My Freedom Day as a Female, Black and Queer Pastor

To be a female, Black and gay pastor on “Freedom Day” necessitates a certain amount of introspection, for my relationship with the church has long been a queer dance whose steps I don’t often apprehend.

Galatians 3:28 says: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Yet this oneness has been elusive in the ELCA and elsewhere, has it not?

There are still churches in the ELCA that won’t hire a female pastor. If hired, we are required to perform femininity in a way that is acceptable to the congregation. Dress like a woman, but don’t be too sexy. Be a strong leader, but never too emotional. Love the children of our church, but don’t spend too much time with your own.

There are churches in the ELCA that won’t hire a person of color — full stop. For those that do, we are often required to perform race in a way that is “nonthreatening” to the community. Be a dynamic speaker, but don’t be too loud. We know that you are Black, but don’t be too proud. And for the love of God, don’t talk about race or white privilege — it makes people uncomfortable. After all, we’re all the same ….

Finally, we know there are churches in the ELCA that won’t hire a queer person. If they do, we are required to perform our queerness in ways that do nothing to change the community. Don’t talk about being gay. Don’t teach our children “that way of life.” Don’t do anything that would cause our church shame in the community.

So, to recap, it’s OK to be female, Black and queer in the ELCA as long as it does not make the 97% European-American demographic of our denomination uncomfortable in any way. I call Bullshit.

Juneteenth is Freedom Day. June is Pride Month. And every single day approximately half of humans are female. Many have said that “none are free until all are free.” When God said that we “are one in Christ Jesus,” it was not an invitation to be all the same. It was an invitation to truly embrace our diversity and to become the beloved community for which Jesus died and the Holy Spirit longs.

Beloveds, what would it look like for us to truly value one another’s diversity and to celebrate one another’s cultures, experiences and way of life? How might our churches be transformed if we practiced radical hospitality, welcoming all just as we would Christ Jesus? What would happen if we followed the Holy Spirit outside of the four walls of our buildings and into the community to experience life with the neighbors God has given us?

Might we learn to dance together? Might the Holy Spirit lead our steps — both in joy and sorrow, lament and justice-seeking? Would she blow among us, compelling us to insist boldly on peace with justice for all of her children? How might she guide us to stop performing “welcome” and to actually be welcoming for the sake of Christ?

John 8:36 says: “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Since Christ has made us all free, let us stop shackling one another and walk in the light of freedom as one.

Bio:

The Rev. Dr. Yolanda Denson-Byers hails from St. Louis, Mo. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., in religion and African American studies. Her Master of Divinity is from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., with a specialty in worship, preaching, education, and pastoral care and counseling. Her Doctor of Ministry is in the field of congregational mission and leadership from Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn.

Pastor Yolanda is a missional leader, with a heart for social justice issues, who has, for the last 23 years, been exercising her gifts through the vocations of pastor, evangelist, campus minister, hospice chaplain and bereavement counselor. In addition, she is very proud of her ministry as a wife and mother. Pastor Yolanda enjoys reading, writing, camping and anything pertaining to a warm climate with a saltwater beach!

I had just started my car to drive to my internship site on June 18, 2015, when I learned from the radio about the martyrdom of the Emanuel Nine. As I drove down the freeway and the details of this atrocious act spilled out of my speakers, I had to pull onto the shoulder and collect myself before making my way to the office for whatever meetings were scheduled that day.

The murders of nine people during a Bible study weighed on me throughout the week. That Sunday we prayed for their families. We prayed that such senseless violence would cease, that God’s vision of justice would be made manifest here and now. Then, as a worshiping body, we concluded the service and gathered for coffee.

I am a white pastor in the ELCA, the whitest denomination in the country. The man who committed the racist murders at Mother Emanuel AME is a white man who attended confirmation class in an ELCA church. This was in no way the first white supremacist terror attack on a church, but it was the one that changed me.

