Connecting our Conversations
Connecting our Conversations is hosted by the Presbytery of Southern New England, a regional governing body in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). This is our space for conversations that push the edges of our faith and help us deepen discipleship.
Connecting our Conversations
Connecting Our Conversations: Unveiling the Pathways to Belonging
Rev. Dr/ Shannan Vance-Ocampo discusses the theology of belonging with Erin Weber-Johnson, lead editor of the transformative new book, Pathways to Belonging.
The editors have generously offered a 40% off code for ordering directly from the publisher’s website with a discount : PATHWAYS
https://wipfandstock.com/9798385203321/pathways-to-belonging/#:~:text=Description,%2D%2Dincluding%20our%20faith%20communities.
PSNE 2025 Summer All-Presbytery Book Study
Schedule and Information:
Our summer book study will begin on Tuesday June 17th and run for five weeks, meeting at 12:30PM for an hour over zoom. After five weeks together in community, the second half of the summer will be spent reflecting and developing your own story of belonging, along with an opportunity to share that journey prayerfully with a spiritual companion.
Register: https://psne.breezechms.com/form/pathtobelonging
Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, hello everyone. This is Shannon Vance Ocampo I use she and her pronouns and I serve as the general presbyter for the Presbytery of Southern New England, and this is Connecting Our Conversations, our podcast space for conversations that push the edges of our faith and help us to deepen discipleship. The Presbytery of Southern New England is a regional governing body in the Presbyterian Church USA. Today's podcast episode is going to be a little bit more didactic than usual, because we are going to be talking about a program in the Presbytery for this summer that is open to everyone, a summer book study, something that we are bringing back after a hiatus of a couple summers, and so please keep your eyes peeled in your email inbox early next week for an email invitation.
Speaker 2:Joining me today is one of the lead editors of the book we're going to be using, which is Pathways to Belonging, and that lead editor is Erin Weber Johnson and hey, and so we're going to be having a conversation about the book and the incredibly rich theme of belonging and what it could mean for us and faith communities today. I think it's going to be a really interesting conversation and I hope the book study will also prove really fruitful for everyone. So today's a very special podcast episode and I am absolutely thrilled to have my colleague Erin joining us. So welcome Erin.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you so much, and thank you for the kind invitation. I'm so excited to talk about all things belonging with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're excited to have you Erin so what. I like to do at the beginning is start with introductions and giving our guests an opportunity to introduce themselves in whatever way makes best sense for them, rather than me making it up about you or whatever I think. Let you introduce yourself, so tell us whatever we need to know about you, erin.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Shannon. I bet whatever you made up about me would have been fantastic.
Speaker 2:Well, I ordained you apparently.
Speaker 1:Well, on that note.
Speaker 1:I am a non-ordained minister who uses she her pronouns. I work at Vandersall Collective I'm a partner there where we are a women-owned, queer-led, faith-utilized consulting base out of New York. However, I live in St Paul, minnesota, with my husband and two beautiful boys who are 15 and 13. I call them St Jude and St Simon. A little bit about me.
Speaker 1:I have spent my entire career in the church, so I found the Episcopal Church. That's where I like to say I found Jesus. I found Jesus in the Episcopal Church in 2003. I was a missionary there with my husband, where he discerned his call to the ordained ministry, went to seminary in New York and then I discerned my call to the non-ordained ministry as a vocation and went to NYU and got a master's in public administration, and then was at Trinity Wall Street for a few years and then at the Episcopal Church Foundation for 10, where I did capital campaigns, annual giving and strategic planning as senior program director, and then, in 2018, joined Mika in this beautiful startup that really reflects our own theological understanding of the way God moves.
Speaker 1:As far as my own ministry, many of you might be wondering well, what does this person have anything to do with belonging, which is a great question. So I'm also very much a writer and this actually is my second volume that I've worked on. The first is called Crisis and Care Meditations on Faith and Philanthropy but very much I root my work in a practical theology that asks questions about what does it mean for us embodied people that we are to embrace a God that loves us not for what we do or for what we produce, but for who we are, as beloved? And at that intersection, then, what does that mean for our own narratives about money, about sustainability, institutions and, in this situation primarily, what does it mean when we have these theological notions about how we feel we belong or don't belong? What are some notions of belonging that have been destructive and what are some new life-giving ways that we can move into in the world?
