Shake the Dust

Today, we’re talking with Kai Ngu, co-founder of Church Clarity and a divinity student studying colonial and missionary historical engagement with indigenous religious traditions. We discuss their personal story of how their views changed on sexuality and theology over time, finding empathy and a way forward with family who vehemently reject their new views, what they’re learning about how Christian colonialism treated indigenous notions of gender and spirituality, and a whole lot more.

Mentioned during the episode:

-  Disarming Scripture by Derek Flood

-  The work of J. R. Daniel Kirk

-  Kai’s article on accusation’s of brainwashing

-  Sarahngu.com which has a lot of Kai’s writing and other work in one place

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com.

Hosts

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra.

Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode.

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]

Kai Ngu: I think it is more threatening to them that I claim to take scripture seriously. I claim to be Christian, than if I said I don't even share the same premises you do. And I think it's more threatening for a simple reason, which is that to take us seriously, the present queer Christian seriously, means they can't just keep their faith model intact in just saying you either opt in or you opt out. To incorporate someone who has a different point of view within the body of Christ means that you have to also reevaluate your faith model. That is generally a lot more unsettling than just to say someone has rejected the whole thing altogether.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust: Leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. I'm Jonathan Walton here with Suzie Lahoud and Sy Hoekstra.

Suzie Lahoud: Today we're going to be talking about queerness in church and in colonization. But before we get to that, some quick reminders. If you like what we do on this show, please go to ktfpress.com and become a subscriber. That gets you the weekly newsletter from the three of us and all of the bonus episodes of this show. It also supports our book projects, transcribing this show to keep it accessible, and everything else we do at KTF. Remember, you can always start your subscription off with a free month by going to ktfpress.com/freemonth. Please also follow us on your podcast player, leave us a rating and review and follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at KTF Press. Thank you so much for your support.

Sy Hoekstra: Our guest today is Kai Ngu. Kai was born in, Sarawak, Borneo in Malaysia. When they were 10, their Chinese family moved to the United States. Kai graduated from Columbia University, lives in Brooklyn and attends Yale Divinity School where they're studying colonial and missionary historical engagement with indigenous religious traditions in Southeast Asia. Thank you so much for being here today, Kai.

Kai Ngu: Thank you for having me. I realize my claim to Brooklyn is like slightly more attenuated. I actually now live in New Haven, but I do visit most weekends [Sy laughs]. But at part I’ve been in New York now for 13 years. So

Sy Hoekstra: And right now you're actually in Malaysia [laughs].

Kai Ngu: Yeah, and right now my connection has become even more attenuated. I'm 12 hours ahead in Kuala Lumpur.

Sy Hoekstra: We will get to why you're there in a little bit, but I think we should start off just by talking about your story of how you got from the point where you grew up in a church that was really conservative on the issues of sex and gender, to where you are today. Would you mind giving us the highlights of that story?

Kai Ngu: Yeah. I think Sy you and I knew each other since college and Jonathan same. I think you all probably, so that was about, I went to college 2008 to 2012, so more than a decade ago at this point. I think most people who've known me since then have known that this is a big question I've been thinking about for many years really, since high school. And I think to try to distill the fundamental tension I was grappling with. I grew up as someone who took my faith very seriously. It was not the primary thing in my life, but at the same time I had the sense that something was not quite right in the ways in which the way scripture and God was portrayed to me with regards to queer people.

That wasn't just about my particular experiences with being in quote-unquote” queer relationships”. But I think it was also just kind of observing queer communities and life within queer communities and seeing that in general, I think, that when people have come out or embrace themselves in some way or accept themselves in some way, there tends to be more of the fruits of the spirit, arguably. More joy, more peace more patience in some cases. Some of the most saint like people, I would argue, I've known are people who are queer, who have had to come to forgive their parents and go through the whole journey. It seemed to me that, I think for me initially it was, I was grappling with sexuality, the experience of falling in love with someone. Being loved by someone else taught me a lot about the gospel, taught me a lot about grace and was like a motivating thing to try to be a better person, arguably, sanctification. So it just kind of felt like, well, I think throughout the whole time I was like, okay, but scripture seems to indicate there's something like special about the male-female union that somehow I'm missing in this current thing. What is this magic sauce that I don't quite get? And if you're Catholic, I think it's clear what the answer is, but if you're not, you don't quite take the whole sex must be for reproduction angle. It's just like, you're just left with a lot of questions.

Like complementarianism. Like men are somehow this, women are this and somehow they've formed to create this special thing that other people can't. The argument starts to break down. I basically felt by the time I left college, that my theology felt like a sieve, as in like a metal sieve we used to filter out things, in the sense that it felt like it was very internally consistent, that there was kind of a metallic logic to it, but it was very porous. It couldn't hold the weight of the experiences I was having, experiences I saw in the lives of my queer friends. I think also more to the point, it always felt to me that the heart of the gospel is that we are unconditionally loved without merit in some ways, and that applies across the board.

There’s nothing you can do to earn or dis-earn it. It's a both very humbling thing and an empowering thing at the same time. I think I always struggle to figure out how this fit with the heart of the gospel. How an anti-LGBT stance fit within that. Often at times, I feel like queer people like myself are called to explain our position, but sometimes I feel like it really should be the reverse. People should have to explain why exactly that position fits within what at least I take to be the heart of this whole gospel Jesus thing. For me, the key part of kind of what broke things open theologically for me, in terms of being like, “Oh, I can see how I can take scripture seriously and my faith tradition seriously, and also possibly embrace my queerness,” was just realizing that scripture itself presented potentially more liberatory paradigms to interpret what we consider as scripture that we applied to it.

I know Sy and Jonathan, you have read some of the blog posts I've written on this, but looking at the decision to incorporate the gentiles into the Jewish covenant around the time of the early church, I think I would argue, and some of the texts I would point people to would be Disarming Violence [Kai meant to say Disarming Scripture], as well as some blog posts by this author named JRD Kirk or Daniel Kirk, who wrote a bunch about this. Those are the articles I found most convincing, which is that there’s precedent in scripture to seriously evaluate what you think to be the core tenets of your ethical moral code, your identity code, if you feel like the Holy Spirit is moving in ways in the lives of people that you did not expect.

So you notice with the early church, a eunuch is baptized really the first time a gentile is baptized, and the Centurion is baptized. Only after that does the early church be like, okay, we need to consult the scriptures and figure out how this fits in. They didn't pause and say, “We can’t baptize you, we need to do a little scripture study or counsel, and then we can go back and figure out who we can baptize.” It was like all right, clearly, God's asking you to be baptized, so we're going to do that and we're going to figure out how to make it work kind of post facto. I feel that kind of epistemological framework, I think, honestly, I think should be like what we apply, not just with queer stuff, but just in general to take the movement of the spirit as seriously, or as a way to lead how we then interpret scripture, because the truth is none of us interpret scripture from a neutral perspective.

So if you're going to pick a perspective, I think it would be a good one to pick  —where a perspective in which you are open to what I think are where the fruits of the spirit are being evidentiary — That word — are being revealed, so to speak.

Sy Hoekstra: I appreciate a couple things about that. One, is your, the tool that you've come to see is important, which is actually using your experience, not as something to just be bludgeoned out of existence by scripture and doctrine, but as a tool, as part of the — acknowledging your interpretation comes from those experiences and saying, “Okay, what can I learn from the world as I experience it?” Which is in some ways, actually, a very traditional way of looking at scripture, but it’s something that I think especially in the churches that you and I, and that a lot of probably our audience grew up in have done away with.

Kai Ngu: Yep. The Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

Sy Hoekstra: The Wesleyan Quadrilateral? I don't know this one [laughs].

Kai Ngu: Oh, I don’t know. If your Methodist, I think you use it a bit more. It's like scripture, tradition, reason, experience are the four corners.

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, oh right, exactly. I have heard that before. I didn't know that's what it was called. The only quadrilateral I of course have ever heard of, is the evangelical one. I forget the guy's name [laughs]. The other thing though that you said very briefly, was that you spent some time trying to work out how to fit your experience into traditional theology. I just want to highlight that that was an understatement. You spent years [laughter] trying to study hard in a lot of different places. I do want to underline the fact that… this doesn't necessarily have to be everyone's path, but you in particular were extremely thoroughgoing about your attempt to understand things as they were taught to you. I don't know. I think that's important to your story, not necessarily everybody's but yeah.

Jonathan Walton: Three things, I want to say, thank you so much for being here. Second thing is, I agree. I just want to reiterate with Sy. I think something that really bothers me about conversations like this is the assumption, is that the person that you disagree with has not done the work, or there's like, we come into a lot of conversations thinking the other person must not be as smart or as learned or as studied as much as I have. I just think that's a fundamentally unhelpful way of engaging whatever the conversation is. I feel like if there was a way to break that posture in the church, it would be really helpful. The third thing is when you're, I think, I don't remember which article it was, but your work around context and engaging with the experience stuff, is I think super important and super helpful.

So you wrote an article a few months ago back on people who disagree on theology or politics accusing each other of being brainwashed. You wrote about coming to grips with the idea that our intellectual views are partially shaped by the people or institutions around us and applying that realization to your disagreements like with your parents over your queerness. So we talk about context and stuff in this big picture, but then you made it super personal in how you did that with your parents. Could you walk us through your thoughts on that? I know that's a big question with a lot of pins, but I think it'd be really helpful if you could.

Kai Ngu: Yeah, I'd be happy to, and thanks for giving me some credit over those 10 years. Although I feel like I really envy people for whom it's just like a gut intuition: Obviously God created me, I'm queer. God's good with me. Truly, that would be…

Sy Hoekstra: That would've been easier, yes.

Kai Ngu: That ability to tap into your intuition and the Holy Spirit, I think in some ways, my process, although it is what it is, I think reflects sometimes my, a sort of habit I’ve developed about needing to kind of write a long FAQ, a long treatise before I feel I can trust my judgment and gut. Anyhow, some bad consequences of that. The article I wrote, so shortly after I kind of came to the conclusion that actually there were some possibilities for scripture to embrace queer people fully into the church, meaning they can get married, be ordained, et cetera. I decided, okay, next step is coming out to my parents and that kind of commenced. That was about 2016, right around Trump's election. It commenced like a very bitter theological war.

Was like really get into like 15th century, well, just warfare in Europe. Bloody, almost verbally bloody battles of Genesis one, Genesis two, the whole shebang. Kind of in the settling of the dust over that, I started reflecting more about what was the most hurtful things that were said to me and why they felt hurtful and also doing some critical introspection. I think for me, the most hurtful things at that point in time that were said were accusations that really I was just kind of giving into my desire, so to speak, that this was not something that I had thought a lot about and done a lot of research as you all indicated, but that was just me giving into maybe peer pressure, because I moved to Brooklyn, or going to a progressive church.

I went and still am a part of Forefront Brooklyn Church. It’s a great progressive, non-denominational church. I think that there was a way in which I felt that they weren't taking the weight of my quote-unquote “rational argument” seriously, and they were accusing me of being brainwashed by liberal peers, by Columbia University, what have you. I started thinking about why that was harmful to me, but also firstly, why they said that. I think, and I started noticing, like I said, this is around Trump election, a lot of people generally accusing the other political side of being brainwashed, too much Fox News or too much MSNBC or social media’s creating fake news vortexes.

So it just felt like my micro dynamic with my parents were being played out macro-ly, on a national scale. Really, also my parents voted for Trump, so it's like it brings a whole other level to it. I can get into that some other time, but actually I think I met with you Jonathan, the day after the election, I think. We got lunch. So that brings things full circle in some way. I realize that part of the charge of brainwashing is a couple of things. Obviously, it makes it easier not to interrogate your own reasons or maybe you also aren't the most rational person, not just like the other side hasn't thought through things or hasn't done the work as you were saying, Jonathan.

But I think particularly when it happens to someone very close to you, like a family member or loved one, and they radically change in ways that, because I had a much more conservative position, radically change. I think the accusation of brainwashing also helps cope with grief. It’s a way of saying, clinging onto the person you thought you knew, and saying, “That person I thought I knew is still there.” Some outside third-party, foreign influence has come in and changed the daughter I loved or something like that. It's a way of externalizing blame. I've been reflecting on that, I was like, okay, I could see how this is part of the grieving process in a way. But if I want them to take my arguments seriously, I have to also reply how I want them to treat me to how I treat them.

Or maybe I need to step back and think about why it is that that charge stings. I think the truth is, if I'm really honest about it, is that, although I have some good arguments for why I have my position and stuff like that, there are also arguably non-rational factors that led to my set of conclusions and set of commitments that have to do with experiences, as I've mentioned. I think a very pivotal experience for me was going to, in 2016, around January, a queer Christian conference called QCF, or GCN at the time, where I was with like 800 to 900 LGBTQ Christians who spoke the same evangelical language I grew up with, like a lot of Jesus, a lot of Bible, people speaking tongues, raising their hands. Pretty multiracial, pretty diverse in their worship style.

And to see that for the most part, a lot of them were pretty open and affirming of their sexuality or gender was very powerful to me. That did not introduce any new arguments so to speak, but that shaped who I was. So I think that article was kind of my way of both acknowledging that at the end of the day, we are not fully rational beings. In fact, we are mostly I think not rational, and that we're shaped with all these experiences. And I think the sooner we can concede that on both sides, that there are biases that everyone's incentivized and motivated or biased in some way or another, maybe the better we can have more compassionate conversations. So I wrote the article really for myself and my parents, but hopefully it's relevant for other people as well.

Sy Hoekstra: I think the way you ended it was that you have made some attempt with your parents to explicitly make that some of the basis of your conversation, is that right, that whole framework that you just presented?

Kai Ngu: I think for what it is, we have gotten to a point where we've stopped arguing about theology and we just tried to deal. I think they've moved from denial to acceptance around the fact that I'm probably not going to change anytime soon. So if they want to have a relationship with me, the reality is they have to also accept people I date or other things about me. I think that that way of recognizing the person before you and not the person you once knew — that was honestly not super honest in some ways and not super authentic — and dealing with the reality in front of you is ultimately the pivot they I think have made for the most part.

Suzie Lahoud: Kai, just to pivot a little bit, you were a co-founder of Church Clarity. Could you talk to us about what inspired that organization and what it's all about?

Kai Ngu: Yeah. So the team of us got together, a guy named George, and Tim, early in the summer of, I want to say 2018, mostly in response to progressively packaged, but ultimately misleading hipster churches. The kind of churches that would have pastors with skinny jeans and tattoos and flashy lights and a very contemporary style of service that seemed to indicate like Justin Bieber goes there, like celebs, indicate that they’re sort of like “with it.” I think with that, people assume that these churches are also with it in other ways, other social morals and norms, particularly around women leadership or standing of queer people in the church. But you can't find like a single belief statement anywhere.

The only time you’ll find it is once you get into the ranks high enough and you try to be a member, you try to lead or volunteer. Like, “oh, actually we have this you have to sign.” And it's sort of hush hush and stuff like that. So I think the foundation of it, the person who came up with the idea, his name is George Mekhail, was like, he was inspired in some ways by Intervarsity’s organizational clarity to say this is where we stand as an organization, everyone should know and just get with it or not. He was like, even though, obviously that has caused some harm, maybe in the long run, that's better than being misleading.

Because I think ultimately when you're not clear, you are being patronizing. As in, you do not think that people have the ability or agency to make decisions with full information and that you beguile them into it or ease them into it or trick them into it. Which honestly is the premise of a lot of, I think conversion, evangelistic tactics. It's like pizza night — surprise, it's Jesus night. It's like…

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, the bait and switch.

Kai Ngu: The bait and switch. It's like that mentality, it’s like this embarrassment about your beliefs, packaged with a desire to stand by them, leads to these weird marketing thing. That we felt was doing more harm than good because people will invest all this time in the church and then leave. So we started this database called Churchclarity.com, that I've since stepped down from, I just serve in an advisory capacity. But we have a group of volunteers that review crowdsourced submissions of church websites, and we have a criteria and methodology by which we score the website for how clearly it communicates. So how easy it is to find statements of beliefs or policies on women in leadership and queer people in the church.

And we give it a clear, unclear score as well as a egalitarian or non-egalitarian, affirming, non-affirming, or undisclosed, like you truly don't know. That's kind of the heart of the mission, and we've realized it's been helpful also for mainline denominations. We can get to that some time, not just evangelical ones. We've kind of steered clear of non-protestant churches. I think Catholic or Orthodox churches have, it's a separate, this is not quite the problem they have. So that's at the heart of it. Honestly that I do still quite believe in that mission, even if I'm no longer formally a part of it, which is why it was important for me to get clarity of where you all stood with the issue of LGBT people before I agreed to do the interview. Have you all ever said that publicly, I guess, in a podcast format, like this is where we stand right now?

Sy Hoekstra: I think what we had actually talked about doing was before this episode, doing that basically. We will have done that by the time this comes out.

Kai Ngu: Okay, great. I wasn’t going to force you all to do it, but I was going to ask you all to do it. So I'm glad you all.

Sy Hoekstra: Well, I appreciate that, A, I appreciate that you're consistent with what you do [laughter], and you'll do it wherever you go. I think that's something that forces integrity on people in a way that I think is helpful. Yeah, we will have done that by now, and we appreciate the push.

Jonathan Walton: The question that I have is, I'm wondering if there are maybe two or three ways that you see colonization impacting how we see our sexuality and see the sexuality of others, and specifically how our faith informs that, or mis-informs that, without giving a preview to your dissertation and thesis in your book which will be coming out in a couple of years.

Or you could if you wanted to do that…

[laughter]

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I was gonna say…

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, we’d love to get that scoop.

Jonathan Walton: I know, right?

Kai Ngu: No, someone else will have to write it. I can only tackle a very small piece of it. Maybe one day when I'm 50. But yeah, in some ways it's very hard to disentangle Christianity from colonization because they're cooked in the same cauldron or come from the same people. It's really not a question of if, but how. I think the crux of it is that around the early modern century, so we’re talking about 14th to 16th centuries in Europe, we see this kind of confluence and convergence of a bunch of hierarchies, both based on race, gender, and sexuality. So where the European white man is seen as at the very top because he's rational, he's in control of his desires and he's acting upon desires in a rational way.

Sex has to be for reproduction, that's like a rational way of using it. You're not giving in to your desires, and it's masculine. It's you're in control. It's virtuous. So I don't think it's quite a coincidence that you have an uptick of persecution against women as witches, uptick of hanging of people accused of sodomy around the time also that you have Europeans going into many parts of the world and saying these people are uncivilized and barbaric for a number of reasons. Sometimes they point to the lack of written documents. So these people are illiterate, they cannot read. Maybe they have a rich oral history, what have you. Or these people are worshiping the devil because they have all these idols, a sign of their barbarism.

One of the things they would point out as a sign of the barbaric nature of these people that they are trying to justify the colonization of in a condescending way, saying that we have to steward these people into full maturity so they can go into the full maturity of Christ, so to speak, is looking at their gender and sexual behaviors. I'm going to read out some quotes. This is from a catechism recorded at 1585 from, Spanish, Catholic catechism somewhere, I forget where in what is now Latin America. But, so this catechism is what is being taught, right? So it’s a list of sins and why it’s a sin, and then quote, “above all these sins, is a sin we call nefarious and sodomy, which is for man to sin with man, or with women, not in the natural way.”

So sodomy is any kind of sex that's not natural. Oral sex might count between a man and a woman. It has to be for the purpose of reproduction. Even above all these, to sin with beast, so bestiality is also included under sodomy. “… Let it be known that the reason why God has allowed you, the Indians, should be so afflicted and vexed by other nations, because of this vice sodomy that your ancestor had, and many among you still have.” So they're connecting the story of the destruction of the city of Sodom, to the destruction of these indigenous civilizations and saying, your sodomitic practices are what is leading, part of what’s leading, to the destruction of your city, just like the Sodom was destroyed in the Bible.

I don't have time to go into why the interpretation of Lott and Sodom is great, and I think most even conservative people will concede probably that's more a story about hospitality than about sodomy. But we see this rationale being put out. So that's in Latin America, and you fast forward… Not fast forward, we just move continents around the same time period to the Philippines and Southeast Asia, a context I know a little bit better. And you have I think Francis de Alcina writing in the 1600s, so just a few decades later, about these devil-worshiping priestesses and how they're kind of crazy.

Then he says, quote, “The devil also chose some effeminate men that they called Asog in ancient times.” It says, “These were impotent men and deficient for the practice of matrimony.” So the missionaries are seeing the devil in everything. Are seeing the devil behind anything that is seen as pagan, but also anything that is seen as effeminate. I think there's this quote from a 1486 handbook on witchcraft that talks about why the feminine is seen as more susceptible to the devil. Quote, “The etymology of the word femina comes from Fe (which means faith) and Minus (which is less than) since she is by ever weaker to hold and preserve the faith … Therefore a wicked woman is by her nature quicker to abjure the faith, which is the root of witchcraft.” You see this connection between effeminacy, devil, susceptibility to the devil. And that anyone who's adjacent to feminacy, the Europeans come across so, so many in Africa, in the Americas and Southeast Asia and Pacific islands, of people who they describe as men in women's clothes holding ritualistic and religious power. They see this as ultimately, why would anyone choose to be like a woman? Clearly, they must be possessed by the devil because also effeminacy is linked to it. Anyhow, so that's a big part of the puzzle I think, that we have to kind of untangle when we think about the role of the church and the state.

And it's much more complicated than that. I think there's something to be said about how the medieval church was a lot more, I would say gender expansive and fluid, but I think the Catholic church feels it needs to tighten up its roster and become much more Orthodox when Protestants come around and start accusing the church, Catholic church of decadence or effeminacy, of like this ornate burlesque shows and the church has to be like, oh God, we have to step up our game and they start eliminating a lot of female saints, for instance. Partly because, not intentionally, but because they are trying to create more stricter, scientific criteria by which someone can become a saint.

So through that logic, a lot of village folklore, so to speak, anything that's seen as pagan or pre-Christian gets eliminated out and women tend to hold a lot of knowledge around herblore and stuff like that that is seen as not Christian. All these things are super, I think integrated, interconnected. I can talk more about Malaysia and Southeast Asia specifically, but that's like a big piece of the puzzle.

Sy Hoekstra: Please do talk more about Malaysia specifically.

Kai Ngu: Yeah. My context is more, I'm looking more at 20th century stuff. The missionaries at this point in time are a little bit more hip and they're like, we need to come through and help the poor, we need to start schools. We need to do these things. It's very much tied in, seeing their role as being part of the economic, socioeconomic development of countries. It's essentially I would argue neo-colonial, you're still helping these backwards people develop. Now you're kind of helping them develop by learning English or introducing modern quote-unquote “medicine”. I'm not going to argue against the demerits of learning English and taking antibiotics.

But what we see also, is the missionaries come and say, you should for instance stop believing all these superstitious stuff about, you can't cut down those trees because you believe that spirits live in them. There's only one God, there's not a bunch of spirits around you're afraid of offending. That's the most generous read. Missionaries also come and It’s like, you should stop, you should plant cash crops and you should do all this stuff that essentially changes people's economic arrangements from subsistence to cash based economy, which creates all kinds of issues. Missionaries also do other things to like, working in the government to keep populations more sedentary so they can build parishes around them.

Anyhow, but part of this clearing away of superstition is, one unintended consequence is, is more environmental destruction. Because in the absence of seeing nature and trees as sacred, such a capitalist values kind of kick in, and people are like, okay, I can cut all these trees and make more money and make timber out of it. There isn't a replacement theology, so to speak, that says actually, maybe nature is, you know there's tons of eco theology that are Christian I don’t have to get into it. And so what you start seeing is that groves that used to be protected and sacred start to be decimated, and that creates erosion by the rivers and prevents, and things that prevent mudslides during big storms start to become bigger and bigger.

They've been really affecting the part of Malaysia that I spent some of my early childhood and I'm hoping to build deeper relationship with east Borneo or east Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak. For me, I came into this question thinking a lot more gender and sexuality, but I realized I really need to take the environment a lot more seriously too, because so much indigenous religions is about seeing and respecting plants and animals as spiritual forces as well. So I think that arguably has some pros and cons, you don't want to live your life scared of a bird singing a certain song and that makes you have to stop work because now it's a bad omen. But I think also the loss of belief in nature as a sacred force to begin with has led to some really bad practical consequences for people's livelihoods. I think Christians have to grapple with them.

Sy Hoekstra: The idea of changing people's agricultural life so that you can put up a church and make a parish, to me is so kind of like, distills a lot of ideas into one. Like you're creating this system where you're coming in and trying to get people more into working in market economy and trying to move them away from any indigenous practice, whether it's religion or just medical or whatever.

Kai Ngu: Totally.

Sy Hoekstra: And literally consolidating your own power. Like over the material and spiritual condition of people, and all of that coalesces in and is symbolized by the construction of a church to Jesus. It's horrible.

Kai Ngu: Yeah, and I didn't elaborate on this point, but it is definitely worth spending a beat more on it. Essentially, the colonial administrators are very frustrated by indigenous farming practices because it's sort of a slash and burn, and you rotate where you plant every seven years, more or less. So you leave land fallow for a while, wait for it to die and come back to life. For a variety of reasons, obviously like sustainability, but also they have some spiritual beliefs behind it. So that's very frustrating to colonial administrators because they cannot keep track of their population. It's like the borders keep shifting. And then these priests come and they build a parish and then the whole village disappears in seven years.

So they're like, this is not working. We can't build an empire, we can't build institutions that are mobile all the time. So they convince and persuade out of a variety of reasons indigenous peoples to switch the way they do agriculture to do more cash crop, which is more sedentary and really kind of ruins the land because you don't give it a break and you work it to the ground for decades. It seems like a fairly innocuous thing, so to speak, you're just shifting how people farm, but it has these huge implications. And there's this interesting letter between… and it might be seen as like, oh, that's just agriculture, how is that a religious disruption? But how people farm and work and live is their religion for a lot of indigenous religions.

It's like you, there is no church you go to. You call in the priestess, the priest, your equivalent of that when harvest begins to give a blessing. And the agricultural rhythms of life is integrated with religious rhythms of life. So when you disrupt agriculture, you also disrupt religious rhythm and you disrupt also the ways in which people are used to interacting with one another. This is a letter written by this bishop in Sabah. It's like, why are all the good men not Christians? It's like we end up getting the converts who are selfish and individualistic, and they’re okay with leaving their village and just farming on their own and screw everyone else, because also that mode of farming was very interdependent and communal.

Anyhow. So he begins with this dialogue with this indigenous native man who says, “I respect your religion, I almost converted at one point, but I can't really let my village down.” Like if I just want to go farm on my own and do my own thing, I can’t. This is the way of life for us. This is the way of working. This is how we help one another. So I think that's something we have to pay attention to. I don't think it's quite a coincidence as well that, the reason why I got into this in the first place, I forgot to mention, is that the priest and priestesses so to speak who hold these religious roles, tend to also be historically and regionally people who engage in some level of gender fluidity or gender play.

I'm interested in figuring out as the missionaries come, the ecological consequences have been somewhat traced out, but I'm trying to understand the consequences for gender and sexuality too. What happens when you have a system that is led by women or effeminate people, and it's replaced by a religious system that's led by men. What are the kind of consequences that has for how gender works in a religious context? That's a bit more my angle, but the environment stuff is very important to figure into all of this. I can talk a little bit more why I think there's a connection, but I'm still not very sure.

Suzie Lahoud: One, I just want to say thank you for the way that you, I just love the way that you show how these conversations are all interconnected. So we're also doing violence to the conversation when we try to silo off these issues, like we're going to talk about queerness now. We're going to talk about how we relate to the environment. We're going to talk about women's roles. And when really all of this is interconnected and needs to be interconnected. And I think that a lot of justice work that's going on today acknowledges that, and the church has been so far behind that conversation in a way that just is so tragic, but to kind of steer things again in a slightly different direction, and maybe go back to your personal experience, Kai.

Something I've been kind of thinking about and reflecting on when it comes to conversations around queerness in the church, is that to put it quite frankly, I find it to be so distressing that Christians who I think are engaging in homophobic narratives without maybe wanting to call it that, or label it as such, I think would actually rather see that folks who identify as queer didn't also identify as Christian. Didn't also claim to have a relationship with Christ, to have a valid living faith. That that feels like more of a threat to them than almost anything else. I think that that also trickles down to folks in the church who are affirming of queer Christians.

So I just wanted to kind of I guess maybe hear your thoughts on that, because again, I find it to be so hypocritical, particularly in a lot of what we talk about on this show, is the white evangelical church in America and folks who claim to be most passionate about seeing people come to a living faith with Christ and coming to a place of community in the body of Christ, and yet again, would rather see… I just feel like it relates to this assimilating force that you've been talking about, that there has to be this assimilation that must take place in order for that to happen. And folks who will not assimilate in the way that Christians see as being necessary are more of a threat than anything else.

So yeah, if you could just kind of speak to that, I don't know if that's something that you've encountered or think about. But yeah, if I could just kind of throw that at you, and realizing that it takes more for you to have to talk about this than for me to have to talk about this, so appreciating your kind of being willing to enter into that conversation, but yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Kai Ngu: Yeah. I think to be honest, I think queer people also are sometimes guilty, I would argue, of the same type of charge, which is that religion and queerness cannot mix. Some of the most vehement advocates for that position are queer people themselves, because it's almost like to acknowledge that would be to deny the pain they’ve experienced at the hands of the church. But that's another conversation. When it comes to this specific subtype, I guess you're talking about people who are supposedly passionate about bringing people in church, yet at the same time, seem to balk at the prospect of a queer Christian more than a queer atheist,

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah.

Kai Ngu: Or find that more unsettling. I often think of that also in relation to my parents, in the sense that I think it is more threatening to them that I claim to take scripture seriously, that I claim to be Christian than if I said I don't even share the same premises you do. It’s like you can't even have a conversation then. My younger sibling is probably more secular than I am and they do not engage in the same theological debates with my parents because the premises are just not workable. And I think it's more threatening for a simple reason, which is that, to take us seriously, the present queer Christian seriously, means too that they have, they can't just keep their faith model intact.

And just saying, you're either opt in or you opt out. And you opt out, you’re an atheist so to speak. To incorporate someone who has a different point of view within the body of Christ, means that you have to also reevaluate your faith model and say, okay, maybe there's some things I need to rethink about maybe how I read scripture or how I think about church authority, let's say. So I have to challenge my own set of beliefs or challenge my own presuppositions, and that is generally a lot more unsettling than just to say someone has rejected the whole thing altogether. Sorry, just like one last comment, I did really like also Suzie how you used the word assimilation, because I think the parallels with race are important.

Because I do think there are, I would argue, like queer assimilationists who essentially want the same model of faith, they just want to be accepted within it. And I take a more radical approach and say, maybe I think what queer people have to offer is liberatory for everyone, but it does mean rethinking everything in some way, which is scarier. But unfortunately I just, I don't know, I like to be consistent.

Sy Hoekstra: We've kept you a little bit longer than I told you we would. So just before we go, where can people find you on the internet?

Kai Ngu: I guess people can find me, I have a website. I recently started going by Kai, so everything's in my English name. My website, I don't know what it has on there. Just like stuff I've written or talked about in the past. So just like a one, it's like a resume, essentially. Sarahngu.com. That's also all my social media handles, SarahNgu, which is spelled S-A-R-A-H N-G-U.

Sy Hoekstra: Awesome. Kai, thank you so much for being here today with us.

Kai Ngu: Thank you for having me.

Sy Hoekstra: Before we go, real quick, a reminder to check out ktfpress.com. Consider subscribing. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at KTF Press, follow this podcast in your player, give us a rating and review. All that is so helpful if you appreciate what we do here. Please do consider doing any or all of that. Our theme song as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you all in a couple of weeks.

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]

Sy Hoekstra: Our theme song as always sendenzis … Hmm. Okay, gonna say that again.

Today, Jonathan, Suzie, and Sy share their perspectives on queer Christianity, LGBTQ folks in church leadership, and why conversations like this one are so important. Their journeys are different and so are the places they land. What they all share is a conviction to center the experiences of queer Christians and to love well.  

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and other paid content at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify. 

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.  

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra. 

Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Suzie Lahoud. 

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode. 

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]    

Jonathan Walton: This is a KTF Press podcast.  

I am not an overseer, right? Like the faith that, we are leaving colonized faith. Just because I am a straight man in a church does not make me the overseer for your sexuality, and then you have to come and get approval from me to function on this plantation. That's not how that works. 

Suzie Lahoud: It assumes the hierarchy. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. We're all sheep, right? So I'm not going to buy into the fact that I'm on a horse overseeing the cotton you’re picking. That's not my role. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]   

Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust: Leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. I am Jonathan Walton, here with Suzie Lahoud and Sy Hoekstra. 

Sy Hoekstra: Today, we're going to be talking about LGBTQ Christians in the church, queer people in leadership in churches and at KTF Press. We're talking about clarity as well.  

Before we get started with all that, as always, a reminder. If you like what we do at this show, or at KTF Press in general, please go to ktfpress.com and consider subscribing as a monthly or an annual subscriber. That gets you the bonus episodes of this show. That gets you our weekly newsletter, where the three of us give you recommendations on all different kinds of media as you are leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. It supports everything else we do, the books that we're working on, the transcribing of this show, all of our just monthly expenses, everything.  

We really, really appreciate our supporters and actually could not be doing this without them. And we would love for more people to come on board so we can continue doing what we're doing and expand what we're doing. We're going to talk about why we're having this conversation in a minute, but since so many LGBTQ Christians are constantly calling for clarity from people who are leaders or are out talking about, I'm not considering myself a major leader in the Christian world [laughs], but people who are out in public talking about things to do with justice, or to do with, anything really to do with Christianity. 

So we are jumping right in, and we're going to talk about what we individually, the three of us, believe about whether or not the Bible is affirming of same sex or queer relationships. And then what KTF is, what our stance is on leadership for queer people who are in queer relationships. I'll just say right now we're for it [laughs], but we'll get into why and the details of why we're for it later. But as for us personally, the word “affirming,” just to make sure everybody knows, it just means that you believe that the Bible or that theology says that basically God is affirming of same sex relationships. That's what the word affirming means. That it's not a sin.  

So I will just say Suzie and I are both not exactly sure about where we stand on whether or not the Bible's affirming of queer relationships, and Jonathan is not affirming, believes that the Bible is not affirming of queer relationships. Us as a company, we are totally affirming of queer people in church leadership. Obviously, if we were hiring anyone at KTF Press, that would be the case as well. We have published people, not on this specific subject, but we have published people on other subjects who personally hold views on either side of this issue and we will continue to do so. And as always in what we do, we are going to continue in these conversations to center and elevate the voices of the marginalized, which in this case are actual queer Christians themselves.  

Next week we're going to have an interview with Kai Ngu, who's one of the founders of Church Clarity, among other things. Part of what they get into is this notion of clarity is queer Christians constantly saying, “We do not want to hear people beating around the bush or contextualizing, or trying to deceive us into thinking that you're affirming of our whole lives, only to find out that you think that we are sinners later.” This whole deceptive practice that a lot of Christians engage in. So we're trying to be straightforward right now, just tell you what we think. That's why I just spoke for everyone so we can just get that clearly out there and we can all… basically queer Christians want everyone to own what they believe... No, not all. I can't speak for all, obviously. Not a monolith, but this is what a lot of people, what we have been hearing a lot from the queer Christian community.  

So, like I said, we are completely affirming of queer people in leadership, including at KTF Press, which is both because we think that's how the church should operate, and we will explain why in a minute. I should also note that we're not a religious non-profit. This isn't a church. This isn't a parachurch ministry. This is an LLC, so the same non-discrimination laws apply to us that apply to everybody else, every other company at least. And at least for the time being, who the heck knows what the Supreme Court is going to do. But anyways, let's just dive right into it with the three of us. Why is it that we believe these things that we believe?  

Jonathan Walton: So I think the journey for me started as a very, very formal question because I work for a large evangelical organization. Something that I wrestle with constantly is not necessarily what scripture says, but the application of that scripture and how that looks in our everyday lives. And I think trying not to be pulled into conflicts and elevating conflicts that culture is fighting, versus what scripture is arguing for. That's definitely how I felt over the last decade with sexuality because I don't believe that scripture elevates it to the place that church tradition does or colonization does, or just our culture does. So I think that's why for me personally, when I look at scripture, I can't get to being affirming.  

At the same time, I cannot get to or justify or condone, and actually have to resist, any level of condemnation at the same time. So I think the affirming/not affirming binary is unhelpful because of the misreading or a skipping over altogether of John 3:17, where it says, “For God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world, but that by through him the world might be saved.” The implication of that for me is, if Jesus wasn't sent to the world to condemn the world, how can I condemn the world? How can I condemn anyone? And therefore, I think when I come to KTF, I say, of course, if Jesus can have anyone, Romans 3:23, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. If we all can testify and God is bearing witness through us and we're all sinful, how could I minimize or diminish any person's voice who is actively seeking genuinely to follow Jesus? 

