crowd shows up? The screaming, the crying, the yelling, "Jesus, please come help me. Jesus over here." People reaching to grab him. The disciples almost at their wits' try to keep his body from being torn to pieces.
There was a great church writer who once said that when we see Jesus in the crowd, here's what we see. We actually see the original, or should I say, the real condition, the real reality of the creator and the creature. What Jesus shows us is the creator in the presence of the creature and the creature in the presence of the creator. If we were in the presence of our creator, we would do exactly what that crowd is doing. "Help me, please. Forget this man next to me who's yelling after you. He is unimportant. Listen to me."
Bishop: "Listen to me. I need help."
Dr. Jennings: "Let me just knock him out quickly so you can hear my voice." This is us. This is the creature and this is how we would act if we were present to God. What this early writer said is that Jesus strips away all other realities to bring us to the crucial reality. God is with us and we are screaming for the help we need.
Now, if we take that as the beginning, then here's what we know. It is out of that relation and that dynamic that Jesus seeks to form a community, a community of people who are border crossing, boundary trespassing.
Bishop: Boundary breaking.
Dr. Jennings: They are together and they bring all those histories of hatred and suspicion and fear and in the presence of Jesus through the Holy Spirit, they are now told, "Work on this. Work on this right now. Because you are here, you're disciples of this Jesus."
Bishop: Amen. Yet in this 21st century, we still gather as segregated bodies on Sunday morning. You talk about who came together and that Christ wanted it that way and yet we have re-segregated and continue, even more so, I think in this year of 2023 than perhaps we had been in some decades past, I see us moving further in the wrong direction. If we're moving away from that, what does it mean for our embodiment then of this creator and being part of this creation that we're going in the opposite direction?
Dr. Jennings: We have, especially in this critical moment-- I'm speaking globally. In this critical moment with the pandemic having done damage to us. We have allowed the fear of the other to drive us further into isolation. What that means is that all the ways in which we have segregated ourselves have now been refreshed. So many people have now, whether they do so because they've surrendered to it, or they do so because the fear has seduced them to thinking that this is the only way, increasing numbers of people have lost faith in the possibility of a new shared form of existence.
Now, the beautiful moment, the beautiful reality that we can start to spy out even inside of this downward turn is that on a planet in peril, more and more people are starting to realize that we do have a shared project in front of us and we're going to survive. We have got to think our way toward each other because it's not going to happen unless we do. We might be able to segregate our lives, but we can't segregate the water.
Bishop: My Lord.
Dr. Jennings: We might be able to segregate our communities, but we can't segregate the air. We can't segregate our food stuffs, and what the pandemic has showed us, we really can't segregate our bodies. I would prefer that we come to this realization not negatively. We come to it positively that to be together is to come into the site of a new possibility of thriving life that we have not yet touched, we have not yet felt.
Bishop: Right. There is a difference to come together out of necessity, to come together out of disaster is one thing, but to come together out of an understanding that this was the intention. This will create beauty. This will create the real Imago Dei. To come together in that way is far more positive and I think loving than to do so out of disaster.
You also focus in a lot of your writing on this notion of possession and how we have misunderstood God's intention for possession. I want to ask you a specific question around that. Do you think indigenous cultures got it more right than some of our theologies when they looked at all of creation as equal and to be revered rather than existing to support humanity's capitalistic thirst?
I'm thinking now about animism and, again, this native American understanding of all of created order, again, having its own purpose and having a sense of equality and how some in the Western world have really almost called that heresy. Talk to us again about that notion of your notion of possession and if some of our indigenous cultures got it more right than we do.
Dr. Jennings: That's a wonderful question and, in fact, what we're talking about is really a way of understanding our life in the world and in places prior to what most historians understand as the modern colonial period or colonial modernity. Here what we're talking about is not so much an indigenous way of understanding possession as opposed to the way Christians have have thought, but really a way that the vast majority of the world understood what it means to live in the world, as opposed to what happens with colonial modernity.
What do I mean by that? I mean by that, that for so many peoples, for millennia, if you ask them “what does possession mean?” If they're standing in a place, living in a place, what does possession mean? What you will hear is that they will articulate their life as being possessed by a place. That this place where we live, these waters, this mountain, these animals, this land, this dirt, this landscape, it not only speaks to us, it speaks through us. When our ancestors die, they join this land. With the land, they speak to us and through us.
Then if you say, "Is this land yours?" In a sense, now that I've said that, you could say that this land is ours, if you understand what I mean, based on what I just said. Now, the way I just described that, that's precisely what we see in the Hebrew Bible. We see a land, the land as God's land, that God gives it life, brought it into being, and that God will speak through the land to the people and then the land will speak through the people as God wills it.
What we find with Israel is that they are in the land, but probably the best way to understand them having the land is to say they are a cosmic renter of the land. The land belongs to God. God owns land, because God is the creator. Here we we're using some clunky language when we say God owns, but let's just stick with it. God owns the land. What God says to the people of Israel is that, "This land that you are on, if you treat the widow or the stranger or the orphan poorly, this land will witness against you." God actually talks about the land as though the land is alive and animate, like the land is another actor. In fact, there's one passage in Leviticus where God says that if you misbehave on the land, the land will vomit you out.
Now let's bring that forward. So many indigenous coaches the world over, what I just said is precisely the way they would talk about if they ever used the word possession. That's what they would talk about. The European colonialist, when he came to the new worlds, wherever we're talking, whether we're talking about the Americas or what we came to call America or Canada, or the Caribbean, wherever we're talking, when they came to those places, they brought a different vision of possession.