Speaker 2:So that's a bit about what I bring today, yeah that's great and that tells us a little bit about some of what your professional portfolio of work has been. And you know folks like you in the church help folks like me and many others do the ministry we feel called to, and so it's really important and helpful and I think we're going to be doing a lot more together. I'm really excited. The Presbyterian Episcopal Next Steps Ecumenical Agreement has passed and is in now our Book of Order, the new one that will be printed in about a month and which allows us to do a lot more orderly transfer of clergy and celebrate the sacraments together and do other things.
Speaker 2:It's really exciting because I love the formula of agreement in the Presbyterian Church and our partnerships. But I always think the formula of agreement is too small. So I've liked in my work I've always wanted to stretch it out into other denominations and have found successfully ways around the formula to include the Episcopalians and the Methodists and the American Baptists, because I think those of us who are in the more progressive liberal mainline do better when we do our work together tend to. So I'm excited about the new things with the Episcopalians because we have one church in our Presbytery that's in a joint partnership. They share land and building and space and they have a joint corporation between them and it's really an interesting ministry. So I'm excited about more experiments like that.
Speaker 2:That's been going on about two decades, so really interesting. So I'm going to hold the book up. Oh, my screen is on blur, erin, can you hold the book up? Do you have a copy? Oh, you did, you did it, you got it. There we go Silly, blurry screen and zoom, anyway. So I want to talk about the book and just jump in. So, first of all, this is what's such a hard interview for me to set up, because of course, there's over 20 authors in this book that you know writing all these different chapters, and you and your co-editors have book end, forwards and conclusions to the book, and then or introduction, conclusion Willie James Jenning from Yale writes the book, and then, or introduction and conclusion Willie James Jenning from Yale writes the foreword. And I sort of, when I was reading the book and making notes for today, I was thinking well, I want to like interview everybody and do like 20 interviews, but that's very time consuming. But I was like, oh, so I really like bring it down Right.
Speaker 2:But this idea around thinking about our theology of belonging and what does it mean for us as individuals and then what does it mean for us in community, and it got me thinking about, like, my own sense of belonging and various stages in my life around belonging. So I just, if I can, I just want to start with just a couple things from the forward. Sure James Jennings, because he says a number of really prophetic things about this idea of belonging. He says says you have to decide. You want this meaning belonging. Uh, some things in life are given to us, even pressed upon us family, clan, tribe, nation, story, drama, quest, historical burden, responsibility. Um, that idea of you know we have our biological family and we have our chosen family, right, but some things must be chosen with a depth of commitment that reorders a life and reorganizes desire. Christian belonging is precisely that thing that must be chosen. It costs everything to belong in this new way, but what does it mean to?
Speaker 2:choose Christian belonging. I love that like opening question in here, like what does it mean to choose? And I think about you know, like kids in confirmation class when we talk to them about you know it's their choice whether or not to get confirmed. Their parents baptized. Our theology in the Presbyterian church right is parents baptize the child, and usually when they were babies, so they had no say in it. But now they're of an age where they can begin to choose for themselves whether or not this is the journey they want to be on. And you know, and that's always interesting, when the kids have a different choice potentially than parents or grandparents, it is, but you know. But I also think that that issue of choosing Christian belonging is like all the time right for us. I just I wonder how those words struck you when you first read them, when he wrote them.
Speaker 1:Well, what it reminded me of is that it reminds me of a deep commitment or a vow that you might make one time but that you keep on showing up each day to make. It's really interesting because you have to choose what. I think that what he describes here is you have to choose a particular type of belonging if you want it. There's lots of belonging that's foisted on us, but that could be automatic, but the kind of belonging that is life-giving and liberating is one that's consensual, and I think consent is an important theme that we don't.
Speaker 1:Actually it's a sub theme, but we begin and we end an invitation specifically with that in mind, because belonging itself and we say this quite a bit, you know, it's the air we breathe Like there's plenty now of medical studies that are showing what happens to us physically, not just emotionally and spiritually, which are very, very important too, but what happens to our physical bodies when we are feeling exile, what happens to diasporic communities, physically, and so there's plenty of evidence that goes to show that belonging is necessary for life. We don't exist apart from one another. We can't breathe, we can't breathe without people, places and that form us. But I think, shannon, to that end, like using like breathing as like a metaphor right, like our bodies acknowledge our dependence when we breathe. Right, so in belonging we acknowledge our dependence.