Sy Hoekstra: Can I ask the obvious follow-up question because I'm pretty sure you have a good answer to it? 

Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. What is it?  

Sy Hoekstra: Well, actually, I should ask the question regardless of whether you have a good answer to it, but I think you do. Don't you condemn other things that scripture condemns? Greed, racism, whatever? 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, but so what's interesting about that is I think there's a difference between condemning individual people and condemning concepts, ideals, and ideologies. So it is not me. It is the Holy Spirit who convicts of sin and it's the kindness of God that leads us to repentance. It is not my personal revelation, argument, or persuasion that convicts of sin. My argument can cause guilt, shame, fear, trepidation, for sure. But I think the transformative reality and power of the gospel is what leads people to follow Jesus. It's what leads people to step out of darkness into marvelous light.  

I think when I condemn capitalism and I make really serious arguments against someone, or if someone asks me, oh, how could I work at this place or do this thing? Then I share my opinions with them, what I believe scripture’s revealing, but I am under no illusion that my argument reveals if something is sinful or not. I think the Holy Spirit, I will leave that work up to the Holy Spirit. I think what scripture requires of me is to bear witness to the Jesus that I know and invite people to follow him. 

Sy Hoekstra: Can I go one step further?  

Jonathan Walton: Of course. Yeah.  

Sy Hoekstra: So I think you just drew a helpful distinction between condemning something like greed at large, and something like an individual person who is greedy or whatever.  

Jonathan Walton: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.  

Sy Hoekstra: So two things then. One, that sounds like a thing a lot of queer Christians hate, which is people say all the time, “hate the sin, love the sinner.” 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I actually think that that concept disconnected from praxis is absolutely harmful. Because I actually, I think people who say that don't actually love our queer family. It’s a quip. 

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. And we will get… yeah, it is. I agree with that, and we'll get more into that idea. So you're talking about condemnation of the sin in general versus an individual person. So do you spend time condemning the sin in general of queerness?  

Jonathan Walton: No, I don't.  

Sy Hoekstra: How come? Why is that different than the other ones?  

Jonathan Walton: I don't think it points to Jesus if I'm just in one side. I don't think it actually bears witness to Jesus in the ways that he would require of me. 

Sy Hoekstra: Because of what, or how come? 

Jonathan Walton: Okay, so two things. When I look at scripture and I see how Jesus dealt with gender and sexuality, religious institutions and the people who represent them when adultery came up, wanted to kill the woman that was caught in adultery, and they would've felt totally justified in doing that. I want to be where Jesus was, doing what he did in the same way. He stood between the crowd that wanted to stone the woman, addressed them, they left, and then he had a conversation with her. I don't think it's my role and responsibility to stand in front of a crowd, pull her up, condemn her, edify the crowd, and then try to tell the crowd not to do this anymore.  

I think there's a, the ways in which we talk about sin and sinfulness in public and in private to embarrass, ridicule, all those types of things, absent and independent of relationship, is radically unhelpful, but we do it all the time. 

Sy Hoekstra: Can I, like a brief summary or related idea? I think what I'm hearing is that you, Jonathan, and Jesus understand power dynamics [laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yeah, that's true [laughs]. That is very succinct, yes. 

Sy Hoekstra: Something that so many conservative Christians fundamentally do not and cannot understand because of their ideology and that leads to enormous problems in all things, but it has very specific problems that it leads to on this subject. 

Jonathan Walton: Yes. And if I will lean into one follow-up comment, is that, I think that is why people get angry with me, is because I don't use my quote-unquote “power” to do that.  

Sy Hoekstra: Non-affirming people get angry with you. 

Jonathan Walton: Non-affirming people get angry with me, yes. 

Sy Hoekstra: We have not, Suzie hasn't talked yet because she had lots of sirens in her background, so she has been on mute for a while.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. There may even be helicopters now, but I think the sirens have stopped. 

Sy Hoekstra: Is everything okay? 

Suzie Lahoud: I hope so. 

Sy Hoekstra: Well, I can't hear anything anymore. So you go ahead. 

Suzie Lahoud: Okay. One, thank you for sharing all that, Jonathan. That is, it's helpful. 

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you for submitting to my cross examination [laughs].  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, that was brutal, Sy, but I think it's helpful because I think that we don't… I think one of the problems is that we're not willing to have hard conversations like this in the church. 

Sy Hoekstra: And I know Jonathan is. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, and Jonathan absolutely is. And Sy, I know you're absolutely, as editor and friend, you never shy away from the difficult questions. And so that, I really appreciate that about you guys and about this conversation.  

I guess, just to frame my own contribution, I just want to start with a little story that is a bit of a tangent, but I think you'll see by the end why I'm going here. So I had a close friend in grad school. She's Muslim and an academic specializing in gender studies. And at a certain point in her life felt convicted that she wanted to start wearing the hijab; she wanted to start veilling. This may seem like a foreign concept to a lot of white American Christians, but actually the hijab is a symbol for a lot of different things. A lot of folks have been programmed in the United States, a lot of white Christians have been programmed to view it just as a symbol of oppression, but there are women in the Muslim community all over the world, who choose to take it up as a symbol against imperialist colonialist oppression. To take it up as a sign of personal and or as a sign of personal piety. You can think about nuns and the fact that they cover their hair and choose to take it up based on their understanding and reading of the Quran. So this friend, for a number of reasons, chose to start wearing the veil and it really bothered her brother. 

So there was one day where her brother brought it up in a sort of very pointed way with her in front of their dad. He was saying, “I don't really know how I feel about the hijab. I don't know if I believe in it, if I think women should wear it. I don't know if I like the perception that it creates.” And going into all of the sort of counter arguments. Her dad very wisely turned to him and said, “Okay, well, then don't wear it.” And I think that's just such an incredible illustration, the wisdom of that father in realizing that at the end of the day, convictions on this particular issue weren't really about the son. They were about his daughter because it was her life that these convictions were going to have bearings on. It was about how she was going to choose to live out her life as a person of faith in this community.  

So I just want to acknowledge up front that I'm speaking as a straight white woman. I'm also speaking, however, as a woman who is married, who is not silent in church, who doesn't cover my head when I pray. So I would say that in a lot of ways, my wrestling with how the Bible deals with human sexuality and how that pertains to my faith and my positions and my views has actually in a lot of ways, been parallel to my wrestling with what it means to be a woman of faith and a woman in the faith community and in the church. And because I have actually wrestled with scriptures that talk about women covering their head. I have wrestled with scriptures that talk about if women should be under the authority of a man. I have felt throughout most of my life, like I was created as a second-class citizen in the kingdom of God, because I was a woman. That God created woman second, so woman's created to serve man. I believed those things, and it was because I wanted to live out my life in a way that was faithful to the scriptures and to the teachings of Christ.  

So as Sy shared earlier, when it comes to the question of LGBTQ Christians and the church's position on queerness and the biblical position on queerness, I am on a journey. I think that's okay to say, because I know that queer Christians, many of them are also on journeys, and come to different positions and land in different places. I think it's actually acknowledging of their humanity and of the complexity of this, and actually acknowledging of their faith to say that it's okay to wrestle with these things, but also I want to learn more about this from other queer Christians. I don't want to be hearing about this from my straight cisgender friends.  

Sy Hoekstra: Amen.  

Suzie Lahoud: I think we've heard enough from folks who don't know what it means to really wrestle. Who don't have enough at stake in this and who aren't the ones who get hurt, and whose lives can actually be at stake when the church takes certain positions on this. So I think we've heard enough of one side of the story. I'm ready to hear the other side, and that's the season that I'm in right now. So it's important for me, in addition to that, for my queer friends to know that I will support them and walk with them wherever they land on this. That if they choose to get married, I will be at their wedding. I will dance at their wedding. And if they are in a healthy, loving, faithful relationship, I will support them in that. If they feel called to a life of celibacy, I will support them in their life of celibacy and be there for the hard conversations around that.  

And so I just think it’s… gosh, the church has so much growing to do in this. Again, I just want to emphasize, I do not believe that there are second class citizens in the kingdom of God, and I think that is what we have created around this issue. Jonathan, I really loved what you shared about not allowing culture to dictate the level that we elevate this conversation to. Because sometimes I'm also just afraid of having the conversation, because to be honest, to a certain extent, I also feel like it's not really any of my business. Like when folks come out to me, I'm really honored when they do that, and I take that very seriously. 

I also try to reciprocate oftentimes when that happens by also… actually I should say, every time that's happened that someone close to me has come out to me, I reciprocated by sharing with them something that is also very personal and very vulnerable from my side. Because again, at the end of the day, I don't think it's really my business. I don't have folks asking me about the intimacies of my relationship with my husband. It's not their business. And Jonathan, I think you're right, that it's, even though I would say you and I land in slightly different places currently, but I think that point, that it’s the Holy Spirit's job to convict people on the way that they live their lives. That's not my job and I'm grateful that's not my job. So, yeah, I think that's how I want to open up the conversation.  

Sy Hoekstra: I'll be brief. The reason I don't know where I am is shorter and more cerebral because that's whatever. That's who I am, even though it's annoying. Actually, I shouldn't say cerebral Suzie, that sounds like I'm judging your journey as unintelligent. That's not what I’m saying. 

Suzie Lahoud: Since the emotive female has shared her part.  

Sy Hoekstra: Exactly. Yeah. Right, right. Right.  

Suzie Lahoud: The cerebral male will now answer with an intellectual response. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs]. After the female had to be quiet for the first 20 minutes of the show or whatever. So basically for a long time, I looked a lot into this stuff when I was kind of a new Christian and I couldn't get around Romans 1, which I think is a lot of people’s sticking point. I can get around all the other passages, no problem. If you think Leviticus or 2 Corinthians or 2 Timothy or whatever, is very clear in making same sex relationships a sin or whatever, you have more reading to do, I promise you [laughs]. And really, it just took me finding other voices who had other opinions about Romans 1. 

And me acknowledging the fact that I am never going to be able to resolve the actual controversies between people about whether or not Romans 1 is like an authoritative condemnation of same sex relationships without going and getting a PhD in biblical history and ancient Greek, which I do not feel called to do [laughs]. And most people don't feel called to do. The rest of us have to acknowledge this is a debate between people who know more than we do, and we need to figure out how to move on from there and not just say, “Oh, well, all the people that are around me and my church and my pastor believe X and therefore that's the truth.” That's the silly way to think about it. And I think there are people who actually don't know that there are other arguments out there.  

There are people who take… most people dismiss the arguments. It’s like, oh, that's just a bunch of queer people trying to justify their desires and trying to lower the authority of scripture so that they can live however they want and not have to submit to the authority of God. I will say again, if that's what you think, you have more reading to do [laugh]. There's no, like that's absolutely wrong. Also, if you ever find yourself on any of these issues, saying all these people just are doing X, we call that bigotry guys [laughs]. That is prejudice. That is you saying, “I know how an entire group of people think,” without actually knowing that entire group of people, because you couldn't possibly know that entire group of people. 

Suzie Lahoud: In this case more specifically, that is homophobia. Homophobia does not mean you are afraid of LGBTQ folks. It means that you hold positions like that one.  

Sy Hoekstra: You have prejudices about them. It's kind of, let's go back to when you learned about racism in fourth grade, you know what I mean? If you have prejudged someone as being something, then that's a problem.  

The things that kind of lead me toward an affirming position are a couple things that I think are interesting. Again, like Jonathan said, I think the Holy Spirit does actual convicting, does actual convincing of people. I don't believe that I'm going to change everybody's mind right now by bringing these things up. But these things that are interesting to me that I think are helpful in terms of how we think about this question are, I have never been able to figure out why someone marrying someone of the same sex or gender is a problem. I'm not saying is a sin, I'm saying is an actual problem. Because here's the thing. Any other sin, I get it. I understand why it's an issue. I understand why lying and stealing and cheating and dishonoring people and murdering, whatever, whatever any of the other things are that the Bible says we shouldn't be living that way, it's not wise. It's not whatever, it harms human flourishing. I get why that is, and I was never unable to understand why that would be.  

So for a long time, I fell back on what I think is a very common thought, which is that, I think the thought is you're not supposed to use that as any sort of hermeneutical tool. You're not supposed to use that as anything that can help you read scripture because God knows more than you. He's authoritative, and if he says something, even if you don't understand why, you need to follow it because he's God and you're not. Which is in the abstract an absolutely true statement that I affirm and that I follow routinely in my life, and I have found his faithfulness and understood why later. Or sometimes I don't, but good things come out of the ways that I follow God, all that stuff is true. But I don't think of that idea anymore solely in the abstract. I think of it in terms of the God that I actually know. Like the God who has been revealed to me and with whom I have a relationship, what is he like? That actual God, not an abstract God who just throws down dictates and you obey them no matter what. The actual God that I know, what is he like, and what are the things that he…  

So the reason that that idea is important, is because then when I go back to everything else, then I understand why these things are a problem, they make sense to me. And then I look at a gay relationship and I go, what on earth could possibly be wrong with this [laughs]? That's a relevant factor now because I'm actually talking about something that is out of line with the rest of the character of God. That doesn't solve the issue completely for me, I'm just saying those are legitimate ways to think about how we read scripture and how we can start to come to answers on questions that we don’t have the expertise or answers to.  

And then another thing is just the issue of like, I talk about this on another podcast that we've already recorded. It probably came out already. I don't know yet though. The testimony podcast that we did. Yes, that will have come out by now.  

Suzie Lahoud: God is outside of time and so is our podcast. 

Sy Hoekstra: So am I [laughs]. But the idea that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, or that Jesus changes rules on divorce when they get applied in ways that are inhumane. Or the idea that the Holy Spirit comes and makes things clean that were not clean, or moves into the Gentiles, which is something that no Jewish people expected at the time. All those things to me say that is actually, that's a part of the character of God. God can change things like that, and I think this is why it's so important for so many conservatives to say, “We have the cannon, we are cessationists. That, the Holy Spirit's not doing anything anymore. Everything is locked down and solid and God isn't going to move.”  

And I think it is important that Jesus says the wind blows where it pleases and that whole passage. Which is not to say, let's all believe whatever we want with no regard to scripture. That's not what I'm saying. And I know that that is how people are going to characterize what I'm saying, and I don't care. Because the fact is the Bible reveals a God who changes rules [laughs]. That's something that happened. Again, this doesn't mean, oh, now I have decided absolutely that I am affirming. This is just a thing that is true about God that should be something taken into consideration. And the idea that we're just going to be like, oh, this is a hundred percent clear for all time, there's no questions we have to ask about it, I think is actually inconsistent with scripture. Inconsistent with the God that that scripture reveals. 

Suzie Lahoud: If I could just jump in Sy, because it's such a great point that I hadn't thought about when you said, “I believe in a God that changes rules.” Because it's not about the rules, right? It's about God. It's about relationship with the actual being that is God and relationship with Jesus Christ. But it just made me think when you said that, I thought of the example of, yeah, in the Old Testament we see God changing the rules. And in conversation with man, like God in conversation with Abraham being like they have this back and forth and he is like, “Okay, I'm going to kill this many people. Okay. All right, fine. I'll kill this many people. Okay. Right, fine.” And they have this back and forth. And then with Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, it's like, “No, I'm not going to give this to you. Okay, fine, I will give this to you.” So I think, yeah, just leaving room, because your point about leaving room for the mystery of God and allowing God to be God. That's where this fits in for me.  

We talk in a previous episode about how all of these conversations… Oh no, sorry. In the future episode that will come out with Kai, we talk about how this conversation is woven into the fabric of all these other conversations we have about God and how we frame our theology and our understanding of who God is and what it means to walk in faith and creation and all of these things. And for me, this fits into the broader conversation of the mystery of God and allowing God to be God and to work in ways that I don't always expect and to work through people that I don't always expect. And to switch the script sometimes in ways that I don't expect. And I think that's so important.  

One thing that you guys know I'm actually studying right now in my graduate studies and have worked on in the past, is the theology of hospitality. This is something Jonathan, you talk about a lot, is having a long table. Actually, I like to think about it as a round table. In our family we love round tables, because it's better for conversation, but like having a big old table where there is room for everybody at the table. And if we look at the fruit of non-affirming theologies, I understand where folks are coming from, but I see so much of the fruit of death and destruction in people's lives. And I think that should really give folks who love and follow Jesus pause. I think that should really give us pause. 

Jonathan Walton: Absolutely. It's like this, I think to add to what Sy was saying, the thought that I had was it's not fruitful to hold fast to a rule-following God if you are trying to have a dynamic relationship with the creator of the universe who's constantly revealing himself to all people at all times. But it's very fruitful if you're trying to control and colonize people. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yes, exactly. Exactly.  

Sy Hoekstra: Sure is. 

Jonathan Walton: And so, very helpful if you show up in Hawaii, very helpful if you show up in Polynesia, very helpful if you show up in South America. When we start to have, you know doing, my scholarship is around colonization and race and sexuality and gender, and like in the Americas. So if you want to go down the path of control, then you need… if one wants to do that, which strong parts of the church, strong parts of the government, strong parts of capitalism are trying to do that, then you need a God that functions just like you. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And I will say we're going to get into, with Kai next week, some of the ways that that happens specifically around sexuality and colonization. I think it’s important to learn about those things because there is this thing that happens where conservative Christians in non-Western countries will sometimes say, “Oh, the gay agenda is being pushed on us by the West, this is a new form of colonization.” And that in some places might be true, I don't know, but it is not true everywhere and all the time. And there are many, many ways in which colonization directly impacted… colonization by the church took away queerness and gender fluidity and all kinds of things from indigenous people. 

Can we get into a little bit about why… it may be obvious, but I think it's helpful to talk about why we believe that people who not just are affirming, but are in queer relationships should absolutely be in church leadership and should absolutely be allowed to be partners in something like our company. Why is that? Actually, Jonathan, I'm interested to hear about that one from you, since you are on a non-affirming stance. Why do you then not say, oh, we need to enforce this as a requirement for leadership in the church?  

Jonathan Walton: The reason that I think it's necessary and helpful for queer voices to be part of our company is because, when we first started out with this entire thing, we are going to center and elevate marginalized voices and that just, that lives into that reality. So if I'm to have integrity as a person, I think it needs to be consistent across my life. So similarly, the reason that I would want queer voices centered and elevated in our company, is because I think they should be centered and elevated in church. What I mean by that is, every single person who is on the margins, the first becomes last, the last become first. So if we're pushing people out, Jesus, I think would bring them in and make space. Jesus would bring them in and wrestle. Jesus would bring them in for conversations. Jesus would bring them in for stories and time and leadership and wrestling, because we're not trying to beat people into submission to a God that we have some exclusive revelation with. I think what we're actually trying to do as pastors, and I'm not a pastor, I'm a campus minister and a follower of Jesus, but I'm not a pastor of a church. But I do believe that when I have conversations with pastors, my reminder to them is we are to pastor. We are shepherding people. We are walking alongside them.  

So if someone is trans and comes out to me and says, “What should I do? Should I have a kid or not with my partner?” Or someone else says, “Oh, should I transition?” Or someone else says, “Should I enter into this relationship?” My question back to them is always, “What is it that you want from me in this relationship interaction? Because what I would like to do is walk with you towards Jesus and whatever that looks like. Let's figure out what it means to do that.” And I think as long as people are trying to do that, you could lead in the church, because that to me equals being sober-minded, which is what we're supposed to look for. 

Sy Hoekstra: You're saying what you think they're looking for is your permission? 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. If someone is looking for my permission, I immediately say, “I can't give you that.” I don't actually think scripture gives me that mandate. That my permission, my blessing, I don't actually think I hold that power. I am not an overseer. The faith that, we are leaving colonized faith. Just because I am a straight man in a church does not make me the overseer for your sexuality. And then you have to come and get approval from me to function on this plantation. That's not how that works.  

Suzie Lahoud: It assumes the hierarchy. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, we're all sheep. And so I'm not going to buy into the fact that I'm on a horse overseeing the cotton you’re picking. That's not my role. 

Sy Hoekstra: I will say, I think it's a point of clarity, because I think you, in a lot of the minds of non-affirming people, are a bit of a unicorn, even though you're not. Like you aren't that… like in the big picture, but I do want to say you are extremely consistent with this perspective. 

Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Yes. 

Sy Hoekstra: Meaning to the point where you spend a lot of time personally shepherding and leading racists. Actual racist white people who do not believe in your value, right?  

Jonathan Walton: This is true. 

Sy Hoekstra: Which is why… and you're doing the same thing. You're not their overseer either, which I think is an important thing to point out. By the way, I'm also not saying like Kyle Howard said when he was on this show, I'm not saying everybody has to be Jonathan Walton, and yeah, has to be called to this work. I'm just saying, this is not… what you're saying right now is, to the person who is suspicious of you, and they're saying, oh, this is, everything you're saying now is just an escape card to get out of doing something that you're not comfortable doing, no, wrong [laughs]. These exact beliefs put you in so many profoundly uncomfortable positions that I'm willing to listen to you say these things without rolling my eyes. You know what I mean?  

Jonathan Walton: Well, I appreciate that [laughs].  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Suzie, do you have thoughts on this stuff about us as a company or church leadership? Just queer people in leadership in general?  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. I think, well, and before I start speaking, the sirens are still kind of in the background. Can you hear that, or am I good?  

Sy Hoekstra: We as an audience will accept that you have sirens in the background and there’s nothing you… 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. There’s a legitimate emergency in her neighbourhood. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. Yeah. We found the emergency, it's real. I just want to reiterate again, that as KTF Press, centering and elevating marginalized voices is a huge part of what we feel called to do. So I think I would just restate what I said earlier, which is if I'm going to learn more about this issue, I want to learn it from queer folks. From queer Christians.  

I think I'll just add to that also by saying that there’s so much fear-mongering in the church around this issue, that the three of us were having this conversation earlier, and we were talking about how you almost have to come out of the closet as affirming even. I'm not even talking about the kind of ostracization that can happen for queer Christians who come out. I'm talking about even just Christians who come out and say, “You know what, this might actually be okay with God.” That alone can get you kicked out of churches, kicked out of institutions. We just posted about this in a recent newsletter. What's going down at Calvin University right now with the CRC’s ruling on human sexuality and raising the report to confessional status. We're seeing this happen in real time in churches and denominations across the country and in faith communities. And so I just, I refuse to give in on any point to the politics of fear. I want a hermaneutic of love that I believe is deeply rooted in the person and expression of Jesus Christ.  

Jesus never once spoke about queer folks. He talked about money a lot and the dangers of money and greed. He spoke about that a whole lot. He never once talked about this issue. So I'm not saying it's not in the Bible. I'm just saying, I think as a company, we feel that again, there's another side of the story that is not being clearly told in the church. This conversation is being had all over the place in the world around us, but we have shut up our ears. And in spaces that are not welcoming to queer Christians, all we've really succeeded in doing is keeping them in hiding. Those folks are still in your community, you're not going to make them change. You're not going to turn them straight.  

And we've seen all kinds of violence that that kind of, like you said, Jonathan, it's about control. It's about oppressing people. All kinds of horrific things have been done to the queer community to try to change who they are. We are not changing anybody by doing what we're doing and by not allowing folks who are queer to be in positions of leadership and to share about who they are, and to share about why they hold the convictions that they do. By not doing that, all we are doing is keeping people living in fear and in hiding and not allowing to live out the fullness of who they are.  

And it just makes me so sad too, because I look at folks who maybe after the fact later in their ministries or in their lives, we realize that they were queer or maybe we know at the time. But I think of folks like James Baldwin, like Audre Lorde. I think of folks like bell hooks and Henri Nouwen and all of the wisdom that those folks had to share as queer people. And the fact that the church would not have listened because of how they identified in their sexuality, that is horrific to me. I've learned so much from their voices and from their wisdom. I think of folks like Bayard Rustin, who was actually one of the primary advisors to MLK, it was his idea to organize the March on Washington and he had to stay in the shadows because he was queer. And that's all the church is really doing.  

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I want to go in with you Suzie and just name explicitly. It's not just that we are not allowing their voices to be heard and not allowing them to be centered and elevated, but what we're trying to do, but when we marginalize queer people, we're participating in homophobia. We're reinforcing transphobia.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yes. Yes.  

Jonathan Walton: We’re keeping patriarchy and toxic masculinity in place. We are making sure that the paterfamilias, as Willie Jennings talks about, stays there, like in the status quo. That is what, like there's explicit theological and other practical stuff happening when we do that, and I do not want to be a part of it in any part of my life, as consistently as I can.  

Suzie Lahoud: I think you naming all those things together just clarified for me that it's… when you, again, Jonathan, when you talk about control, it's like this is all the mesh of the armor. And if you allow, it's like those who want to remain in control and in spiritual power and authority over people can't allow for chinks in the armor. That's why it is threatening when women suddenly feel empowered. Then it becomes a conversation about the slippery slope to becoming affirming. The conversation about, you always hear the slippery slope argument, what that's about is about chinks showing up in the armor where the folks who are in control feel like they can't be in control anymore. And I just want to say, you're not in control. You do not own the church. It is not your body, it’s the body of Christ.  

Sy Hoekstra: And that is the way that slippery slope arguments most often function. A slippery slope, if you're making that argument in good faith, that is an experience-based argument. It's like I have seen this thing that you're doing lead to this horrifying thing. And the thing at the bottom of the slope has to be actually horrifying. It can't just be like… 

Jonathan Walton: It can't just be your emotional discomfort and inability to deal with conflict and tension in people that are different from you. 

Sy Hoekstra: Which is why you have to turn it into if you become affirming, then you have destroyed the authority of scripture and of God himself and you're ruining the faith. Like you're sending people to hell, whatever. That has to be the end of the slippery slope, and if that's not the end of the slippery slope, then the slippery slope argument doesn't work. Which is actually something I think we wanted to touch on, like you Suzie, mentioning how often Jesus actually talked about this issue. How often the Bible as a whole actually talks about this issue, versus how often it talks about something like money. And it is so wild to me that the litmus test for your beliefs on the authority of scripture or your beliefs on orthopraxy or whether or not you are sufficiently doctrinal enough is about this issue in so many places. And increasingly so, not just the CRC, the PCA is trying to do the same thing. This is becoming the litmus test for being someone who cares about scripture or God or whatever, and not the stuff that God actually talks about in scripture a hundred thousand times more than this. Nobody seems to care if you're hoarding wealth in your bank account. Not an issue. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. Which, how many pastors have been doing that?  

Jonathan Walton: Right.  

Sy Hoekstra: I mean, the Catholic Church is the largest real estate holder in the world. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and also in New York City specifically where we are [laughs]. It’s like that kind of stuff is just, the fact that you can get away with that and not recognize that that's idolatry and act like you're being faithful to scripture blows my mind. And it didn't used to blow my mind because it's the air we breathe. It's like, it's the thing that a lot of people just grew up in. This is part of, I first realized this before Obergefell, when the gay marriage debate was so intense in the church. It just, it struck me at some point that it was like you all think that we need to enforce Christian marriages on the rest of the country by making them straight, not by making them Christian. You're not objecting to atheist marriages, you're objecting to gay marriages, which means very clearly that when you think you of a Christian marriage, you think of straight people before you think of Jesus, right? 

Suzie Lahoud: Wow. Yeah.  

Sy Hoekstra: And that's an idol. That is, it couldn't be more clearly an idol. You're saying being straight is more important than being a Christian when it comes to a Christian marriage. So this is just, it's an idol that runs throughout how so much of the church thinks about anything related to LGBTQ issues. In the culture wars or in our need to control people or whatever, we have created a massive idol that is difficult to identify and is kind of everywhere.  

We had a bunch of technical issues recording this, so Jonathan had to run, but Suzie, I wonder if you have any closing thoughts. 

Suzie Lahoud: Well, I guess one maybe final thought that we had discussed earlier, the three of us, in prepping for this conversation was, so I heard this, I think it was a sermon illustration I heard once about this professional athlete. I don't remember his name, I'm probably going to get the details of the story wrong, so, but I'm just using it as an illustration.  

Sy Hoekstra: Suzie and sports. 

Suzie Lahoud: Right. I don't follow sports. But anyway, this particular athlete was signing autographs for fans, and this one woman came up to him. It was something borderline inappropriate, she wanted him to sign her shirt while she was wearing it or something like that, and he flat out refused. So the folks around him were kind of like, “Hey dude, that's really rude.” Like he just did it in a very brusque way. And they were like, “That's really rude, she's a fan, da, da, da, da.” And he said, his response was, “If someone's going to be offended, it's not going to be my wife.”  

That's also how I in some ways view this conversation is, if I'm going to say something that's going to offend somebody, it's not going to be the folks for whom this defines their life. It's not going to be queer Christians for whom again, they have so much more at stake in this conversation. I realize that some of these things are going to be offensive to Christians who are non-affirming, but I'm sorry, you are not the foremost people in my mind when I'm thinking through wrestling through these things. 

Sy Hoekstra: Or, can I say, Jesus' mind [laughs]. That's how it goes.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yes. But having said that, I realize another way the argument could be turned against the way that I'm using it now would be, well, shouldn't it be it's not going to be God that's going to be offended? And I would say, yes and I agree with Sy that I think Christ is much more loving and much more accepting and much more welcoming than the church gives him credit for, and than the church demonstrates in its practice. Again, that goes back to the idea of why center and elevate marginalized voices. Those are the voices that I care about and that I think Jesus cares about.  

But having said that, I do understand where Christians in the church are coming from when they're wrestling with scriptures, when they come at it from a non-affirming position. Again, this has been a journey for me. So when we talk about things like gay marriage and again, gay marriage has been legalized in the United States, so this is sort of an old conversation now, but churches were fighting it tooth and nail at the time. Actually, there are political forces in our country that are now fighting to overturn it. That's on the agenda. So actually, I think it is very much, as I think about it, it’s still a live conversation, especially, we are recording this on the day that Roe v. Wade was officially overturned. So there's a lot that's still up in the air right now and the culture wars are alive and well.  

Sy Hoekstra: And legally speaking, Roe is actually doctrinally connected to… I know this is really confusing if you're not a lawyer, but the right to privacy is what's at stake in, or what has now been overturned in the context of abortion, and that's the same constitutional right that's involved in gay marriage. That was even the same right that they used to outlaw the criminalization of sodomy. And by the way, contraception bans, those could come back. There are a lot of things that can fall once Roe falls, but that's a tangent. Go ahead. 

Suzie Lahoud: But all that to say, yes, there are political forces actively at work in our country today to build that legal precedent. Like you said, it's all interconnected. But yeah, but all that to say, I do want to also be accepting of brothers and sisters in Christ who are still wrestling with this, who come at the conversation from different places. I think there is a space for building consensus within the church and within broader society, built on this principle that, it's actually from a philosopher, John Rawls, and he talks about the concept of political, not metaphysical. Basically, it's a concept that allows you to build consensus when folks are coming from different religious backgrounds, when they're coming from different faith perspectives. Basically, what Rawls is saying is that you can come to the same political conclusions and agree on certain political points, but you don't have to agree on the fundamentals of how you got there.  

That's essentially how we were able to come up with things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which gosh, some Christians don't agree with [laughs]. And I can't even get into that conversation now, but people like me, I think that's a good thing. I think that's amazing that across the entire world, folks from different religious backgrounds and different social backgrounds and different cultures were able to come together and agree on these fundamental rights of a human being. I think that's a beautiful thing. I think that builds a strong fabric for social cohesion and peaceful coexistence. And shouldn't we, aren't we called to be peacemakers as followers of Christ? All that to say, I think there is a place for Christians who wrestle with this to still be able to come to certain conclusions and be able to build healthy, safe spaces for the queer community, even within the church, even if you are still wrestling on your own personal convictions on this issue. But again, going back to my original point, recognizing that you have the least at stake in this conversation, and this does not pertain directly to your life. 

Also, as Sy was saying, what's the danger and threat to you anyway of your brother or sister in Christ being queer and choosing to be in a queer relationship and even choosing to marry their partner? How does that hurt you anyway? But I just want to throw out that, because I think it can be helpful. 

Sy Hoekstra: There are answers to that question, but it's what I was talking about before. The danger is the destruction of the faith through the lowering of scriptural authority and the authority of God and all that. That's what we're saying is probably not actually the case if you want to spend some time looking into it. 

Suzie Lahoud: Right, right. It's a misperception.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly. One other thing is, I think a lot of people get really hung up on, okay, but didn't the church have one opinion on this for so long and now it's changed? Again, the history is, I don't want to over emphasize this, but there have been kind of varying opinions on this. There have been people throughout church history who are kind of gender fluid, who are kind of not super clear on their sexuality. That sort of thing has happened and that's history that has not surprisingly been uncovered more recently. The other thing though, is when people are just like, oh, there's tradition on this and all these arguments are new. Like all the affirming arguments are new, and so we're going to be suspicious of them. I would just say another thing to consider is, the other thing that's new is us letting queer people do theology and not have to stay hidden in the closet because they're afraid of literal death. So that is a recent development in history as well. 

Suzie Lahoud: Well, actually, could I just jump in for a second Sy, and clarify, allow having queer folks do theology as openly queer folks, yes. 

Sy Hoekstra: You're right.  

Okay, I think I am going to going to wrap us up here, even though we could go on about this forever. Look, this is a really hard conversation. I'm sure we have made some people upset. We're trying to do this in as respectful a way as possible. If you have stuff that you want to tell us to educate us on things that we're not thinking or that we haven't considered, we would love to hear from you, with the obvious hesitation that if you're just angry at us that we gave credence to anyone who is affirming and you don't like them. I mean, you're still free to write in. We may or may not respond depending on your words. Because the truth is, whenever anyone talks about this, they get wildly hateful stuff from people. That's the reason I'm hesitating there. But if people are genuinely trying to engage and converse or teach us in any way, we would love to hear from you. You can always email [email protected] with any thoughts that you have about anything that you hear on this show, or that you read from us.  

Also, as a reminder, go to ktfpress.com, check out our subscription. That gets you the bonus episodes of this show and our newsletter, and supports everything else that we do. If you would consider supporting us if you appreciate what we're trying to do here, that would be enormously helpful and we would really appreciate it. And you can always go to ktfpress.com/freemonth to start off your subscription with a free month, if you just want to check it out.  

That is all from us for now. Next week we have Kai Ngu on, again, to talk about, one of the co-founders of Church Clarity and a divinity student studying all kinds of really interesting things to do with theology and history and colonialism and sexuality, and that conversation we've already recorded it, that conversation with them was fantastic. So listen up to that one.  

Our theme song as always, “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you all in two weeks. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]   

Sy Hoekstra: Can you leave your computer on so Suzie and I can just finish the episode up?  

Jonathan Walton: Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have to leave, like I have to physically go, but you can keep talking.  

Sy Hoekstra: Okay, awesome. We appreciate it. Thank you, Jonathan.  

Jonathan Walton: All right. Bye.  

Sy Hoekstra: This is, Jonathan didn't mute himself and now I can hear myself through Jonathan's headphones. 

Suzie Lahoud: [laughs]. 

The team is doing something a little different and more personal today. Jonathan, Suzie, and Sy are all talking about their own reasons for following Jesus at this point in their lives, as well as the things that push them away from faith and the Church. Suzie mentions Henri Nouwen’s idea that the most personal is often the most universal. So we trust that opening up these stories will resonate with you, and you’ll find something helpful in them. Enjoy! 

The songs mentioned in the episode: 

* “Be More Kind” by Frank Turner 

* “God is Real” by India Arie 

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify. 

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.  

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra. 

Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra. 

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode. 

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]  

Suzie Lahoud: We're talking about God meeting us in the deepest places of our humanity and in the particularities of where we need to be loved I think. Which makes so much sense because the Bible says that God is love. That is how we experience the manifestation of the transcendence of who and what God is. So I just love how deeply personal it is, even just beyond our own stories. It's getting at the root of where we hurt and why we hurt and God being present there with us.  

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust: Leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. I'm Jonathan Walton here with Suzie Lahoud and Sy Hoekstra.  

Sy Hoekstra: Tonight is testimony night at the church of Shake the Dust. Suzie's going to tell you [laughter] what we’re all about. 

Suzie Lahoud: Whoa, we're a church now?  

Sy Hoekstra: I mean, if we're having a testimony night, yeah, exactly. 

Jonathan Walton: Who's leading worship? Who’s leading worship? [laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan's on the organ. We're going to talk a little bit about some of our own current, more current faith journeys, not previous testimonies. Suzie's going to explain more of what we're doing later. I promise it'll be great. I'm just here to remind you really quickly, if you have never checked it out, please do go to ktfpress.com and look into subscribing to this show if you appreciate what we do. That is the best way to support our work. That gets you the bonus episodes of this show, of which there are several. It also gets you our weekly newsletter from the three of us where we give you, each of us give you a couple recommendations on things that have helped us in political education and discipleship as we try and grow and leave colonized faith.  