For them it was not being possessed by like it was for the indigenous people, the land speaking through us. The land in a sense giving us the logic of our very existence. It was possession of. They came and they said, "No, the way we understand possession is that you own it and we have a specific set of conditions by which you can claim to own the land. If you don't meet those conditions, then that land is considered, the word is terra nullius, empty. That is land that anybody can take because it is not owned. What they forced upon indigenous peoples is that if you are going to be able to keep this land that we are trying to take you out of, you have to accept the way we look at land. You have to stop saying, "The land speaks to us." We don't care about that gibberish.
You have to say, "We own exactly 17,000 acres from here to there. That's our land. We will enter into negotiation with you about how much of the land we will sell to you." All of that it's foreign, strange ways of thinking. Now why is all this so important for us? This gets back to your wonderful question. Why this is so important for us is that if we do not have a sense of the land as alive, an animate, a living reality that is in relation to us and to God, then the vision will have of land is as dirt. Stuff that we can do whatever we want to with it. Change however we want.
We will have the idea that the land basically is like a slave to us. We can do whatever we want and the land has no voice, no say in the matter. Then we can treat the land as a commodity, as property. Then it becomes, we can cut it up, fragment it, put on what we want to, and if there are things that we want to dump on it, we can do it because it's land and it's our land. That is the reality that Christianity helped to create against its own older, more ancient shared vision of the land as alive and living.
We are inside that history. I always tell people we really can't get to the bottom of the ecological catastrophe and how we address it until we come to an actual Christian vision of land as living, as a creature like us that needs to be treated as a co-creature like us. Until we come to that, we will continue to talk about the land in terms of stewardship and how we use it better, how we can manipulate it better, how we share it. It's okay to talk that way at one level, but at the most fundamental level, it still treats the land as a slave.
Bishop: Well, exactly. When I hear you speaking, it makes me think about, as I've heard some other theologians put it, this illegitimate expropriation of our neighbor's land. It still has an illegitimacy to it because it could turn on a dime, and we could get back again to this ownership through conquering, ownership through domination, rather than what I heard you talking about was an ownership through relation. From dust we have come, into dust and dirt we shall return, and speaking through embodying that land, again, rather than through violence and domination.
Dr. Jennings: Right. That's so difficult for us. We have been shaped and this is a part of as I call the pedagogy of the colonial moment. We have been shaped, all of us, that the first time we look out on any horizon, any landscape, any land, the first question we have been habituated to ask is this, "Owns it."
Bishop: That's right.
Dr. Jennings: That's the first question we've been habituated to ask. What we have to understand, that's a marvelous-- and I mean, marvelous in the negative sense, that's a marvelous achievement of creating a demonic vision.
Bishop: Just call it what it is, demonic. I like that. Again, as I told you, at this table, we're going to get to the whole truth, and that's a demonic understanding, but so many would recoil from that use of that term.
Dr. Jennings: Absolutely. They would think, "What's wrong with that?" What's wrong with that is, when you ask that question, it is tantamount to asking, "Who slave is this?"
Bishop: Hmm, my God. My God. Well, in this same vein, because we know that what you've been describing is what was inherent in things like the doctrine of discovery and manifest destiny. That's really what this began to lead to. Now, just a few days ago, the Pope apologized for the doctrine of discovery and how it was used to rationalize Europe's conquests. It's funny because I have on my-- Here's the question, is this remarkable, or is it too little too late? What does it mean that the Pope has now apologized for that, lo these many years later?
Dr. Jennings: Listen, with this Pope, and not his most immediate predecessor, but the Pope before that one, we had those moments in which from the papal office, from his chair, the Pope spoke words that I applaud because they do two things. They acknowledge history of Christian wrongdoing, which is fundamental to the work of repentance that we as Christians always do. We repent because this is what it means to be Christian.
The second thing it does is that it alters a trajectory of thinking that moved out from those original people decisions. That then shaped ways of doing theology, ways of understanding church and ways of understanding the Christian life. By the Pope saying, "As the leader of the church, as Christ's messenger on the earth, I say, we apologize. We repent for what we've done." That is beautiful because it then will say to so many people-- bring this question to them. How has this idea of discovery worked itself down deep into the bones of Christian sensibility, of theological sensibility, of church sensibility?
It has worked itself down into the bones. It's worked itself down into the bones, as I've often said, by creating a situation where the church and Christians have been shaped to see themselves as teachers first and learners second. Because to discover means that you have arrived at a place where you have entered knowing that you should be in charge. Your discovery means that you have positioned yourself to now explain to everyone else that they have been discovered.
Bishop: Right. You thought you had an existence before we got here, but we have now discovered you.
Dr. Jennings: You thought you has existed, but you have now been discovered. Because before you were invisible to everything including God.
Bishop: To everybody.
Dr. Jennings: But I have discovered you. That framework is so deeply embedded. First inside of a certain reality of Christianity, but then it's like a woman pregnant with not just twins but with triplets that gave birth to a reality of Western thought, Western education, that always imagines the rest of the world in need of being taught, and developed. We use that language to this very moment. The developed world. What does that mean?
Bishop: Right.
Dr. Jennings: You tell the whole world outside the West as developing? That very language itself grows out of the doctrine of discovery. Having the Pope say this has been such an important thing. Also, the Pope's recognition that it established a way of engaging people that at this point is counterproductive to the witness of the living God found in Jesus of Nazareth.