Speaker 1:You know, there's this rugged individualism, this idea that we must be self-sustaining. Right, and yet it's a bit of a lie. Right, because we exist in this enduring state of mutuality, of giving and receiving our breath from others, finding our place amid creative, creaturely existence. Right, like we exhale and we offer life, our sense of self and our hopes. But when we inhale, we acknowledge that we need that breath, we need that belonging, and so I think, because it's a fundamental feature both for individuals and collective people people I think that we crave it, but the way in which we engage in it is vitally important, as there are different facets that distinguish between, I think, christian belonging that is a healthy type of belonging and all other forms that are imitations and all other forms that are imitations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also I love this idea that God is, is an, is an essential and integral part of the equation, right, and? And that, you know, the first thing we see in the Bible, genesis, is all about belonging, god and creation, that the creating of creation, right, the ordering of creation, is all about belonging and all about you know what is our appropriate spot in that, which is not, of course, domination, but is integration, and without healthy creation, we don't breathe, right, we don't breathe, and so it's the most basic and foundational element and it's also everything, right, so there's just it's, it's, it's global and it's universal in that way.
Speaker 1:Well, and I want to say that that is a big part of the why, of why we wrote this book, because there is all of these cascading crises right, I know, I laugh with my business partner Mika, like I'm really tired of saying these are unprecedented times. I'd like some good old, boring precedent of times. It'd be really great. But the cascading crises of the pandemic and economic challenges and, oh, george Floyd, we just remember George Floyd's murder Years, yeah, weekend, that's right, and January 6th, and so the toxic soup of racism and sexism and ableism have led to this very odd moment in our common life. Together and through it all you know, shannon, you know each of us were caring for families and loved ones and discerning what it means to be in community amid changing technological changes and new understandings of neurodiversity. I should say Dr Dustin Bedek and the Reverend Dr Glenn Bell and I.
Speaker 1:What we really came to is that belonging is the question of this generation, but it's also the question of every generation, right?
Speaker 1:It's the question of our ancestors who continue to form us and those that will come later on. And so how we define and articulate it, what are the practices that we transfer, what are the ways that it's both affective reality meaning like where we receive these whiffs of home aligning with where we see it, real, intangible form. This is what we wanted to pay attention to, and realizing that, even though the three editors ourselves do represent some level of diversity, we represent different generations and economic realities certainly, as well as very different theological places in our spectrum of life. Together we recognize that we are one very small piece of the conversation. So that's why we brought so many different authors, who are very, very diverse, to have the conversation, because we recognized that it wasn't just a matter of seeing a bit of, and it wasn't just like this elephant model of oh I see part of the leg and you see the other trunk, but rather there are truths that overlap and then there are truths that exist parallel, and we wanted to have a conversation to flesh those out together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so helpful. I also, you know, love that at the beginning it's named and Dr Jennings again names this and it gets talked about in other essays in the book about this warping of belonging that has happened in Christian theology. And I'm just going to read one other short piece from him. He said too often we have made Christian belonging into a prison that strips us of all ties and burdens us with a string that forms only a ball, ever turning onto itself the bad record of Christian belonging modulated into horrific form with colonial Christianity and the arrival of racial belonging. With racial belonging we entered a white wasteland that we are yet to escape, where belonging became a property and life became a series of enclosures that run from the body to our families, from our peoples to nations, from our labor to our loving.
Speaker 2:That just really, you know, rang out to me in so many ways. You know the five-year anniversary. I can't believe it's been five years since George Floyd was murdered it feels like it was yesterday, right but also that there's just so much going on at all times, a large amount of my time outside of the United States and the global South. I certainly resonate with that idea of a wasteland and property. This missionary adventure, misadventure that we've been on in the global South as Christians in the global North, and the way that we tied that missionary enterprise to the capitalistic and militaristic taking of land and people and then telling them to adopt a theology so that they would belong in the right way with the right kind of church, with the right kind of Jesus. Right, I mean, it's very deep and twisted in those ways.
Speaker 1:Those ways and and it pervades our, our life together now in so deep and hostile ways. What you know? One of the things? So my chapter is one of the first chapters and and it talks about how. So the word belonging actually comes from the 1400s and it was meant only to be used for objects. And it was meant only to be used for objects, so it was supposed to be around situatedness, right, like, oh, set that LaCroix over there on the table, it belongs with the rest of the cans, you know, put the cows in the yard, that's where they belong. Right, that's they didn't. It wasn't supposed to be around people. Yeah, right, it never was to be around people. Right, it never was. But when it did start to include people, when our idea of bodies was that some bodies were objects and I want to name we might focus on one period of time, but we see this all throughout the Hebrew scriptures, we see this throughout all New Testament, right, bodies being used as objects rather than as beloved creatures of God, right, right.