It also supports everything we do. The other book projects that we have going on and the transcribing of the show to keep everything accessible. Everything that we do at KTF Press, it supports all of it. We really appreciate if you would go take a look at that. Okay, Suzie, give them the not jokey, goofy little description of what we're doing that I just did. Tell them what we're actually doing today.  

Suzie Lahoud: Okay. Well, as Sy shared, this episode we're going to be talking about our faith in a more personal way. When I was in college, a divinity school professor was invited to our Christian fellowship’s weekly meeting to share her testimony. And she opened by saying that she feels like your testimony shouldn't really be about that moment when you decided to follow Christ, however many weeks, months, or even years ago. It should be about why you still choose to follow Christ today. Those are the testimonies the three of us want to share with you all now. But we want to take it a step further. We also want to share about the moments when we've been tempted to walk away. We hope that this is a conversation that encourages you, challenges you and stirs your soul. So Sy, you want to open us up?  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I am going to get us started. I think I'm going to start with the second part of the question, which is the why you almost walked away, because well, it's just a little bit… believe it or not, that is actually a little bit of a lighter topic in my story. So the thing that I actually wanted to start out with, was I have not had a lot of really significant moments where I thought I wanted to leave. The reason is not because of the immense and abiding power of my gigantic faith. The reason is, actually, it had to do with my parents and the million different little ways that they taught me and I think my siblings to… the incredible power of the ability to roll your eyes at church, is how I think of it in my head.  

Suzie Lahoud: I actually really love that [laughs]. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Like the ability to… they did not hold sacred anything that wasn't sacred, right? They were fine with laughing at church when it got ridiculous. They were fine with criticizing things that were wrong, even if both my and their ideas of what is wrong and needs criticizing have changed over the years, that idea was always there. So I didn't… I just don't have a lot of those, I hear so many stories of people who are like, “I saw these pastors that I really loved supporting Trump and that really hurt my faith in Jesus. They hurt my faith.” You know what I mean? Their faith was so tied up in whether or not those pastors were good people doing good things that it becomes a part of your faith altogether.  

And people were taught that. People were taught to be a part of a, effectively cults of personality, or they're taught to be part of an entertainment industry that you bring people into, that is wholly focused on propping up the goodness of the church and the people in it, which has nothing to do with what Jesus says. So I didn't have a lot of those moments. Here's the moment that I have where I almost did, that really shook my faith and it's extremely trivial at first. This story will be silly and you'll wonder why I'm talking… roll your eyes at the fact that I'm talking about this. However, it will lead to a bigger point, which is this. When I was a little teenage, brand new, baby Christian, I was in a world that was very focused on apologetics, like that corner of the church. Which Jonathan knows, because that's how I was when I got to Columbia and that's not how he was, and we had a lot of funny conversations about that [laughter]. 

So I get to college as a relatively new Christian. I had been just been trained to be very focused on, college is like the lion's den. It's like you're coming in and there's all these ideas that are going to come at you that are going to try and take you away from God and you have to defeat them with your apologetic prowess. And I was always a little bit into that. Not fully bought in, but always kind of there because I really cared about what white people thought. Like that's the point that I eventually got to. So when I came to college, my freshman year was when Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great came out. 

Jonathan Walton: Oh yes, the Four Horsemen [laughter]. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yes, right? Yeah. And Sam Harris had a book come out that year too. It was like, it was all about… 

Suzie Lahoud: The Second Death of God.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, right. It was all about those guys. I can't remember which one it was that I read. I think I read Sam Harris's book first. And because I was kind of into apologetics, but didn't actually know that much [laughs], having a concentrated sit down and just read a bunch of his stuff, I was like, “Oh no, am I completely wrong about everything?” And it didn't take me very long to, literally then I had one night where I was very shaken. And then literally the next day, I just read some responses to him and I was like, oh, this is actually, there's a lot of holes in what he was saying. But the point that I had to get to more broadly from being in community with people like you, Jonathan, or Gabrielle, or lots of other people, lots of other people who I had the good fortune to be in community with at the time, was there were so many of you who did not know who any of these people were and did not care about what they thought in any way. 

[laughter] 

Jonathan Walton: It's true.  

Sy Hoekstra: And because it really was, it was like… and I'm not saying if you're bothered by some argument that someone made against Christianity, you shouldn't go look into it or you shouldn't go follow that rabbit hole of doubt and figure things out for yourself. But what I am saying is, I cared way too much about what those people thought because they were educated, privileged white men. That's what it came down to, right? Like why do I care so much about what Richard Dawkins thinks, and I couldn't care less about what some Muslim student on campus with me thinks, you know what I mean? Or I couldn't… the idea that Christianity is running around oppressing all kinds of marginalized groups, those people's calls for reform or even anger with Christianity, none of that bothered me.  

What bothered me was the people who had the status, telling me that I was foolish and wrong, and I wanted to prove that they were foolish and wrong. So that's kind of a place where I was actually legitimately shaken for a bit, and the thing that propped me up was — shocking for someone who's on this show — listening to marginalized people. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra:  But like I said, a lot of the stuff that carried me through all the complete obnoxiousness of how so many Christians responded to Black Lives Matter or Trump or everything else, was at least in part, like I said, my parents just giving me the ability to separate out Jesus from everything else. I think actually that kind of, that white evangelical fixation on your personal relationship with Jesus had a lot of problems that we criticize all day long, but there was one way in which it really helped me. Which was like, the thing that it did give me was an understanding that communion with God is the sacred thing.  

Your relationship with God, your interaction with God, the thing that we're trying to restore from the Fall is our relationship to God. That whole thing is actually very helpful if you can see it as something that should push you away from ending up in like a cult of personality. Or ending up in a church where you have to cling to certain political beliefs in order to be like a real full-fledged member of the church or whatever. Should I stop there? Do you guys have questions or thoughts on that before I get to the other thing?  

Jonathan Walton: No. I mean, yeah, that just all resonates with me. I'm like, yes and amen. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I mean, you were there for a lot of that [laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton: I was, and I'm also just realizing that I wonder if our stories will be very similar.  

Sy Hoekstra: They won't be. They'll be from different angles. 

Jonathan Walton: Well, actually, more of our conclusions will be very similar because my conclusion is very similar. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. 

Jonathan Walton: I also just appreciated your mother and your father more as you were sharing. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, for sure. 

Jonathan Walton: Because my mama has a whole lot to do with that as well. Yeah. So keep going. I think, keep going.  

Sy Hoekstra: Sure. Okay. So the thing that most attracts me to Jesus now. By the way, I have a story in here that is my direct attempt to exercise, remember at the end of the last season when I said I didn't know how well I had done at being vulnerable? I'm calling the shot here. I'm going to kick myself in the gut vulnerability-wise right now [laughs], and make myself just feel those feelings that I don't want to feel for the sake of sharing the story. This isn't it yet though.  

So I think a lot of what at the moment — and like Suzie was saying, this always changes — keeps me very close to Jesus, comes from passages Like where he talks about healing a man on the Sabbath, which he does in more than one occasion, but he specifically talks about how the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Or how, like the example that Jesus gives at one point of David and the soldiers he had with him eating the food that was reserved by Levitical law for the priests, because basically they were starving and desperate and on the run. All these different stories like that, where Jesus has this amount of grace where he understands that the religious rules are not and never were the point. And that they are there for human flourishing, and that when they contradict human flourishing, you can break them, because they are like, that's not what they're for. They're not supposed to become abstractions that cause harm. And it's the same thing, like there's another story in one of the books… dang it, which book is it?  

I don't know. There's a story where King Saul goes into battle without waiting for the prophet Samuel like God told him to. He was supposed to wait for the prophet Samuel to get there, and he made these sacrifices and just assumed that God would be on his side and went off into battle and lost. The point that Samuel makes to him when he gets there, is that God desires obedience, not sacrifice. He doesn't want you to turn the laws into something that's for your own profit either. He wants you to have… the point of it is, like I was saying before, is the closeness to God, is the trust, is the faith. Is all of that. Is that kind of stuff that leads to flourishing, and it's not you getting what you want, it's not you being overburdened by a bunch of rules. So there's that emotional core to Jesus's teaching that is fundamentally about love for people and not love for any sort of institutional set of rules. So in finding that specific kind of love that breaks through the rules and the institutions and all that, there's an enormous amount of flourishing to be found there I think. That's a lot of what has me… what's the word? I don't even know what the word is. Kind of enthralled by Jesus at the moment.  

So here's the example for my life, and I may have to do a little bit of work to show how this connects. But before I ever dated anybody, I had this speech that I had planned in my head in various ways for anybody who I ended up in a long-term relationship with. It was basically a speech that said, “I know that you at some point, will be embarrassed or somehow ashamed of me as a disabled person in your life, and that's okay. I understand, I will have grace for that.” It's ridiculous to not see that as a defense mechanism now. It's sort of like what I had up was this wall of I can only expect so much love from people. I can only expect so much in terms of a relationship and what it can give me, and I need to tell people ahead of time that that's okay so I don't end up hurt by it.  

So Gabrielle, my wife, was actually the first person that I ever dated for any really extended period of time. And I gave that speech to her one day in like a… it's not, speech is a bigger word than it is. Her reaction was kind of just like, “I don't actually think that I will be. That's probably not going to happen.” And I was like, I started thinking about all the stuff that I know about her and like she… the reason that this started to seem possible to me, is because, and Jonathan will know this, I know I knew her at that point for a long time and she backs that idea up. She is kind of one of the people that people naturally go to with some of the most difficult things in their lives, because she is so evidently not going to judge you [laughs]. She is so unembarrassed by people's difficulties and burdens and ways that they make things, like life circumstances can make things tough on other people. 

But I didn't fully believe what she was saying, so I kind of, I had a couple of like, “Are you sure? Like, are you sure?” And her just continuing to say, “Yeah, I've never actually felt anything like that being with you.” At some point I just started to cry because that was literally not something that I had as a possibility in my head, because the ways that I burden other people, the inefficiencies, the things that are frustrating, the things that I can't do, that I should be able to do. All those things are frustrating to me because I take in those ableist messages from the society around me and I just assumed everybody else would feel the same way. 

So feeling from Gabrielle a love that broke through those kinds of rules and those kinds of requirements that we put on each other, that are not meant to be about human flourishing, they're meant to be weights that hold people down, like Jesus says to the religious leaders, was unbelievably healing for me. So there's this song that I sent to Suzie and Jonathan today, did any of you listen to it?  

Suzie Lahoud: Yes, I loved it.  

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. So it’s by this guy named Frank Turner who I listen to. It's been in my head for like a few months. The song's called “Be More Kind,” and it just, it goes, “History’s been leaning on me lately; I can feel the future breathing down my neck. All the things I thought were true when I was young, and you were too, turned out to be broken and I don't know what comes next. In a world that has decided that it's going to lose its mind, be more kind, my friends, try to be more kind.” Actually, I'm going to keep going because the second verse is good too [laughs]. It says, “They've started raising walls around the world now, like hackles raised upon a cornered cat. On the borders, in our heads, between the things that can and can't be said, we've stopped talking to each other and there's something wrong with that. So before you go out searching, don't decide what you will find. Be more kind, my friends, try to be more kind.”  

And I keep… he's an atheist by the way, this has nothing to do with Jesus in particular. But I have the song in my head because the emotional core behind it is so in that same vein as Jesus, I think, in terms of there's just so much happening to us individually, there's so much happening in society that is so oppressive and so problematic and so difficult and harmful to so many people in so many ways, that the thing that I just want to tell people to do is be more kind, because we just do not need any more people being less kind.  

So, Mika Edmondson recently talked about how he was, he just made this offhand comment on our show about self-control. He's like, “I'm just so glad that that's a fruit of the spirit.” And I think kindness for me is the one where I'm like, we don't talk about that enough, that just kindness and gentleness are a fruit of the spirit and are not… I think we think we cannot be straightforward or frustrated or lamenting and kind all at the same time, but it's like that. That is absolutely what Jesus was. Jesus was flipping tables and saying, “Let the little children come to me,” or whatever you see as Jesus being particularly kind towards people. So that idea of we just needed more of that kindness, we needed more of that acceptance in the world that helps us flourish. I never fail to find that in Jesus, and so I think that's why I'm at where I'm at. That's a lot of talking guys. Do you have any questions [laughs]?  

Jonathan Walton: I think what's interesting or what's compelling about what you were saying is that, I told myself a different story about having to marry someone or getting to marry someone, is that I was like, when I get married, they will have to leave their families to marry me. Because I remember going to my uncle's wedding and everybody on my aunt's side was not there. And I was like, well, why aren't they there? And so, because she's white and he's Black. So I grew up with the expectation that one day, if I decided to marry someone, it's very possible that they would have to choose me over their family. And I think I had that conversation multiple times with people that I was dating.  

But what's different is that proved to be true in most of those dialogues. But the result of being chosen in the midst of a… so my intrinsic value being validated when extrinsically that was being shut down was transformative for me.  

Sy Hoekstra: Wait, what do you mean by that — intrinsic, extrinsic? 

Jonathan Walton: The extrinsic value placed upon me in society is that I am less educated, less smart, more brutish. All the things that come with being Black. Whereas intrinsically, God has made me in his image.  

Sy Hoekstra: I see, okay. 

Jonathan Walton: So that again, the response to the brokenness is a prepared speech thing, but the balm is relationship, and that's a transformative thing. So that resonates with what you were saying. 

Sy Hoekstra: It's like the peace that — this is Lisa Sharon Harper, for you and me, Jonathan, this is definitely where we got this — but that peace and goodness and shalom being something that happens in between people and not something that happens in an individual. 

Jonathan Walton: Right.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yes.  

Jonathan Walton: It's actually impossible for it to happen individually. 

Sy Hoekstra: Because that's not what was broken. Yeah, totally. Right. 

Jonathan Walton: Right. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yes. Which I will say, going back to one of the first things you said, Sy. And two, I just want to say thank you for your vulnerability and sharing all of that because I do also just resonate so deeply with how personal you got. It makes me think of, I love when Henri Nouwen talks a lot in his writings about how the most personal thing is often the most universal. That, I think, it’s when we get down to that level of our greatest fears being unlovable, unloved, rejected. Like that's so, it doesn't matter who you are, that's something that I think it is, I would say probably universal, maybe almost universal. And then when someone is willing to share that with you, it's just this moment of like, oh yeah, I'm not the only one who feels that way, even though the particularities of where that comes from might differ, as you guys were just sharing.  

But then also I want to go back to, Sy, when you were talking about the ability to… how did you put that, to roll your eyes at church? It was so great. And I just, I think I will come back to that in my own story because you summarized so succinctly, and so... in a very pithy way that I think is really helpful, just something that is so important, which is being willing to separate out the things that are actually of God and the things that are of people. So I think that's so important, but then also that doesn't mean we throw community out the window because as you guys were just saying, community is part of how God works in our lives and how we come to a place of flourishing and fullness and healing and Shalom. 

But at the same time, the Bible doesn't teach us that people are good. It teaches us that God is good. So being able to distinguish between the two I think is often so important. So again, I think that's something I'll probably come back to later, but I just thought that was so well put and such an important piece that you brought out there. 

Sy Hoekstra: Thanks.  

Jonathan Walton: Why don't you go next Suzie. 

Suzie Lahoud: Oh, man. Really? I thought you were going to go next [Sy laughs].  

Jonathan Walton: Well, I can go, but I think I'm going to be fast. At least that's how it starts and then you open the gates [Sy laughs]. But I think in thinking about this question, the thing that… I can't say that I've had a significant crisis of faith in God. What I can say is that there have been times where I have tried to, like if I can't figure out the answers to the questions, then I will try to get away from God and he will come and get me.  

So I was actually thinking about the normal things that cause Black people to quote-unquote “lose their faith.” One of the biggest things is, oh, I guess this is a white person's religion and all that stuff. But honestly, that has never been a hang-up for me. The apologetic stuff didn't really do it for me either. Those things didn’t cause me to question God, because I had such visceral experiences with God at a very young age, and we could talk about that at another podcast. 

Sy Hoekstra: Those are also two completely separate questions. They're separate conversations.  

Jonathan Walton: Yes.  

Sy Hoekstra: The things that take Black people away from Christianity and the apologetics conversation have nothing to do with each other.  

Jonathan Walton: Right. That's true. That's true. The thing that drives me away from God, and then he comes and gets me, is humanity. My experiences with God is that like, I have had very, very low moments where I don't want to go on anymore, and he comes and gets me because I've lost faith in the people around me. So when I was younger, I wrote a poem. I think it's in my first book, but it's called, “As I the Lonely Go.” It's the only time I've ever thought about killing myself, and just is life worth living? I imagined jumping off a building and what that would be like. The last line of the poem is like, “I wonder where, just where the lonely go.” And there's an inherent, I think, sense of rejection that I felt as a kid because of my dad not taking an active part in my life. So being there, but not present in my life. But when, fast forward, there was a time I was watching Finding Nemo, which is another poem about that…  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. 

Jonathan Walton: Where God, like basically this father, Marlin is chasing his son Nemo, and God was like, “I'm chasing you like this.” And it just wrecked me. So I leave my house, I'm sitting in a field in front of our house just crying because I'm like, oh, this is how God loves me. So I think humanity consistently pushes me away from faith because I'm just like how can we hurt each other so badly all the time and things be worth it? But then God just shows up. So when Terence Crutcher was killed, I don't know why, but it just did something inside of me. I was listening to a worship song by some white woman and her words, because Terence Crutcher was killed by a white woman, I was just like, I just could not do it. I was like, “None of this is for me.” 

Sy Hoekstra: CCM? 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, CCM. This song, this singing, it's not for me. It's not for me. It's just like, she's not singing about me. None of this is for me at all. And God just comes in and he gets me? He's like, “You think you're trash. You are not disposable. I came for you,” you know what I mean? So I feel like humanity pushes me away from God and he consistently comes and gets me through random acts of kindness to get back at what Sy was saying about people being kind, to events and conversations. To visceral moments of like, oh, God is there, like with Finding Nemo. To conversations with Maia, where Maia looks at me, and Maia said… I wrote about this in a piece that we highlighted from the New York Times, where the writer talks about, I think it's Sam Anderson, talks about body image issues and his struggles. And I distinctly remember my cousins calling me fat at 11 years old, riding my bike down the road. I'll never forget it. And Maia looked at me in the bathroom and she was like… I was complaining about how I looked to myself. And she goes, “You're beautiful, baba.”  

Sy Hoekstra: [laughing] Aw. 

Jonathan Walton: You know? I think God has his ways of reminding me that he is there with me, even when humanity, even the humanity within myself would push me to think I am not valuable. Would push me to think that life is not worth it. So the lie that I believe is not that God isn't real, it's that my life isn't worth living. Like none of this is valuable. Which I know is a different question.  

Sy Hoekstra: It's not. I don't think it is.  

Jonathan Walton:  Okay. Okay. 

Sy Hoekstra: I think it's just, the way you put it was that it’s humanity, the dregs of humanity taking you away from faith, right? 

Jonathan Walton: Right. 

Sy Hoekstra: Taking you away from a relationship with God. It doesn't have to be renouncing the doctrines of Christianity and walking away.  

Jonathan Walton: That's true. That's true.  

Sy Hoekstra: You know what I mean?  

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Sy Hoekstra: I even think there's some white cultural stuff in framing it that way.  

Jonathan Walton: Well, that's very true. I had a conversation with my uncle, my uncle Marvin. And based on any type of catechism people probably say a lot of people I grew up with are not Christian. But if you ask any of them about Jesus and any of them about God, there is nothing more certain in their lives than that God is real. So it’s this, it's yeah, but I don't have a frame. I don't have the words to communicate the depths of faith that he has. I don't have words for the power that comes from the faith that they have.  

Suzie Lahoud: I just love where this conversation has taken us, which is that our faith is rooted in the deepest parts of who we are, and God meeting us in the place of our deepest fears and hurts and insecurities and restoring those things. I just love that because it gets beyond the cerebral aspect of faith that we've kind of been critiquing a little bit. Not that it's not important to also, we're called to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. So it's not that our mind doesn't play a role in that, but we're not talking about philosophical arguments for the existence of God. We're talking about God meeting us in the deepest places of our humanity and in the particularities of where we need to be loved I think. 

Which makes so much sense because the Bible says that God is love. That is how we experience the manifestation of the transcendence of who and what God is. So I just love how deeply personal it is even just beyond our own stories. It's getting at the root of where we hurt and why we hurt and God being present there with us. It's Emmanuel, and I just think that's so beautiful and so powerful and so simple. Yeah, that's just something that strikes me, and thank you again to both of you for going there. I really appreciate that.  

Sy Hoekstra: No problem. Let's hear yours.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. I would say similarly for me, it's interesting, it strikes me in the past going along with what you guys were sharing, it’s really been from my place of woundedness and blatant insecurity that I've kind of held onto God and sensed him holding onto me. But honestly, what strikes me the most today in terms of why today when I woke up and got out of bed in the morning, why do I still believe that God is real and present in my life? Why do I still cling to him? And honestly, I need someone who can hold it all together because I can't. I can pretend to be intelligent. I can pretend to be brave. I can pretend to know the things, to be able to critique the things. But at the end of the day, when I'm tired, when my strength fails me, when my kid is sick, when I'm out of ideas, when I'm not sure if I'm doing the thing that I'm supposed to be doing, I need to know that someone is holding me. And that someone is God. I'm blessed with an incredibly supportive and loving family and an incredible husband, but that's not what holds it together for me.  

I was sharing with, Sy and I were actually talking about this. I want to share kind of a small illustration of this. We're lucky because this turned out to not be a part of our story, but we took our daughter in to see the pediatrician a couple weeks ago for some issues that she'd been having, and they made us take her in to get tested for leukemia. That was something I did not expect to have to even consider. I was not prepared. I think it's moments like that where again, you need someone who can hold it all together. No matter how brave we pretend to be, no matter how much we pretend to have it all together, who holds you up when you have nothing left? So that's God meeting me there.  

And in the beautiful ways that God meets me, I think two mornings ago I woke up early because I was feeding my baby. And just seeing the traces of the sunrise, the pink on the clouds, and it made me think of, Jonathan, when you talked about delight in one of our conversations and just the power of delight. I thought, God did that without even knowing or caring maybe, that someone was going to wake up and see it, but then I got to wake up and see it. Then he let me see it, but God doesn't even just do it for me, he just does… that's delight. Just the fact that we get to glimpse traces of transcendence in our lives through moments like that. We get to try to grasp something that is just beyond our reach because I do, in my moments of doubt, very much along the lines of what you all were sharing. It’s the manmade constructions that we try to put around God. It's the way we try to box him in, fence him in, that produces doubt in me. Those are the structures that cause me to want to walk away.  

But the God that breaks out of those boxes, that exists beyond those fences, that's the God that I've never really had reason to doubt. I think that's something I also want to continue to wrestle with despite my moments of doubt. I love in the Bible when it talks about Jacob wrestling with God. I feel like I come back to that so often. I want to be known as someone who wrestles with God. Yes, I have questions. Yes, I have critiques. Yes, there are things that I want to see us as a collective, as the church repent of, because I do again, believe in the communal aspect of our faith. I do believe in communal sin and communal repentance and I want to see that happen.  

I feel like the prayer that I so often come back to is, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” Yet every time I pray that prayer and take that, what philosophers, what Kierkegaard calls the “leap of faith” that I think is so fundamental to everyone's life, regardless of whether you say that you believe in God or the universe or whatever, it all requires that leap of faith. For me, every time I take that leap into the transcendence and infinite existence of God, he meets me and he affirms me and I just, that's something I can't walk away from.  

And I appreciated Jonathan, you touching on visceral experiences you've had in your faith. And I never want to walk away from the intellectual arguments because again, I know we're called to love God with our minds as well. Yet it really is the visceral experiences as you put it. That's part of why I think I describe myself as sort of a closet Pentecostal, or almost sometimes I feel like a Christian mystic. That I just, I think God is real. Or even Jonathan, you were talking about the tradition in the Black church of just an everyday faith in God that goes beyond our white Christian apologetics. I love that song by India Arie, that I think touches on that, of “how I know that God is real. All of this is not by chance.” And just the beauty of creation.  

It's the simple things that I think ground my faith in God today, and they're basic and they're particular to me, and they're also universal. They're things that I can't deny. In that sense, they're also, if I wanted to make a philosophical argument, phenomenological. But that's not why they're powerful to me. They're experiential but they're powerful to me because they're also emotional. They're also rooted in the most fundamental fabric of who I am as a human being. And every time I'm tempted to, or even try to step away from those things, I feel that I'm losing the most important piece of me, and so I can't walk away.  

Jonathan Walton: Amen.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Amen. What I think is interesting, is one way that someone could come back and like, or that a lot of people would come back and critique what you just said and what all of us have said is, is that point about you need someone to hold things together. Like people could just kind of go, oh, that's an emotional crutch…  

Suzie Lahoud: Oh yeah.  

Sy Hoekstra: Which is an ableist phrase in and of itself. But I think your willingness to just say, no, that actually, there is a way that I am weak here and God resolves it and I'm just fine with that because I'm not a person who's perfect and has it all together. I think that's an important bit of vulnerability. For people to just say, for you to be able to just say, no, I'm not entirely rational. To say, I do have emotional and communal and everything else needs. And I think to deny those needs is something that colonized faith and that hyper-rational, enlightened Western thinking all have in common with each other. They’re all from the same thing, the denial of any…  

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So anyways, I thought that was an interesting point, but thank you very much for sharing all that. It was, both what you said was quite powerful I thought.  

Suzie Lahoud: And thank you Sy, for bringing that up, because that is the devil's advocate in my head. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.  

Suzie Lahoud: Sometimes when I'm like is my faith just my opium, to paraphrase Marx, where religion’s the opiate of the people? Do I just allow myself to be happily delusioned [sic]? I think that's where, again, that idea of the leap of faith that you, at a certain point, you will always believe in something. What you believe in, that's a different thing. Then I go back to what is this built on, what is this based on? Again, I think it needs to be cognitive, but it also should be experiential. And it also, when you get into the realm of spirituality there, again, I believe in transcendence, like there is something else going on there. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right that that would be the critique of something like that. Yet there's a deeper truth there that I think you can't get beyond.  

Jonathan Walton: I think what's interesting about what we're talking about is that I think what we are trying to do and what we're sharing, is bearing witness, which is what Jesus calls us to be, his witnesses, not his defenders.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, totally.  

Suzie Lahoud: That’s so good. 

Jonathan Walton: And when we testify, we're doing what he's called us to do. And I'm not saying apologetics is some, a-biblical heretical thing to do. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is if our defense is not rooted in a relationship with God, then I think we've missed something. Because I should be able to talk about the Jesus that I know, not the Jesus that I learned about, yeah, from somebody else. 

Sy Hoekstra: Totally. It's the Jesus that you know and not the Jesus that you learned about from somebody else that's going to get you through the actual difficulties of life, like the actual brokenness of the world, you know what I mean? The fact that, if you can only talk about the Jesus that you learned about from somebody else, that's actually indicative of a deeper problem.  

Jonathan Walton: Right. So I think like Rich Villodas, New Life, would say, “We're not called to live off of secondhand spirituality.” 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. But I also think that the delusion piece comes in if you're not willing to look the manifestation of the practice of our faith fully in the eye. That's part of why it's so important to me to be able to be honest about the ugly things that happen in the church, and the ugly things that Christians do and have done historically. I think if our faith is authentic, we shouldn't feel like we need to, I guess it's going back exactly to what you were saying, Jonathan. We shouldn't need to feel like we have to defend it or preserve it, or protect it from itself. If it's genuine, if it's real, it can hold water in the midst of all of the nonsense that humanity wraps around it. And I think that honesty is important. 

Jonathan Walton: Right. And if it doesn't hold water for X person, it will hold water for Y person and somebody, you know what I mean? Because not every testimony and everything is for everybody either. You know what I mean? 

Sy Hoekstra: Yes. Which I think is actually a good kind of place to end us, because what I wanted to say was, these are our personal stories. I hope they've been helpful to you all. Thank you for sticking with us through a bit of a kind of abnormal episode for us, but we thought this would be something that would hold water for some people and in a helpful way. And also give people an idea of hopefully how we can be honest and vulnerable and how to talk about testimonies in terms of what's actually going on in our lives now, and not just some story from 20 years ago, which while it was extremely important to you, is not actually like the substance of your faith today. I think people kind of do need to learn how to do that. Like be okay with the limitedness of your own story, and also to tell your actual story as it is now [laughs].  

So I think we're going to end there. Thank you two very much for having this conversation, and thank you all for listening. Please do remember if you like, appreciate what we do at all here at KTF Press, do go to ktfpress.com and consider becoming a monthly or annual subscriber. That helps us out so much, that is the best way to support us like I said. You can also go to ktfpress.com/freemonth if you want to start your subscription out with a free month.  

We mentioned a couple songs. We will have links to those in the show notes in case anyone wants to listen to what Suzie or I were talking about.  

As always, our theme song, “Citizens” by Jon Guerra, our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you all in two weeks. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Sy Hoekstra: I think I will start with… can you guys hear that sound?  

Jonathan Walton: No. The Holy Spirit? 

Sy Hoekstra: [chuckles] Yeah, can you guys hear the Holy Spirit talking?  

Suzie Lahoud: I do have my fan on in my room, is that…? 

Sy Hoekstra: No, no. It's something coming from my end, I don't know what it is. 

Jonathan Walton: Okay, I do, the AC is behind me.  

Sy Hoekstra: It's a small squeaking. It's not… 

Suzie Lahoud: [singing and Jonathan starts to beat box] It's in your head, in your head, zombie, zombie, zombie. Okay. I'm done. 

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] 

Suzie Lahoud: I just had to get that out. You're welcome. 

Sy Hoekstra: Those are not going to be timed with each other when the actual recordings come in to me, and we're not on a VoIP call [laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton: You will then take the time to make them timed. It will be great. 

Sy Hoekstra: No, I won't. 

[laughter] 

Today, Jonathan and Sy are talking to Dr. Amy Kenny, disabled Shakespeare scholar and author of My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church. They discuss curing disabilities versus biblical healing, finding beauty and power in disability, reshaping the Church around disabled people, compassion in literature, and so much more! 

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and other paid content at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify. 

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.  

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra. 

Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Suzie Lahoud. 

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode. 

Transcript

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”] 

Amy Kenny: I remember as a kid having so many people try to pray me away, but I didn't have examples of people in my life who were celebrating my disabled bodymind. And not in terms of pity or inspiration, but in terms of thinking about how miraculous and interesting and magnificent my bodymind is. And I think it took a long time and a lot of therapy to get to that place because the narratives out there are so seeped in ableism.  

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust: Leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. My name is Sy Hoekstra, I'm here with Jonathan Walton. Suzie, we had a slight scheduling snafu, so she couldn't be here with us. We are going to be talking today about disability justice in the church with a fantastic guest who Jonathan's going to introduce to you in a second. But before he does, as always, just a quick reminder, go to ktfpress.com if you have a second, check out the subscription that we have there. It gets you the bonus episodes of this show, it gets you our weekly newsletter where Jonathan and Suzie and I recommend all kinds of things. All kinds of media highlights and everything to help you in political education and discipleship as you leave colonized faith. It's a Substack website, if you have the Substack app, or if you already have a Substack account, nice and easy for you to go find us. That's it for me for now. Jonathan, tell the people who we have with us today. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, today we are blessed to have Amy Kenny.  

She is a disabled scholar and a Shakespeare Lecturer who hates Hamlet. Ditto [Laughter]. She serves on the mayor’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Taskforce in her home city, coordinates support for people experiencing homelessness in her neighborhood, and is currently co-launching Jubilee Homes OC, a permanent supportive housing initiative in her local community. She is a Scribe for Freedom Road Institute and believes that every human is an image-bearer worthy of belonging. She's the author of the book My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church, which we are going to be talking about today.  

Thank you again so, so much for being here.  

You write all the time about people having tried to heal you through prayer (so we're going to jump right in with this question [laughter]) by suggesting a wild assortment of home remedies. When I saw that I was like, this is terrible [laughter]. 

Sy Hoekstra: Garlic in the socks was my personal favorite. 

Amy Kenny: Oh, my personal favorite’s the hitting your leg with a hammer.  

Sy Hoekstra: Ooh, okay.  

Amy Kenny: It's so violent and ridiculous [laughter]. What do they think is going to happen? Somehow, I'm still disabled [laughter]. 

Jonathan Walton: Right. you discussed the difference between this type of curing and the Bible's notion of healing, which is really powerful. So could you talk about that distinction and why it's important for the church to understand? And I would say not just understand, but embrace. 

Amy Kenny: Yeah, I think it's crucial to our understanding of what is happening in these healing narratives with Jesus, and also to our own understanding of what it means to include disabled people in whatever spaces we're in. Curing I think is usually what's taking place in these stories, which is a physical process. It's usually a rapid one. It focuses on eliminating pain or disease, and that's generally, in a lot of Western settings, what we think of medicine as. But healing is much deeper than that. It's messy and it takes a long time. It's complicated and it takes a community as well. It's not just about an individual or about one bodymind, it's about restoring that person to the community and giving them a deeper sense of belonging.  

I think that's so crucial for us to think about when we read these narratives and when we talk about healing today, because just by virtue of any of my mobility aids, my cane named Eileen… get what I did there? [Laughter] My mobility scooter named Diana after Wonder Woman. Folks approach me and assume that I want to be fixed or changed, and that's a really harmful and ableist assumption. And it's based on that idea that bodies need to be cured in order to be healed, and one of the invitations of the book is to rethink that premise. 

Sy Hoekstra: You actually talk about the Greek word for healing that Jesus uses a couple different times in the Bible and how it encompasses everything, like communal restoration and psychological healing. I thought that that point was really interesting. You do a reading of John 9, which despite the fact that I've read it a million times, I thought was really interesting and something I'd never heard before. Would you mind digging into that a little bit?  

Amy Kenny: Yeah. That word sozo, means to make whole. It's not about fixing or eliminating some sort of pain or disease or even disability, it's about restoring. I think that's such a different understanding if we think of Jesus more as a therapist than as a kind of magician or vending machine. I think that's a really different way of approaching Jesus in these narratives. John 9 is really important to me, really central to my understanding of what it means to follow Jesus or to think about Jesus. Because people are assuming that this man who unfortunately is unnamed and is blind, is sinful somehow. The disciples are asking, “Who sinned, this guy or his parents?” 

Jesus says, “Nope. [laughter] Wrong. That's not it at all. In fact, this person is blind so that God's works can be revealed.” And ableist readings would tell us that the curing is what reveals God, but that's not actually what Jesus says. And Jesus is pretty, I'm generally not a “the Bible is clear” person, but I think Jesus is pretty clear that it's not about sin that is connected to disability here. What's so fascinating about this passage is that when this man receives sight, that doesn't actually solve any of his problems in the community. He's still ostracized and excluded. He is still condemned and on the outskirts. And I think if that passage were only invested in the physical, in the cure, then it would end after a couple of verses.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. 

Amy Kenny: But it goes on for 40 more verses talking about what happens to this man and the restoration and healing that Jesus offers.  

Jonathan Walton: That was powerful. At one point in the book, you talk about Zora Neale Hurston, when she said, “If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Which I think is just a powerful way to understand the oppressive intent behind narratives about supercrips and brave or courageous disabled people overcoming their disability. Can you, you talk a little bit about how learning to speak about pain and suffering was crucial for you, to learn how to do that in spite of the fact that so many people just don't want to hear about it? 

Amy Kenny: Yeah. People would rather me be a mascot for their narrative of what it means to be a disabled Christian woman, than actually share the realities of my experience. And there's so much inspiration porn narratives out there. This idea from Stella Young and Maysoon Zayid, that disabled people are here to inspire others. We become objects instead of subjects. We are used and consumed and really just for the pleasure of others, instead of having our own complex, messy lives. Who wants to be a mascot or an inspiration when you can be a human? I think it's also unfair because it suggests that the most important thing in my life is doing something for you. Making you feel good, moving you.  

That's unfair to put on disabled people. I think it works the same way with being brave and courageous. I'm often told that I'm courageous or I'm brave, and this isn't by people who know me. This is by strangers. Folks at the library approach me saying that. Someone at the grocery store, “Oh, you are so brave. Look at you, good for you for getting out and about.” As though just by virtue of existing, there's something brave about being disabled. And that gets really exhausting because I shouldn't have to be brave to exist. I should get to live into the fullness of my humanity whether or not that is inspirational or brave or happy clappy, and I should get to have a full range of emotions. That shouldn't be taken away from me because I'm disabled.  

Sy Hoekstra: I've definitely gotten the “You're so brave” by strangers on the street before.  

Amy Kenny: Right?  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Like all the time. Well, not all the time, but it happens and it's so disorienting when it happens. Because I'm usually just lost in my own thoughts or I'm listening to something or whatever, and someone just randomly says, “You're so brave,” and I'm like, “Uh, uh, thanks, I guess?” But when I was reading, there's one passage in particular where you were talking about all of the doctors and nurses who were calling you brave and courageous as they were performing seemingly painful medical procedures on you. And the thing that it reminded me of, I'm guessing, do you know who Imani Barbarin is?  