Bishop: Amazing. You talk about what it's meant to the church, again, these doctrines, these philosophies, these foundational notions that folks held, it also meant something to the public square, to governments because things like eminent domain. The notion of still being able to move in, to displace, to take because we have the right, we have the superseding need, so even the way that we relate through our governmental entities was affected by things like that. That eminent domain shows up so often in communities of color.
I think about a community that I pastored in Boston. It was a wonderful community. Something like what you talked about, the crowd that gathered around Christ, because it was people of color, but they were a varied ethnicities. There was the most wealthy there, but middle class and below were there. It was taken by eminent domain. They were promised that they were going to be relocated and they would be able to stay together as a community. Of course, that didn't happen because it rarely happens. These promises are made to these communities, but it rarely happens. The same notion of this colonialist idea of the majority being able to come in and displace the minority still exists today out of this same kind of philosophy.
Dr. Jennings: Absolutely. That's discovery, development, and domain are a straight line. What you're naming is the fundamental problem of the idea of terra nullius. That something is empty. Therefore in need of being brought into proper use. Those who have been empowered to bring it to proper use, the way I put it is to bring it to maturity, claim the right. They claim it as a moral right to do what's best for that land as they claim the right to do what's best for those people.
It's precisely that vision that I'm going to bring it to maturity, bring it to where it can be most productive, that so many governments as nations formed understood that that was a fundamental power in their hands. To look out on the world and to ask in terms of the space that is in their domain, what is its best use? Then it would always add for the sake of the common good, for the sake of the people.
We always knew that the crucial part of that sentence, is the first part. What can it be used for? "Oh, I forgot to add. Oh, for the sake of the common good, but let's stick with the first part. That's it." We are deeply inside that. This is a problem I'm thinking a lot about these days. It's the problem of real estate. The problem of a developer class that is primarily hidden across the world.
Bishop: That's right.
Dr. Jennings: It's the problem of an engineering and architectural class that often functions without a moral compass in what they envision, what they create, and what they do. It's those in every sector of society that benefit by having the fundamental decisions about the very structure of our living taken out of the hands of the people, taken out of any kind of democratic process, and made the domain of just a few. I have seen in so many places where decisions that should be for the many are made by the two.
Bishop: That's right.
Dr. Jennings: Not even the few, two. Sometimes the one.
Bishop: The one. That's exactly right.
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Bishop Easterling: Beloved, I am so pleased and excited to welcome to the table today, author, theologian, scholar, and advocate, the Reverend Joel Edward Goza. Joel is currently Professor of Ethics and the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Simmons College in Kentucky. He is the author of the widely acclaimed, America's Unholy Ghosts: The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics. His current book project is tentatively entitled, Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations, Repentance, and Redeeming America. Joel, welcome to the table.
Joel Edward Goza: Bishop, I'm so honored to be with you this afternoon. Thank you for having me.
Bishop Easterling: Excellent. Thank you. Now, in a minute, I'm going to read a couple of reviews that are at the beginning of your book, but before I do that, I have to ask you a couple of really important questions. Coffee or tea?
Joel: Cold coffee.
Bishop Easterling: Cold coffee?
Joel: Yes. I'll cook up my Folgers, put it in the pot, and then I have an apple juice container that's empty, and I will pour it in there, put it in the refrigerator, and that's my coffee for the next of the week. That's how I get going. That's what jump-starts me. My wife thinks I am just awful for doing things like that.
Bishop Easterling: Well, you know, no. Our son, our oldest son drinks cold coffee. He drinks iced coffee. We make a huge pot of coffee at home, and then the rest of us, my husband and our youngest son, we drink our coffee hot, and then he comes by and gets it, puts it over his ice, and that's the end of the coffee.
Joel: Yes. That is the end. Growing up in Houston, Texas, it never made sense to drink something that was hot to me. I was already hot enough at that point.
Bishop Easterling: Understood. Decaf or regular?
Joel: Oh, definitely decaf.
Bishop Easterling: Decaf?
Joel: Definitely decaf.
Bishop Easterling: All right. You're decaf.
Joel: Oh not decaf, caf. See, that's the problem. I don't have enough caffeine in my system right now.
Bishop Easterling: All right. I was going to say, "Wow. One for team decaf," because so far, it's been three to zero for caffeinated on this question. Then cream and sugar or straight up?
Joel: Cream and sweetener; I'm a diabetic. I don't know if that's okay. I can't do the sugar.
Bishop Easterling: Can't do sugar.
Joel: I get some of the sweetener in there every now and then. I can go either way as long as I got the cream.
Bishop Easterling: Understood. One of the things that we joke about is that I often change up my coffee cup. Today's cup says, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." A wonderful quote from Gandhi. That will be our guiding principle today. I think that sums up who you are quite well. You are being the change that you want to see in the world. I'd like to read a couple of the reviews from some other leaders in this field that are in your book.
Ibram X. Kendi says, of America's Unholy Ghosts, "An impressive analysis of some thinkers who inspired America's addiction to racist ideas, an addiction that continues to destroy America. Unholy Ghosts is for anyone daring to be anti-racist, daring to end racial inequity."
J. Alfred Smith says of the book, "Joel Goza introduces us to those respected intellectuals whose ideas became the DNA of White supremacy and American exceptionalism. He carefully and clearly documents his presentation with preciseness and ethical urgency that calls for an awakening from our apathetic slumbers. This book is a must-read."