I wish I could say that this change was rapid, that the worshiping body and I began that coffee hour discussing how we could dismantle the machinery of white supremacy in our community. But my shaking voice and trembling knees when addressing issues that could make a majority of my congregation uncomfortable would make me a liar. The truth is that, before I could lead anything like that, I had to begin dismantling the hold that white supremacy had on me, often presenting itself as “the polite way to be in church.”

The prolific and prophetic voices of Black people, Indigenous people and people of color in this denomination remind white folks such as myself that being a faithful Lutheran has very little to do with being polite. The Holy Spirit empowers us to tell the truth. We confess that we are not going to do anything perfectly, and still we are called to be in the world, loving and supporting our neighbors. We are people who live in the unfolding kingdom of God, tasked as co-creators and stewards.

The past eight years have shown us that white supremacist violence is not going to go away simply by our earnestly hoping for it. From Charleston to Buffalo, the demonic force of racist violence continues to claim the lives of our siblings of color in this country.

As white people, we need to boldly proclaim that the end of white supremacy is our vocational calling. As a church we must continue to confess that white supremacy is intertwined in our church and our culture, and to provoke conversations on how we can change those systems. We must continue to pray for God’s justice, then unfold our hands and use them to build the world in which God calls us to live.

Resources:

ELCA worship for commemoration of the Emanuel Nine

https://www.elca.org/emanuelnine

Bio:
Rev. Kelly France is an interim minister who serves in the Southwestern Minnesota Synod. He is also vice president of the European Descent Lutheran Association for Racial Justice

June 2022 — Reflecting on and Commemorating the Emanuel Nine

On the evening of June 17, 2015, a white supremacist walked into Mother Emanuel AME Church, sat down and joined a Bible study focused on Mark 4. We all know now that he intended to start a race war. Innocent lives were taken in an act of hate, an act all too familiar in our society.

That evening nine innocent people were killed in a temple of the Lord, where love was shared and life in Christ was embraced. The Emanuel Nine are saints who still witness to us today from their graves . . . they witness to the power of God’s word and God’s love! May we never forget and may we be changed! Their family members stood up just days after this horrific tragedy and amazed the world when they voiced forgiveness in Christ’s name. They shared an understanding of the power of God’s word, that it will prevail over any attempt to stifle or kill it. God’s word will be spread far and wide.

Michael Curry, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, has spoken often about God’s love. “Our commitment to be an inclusive church is not based on social theory or the ways of culture,” he says, “but on our belief that the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross are our sign of the very love of God reaching out to us all.”

This June, inspired by a request from an AME congregation we asked the congregations of the ELCA South Carolina Synod to study the Parable of the Sower in Mark 4, to substitute it as their Gospel reading for Sunday, June 19, and to include the names of the Emanuel Nine in the prayers of intercession. Each year our Inclusiveness Network sponsors a worship service in a central location; this year we have decided to reflect on Mark 4, the Scripture being studied by the Emanuel Nine the night they were murdered, and to ponder how it might shape the way we live into community as Jesus’ disciples.

Only God’s word in Christ has the power to stretch and transform us, to equip us and entrust us with a message and a ministry of reconciliation. Only God’s word can open our hearts to the truth that Jesus came not only for me and you but for all God’s beloved children. Only God’s word, Jesus, can bring hope for our communities and the world.

In Jesus we have the power to become communities that reach beyond themselves, and to bring the transformation of God’s extravagant love to every sister and brother. Thanks be to God for this word of life and love. “Lord, let our hearts be good soil!” In Jesus’ name. Amen.

We remember Rev. Clementa Pinckney · Tywanza Sanders · Rev. Sharonda Singleton · Cynthia Hurd · Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor · Ethel Lance · Susie Jackson · Rev. Dr. Daniel Simmons · Myra Thompson.