Speaker 1:But what happened is that when we started to use belonging for people, then we started to ask some really hard questions. That to your point and to what Dr Jennings was describing. What are the practices that belong? What do I have to produce to belong? How do I make my measure? What does it mean to be in alignment? And these questions then invade our souls today. So you know, from a worker's point of view, for example, how many hours a week do I have to work in order to feel like I belong here? How do I have to prove my worth at church? How many hours do I have to volunteer? So I feel like people feel like I've got skin in the game and I belong right here. So I feel like people feel like I've got skin in the game and I belong right.
Speaker 1:You hear these things come up in really sneaky ways that show a clear sense of needing to put a commodification to our work. That is false. We were not created to be commodified. We were not created to put a dollar sign as to what our hour is worth. We were not created to belong purely for what our product could be, and I want to say the absence, then, of true belonging.
Speaker 1:It kills our souls, right, like it kills, kills, but it also kills. It functions like a parasite within the core of our being. It. It slowly eats away at what we need to live and thrive and grow and it it renders us unable to extend ourselves to others. Right, we become really careful about uh, you know boundaries are good but we become very careful about. You know, boundaries are good but we become very careful about not being used because we don't trust others. And as our inner life grows thin, we grow less able and willing to extend trust and kindness and attentiveness. That emerges, and I've seen it over and over. We pray less, we become cynical, we become questioning of people's motives and our institutions then become hollow. They become ways in which people prop up just for the hope of sustaining the institution, rather than creating communities of belonging that provide liberation in life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that anxiety cycle, that fear cycle is such a killer to a sense of community and belonging. And this is what I love about preaching and looking at scripture, because you know, the human condition is all over scripture, that's right. Oh, we have still not figured ourselves out, lo, these many years, right, I mean, it's amazing. No, I mean the human condition is everywhere. And I remember the late Peter Gomes talking about the Psalms and he said I always tell people this story, I just loved it, and I'm sure he told it a million times probably. But he had a woman come to him at one of the parishes that he served before he went to Harvard. And this young woman, a mom in her forties, came to see him and she had just been diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer that was going to kill her right Very quickly. And she was just distraught, absolutely distraught, of course, and angry at God, and angry, and said you know, what should I do? What should I do? And he said you know, I always recommend people read the Psalms because every human emotion and condition is in there. Your rage is in there, your grief is in there, your sadness, your joy, everything's in there, right? And so I just I think of that when I preach that, that that story he shared, because I do think the human condition is all over the place in the Bible and it's both the broken human condition you know there's there's plenty examples of, of the brokenness of human condition and slavery, even in the Bible, absolutely all over the place, and uh, and then there's these amazing communities and redemptive stories, and you know it's all in there, right? You know our the blessings and the brokenness, and so I just, I really do think it it can, scripture can take us to those places when we need to really look at what's happening to ourselves, what's happening, you know, with belonging.
Speaker 2:I just want to finish with one other piece from Dr Jennings, and I'm going to put this piece away, but he said he's talking about you know, then, I like how he uses this Christian belonging is this prison, and it takes us as a string that makes a ball and it only turns in on itself, and then he talks about unraveling the ball. He says intimacy forms a project of living together with difference, accepting new ways of being in the world, with new people, and this is ultimately what church, what the gathering is supposed to be the presentation of Jesus's body, extending strings into the lives of all and allowing the lives of all to then extend into the life of God. He fixes that curled up you know ball and unfurls it as he closes here, and I love that image of you know. There's, you know, strings and pieces of us that go out into God and come back to us and go out into community. And we're, you know we're in this interplay between ourselves.
Speaker 1:Another author of the book, diamon Hardis, speaks to this in a beautiful way as well.
Speaker 1:He is what's called a roving listener and has done just a remarkable job of showing us a different way of creating and fostering belonging and community, where by listening and by creating you know there's lots of formal ways to do asset mapping, but the way that he does it is from a place of our community has so many strengths and has so many gifts, and so what do I need to do, what are the questions I need to ask so I can hear the stories of these strengths and gifts and then, as Dr Jennings' metaphorical ball unravels a bit, where we start to see where people are connected, then how do I form new connections?