Then Khalil Gibran Muhammad says, "Joel Goza writes within the faith traditions of the Black Prophetic Church with the passion of a modern-day racial justice apostle, and with the mind of a philosopher unraveling some of the oldest ideas to justify racism and poverty. America's Unholy Ghosts is an urgent offering to its readers who seek exorcism and rebirth for a new nation."
So, who are these unholy ghosts that help to frame this book, and why do we need to have our American DNA exorcised of them?
Joel: Absolutely. The philosophers that I write about are Thomas Hobbes, who is one of the first influential English enlightenment philosophers. John Locke, who is the father of liberalism, and Adam Smith, who is the father of capitalism. One of the things that Dr. King writes about in his first book, he says that one of the things that the church must do right now is we must study the roots of what he refers to as ideational race hate.
Dr. King was convinced, working within the context of the 1950s in the 1960s, that there was something within America's very DNA, something at the very foundation of the project that was still prohibiting his pursuit of the beloved community - 200, 250 years later. That if we are working on top of broken bedrock, until we fix our foundation, if we have fruits that are still poisoned by what is at our roots, until we really analyze what is going on, then our work is always going to fail to have the impact that we are working and desiring to see.
What America's Unholy Ghosts is trying to do, is it's really examining the intellectual infrastructure, the common sense, as maybe Thomas Payne would say, of our society and how it is that the racial nightmare of our nation seems to be repeating itself generation after generation after generation.
This book ended up coming out in 2019, and we are in this season where decades of history are getting compacted into just a month at a time and it's opening a door to really reflect and rethink some of our basic assumptions. These assumptions that we have failed to examine, but must re-examine, if we hope to begin crafting a society that is not defined by racial inequality and division.
Bishop Easterling: Talking about re-examining, in your book, you say, "Only by returning to the original crime scenes where America's ideologies were first crafted, can we begin to understand our ongoing addiction to racist ideas, institutions, and ways of life." Why do you call it an addiction?
Joel: What we try to do through addictions is we try to numb ourselves to the pain. This is the beautiful thing about a narcotic, is that we find ourselves in this unspeakable pain, and the question becomes is, how do you numb yourself? When you are a nation that is wealthy, but we have poverty, we have radical inequalities that are literally destroying people, the question becomes is, how do you numb yourself to the pain? These racist ideas became that narcotic.
Now, narcotics can numb you from the pain, but they can never address the root problems. When you think of racism as this addiction, the question becomes is, how do we numb ourselves from the pain that we witnessed and how do we make sense of this world? There was a way of numbing the pain simply by saying, "If you want to know the problem of America's racial inequalities, simply look at Black people, that the crime is colored, Black. It is because of X, Y, and Z.”
Since the crime is Black, then we can have a certain way of doing our economics, a certain way of doing our churches, a certain way of doing our prison systems that ends up undergirding the racist ideas that have so formed our culture. What America's Unholy Ghosts really seeks to do is it seeks to identify the different type of lies that we have bought into about politics, about the nature of economics, about the nature of justice, about the nature of justice itself, and about religion that provided those numbing effects for us so that as White people, like I'm speaking as a White person, I can live comfortably within the inequalities that I've examined.
Now, my next book really examines some of our foundational assumptions about Black folks in a lot of detail, but on America's Unholy Ghosts side, it is just thinking at a very foundational level, the way that we do government, the way that we do economics, the way that we do justice, the way that we do church, and how this helps feed the system that we find ourselves in.
Bishop Easterling: Of course, you could also add to that list of things that you've examined, you could add medicine because, certainly, the way that medicine has been practiced, the racist ideas about a Black intelligent, even in terms of how much pain a Black person should be able to withstand, so what has been done to the Black body through medicine.
Of course, we could look at the Tuskegee experiments, we could look at what happened to Henrietta Lacks, we could look at the father of our gynecological system and how all of that was researched and practiced upon Black women's bodies throughout slavery, so biology, psychology. We could talk about the foundation of all of those and their racist roots, again, coming out of the enlightenment and how all of those deep thinkers that still frame those traditions today operate among us.
Joel: That is exactly correct to a very scary, scary extent. One of the students of John Locke that I write about is a guy named Thomas Jefferson, who many Americans have heard about. He was famous for writing that all people are equal, but after he writes that all people are equal, he also writes a book that is called Notes on the State of Virginia. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he begins making arguments that Black folks can't feel pain, that they don't have the ability for relational intimacy, that Black men love sex, but they're not good fathers, they are not good husbands.
Now, he is doing this for a particular reason, and the reason that he is doing this is so that when people witness the violence that happens in slavery, they can believe in the myth that Black people can't feel pain. When they witness the agony at the auction block with families being torn apart, with women literally breaking down and weeping, that White folks can pretend and do pretend to not understand the agony that they are witnessing.
Even when you go into modern times, they have done research that shows that when White folks see Black folks in pain, that it literally does not register neurologically on them. They respond in such a way as if they were witnessing something that is non-human going through an experience that doesn't have the depth of human suffering associated with it.
One of the tragedies that we witness when we work in places like in inner-city Baltimore or here in West Louisville or in Houston's Fifth Ward, one of the things I became convinced of is that the destruction that we are witnessing was not in any way by accident, it was not happenstance, that it is instead destruction by design. If that is so, then we find ourselves in a place and moment in time in history where we must begin reimagining our world, reimagining the way that it is designed to do, and with greater urgency, begin fighting for a future that is much more worthy of our children.