Amy Kenny: Yes.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Okay. So disabled activist, and she… I'm paraphrasing, but she has said something to the effect of, when people start calling you a hero, is when they have an excuse to kill you. That's what I kept thinking of, is like this notion that if you are brave and if you are courageous and you are willing to bear all of the burdens that the system or that individual people's microaggressions put on you, and then you end up dead because of it, it's an excuse. It's not as sad because you were voluntarily being brave under the circumstances. Even if you weren't really internally, but it's an appearance thing. 

Amy Kenny: Yeah, it's a virtue signalling and it excuses actually doing anything to prevent the ableism from our society. 

Sy Hoekstra: Exactly. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And it doesn't just apply to disabled people either. I heard somebody, I was listening to Jon Stewart's podcast at one point. One of his writers brought up this quote that I had read from Imani Barbarin. They were talking about it in the context of war veterans, who they come back from war and then they get denied the healthcare that they were promised by the VA. And because they're heroes, because they were made to be heroes through the process of like valorizing the military, it just becomes part of the excuse to make you jump through a million completely unnecessary bureaucratic steps in order to be able to get the healthcare that was promised to you legally when you enlisted or whatever. 

It's something that I think applies to all kinds of heroes and how labeling someone a hero or brave or whatever, separates them from everybody else. It kind of fits right in with inspiration porn and all that other stuff.  

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I feel like I am… on our podcast, we focus on how, we're talking across difference. I've known Sy for a long time, but I will never know what it's like to be blind and live in that reality. So I know there's a steep learning curve, but what resonates for me though in that, I have a poem and I've talked with Sy about it, like how my mom as this hardworking Black woman would be valorized.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, absolutely.  

Jonathan Walton: And there's a… whether you are idolizing someone, you are still dehumanizing them. One of the ways that that dehumanization happens is around beauty and power and things like that. So you write about power and beauty that we can find in disabled people in their bodies, even though our standards of beauty and power are often, they exclude you and people in your community. So could you give a window into your thoughts about how we need to lift up disabled people as beautiful and powerful in a way that isn't riddled with ableism. And you're already good at this, but communicating it for someone like me, who like, I will join your community one day statistically, right? 

Amy Kenny: That’s how inclusive we are [laughter]. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, of course. Always welcoming as Dr. Lamar Hardwick would say.  

Amy Kenny: Yes. 

Jonathan Walton: And so to help me enter your community in a more loving way, what's a way that I can lift up y’all as beautiful and powerful in a way that isn't riddled with my own stuff. 

Amy Kenny: Yeah. I think that this comes out a lot when people describe us as special needs and assume that our needs are special, when actually we are just human. You know, when you go somewhere, when you go to a restaurant, you want there to be somewhere you can pee [laughter]. When you are working, you want there to be a plan for your escape in the event of an emergency. You want to be able to access the content that people are sharing online or otherwise. Those aren't special needs, those needs are human. So really stripping away this idea that there's something extra or special or different about disabled people, that means that we are some sort of subcategory of human.  

I think this comes out in relationship too, that's in relationship to power, but I think it also comes out in relationship to beauty, as you are saying, because disabled people are so infantilized that we're never really allowed to be beautiful. We are allowed to be adorable and inspiring and heroic, but we aren't beautiful because our bodies don't fit into this idea of the cishet, thin, white, idealized nondisabled figure. And I think most of us, when we think about beautiful bodies, have so internalized those notions of ableism, racism, fatphobia, queerphobia, that we don't even realize that that's what we are doing, and this gets projected onto our notions of what heaven or utopia or new creation are.  

I think it also gets projected onto relationships that we see. All the time when out in public, I either get pat on the head, like I'm a dog. “Good job little dog.” Because I'm a few feet lower than folks when using my mobility scooter or wheelchair. But something that my husband receives a lot, he’s told that he's a saint, just by virtue of having a disabled wife. As though the whole purpose of our relationship and partnership is to shame him into staying with me, comma, the burden. That's just absurd and really harmful. And love him, but he's no saint [laughter], and our relationship is mutual. So I think even extending this idea of power and beauty into relationships and to stop these myths of in an inter-abled relationship, there's one person who's a burden and there's one person who's a saint, or our notions of what beautiful can be.  

Beautiful is where joy is and where someone is radiant. And we just, we don't have the same parameters when it comes to nature. All kinds of nature is disabled and we think it's beautiful. What if we could extend that to humanity? 

Sy Hoekstra: Oh man, I have 800 thoughts about that.  

Amy Kenny: Only 800? [laughter].  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. It is low. One thing that comes to mind… man, this is like a little bit of a depressing story. But when I was in high school, there were a couple times, I'm not going to say that this happened a ton. There were maybe two or three times where some girl was being very obviously flirty, in a way that I would… like very awkward 14, 15 year old. Like you're trying way too hard and it's kind of adorable and really awkward at the same time. But I didn't realize that until I was like 27 or something, being like, oh, that interaction I had was someone attempting to make some romantic advance, because I had so internalized the idea that there was nothing to be found in me in terms of beauty or romance or anything like that, which is a — hi, Dr. Kenny, I met you half an hour ago and now I'm disclosing high school insecurities, but… 

Amy Kenny: That's what podcasts are for. We talk about all our trauma together.  

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: It kind of is what podcasts are for [laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, the trauma buffet. We all just kind of come out. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, right. Exactly. So, yeah, I don't know, but what I'm getting at, is having books like yours and having people talking about it openly. There's just so many people, I think, for whom that is so healing. Also probably not just disabled people, just anybody who doesn't fit into the, whatever our standards are for any reason. Which is another of the million ways that we have talked about on the show before, is that any individual groups' liberation is always going to radiate out and make other people have more flourishing lives.  

One thing I wanted to talk to you about though, I wrote down a lot of phrases when I was reading your book that you wrote. One of them was, “My civil rights are not guacamole.” You were specifically talking about an IEP meeting that you had when you were in high school and just the extreme amounts of difficulty that you had getting your teachers and your school administrators to provide even the most basic accommodations, like really simple stuff for your education. Then you also talked about, well, basically you were saying they were treating your civil rights like the optional, extra guac on a burrito [laughs]. You also talk in the book about the ways that churches actively fought against the disability rights movement and the Americans with Disabilities Act and actually got themselves exempted from the Americans with Disabilities Acts requirements for buildings to be accessible. 

I was just wondering if you could dig into a little bit how your vision for society and your vision for church of centering disabled people in terms of how we build things up from the ground so that we're not just treating the things that you and I need as an avocado spread. 

Amy Kenny: Yeah. Teachers, churches, act as though they're doing us a favor when they allow us into their world, as though this is extra or optional. At the root of that, I think is this idea of the charity model that disabled people are pitiable objects that we give charity to, and we can extend that at any time and we can take that away at any time. That's largely, the particulars are, some of them are in the book, but that's largely how I have been treated in churches and schools, as though civil rights are something that are extra and altruistic.  

And of course, because churches fought against ADA, it's still legal to discriminate against disabled people in church spaces and in Christian schools. So churches don't have to provide ramps or sensory rooms or accessible services in any way. And that hurts still, even though I know that that doesn't smell like Jesus, that still hurts that that's the case. My vision for the way that we really should be gathering, is the one that Jesus gives us in Luke 14, which is this accessible banquet. Jesus says, go out and invite poor people and disabled people. Those are the first people invited. There's no suggestion of cure or condemnation. It is an accessible banquet where there is community and people get to dine together at an accessible table where poor and disabled people are centered. And if churches could do the same, if churches could create that accessible banquet, it would radically change what church could be to disabled people. 

Jonathan Walton: So my daughter is amazing. She got the empathy award for her class. She's five. 

Sy Hoekstra: Proud father [laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton: But she asks me these questions, and one question that she asked was, I brought up Uncle Sy and I said, Uncle Sy is blind and we're going to go there and him and Gabrielle ahyi. Ahyi is like “ma’am” in Chinese. We speak Mandarin and English in our house.  

Sy Hoekstra: My wife. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, my wife's Chinese and Gabrielle is able bodied. So Maia said, why would Gabrielle marry Uncle Sy? And my reaction was, I said, because he loves her, because she loves him, because he's just as valuable, and all these different things. But then I told Sy about it, and Sy you said to me, “Well, it's obvious that she has not seen many couples together that are like one person's able-bodied, and one person's not.” And that had never, that had not crossed my mind at all.  

Sy, you didn't see my reaction, but I was like, “Oh! I didn't think about that.” I wonder, particularly because in this question we talk about, it's not necessarily strangers that do harm, but it's friends and family who say things that are hurtful and do damage. So how do I change the air that Maia breathes so that when she has a conversation with our godson who's autistic, has a conversation with my aunt who has had a stroke, is in a wheelchair now. What would you say as a follower of Jesus discipling people to help us create different air so that we're able to breathe and move more freely? 

Amy Kenny: Usually just run them over with my wheelchair and I'm just gone before anyone knows. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: Even children, Amy? 

Amy Kenny: Oh yeah, they're easy targets [laughter]. The thing about idols is that they become so invisible and so immersive that we don't realize they're there. And I think one of the first phases is to acknowledge that they're there. To ask questions and be curious and learn and grow together. There's a lot of messiness along the way to be sure, but even surrounding Maia with various interabled couples and various cool crips, folks who are disabled and have disability pride, I wish I had that as a kid.  

I remember as a kid having so many people trying to pray me away, and I had ample examples of that, but I didn't have examples of people in my life who were celebrating my disabled bodymind. Not in terms of pity or inspiration, but in terms of thinking about how miraculous and interesting and magnificent my bodymind is. And I think it took a long time and a lot of therapy to get to that place, because the narratives out there are so seeped in ableism. But what if instead we invited one another to behold disability in nature, and we thought about how, and this is some of how I came to disability pride for myself, is thinking about how kangaroos don't walk, they hop. They can't go backwards, they can only go forwards. I'm Australian and so that for me really resonated because I have a somewhat stumbling, hoppy kind of can't-do-certain-things gait.  

Lions sleep almost all hours of the day and they're fierce and amazing, and we think they're cool. But they act more like spoonies than workaholics and I'm a spoonie. No one belittles them because of that. No one belittles the emu as weaker than the sparrow because it cannot fly. No one thinks that bees whose whole existence and survival is down to drone bees who are stingless and only carry one set of chromosomes. No one thinks that those are pitiable or less than. Their whole existence is down to what we might call disabled bees. And I think starting to behold that in nature, starting to realize that my body too is marvellous, and my disability doesn't take away from that.  

And it's not in a way of saying, “Everything's perfect and great yay,” but to recognize that my body contains secrets that science is still discovering. My leg is as blue as Sapphires, and my spasms and different way of moving about the world is celebrated when it comes to nature. What if we could really believe disabled bodyminds are made of stars? I think just surrounding all of ourselves with those kind of narratives is so important to unlearning ableism, but also to celebrating disability as the gifts it can offer us. 

Sy Hoekstra: I remember speaking to a guy one time and he had a daughter and I found out she was deaf and I was just like, “I'm not sure that anyone else has ever had this reaction when you told them that, but hurray, I'm really excited about the fact that your daughter's deaf” [laughs]. He was just like, “No one has ever had that reaction, but I do appreciate it.” I think, it is sort of, it's just, it's a little bit funny to people who haven't thought that way before, but I do in probably what is a little bit of a stereotypical way, just get excited when somebody else walks in with a white cane or rolls in on a wheelchair or whatever. 

Amy Kenny: Yeah, because there's solidarity and access intimacy. Also because disability is a culture. It's not only that medical model that most of us have been taught, and it's not just the social model either. It is a culture. We have our own heroes and languages and customs, and we have our own inventions and ways of being together. Just like other cultures, we should celebrate disability for what it gives the broader society, because we're uniquely creative because we live in a world that isn't made for our bodyminds. 

Sy Hoekstra: Because you said the word spoonie before, can you just give people a quick explanation of what a spoonie is?  

Amy Kenny: Yeah. A spoonie is someone who uses spoons, which is basically a metaphor for energy when you are chronically ill or disabled. So it's this idea that one task equals one spoon and those spoons fluctuate from day to day. So some days I have enough spoons to be able to get dressed and work and talk to lovely people on a podcast. And other days I don't have any spoons to get out of bed or to shower, or I need assistance doing a lot more things. So it's just kind of a helpful framework to get people to understand what it means to live as a chronically ill or disabled person. 

Sy Hoekstra: One question that I just really randomly came up with. Your normal job is you're a Shakespeare lecturer. I mean your normal job, your day job. When you teach your students Richard III, do you just come in blazing with the anger of a thousand suns or how does that happen? 

Amy Kenny: Always.  

Sy Hoekstra: K [laughs]. 

Amy Kenny: Always, yeah. Not just when I teach Richard III, yeah, I just teach angry [laughter]. I do teach Richard III really deliberately because I think that there's something interesting for students about having to think about a disabled body on stage, being taught by a disabled bodymind in the classroom. We just can't avoid it and we shouldn't, and so we should talk about it. And it really makes plain for them I think, the ways that my body becomes public property. The ways that so many narratives are placed onto our bodies as disabled people about being super villains, looking at you Darth Vader [laughter], or being inspirational heroes. Or disability being a fate worse than death as we see in movies. Like what's that one horrible movie where… 

Sy Hoekstra: Are you thinking about, it's called like Me Without You or Me…? 

Amy Kenny: Yes. Yes. Anyway, no one see that, but just, it’s horrible. Anyway, just talking with students about that and thinking about what does it mean for Richard to use his disability as a performance, and for him to talk with us about disability and how does that line up with some of these other narratives and tropes that are out there? I think just as in any of my classes, what the class is called is Shakespeare, but what I really teach is compassion, and inviting students to think about the lived experience of the other and to resonate with that and to have compassion. Even where a character is a villain, to try to consider, what are their motivations for doing this and what are the places that we can connect with this character, or have a deeper understanding of our own humanity because of this character. 

Sy Hoekstra: My sister is a high school literature teacher, and I would be willing to bet that she's tearing up right now [laughs].  

Amy Kenny: Amazing. 

Sy Hoekstra: The whole idea of literature teaches you empathy and compassionate mercy is yeah, right up her alley. 

Jonathan Walton: Man, so much to learn and grateful that you all are willing to teach me, and us, I should say. 

Amy Kenny: I feel the same. We all have so much to learn because we've all been indoctrinated in these systems. 

Jonathan Walton: It's true. Okay. So Sy, when I'm in Sy’s presence, he gets this a lot. As soon as he says, “Oh, look, he went to law school.” Everybody goes like, “Wow.” We all know what the wow is about.  

Amy Kenny: Oh yeah. 

Jonathan Walton: And something that I was, when, in trying to do work around patriarchy and build, like undoing the toxic masculinity that I'm indoctrinated with, is giving Maia and the women around me compliments on things they can control. What is a compliment that is helpful and not patronizing for your community around your accomplishments that isn't riddled with celebratory pity? 

Amy Kenny: Sy, go first [laughter]. I think a great question to ask ourselves anytime we're going to give someone a compliment is: am I saying this because of their social location or because of the complexity of their identities? Because of course many people contain multiple marginalizations. And it's not to say that it's wrong if the answer is yes, because we should recognize the complexity of barriers for people with multiple marginalizations. But I think that can be a helpful tool to think about why am I giving this compliment? Why should I be surprised that Sy went to law school? Because law school sounds horrible and hard, or is it because there is something that, there is a ceiling that I'm assuming because of disability? 

So I think even in your setup of the question, you're answering it. And I think that idea of giving people compliments over things they can control is so important, because I often get that I'm courageous or brave or an inspiration. Or if someone finds out that I'm Dr. Amy Kenny, there's kind of a surprise of, “You? Wow. Oh, okay. Well, good for you.” As though it was just given to me [laughter]. As though I didn't battle ableism institutionally and interpersonally every phase of the way.  

And I think, I don't know if you experience this Sy, but I think it's complex as a disabled person who has air quotes “achieved success” in what it looks like in some capitalistic model. Because of course capitalism is harmful to disabled people, because we can't keep up, and it sells us the lie that we are what we produce and that we don't have worth just simply by existing. So then if you make any sort of strides within that system and are praised, the weight that I often feel is that that's weaponized against other members of my community. 

Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely. Yes. 

Amy Kenny: I don't want to be everyone's go-to version of, “disabled people can make it, so you should too.” No. I want to create a classroom and an atmosphere and a church and a table where we are so centering people who are multiply marginalized that it allows for the co-flourishing of everyone. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I also think that specifically with the point of inspiration porn, when people get complimented for overcoming their disability by trying really hard and having a good attitude and then serving as inspiration for other people who don't have it as hard. I don't mind people telling me that I've overcome a lot when they understand what I've actually overcome. If they understand you, in getting your doctorate, had to face all kinds of ableism, in addition to actually just getting a doctorate, which is hard in and of itself, that's great. If somebody understands that and they want to tell me it's inspirational to me that you were able to fight this horrible system and get through it, okay. And they understand that it would be fine if I didn't get through it, okay. Because it's like an incredibly random set of circumstances that gets you through in a way where you're still, like you’re quote-unquote “achievement” and success is still intact.  

Amy Kenny: Yes. 

Sy Hoekstra: That's great. You can compliment me for that all day long, because you know what, it is hard, and I appreciate it when people compliment me for stuff that I did that's hard. But yeah, that was my thought when you said it's kind of about the intent of the compliment. Why are you giving it? What's the purpose of it? So you could give, what I'm saying is I think you could give a compliment because someone has a particular status, as long as you have actually listened to them and understand what being a member of that marginalized group entails.  

Amy Kenny: Yeah. So what I'm receiving from that is that context is key. I think generally when it's inspiration porn it's strangers or people on the periphery of our lives.  

Sy Hoekstra: Totally. Yeah. 

Jonathan Walton: Right. 

Amy Kenny: When someone realizes what it took to get you where you are, then a compliment actually feels really validating as though they are appreciating the fullness of what it took.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, totally.    

Amy Kenny: I think there's a way that once you have a certain degree, people put success onto you, even if it's not true in your life. An example is that I have a doctorate, so then I'm in this column of success, but that really erases the fact that my job is not stable. I'm on temporary contracts. So this idea of this external validation because there's some sort of degree, and not really understanding the complexity of a situation, that it's actually very common for disabled people. Typically, the more degrees a disabled person has, the higher the wage difference is between their non-disabled counterparts. 

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I didn't know that. And then there's the added layer of if you spend time where you can't find work, whatever money you have gained is going to be used against you if you try to get social security. You're married so you can't get, you're not even eligible, I think, for social security? 

Amy Kenny: Exactly. Yeah. Disabled people don't have minimum wage protection, marriage equality, 80 percent of polling places are inaccessible.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think I have voted independently twice and I've voted a lot more than that [laughs] because the machine never works. There is a machine there for me that is supposed to be used by visually impaired or reading disabled people. It's like an audio voting machine, but it is often broken down.  

Amy Kenny: Yeah. And even saying all of these facts, a lot of people are completely unaware of any of these, and that's part of how ableism works, is to erase our stories. So when someone's saying we are just their inspiration, if they have a knowledge of all of those facts, hey, I'm in. But if they don't know that we don't have marriage equality, we don't have minimum wage protection, disabled people are kept in poverty deliberately in the system, tens of thousands of people die just waiting to find out if they're eligible for disability payments, then it just has a really different context and a really different tone. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, absolutely.  

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, when people tell me, “Oh, it's so great that you made it to Columbia,” and they have no idea where Brodnax, Virginia is, it means nothing. But if they know where it is and where I'm from, it means exponentially more. So that's, thank you for sharing all of that, because that's… it's closer than I thought it would be, but harder than I expect, you know what I mean? Because what you're saying is not unfamiliar, but it's a turn to unlearn these things, it's an exceptional level of difficulty that is absolutely necessary to exist as a kind person. So I appreciate you sharing all that. 

Amy Kenny: Yeah. And what an invitation to each of us to see the ways our stories overlap in this Venn diagram, and to make sure that we are doing that for one another so that we have mutual liberation.    

Sy Hoekstra: Before we let you go, obviously everybody go read the book My Body Is Not a Prayer Request. You can tell right from the title that Amy's a fantastic writer, and is just as witty on the page as she is in person. Where can people find you though?  

Amy Kenny: Sometimes I'm on Instagram @DrAmyKenny. I say sometimes because I am an introvert. So sometimes you can find me there, other times not. 

Sy Hoekstra: Awesome. Thank you so much for being with us today. This was seriously a pleasure.  

Amy Kenny: Yeah, this was great. Thanks for having me.  

Sy Hoekstra: Of course.  

Jonathan Walton: Yes. Thank you so much.  

Sy Hoekstra:  Everyone, before we go, just as a quick reminder, ktfpress.com, if you at all appreciate what we're doing, please go check that out there and consider subscribing to get the bonus episodes of this show and our newsletter. And to support everything else we do, like the things that we do to keep our stuff accessible, like to transcribe this show. That costs money, and we appreciate it when you support that.  

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you in two weeks. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

This extra feed drop is Sy reading the essay of his we just published. There isn’t a separate transcript for this episode. Below is the only audio information in the episode apart from Sy reading the essay, which you can find at the above link. Enjoy! 

[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”] 

Sy Hoekstra: Hey everybody. It’s Sy, just me today, here to give you the audio version of the essay I wrote that we just published at KTFPress.com called Blind Behavior. Here we go. 

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. 

Host 

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.  

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra. 

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode. 

Transcript

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome everybody to this little announcement feed drop that we're doing. Welcome from whatever feed you're listening on- if you're listening from The Hive from Sub:Culture Incorporated, or from Shake the Dust from KTF Press.

I am Sy Hoekstra. I'm here, as always, with Suzie Lahoud and Jonathan Walton. I'm also here, as not always, with Tamice Spencer.

Let's just get right into this. Suzie- what are we announcing today?

Suzie Lahoud: So we have been kind’ve dropping hints about this for a little while. We've been trying to contain our excitement and not put out too many spoilers, but it's now official. So we wanted to let you all know that we are so excited, so honored and privileged to have signed a book deal with the one and only, Tamice Spencer!

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah we did!

Jonathan Walton: Yeah!

Suzie Lahoud: So, yeah, so that's official. Throwin’ out the confetti. And, yeah, Tamice, would you be willing to just give folks a little bit of a taste of what you're hoping to dig into and offer with this book?

Tamice Spencer: Yeah, I’m excited. It's going to be a mix of personal narrative and theological reflection telling the story of how, basically telling the story of my own quiet exodus out of evangelicalism, but into, I would say, a more faithful walk with Jesus, a deeper walk with the scripture. And I think a lot of people have a lot to say on the other side, but there's not a lot of people who are kind of leading us through that journey. So I'm going to try to tell my story. It gets really personal and really deep and really real, but at the end there's worship. And I'm hoping to convince everybody that there's worship on the other side of this whole deconstruction movement. I'm excited. I appreciate you guys.

Suzie Lahoud: Well, we're so excited. And like I said, just honored that you would allow us to be on this journey with you. I can personally attest to the fact that conversations around this book have already been so powerful and impactful, and we've seen pieces of it that Tamice has already been sending us, and yeah, y'all should be excited.

And also, for those of you who don't know, Tamice, we first worked with her as KTF Press with our first anthology that came out last year. So her essay is the final essay in the book. And she's just a phenomenal writer and has a lot of wisdom to share and words to speak that folks need to hear.

Jonathan Walton: And so Tamice, on behalf of the KTF team, thank you so, so much for this opportunity. And I also want to say thank you to all of our subscribers that actually make this book possible. Your subscription goes to yes, the weekly newsletter; yes, the podcast; but absolutely publishing amazing writers like Tamice. So thank you to our subscribers and a big shout out to all those supporters of Sub:Culture! Thank you for your partnership as well.

Sy Hoekstra: All right everybody, if you want more news on the book as it comes, you can go to KTFPress.com and sign up for the free version of our mailing list there. I mean, you're welcome to subscribe too if you want to do that, but the free one will have news about the book as it comes.

Thank you all so much! We'll talk to you soon. We're so excited, Tamice.

Tamice Spencer: Thanks, guys!

Today, we have a conversation with returning guest Milly Silencio (formerly Milly Aquije) about the effect that acquiring privilege at different points in life has on us, our relationships, and our interactions with God. Milly goes into detail on the tension between being an undocumented activist who is now married and applying for a Green Card. Each of the hosts also discuss their own interactions with the notion of gaining new status, and the result is a fascinating and deeply personal conversation on multiple subjects like money, education, and “healing” disabilities. Enjoy! 

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show, and subscribe to get bonus episodes and our weekly newsletter at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify. 

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.  

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra. 

Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra. 

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode. 

Transcript

[A guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]  

Milly Silencio: I always think of my own story. What would it have been if people who mentored me first would've told me, “Hey, Milly, guess what? Why don’t you get your Green Card first, and then we'll disciple you.” I wouldn't be here. So, but I'm just saying it could happen because I've heard in churches of that. Or even denominations that do not license or ordain people who are undocumented, but are getting all of their services in their churches as deacons, lay leaders, everything. And they're just doing this with their big hearts, lowly hearts, in service to Jesus, but yet should be compensated for that. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Suzie Lahoud: Welcome to Shake The Dust: Leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. I'm Suzie Lahoud here with Jonathan Walton and Sy Hoekstra. 

Sy Hoekstra: And I am here with a slight rasp in my voice because I went to a baseball game the other day and yelled at the players really loud. And that's a silly thing for a podcaster to do, but I did it and here we are. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: We today are going to talk about the idea of acquiring privilege and how that kind of changes your relationship with people around you and with God and with yourself. It’s a bit of an abstract topic, but I promise we will bring it right down to earth. We also have a guest with us, but before we get to her, just really quickly, I want to remind everyone to head over to ktfpress.com/freemonth, and take a look and really consider becoming a supporter of this show and everything we do at KTF Press by looking at that subscription. It's $7 a month or $70 a year. It gets you our weekly newsletter with recommendations on political education and discipleship from the three of us, you get two from each, the three of us every week, plus some other stuff.  

You also get bonus episodes of this show. There are several hours of those at this point and they're really great, we hope that you go and check them out. And that supports just everything else we do, the book that's coming up soon, all of our other work, our articles, everything else. Thank you so much to those of you who are subscribed. If you cannot do that, please do consider just following us. Actually, everybody go and follow us on social media, @KTFPress on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Leave a rating and review for us in your podcast player for this show if your podcast player allows for that sort of thing. And hit that follow or subscribe button in your podcast player as well while you're there. And now I will give you to Jonathan.  

Jonathan, tell us, who do we have back with us today?  

Jonathan Walton: Yes. I'm so, so, so excited to introduce Milly Silencio, formerly Aquije, last time she was here. She is a lot of wonderful things. An educator, spiritual advisor, mentor and a Dreamer. Her current professional experience includes being an executive pastor with Reconcile Brooklyn. She's also the founder of Hoping Greatly, where you can see her writing @hopinggreatly.com, where she uplifts others through her story of resilience as an undocumented immigrant. Education wise, she has a degree from Nyack College and Hunter College, as well as being a licensed clergy through the ECC, that's the Evangelical Covenant Church. Mrs. Silencio has also served in church plants and youth ministry since like 2005. 

Shout-out to InterVarsity. She's an alumni of our campus ministry and still actively involved as a founder of the Alumni Mentor Movement. She's worked in higher education at Hunter College and City Seminary. As an extremely talented writer, she contributed to our anthology entitled Keeping The Faith: Reflections on Christianity and Politics in the Era of Trump and beyond. And she's also an active contributor on My Undocu Life, and is on the board of directors for Women of Wonder. She is an accomplished woman, so thank you, thank you, thank you so much, Milly for taking time out of your busy schedule to spend some time with us. 

Milly Silencio: Well, thank you. Thank you guys for having me again. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So as Sy said, we're talking about the, just the idea of acquiring privilege that we did not have and how that changes our relationships with different groups of people, ourselves, and God. So we're going to just go around briefly and talk about our personal experiences with the idea of acquiring privilege and we'll start with you Milly. 

Milly Silencio: Yeah, sure. Thank you guys for having me. I feel so honored in just being here. And yeah, for me privilege hasn't been such a great word all the time at all. Just knowing where I came from and my humble beginnings as just being an immigrant daughter, a first generation graduate in my family. So we really have never had privilege. We've always been a very low-income and everything. So now in this transition that I'm in, so I recently got married.  

Sy Hoekstra: Congratulations!  

Milly Silencio: Thank you, thank you, to a wonderful, just big-hearted American and stuff that, I know he wouldn't like me to say that and stuff for sure. Let me just say big-hearted Jersey boy and stuff.  

[laughter] 

Milly Silencio: Yeah, Josh. It's been awesome because when we met, we spoke about our stories and our background and he was honest with me from the beginning of telling me his journey out of white supremacy and a cult. And for me, I had to think about that as well, and take a step back and be like, wow, this is interesting. God has given me someone who's been reconciled into loving and just having a heart for justice. So the interesting, I would say now season I'm in is, since I'm marrying as undocumented, as a Dreamer, someone who was born from America, is at times the assumptions that I already have privilege, right? Because I'm married to a US citizen. Then automatically in some, I don't know what it is, some expectations of just people that, yeah, automatically I got married on October 2nd, and voila, I am documented. That is so not true whatsoever. That is not how it goes at all.  

And I think just clarifying that, but I do see the assumptions of privilege because of being in that transition of the cusp of starting my process of adjustment of status, which I am in the end of this year. But I do sense that of people asking those questions, “Hey, will you still be part of the community, will you not write off the undocumented community?” And worrying about that and yeah, it’s hard. It's been a moment of grief for me, and also a lot of just grateful for counseling to process as well this moment, even though I know and I'm aware that I definitely have what they call legally a “bona fide marriage,” which means a love marriage and stuff, but it's still just even the notion of knowing or having the support and the really bad, just people's understandings of it. I felt a lot of guilt and shame in this process, so yeah, so I can definitely talk about that. 

Sy Hoekstra: We will get into all of that more. As much as I want to get into it right now, I do want everyone to still go around and talk about their notions of acquiring privilege. Thank you so much for opening up to all that. All that is fascinating and we will dive much more into several different aspects of that.  

Briefly for me, it's funny because, well, so first of all, I grew up a white, straight guy with money in America. So there's a little bit of a question of what do you mean acquiring privilege? It seems like you had that the whole time [laughs]. But there's a conversation that always takes place within the disability community about curing. About people who can, there's some medical treatment out there or something that could like basically remove your disability from you in certain cases.  

So it's not something that can happen to me at the moment. It is potentially something that can happen to me in future. There are all kinds of technologies that people are working on to help damage retinas like mine work better. It’s a possibility. But it's a thing that we think about all the time, because it's so wrapped up in the notion of disability identity, because so many people come from the, kind of the position that I am proud of my disability and my community, and it's a deep part of my identity, and even if you offered me a cure, I wouldn't even take it, and it's an insult to offer me a cure. All those, those ideas are always floating around. Yeah, I don't know. I'll get more into different aspects of that, but that is something that disabled people are always talking about.  

Because for a lot of people, if you're deaf or hard of hearing and you can get a cochlear implant, or for lots of people who can just take different medicines to mitigate the symptoms of whatever their medical condition is, that's a real life question of like, do you want to acquire this privilege? And like Milly was saying, is there grief around losing something of yourself in the process of doing that? So yeah, that's me. 

Jonathan Walton: You know, when there's a question of acquiring something we didn't normally have in the system that we have in the world, so you've got these subordinated classes and you've got dominant classes. And something that I've been thinking about a lot is like, in places where I have been quote-unquote “subordinated” or “abnormal” or “different,” like I've changed a lot. Like multiple classes where I have quote-unquote “acquired things” that society offers to those who have higher education. And like for me, I have an Ivy League degree, I have a graduate degree, and there are assumptions that come with that. I don't rent, I own a home now. Like that's an assumption.  

The assumption that we have access and, or possession of resources, knowledge, and power immediately because of where we live, the degrees that are, we don't hang them up, they’re in like file cabinets somewhere, but usually people hang their degrees on a wall. Like the assumptions that come from that, especially if people are from my own family down in Virginia are stark, real, and sometimes very true. The average income in my town in Virginia is $14,000. The median income in Manhattan is $80 [thousand]. And so that's just true.  

So the reality of engaging with that, that like as far as I know, I'm the only person, undergraduate from the 12 counties that make up the district where I'm from to have gone to an Ivy League school undergrad, ever. I usually get an email when someone applies to Columbia from where I'm from. I've got one email in the last 15 years. Just that reality is something that I'm actively wrestling with because I don't know what it means to, as Dominique Gilliard would put it, like stewarding that privilege for subversive witness. Yeah. I think that's something I'm actively trying to figure out, especially with my own daughters who have no semblance of the subordinated classes that I come from. It's not part of their life at all [laughs]. So yeah.  

What about you, Suzie?  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, I feel like for me, this conversation tends to revolve around the acquisition of wealth or money and it starts really when I was young. I was born into a family that was middle class, maybe even lower-middle class. I was a pastor's kid, one of five children, and my dad was in grad school and working at the time. So we had enough, but not a lot of excess. And then we moved overseas to Uzbekistan when I was eight, and all of a sudden we were wealthy compared to the average person living there. And so the fact that I had more than literally two sets of clothes meant that I was wealthy. The fact that I didn't even think about buying a tube of toothpaste, my friends used to give each other Colgate toothpaste for birthdays.  

So all of a sudden I was wealthy in the eyes of the people around me and relatively, that was true. And it kind of bothered me. I was telling Sy yesterday, this one story of one day walking home from school, I was attending the local former Soviet public school and was walking home with two of my friends. And one of the girls didn't know me as well, and she was like, “Well, Suzie, why did your family choose to move to Uzbekistan from America? Why would you do that?” And my friend who did know me pretty well and knew my family, she was like, “Oh, well, because in America they were poor, but here they're rich.” And I got so angry at my friend for saying that. Afterwards I pulled her aside and I was like, “Why would you say that? That's awful.” And she's like, “Well, one it's true that you are wealthy now. And two,” she's like, “I was covering for you because your parents are missionaries and that's illegal. So you should be thanking me.”  

But I think just that speaks to sort of my uncomfortability with realities about my socioeconomic status, and that has continued to this day with, I married a man who, he is Lebanese and we both feel a calling to a certain kind of ministry, but he also is full-time in the business world and has actually managed to earn quite a bit of money. So I never expected that I would be married to someone who would have that ability and that status. And for us as a married couple, a lot of what we wrestle with is how do we, as Jonathan was just saying, how do we steward that privilege well?  

Again, it's something that makes me very uncomfortable and I think it's a huge responsibility. Rather than just ignoring it, it’s something that we really feel like we need to call ourselves to a really high standard of being faithful with that and not judging that standard, even by the way that we see people around us living that out, because I think the status quo isn't always the most faithful bar for what stewarding your privilege looks like. 

Sy Hoekstra: So Milly, let's dig into a little bit one of the things that you said, which was the notion of how much people misunderstand the process of acquiring through marriage a Green Card. Could you elaborate a little bit on some of those misunderstandings, the anxiety of going through that process, kind of what it's been like for you? 

Milly Silencio: Yeah. So like I said, sometimes certain people think, oh, when you're getting married and you're undocumented, as soon as you say that “I do,” you sign your paperwork… 

Sy Hoekstra: They hand you a Green Card. 

Milly Silencio: That's it. It’s like [makes the sound of a bell ringing] 

Suzie Lahoud: At the altar.  

Milly Silencio: Yeah you know, here they go, at the altar [laughter] and you're automatically a citizen. So it's not true and stuff. So just definitely demystify that. Usually every person and stuff, and I say this just in general and I'll speak in “I” terms afterwards. We all have a process and all of us, according to how our entry point was in America, whether legally or not, we have to do certain forms. These forms all cost a certain amount as well, and also you have to do, guess what, also a medical exam to see if you are fit to even become a person to be petitioned from a citizen. Yes, you need a medical exam and it's required you have to get vaccinated. I am pro-vaccination so to me that is not an issue. But there's some in the undocumented that are not. So they're saying how in the heck is this required for us, but yet others do not even wear a mask in their respective states? So that's a whole other interesting story. But it is a lot of forms plus this medical exam, which only has to be done by those doctors who are part of this kind of process and are basically registered to do this. And all of this, it's totals to a lump sum of $3,000 or so. 

Jonathan Walton: Oh, wow.  

Sy Hoekstra: Sorry, can I note, that's if you don't hire a lawyer to help you.  