Speaker 1:Right, he is brilliant at it and the way that he has described it and the volume I really want to highlight to you all, briggs, just a fresh sense of hope for me that we do the work and we don't always see the product of what we do, and that is okay Because, as Patrick Reyes writes in his second chapter or third chapter of the book, sometimes the work we are doing we do for the generations to follow, and that's good too, that's a virtue. Yeah, we're doing something reparative with we do for the generations to follow, and that's good too. That's a. That's a virtue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're doing something reparative with what we do. I also loved I saw you know glimpses of my own story and some of the writing and just the real human. I loved in your essay how you talked about going into this diner and someone said oh, I know you're a Weber, right, you know because of your face. And the Weber face is real, shannon, it's strong, oh my gosh. Well, so years ago we were in Granada, in the south of Spain, which is where my husband's father's side of the family was from before they came to Colombia. Now they came 500 years ago and they were the conquistadors. So you know, bad things, very bad things. Ok, but we were walking in Granada and this woman was walking towards me on the street and she looked. She was the spitting image of my father in law's sister.
Speaker 1:Tia Gabriela and.
Speaker 2:Tia Gabriela. She just passed away in November, so blessings upon her, but she was sort of a little bit of the family terrorist. I have to say Everybody was afraid of Tia Gabriela, like she just was. She was a tough cookie, you know, like she loved everybody. But she was tough.
Speaker 2:And I had this moment of panic on the street because I thought I was like, oh no, I'm in trouble. What did I do? She's coming like she's walking down towards me in the night. And then my next thought was wait a second, shannon, snap out of it. There's no way she, there's no way. She's too elderly, she can't fly across the ocean anymore. But I mean the gene pool is strong, right. I mean it's amazing what happens. And so I, when I was reading that story about Weber face, I thought, oh my gosh, yes I talking about how his preschool and elementary school teachers would tell his mom not to teach him Tagalog, his native language, at home. That happened to us. We raised our daughter bilingual from birth and I had a number of parent-teacher conferences when she was little where they would tell us don't take her home to Columbia for the summer, don't speak Spanish at home with her, she's going to get behind in school.
Speaker 1:Oh no.
Speaker 2:And we would have to tell the teachers, like you know, take a hike in a very nice way and this was at a, this was in a religious education, she was in Catholic school, she was at the lower school where my husband taught at the at the upper school, and so these resonances, like I think people as we read, as I hope, as folks read the book, that they will find resonance and story where there'll be like, oh, I see a little shard of myself in here or a little piece of my story, uh, in these things, because, uh, you know, uh, we're all walking the journey together.
Speaker 1:We are walking the journey and it's a complicated one. So, you know, in my chapter I talk about how odd it felt to feel like, oh, I belonged here and yet I, why? I didn't understand. Why did I? And especially because I tried so hard to belong in other places and was that right? What is the relationship to my body and relationship to are and to live in a way that is one of dignity? Um, without shame or apology? You know another, another, um, there were two authors as well uh, that, uh, describe what it means to be neurodivergent or specifically autistic in the world.
Speaker 1:It was fantastic, yes, Absolutely, and I think you know we talk about neurodivergence as a disability, and here they they describe it as a a beloved gift, one in which, at creation, we were all together, we were all beautifully diverse, and it was only a bit of a colonial mindset perhaps I'll use that, that's my language that said, who's thinking is right and who's thinking is different, right, and so I was really struck by that. And then, oh, we have got a fantastic author who writes about AI. And what is that going to do for our belonging and what?
Speaker 2:is it going to do? That's the question of the day, right.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:I listen to some podcasts on AI and I recommend them to people, but I always say, like, don't listen to this podcast, like you'll scare your pants off, like you're going to get really upset. But I do think it's important to listen to, but it's it's like there's there's positive and negative use to it. Right, I mean, but what's it doing to us?
Speaker 1:So so on the negative, of course you know we're we begin to wonder what is ours that we've created, what are the unique facets of our being that we're transferring and what is being lost in the transfer. I want to say also, we created a bit of a complex conversation in the volume because then we had Mike Dando, who talks about Afro, futurist, speculative design. That's a lot of words. I'm just going to name that was a lot of words, but what it comes down to and how he has used AI positively is he works in primarily communities of color middle schoolers. He brings kids together and says your community has strengths, dream about what your future might look like. Your community has strengths, dream about what your future might look like.
Speaker 1:There are no boundaries and he's he talks about, you know, for communities that are often told what they can't do and what are the limits to what their life together will be, what it means for people to begin dreaming of of, of a world that looks like them, out of words that are their words and mediums that are their mediums. So he utilizes hip hop, he utilizes comic books and there are all sorts of creative work that comes from this and he utilizes AI in a positive way. In that way he tells of one girl who said you know, I can't really imagine a future and by the end had created a superhero, that her superpower was her culture, and all of the stories that came from her culture became what built her up for the world.