Bishop Easterling: When you say that, that it is destruction by design, that is almost too much to comprehend. One wants to almost have a knee-jerk rejection of that because it's almost too much to think about, that the fathers of our country were that insidious with their thinking, and yet, as your work has shown us, as the work of others, that's exactly true.
That's why I think you're telling us that we have to go back and examine these racist roots because some folks will want to ask the question, "Well, why can't we just move forward, agreeing to do better? Why do we need to spend any time on the past? Why can't we just say, we accept that and move forward?" What I think you're telling us is that there are ways that we're not even cognizant of that this is affecting us. When you talk about a particular group of people being in pain and there fails to be a neurological registering of that pain, you're telling us it isn't as easy as simply moving on.
Joel: Absolutely. Part of the truth of the matter is, is that history could've been different. History is always shaped and always contingent on the types of decisions that we are making today. The types of decisions that we are making today is always based on our understanding of history. It's always based on our understanding of history.
One of the things Ella Baker said is that the reason we got to understand this history is not to produce White self-hate, it's actually not to produce shame, it's not to produce even perhaps guilt, even though shame, guilt are going to be very natural reactions, but this thing is about our future and about the future that we want to design together.
Now, when you look at, for instance, an issue such as reparations, I write about reparations. Now, do the past demand reparations? They absolutely do. Part of my fight for reparations is about the future that I want for my children, where we all are able to live together. The only way that we can create a more human, more inclusive future is by addressing the history that has dehumanized our life together.
The folks who have profited from the crimes of the past are most often the ones who want us to forget the past that they have profited from. The reason that that becomes so difficult is that one of the clear ways to repeat the mistakes of the past is to simply forget about them. The only way that a different future for us can be built and the only way different possibilities can emerge is for us to enter into the difficult work of repentance.
Again, we're not talking about repentance-- I'm not talking about wallowing in self-hate, I am not talking about demonizing White folks, I'm not talking about any of that, but I am talking about this process where we create a context where the crimes of the past are no longer allowed to repeat without being checked.
Bishop Easterling: I want to pick up on that in a moment because that's so important, and it's one of the things that I keep repeating and keep trying to drive home. I know there's some resistance to this important work of dismantling racism, anti-racism, understanding White supremacy, that folks resist because they think we are asking them to wallow, like you said, in this hatred, in this shame, in this guilt. Absolutely not. That doesn't benefit any of us. I appreciate you lifting that up. I want to talk about that in a minute.
Before we get too far, I want to, again, continue to have our listeners understand a little bit more about your book because these unholy ghosts, as Khalil said that we need to have exorcized from our DNA, you put them in tension with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. He becomes your conversation partner, if you will, in this book.
As I began thinking about that, I thought to myself, "Now, wait a minute. Is that fair? Is that not a Herculean task [laughs] to place on the shoulders of one man who happens to be a Black man, who was himself harmed by this racist rhetoric and these notions? Isn't that a Herculean task to put that all on his shoulders?" Tell us what you were doing by bringing forth-- you already mentioned beloved community, but tell us a little bit more about why you put them in conversation with Dr. King?
Joel: Well, first of all, it is a Herculean task. I would want to say that there are perhaps two reasons for that move that was intentional. One is that we have fundamentally mis-framed who Martin Luther King Jr. was. As a White kid that grew up right in the time where we began celebrating the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, which I believe the first celebration was about 1986 or so, so I'm about six years old at this point, there was a particular way of framing King that warmed White hearts without ever challenging racial injustices. That's how the King holiday was designed.
In my mind, there is this overlap between the work of Sesame Street and Dr. King. He's got to have a simplistic notion of Dr. King. The more that I lived in the inner city community, the more I actually took time to read Dr. King and what he said, is he moved from this feel-good character to somebody who was an intellectual revolutionary. That when you talk about Galileo, when you talk about Copernicus, when you talk about Einstein and Newton, you are talking about men whose brilliance demanded that we begin seeing the world through their eyes in order to see it truthfully.
That is exactly the type of man King was. That is exactly the radical edge of brilliance that King displayed, is that to see our world and our nation truthfully demands intimacy with the thought works of Dr. Martin Luther King. Otherwise, you're going to miss what our nation has become. He would talk about, for instance, our addiction to three things, the military and violence, to materialism and capitalism, and to racism. We've got to really wrestle with that and not just write it off of a color-blind inclusivity.
The second thing is that Dr. King was more than a man in one specific way, is that he's the embodiment of a church tradition. That I'm using Dr. King to speak to an institution and perhaps in American history, the most anti-racist institution that was ever established. Perhaps the one institution that was made to help people thrive despite a racist world while intentionally working to uproot that racism. It is what I refer to in America's Unholy Ghosts as the prophetic Black church. Now, what people would ask me, what do you mean by the prophetic Black Church in the book? I don't make it clear because I didn't really know, so that was part of it.
Bishop Easterling: All right. That's honest.
Joel: I think I have found a way of talking about it is that it is that church that formed during the times of slavery, often meeting in the woods that instilled a sense of dignity, a sense of hope, the church that eventually inspired the destruction of slavery. It moves from the secret gatherings to very public gatherings during the aging of lynching. It keeps folks going through those persecutions. Where did the political imagination for the Black community come from, from Frederick Douglass and all the other folks? Where did education come from?
The church was the incubator for all of these things within the Black community. There is a mosaic of Black beliefs and Black convictions, but there's no doubt that one of, if not the critical incubator, becomes the Black church. The Black church begins playing these holistic roles where it is not simply about the salvation of souls, but it's nurturing in the care of souls, the nurturing in the care of people, while also fighting for education, while also fighting for public policies, while also shaping public leadership.