Milly Silencio: Yes, this is if you don't hire a lawyer to help you. So if you do hire a lawyer, let's just say it's like $10,000 or $20,000 or so and stuff, depending on your case. And it gets really, really hefty in that price. So for me it was a big decision I had to take with my husband. And the reason is DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, it gives you a work permit, but then also basically shields you from being deported every two years. So guess what? My DACA is going to expire next year in June, which makes me also understand, I need to renew at least eight months before and start the process, or start my process of my husband petitioning me for adjustment of status, you know. With me consulting with other mentors and I was just prayerfully seeing that, and my husband was just honest with me and saying, “Babe, you've waited too long in the system, it's been 30 years, we should do adjustment of status,” even though the difference is huge because my DACA amount is like $500. And then the other one, like I said is close to $3000 if you don't do it with a lawyer.  

So that is one thing for sure to definitely share is, there's a whole process of documentation you have to fill. Some of these applications are overwhelming. They're like 18 pages each or so. And you have to put a lot of different history and you have to put a lot of different proof of saying that you are who you say you are. That you guys are married, that you have even witnesses, especially if your marriage is less than two years and stuff, which is our case.  

So yeah, so that's the whole endeavor we're doing, making sure we have many things joint, which we do of course, as a married couple because we're not doing this because I paid my husband. So no, not at all. It is a love marriage. But even though it is a love marriage, it's true what I shared with you guys. I faced a lot of shame and guilt of even going through this process, even though I know it was nothing I could have done differently to go to the next step, and it's something that, yeah, is the systemic just barriers that I still have in me, that's something I processed in therapy.  

But yes, that's just something to tell you guys more information about the process of legalization a lot of documents, it's hefty price. And mind you, that itself takes time. Some cases take one to two years, others take like five to ten years or so. So by the Lord's grace I'm hoping things are speeding up in immigration that it may take at least one to two years for us because of my case. But let's see. Let's see what happens. 

Sy Hoekstra: Just because I've been through this with my wife, that you apply for, first you apply for a conditional Green Card, then you have to file another application for an unconditional Green Card a couple years later. And then there's like, I mean, there's an interview involved where they ask you all kinds of questions to try and figure out if you're married. I mean, we submitted like the check that we paid the venue for our wedding, because you just want to submit like anything you possibly can to show to them this is like a real, actual marriage. I mean, the application that we had was like a binder. It was enormous [laughs]. So, yeah, I mean that's, I appreciate you elaborating on that and talking about some of the feelings around it, because it is a lot for sure.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. So Milly, you were sharing about some of the kind of mixed emotions around this and feelings of even sometimes grief or guilt or, and so I was wondering how do you talk to your immigrant friends and family and particularly to your undocumented community about this change, and what is that communication like for you? 

Milly Silencio: Yeah. I've been very intentional after getting married and just still maintaining that friendships that I do have with people who are undocumented, and I've been very open in just letting them know, “You guys know I don't have a Green Card right now.” Thank God, because that's the way of the community, I can just be honest, right. And they understand that. And I have had friends ask me, “Hey as you're in the process, will you forget about us?” And there, I reassure. I'm like, “No, absolutely not.” I've been in, this is part of my story and it will continue to be part of my story.  

And the best way I can say is I have come across a great like Latina mentor and friend that was formerly undocumented. And hearing her witness, and even when she was, before she spoke at a certain event, she did say in her bio, “formerly undocumented,” that's something I continually will always put in mine as well. And that's something I've shared with friends who have had that question, what does this mean? Will we lose you? And I'm like, “Absolutely not.” I'm still going to be part of community, but even stronger. Like talking about privilege, this is for me will be my good steward of privilege when I do come to the next round, which is hopefully in a year or so being documented, but just helping the community, but also being that bridge between both of those who are.  

Because it's a lot to process at times in knowing you need this, and this is good for you, but then you're so attached to the community, you don't want to leave in certain ways. But I also am understanding that just the same way I transitioned my season from being single seven years to now being married, is the same way of just allowing that grief of knowing that, yes, I'm not going to be able to speak on certain contexts, because I'm not completely part of that context anymore. But I still can speak because of just the three decades I've been part of this system. So any day, any time I will always be a supporter for undocumented communities. Just because I'm in a transition does not mean I'm exempt for anything in that way. I will completely be a fierce ally and help those allies even understand better what it looks like to support us.  

So that's conversations I've had with very dear friends who are undocumented and they felt so relieved in knowing that I will still be part of the community. I will still attach that to my bio because they've seen it. And I know because I've seen it myself, of people who just forget. It's as if, I understand sometimes, but also other times I agree to disagree on their interpretations of going forward in their lifestyle and just forgetting to give back to the community and stuff. So yeah, that's something I've really, did grieve about, but then also understood, it's still part of me. It's not going to leave me anyways. It's just a different perspective and a different side, but it also will be stronger, my voice and my power in how I can interpret, like I said, for both sides of the allyship, but then also the community. And I think I'll be a fierce bridge in that way as well. 

Suzie Lahoud: I love that analogy of just being a bridge, and also if I could just emphasize what you said about not forgetting, because I feel like that's the tension a lot of times for me with, you know, I shared a little bit about my story, but even just changing locations from places like Uzbekistan and coming back to the US or going back and forth between Lebanon and the US, and Lebanon's a country right now where people don't always have running water and electricity. So just this idea of when you've been places and seen people's struggles, there is this responsibility, I think, to carry that knowledge with you and to not forget to remember.  

And I just love how we see that in the Bible with, I feel like in some ways you could look at the story of the Exodus as the people of Israel journeying out of being enslaved people and acquiring the privilege of citizenship in a new land. And yet God tells them throughout that journey to remember, remember where they came from. And then when they get to the new land to care for the sojourner and the stranger among them, because they were once sojourners and strangers. And so I just love those two themes that you hit on of just choosing to not forget, choosing to actively remember, and to stay connected to that community and serve as a bridge between those two realities of life. I think that's so important.  

Sy Hoekstra: I think — I totally agree with all that — I think the grief thing is the thing that hits me, right? Like the notion of you lose something that a lot of the world looks at as like a stain. A lot of the world looks at it like something that you should not be proud of in any way, like an undocumented status. But losing it for you because you've made it part of who you've identified with it, like to an enormous and like highly risk-taking degree in your case. It just becomes such a part of who you are, and I think that's where I connect a little bit on the disability front, because there's just like a ton of fraught feelings around acquiring privilege through like, when you're talking about disabled people, it's like a literal change to your body, you know what I mean? Is what's like creating the privilege in those cases, and it's just it's so… it's like not just a part of who you are sort of in your day-to-day life or mentally what you've identified with. It's a part of your literal body is changing, and that causes people a ton of grief, a ton of emotions. And I think, so I don't exactly know where I'm going with this. I'm just saying I identify with that part of what you said really. 

[laughter] 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean, I think I'm in your boat where like this inspired a lot more thoughts than I thought. On paper there's like reading it, but then as we're having the conversation, something that is interesting to me is two things. One, the difference between rights versus privileges. And like, I'm like, oh, are rights things we can acquire when we can't get the privilege? Like I can't leave being Black behind. There's no physical change that, like Sy talks about, there's no healing that's going to happen. Or be like with the LGBTQIA+ community it’s like, that's not something that they necessarily want to change or are going to change.  

So there's a right, whereas when you're embodying the change, like you as a physical person have changed statuses. That's something to me that's pretty compelling to think about. Particularly when we think about the second part, these are communal identities, these aren't individual ones. So the idea that like, to my mom I am different now because I have an education and her needing that reassurance, that I won't forget. Or when I look at Maia and Maia will never know what it's like not to expect the fridge to be full, or the bills to be paid. Or like, she breaks down if we get the wrong sushi roll [laughter]. Like that's, I'm like… 

Suzie Lahoud: I mean, I would break down if I got the wrong sushi roll. 

Jonathan Walton: It takes everything in me not to be like, “Do you know where you come from?” But she doesn't. The first time she picked a squash out of the field in Brodnax, where I'm from. And she was like, she didn't want to get her hands dirty. And I'm just like, this is you, you know what I mean? But there's this, there's a separation now of like, she's not in the same class as I was, but I'm in this class. How do I explain to her where she came from? There's a communal aspect. We don't have the same accent. We don't have the same educational trajectory. We don't, and it’s a very, as you're talking, it's a very, like I changed, but we are the same. I am this, but I am so like you.  

So there's this talking across a social wall that feels significant. And this is the last thing I'll say, because I think they illustrate this that like, I've become really married to shower heads that are like really nice [laughter], and I notice like, hot water. I've started to notice things when I go into other people's houses because of the class change. Because of how our, like we had to redo our bath, our bathroom is new. I didn't grow up with new anything in a house. We make repairs when things break. There's things that, just like things that are unacceptable in our household now that have been acceptable my entire life, that I'm still kind of wrestling through. So yeah. Anyway, that was me rambling. And I know I have a question right here, but Suzie's going to say something. Go ahead. 

Suzie Lahoud: Oh, I was going to say, could I just ride this train a little bit farther and just, and I will have a question at the end of it. Or I might just be completely derailing the conversation. But just, if we could touch on the generational aspect too, because I think, yeah, Jonathan. This is something I think about too as a parent is, some of the things that I experienced, so again growing up in Uzbekistan, there were some hard things about living there and some hard things that my family went through. And so I appreciate when things aren't hard so much more and I appreciate what I have now. So like I appreciate physical safety more. I appreciate getting to go to the park and buy a balloon. I appreciate things like that that I couldn't have or do, and I love giving those things to my kids and providing those things to my kids.  

But then I think, how do I also pass on the lessons that I learned through what I experienced growing up, and the resilience and all of those things? Because I'm actually grateful that there were aspects of my childhood that weren't easy, and I think that they shaped me and formed me in important ways, those experiences did. And so how do I also pass that on to my kids? Because they don't have the context and the background for what we're experiencing now that I do. Yeah.  

And so I guess to throw this out as a question for you, Milly, how do you think about this change of status that you're now in? It's in process for you. Like you said, you're not there yet. This is still a process, but now you're married and you're going to, I don't know if you guys are planning to have kids or not. But is that something that you think about? And then also Jonathan, if you want to, it looks like you have more to say. 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I'll contextualize a little closer. Like as you preach, as you shepherd other people, is how you talk about your experience changing? Is how you talk about God changing and if so, how?  

Milly Silencio: To answer, I'll try my best to answer both in one for sure. So to definitely answer you Suzie, yes, me and Josh have spoken about kids. We want to have them, not yet. And the reason is because of also socioeconomic status for both of us, he is an entrepreneur, he's a bike mechanic. I'm a church planting pastor where church has severely been hit because of the pandemic and stuff. So yeah. So that we, that's one thing there. But when it comes to kids, we have spoken about that. What would we like to impart to them? And we've been very, both of us have the same heart of them growing in a bilingual home and growing up to definitely have, because they're going to have our last name. Which, by the way my husband took my last names. That's a whole other side story for you and stuff, because that's how much he wanted to just, for us to continue having that in our story.  

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan did that too. 

Milly Silencio: Nice, nice. Yes, and stuff. So we had that conversation. We want to even, from us thinking in time when we have kids even being intentional for them to even have a Spanish first name and then maybe an English middle name because of their last name being so Latino. Silencio is really Latino. But also in regards to what you said Jonathan, hilariously enough, I just gave a message a few weeks ago, which in my mind, because I had to do as well, as a church planter, you have many hats. I also had to make sure everything in the church was okay. Our church is going still fine tune things, like our lights went off. So it was just so many different things that were happening, and just us making church church, if that makes sense.  

And Cory was off for that Sunday, so I was on. I struggled making the message, which is a whole other side story in itself. But when I did, and we were speaking about 2 Peter, what I gravitate towards and that's something I'm seeing is part of me all the time is, I gravitated from the very beginning when Paul, not Paul, Peter started seeing and talking about “To the exiles of” X, Y, and Z. From there, it just set the tone for me, because I’m like, I know what exiles are. It's migrants. It's like us and our stories, our immigrant stories. And it just helped me understand and love even more.  

Not to say I don’t and stuff, but I've been appreciating a lot more my story. My migrant story, my mom, and honoring her more and knowing that the story that I'm saying right now actually has been a story that's been told to me in parts because of her traumatized state these past years. So I think for me, when I look in scripture, I think about that as well. Whenever I see migrants or exiles or foreigners, I understand that in that so other different level, that it makes me just have that perspective and lens in how I preach or how I teach as well. And also making sure that those who are from different ethnicities and different races in our congregation know the beauty of that. Of being a mosaic for God, being part of the body of Christ in that way, but not being uniformity and stuff.  

So that's how also I interpret it because I'm just tired of justice systems that may also in scripture, because that's one of the reasons why I also had to have a reconciliation moment with scripture and so much white supremacy surrounding certain commentaries and other theologians interpretations of books of the Bible. So yeah, like I said, that's a whole other side story in itself, but it's been great to still see myself whenever I meditate on scripture, still me having my story in it.  

Also as a woman and stuff, and I was very intentional in that message in talking about the comparison of the inheritance of Christ to then the times that we as women didn't even have access to inheritance like the daughters of — the name fades me. But it's in the book of Numbers and stuff, which talks about these daughters — oh, Zelophehad — who came to Moses because they were women, and there was no male heir, when Moses went to Jesus, went to God and God was like, “Yeah, give it to them.” So I'm just saying, so things like this that also I hone into my womanhood as I interpret scripture and see like, wow, it's true. Like we've really been blessed in where we are. I've really been blessed in where I am and I never want to take that for granted.  

Suzie Lahoud: So I guess building off of that, how your experiences shaped the way that you read the Bible and how you preach and disciple, there's an idea that sort of floats around churches, saying that people with less privilege know God more closely or better understand Jesus' teaching, specifically because it takes trial or hardship or desperation to sort of break you if you want to truly be close to him. And so we wanted to kind of talk with you about that framing, because I think there's a lot in there and some of it is really good and true and helpful and some of it maybe needs to be teased out and maybe critiqued even. So yeah, if we could just kind of pick your brain on that a little bit. 

Milly Silencio: Yeah, sure. I think for me when I was also looking at this question as we were talking about it via email, I felt a lot of like, I would say resistance with it, but then also understanding. Resistance I think because I've known what it is to be in churches which praise exactly that, the lowly in spirit, the poverty, and yet teach the other spectrum of Jesus as well of like prosperity gospel and things like that, but yet do not help practically those who are at the margins, even though they themselves are part of their community. And to me, I have an issue with that.  

For me, I think it's a balance. If we believe in a God of yes, he is there for those who are what, lowly in spirit. Then we should also believe that he is there for the rulers of nations too, and he is there for all. So I think for me, I wrestle with that because of just knowing people, preaching and teaching, especially the lowly in spirit in the context of it being so I would say, caged in to be, for you to continue in that poverty, and for that to be a benefit for society, but yet not helping them in their spiritual formation or growth beyond just even the systems of this world.  

And for me, in my context, I could say even beyond your undocumented status, because I do sense that even in, at least in my context, I have been in certain churches where even though they're a part of the community, they've never even spoken about the immigration issue or even highlighted, “Hey you are, God sees you, God hears you. He loves you. And your undocumented status does not breach you from access to Jesus.” I have never heard that in the Latino Pentecostal churches that I've been in. I wish I would've heard that because I think I would've been in a different journey now. But yet like I said, for some reason, and I think this is again the, I would say the wave, the spirit, unfortunately of colonization and also white supremacy and how even our own communities, immigrant communities have been indoctrinated to say certain scriptures in this way of maintaining the lowly to be even more low. And for them not to go against what's already in place in society.  

And to me I'm against that, because then we also even see that in church planting, where certain curriculums or even leadership development, it goes to the context of, yeah, let me… for where I've heard it, and I went completely against it as well of an immigrant needing first legal services to then from there needing leadership development, as if Jesus said, “Hey, guess what immigrant, get your Green Card first and then you can be a disciple of mine.” That is not Jesus and stuff. So it's things like this to me that I struggle with that context because I know God is true. He is, I've seen it in my family. There's times we didn't have enough for rent and by God's grace, we won one of those monopoly pieces we submitted it in and it arrived that check literally the time we needed rent. So like McDonald's paid my rent. 

Sy Hoekstra: McDonald’s monopoly? Yeah.  

[laughter] 

Milly Silencio: Yes! McDonald's paid my rent one month and stuff. And for us, and just to say that context, I understand that and I think that's great, but I also think it’s great to help others continue grow in who God has created them to be and just letting them grow. Because I feel like I didn't see that. I wish there was better mentorship in that way for spiritual gifts in all these context of the ministries, right? Whether it be not only pastor, but teacher, prophetic, apostle, all of them to be grown, instead of it just being certain people only in some sort of hierarchy in church. But anyways, I don't want to get into a tangent, but those are my thoughts. And kind of just feelings around that of the systems that may, but then also seeing it even in church context of just unfortunately people not noticing that, saying that too much is actually not helpful at all to help those who are in the struggle for sure. It alleviates, but it also is helpful to give other resources to continue whatever it is that they're needing for.  

And I always think of my own story. What would it have been if people who mentored me first would've told me, “Hey, Milly, guess what? Why don’t you get your Green Card first, and then we'll disciple you.” I wouldn't be here. So, but I'm just saying it could happen because I've heard in churches of that. Or even denominations that do not license or ordain people who are undocumented, but are yet getting all of their services in their churches as deacons, lay leaders, everything. And they're just doing this with their big hearts, lowly hearts, in service to Jesus, but yet should be compensated for that. So that is my issue with it.   

Sy Hoekstra: It almost becomes justifying of the poverty, the material lack. Right? 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. 

Milly Silencio: Yep.  

Sy Hoekstra: Exactly. That's a sad, but very true point I think. Suzie, you had a number of thoughts on this I think too, right? 

Suzie Lahoud: Well, I guess just one thing that I've been kind of thinking about is, so we recently celebrated Easter, and also I shared in one of our weekly newsletters a great talk that Mako Nagasawa gave on restorative versus retributive justice, and arguing that God's form of justice is restorative not retributive. So it gets into atonement theory and all of that. And the way that this all relates for me right now, maybe to atonement theory in my understanding of what Christ’s sacrifice on the cross means, is just that I believe in a God who suffers with us. And that moment of Christ suffering on the cross, seeing that as a moment of solidarity with us in our suffering, I think it enlightens this for me, because it's showing that yes, God is with us in those moments of hardship and tribulation, but it's not retributive. It's not God actively, you know… Sy, you put it, when we were talking about this the other day, you put it in terms of, it can almost create an abusive view of God, that like God has to crush you and break you and make you experience hardship in order for you to be sanctified and purified and all that.  

Sy Hoekstra: Keep you close to him with material lack, which is like literally a tactic of abusive men. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yes, yes, and has been critiqued in different even justice movements. And can feed into, like you were saying, Milly, an almost glorification of lack by the people who have everything that they need and have massive amounts of privilege. And so, yeah, I think, again for me, I've been seeing this, trying to see this sort of through the lens of the cross and how I view the cross and that, again, it's God entering into our suffering with us, and I firmly believe in that. And I'm not questioning that at all, but then do want to critique the unhealthiness of thinking that God has to make you suffer in order for you to be close to him. And it's complicated because those two things somehow seem like they should be linked together, but I think there's some unhealthiness that we need to, as we always talk about on this show, sort of disentangle.  

Jonathan Walton: So one thing that really stands out to me is that, from what you're saying Suzie, is a message I actually got to share at Reconcile. Where we talked about like, Reconcile Church where Milly is a pastor, and the difference between a colonial subject versus a congregant. And like, you have to see God as an overseer in the context of colonization. And so the entanglement, it has to be like teaching for control. It can't be teaching for empowerment. It can't be teaching for agency. It can't, it has to be teaching and then contextualized for control. And the twisting of passages to say like, blessed are the poor. And so this joining of like, well, if I am suffering, then I am exalted. And that means if you're a slave and you stay a slave, you're somehow closer to God, so it's okay for you to be a slave forever.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. Because that… yeah. 

Jonathan Walton: And so they get joined together, whereas like it, but the flip side isn't true whereas we don't then have the discipleship, as Milly was talking about of like, if you are rich, give your money away. There's no pursuit of downward movement even though Jesus talks about that, like the first will be last, the last should be first. Like we don't push that, but we absolutely grab Philemon and say, this is how it should work out. Yeah, it’s really difficult to disentangle them because they're the foundation of our society. 

Sy Hoekstra: I think the kernel, the reason this is like slightly uncomfortable is there's a kernel of truth in what we're talking about, which is Emmanuel. Which is like God promises to be with people in their suffering. And so they do like as a matter of fact meet God in suffering because God has promised to be with you in suffering. That is a thing that happens. But that is not some, like you can use that truth to exploit people, for control in all the ways that you each talked about. I just wanted to put that out there. God promises to be with people who are poor, who are suffering, who are mourning, who are everything else, but that’s… 

Jonathan Walton: But he doesn't leave us there [laughs]. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, exactly. Right. 

Suzie Lahoud: Right. Right. 

Jonathan Walton: Like in eternity, right?  

Milly Silencio: Yeah. 

Sy Hoekstra: Being with you is not the same as holding you down, you know what I mean? Like he's there. He's not, yeah, the ultimate goal is to lift you up. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. And as you were sharing Jonathan, I think it’s starting to kind of coalesce for me. Because again, this is something I'm sort of actively trying to decolonize in my own thinking and reading of scripture and understanding of who God is. And just because God is with you in your bondage, doesn't mean he doesn't fight with you for your liberation and lead you out into liberation. And I feel like we've been preaching a gospel that is just God is with you in your bondage, so you can be content in your bondage. And it actually, rather than leading to liberation, it becomes a barrier to liberation. 

Milly Silencio: I really love this conversation because it's something I've been thinking about a lot and just wrestling with. Like I said, honestly speaking, I wrestle at times with reading scripture because of all these other different systems that I know go with it. But I think as you guys are just having this wonderful conversation, what I'm also reminded of is of God's sovereignty, and God is God and we are not. And the reason I say this too, is also the other extreme of people who have God and who may be in okay socioeconomic status, but yet they do everything, they go ahead, go to a missionary trip, take that picture, right, and stuff. Go to a Black Lives Matters protest. And then they've been just, to put it, and I can do this because I've been single for, I was single for seven years and stuff and been single like seven years, and are asking God and doing all of these different causes. This is where I'm saying like, God is God and we are not, because I also think that other extreme of treating God kind of like a Santa Claus or a genie in the bottle is not it either and stuff like that.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, that’s a great point. 

Milly Silencio: Because I've heard it and we're people struggle of just these moments of wanting to have certain life shifts and seasons, but it doesn't happen the way they want it. And let's be honest, all of us with our life seasons, we know many of the things that we wanted did not happen where we wanted it, but when God knew this was the time for all of us to be at this time, place, and moment.  

And I think about that and I'm like, “Thank you, God, you've saved me in so many moments that I thought this was it.” And I think that's the beautifulness of the need for God, but in a like, “God, I need you to hold me. I need you to be with me.” Like you were saying, God is a God who is with the suffering, but it also is a wonderful way of knowing he is with us too in that liberation. I think it's in that experience too of knowing that he even liberates us from ourselves in our context of thinking we need something for certain timeframes, but then also he's just a loving father, and stuff that teaches us, yeah, you need to go out from this extremity to another. Or sits with us and cries with us and mourns and grieves when we need those moments.  

And I think about that as even Cory gave a message a few months ago, and he talks about how God loves us so much that even correcting us hurts him. And he made an example of him with his son. At times his son likes doing, like going ahead, going to like an outlet or something. He's like, “Jael don't do that,” and stuff. And of course he does it and stuff, but it doesn't mean that Cory loves his son any less. The same thing with God. It doesn't mean that God loves us any less when at times we are doing something and God's like, no, that's not really the way and stuff.  

Sy Hoekstra: You're going to get electrocuted.  

Milly Silencio: Yeah, exactly [laughter]. Right? And I think that's it too. I think that's part of the process of God healing our mindsets, and healing the systems that may, that have been passed down. And of God just detoxing that and just for us to be with him. And I think it's a communal experience too, because look at us having this conversation and us in all different point of views and perspectives of this word, privilege. And I think that's beautiful because we can't do this alone. We need God's help, but we need each other. And I think that's something that we need to continue, even though yes, we're in a complete pandemic still, but we still need to continue having both relationships together. Because if not, we're going to get lost. And I think to me, that is my greatest fear in this time and stuff, is just us getting lost in too much of our head space individualistic, but then also negating the communal aspect of faith as well. 

Sy Hoekstra: I think I unfortunately need to cut us off [laughs]. I don't want to, but we've gone for quite some time. I really appreciate Milly, you being with us in this capacity as a guest who's been here before. And we just know you too well at this point, so we are not as nervous about talking and then you don't talk as much. Anyways, what I'm trying to say is you're a part of our family, and that's why we talked so much this episode [laughs]. 

Milly Silencio: Oh, thank you guys. No, I love it. And yeah, for me, I'm like, oh shoot. I feel like I had a whole pastoral moment right now. I need to pray [laughter]. That's so funny. Yeah. I was like, oh wait, why did I go here? I don't even know, but here we are. 

Suzie Lahoud: Oh, no, we brought you on for the pastoral moments. No, I was so grateful for that. That was so good. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Right. Agreed, right. Why have a pastor on your show if you don't want pastoral moments? You know what I'm saying?  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. 

Milly Silencio: Yeah. I know [laughter].  

Sy Hoekstra: So I mean, we know people can find you're writing and everything at Hopinggreatly.com. They can find you on Instagram @HopingGreatly. Where else do you want people to follow you, or is there anything else you want people to check out?  

Jonathan Walton: Ask people to support you. 

Milly Silencio: Yes, please. If you want to support my work, please send me a DM in my IG in Hoping Greatly. Or even send me an email, [email protected] and stuff, and be like, “Hey, how can I support you?” Definitely, I am going to start a campaign actually for my missions trip in October in Berlin which I'm super excited for, because I’ll be getting to meet a long family friend of Sy, by the way,  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, yeah. 

Milly Silencio: Pastor Scott Corwin there.  

Suzie Lahoud: Whoa. 

Milly Silencio: That's a whole other wonderful story. So yes please. If you want to unite with the mission for me to continue in just spreading my story but also hope to the undocumented communities, support me in my work for sure. 

Sy Hoekstra: Absolutely, everyone go do that. It is one of the most random things of my entire life that my high school pastor and you found each other on the internet, and you're now going to stay with him. 

[laughter] 

Milly Silencio: Yes. Such a small world.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, for real. Thank you so much for being here with us, Milly. Thank you everybody for listening. Just as a reminder before we finish up, go to ktfpress.com/freemonth to get a free month of the subscription, get our newsletter, get our bonus episodes of this podcast. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @KTFPress. Please do rate and review and subscribe to this podcast on your podcast player, all those things are very helpful to us.  

Our theme music as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you all next time. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Jonathan Walton: And as a writer she contributed in our anthology, uh… Oh man, I forgot the title of our anthology. I deleted it. 

[laughter, and Jonathan snorts at himself] 

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan…  

Suzie Lahoud: I think we have our blooper. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah 

Jonathan Walton: Aw man. 

Milly Silencio: That was good. 

Suzie Lahoud: Jonathan forgets the name of our book. 

Today, the team interviews Dr. Mika Edmondson, the Lead Pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church Koinonia in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of The Power of Unearned Suffering: The Roots and Implications of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Theodicy. They discuss how Dr. Edmondson sees and resists colonized church practices in his context, his theological library of marginalized voices, how to stay uncompromising and hopeful while working in white church spaces, and a lot more! This conversation is packed with deep wisdom, and you all are going to love it! 

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify. 

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.  

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra. 

Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra. 

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode. 

Transcript

[A guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]  

Mika Edmondson: I think that's one of the great gifts of the scriptures and of the prophets. With the prophets, they don't just bring just a new idea, they bring a new vision. They're saying, behold this vision of community, of peace and shalom. Everything in your lived reality would say that this wasn't even possible, but look, look at God's intention. And when people see that as a possibility and not just a possibility, but a guarantee for our future, man, it changes everything. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust: Leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. My name is Sy Hoekstra. I'm here with Jonathan Walton and Suzie Lahoud.  

Jonathan Walton: Today, we have an interview with Dr. Mika Edmondson, the lead pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church Koinonia, in Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Edmondson earned his doctorate at Calvin Theological Seminary, and he published his dissertation as the book, The Power of Unearned Suffering: The Roots and Implications of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Theodicy. He was the first African American to receive a PhD from Calvin, where he also contributed as an adjunct professor. He earned an MDiv from Vanderbilt Divinity School, and a bachelor of science and applied physics from Hampton University. We talk with Dr. Edmondson about how he sees and resists colonized church practices in his context, his theological library of marginalized voices, how to stay uncompromising and hopeful while working in white church spaces, and a whole lot more. This conversation is packed with some hard-won wisdom, and we know you're going to love it. 

Suzie Lahoud: As a reminder, if you like this show, the best way to support us is to go to ktfpress.com and subscribe. That gets you our weekly newsletter, where the three of us recommend resources to help you in discipleship and political education as you seek to leave colonized faith for the kingdom of God, as well as bonus episodes of this show. You can get a free month of the subscription by going to ktfpress.com/freemonth. Again, that's ktfpress.com/freemonth. Also, please remember to hit the subscribe and follow button on your podcast player and leave a rating and review. Follow us @KTFPress on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and tell your friends about us. 

Sy Hoekstra: And now, here's the interview.  

[Instrumental music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out] 

Sy Hoekstra: Dr. Mika Edmondson, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust today. 

Mika Edmondson: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.  

Sy Hoekstra: We really appreciate you being here, and we just wanted to get started with a bit of a, kind of a broad question. The tagline for this show is leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. We just wanted to hear how you see colonized faith showing up in your context in Nashville and how you think about trying to lead people out of it. 

Mika Edmondson: Wow, that's a great, great question. So I actually think that the very shape of the church itself in terms of its demographics… yeah, I'll just start with demographics. I think the demographics of the church itself reflects a history of colonization, because essentially people, they are able to sort of imagine themselves being a part of certain communities or not being a part of certain communities based on their history. Based on the history of whether or not people were able to integrate or whether they were segregated. So for so many years, the church roles themselves were segregated. So because of that, people, traditions have developed, basically reflecting the cultures of those who could see themselves within that community or were allowed to be in that community.  

So there's so many ways in which the way the church functions sort of culturally, the folks who show up on Sunday morning or can see themselves as a part of certain traditions, all those things really reflect that history. So we have got to be very much attentive to that. We've got to, actually, we can't just go with the flow and just think that this is the way things always have been, or that this is the way God wants them to be. We've got to be very deliberate about taking what it is that Jesus calls us to be and who he has shown us that we will be in the eschaton, and we got to show how that makes a claim on today.  

Sy Hoekstra: So how does that show up specifically in your context in Nashville? 

Mika Edmondson: Yeah. So a few different things. I'm a part of, I'm a minister in the Presbyterian Church of America, so the PCA. It is a denomination that is a little over 40 years old, and we're in a city, Nashville is a city that is almost one-third African American. So African Americans make up about 28 percent of the residents of Nashville, Tennessee. This denomination has been in this city for nearly 40 years, and I am the first teaching elder to be in the PCA in the Nashville presbytery. The first Black teaching elder, okay? What that lets you know is that something has gone wrong, for it to have taken that long to bring your first Black pastor in a city that is a third Black.  

This is not me pointing fingers at the PCA. This is me simply saying that the PCA and many of our denominations have inherited a set of ecclesial circumstances that we have not interrogated, that we have not questioned. So we have kind of gone with the flow, and that is why the demographics look the way they look. So the form of ministry that I am doing is gospel ministry that lays hold of the catholicity of the church, the fact that the church is of people who come from every tribe, nation and tongue. So looking at a sort of circumstances where our denomination, our presbytery has not had African American pastors in a city that is a third Black, that lets me know that we've got some work to do. So yeah, so that's how it shows up. It shows up just in our demographics.  

Our church, the local church that I pastor, which is called Koinonia, is a church that has been very intentional in pushing back against that history. It also shows up in what we are willing or not willing to address ecclesially. So I think many of us have inherited a faith that says that the gospel makes a claim on my personal relationship with God through Jesus. And it's very much a matter of me being personally reconciled to God, so that I can go to heaven one day. And some people, for many people, that is kind of the extent of the gospel. That's what the gospel is.  

But if we take what the Bible describes as the good news of Christ coming to destroy the works of the devil, to establish justice, to bring life and wholeness to a ruined world, then we actually recognize that the gospel makes a claim on not just my personal individual relationship with God, but it actually makes a claim everywhere that the curse of sin and death and pain and suffering is found. So our inability to actually say the gospel makes a claim on mass incarceration. The gospel makes a claim on police brutality. The gospel makes a claim on healthcare disparities and education disparities. The gospel makes a claim on domestic violence. The gospel makes a claim on all of these areas in which people are suffering. Our inability to actually articulate that claim is a function of a colonized faith. It's a function of a faith that says, we are… it says the role of the church is to make sure people go to heaven, rather than the role of the church is to articulate the claim that heaven makes on earth.  

You can see how people who don't make the claim about how heaven comes to earth, about how heaven challenges unjust systems, what they're doing is they're really complicit in allowing those systems to continue to flourish and to continue to exploit people. So I can go on and on. I mean, the way we read the Bible, the way we… I can go on and on with that, but that's where I would kind of begin.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I very much appreciate that. Jonathan, I think you were about to bust in with something [laughs].  

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, man. I was muted, but amen. All the amens [laughter]. So I met you virtually on Twitter. That was how I met you. I was like, oh, because you tweeted, “You can have a great theological library without a single slave holder on your shelf.” And I was like, retweet, background photo, keep that there.  

[laughter] 

So who's on your shelf, your theological library? Like what theologians, what commentaries, what commentators? Because we know as a publishing company, publishing is not, it's full of some slaveholders. 

[laughter] 

So like, you know it’s not necessarily a decolonized space.  

Mika Edmondson: Absolutely, yeah. Okay, great question. So I think that what we've got to do, is we have to really reimagine what we believe theology to be, and who we believe does theology. So a lot of times when we think about theology, we think about, I think we think about academic… I think we think about professors who are in the business of teaching religion to students who will either serve in the academy or in the church. I think oftentimes we think about theology as that. And I think we've got to sort of reimagine what we think theology or who's doing theological discourse actually is.  

So the folks, and when we begin to reimagine that, it will actually expand our theological repertoire. It’ll allow us to see theological resources where otherwise we would not have recognized them. So some of the theologians that I have on my shelf are folks like Maria Stewart. So Maria Stewart, so she was the first woman to give a public speech on these shores, in America, and she was a Black woman. She gave public speeches around politics, around women's rights, certainly around anti-racism and emancipation and she was an abolitionist. She was giving these speeches when she was in her early thirties. She had come to faith in the wake of the death of her husband, and she immediately recognized that this Christianity, this faith makes a claim on my social situation and a claim on the situation of those around me.  

So she began to actually articulate that through these speeches, through pamphlets, through prayers. So she's a theologian. She's actually a theologian. I think that there are people that will look at Maria Stewart and they would see her as maybe like a social kind of, sort of social activist, but they wouldn't look at her speech as sort of theological. I would say folks like certainly the example of Harriet Tubman, folks like Ida B. Wells, folks like Phillis Wheatley, these are examples and folks that I've got on my shelf.  

Martin Luther King Jr., I'll give you an example. So I'm sort of just moving through. He's somebody that features prominently on my shelves. He's someone that actually got a degree in systematic theology from Boston University. Most people don't know that he got his PhD in systematics. So everything that he did was intentionally and deliberately and deeply theological. So, but I think a lot of people listen to his speeches and they read his writings and they think, oh this is social discourse, this is sociological discourse, but they don't think of it as theological discourse. But it is. It’s very much theological discourse. So, yeah. So MLK, his father, Daddy King is another one that I have on my shelf. You can't go wrong with Augustine and Cyprian and some kind of some early North African theologians. 

Jonathan Walton: Thanks. That's super helpful, because I do think that expanding the… it's intentionally narrow, when, on purpose that we think of theology as this. So when we begin to widen the scope it’s super helpful.  

Mika Edmondson: Absolutely. Again, I would say this. For everybody who's listening, I would say listen to marginalized people. Find their theological discourses. Find where they are talking about what God has to say about suffering in their social situation and freedom. Find those things and make sure that you really dive deep into those things. That's really, really important because God has, he has uniquely revealed himself and his agenda to people who are on the social margins. For instance, so Hagar. Hagar is an enslaved person. She is a victim of sex trafficking. She is a person who has been abused and she has been discarded.  

And it's within the context of that pain and suffering that God, that the angel of the Lord appears to her and begins to show her that God sees her. Where no one else had seen her. No one else had really seen her humanity, her dignity, her worth, God had seen her. This is interesting because this is the very first place in the entire scripture, entire Hebrew Bible where the angel of the Lord appears. And it is to a person that is an enslaved person on the bottom of the caste system that's been discarded in the midst of her distress, and God, the angel of the Lord, the message of the Lord, the good news of the Lord appears to her. So God has really… the major salvific event in the old Testament is the Exodus. So in that God is revealing himself to a bunch of enslaved people.  