Speaker 2:So I want to say. It's complicated, it's all sorts of things. I'm so excited to read this book with others and to hear other people's reactions, and because we all have a belonging story and it's like every day of our lives, right. So I just think it's going to be so interesting. So I have to tell you, erin, halfway through reading the book, I wrote myself a note because I was thinking about the design for this summer book study that we'll read together and we will work ourselves through over five weeks, the five sections June, july.
Speaker 2:And then I was thinking, oh, and I'll have people, you know, do some journaling in August, was my first thought. And then I got halfway through and I was like, oh no, in August I'll give some prompts and people can write about their own story of belonging. And then I get all the way to the end of the book and there's this invitation from you and the conclusion about writing a story. I'm like, oh, great minds think alike. And so the other thing I love is that you know, in your introduction and in the conclusion, you offer invitations in both spaces an invitation as people begin and an invitation as people end the reading part of it, which is not the end, of course, and so I would. I just I wonder if you could reflect for a minute about this interplay between invitations and belonging, because I just think it's really interesting that you start and stop with those two ideas put together.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well, as Dr Jennings said, you have to want this, you have to want this and and and. In that wanting there's the choice, and so we believe that through invitation, one makes the choice. What I want to name, too, is that, for those that are listening, your story, your words, your experience is vital to this conversation. The conversation hasn't just ended when the volume ends. You are important, and so, with that in mind, we offer the invitation, because we want the conversation to keep going.
Speaker 1:We want to find one of the other crises I believe is happening is we don't see a lot of imagination, because, you know, these false notions of belonging strips us of life and strips us of our ability to dream futures together, right. So by sharing vulnerably, by giving of the resonances like you have beautifully embodied already in our time together, by unraveling some of these other notions that we've held and saying what is ours to hold and then what is ours to let go of, we can begin to experience collective vulnerability. That's necessary for shared thriving, for shared loving, because if we exist in a state of mutuality, if we exist in a state of codependence or not codependence, counterdependence that means that I am me only because you are you, and we have to be able to invite each other's conversation in order to be who we are together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my idea for August is that people will get a prompt every week to help them deepen this sort of journaling, writing practice during the month around their own sense of belonging, with some different prompts, and that those who want to can be paired up with someone else to check in with a couple times and to go back and forth and share with each other and hopefully, somebody new that they haven't met before or that they didn't know and, in trust, can share with them, which that's sort of my hope for the second half of the summer is that people have that opportunity and also that it's a summer book study, so people are going to dip in, they're going to dip out because of summer schedules, but that it'll be there for you to come back to and so, yeah, so I was.
Speaker 2:I'm hoping that that way of using that invitation will be fruitful for others. That's what I'm thinking of. Right way of using that invitation will be fruitful for others. That's what I'm thinking of right now as a way to gather voices and also to gather people as they would like to be, to create a structure for conversation.
Speaker 1:I can call her now, reverend Dr Mihi Kim Court has a fantastic chapter where she talks about too many cooks in the kitchen, yes, and what it means to create these spaces of care that look specifically like you, and I would love for the conversations that take place that you are engaging in to be a place that reflects specifically it doesn't reflect necessarily some prescription, and that's something that we really shy away from. In the volume right, we talk about different facets. We've got five that we think sort of guide and create structure, but rather we recognize that, because this is a polyvalent definition, because we exist only in seeing the glass darkly right, we need the reflection of your bodies and your stories in order for us to get to be more mindful of the totality of belonging.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm also. One of my other hopes for this is that this idea of belonging, when you, you know, lead a presbytery, a governing body like ours, it feels really diffuse, very different than you know. My first two calls in ministry I've had four calls now, two in the parish and two in judicatory work and you know, when you're in a congregation the community is tight and much more bound together. And this Presbytery, of course, is three states. It's New England which is hyper individualistic. That's the culture of New England. If you go two towns over or one town over, you've gone to the moon, and so the states are very different, the cultures are very different. We have wide economic disparity in the presbytery. We go from, you know, one percenter communities to immigrant communities that are largely undocumented, to everything in between.
Speaker 2:I always tell people the one kind of community we don't have too much of in this presbytery that I had a lot of in my previous presbytery is rural communities. We don't have a lot of rural churches. We only have one in this presbytery. So we're very urban, suburban but and very beach oriented. You know, the churches kind of string out along the waterways and so holding community and holding belonging with each other in adjudicatory is such a challenge.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, one of my dreams is, as we talk about this book is is to talk about that right Is, talk about what is belonging in that, in that context, because it's such a multi-layered thing to think about belonging, and for all of us. And so what does it mean in a presbytery, what does it mean when we, when we think about connectionalism, being the body of Christ for this place, connected to each other? So I'm, you know, I'm curious about that, and I'm also curious about this idea of interrogating our theology of belonging, which is something that happens in the book as well, as you know, interrogating what it means and interrogating the theologies that got us to where we are and maybe reframing those for where we need to go. I appreciated some of that in the book as well, because there's, I I sense, a lot of interrogation in the book as well, but in a open and invitational kind of a way.