For me, King became one of the wonderful voices within that tradition. There's a choir of folks that you could pick from, but I worked with King on that because I felt like he had been so mis-framed and intentionally and racially mis-framed by our nation. I wanted to deal with that radical brilliance that has been in our presence but that has been ignored for far, far too long.
Bishop Easterling: Wow. You touched on so many things that I want to unpack. One of them, if we could stay with this notion of the Black church for a moment though, I also believe that as I read your book and was thinking also about, how is he using this term, the Black church. I've heard other people say that if Christianity is to be saved, it will be saved through the Black church.
What they mean by that is this notion that God is real. God is real. Jesus Christ came for the purpose of giving voice to and centering the marginalized and those who accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. It isn't just about a personal salvation. It is about being present in community and transforming lives and community. Dismantling again, those oppressive systems. Speaking directly to empire, really tearing apart the aspects of empire that privilege a few while oppressing the masses.
The Black church not only preaches that and teaches that, but it calls upon those who are adherence of Black church theology and spirituality to live that. You're not supposed to just show up on Sunday morning to be entertained, but on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday you live and put into practice that which you were inspired by. I also think that's an aspect of that Black church phenomenon that you're talking about.
Joel: Yes. Absolutely. It's also implicitly saying something about White Christianity. For me, as a White person, the term appropriation was hard for me to get my mind around. To understand appropriation, what I had to do is I had to look at a White model in dreadlocks, try to seek to understand, now why is this offensive. Why does this become offensive? What I realized is that this becomes offensive because this model steals African style without standing in solidarity with the African-American struggle. It becomes a way of appropriating the style, but not standing in the struggle.
When I started thinking about what White Christianity is, what it came to really mean for me was that it became an appropriated religion. Now, in what way is it an appropriated religion? It is an appropriated religion in the sense that it took the religion of the enslaved, of the Jews, and began using it by the masters, for the slave masters' purposes.
How does that appropriation happen? That appropriation happens by taking Christianity and losing the prophetic tradition that set it apart, that made it a system of liberation, of freedom, of empowerment. When we talk about Black Christianity, it is not the appropriation of White Christianity, but it is in fact, is taking off the way that enslavers appropriated Christianity and use it within a context much more in keeping of its original intentions.
Bishop Easterling: Interesting. Now, I want to be clear just for our listeners, just for a moment. For me, when we're talking about these things, the Black church, the White church, whiteness, we're talking about constructs. Again, it isn't all White churches, it isn't even all Black churches. Whiteness is a social construct. We're not just pointing to all White people. We are talking about social constructs and the ways that these things have been developed and then utilized within our society.
I just want our listeners to hear that lest they think that somehow we're now reducing this to Black church good, White church bad. That is not what we're talking about. We're talking about, again, structures and systems and how they are utilized either for good or to continue oppression. Let me go back then to, again, what you talked about, why you put King in conversation with these three unholy ghosts that you named, and you talk about what we've done to King.
The word that kept coming to my mind was how we've neutered him. To my mind, we've done the same thing with Christ, with Jesus. We have made Jesus safe. There's no need for us to be confronted by anything because Jesus is so passive, whereas I talk about love a lot, but in a far more radical sense than I think those who've tried to neuter Jesus and/or King would be using that term, "Oh, let's just all love each other. Why can't we all just get along?"
I think we've done that so that we don't have to confront the radical transformation that Christ came, I think to call upon those who had a relationship with God, but certainly also what King was talking about. Again, this notion of celebrating King. Some people who stand in stark contradiction to everything King stood for, can stand up on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and extol his virtues and turn right back around the next day and continue to promote and uplift policies that are hypocrisy, up against what King stood for.
Joel: There's a way of painting Dr. King to when people get enraged at racial justice, that we think that they are the folks who didn't hear King, or that rejected King, or that had simply lost their minds. What are they talking about? If you listen to what Ronald Reagan says about King, obviously those who are the angriest and those who are fighting the hardest to transform our nations are the one out of step with his legacy rather than the ones who are in step with the legacy that King himself was trying to create.
One of the arguments that I will make when we look at a struggle today, such as reparations, is that to reject the call for reparations is not only to reject the radical Black folks fighting for justice today, but it is also to reject the tradition from which they come. Martin Luther King calls for reparations, Douglas, Du Bois, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells. That there is a whole tradition that is pointing within this trajectory.
One of the things I had to realize that became so tough was that our nation never lacked problems to our racial dilemmas, or never lacked solutions to the problems of our racial dilemmas. We simply ignored those who had the solution because they were radical and they were Black. It called everything into question, and we weren't quite ready to rethink our life at the type of deep level that we would need to in order to become a nation that we claim that we have always been.
Bishop Easterling: One more thing I want to parse out of your description of King, you talked about, again, his thought, what he brought to bear on the civil rights struggle as revolutionary. In your book, you talk about the difference between evolution and revolution, and how that which was revolutionary, and which really was attempting to exorcise, again, these unholy ghosts out of our DNA became-- that the movement that was doing that was slowed down by this notion of evolution. Can you talk about what you mean between the difference of evolution and revolution?
Joel: Yes, absolutely. What revolution is saying is that the problem with the game is that the rules have been broken. That the rules themselves create destruction. What evolution tries to do is it tries to keep the same type of ideas and come up with a little bit smaller improvements on the sides.