So God really specializes in speaking to people on the bottom in some unique ways. They have a certain set of existential, certain set of circumstances that allows them to long for God that is sovereign, and a God that reaches to their place. It doesn't mean that God doesn't speak to people who are in different, other places in the social system. It just means that God reaches especially down to the bottom to let everybody know that he's there for them as well. So I would say listen to people on the bottom. Listen to people that are marginalized. That's who taught Jesus the Bible, was his mother especially. We know that Joseph was there somewhere [laughter], but the gospels are especially… as the gospel writers under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit compiled these memoir, recollections about the life of Jesus, people were very much careful to talk about his mother and the influence his mother had in his life.  

And you see that through his ministry. So Mary's Magnificat, some of the great things of Mary's Magnificat about God doing this divine reversal, where the folks who are on thrones are brought down and the lowly, the humble are exalted, these great kind of, these reversals. You see that in the Sermon on the Mount. So we see Mary's kind of theological influence on Jesus's own ministry. So God intentionally chose a person, a poor woman that was a marginalized, a part of a marginalized group in Roman occupied Palestine, who was on the bottom. She was the one that taught the Messiah the scriptures. And I just think that's intentional, and I think God is showing us something. So I just say pay attention to women, pay attention to the women of color, pay attention to poor people, pay attention to marginalized folks, listen to what they have to say.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. Well, and thank you for sharing that Dr. Edmondson. I have to say when you were sharing that, just now, I feel like it's so empowering that piece of the story. I'd actually never heard it preached that way, the role that Mary played in Christ's life. So thank you for continuing to bring truth like that to the surface and demonstrating how we bring those marginalized pieces to the fore.  

So your ministry has included working in a lot of predominantly white organizations. And you know, we were just talking about decolonization earlier and the legacies of colonization on our religious institutions and our churches and our ministries. And I'm sure that you've experienced that a lot of times, these predominantly white organizations and Christian ministries are resistant and can even be hostile toward real thoroughgoing racial justice.  

So one of the things that we wanted to ask you today on the show is, how do you stay uncompromising in spaces like that? Then also, how do you deal with the pressure and strain that that must put on you and your family? Because you're also a person and you have to carry the weight of these discussions and struggles back home with you as well. So how do you deal with that on both sides, both in terms of being a presence and pushing back, and then also how you deal with that as a father and a husband and a human being?  

Mika Edmondson: Yeah. Thank you so much for asking. Great, great, great questions. So three things: humility, intentionality, and measure. I think, so humility. Humility. So I recognize that I am called to be a witness in these settings and wherever the Lord sends me. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the responsibility is on my shoulders to make these people change their minds and to make these institutions change. What I'm called to do is to be a witness. And I'll tell you, that really frees you up, when you know that what Jesus is holding me responsible for is to tell the truth and to be a witness, but Jesus is not holding me responsible for changing these people's minds. He is the one that does that. He's the one that transforms, he's the one that redeems, saves. The spirit sanctifies, and it's his responsibility to do all the saving. So humility.  

Intentionality. To make sure that I am being a faithful witness and being intentional and not thinking that these organizations or these settings are going to kind of get it, unless someone says to them, “Hey, did you see this blind spot?” Or, “Did you see this thing?” So we've got to be intentional about that.  

And I'll tell you, measure. So it's interesting, I think that that's something that we often struggle with, is measure. So what I mean by measure is self-control in speech. Loving self-control in speech. I love that self-control is part of the fruit of the Spirit. It's, you know the Spirit is at work when someone is very lovingly thoughtful and careful about what they say. That they are speaking in such a way that blesses and meets the hearer where they are and can love them well. Measure means that you don't say all the things all the time. And measure, and you have to be measured whenever you're doing discipleship, because measure means that you, again, you meet people where they are and you walk them to another place.  

Think about this. So God is measured in how he deals with his people. So God comes to people and God knows the whole ugly truth about everything that they've ever done, everything that they are currently doing and everything that they ever will do. And God does not lay all that on you at once, right? God will reveal some things, but God is measured because God loves us. Even when God is offering a rebuke, he's doing it in such a way that you can receive it and grow from it, rather than being overwhelmed by it. And I think he calls us to deal with each other the same way. To deal with each other with love and kindness and measure.  

So when I'm in these spaces, I speak up where I feel that I can do the most good. I try to be a witness. I try to speak truth. I try to be honest and frank. So I'm not quote-unquote, “pulling my punches” in that sense, but I'm not saying all the things at every meeting, and I'm not saying the same thing every single time. Because I think, I just think wisdom calls us to be more varied in our responses with people, and to let them know that they're more than just, that they're more than just their worst opinion about something. That they're more than just their worst mistake. They're more than just their sin. I try to deal with people more holistically. To let them know, “hey look, I'm for you, and the whole reason that I would even be calling out sin is because I'm for you. Because I want to see you succeed. Because I want to see you grow, because I want to see you thrive, and I want to see God honored in this space.” 

Sy Hoekstra: Before we get to the second half of that question, I can see a way that everything that you just said gets twisted into tone policing. Because I don't think that that's what you mean by it, but I do think that’s what some people could conceivably hear from it. I would just like to hear your thoughts on the interaction on how the notions of humility or being measured in self-control can be weaponized to silence people. 

Mika Edmondson: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is something that the person, that the speaker themselves has as a value. It's not something that the institution can force upon you. So humility, intentionality, and measure is something that I myself know. That as I am seeking to be a witness and witness to Christ’s truth and grace, that I am actually embodying. But it's not for the institution to look at me and say, “you're not being humble, you're not being measured and you're not being intentional.” [laughs] So I would say that's one way I would sort of qualify that.  

Another thing is, so we've got to keep in mind that Christ calls us to grace and truth. That's what he came in. He came full of grace and truth, and sometimes we can choose one at the expense of the other. We can say, “I'm telling truth and I really don't care how it comes off. I'm telling truth and I don't care. I'll say it in a way that sounds mean or sounds unkind because I'm telling the truth.” And there are others that are like, “Well, I'm being gracious, but I'm never going to actually be truthful.”  

Sy Hoekstra: Or being truthful is ungracious. 

Mika Edmondson: Right, or something like that. But we have to hold those things together. We have to hold those things together. We have to recognize that being truthful is a form of grace, but it has to come out that way. Being gracious actually carries with it the call to also be honest and be truthful with people. It carries both of those. So we have to have both of those things working. 

Sy Hoekstra: I think what I hear you saying then, is that the institution has to care as much about, or more about even, truth as it does about the graciousness of the people who are involved in the institution. 

Mika Edmondson: Yeah, it has to hold both of those things together. That's exactly right. So tone policing is when, in order to get out from under the truth that someone has to share, that we point to the way they shared it. To say that because you shared it this way, I don't have to now reckon with the truth that you're sharing. And that's really what tone policing is saying, “Let's pay more attention to how you said what you said than what you said.” An institution that is doing the oppressing has no business saying to that person, “We will not hear you unless you come to us on our terms and in our way and in our tone.” That's another form of oppression. So we definitely don't want to suggest that in the least.  

That's another way in which they use that kind of power dynamic. What I'm doing is I'm counseling folks who are on the bottom, or folks who are in systems around how can we be more faithful witnesses of Christ's truth in terms of not just the propositions that we speak, but also Christ's heart for humanity. 

Sy Hoekstra: That makes total sense, and I appreciate that, but I also just took us on a tangent, because I had those thoughts and I would still like to hear [laughs] the second half of Suzie's question, which I think is really important for people to understand where you're coming from and to humanize people who are talking about this stuff. You know, the strain and everything that it puts on you and your family. How do you deal with that? 

Mika Edmondson: I would say prayer, a lot of prayer. A lot of laughter, and recognizing my priority. So here's what I mean by that. I mean, so we have to recognize our deep dependence on the Lord and be going to the Lord regularly to call on the Lord on behalf of our families and ourselves for help as we… and to be honest, to lay out our lament before the Lord. I think, so honest prayer before the Lord and laying out your lament and your frustrations and your complaint before the Lord is a form of care. It’s God allowing us the space to be able to bear the load of that space. He's saying, “Bring this to me. There's some dysfunction. There's some poison. There's some toxicity. There's some pain that this certain circumstance or situation or system will try to thrust upon you. And you take all of that, and you bring it here. You cast it to, you give it to me.”  

You're not going to be able to withstand those spaces if you aren't giving it to the Lord. If you aren't going through the actual, the sort of routine, the ritual of actually taking it and laying those burdens before the Lord. Casting your cares before the Lord. So that's one thing. Another thing I mentioned was laughter. It's really important that not only do we weep and lament, but we also find spaces to laugh and actually lay hold of joy. I think joy can be a… I've heard people say joy is a revolutionary act, because what joy does, is joy makes an eschatological claim. What joy says is that trouble is here, but trouble won't last always.  

Suzie Lahoud: Love that. 

Mika Edmondson: Joy says, yeah, there's an end date to this suffering and so I can laugh even in the midst of my suffering. Yeah, it was interesting. It's one of the kind of great seeming contradictions of the Black experience in America. You could read testimonies of slave holders who were struck and confused by how much enslaved people would sing and laugh. And they're not singing and laughing because their situation is not painful and dire and heartbreaking and heart wrenching, but they are laughing because they know that this situation does not have the final say. 

Jonathan Walton: Amen. 

Mika Edmondson: So laughter, I just think that there's a, that's a form of self-care. I mean, I love stand-up comedy. I watch a lot of stand-up comedy.  

Sy Hoekstra: You and Jonathan have that in common.  

Jonathan Walton: Yeah! 

[laughter] 

Suzie Lahoud: I was just thinking of you guys when you said that. 

Mika Edmondson: Yeah. I watch Marvel things, I watch Star Wars things.  

Sy Hoekstra: And now you're talking my language [laughs]. 

Mika Edmondson: Oh, my goodness, yeah. I mean, Boba Fett, Mandalorian, all the things. If it's happening on Star Wars, I'm watching it. I don't think that's escapism actually. I don't think that's saying I'm not paying attention to the realities of this world, but I think it's saying I am paying attention to the realities of this world in a different way. And I think it's saying, because that's the one, one of the wonderful things about like sci-fi and fantasy, is that you can still engage the real dynamics of this world, but you can do it in a different way and you can imagine… 

Sy Hoekstra: Different worlds. 

Mika Edmondson: You can imagine greater possibilities. You can imagine something different. I think that's one of the great gifts of the scriptures and of the prophets. With the prophets, what they bring is they bring, they don't bring just a new idea. They bring a new vision. They're saying, behold this vision of community, of peace and shalom. Like everything in your lived reality would say that this wasn't even possible, but look. Look at God's intention. And when people see that as a possibility, and not just a possibility, but a guarantee for our future, man, it changes everything. It changes everything. It's like, oh my goodness.  

So I would say laughter, again fantasy, sci-fi, go somewhere where your imagination can be expanded. Where you can question things that you thought could never be questioned. Where you can begin to imagine something new for yourself and something new for this world and something new for the future. Yeah, so laugh a lot [laughs]. 

Suzie Lahoud: I love how you just brought us full circle from where we started, where you're talking about expanding our theological imagination, and then you brought it down into self-care. And just a side note on what you were saying about laughter. So in my sort of previous life in Lebanon, we were working with teams that were implementing spaces for children in Syria to kind of deal with some of the trauma that they were facing and provide sort of psychosocial support. And we would do deep breathing exercises with these kids because that's one of the things that helps relieve that kind of stress and helps you physiologically deal with that kind of trauma. It turns out, one of the things I learned, is that laughter and singing both create that same deep breathing mechanism.  

And I just thought, how wise of God that he has us gather together and sing together. And that not only are we in the presence of God worshiping him, but physiologically, that helps take the burden off. And of course you talked about prayer and I actually was listening to a sermon of yours where you talk about prayer as a form of catharsis, and then now you sharing about laughter. Just again, the wisdom of God in knowing we need these things. These are good things. These are holy things, even though we're not sort of conditioned to usually view them in that way.  

Mika Edmondson: Yes, that's exactly right. You know, so I would say thinking about the way in which God has crafted, carefully crafted worship. So in the old Testament, the Lord calls his people to rejoice before him. And it's not to say that whenever we get together, all we can do is laugh, but that's part of what we're supposed to do as well. We're actually called to actually rejoice. To have genuine joy before the Lord, because the Lord knows that we need that. Because, as I said, trouble won't last always.  

And the Lord brings us to this wonderful table that says to us that trouble won't last always. It's a table that simultaneously signifies the brokenness of this world, but also the healing of this world. Also the fact that, I love it that it looks back and forward. It's not just a table where we remember the brokenness and remember the pain, but it's also a table that says, that participates in the feast of the coming of the lamb. That participates in the new creation, the not yet coming into the already. And God's saying, “Hey, we are going to a place in which you will laugh, and I want you to begin to lay hold of that today.” Our household has a lot of laughter. Our church has a lot of laughter. Laughter is life giving. 

Sy Hoekstra: You know how I know that you're serious when you say your household has that, is just from listening to your wife on Truth's Table. Because that podcast, they just never stop laughing [laughs]. Even when they’re talking about like deadly serious things. 

Mika Edmondson: Yeah. It's a response to theodicy. So theodicy is the problem of evil and suffering. It's that kind of tension between the omnipotence and omnibenevolence of God. The goodness and the power of God over against the idea that, over against the suffering that we see in his world. So we say, man, God is good. God wouldn't will my suffering. God is powerful. God can prevent my suffering. So why am I suffering? Well, people have wrestled with that tension since suffering has been in this world.  

And laughter is one way that people can address that. One way in which people can look pain and suffering in the face, and again say that it won't last always. That it does not have a claim over all of what I, and who I am. Even though it impacts me, there's still a greater reality that makes a claim on me. It cannot rob me of my humanity. It cannot rob me ultimately of my dignity. So we can, in the worst of circumstances, God gives us sometimes the ability to even laugh. 

Sy Hoekstra: Can I, I have another question kind of along those lines, although it's on a bit of a different subject, which is that you did your PhD, I believe, on the life and theology of Martin Luther King Jr. 

Mika Edmondson: I did. 

Sy Hoekstra: And you wrote a book about it too. What specifically from his work do you get, do you bring with you that aids you in helping people in your church on a day-to-day basis, walk through suffering? Particularly racial injustice-related suffering that you have to face? 

Mika Edmondson: Oh yeah. Yeah, a number of things. One thing is, now the thing I focused on directly through my particular research was something called redemptive suffering. Redemptive suffering doesn't necessarily mean what it sounds like. When people hear redemptive suffering, what they think it means, is they think it means that somehow suffering is good. Or somehow suffering is noble in and of itself. But what it actually is, is saying that given the reality of suffering in this world, God does not leave us without a witness. God gives us the opportunity to engage even the worst of life circumstances in a way that witnesses to Jesus. What that lets us know is that Jesus is always with us. Jesus is always sanctifying. Jesus is always blessing.  

Jesus said, “I will never leave you and I will never forsake you.” So Jesus is with us, even in the face of life's worst circumstances. What King was able to do, was he looked at the Black social situation in America, and he was able to make the connection between that social situation and the cross to say, Jesus is one who understands what it's like to suffer. And although the tension between, the tension of theodicy between, again, God's omnipotence and omnibenevolence and the suffering we see in this world, it will never be fully resolved rationally in our minds, but we know God is with us in it and through it.  

And why do we know that? Because of Jesus Christ. Because God himself has taken upon himself the suffering of this world. He has willingly stepped into it and shown solidarity with us. That's actually a more powerful response than a philosophical answer. I'll give you an example. So I think it is fascinating that the oldest book in the Bible… 

Sy Hoekstra: Is Job.  

Mika Edmondson: Right, the book of Job. The book that is all about theodicy. It's all about suffering. It's amazing that in that book God doesn't give an answer. God is not like, “Now, the answer is X, Y, and Z [laughs]. You’re wondering why this happened, the answer is X, Y, and Z.” 

Sy Hoekstra: Right. 

Mika Edmondson: That's not how the book resolves.  

Sy Hoekstra: Nope. 

Mika Edmondson: That's not what happens. What we are assured of is we are assured that suffering is not the fault of the victim. That suffering does not have easy answers, but we are also assured of this, that God knows about it. This courtroom scene at the beginning shows the Lord God knowing all about Job. Knowing more about Job than Job probably ever imagined God knew about him. God was deeply aware of Job’s situation, and aware of the suffering that would come his way. 

God was sovereign over those things. God had the whole situation, as it were, under control, to the degree that the devil himself has to sort of ask God's permission because Job is God's servant. That's why God says, “Have you considered my servant Job?” So God is aware. God is sovereign over. That's so important for people who are suffering and on the bottom, because they need to know that God is bigger than the forces that are over them. People who are on the bottom need to know God is bigger than the forces that are over them.  

That just brings me back to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Because Dr. King went to, he went to what we might call liberal seminaries, engaged Protestant liberalism, but he was an African American that grew up in the segregated south. So he knew suffering firsthand, and he knew he needed a God that could make a way out of no way and intervene. So when Protestant liberalism said, “Well, God might not be all powerful,” Dr. King said, “No, no, no, you don't understand. We need a God, that's all powerful. We need a God that can make a way out of no way. We need a God that can intervene because we got the kind of suffering that needs intervention. So we don't have the existential privilege to not believe in a God that's sovereign.” So that's why King held on to those things.  

He has his famous kitchen vision in 1956. This was a few months after the Montgomery bus boycott had begun. He was getting death threats every day. King got upwards of 40 death threats every single day. He had his own ways of coping with that, but in January of 1956, he got a call in the middle of the night. They had threatened his family. They threatened to bomb his home and he could not shake it. This threat got next to him and he could not get over it. He said he poured over a cup of coffee and just prayed and struggled. And he said he began to draw back on the concepts that he had learned at Crozer Seminary and Boston University. And this is what he says. He says, and the answers didn't come there. He said the answers did not come there. He said, but then I thought about the God that my father taught me at Ebenezer Baptist Church. The God that makes a way out of no way. Then he said he kind of heard a voice that told him to stand up for justice and to stand up for righteousness and, “Lo, I will always be with you.”  

And it was on the strength of that kind of vision early in the civil rights movement. You got to keep in mind that this is just a few months into it, and King is already contemplating getting out. He's trying to bail out. Yet he reflects on the sovereign, powerful, loving God that the Black church tradition had taught him about. It was that vision of God that kept him going. It was that vision of God that allowed him to know that he could continue to go forward and no matter what happened, he would be kept by God. So those are the kinds of sensibilities that allow me to tell people within our context, that God is a great God that’s bigger, that has a stronger claim on you than the things of this world.  

Yes, suffering, injustice, oppression, pain, they make a claim on us. They make a real claim on our bodies and our situations, but God's claim is greater. God's claim on us, God's care for us is greater than that. So the sovereignty of God, that's something that I bring from King’s theology. Also the presence of God in the midst of suffering. The presence of God. Again, that's something that kind of that kitchen vision told King that, I will be with you always. This kitchen vision is something that King repeated throughout his ministry. It wasn't just like something that sort of happened and he went on with his life. This was kind of something for him that he felt was almost like a kind of conversion experience for him in a certain kind of way. It was the thing that when he was at his wit's end and he was ready to give up and ready to quit, it was the thing that reoriented everything for him and sort of gave him the kind of perseverance that you saw.  

And at the center of that was not only God's sovereignty, but also God's presence. It's the cross that lets us know that God is present with us through our suffering, because it is at the cross and through the cross that we see most clearly God's solidarity with us in suffering. God saying, I will not just tell you how to get through this, but I will come alongside you in this, and I will take it upon myself in all of its brutality. If you've undergone injustice, so have I. If you've undergone abuse, so have I. If you've undergone abandonment, so have I. If you've undergone all of these things, I have done it as well, and I've done it to show you the extent of my love for you. 

Jonathan Walton: That was a lot, I'm taking all that in. I would love to ask you about his phone call to Mahalia Jackson at another point.  

Mika Edmondson: Oh yeah. 

Jonathan Walton: There's some stuff there for me. But you're the lead pastor of a church in Nashville and something that has stood out to me going to a multi-ethnic church in New York City, is that often we are a multiracial community that functions as a white church. So how do you go about trying to lead people into a truly multiethnic, multiracial community, as opposed to leading a church that's culturally white with Black folks in it?  

Mika Edmondson: Absolutely. So we have got to deal with the issue of power because race is a reality of a power disparity. That's what race is. So we have to recognize that we're not just in multicultural or multiethnic spaces. We are in multiracial spaces, and so we come to these spaces reckoning with power disparities and injustice and oppression, the misuse of power. So we have got to be deliberate about addressing that within the life of the church in institutional ways. Not just symbolic ways, but institutional ways and practical ways.  

So this is what I would suggest for anybody. First of all, you have to have a commitment to recognize, first of all you got to recognize that the church is the venue of redemption, flourishing, and freedom. The Lord rescues his people out of Egypt. He brings them to Sinai and God rehearses the emancipatory act that he's done. God says, “I'm the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” Now, God is… so God could have just said, I'm the Lord your God, do this, do this, do this, do this, but he doesn't. He says, I brought you out of Egypt, and he wants to remind them what the situation was in Egypt, out of the house of bondage. So what God is saying is he’s saying, I'm going to give you, through these laws, an emancipatory culture. I've just rescued you, and I don't want you to turn into Pharaoh to each other. I don't want you to turn this covenant community back into Egypt because that's what you'll do if I leave you to your own devices. So I'm going to give you an emancipatory culture. I'm going to give you a way of being and flourishing in community that is meant to protect and promote freedom and flourishing.  

And that's what the church is. It's supposed to be not just a covenant community, but an emancipated community. An emancipatory community in which we have a culture of freedom and flourishing. So we've got to actually understand that that's what's supposed to be happening in the church. So that's one thing. So let's talk about the church as this emancipatory community. When we do that, then we'll be able to understand why it's so important that we use our organization and our followers to actually address the areas of oppression and injustice and inequity in people's lives.  

So what we want to do is first of all, we want to think about, we want to, I would say for anybody who's in a multiracial church, I would say think about first of all your hiring practices. Who's in leadership and what does that say about your commitments there, about who can carry authority within the church? And it's not just that the hired folks who are your leadership team or leadership staff are the only people that carry authority. They aren't, but they are strategically placed people that can be cheerleaders and representations about who we're willing to invest in in our church that might carry some kind of authority. And people look for that. People look for that.  

I think I'll put it this way. I think our churches have to be intentional about finding biblically qualified, competent Black women to carry authority within the church. I'm going to say that again. I think our churches, within our context in the United States, have to be very intentional about finding biblically qualified, competent Black women to carry authority in the church. Why do I say that? Because Black women are the group in our society that is most likely to have authority taken or denied, or most likely to be in many ways diminished and dehumanized and put on the bottom of the caste system. So in the church, we've got to be super careful about showing that they are not at the bottom. That they carry, that they can be, that they can carry authority. That they have wisdom that we need. That they have dignity, that they have worth. That they can lead and that we can follow, because there's so many contexts in which we will never get to follow a Black woman's lead or submit to a Black woman's authority. So we've got to be out in front with that.  

The early church was known for that. The early church, it was a shocking community because it was a community in which someone who had been enslaved could actually be an elder or a deacon. It was someone that, and the person that was the owner would have to submit to their authority. Now that was a shock. This is the whole, if y’all familiar at all with the book of Philemon, this is really at the heart of the book of Philemon. The ways in which what the Lord has done actually challenges the social cast systems of our world by flipping them on their head.  

Another thing, make sure that you read, as I've mentioned before, that you read the Bible with marginalized voices, hear the wisdom that the Lord has given them about how to know God. So a lot of times, our congregations are listening to us about who we are quoting. And if your only quotes are from rich white men [laughs], or dead, prominent white men, then you’re saying something about who you believe has wisdom. But we need to diversify those sources. Think about this. I love Proverbs 31, but not for the reason that some people love it [laughter]. I love Proverbs 31 because in Proverbs 31, Proverbs by the way, is a collection of wisdom around justice and equity that was actually intended to equip the leaders, the governmental leaders of Israel to function well within the society. So King Solomon pulled together all of this wisdom.  

And here's this Proverbs 31, which is actually the recorded wisdom of this woman. It's this king's mother, that’s basically saying, this is what my mom taught me about how to be a just official. This is what my mom taught me. And he begins to lay it all out, and it's not, it doesn't begin with how to find a wife. It begins with like how to rule justly. How to listen to people who are on the bottom. How to advocate for people who don't have rights. If you look at the way Solomon actually dealt with his own mother. How he listened to his own mother and had actually a throne built beside his throne where his mother sat as a co-regent. So we just got to, we got to be careful about who we listen to and we got to cite these sources. And we got to let people know, hey, I'm listening to lots of different voices here, and you ought to listen to them too. When we do that, so, and I'm very careful about that.  

So our sermon illustrations is another thing. So who you cite. Make sure you're citing, again, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, Maria Stewart, Mary McLeod Bethune. All these folks that have wisdom from God. Also make sure that you use sermon examples that not only illustrate the point, but illustrate the point in ways that challenge oppressive norms. Then also talk about all of what the Bible talks about. There are some great commentaries. I'm thinking of, for instance I'm preaching through the book of Acts right now, and Dr. Willie James Jennings is an amazing resource on the book of Acts. Another one is Craig Keener, amazing resource. Old Testament, man, Walter Brueggemann is an amazing resource around the weightier matters of the law, around how justice makes a claim.  

Read those commentaries and talk about what the Bible talks about. Talk about the justice things, don't spiritualize it away. That will tell the congregants under your preaching that this is a community that cares about justice. Also, pray about those things. Do it deliberately. We pray about all the things. I pastor in the community, Bordeaux Nashville in Northwest Nashville has higher rates of incarceration than any place else in the nation. I would be a bad pastor if I didn't… you know, and so our mission as a church is to love diverse people, places, and things to life. What kind of pastor would I be if I claim to love this neighborhood, but I did not talk about the scourge that this neighborhood is facing? And I didn't pray about that, and I didn't ask God to please heal that, and please address that and please restore that.  

Another major issue that this neighborhood is facing is gentrification. It’s a community whose culture is being erased through gentrification. In some ways through a kind of colonization, frankly. Those are the things we pray about, those are things we talk about. So being in a multiracial community means you have to, you talk about those things. What you do is you summon the community together, not just the minorities in the community, but you summon majority folks. You summon white folks to say, “Hey, I'm going to weep with those who weep. Your burden is my burden.” That's a beautiful thing.  

And I think, and here's the last thing about multiracial churches, and I'll just, I'll shut it down with this. We need that kind of witness, because the world doesn't care really, if Black people talk about this amongst Black people only, because they expect that, to be honest with you. They expect that. The world cares when you have a multi-racial community of people who are challenging the boundaries and the cultural expectations that society sets, and says, “I know that my society says I'm not supposed to care about this, but I do. I know that this is suffering that I'm not supposed to see, but I do see it, and I'm going to address it for Jesus's sake.”  

Jonathan Walton: I'm just going to let all that soak in. So, yes. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think that's as good a place as any to end it. We also, I know you have to go now Dr. Edmondson, but this has been really great. Thank you so much for being with us today. Before you go though, I just wanted to give you a chance to let people, listeners know where they can follow you or anything, any work you're doing that you might want to have them take a look at. 

Mika Edmondson: Yeah. Thanks for asking that. So yeah, I would say I'm grateful for the opportunity to be out on platforms. My main bread and butter is in the life of the local church. So, but if you really want to sort of know where my heart for ministry is, you'd have to go to cpckoinonia.org. That's our church's website, cpckoinonia.org, and get a look at our worship services. And you'll really know… and not just the sermon, but actually all the entirety of the worship service. Then you'll get a sense of the rhythms of our, a little bit of the sense of the rhythms of our community. The things that our community is passionate about, the justice work that we're doing in the community and within the life of the church. And if anybody will kind of, sort of wants to follow my work, that's where you follow it. You follow it by getting connected to our local church and its life and its mission. 

Sy Hoekstra: Especially if you're in Nashville, go check out Koinonia. I have watched a couple of those services, I could vouch for it [laughs]. Thank you so much, Dr. Edmondson for being here with us today. We really, really appreciate it. 

Mika Edmondson: Thank you so much for having me, I really enjoyed it. 

[Instrumental music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out] 

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for listening today. Just as a quick reminder, go to ktfpress.com/freemonth to get a free month of our subscription and check out our newsletter and the bonus episodes of this show. Leave us a rating and review on your podcast player. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at KTF Press, and don't forget, you can always write in to [email protected] with any questions you have about anything you hear on our show, and we might answer your question on a future show.  

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you all in two weeks. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Sy Hoekstra: Okay. [in a truly bad Italian accent] Here we go. As Super Mario would say, here we go. 

Jonathan Walton: He talks?  

Sy Hoekstra: What? 

Jonathan Walton: He talks? 

Sy Hoekstra: You didn’t know that Mario talks?  

Jonathan Walton: No. What does he say?  

Sy Hoekstra: He says, “Here we go.”  

Jonathan Walton: Where, when, in what venue or context? 

Sy Hoekstra: Oh my gosh, Jonathan. You haven't played a Mario game since like Super Nintendo, have you? 

Jonathan Walton: [long pause] Yes.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah...  

Jonathan Walton: That is correct. 

Sy Hoekstra: That’s the issue. 

We’re talking all about abortion today. Jonathan, Suzie, and Sy sit down with Mako Nagasawa, founder of the Anástasis Center and author of Abortion Policy and Christian Social Ethics in the United States. We talk about the surprising history of the theology around abortion, the political and historical factors that shape modern pro-life politics, gender and disability in abortion debates, and a whole lot more. 

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get bonus episodes and our weekly newsletter at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify. 

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.  

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra. 

Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra. 

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode. 

Transcript

[A guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”] 

Mako Nagasawa: I think there's something else emotionally that's happening, where evangelicals are trying to evoke disgust as an emotion, as a mobilizing force among their voter base. People don't want other people to think deeply, they just want you to feel something. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust: leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. I am Jonathan Walton here with Suzie Lahoud and Sy Hoekstra. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

Sy Hoekstra: Today, we are going to be talking about abortion, the theology and the politics around it. So a couple of notes before we get started on that. One is just the topic in and of itself, I think, is kind of its own content warning, but there are issues of domestic violence and potentially sexual assault that will come up around that conversation. In addition to that, I just wanted to particularly note for this episode, we are recording this on May 3rd. We recorded some of these before we got the season started. It's the day after we learned of the leaked Supreme Court opinion, which is kind of a wild idea in and of itself, but the leaked Supreme Court opinion that is likely going to overturn Roe v. Wade in the coming month and a half or so before the Supreme Court term is over. So I just wanted to acknowledge at the top, this is a heavy emotional topic to begin with, and it's going to be an extremely fraught topic in the next couple of months. There are implications beyond just the issue of abortion, but that is where we're going to be focusing today in an attempt to try and get a better handle on where the church can and should be on these issues.  

Before we get started as always, I just want to make a quick plug for everybody to go to KTFPress.com/freemonth and look into the subscription for this show. If you appreciate what we do here at KTF Press in general, or here on Shake the Dust, this is the best way for you to support us, is to sign up as a monthly or annual subscriber. That gets you our weekly newsletter with recommendations from all three of us on political education and discipleship. That gets you the bonus episodes of this show of which there are now several hours. We did a show every month in the off season and you're also supporting then all the work that we do, our upcoming books and everything. So we would really appreciate it if you went and looked up that. 

If you can't go to KTFPress.com and become a subscriber, we would also really appreciate your support in the form of following us on social media @KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We would love for you to follow this show on your podcast player to rate us, to review us if your player lets you do that. I think that is it from me. Suzie, tell us—I'm very excited about this person— please tell us who we have with us on the show today.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, our guest today is Mako Nagasawa, author of the book, Abortion Policy and Christian Social Ethics in the United States. Mako studied industrial engineering and public policy at Stanford with a focus on education. He worked at Intel Corp for six years while serving a Spanish speaking ministry to Mexican immigrants in East Palo Alto, California. He has also worked for two start-up companies trying to bring technology and jobs to inner city communities in Boston, Massachusetts. Since 2000, Mako and his family have lived in a Christian intentional community house, in a Black and brown neighborhood in Dorchester. Mako has done campus ministry since 2001 and founded the Anástasis Center in 2014. He has a master of theological studies from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary.  

Mako, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.  

Mako Nagasawa: Thank you. Thanks for having me, it’s great to be with you. 

Suzie Lahoud: Well, we're just so grateful to have this, as I said difficult, but I think important conversation with you today, and your book certainly brings so much to this discussion. So just to start us off, your book, a lot of the work that it does is placing our current abortion debate in its historical context, a context that unfortunately many Christians I think know very little about. So just to start us off, could we do a lightning round of you giving some brief responses to some basic things people might believe about the history of abortion, politics and theology, just to give people a sense of how much more information there is to learn. Would you be up for doing that? 

Mako Nagasawa: Sure, I’ll do my best. 

Suzie Lahoud: All right. So first point: the Bible and church tradition clearly teach that life begins at conception.  

Mako Nagasawa: Yeah. That is not true, and to distinguish the Bible from church tradition, first of all [laughs] that tells us that, okay, I am coming at this as a Protestant. 

Suzie Lahoud: Great point. 

[laughter] 

Mako Nagasawa: There is one passage that is the single most important passage on this issue, because it talks about the moral weight of the unborn fetus, and that is Exodus 21:22 -25. It's a situation where a pregnant woman is struck and something happens from there. So the Hebrew and the Greek Septuagint translation of that passage do not agree with each other. Okay, so that's number one, fascinating and important, but not only that. Neither one can be interpreted to mean that legal human personhood begins at conception. So the Hebrew Masoretic text says it's birth and breath. And so the majority Jewish position on abortion says birth and breath constitute full legal personhood.  

Then the Greek Septuagint says something about fetal formation, which is difficult to understand exactly what it has in mind. So, but in any case, the idea that the Bible teaches that full human personhood begins at conception is not true. Then you get into church tradition. So broadly speaking, the Greek East and the Latin West went in different directions on the fetus and abortion because they relied on science, the science of their day and different scientific influences. In a nutshell, Galen and Hippocrates were influences on the Greek East, and Aristotle was an influence in the Latin West. They had a difference of opinion and they were aware that they have this difference of opinion, and so church tradition does not agree on what to do.  

Suzie Lahoud: So second point: historically, Christians have advocated for policies punishing abortions, regardless of the mother's circumstances.  

Mako Nagasawa: No, that is not true. Not until 1980.  

Sy Hoekstra: What 1980? What happened in 1980? What was the position before that? 

Mako Nagasawa: First of all, I should say Catholics and Protestants went in different directions for quite some time. But in 1980, that's when the GOP and the Republican Party used the Southern strategy and abortion to bring in conservative Protestants into the GOP away from the democratic party. So that's when things started changing. Until then, the Southern Baptist Convention said that abortion should be legal for all the typical exceptions, rape, incest and fetal deformity, because of the likelihood of harm to the physical, mental, and emotional state of the mother. After that point, the logic of retribution started to be applied to abortion policy. So we moved abortion policy away from a social welfare primarily issue over to a criminal justice issue, and that changed.  

Sy Hoekstra: Which makes so much sense for 1980 in the era of expanding mass incarceration and all. 

Mako Nagasawa: It does. 

Jonathan Walton: [singing] Jerry Falwell. 

Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] And Jerry Falwell . Yes, right. Exactly. Go ahead Suzie, sorry.  

Suzie Lahoud: Next one: conservative Protestants in the US have historically been anti-abortion. 

Mako Nagasawa: So that is complicated, but in the sense that we typically think about it, no. It was not until 1980 when conservative Protestants and like the Moral Majority thought they should be anti-abortion. Before that they thought being anti-abortion was a Catholic thing. 

Suzie Lahoud: The sanctity of life has been the primary justification for the anti-abortion movement in US history.  

Mako Nagasawa: Well [laughs], in a formal sense, sometimes. So there may be well-meaning people who believe in the sanctity of life and say that that's the reason, but the leaders of policy shifts were not motivated by the sanctity of life. It was that, at different times in US history, anti-abortion laws were motivated by, for example, anti-poisoning of the mother. Because the doctors who formed the AMA in 1840, wanted to get rid of the quacks who were prescribing poisons for abortion. So abortion was kind of used as an issue for other reasons, and historically, it's pretty clear that that's how it's been used. So then meanwhile, the doctors practiced abortion in their clinics. So that's why we know that it was anti-poisoning, not anti-abortion.  

Then later anti-abortion laws were motivated by WASP elites, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites who were anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. So with all these Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, Poland, they came and had big families. So the leaders of Anglo-Saxon Protestant communities were afraid of being replaced by these people who were not white at the time. They were not considered white at the time, and so they started to push anti-abortion. But the South was different because they were more accepting of abortion because of anti-blackness and the prevalence of rape. Just to deal with that made it easier for white supremacy. So it was complicated. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, I have to say Mako, that's one of the most incredible things I think about your book, is how you remove the veil on how this debate has been utilized and almost weaponized at certain times throughout history. So again, thank you for taking us through that at such a rapid pace, but certainly so much to unpack there.  