Speaker 1:And I want to name too that the invitation absolutely is to interrogate and it's also to dream of a new way to be, and I want to hold both in tension because I think both are necessary for this moment and are crucial happen In institutions right now.
Speaker 1:We see deconstruction of social systems, we're seeing a lot of deconstruction of relationships as we're deconstructing our own theology around what it means to belong and who to belong to. I think that there's a crucial need for us to imagine what a God that loves us, because we are wonderfully and beautifully made, because we are gods right Like to start naming what we do know together and claiming that as our own is vital practice as well. Glenn Bell does a beautiful job of that in his chapter, I think, of creating sort of a foil for much of the interrogation. But saying this is what I know to be true as well, and this is what we can invite, and let me say it's not a one size fits all situation. Rather, it's very contextually and locally based. But imagining together is going to be a crucial practice, I think, in order for us to begin living as neighbors and that neighborliness that Walter Brueggemann always talks about, about what it means to be in covenant.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's really helpful and I hope that the considerations will be rich for everyone.
Speaker 1:You've talked a little bit about it, but any other hopes and dreams about how this book will get used in the larger church that you all had as you put it together and as you worked with this cadre of writers. So when we, we were very clear when we, the three of us, got together, there's there's all sorts of institutional realities at play, even for the three of us. Right Like Dustin is an academic, and there's always the publish to perish mentality, glenn is nearing the end of his career, and there's always this idea of what does it mean to have a story and to live into your story. And then there's always me as a consultant, and what does that mean? To want to inform the conversation, but more from the margins. And when bringing all those different considerations to bear, one of the things that the three of us were very clear about was that our primary goal, our only goal, was for it to be an active care for the people and communities that we love, and so I hope that it will be used just for that, as an active care. I hope that communities will receive the invitation and that bonds of trust will be built through the conversations that are created. I hope more judicatory bodies like yours will utilize it, but I also hope that individuals read it and start to feel breath in their lungs again, feeling a sense that they can breathe because they're unlocking things that they were holding, that they didn't know they were holding. I hope that it provides a sense of hope for those that are doing the work but are doing so in unimaginable hardships and in ways that it doesn't feel like they'll see the good anytime soon.
Speaker 1:I'm actually reminded this is not related to the book, but it's where I am seeing hope as an active belonging.
Speaker 1:Our dear friend, the Reverend Dr Derek McQueen, is the pastor at St James Presbyterian Church in Harlem and he's absolutely dear to Mika and I, and his church was broken into on the 130th anniversary of their being together and much was stolen and many things were destroyed, and we started a GoFundMe for him not for him for the faith community, started a GoFundMe for him, not for him for the faith community, of which he's very much a part of, and it's been remarkable to see the way in which people have given, many of whom don't know Derek, many of whom maybe only know Mika or I but I think that there was a desire to give as an act of repair and as an act of building something new again, to say we can dream something better together, and so that is where I find a lot of my hope as well. Is that, um, that in so doing this work and talking and and being with one another as God's people, we begin to repair.
Speaker 2:That's really helpful. I uh I appreciate that this Presbytery is beginning those, those practices of repair, um and uh. Some of that has been through the journey we've been on the last six years of we worked with a consultant on anti-racism and developed a team and that's now woven into the life of the Presbytery. We're nowhere near where we need to be on that journey, but we're. We're taking it right, which I think is an act.
Speaker 1:You have to choose this, choose it.
Speaker 2:And then, um, uh, we had our Presbytery meeting a few weeks ago and this rural church I talked about a few minutes ago, um, is going to be closed. Uh, in the fall, their, their ministry life cycle has come to an end and it was a circuitous road that got us here. But the land they have about 22-ish acres and 22 and some change, and the land is going to be gifted to the Nipmuc people, the original tribe in the area, and they're going to develop a community center out of our building. Because, of course, the history of the land grabs in New England in the colonial period was not just kill and murder everybody but move them off the land to faraway places so they can't come back. Well, those faraway places are today Quebec or Wisconsin or Kansas. You know they're not that far now, but they were then. You know it was like the ends of the earth then. And so our partners up in Northern New England wanted to return some land and found everyone was on the other side of the border, that was left. You know the ancestors that were left of that, of that tribe. And so they have people that come back to this land and this territory, this part of Massachusetts, from faraway places to return and to be reconnected to the land, and so they're able to use the space for that and then also use it with those who are currently here and based in Massachusetts. And we heard some really interesting stories about things that elders are teaching younger generations reteaching them how to hunt, reteaching them how to be on land, reteaching language, and so it was a very powerful moment to have a few folks from the tribe join us at the Presbytery meeting and share just a little bit of their story, and we'll have a ceremonies, a series of ceremonies, in the fall to do this, return and are working on that now and have a great team in the Presbytery working on it. And so these are.