Now, the problem with the evolutionary type of progress in that paradigm is that it is extending the life of a system that is designed to fail, and that will fundamentally always create two different worlds, even within the same city. A world of the oppressed and broken, and a world of affluents. The question of King was, he said, "Phase one of civil rights movement is for participation in society, and then phase two in the civil rights movement is moving equality from an ideal that we herald to a reality that we experience."
King envisions these radical investments happening into inner city communities, into education, into the social safety net that will empower equality to become the words of Lyndon Johnson, and I'm going to mess them up a little bit, but he says, "We're going to move them from a right to a reality, to where this is something that we are actually going to fight to realize."
What ends up happening is that we stop that revolutionary push that would cause us to question our education system and the way that we fund it, our prison system, our health system, as you had mentioned, our economic system. Instead, we try to create these small incremental changes. We will do integration, and what is integration going to look like? It is not going to be ever putting White people into Black space, but we'll take a couple Black people and allow them into White space, and allow them to get acculturated into that space, and that this is what progress will look like.
While at the same time, really allowing the destructions of the inner city to continue, allowing Black employment to implode because of the refusal to really enforce informative action, allowing Black education to implode by robbing it of the public funds that it needs to thrive. The evolutionary sense of progress just perpetuated broken rules, and the revolutionary work that King was calling us to, was a work that we have the responsibility of picking up today.
Bishop Easterling: One might wonder, was there some event in your life, something that you experienced that really stirred all of this in you? Again, in your book, you talk about birth via bullet. Talk to me about what you meant by that and that experience that you had when you were, as you said, living in a community that was impoverished, that was predominated by people of color, and what experience you had that really removed the scales from your eyes.
Joel: I had mentioned earlier how it is in society, these times of crisis that give us the opportunity to really rethink our world. For me, it was a personal experience at this time of crisis where everything in my world had fallen apart. My career, my love life, my hell, my hopes went kablooie, and it went kablooie in one season. For some reason, it's not one storm, it's all of them hit at the same time. What I ended up finding myself in is in a place where the world was not making sense to me. I was ready to take the risk of really relearning my world from a different perspective.
At the time, I had a friend working at an inner-city school, and he encouraged me and my friends to move into an inner-city community in Houston, Texas. It's in the wider Fifth Ward area. When we did, it really turned my life upside down. One of the things that I would say, and I don't want to offend anybody, but I think you may understand what I mean is that everything that I ever knew about Black people, I learned from Ronald Reagan.
This was the era that I came up with, that placed these racialized caricatures in my mind concerning Black families about Black problems.
Then, once I was in the Fifth Ward area, everything that I believed got called into question, the ways that my faith had harmonized with racism, the way that my political convictions had harmonized with racism, and the way that the very way that I lived my life was complicit with the greatest crimes of our country. It was in that context that I began to be able to see the world through a different lens.
Bishop Easterling: Womanist theology talks about being in community, that one needs to be present with those whose situation one is intending to improve. It isn't good enough for one to send a check or to do a drive-by. Right?
Joel: Right, yes.
Bishop Easterling: That one actually needs to take up some residence. Bryan Stevenson frames it as getting proximate to the pain. Is that what that experience was like for you? Can you talk about how it changed everything you knew of these caricatured people, but that actually being in community allowed you to have a reframed, a deeper understanding?
Joel: Yes. Intimacy does stuff to us. It is those relationships for everybody. Before I moved into the inner city, it was these relationships that had formed me. I am thankful to have a mother and a father who deeply loved me, and that love did something to me. When I moved into the inner city, that love did something to me as well. It started changing the way that I saw the world and it started helping me to make sense with a reality that I had been segregated from. I think that we often fail to appreciate the way that segregation has shaped our lives because what segregation was intentionally designed to do was to make the type of relationships that we need to understand our world virtually impossible to foster.
There was a series of unlikely circumstances, unlikely miracles that happened where I got into a community where I was embraced where I was and given the time to really rethink things, and it became very redemptive for me. As I said, I came into a time of my personal crisis and that's where stuff started to work out, where I had to start working things out. It wouldn't be my only season, so life continues. That was nearly 20 years ago now.
Bishop Easterling: To me, the flip side of this coin is something that I heard you talk about in a video clip that I looked at a little bit, and it was harmonizing scripture with White supremacy. Here in the Baltimore-Washington Conference, we created a study called, Who Are We? The first confession in that study was understanding that we all come to scripture with a particular lens. None of us come as blank slates.
There are things that we learn from our family of origin, from the schools in which we were educated, from the communities in which we grew up, relationships that we had or didn't have, but we all come to scripture with a lens. As I listened to you in harmonizing scripture with White supremacy, you made me think about that. What were you trying to touch on in that phrase, harmonizing scripture with White supremacy?
Joel: When we think about the racialized world that we live in, what we often forget is that for this racialized world to exist, this racialized world had to be accepted by people who considered themselves Christian. What the philosophers that I examine do and what was very important to do was to know what Christianity and scripture was all about before you've ever read scripture.
One of the philosophers that I write about is a perfect example of this, and it is a guy named John Locke. John Locke wanted to say that religion is only about our relationship with Jesus and the salvation of our soul. What Locke would do is he would take these scriptures that seem to be talking about politics and what he would say is, we know that scripture is not talking about politics because Christianity is apolitical.
Now, what was important about that was the only way to think that Christianity was apolitical was to believe that it was before you ever read scripture and then read scripture accordingly. What will always happen, for instance, with the Beatitudes, is that we will talk about the poor in spirit that are blessed because we know that's already where the accent falls, that it's on the spirit, and we will ignore that the poor are blessed.