Then the final thing that we wanted to sort of throw at you: countries that have laws outlawing abortion have fewer abortions.  

Mako Nagasawa: I think generally what we are interested in there is that it's the overall approach. So countries that outlaw abortion, because they take a criminal justice style approach to it like Uganda, actually have the highest rates of abortion. Because it also accompanies the belief that, look, this is your own choice, it’s your own failing, if you have sex before you're ready, if you have a child before you're ready. So the tendency for social welfare supports to be there also drives people to have abortions. As opposed to let's say Western Europe, where there are some anti-abortion laws like after the first trimester. But the rates of abortion are the lowest in the world because there's stronger social welfare programs and they take a social welfare approach. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. 

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for going through that. I hope that gives people a sense of kind of A) your breadth of knowledge on the subject, and B) how much there is for everybody to learn here. And how important it is for us to learn those things before we jump into giving our opinions on the subject. You have a lot of historical context in your book as I'm sure people have now heard from what you've said. Could you give us kind of a broad overview of how the position among Protestants in the United States has changed over time in the US?  

Mako Nagasawa: Sure. That's a, it's a fascinating story. So, at the time of the US Constitution when it was written, Catholics and Protestants alike believed in quickening. Quickening was the halfway point in the pregnancy where mom felt the baby kick. That was again, based on this idea from the Greek Septuagint translation, which said fetal formation happens at some time, some undefined time. And the Latin West, meaning Catholics and Protestants, just accepted that ensoulment was responsible for motion. 

Sy Hoekstra: Ensoulment, meaning the literal moment that a soul enters a baby. 

Mako Nagasawa: That’s right. That's right. So that's why it was important for mom to feel the baby kick. So somehow the physical formation of the fetus was ready enough for God to ensoul the fetus, and that meant the baby kicked. Obviously it was subjective and all that, but the practice of abortion was considered okay up until that point. So that started to change in the US in the 1800s, because doctors were concerned about the quacks. So the quacks were running around, these were the snake oil salesmen, and they would sell a lot of things and be very duplicitous and they would sell poison to women to cause abortions. So the doctors started to become anti-abortion in the sense that they were against poisoning. So this was also a way to get the public to believe that the AMA and licensed physicians, really was qualitatively different than buying poison from like the guy running around with a wagon. 

Jonathan Walton: The American Medical Association, right? 

Mako Nagasawa: Right, the American Medical Association. So that was another step. At the time of the Civil War though, what we would call evangelical Protestants accepted abortion. So, up to the point of quickening again, because the idea was, you want to have fewer kids because then you could raise them better. Now whether that's true or not, I'll leave that up to you, but that was what they thought. And those attitudes continued on, even when immigrants came from Catholic countries and they had big families. So in the North, it was Irish, Italian, German, and so on, and in the West it was Mexican Catholics. So the Protestant communities were getting quote-unquote “replaced,” or that was the fear.  

So the leaders of those communities, both in the church and the doctors, because the doctors also tended to be Protestants, the elites started to try to persuade women not to get abortions. So Theodore Roosevelt who winds up also being a big racial replacement fearmonger, goes around asking WASP women not to get abortions. So that was happening in the North and the West. In the South though, because… gosh, there's no easy way to say this, but because biracial children or the offspring of a white man and a Black woman could no longer be enslaved, there was not an economic reason to keep those kids. So they actually, the Southern states actually held onto quickening for decades. I'm not sure exactly when each one changed, but well, until like I think 1910, Kentucky had quickening in their state laws as the marker, versus the folks in the North and the West became anti-abortion in policy, even though doctors continued to perform abortions. But in any case, the politics of reproduction has always been linked among Protestants to race, economics, professionalization and things like that.  

Now in the 1950s, that's where, by that time the Catholics had changed their position in 1869, and the Catholic Democrats— Catholics were largely Democrats because they supported the New Deal and they were anti-poverty and pro-labor. And yes, they were anti-abortion because they saw that the Great Depression made people get abortions, because if you have no hope, why would you bring children into the world? So to them, economics was a, or poverty was a driver of the abortion rate. But in the fifties, sixties, and then later on, slowly white evangelicals started to tie the abortion rates to poverty in the opposite way. So they thought it's just your fault if you bring children into poverty. So in the 1950s, they were already mobilized against Brown v. Board. So this rhetoric of unelected judges making decisions for us and states' rights, that comes from the anti-civil rights movement, especially among white evangelicals.  

Then that language became used and drawn into the convergence of the pro-life movement with the Republican Party. So in 1980, that came to kind of this point of convergence with the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich and others. 

Jonathan Walton: Yes. I'm going to resist the urge to talk about Jerry Falwell, all of that, and take a little bit of a pivot to jump into the beginning of the book. You start to draw a thread from the anti-science sentiment that emerged in both the Protestant and the Catholic church in the mid 1800s, and a loss of nuance regarding abortion within the church. Can you unpack that a little bit?  

Mako Nagasawa: Sure. So until 1869, the Roman Catholic church believed that abortion was okay until the point of quickening. Again, that was based on well, the Greek Septuagint translation. It was also based on Augustine's view, Thomas Aquinas, multiple popes during the medieval period had said that. I mean, it is striking. In 1869 they changed their position and they said, we believe now personhood begins at the moment of conception based on moral probability. And moral probability is not certainty, but it's basically, it's we don't want to take the risk that we're killing a person. So there's a moral probability that that's the case from the moment of conception, and so that's how they argued.  

In 1870, and by the way, it's because we were learning more about the fetus from a scientific standpoint. So the Catholic church in many ways is responding to science and trying to make a good faith response. However, at the same time they're also afraid of science, and afraid that science is going to dethrone the church, the authority of the clergy. Especially when it comes to scripture, this is the deconstruction of scripture happening through what's called literary criticism. So the Catholics were mostly concerned about that. I mean, I think they had some reservations about Darwin and Darwinism being taught around this time. But in 1869, they shift on abortion, or I should say, they shift on personhood and the point at which they're saying it begins.  

But it's also really intriguing that in 1870 in Vatican I, they shift on the authority of the pope. So they declare the doctrine of papal infallibility. You could tell this is motivated by fears of science, because they thought science is creating a structure of knowledge. And so as the church or as a Christian faith, how do we compete with that structure of knowledge? Well, it's to declare that our guy is never wrong when he sits on the chair, right? Ex cathedra. So that had never been said before, and it’s really hard to project that backwards because popes change their policies [laughs]. And I mean, at one point there were three popes.  

So the idea that all of a sudden, like papal infallibility comes about at the same time you say that human personhood begins at conception in all probability, I think reveals something. I think it reveals a concern to respond to science and in some ways to maintain your relevance. So I would interpret that as, in 1869, that the church is saying, the Catholic church is saying, we're going to make an argument about human personhood and abortion that science just could never touch, could never prove, and we're going to locate it here, that will guarantee that we will always be relevant. In the meantime, keep in mind that the church is also arguing about contraception and saying, because there's all these new contraception techniques, right, like the condom had been developed recently. The idea of the condom had been around, but the condom itself had been developed fairly recently around that time. 

Sy Hoekstra: Then if you add in industrialization and mass production, that's a really big new issue that you're dealing with. 

Mako Nagasawa: That's right. So that is what the Catholic church is dealing with in the 1800s. 

Sy Hoekstra: Can we jump to, this part I thought was really interesting, so that we're not just sort of Protestants talking about the Catholic church. You draw a parallel to basically the rise of the kind of uniquely 20th century idea of infallibility and inerrancy of scripture, which is the parallel Protestant move to what you just described. Could you explain that a little bit?  

Mako Nagasawa: That’s right. Well, in 1902 fundamentalists, what we now call fundamentalist evangelicals published “The Fundamentals.” There was a brochure outlining kind of fundamentals of Protestant Christian faith. Basically saying, scripture in its original autographs, those are infallible. like those are absolutely trustworthy, totally authoritative and so on. And it was the Protestant version of the Catholic statement of papal infallibility. Like, well, we need to compete with science somehow.  

So it's a little… well, it's interesting when you place it in context, because at that time there were evangelicals who still believed that chattel slavery was biblical. Who thought like if you support scripture, then you should support the return of chattel slavery. I mean, I think that was the position of Princeton Theological Seminary for some decades. So they felt attacked, the Protestants did. The conservative Protestants felt, oh, the country, they abolished slavery and now we have this progressive Protestant wing. So they were feeling like the minority and beleaguered and so on and so forth.  

And then there was the 1925 Scopes Trial where creationism versus evolutionism was kind of on display in front of the nation. And of course fundamentalists were very concerned about that, and that was another kind of a blow to the fundamentalists who insisted on, in my view, the worst possible interpretation of Genesis one — that these were six 24-hour days and so on. So many doubled down, this became part of, this kind of approach to scripture became part of a resistance to science. 

Sy Hoekstra: I think we should probably just note that, I think whenever you talk about like the infallibility or inerrancy of scripture, people don't necessarily realize that that's like a 20th century invention. That doesn't mean nobody before then was concerned about the authority of scripture [laughs]. Like whether anything that scripture says is true or anything like that. It's just there was this context and the characterization of the Bible having absolutely not one error in it, and everything being literally true, is a recent invention in one relatively small wing of the church. 

Suzie Lahoud: Right, and that that's a separate discussion from say divine inspiration. 

Mako Nagasawa: Right. So scripture could be authoritative because it's inspired and it points us to Jesus for instance. That's the traditional way of understanding scripture. Infallibility means without error in regards to a whole bunch of other things, like history, science, and so on.  

Suzie Lahoud: Another thing that we wanted to dig into with you, is you also talk in your book about the social context in which debates around abortion need to be understood, particularly as it pertains to the rights and agency of women. So could you just sort of dig into that a little bit more? You begin sort of in the Greco-Roman world, but then you also bring it forward into the world today. Yeah, could you get into some of that from the book? 

Mako Nagasawa: Absolutely. I think it's really important to recognize today, for example, that there are ways that policies complement one another, or they reflect a whole package of views. In the book, I talk about a North Carolina law about men being able to continue on with sex, even if a woman were to withdraw her consent. So while they were having sex. Apparently, this came about because some men took off their condom during sex, and then the woman said, “Wait a minute, I refuse to go on.” And essentially North Carolina said, no, the man has a right to continue. Now that I think is just absurd. Other states for example California, say that is rape. To continue on in the act of sex when one partner has withdrawn their consent, it is rape.  

That's what I mean by, we have to look at the social context, and especially the rights and agency of women, because you would think that if you're against abortion, or if you want to keep the abortion rate low, then you would be against laws like the one in North Carolina. But somehow, different states seem to incorporate abortion and other aspects of reproductive politics into a larger package of policy views that are stripping rights from women, stripping agency from women. I look at what scripture says about the relative power of women to men, and I reach conclusions that are surprising to me sometimes.  

I read the book again yesterday and I thought, wow, this is amazing [laughter]. So for example… not the book [laughter]… but the fact that for example, Jewish and Christian tradition recognize these things. For example, Jewish law recognizes that women are more, that wives are more vulnerable than husbands in marriage itself, which I mean in the ancient world, that is undeniably true. So in Exodus 21, there's this small place where it says, wives are entitled to food and shelter and conjugal rights, meaning sexual pleasure, and husbands are not entitled to sexual pleasure from their wives. And the Jewish tradition and rabbis are just uniformly recognizing this.  

What that means is that Jewish law recognizes that marital rape can happen. It can happen, and they are against it. They interpret scripture as being against it. So, and that's different than let's say the UK or the US until the seventies and eighties. Our laws said marital rape is not even a thing legally. Because the presumption is when a woman says “yes” at the altar, she says “yes” to every other time after that. Even if her husband has been separated from her and returns and demands sex. Even if he acquires AIDS or a venereal disease, she cannot say “no,” because at the altar, she said “yes.” Jewish law goes completely opposite of that, and that is based on not just Exodus 21, but also the recognition in Jewish law that laws favor the vulnerable. That you want to protect the party that's more vulnerable.  

That is also seen in the rape case in Deuteronomy 22, which is you need two to three witnesses to make an accusation against someone else. But in the case of rape, the woman's voice counts as the two to three. So you don't need others, and of course, there's not going to be witnesses to the crime. There may not even be character witnesses to the guy's character. Essentially, Jewish law or scripture on the whole advantages women over men in certain cases. That is really significant.  

I think that the Christian Church recognized this early on when they said that prostitution is a form of slavery. So they said we don't want, we recognize prostitution is a problem, but what kind of problem is it? Is it a problem where the woman who is a prostitute is guilty of sin? Like, is she committing a sin? Now, many folks would say, “Yes, absolutely,” but the early church said no. So as early as the Council of Elvira in Spain in maybe 306, in the year 306, they said essentially, no, the woman is not guilty of personal sin. Prostitution is a social sin and, essentially, what they're doing is they're recognizing there are many reasons why a woman might be a prostitute. She could be being blackmailed. She could have been kidnapped. She could have been abandoned by her parents and then raised by a pimp. I mean, she could be in poverty and this might be her only way of making a living.  

And the Council of Elvira said, we understand that, and we don't think it's a good situation for her to be in. So as much as possible, we want to provide a way out. But the personal sin is on the man. The man buying sex from a prostitute, what are his motivations? Well, really, there's only one motivation for that and it's always sinful. So they recognize that there are situations where women are more vulnerable than men in these situations and they continued on. In church tradition, Especially when you get to Pulcheria in the fourth century, who basically was like a Roman emperor for a time and then Theodora and Justinian in the five hundreds. They change a lot of laws out of Christian conviction about women's rights, women's rights to own property, women's access to their children and so on and so forth. So that's a, it's a big deal when we look at Christian tradition as a whole and how much they focused on the wellbeing of the woman. 

Sy Hoekstra: Which is a little bit wild when you consider where we are today, in terms of how people think about abortion. Because I think in your book, you also talk about how they basically said the same thing about abortion. They made exceptions, or bans on abortion for women who were in like material need, which was a lot of people back then, right? Like that was a very large chunk of the women. 

Mako Nagasawa: Yes. Technically, I think Basil of Caesarea in his Epistle Number 219, he’s talking about infanticide. And he is talking as a church leader about, but it would cover abortion. But a church leader about like, what kind of church discipline should we have? And that's a whole other topic, but essentially he said, yeah, infanticide is never desirable, and for most cases, we would say 10 years of going without communion or something like that. However, if the mother or the parents are in poverty, then it's understandable. It's understandable that they would commit infanticide because maybe they're having to choose between different children or something like that. So they look at infanticide and abortion within a social context and not just as an individual issue. And because they do that, they have a lot of I think compassion and sensitivity to social welfare.  

Sy Hoekstra: I want to talk about the question of disability for a minute, because this is actually, where we just went with this conversation is where I start to get nervous. So I think listeners probably know I'm blind and it's the result of a genetic condition. I've been told by doctors before that, oh, we can get rid of this genetic condition now by detecting it in the womb and aborting fetuses. So I normally hate talking about abortion. I’ve appreciated this conversation because you're digging into nuance on a level that we don't normally. But I normally hate talking about it because basically, it's really hard to get like any real disability acknowledgement of the pain involved.  

Because a lot of times the pro-lifers, the conservative movement want to talk about these issues of how the overwhelming number of children with Down Syndrome are aborted when it's detected in the womb, or whatever. And kind of use the disability rights movement to put forward their cause, but otherwise say nothing about disability. You know, you were saying, you're not talking about social welfare for disabled people that would actually prevent probably some abortions if you were supporting disabled people in real ways, that sort of thing.  

Then a lot of times the pro-choice movement is just sort of, because they want to fight the pro-life narrative and make everything about just autonomy over your own body, it becomes an issue where, I'm not against any of that, I understand your political needs. I just, there needs to be some amount of recognition that the result, the impact of legal abortions is taking out entire populations of disabled people. Its like when you have any system like that, it's going to run along the lines of existing discrimination and existing prejudices that people have, and like that's what shows up in abortion. So I don't, I'm not someone who says let's ban it, let's criminalize it, let's whatever, but I just have a hard… Because I will also say, abortion is a disability rights issue to a certain degree abortion access, because there are plenty of people with medical conditions and disabilities where pregnancy is a death sentence. So abortion actually needs to be available in order to have the mother not die of the child who's being born and also potentially the child dying as well, right?  

So anyways, I'm wondering where all of that, I just rambled for a bit, but this is a hard thing for me to process sometimes. I'm wondering where you think disability and eugenics and all those questions plays into this debate in any significant way, if you have thoughts on that. 

Mako Nagasawa: Well, a few, Sy. As you said, it is kind of, the two issues or the two sets of issues are often brought together in ways that are not always coherent and not always consistent. So when we look at reasons for why women or married couples say that they procure abortions, I think we have to take that seriously. Now, it’s not that we always can agree. For instance, my personal view of Down Syndrome, when you have such a situation where the majority of parents and siblings of a Down Syndrome child and sibling say this person has made my life richer, like our family life is richer, who is it that calls the Downes Syndrome person a liability exactly?  

So I think it is a tragedy that up to 92 percent of kids detected in the womb with Down Syndrome are aborted. In the book, I don't consider every single disability, whether it's genetic, epigenetic, environmentally caused and things like that. I felt like that goes really, really far and the book was already feeling really long. But I would say that it is really hard for me to believe the current pro-life movement when they say we are for life, when they also want to strip out funding from public education, for example. 

Sy Hoekstra: Or Social Security Disability Income, yeah. 

Mako Nagasawa: Exactly, because the first people affected are usually special needs folks. Again, I think the bigger issue is, are we treating abortion as part of a criminal justice paradigm or are we treating it as part of a social welfare public health paradigm? The reports from women who procure abortions indicate we should treat it as part of a social welfare public health issue. When over 14 percent of all abortions are procured by married women, that's really serious. Even married people, probably for economic reasons, are stressed and parenting is hard. So folks get abortions because they can't afford another child either economically or emotionally. 

Or what do we do with the fact that women at the poverty line have three times the level in terms of the abortion rate of women who are not in poverty? That tells us a great deal about why it is that people have abortions. So if we believe that we should at a minimum try to bring down the abortion rate by bringing down the rate of unintended pregnancies, then I think we have to move abortion away from just a criminal justice issue over to part of our social welfare. 

Suzie Lahoud: Going along with that, could you talk to us about policy responses to abortion that the pro-life movement has put forward in the US, and why you see them as inadequate or harmful? What are the factors that you think we should take into account when shaping abortion policy? Again, building off of this really helpful paradigm shift that you just shared with us?  

Mako Nagasawa: Sure. Traditionally, the pro-life movement has, well, I would say in the past few decades, has tried to see abortion as an issue where the fetus is the victim, the mother is the secondary victim, and the doctor is the criminal. So the responses to that have been well, we should strip the doctor of a license or so on and so forth. So I think the inadequacy of that is, again, it is treating the doctor or the healthcare system as part of the criminal justice system. So those folks have to become mandated reporters. People like nurses, administrators, doctors in clinics where they suspect maybe abortion is being practiced by someone, one of their colleagues, they have to tell on that person, or at least that's the theory at times.  

I go through a couple of examples where, a couple of states where that is actually being carried out. But essentially, we have decades worth of data prior to Roe v. Wade of how those kinds of anti-abortion laws did not actually stop abortions. They just made it really easy for wealthy white women and connected women to get abortions kind of in secret and women of color or poor women are forced to get back alley abortions and so on. Because it does not actually affect the abortion rate. What it winds up doing is, it winds up creating an atmosphere like Prohibition created for alcohol. Namely, police officers became totally corrupted by kickbacks or ways that they were even invested in it.  

So when it came to abortion, there's just story after story of, for example there was one story of a doctor in coal country, in Pennsylvania, who, he was performing abortions. There was abortion tourism going on because people would travel to this town to get an abortion. So it actually fed the local economy in that sense. So one person tried to run against this or tried to run for district attorney or something and promised to throw this doctor in jail. But it never worked because the police, they and their families all benefited from the services this doctor provided. The doctors were brought to trial, the juries would just say, not guilty. There were some token people, usually doctors who were about 65 and ready to retire, and law enforcement would go after them as kind of a token gesture. But I mean, it’s just really weird.  

So when you read Mark Graber’s book on abortion policy, it is stunning how anti-abortion laws in that sense warped law enforcement, the medical profession and so on. So treating it as part of a criminal justice paradigm, again, it is really dangerous. It puts people into, it puts doctors into the situation of, for example, having to turn down a suicidal, pregnant woman who says she's going to kill herself because she didn't expect to be pregnant. And then doctors are supposed to say no to that. It puts everyone in a really, really hard situation. Now granted, no one's in a good situation, but I think there are factors like that, that we should take into account.  

Another policy that the pro-life movement tends to be against is meaningful contraception. So copper IUDs, for instance, are the single most effective way of — especially for poor women — of having reliable birth control. But conservative lawmakers will vote against programs giving out free copper IUDs, or other contraceptive care related to for example the Affordable Care Act, because they don't want to quote-unquote “fund abortion.” The problem with that, and I get into this in the book, is that the most conservative that you could be about when ensoulment happens, is probably at 23 days. Which is well out, and I could explain that later, but it's well outside the range in which a copper IUD might be able to cause an abortion if it allows a fertilization, but causes non-implantation in the uterus. Oh my gosh, it's so complicated. So conservative lawmakers are their own worst enemy in that case, because they are throwing out the single most effective tool that would prevent unintended pregnancies and abortions. 

Sy Hoekstra: I think that really does highlight the degree to which preventing abortion is not necessarily about preventing abortion. 

Jonathan Walton: Exactly. 

Sy Hoekstra: Like you were saying before, it is about punishing people, women who have been promiscuous or whatever. It is about controlling people's sexual activity more than it is about the sanctity of life or whatever. 

Mako Nagasawa: That's right. Another good example Sy, is sex education in public schools. In Texas for instance, and I think this is true in other school districts, they want to only have abstinence only sex education. Well, that is the single most ineffective approach to having sex education.  

Jonathan Walton: Mako, I have a lot of thoughts. You're well aware of like the anti-intellectualism that's embedded itself into the white evangelical Moral Majority. Is it possible for you to help draw the line? Because you said it was a hundred years later and effectively white evangelicals were having the same argument, the same problem that the scholars a hundred years before in the Catholic church were having. They're afraid of losing influence, afraid of losing power, afraid of losing these things, and therefore you construct a narrative and an institution that then protects the institution and the individuals in it, and disadvantages the communities around it. So can you explain how they are not different. Like we're doing the same thing, if that makes sense? 

Mako Nagasawa: Sure. I think there are different ways. Well, Jonathan, there may be different ways in which you mean that, but there are certainly ways that I hear your question and I think… So there's definitely similarities with the anti-science standpoint, with the anti-intellectual view. When you look at Paul Broun, who's a Republican Congressman and I talk about him in chapter one and the amount of being against evolution, against standard geology, and against embryology, which is crucial because that's also, the field of embryology is telling us something about how human personhood cannot possibly be traced back to the moment of conception. That's really important. 

So if you say, oh, well, I'm just going to throw out that field of science and you claim to be a doctor and a lawmaker, then you can tell there's anti-intellectualism going on. I think there's something else emotionally that's happening where I think evangelicals are trying to evoke disgust as an emotion, as a mobilizing force among their voter base. So you think about how often it was that people say, well, the Democratic Party is filled with pedophiles, the QAnon conspiracy. Or turning human beings like migrants coming from the south to the US-Mexico border into germs. Like they're coming to infest our country. They have disease and things like that.  

When language like that is used for outsiders or for issues, it is fascist and it is anti-intellectual, because people don't want other people to think deeply, they just want you to feel something. So abortion and pedophilia, I think are the big culture war issues along with critical race theory, and, oh my gosh, your children are being taught to hate themselves, which is not true. So all of these issues have something in common, which is the intended emotion is disgust.  

Sy Hoekstra: And it’s also all around: they're coming for our families and your children. 

Mako Nagasawa: Right. So there's a sense of, I need to protect my family or my community. Especially for men, I think there's a kind of a, it taps into some kind of potentially toxic idea that I'm the only one who can go out and protect my family against this, against ideas. So yeah, I think there's that, and I think then when it comes to scripture and science, it is very anti-intellectual. So I think every time I talk with folks who are about, like for example on abortion, I weigh in selectively on certain debates that are happening on Facebook. I'm one of those people who tries to insert polite, thoughtful comments here and there.  

Sy Hoekstra: But then you’re a baby killer. 

Mako Nagasawa: Well, there's that, but also, yeah, there's a whataboutism. But also in the most hopeful sense when I say, what about Exodus 21, and people take one or two steps down that path, they are just shocked. They didn't know these things. So they're not sure what to do anymore and they leave the discussion. That suggests to me that there's some hope for these discussions. 

Jonathan Walton: Right. I think that the point that you make about disgust, that is a, it's a high motivator. Like it's an innate motivator. Then also the getting people to feel deeply as opposed to think deeply is helpful for fascism and social control. So I hope that your book inspires people to do and learn differently and admit that we are unconsciously incompetent when it comes to the majority of these things. We just don't know what we don’t know.  

Sy Hoekstra: Unconsciously incompetent is a great phrase [laughs].  

Mako Nagasawa: Yes. Yeah.  

Sy Hoekstra: So we're going to wrap up here, even though we can talk about this for hours. And there's so much more in your book, we've touched on a lot of it, but not anywhere near all of it. So, but before we go, could you tell us where people can find you on the internet and anything you'd like to plug.  

Mako Nagasawa: So I'm on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but I would love for people to take a look at my organization's website, and that is at www.anastasiscenter.org. That is spelled A-N-A-S-T-A-S-I-S, anástasis. It's the Greek word for resurrection. There's a beautiful piece of artwork called “The Anástasis” that I'm drawing from. So there's a lot of material there on Christian restorative justice or relational vision of justice, which I think abortion is certainly part of our, I think we need to be informed by relational visions of justice. Because even treating the mother and the fetus as one, but also two who are related is really vital. And then do you bring in the role of the father, that gets… and the role of other people. Like something as basic as this question, are we responsible for other people's children? Well, I mean, I think Senator Ron Johnson recently said, no, but, and I think that displays the retributive mindset of dare I say, white evangelicalism, because they believe in a highly retributive God. And I think to believe more and more in a relational and a restorative God who calls us into responsibility for other people's children, I think is really, really important. 

Sy Hoekstra: So Mako has a lot to say on a lot of subjects and you should go listen to him if you couldn't tell [laughs]. It's just like, yeah, all your stuff on restorative justice is super interesting, and people should definitely check out that website. What are your handles on social media?  

Mako Nagasawa: Oh, on Facebook, Mako Nagasawa. M-A-K-O, last name N-A-G-A-S-A-W-A. On Twitter it's @Mako_Nagasawa, and on Instagram I think it’s just Mako Nagasawa. 

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for being with us. Listeners, just as a quick reminder, please do, in addition to going to Anastasiscenter.org, go to KTFPress.com/freemonth, sign up for the free month of our subscription. Please do consider supporting us that way if you are at all benefiting from what we're doing. We would really, really appreciate the support. Please also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @KTFPress. Follow, subscribe, whatever your podcast player says to this show. Give us a rating and review. All of those things are extremely helpful to us, and we really appreciate you doing them.  

As always, our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you all in two weeks. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah, Sy, I’ll say, the question that I have on here is about scripture and I think we've… 

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan 

Jonathan Walton: Yeah? 

Sy Hoekstra: Do whatever you want, man. Go off about Jerry Falwell, do whatever. Go for it.  

[laughter] 

Jonathan Walton: Mako, I have a lot of thoughts.

Suzie, Jonathan, and Sy give some updates about Season 2, which starts this Friday! 

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show and subscribe to get our newsletter and other paid content at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.  

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify. 

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.  

Production, editing, and transcript by Sy Hoekstra. 

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode.

Transcript 

[A guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending — F#, B, F#, E, D#, B — with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”] 

[Instrumental music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out] 

Suzie Lahoud: Welcome to Shake the Dust, leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. I’m Suzie Lahoud. 

Jonathan Walton: I’m Jonathan Walton 

Sy Hoekstra: And I’m Sy Hoekstra.  

Suzie Lahoud: We just wanted to drop in and let you know that season 2 of Shake the Dust will be starting this Friday! 

Sy Hoekstra: This season is going to be a little bit different because my wife is about to have a baby. So we are banking some episodes and putting them out every other week. There may be fewer episodes this season, but we already have a lot of things recorded that we’re very excited about. Some familiar voices, some new guests. We’ll be diving into some new topics, and we’ll be going further on topics we’ve already touched on. And we’re going to start this Friday by talking about the theology, the politics, and the history of abortion, and hopefully provide you all with a more nuanced and helpful discussion than a lot of what you’ve been hearing around the media the past couple of weeks.  

Jonathan Walton: We also just celebrated the one-year anniversary of our newsletter and this show, and we’re so thankful for all your support over the past year. This is something that we all do on the side of our very busy lives, and so we’re really glad and really proud of what we’ve been able to do, and really hope that you will come along side us to support as we try to do even more of it.  

So as we kick this season off, please do consider going to www.ktfpress.com and becoming a monthly or annual subscriber. It’s only $7 a month or $70 per year, and it gets you our weekly newsletter where all three of us suggest things for you to read, listen to, and watch that have helped us in our political education and discipleship. It also gets you many hours of bonus content of this show, and it supports our writing and our future book projects. So please go to KTFPress.com to become a subscriber, and remember, you can always go to KTFPress.com/freemonth to start your subscription off with a free month. 

Suzie Lahoud: We also want to make the subscription available to anyone who isn’t in a position to pay for it right now. So please, if you want a reduced or free subscription, just write to us at [email protected]. We won’t ask questions or make it weird. Just let us know. We want as many people to have access to this as possible. 

Sy Hoekstra: Thanks again so much for your support. We would not be here without any of you, and we’re so happy to have you here again for season two. We will see you all on Friday. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, can I get a really deep, intense way of you saying “This is a KTF Press podcast” to add to that epic thing? 

[There is a loud woosh sound into a bass drop, like in a movie trailer] 

Jonathan Walton: [in a low voice very close to the mic] This is a KTF Press podcast. Get ready! 

[laughter] 

Suzie Lahoud: Wait, so you want, you want it to be weird? 

Sy Hoekstra: Oh yeah I want weird. This isn’t for a real thing. 

[there is a slow crescendo of various movie-trailer-esque sound effects into a series of fast-whirling woosh sounds ending in an even louder, more epic bass drop] 

Suzie Lahoud: [in a very deep voice] This is KTF Press. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: Perfect, thank you very much [laughs]. 

Jonathan Walton: This has to be, it has to be a real thing, Sy. It has to be. 

This month’s bonus episode is on the ways that middle- and upper-class churches often function in ways that exclude poor people and reinforce classist structures. We also talk about how to operate congregations more in line with God’s vision for the Church. Jonathan couldn’t make this one, but we have Gabrielle Apollon back on the show as a guest host. We have a lot of really helpful tips and personal stories in this one. Enjoy! 

Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show at KTFPress.com. 

Hosts  

Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  

Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter. 

Gabrielle Apollon — follow her on Twitter. 

Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify. 

Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.  

Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra. 

Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra. 

Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to [email protected] and we may answer your question on a future episode. 

Transcript

Suzie Lahoud: Can we also just throw out this heretical lie that people suffer financially, chronically because they're lazy? Because they don't work hard and are therefore less righteous. That is such a lie. In fact, I feel like the people I know who are the most hardworking, who deal with levels of stress and exhaustion, unlike anything I've seen any of my middle-class or upper-middle-class friends struggle with, those are people who come from low-income backgrounds. 

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust: leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. A podcast of KTF Press. My name is Sy Hoekstra. I am here as usual with Suzie Lahoud. Jonathan could not make it because of just some scheduling issues that came up. So today we have with us a guest host, and previous guest of the show. Welcome back Gabrielle Apollon. 

Gabrielle Apollon: Hello.  

Sy Hoekstra: We are so happy to have you back. For those of you who don't remember, Gabrielle is, A, my wife [laughter]. And B, a human rights attorney who works at NYU Law in the Global Justice Clinic, former immigration attorney, all-around boss. And today we are going to be talking about classism in the church. So before we get started, real quick, as always, thank you for subscribing. This is a subscriber only bonus episode. Please remember, if you don't, do follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @KTFPress. It is very helpful when you do that. When you show other people, when people look at our little profile and they see that you follow it and they’re your friend, it's good for us. That makes us look good, and we really appreciate your support in that way. Follow us on your podcast player, give us a rating and review, and I think those are all of my usual entreaties to you. So let's just get started and jump right into the conversation. So let's just talk some basic ways that churches exclude low-income people from daily operations or make it difficult for poor people to participate in church community. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. So I guess I'll just jump right in. And full disclosure, I feel like the two contexts that I'm most familiar with and will be sort of speaking from, are one, having spent my college years in the Bible Belt in the South. So that context of church where I feel like one of the major cultural barriers that I saw, was even just this basic idea of Sunday best, and people getting dressed up. I remember going to one church and it was like everyone was just wearing J. Crew or Lilly Pulitzer [laughter]. And just wondering, if someone just wandered into this church or didn't have the means to dress in that specific way, I felt self-conscious coming over as a missionary kid who had no sense of fashion.  

And how would that make someone who didn't come from that same socioeconomic background, even that same culture, how would they feel walking through the doors of that church? Would that be a barrier to entry? I think it would be, again, even speaking for myself, I felt less comfortable in that space. It felt like there was a uniform that you had to wear that I didn't have access to. So that, it's a very simple thing, and sort of more on the surface.  

But then the second context that I'm familiar with, is having lived in Lebanon for seven and a half years and my husband and I were a part of, and actually still technically are members of a church in Lebanon. I have to say, the Lebanese church as a whole is an amazing case study for this in the way that a number of churches, there was sort of a movement of responding to refugees coming across the border from Syria and watching churches struggle with this idea of wanting to incorporate or not wanting to incorporate Syrians into their congregations. One of the tensions there was just, to be honest, when you have folks who are living in tents in the Beqaa Valley, or living in unfinished apartment buildings or living in attics or basements, these are folks who also don't have access to regular running water. They can't afford to spend a lot of money on personal hygiene items. So honestly, one of the complaints that we would get a lot from folks is, “I don't want them in my church, in my pews because they smell. They don’t smell good.” And that was just a very simple, real thing, but it just made me so sad. Like we shouldn't even be talking about that. That shouldn't even be an issue. Why would we keep people out of church for that reason?  

Also, it upset me because the assumption was that that was a problem because they had poor hygiene habits, when really it was a problem because these people all are fighting for their lives every single day. They are struggling to feed their kids. They're struggling to literally have a roof over their heads, and for them taking a shower is not an easy, simple thing like it is for you and me. They're living practically outdoors in these tents. So I think just the lack of understanding and sort of compassion and empathy that a question like that, or a barrier like that, that we've created, I think it shows a really ugly side of us that is not in keeping with the teachings of Christ.  

One thing that one of my mentors in Lebanon used to remind us a lot, his name is Rupen Das. He wrote an amazing book called Compassion and the Mission of God. He would always remind us that when Christ was preaching, if you imagine Jesus teaching the Sermon on the Mount, he's speaking to a population that 90 percent of them were most likely, based on historical records, living in poverty at the time. So I think the final point that I want to sort of touch on, is that another barrier we see in the church is not just who do you allow through the doors? Who do you allow to participate in your community? What are the expectations in terms of how they dress, how they smell? But also, are there barriers to them being in leadership?  

Because I think if we understand the context in which Christ preached the kingdom and carried out his ministry and the people who were involved in his ministry, I think we need to understand that a lot of times it is folks who come from low-income backgrounds, who are actually experiencing real levels of poverty, who are most equipped and qualified to understand the teachings of Christ and to understand the kingdom of God, and to allow us to understand it. And how many of those folks, if you look at your church, are actually in leadership? How many of those folks are you asking to lead Bible studies?  

And if you're not doing that, if you're not realizing that they actually have more to give than even receive, I think a lot of times when we welcome them into our church, we're like, “Oh, well, this is a charity case.” 

Sy Hoekstra: Look at us and how great we are. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. We're going to let them in and be nice to them because we're good Christians and we want other people to see that we're good Christians and we can help them. And that, I think that's such a wrong model because again, it's the upside-down model of the kingdom that shows that actually those are the folks that are going to understand what this is really all about on levels that you, in your middle-class comfortable lifestyle, cannot even grasp. So you need to be willing to sit at their feet and listen to the things that they have to teach you and watch them live out their faith.  

I think that when you're not willing to do that, when you don't see that representation, again, even in your leadership, in terms of who is teaching the word and shaping your understanding of the gospel, I think that's actually a form of prosperity gospel. Because I think the subtle assumption there is that if you were a real follower of Christ, you would be living a comfortable middle-class lifestyle or even an upper middle-class or wealthy lifestyle. And again, I don't, I think that's heresy.  