Speaker 2:These are things we probably couldn't have imagined a couple of years ago, but that are beginning to happen, and I do think this helps us to belong better and to know where we came from. And again, like you said, belonging is something into the future for generations that we may not yet see and even know. And I asked one of the elders of the church at the meeting. I said how are you feeling about this? How are you doing? Your church is closing? And she said oh, I'm just so excited. I'm excited for a couple months from now, driving down the street and seeing children playing in the fields. That's what I'm excited about. I'm so excited this is happening, and so for her there wasn't this grief of her church closing, but this promise for the future that she was holding on to and shared with me just briefly in a conversation. And so you know, these are the sacred, holy moments in ministry right when we really see belonging taking on very different forms and you can imagine a future, but we probably can't imagine all of it.
Speaker 2:And so that's very, very special stuff, and so I hope we can talk about some of those stories, because we've all probably participated in something that has been reparative in some way. It may not be something as large as that, but it could be something in a relationship or in a community and that helps us to deepen belonging as well, so I'm so grateful for this book and these stories that are here in it.
Speaker 1:I am too. Actually, it's been a great gift to work on on it. You know, um, we it was interesting. It's. What I want to name is the sequel to crisis and care, but but it's set up in the same way as that. It's set out to be meditations or reflections. It's not set out to be like um, a checklist or and, and also we were very careful to say that people are going to have different access points and different theological understandings, and so to try to write to a broad audience of people so that there's no barriers to entry, and so that's something that I think is something that we held throughout, and so I invite everyone who's listening to dive in at wherever you want. The chapters do not necessarily build on one another. You can take each one independently and go at your own journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they're bite-sized. I appreciated that, so I read it in series.
Speaker 2:So, as we close up Erin, we could talk forever and forever, I know, but I like to ask people sort of a closing question about life and work and ministry. There's a podcast I listen to called Outrage and Optimism, which are good words for today, right, and so what's sort of a place in your work that maybe outraged is too strong a word, but where there's struggle, Right, and a place in your work where you see hope? Presbyterians, of course, like to call the struggle depravity, but we won't, we won't go that far today In an ecumenical conversation, we love to talk about our total depravity. So, presbyterians, so, but you know where's the struggle and where's the hope and uh, and I think we're all kind of somewhere in between those two things. But what's it like for you these days?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So um in our clients, what I'm finding is, um In our clients, what I'm finding is, with depravity, with outrage, I would say that in the absence of knowledge, in the absence of knowing what's ahead, in the absence of having clear structure geopolitically, with all the different crises that are happening and, frankly, being exhausted from the pandemic, you know, people aren't always their best selves, and so I think that the thing that makes me unhappy and angry more and more is that lives are treated carelessly, and I see that carelessness in my work.
Speaker 1:A lot People are taken for granted in and throughout church and institutions in ways that are really painful to watch. I think that what brings me hope, what brings me a lot of hope, is that just this morning, mika and I finished a fantastic capital campaign, and it was for a church and adjudicatory body, a camp conference center that had a church on it and a adjudicatory body. It was a very large situation. They didn't think that they could do it and they did it, but in so doing, they repaired many of the disconnects that were taking place in the local community and had an opportunity to reconcile with many of the local leaders there. And so that I think, when people think about raising money, they think about the things that will happen at the end, but the process itself was one that was really quite reparative, and that's what brings me hope today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's always resurrections happening.
Speaker 1:We are an Easter people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much, erin, for being on the podcast for our Presbytery, this podcast connecting our conversations. We talked about a couple of resources today. We're going to link those in the podcast notes, the book, information about the study, all of that. I'm absolutely thrilled that we're going to be delving into this amazing book and series of thought essays and theologies this summer and really excited to see what the Spirit will do for us in this encounter with each other. So thanks, erin, for bringing this to us and thanks for being part of connecting our conversations. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Shannon Thanks.