There is a training that we have all received before we've ever opened up scripture, and too often, rather than allowing scripture to shape our convictions, we shape scripture. Instead of scripture reshaping our convictions, we reshape scripture to fit what we believe beforehand. It is a very violent act of reading.
Bishop Easterling: Again, it takes me right back to again, that notion of that is why Christ then does not become the revolutionary figure, that he ought to be for us and for our world because we've already predetermined everything that it could mean. We read onto it what it's trying to tell us rather than really allowing us to tell us what God intended and what the Holy Spirit intends through that revelation. Peter Gomes talks about The Scandalous Jesus.
I remember the first time a woman that I was in seminary with heard that she was so offended. What do you mean? How can Jesus be scandalous? She was so turned off by that phrase, but what Gomes meant by that was, it was scandalous in terms of the work of our culture, empire everything that our society stands for. It stands the message of Christ then is scandalous if one is trying to identify and to connect it to empires. Again, I hear that in what you're talking about.
Joel: There's someone who's been very, very influential in my life, and that I love to the bone. I refer to Jesus as a Jew nailed to the tree. For him, this was offensive because he had been trained to think of Jesus in the reflection of the White man that he had wanted to be like, and to think that there was this Jew that could tell a White man what to do that was considered a criminal became a very difficult paradigm to embrace.
Bishop Easterling: Indeed. Let me ask you this question. We've talked a lot about the difficulty. We've talked a lot about the unholy ghost. We've talked about there needs to be an exorcism out of the DNA of our society, but then some of our own personal thought, where do you find hope? Where's your hope in this work?
Joel: One of the lines I love is what James Baldwin said, that hope is invented every day. Hope is a craft, hope is a work. What you hope for when you're looking for hope is that you see this crack of the impossible happening, that you see this crack of the impossible happening. Where I find hope is in the reality that everything is contention, that where hope is, is hope is in taking the responsibility and entering the struggle, and knowing that sometimes somehow the impossible does happen. It often happens in the context of impossibility.
When slavery fell, it had never been more entrenched, never more impossible to break than when it shattered. It had been growing more impossible by the day for 200 years at that point, essentially. Segregation, it was impossible to shatter segregation. We knew this couldn't happen, and yet, they killed a little boy named Emmett Till. After they killed that little boy, there was a generation that rose up and said, "No more," and they changed our world.
I am of a generation, for instance, that has never seen any type of policy progress in my lifetime. Born in 1980, we had one bit of positive policy in my life, that was the Healthcare Act. I remember that very distinctly because my wife and I looked at each other and we said, we might be able to have a child now, before we could not have done that.
Then when you looked at the passage, the failure of the Build Back Better, I was convinced, beyond the shadow of a doubt, we're going to watch ourself burn alive. Yet, the impossible happened and things started happening to where we got for the first time, a climate bill that gives hope to the children that I'm raising right now, that come up about my waist. It happened from within an impossible context.
The question of hope is, hope is never far from danger. There is this hope that I have experienced through the Black church tradition that is not optimistic, that it is a hope, as I think the boys would say, that it is often less than hopeful, but it's held onto with a dogged determinism, and through community, we hold onto these fragile hopes as we try to live beautiful lives during dark times. Every now and then, something happens and good things happen. Positive things happen, transformational things happen.
I am holding on to the hope that the children that we are raising now are going to be able to go in a different direction, that before we get into the grave, that we'll be able to make up for some of the crimes that we have already committed against these children, and you try to invent that hope one day at a time. I always think about the stark difference between optimism and hope, but I've seen the impossible happen. I've witnessed it happen. Even as I say, it's not an optimistic hope, it is a hope that has witnessed the impossible.
Bishop Easterling: Amen. For me, and I appreciate everything that you've just said and I resonate with it. For me, those in our society, whatever walk of life, whatever calling, whatever vocation they're in that are willing to engage this work that you talk about, looking back, not trying to shy away from some of these understandings, teachings, foundational principles that infected our world with racism, with sexism, with othering, with bias.
Looking back at those, honestly, not trying to shy away from it, understand it, again, not for guilt, not for wallowing in self-pity, but what were they? What are the vestiges of those that still impact us today? Recognizing that, and then being willing in community together, with one another, to dismantle them and create that brighter future. Pastors and preachers and theologians who aren't afraid to get into their pulpit and talk about the truth of scripture, and the truth of where our society is today, over against what God in Christ intended for us is where I draw a lot of hope.
I want to end with a portion of your book. Again, those who are listening to this, if you have not read this book, I really do commend it to you. It's really important, but these are your words, Joel. "What remains after the exorcism of America's unholy ghosts? Faith, but not a faith reduced to obedience to racist rulers and to knowledge of religious formulas. Hope, but not a hope limited by White fears and what the smallest minds deem possible. Love, but a love that rejects false superiorities by embracing a radical solidarity.
I understand our nation's wounds will not be healed by a faith, hope, and love that fails to transform the societal systems and lifestyles that segregate the American way, but to the extent that faith, hope, and love are insufficient virtues for the needed radical racial revolution, perhaps, they are also equally indispensable." Amen and amen.
Joel: Such an honor to be with you, Bishop. Thank you.
Bishop Easterling: Well, Joel, it's been an honor to be in conversation with you. I pray that you will continue to challenge us, to enlighten us, to inspire us with your work, and I look forward to your next book.
Joel: Well, thank you so much. The pleasure is all mine.
Bishop Easterling: Amen.
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