Gabrielle Apollon: I appreciate what you mentioned, just so much of it, but especially what you just said about the prosperity gospel, because I think that we often just talk about just how the prosperity gospel kind of, in it's most explicit forms, exploits poor people and capitalizes on the very real needs and manipulates it by incorporating all sorts of stuff related to faith, and what it means to believe and what it means to give. All of those things, but I think that there are so many different subtle versions of the prosperity gospel, or really ways that we exploit poor people or exclude them, that I think should also be talked about.  

I think that if we don't talk about issues of class and make a space, a safe space, for people of different classes, then you are actually harming people. It becomes like a potential place of harm because as you mentioned, there's this like air that we breathe, and there's the stigma about poverty that is kind of in all of our, I think, world and all of our cultures, and it winds up in church. And if, unless we're discipled out of that, as I think we have to be discipled out of white supremacy and other things, then we remain steeped in that and we perpetuate it in our churches in various ways. So we either often look the same as the world in this way or sometimes we look worse in our kind of homogenized bubbles and left to our own devices.  

I think, you mentioned these issues and when people were actually in the door. When refugees were in the churches in Lebanon, but I think there are so many things we do that stops people from even thinking that these people can come into these spaces. Or I'll just speak for myself and just share a little bit of the context that I come from. So I grew up with very little money, I guess comparatively, in terms of, our family was undocumented for quite some time as I've mentioned in the other podcast. So money was a very real struggle for a long time.  

Then I, but I went to a private school and so I was very much kind of in between different worlds in high school, and then went to Columbia for college. So very different world there [laughter] to put it lightly, but also in the churches. The churches that I started going to in New York City and on the Upper West Side, the vast majority of the people who went there are well-to-do. And knowing kind of my background and knowing, you know, we were homeless for a little bit and bouncing from home to home, and having that context and hearing the messages and hearing the assumptions that were made in a lot of spaces, but even in sermons, really made me, I think, think twice sometimes about who can I invite into the space.  

Sy and I have a few examples of sometimes we would invite homeless people there and sometimes it was like really embarrassing, the types of examples and…  

Sy Hoekstra: Should we talk about that video? 

Gabrielle Apollon: Yeah, go ahead.  

Sy Hoekstra: Oh, okay. I'll do it. Yeah, sure. There was one homeless man in particular, he came to church with us and the moment we sat down, we were a little bit late, so we missed the first couple of worship songs or whatever. The moment we sat down, we had a video come on the big screen, and it's a couple from the church talking about how they actually had moved to New York City in order to be a part of this church that we were in. And they just kept going on about how big and lovely their apartment or house was in wherever they came from before they moved to New York City, and how they had sacrificed so much to come and live in this somewhat smaller apartment in New York City [laughs].  

That was the first thing that happened when we walked in with this man. He actually liked the service overall and the message from the pastor and everything. But it was just an immediate like, “Hi, hello. Welcome here sir, this church is not for you.” That isn't to say that we shouldn't talk about sacrifices that people make. I just think we need to put them in their proper context and not sort of glorify the relatively small sacrifices that people who have enough money for food and shelter and everything make, and put… you know like Jesus did with the widow who puts the two coins into the offering, instead of the rich person who puts way more in, and Jesus makes it very clear, that person is the sacrifice that I care about.  

They've sacrificed more. You need to take that context into account. And if you don't, I think you are missing the way that Jesus sees things. Suzie, in light of what you said, I was just thinking camel through the eye of a needle [laughs] it's going to be one of the main texts you're looking at if you're thinking about how Jesus actually thinks about these issues.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. 

Gabrielle Apollon: Yeah. It just, I think it's a good example of like what does either the invisibilization of someone's experience, or just not even crossing people's minds, what does that communicate to people who are in very, very different situations. And how is that harmful or not? And the verse that came to mind was, in 1 Corinthians 11, we often hear the verse about communion and whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. And that's something people are like, “Oh, examine your heart before you take communion” and whatnot. But the context of that story I think is, one, I think it’s quite telling that we don't ever… 

Sy Hoekstra: Talk about the context of that story? Yeah. 

Gabrielle Apollon: …use this context when we discuss this. But the context is, Paul is critiquing the church because they are having the Lord's Supper, celebrating the Lord's Supper, and rich people are coming in with all their yummy food and alcohol, and the poor people are watching them eat because they didn't have anything to bring. And he is chastising them. He's saying, he literally says, “Your meetings do more harm than good,” and is calling people to examine themselves in light of this disparity. He, I think he literally says, making people feel like they are nothing and humiliating them, and that's obviously, some people are like, “Oh, that's kind of a strong example, we would never do that.”  

But what do we do when we aren't acknowledging these differences and we're not acknowledging… and acknowledging or differentiating people's responses to the gospel? Like I often was like, “Wow, why can't we just acknowledge this illustration or something is related to a certain context, and just make that explicit and acknowledge that might not actually align with your context or whatnot?” And it always felt like, am I asking for too much? Am I asking people to consider all these people who might not even be in the pews? But one, I think we, again are discipling people as to how to think about issues of class, even if they're middle-class or upper-middle class.  

But two, I've seen it done well. I've seen people, and actually this church we're checking out, I've just appreciated Renaissance because even as they do a sermon series about money, it's not just like, “Yeah, everybody, you need to give,” but they're actually like, “Okay, if you are struggling financially, here's what we, we have a Deacons’ Fund. Please use it.” They're recognizing that not everybody is in the same place, and it just feels like, oh, I'm seen, I'm heard. And it doesn't mean that none of the other stuff could apply to you, but it means that you're acknowledging that this is a reality that matters.  

It's a reality that deserves to be talked about and not just in a separate announcement. Because we often do that, where it's like outside of the sermon and you're like, “Oh yeah, if you need money let us know.” But we don't integrate it in our discipleship or in our teachings. And I think that that really does matter. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Shout out to pastor Jordan Rice and Renaissance Church, doing a good job talking about money.  

Suzie Lahoud: Love that. 

Sy Hoekstra: I was going to say, I think like when Gabrielle, when you and I were talking a little bit about this beforehand, we talked about that verse in James, where James says not to show favoritism to the wealthy people in a congregation. And I think the example he gives, he mentions like reserving good seats for them in the… is that true? Am I wrong about that [laughs]?  

Gabrielle Apollon: Yeah. I think it's like letting them be up front or giving them some prominent space.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. 

Sy Hoekstra: I probably should have looked this up [laughs], but that's not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is, I think we want to think about classism a little bit like the way that white people often think about racism. Like it has to be this overt thing. It has to be, oh, you rich people come sit up here in the places of honor, and you poor people go and sit in the back, like segregation. And that's what classism is. And we don't as often think about it in terms of, Suzie, like you were saying, saying I don't want people in my congregation because I don't like the way they smell, that is, that's the same thing. That's showing favoritism to people who live indoors and have running water and can afford deodorant. You know what I mean? It's the same thing, it's just done in a more roundabout way.  

In a similar way, what you were just saying about the verses about communion Gabrielle, the incredible thing that I think so many churches have done, is allowed kind of the world around them to segregate for us so that we don't have to do it directly. So many of those churches are just, they just live in wealthy neighborhoods. They just, the sermon illustrations they give are all about, are from a perspective of somebody who has money, and the services and the community gatherings they offer are for people with money. 

They go on expensive retreats and they, maybe they provide scholarships, but maybe they're not enough. Or maybe the ways of getting it are a little opaque. Or maybe the people you have to talk to aren't the safest people to talk to about your financial circumstances or whatever. I think we just do all of those little subtle things, and then manage to pull that verse out of context and make it about sitting there and contemplating whether or not you got angry at your coworker. Like that's the thing that you have to repent of before you go and take communion and not whether or not you are doing an injustice in your community in the eyes of the Lord. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. 

Gabrielle Apollon: Suzie, I mean, I think this feels like an extreme response and I don't think you can, or extreme example, and I don't think you can completely chalk all of this to colonialism and this culture that we export through missionary culture. But I do think that it is connected. I recall, so my family is from Haiti. I had gone to Haiti after the earthquake and was there with kind of a, like a Cru, a mission trip like thing, which, plenty to say about that, but that's okay [laughs]. And we’re talking, we were inviting people to this church that was run by Haitians in this particular area that had been hit by the earthquake.  

And this woman was sharing with us, she didn't feel like she could go to church because she didn't have, she had lost all of her things and had none of her good clothes to go to church with. And it was one of those things where you're like, well, that's definitely not what the gospel should look like. As a Haitian, I can say there's plenty, there's so much class stuff also just within our country and our communities. But I do think there's something about the religious kind of culture that we export that says people have to look a certain way, and like you mentioned Suzie, Sunday's best, right?  

But what does that look like when you are in extraordinarily dire situations also, and there are these huge barriers that come up that logically should be like, okay, of course you should, even if you've lost everything, God definitely wants you to go to church and it doesn't matter what you… or meet him in one way or another, and it doesn't matter what you wear, but it's a very different thing when that has been inculcated for decades or sometimes centuries within your community. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. And what I didn't even realize at the time, again, going to, so dropping little missionary kid, Suzie from Uzbekistan into the Bible Belt. And I didn't realize there's an actual theology around it, that you're right, absolutely gets exported. Because again, I did experience similar strains of theology in Lebanon that you are dishonoring God if you can't dress nicely on Sunday, if you can't show up clean. So I sort of laughed it off before, but I didn't realize that really it’s become a theological understanding that then you can judge other people by. To go back to those barriers, so again, that's just one that is so horrific. 

But it's, back to your point to Sy about location, I think thinking about the location of your church, if it's in a suburb, especially in the US where we have red lining and all of these things, and like you said, society has done a lot of this dividing for us in a really ugly way. But also, do people have access to your church through public transportation? Because that's a thing too. And again something I saw in the US and in Lebanon, can people get to your meetings if they don't have a car? Like, that's a very basic thing that I think creates a barrier. So I just wanted to circle back to that, just because I think these are really practical things that churches should be thinking through. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I appreciate that. We talked about, Gabrielle and I, this one group we were in, where it was a bunch of relatively wealthy people and then there was one poor homeless woman in it. And they just kept, when we would do worship, telling people, “I emailed you all the song lyrics, bring them up on your phones.” It's like, and she didn't have a smartphone. So we kept trying to get people to print out lyrics and people just wouldn't do it. It was weird, but that's the kind of thing, like access to technology is a big thing. Like if everything about your church service or the, I don’t know, the ways that you register for things, all your processes, if you're different kinds of like online video calls or whatever.  

If all that stuff just requires someone to have some expensive piece of technology and internet access, you need to provide those things. And I'm not saying don't use technology. The same as you’re not saying, don't use cars. Just, like, carpool. You have to figure out a way to normalize helping people out and to not make, to make your community safe enough that people aren't afraid to ask for those things, that it's not weird when you offer those things. All that kind of stuff has to be taken into account. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah.  

Gabrielle Apollon: Yeah. Well, and the reality is oftentimes it can be less convenient, right? Like speaking of the car situation, like growing up, we didn't have a car for a long time and it was truly only because people from church would come and pick us up and take us to church. And sometimes we didn't live… 

Sy Hoekstra: And school. 

Gabrielle Apollon: Yeah. Oh yeah, and school. And sometimes we didn't live in convenient areas and that required somebody to get up even earlier on a Sunday morning and come get us. That stuff's not always, obviously, I feel like it's stating the obvious, that's not always fun. That's not always easy, but it enabled us to have access to these communities and this space that we wouldn't have had otherwise.  

Yeah, I think I've definitely seen this stuff not go well, like Sy mentioned, or not work out in the best ways, but I've also seen, like I have this just very distinct memory. So we talked about what happened when we brought, we invited a homeless guy to church, kind of here in New York. I studied abroad in Paris for a little bit and was part of a church there. And I did not expect this I think, but I just invited this guy who I saw on the street on my way to church to come to church with me. I was like, “Oh, there's coffee.” So I'm pretty sure he came mostly for the coffee [laughs] and food. But the way that I saw that church kind of wrap themselves around him and like it wasn't, once he got there and… you know, I left after a few months because I was in study abroad, but I was able to see through social media and just staying in touch how they continued to support him. And he actually became an integral part of that community. It’s sad that I actually don't think I expected that.  

Often you’re like, “Okay, well, I've got to figure this out. I've got to figure out if I'm going to invite him to lunch afterwards. And that, a lot of that onus kind of feels on you sometimes, but to see a whole community gather together and actually embrace somebody in when it's not the easiest thing sometimes. And like you said, when there are challenges or they're not coming from the same place as you, is so cool and such an example I think, of God's love in an incredibly powerful way.  

I think what you said before, Suzie, is also really important just to keep in mind, that like yeah, not everybody's a project. But to see what people can do when they do actually bring somebody in and treat them as part of the community and not different, or like you said, a charity case, is really cool. 

Sy Hoekstra: Can we talk a little bit about specifically the issue of sharing money? So you've mentioned the Deacons’ Fund, Gabrielle. But there are obviously many verses and stories in the Bible about the people of God sharing resources in all kinds of ways that are pretty foreign to a lot of wealthy Western churches nowadays. How does the process of sharing resources and sharing money, even though it's ostensibly for the benefit of anyone in the congregation who needs it, how do we do that in ways that are harmful and exclusive?  

Gabrielle Apollon: I mean, I think one thing that comes to mind, and it's really the Deacons’ Fund, but it's also related to other ministries, like financial counseling, which is ostensibly good and important, but there are lots of, I would say maybe sometimes non-biblical, but lots of kind of white middle-class norms that people are also exporting through that. So I know for me, like I actually, I've had good financial counselors and I also had someone who yelled at me when I was basically explaining how it was a non-negotiable that I had to send money to my family in light of their circumstances. 

And that just didn't make sense or compute to them in what they thought was financially responsible. Yes, there were other financial needs, but there was also like, my family needed to have money to pay rent. That was something that a lot of people aren't used to, whether it's children of, like adult children or people they're like, “Oh, you shouldn't be responsible for that.” It's like, all right, well, I'm glad you can say that.  

Sy Hoekstra: But I am though. 

Gabrielle Apollon: [laughs] It’s just, yeah, this was just my reality. And what does it mean for, whether it's like family support or even support to you, if people restrict that because they're like, “No, that's not exactly what this is for,” and you're like, “Okay, well then I guess I'll have to figure this out myself,” even though there's definitely money there.  

Sy Hoekstra: I think another way that that particular issue manifests itself is like, there are restrictions on how you can, how the church can give money. So saying like I can give money to members of the church, people who attend the church or whatever, but if the families of the members who live somewhere else, or aren't a part of the church need money, that's not who this money is for. Which ignores that same reality. It’s like, okay, but I as a member of the church, I’m responsible for these people, even though it's my aunt or my grandmother or my cousin or my mom or whatever.  

Those things, those are people who in my community and from my background, I am responsible for and I'm going to pay for this thing for them, whether or not you reimburse me or I have to use a credit card or whatever. So if you want to help me with this, you can, and then a lot of churches just say, “No, that's not what this is for.” You know what I mean? Like that kind of tight demarcating of the boundaries of where your money that you're giving out as a church can go, really runs along lines of white middle-class ideas of who people should and shouldn't be responsible for and how we should be using our money to, as little island individuals, make sure that we are not ever a financial burden upon anyone else or the system or whatever.  

Then I also think, like I was at a church, I lived in Chicago for a year and I went to this church that had mostly middle-class and wealthy people in it, except for this one guy who my roommate and I were friends with, who was pretty low-income and was living in a shelter. He would show up really consistently and he would always be super helpful with helping set up and tear down, and was a kind of integral part of the Sunday mornings. He was, I don't know what he was involved in more broadly in the church, but he was always around and he needed help because he was poor, but he didn't just need help one time.  

Like he, I think a lot of times when we run these Deacons’ Funds or whatever, we expect to help somebody one time with a rent check they can't pay or whatever. But he had ongoing needs because he was not a middle-class person. That's just how it is. And the people who ran the Deacons’ Fund just didn't understand this. Like did not know how to deal with somebody who kept coming back and asking for the church to meet his needs over and over again. And they couldn't deal with just dismissing him I think, as irresponsible, or somebody who hadn't taken advantages of the meritocracy of America or whatever it was that they believed.  

And they just, they were frustrated with him all the time. He in turn then got frustrated with them. They wouldn't understand sometimes the urgency of some of his needs. They would promise him some money, but they wouldn't give it when they said they would, or somebody who needed to give him a check wasn't at church one Sunday, and I saw him get really frustrated about that. And it just created so much tension, because this was an entire church of people who had never seriously interacted with anyone poor for any long amount of time and didn't know how to handle their needs. I think that is, it was just this really interesting case for me of somebody making that reality so plain, just by continuing to show up in a place where I think a lot of people thought he didn't belong. 

Suzie Lahoud: Gosh. Yeah. Sorry, as you're sharing that story Sy, I just can imagine what maybe some of those conversations looked like. And it just reminds me of even doing relief work in Lebanon, something that comes up a lot is this idea of dependency, and you don't want people to become dependent. And that just makes me so angry [laughs], because I feel like it shows such a fundamental lack of understanding for the fact that… I mean one, as human beings, none of us is completely independent. Even as a middle-class person, you are dependent on someone, and if you're not dependent on someone, you're dependent on systems that you take for granted that prop you up.  

And I think just the lack of compassion and just basic understanding for folks who do have ongoing needs, and that doesn't mean that they're taking advantage of your generosity. That doesn't mean that they're lazy and not doing the work. Sy, I feel like that maybe provided a segue to a point that I just want to make sure it gets hammered home which is, can we also just throw out this heretical lie that people suffer financially, chronically because they're lazy. Because they don't work hard and are therefore less righteous. Like that is such a lie. In fact, I feel like the people I know who are the most hardworking, who deal with levels of stress and exhaustion unlike anything I've seen any of my middle-class or upper-middle-class friends struggle with, those are people who come from low-income backgrounds.  

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, absolutely. 

Suzie Lahoud: You don't even understand the levels of like working multiple jobs and not having a car. Having to take care of your kids and work at the same time. Like all of these struggles that people face, and then we call them lazy? In the church? That just, that's outrageous to me. So all that to say, and I think it goes back to this point that I think you brought up earlier Gabrielle, but I know it's something that we also wanted to bring up in this conversation, which is, and I think I was touching on this a little bit earlier as well, representation in your church leadership of folks from low-income backgrounds and different cultural backgrounds.  

Because I think socioeconomic cultures are real, so class cultures are real, but then also different cultural backgrounds of, Gabrielle, you mentioned coming from a Haitian family. And then with my husband's Lebanese family, we talked before about how I've struggled with finding good marriage books. Because yes, money is a part of marriage, and the expectations around where your money goes, it’s not going to always follow these WASPy models and norms that you were just touching on Sy. So all that to say, you need to have folks represented in your leadership from these different backgrounds who understand those dynamics so you don't fall into the pitfalls that Sy, you were just alluding to.  

Because you need to admit the limits of your own understanding if you don't come from that background. If you've never had those struggles before you probably are going to miss it, and that's going to do damage and do harm. So the best thing you can do is have people on your staff who do understand that. I think that also gets to some of the favoritism you were touching on Sy, that obviously the book of James talks about. Where a lot of times I feel like elders are appointed also based on how much money they can give to the church. I feel like I’ve seen this happen in a lot of churches, that you are seen as a “pillar in the church,” and not just because of your moral disposition or the model that you are of faith, but also I think sometimes based on the size of a check you can write to support the church budget. 

Sy Hoekstra: You’re a financial pillar. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, exactly.  

Sy Hoekstra: You’re a giant stack of money pillar [laughter]. 

Suzie Lahoud: And I'm sorry, that is favoritism. That is favoritism. Just because you can write a bigger check, God bless you for doing that. God bless you for investing your money in the church, but that doesn't always mean that you should have the biggest say in where the money from that check goes. And you need to be okay with that as the giver and the church needs to be okay with that and to understand that. Sorry, go ahead Sy.  

Sy Hoekstra: No, I was just going to say, I think that implies that people who do have a lot of money and are giving a lot of money to the church, because the default culture is to sort of honor you, it's kind of on you to say, to understand that you're wielding a lot of power and to not use it on your own behalf. It is up to you to then leverage, like we were talking about with Dominique DuBois Gilliard, talking about leveraging privilege. That's something that you should be doing on behalf of other people, and it's not something you should be doing for yourself. You should be making that clear to the staff, I do not want you kind of bending to my whims because I'm somebody who pays your salary and your rent and whatever.  

On that track, can we talk a little bit before we end, about how churches can do better in this area? We've given some examples, but any more final thoughts?  

Gabrielle Apollon: I do have one thing just to say about something Suzie mentioned earlier. Which you mentioned the systems of injustice and inequality that have affected how much people have. It's amazing to me, I don't know how many years I've been in church now. I think, well, yeah, I basically grew up in the church, but this recent sermon series about money that Renaissance did, I think was the first time that in a series about money, I ever heard a pastor say, yes, the realities of inequality and injustice and racism actually do impact who has the money and who doesn't. 

I was like, huh, it's amazing that this is the first time I've ever heard that. And that was not hard to do. It's just acknowledging these realities and making things more plain, I think in speaking truth to the situation. As opposed to being like, okay, what do I need to say just to make sure everyone is more generous and not thinking about people's very stark experiences with whether it's discrimination or racism or inequality that really matter and that really have impacts on people's lives. So yes, we should go to examples of things that are good, but that one I was just encouraged by was like, oh yes, you can do this. This is not hard to actually just make plain to people.  

Sy Hoekstra: Well, I mean, that is one example. That's great.  

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. I mean, I think I should go back and say too because I, by the way, Gabrielle, I love that you always come with the positive examples. I think that's so good and so beautiful and so helpful. Because I feel like I tend to hammer home like the critique and the negative examples [laughs].  

Gabrielle Apollon: They’re both real. 

Suzie Lahoud: No, but I just think that's so beautiful. So thank you for bringing that piece consistently. I should say, going back to the example of churches in Lebanon, I learned so much from watching Lebanese churches grapple with the struggles of trying to incorporate a population that comes from a different socioeconomic background, a different cultural background, coming from traumatic experiences of war, that also I should say, a lot of Lebanese folks could also relate to from their own past. But watching that struggle, I learned so much and I think there is beauty in the struggle. I think one of the things I want to get across is, it's worth diving into the messiness of this. 

Sy Hoekstra: Because it will be messy. 

Suzie Lahoud: Yeah, it will get messy. And I think that's also one, that needs to be one of the things that you're willing to do, is to allow it to get messy. To allow it to loosen your grip on quote-unquote “church order,” that really is just WASPy norms that we've wrapped the church in. Even around, again as you were saying Sy, like how we manage our finances as a church, all these things, you need to allow it to get messy, and you need to… Okay, I hesitate to say this because I don't want people to hear this the wrong way. But you will make mistakes and you need to be okay with that, and you need to know how to learn from your mistakes in a healthy way. 

Sy Hoekstra: Which doesn't mean ignore the ramifications of your mistakes or don't go back and apologize and fix things. Yeah. 

Gabrielle Apollon: Right. 

Suzie Lahoud: Exactly. Yes. Because what I don't want to do is justify the harm that churches cause, but I think, and I say this because our church and churches that we partnered with made mistakes. And a lot of it came from not understanding people's situations. Even basic things like having meals together as a church and people coming and hoarding food, and all of a sudden it becomes like a free-for-all. Having close to riots breaking out at one of our first distributions of trying to provide assistance to people, people that we also wanted to feel free to come and be a part of the church.  

There were just different dynamics and we made mistakes and had to learn, but at the same time, we got to have fellowship with folks that we wouldn't have had fellowship with otherwise. One thing that I really loved that we were able to do, was do just Bible studies in our homes. And the way we did it was, some of you all may be familiar with the Discovery Bible Study method, but basically you're not allowed to use any previous knowledge or understanding of the Bible. You just look at the passage and you ask three basic questions: What does this passage teach us about God? What does it teach us about man? And what is something that we can apply to our lives from this passage?  

And it was so beautiful because when I said earlier I feel like folks who have experienced want and need, that they have a deeper understanding of the teachings of Christ and the gospel than oftentimes I do, I really mean that, and I've seen that. So it was so powerful, just not having a Bible study where it's like one person from the church is leading these other people from different… It was everyone sharing from what they gleaned from the scripture, and also just put things in perspective. Like one of you talked about this point of things that I look at in my life as struggle and sacrifice, pale in comparison to what other folks are struggling with. But also the fact that they were willing to share their struggles with me meant so much to me.  

And so just, there's so much richness that happens and so much faith stretching that happens. I don't know, so yeah, there is beauty in the struggle and the messiness. And also we as, I will say for myself, I know that I have so much to learn from people who have walks of life that look very different from my own. And I want the church to be purged of these ugly expressions of classism that have become so inculcated, as you were saying Gabrielle. 

Sy Hoekstra: The thing that I was going to talk about was also like proximity and humility. Those are kind of some of the main points for me. Then like the messiness that you were talking about that you're going to have to work through is just another one of the million applications of why, as we've talked about on this podcast before, emotional health is so important in a church context. And why not being someone who is easily overwhelmed by conditions that you're not used to, or someone who knows how to deal with those feelings of being overwhelmed and uncomfortable in a healthy way is just crucial to this work. 

Gabrielle Apollon: Suzie, I really appreciate you going back to this, I think, truism of people who have been affected in this way and are directly affected whether it's by poverty or whatnot, have so much to teach us. I just remember that growing up, the people who watched out for us the most in our church and watched out, and dropped stuff off even when we didn't ask for it, were people who knew what the struggle was like. Were often not the people who just like had so much overflow to give, but it was other people who had been poor or were still poor and are like sharing out of what little they had. 

I think that just really, I think, speaks to that which you said. Like that's where, that's actually what leadership and that's what discipleship — where I learned this is what you do. You give back even if you just have even a little more. Then to be honest, to answer your question Sy, I think sometimes, and this is obviously not just when it comes to class issues, but what I have seen is that sometimes even, it's non-church communities that sometimes do a better job at this than our churches. And not all the time, like there obviously, as Suzie you mentioned, there are some great examples of churches living out like loving our neighbors as ourselves.  

But for me, just thinking about even in school, academic environments that I was in, so I'm now like a little jealous because I’ve seen like a lot more kind of first-generation student groups pop up post me being in college, and I'm like, man, that would have been nice. It would have been really nice to be able to talk to other people about the survivor's guilt that I felt and navigating how much money to send home and how much to keep for myself and… 

Sy Hoekstra: Sorry, just for clarity. When you say first-generation, you don't mean first-generation immigrant, you mean first-generation college student. 

Gabrielle Apollon: That’s true. Yeah. I mean, both would be great, but yes. 

Sy Hoekstra: And you happen to be both, but here we're talking about college students, yes. 

Gabrielle Apollon: Exactly. But, and especially this, and I just want to kind of name some of these things, because I don't think we talk about this stuff enough in our church communities. But I really had the strong pressure, feeling that I had to compartmentalize everything that was going on at home so that I could get my schoolwork done and whatnot. And those are just things that have been really nice to have a community or space to process those things in. And I had a wonderful Christian fellowship. I had amazing people, I went to a church, but there wasn't, we didn't talk about that kind of stuff at the end of the day.  

Or if you did, you were the only one that was bringing that up because most of the people were not having those similar experiences, which is a certain level of vulnerability too. So I didn't necessarily have that in college, but I did do like, in law school, I got a scholarship that was for first-generation grad students. And seeing how they, the type of community and the type of resources that they provided, I think really gave me a glimpse of like, oh, you can actually do this. As I was mentioning, not constraining resources to these very concise, discreet topics. Like you can pay rent for this and whatnot.  

And they were like, we know that you guys have needs that don't fit in traditional molds, and like just come to us and we'll see what we can do. And those needs sometimes looked like trying to figure out whose criminal defense fees that I needed to pay or things like that. Things that were going to be the things that stopped me from doing my schoolwork, but weren't necessarily like, oh, you need a laptop or whatnot. Then they made space for community where you could talk about that stuff. And it would be amazing if one, there were enough people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and more churches that that space was possible. That community, that people could find that community and be comfortable enough to talk about those kinds of issues within our faith communities. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And that program really was great. By the way, shout-out. This is the AnBryce Program at NYU. They're incredible. 

Gabrielle Apollon: Thank you for giving a real shout-out. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. But one of the things was you got full tuition from this program, but that doesn't mean that you have money to eat or pay rent. And like they were serious when they told you to come to them with other needs that you had because you went there and they helped you find a truly incredible loan to pay for those things. I don’t know, it's just putting in that kind of work and making, leaving the door that open for people to come is super important. The other people, Suzie, I think we should shout-out who are doing this well for the church, is Sub:Culture Incorporated, which is — the author of our next book, Tamice Spencer, it’s her organization, she and Robert Monson.  

She, Tamice’s story is kind of that she was a campus minister for a long time and the only thing that she was ever allowed to raise money for students, was for them to go to a retreat or something. And she's like, “but all the Black students that I have, they need money because their car broke down” or whatever, and that wasn't something that the campus ministry wanted to pay for. So she started her own ministry where they do pay for that stuff, and that's incredible. 

Gabrielle Apollon: Truly incredible, but also not something you can't do. 

Suzie Lahoud: These things are not hard [laughs]. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Immediate action step for listeners. Go donate money to Sub:Culture Incorporated [laughs].  

Suzie Lahoud: As you were speaking, Gabrielle, it also made me think just as a small side note, one, yes, absolutely, check out Sub:Culture Incorporated and the work that they're doing, and the resources that they have around this. But also as a church, maybe recognize that sometimes the best resources, because I know I shared, I gave a sneak peek into some of the mistakes and things that my husband and I have learned over the years, but also not to, I also don't want to bless ignorance [laughs]. So do the work in the sense of go do research and read helpful resources and recognize that unfortunately, sometimes the best resources will not be explicitly Christian resources.  

So they may not be books that are written for churches trying to do this, but they may just be resources on this period. I think that churches would be better resourced if they would look into those things. So, yeah, again, Sub:Culture Incorporated is amazing because they are doing this through a Christ-like lens. But also just try to just find the best of what's out there on supporting folks from these backgrounds and creating communities that address socioeconomic injustice and are aware of the challenges and the disparities and all that. 

Sy Hoekstra: Gabrielle, did you have any thoughts before we finish?  

Gabrielle Apollon: I mean, I do think, I just want to kind of reiterate maybe the need for our pastors and our leaders to help disciple people out of this classism that is so, it permeates everything we do. I can't think of a subject or an issue that doesn't have a class component, but we’re not usually talking about this. And as Suzie mentioned though, that takes them, discipling them, like getting discipleship themselves so that they're not, leaders aren't saying ignorant things that make the situation worse, which is definitely a risk also when people bring up these types of issues. 

But I think that that's critical, because again, yeah, this is the air we breathe. This will be what seeps into every aspect of our church communities, unless we're fighting this stuff. It's the whole, what are you discipled in six days out of the week and then you only have a day to try to maybe undo that stuff? Like you actually need to talk about this stuff. It's not just everybody, as you mentioned Sy, that everybody is the same or, because we know that inherently, but our culture is discipling us. Or we know that in our faith, I should say, but our culture is discipling us very differently the rest of the week. 

Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think you will not be able to get away from being discipled that way if you take seriously the real unfiltered words of Jesus. Meaning unfiltered through all this stuff that you've heard about what Jesus thinks about money. In the Sermon on the Mount in Luke, Jesus straight up says give to those who beg of you. There's no qualification whatsoever. How many times have you heard Christians try and qualify why they shouldn't give money to that person on the street? You know what I mean? There's just stuff like that where if you really take Jesus' words seriously, you're going to start to change. 

It just takes a lot because you're going to have to be really different unfortunately, than a lot of the Christians around you.  

Suzie Lahoud: So yeah, I'll just say this because I know Gabrielle, you're also from a somewhat Pentecostal background. But when you start to take Jesus' words seriously and directly and unfiltered, you will also see miracles happen. I really believe that God provides in miraculous ways. When churches step up to the plate and dive into the messiness and hit up against their own limitations, and then you see God provide in incredible, miraculous ways. That's another blessing that you receive. You're so right Gabrielle, that this is integral to the mission of the church, and there is so much more that we need to dig into, not just as a side topic or side ministry. This can really, I think, transform churches when they're willing to dive into this and experience the fullness of all that Christ has to offer on this.  

Gabrielle Apollon: I know we are, Sy wants to cut us off. And I'm only a guest and so I shouldn't take over, but I promised Sy I needed to make a joke about nepotism since this is my second time on here [laughter]. As your wife, I feel like I'm just going to take the liberties and say, Suzie, I would love, because I feel like you have direct experiences about that particular point you made, and I think it's worthwhile if you don't mind, like sharing an example. Because I think when people haven't seen that happen, they're like, “Yeah okay, maybe. I don't really know what that means.” So if you do have an example, and Sy won’t literally turn off the recording, then I’d love to hear it. 

Sy Hoekstra: You’re making me sound like a real authoritarian host right now. I’m perfectly fine with this question.  

[laughter] 

Suzie Lahoud: Oh man. Yeah. Just, well, like I shared, so for I guess two years, we had this weekly Bible study that would meet in our home and it was my husband and I and this community of folks that they had fled to Lebanon from Syria and were interested in getting involved in the life of our church. We were really careful to try to not provide assistance with strings attached, not make folks feel like they had to be involved in the church if they were receiving assistance, but there was a community that really wanted to, they said they wanted to study the Bible with us. So that's what we were doing. 

And there would be weekly prayer requests, and there were regularly things that came up. But what stand out to me are examples of, honestly just like physical healings when folks couldn't pay for medical care and when hospitals were overloaded. So like a guy who had completely thrown out his back at work doing construction work. I remember we laid hands on this one guy who had damaged his back and he came back the next week and he was fine. There were different cases like that.  

Yeah, so just, and then there was one that I shared in the article in our book, that's probably still the one that most powerfully stands out to me, which was a young girl who had a brain tumor and we laid hands on her and prayed for her. And I have to say with like, from my end very little faith, that God could heal her, and he did. This is a family that the UN didn't have money to provide assistance. There's no way the family could have covered the medical bills because there were other cases where we would have to sit down with families and be like, “You can't afford this chemo, and that's not your fault.” So, but in this case, God healed this baby girl. So yeah, I mean, and again, it's that the messiness and the hardness of it, because you also lose people and you also see people go through difficult things, but God is real in the midst of all that. I'm sorry, I didn't have one specific example to share [laughs]. 

Gabrielle Apollon: No, no, no. Those are, you had lots of examples. Right. I think that it just comes to mind obviously like different scales sometimes. But for me, I just distinctly remember there were days, I mean, one, there was, my mom literally would get up like three hours before I had to go to school and start praying that somebody would be able to take me to school that day and reach out to however many people to try to get someone. And the Lord would really provide in that way.  

But I remember, and I was, I actually had recently come to faith in a real way, but we would have to pray for my, we'd have to like drop my brother off to see his dad and there was no, like we didn't have a ride to do that, and my mom would get in trouble with the courts if it didn't happen. So we were just praying that miraculously, somebody would be willing and available to do it and it would happen. But it would happen often in the nick of time, but it would be people from church oftentimes who's like, “Oh, you were just on my mind and I called and checked to see if there's anything you needed.” And things like that, that I was like, well, the Lord is somehow making this work because I don't have any other reasons to identify as this happening week in and week out. But yeah, seeing communities and people of God stand up and do things is such a testament to the Lord's work, for sure.  

Sy Hoekstra: I think that is as good a place as any to end, on that positive note. 

Gabrielle Apollon: I'll allow it.  

Sy Hoekstra: You'll allow me to finish? 

Gabrielle Apollon: Your own podcast. 

[laughter] 

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you, Gabrielle.  

Suzie Lahoud: I like having Gabrielle on. I think we should do this more often [laughter]. 

Sy Hoekstra: I mostly do also. Thank you. No, I'm kidding [laughter]. So thank you so much Gabrielle for being on and joining us today. We really appreciate it. 

Gabrielle Apollon: Thank you guys. 

Sy Hoekstra: Thank you all so much for listening. Just as a reminder, please do follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @KTFPress. Follow this podcast on your app. Subscribe, follow, whatever the button says in your particular player. Leave us a rating and review, and thank you so much again for being subscribers and listening to this bonus episode. We will have, by the way, information on season two coming soon. So stay tuned for that. You will not have to wait another month. And this may actually be the last monthly bonus episode for awhile because we might start, I think we probably will start that up next month, but we will have more definitive information on that coming soon. Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam and we will see you all very soon.  

[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.] 

Sy Hoekstra: I think for me… [siren noises in the background] Oh, there's a siren coming. Suzie, do you want to talk?  

Suzie Lahoud: Oh sure. By the way, I have some church bells going in the distance that, you all aren't picking up on that? Okay. 

Sy Hoekstra: Nope. 

Suzie Lahoud: It would be nice except that I'm on a podcast.