Resources:

ELCA worship for commemoration of the Emanuel Nine

https://www.elca.org/emanuelnine

BIO:

The Rev. Virginia S. Aebischer was elected bishop of the ELCA South Carolina Synod on July 25, 2020. Previously she served as assistant to the bishop (2008-2020). She received her Master of Divinity from Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary and was ordained in 1989. She has served as pastor of Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Charleston, S.C. (1989-2001) and Mt. Tabor Lutheran Church, West Columbia, S.C. (2001-2008). Ginny is married to the Rev. Paul Aebischer, pastor of Ebenezer Lutheran Church, Columbia, and has two grown sons: Joshua, who is married to Addie and lives and works in Columbia, and Micah, a graduate student at Clemson University. The newest addition to the family is granddaughter Rosie.

For a long time, no one in Tulsa’s white or black communities talked about the massacre that destroyed the Greenwood district in May 1921. Those who were there remembered.  A few kept the memory alive.  But most simply chose to forget. Shrouded in silence for decades, it lay there in the heart of the city, eating away at it like a cancer.

History — especially difficult, painful history — needs to be remembered. It needs to be talked about, studied, examined and explored. Not to make people feel guilty or ashamed, but to be honest, forthright and aware of how history has shaped who we are and what we are about. A sanitized history only drives the painful stuff underground, where it eats us up and slowly destroys the fabric of society. Besides, a history with no pain, suffering or struggle is a lie.

I have always appreciated how honest the Hebrew Scriptures are about the painful history of the people of God. If you have any doubt about that, just read the prophetic writings. Why did God’s people preserve those difficult, painful indictments of their own greed, idolatry, disobedience to God’s commands and mistreatment of the poor and powerless? Because God’s people knew that, forgetting, they might turn their backs on God again, and they knew the results of doing that were disastrous.

Today, Tulsans remember. A year ago, we marked the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre with much fanfare and national attention. This year we will remember again. And we need to. The destruction of Greenwood still shapes this city. The systemic racism that led to the massacre persists. The work of reconciliation is ongoing. The debate over reparations for those who lost land and homes and lives continues, even though it has continued for far too long.

We need to remember. The Tulsa massacre may have been the worst racial violence of the early 20th century, yet massacres, lynchings and riots took place in communities across this country. In 1919 a massacre similar to Tulsa’s took place in Elaine, Ark. At the same time, not far from Tulsa, Osage people were being murdered so that whites might take their land. Today, racial violence continues to plague our nation, as we recently witnessed in Buffalo, NY.

Like the people who preserved the prophets’ writings, we also need to remember the churchs’ role in this difficult, painful and bloody history. Here in Tulsa, on the Sunday after the massacre, the black community was blamed for the death and destruction from pulpits across the city, including in our Lutheran congregation.

Across our church, we need to continue our work for racial justice. We need to study, with honesty and forthrightness, who we are and where we come from. We need to learn from the past and make the changes necessary to become the inclusive, grace-centered communities we aspire to be, where all people — no exceptions — can experience and live in the steadfast love of God that is ours in Jesus Christ.

To learn more about the Tulsa Race Massacre, visit:

John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation

www.jhfcenter.org/

Tulsa Historical Society and Museum

www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/

History Channel: Tulsa Race Massacre

www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/tulsa-race-massacre

BIO: Michael Girlinghouse has been bishop of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Synod since 2011. Prior to becoming bishop, he served as a campus pastor at three universities and as a parish pastor. A devotional writer, he is author of Embracing God’s Future Without Forgetting the Past (Fortress Press, 2019). Bishop Mike graduated from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, has one adult daughter and lives in Tulsa, Okla., with his wife and their two dogs.

In recognition of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I share the journey of my achievements and struggles as a person of Asian descent in our church, and in our nation.

I immigrated to this country when I was seven years old, and the kids teased me by telling me to go home.

I learned to speak, dress, publicly act like the dominant culture, and people still told me to go home.

I graduated from college and became a productive citizen in our society, and people still told me to go home.

I graduated from seminary and served in a predominantly white denomination and church, and people still asked me, “When do you plan on going home?”

I considered serving in an Asian church but the immigrant Asian pastors and community elders felt I wasn’t Asian enough because my voice and language wasn’t theirs; I felt they were telling me to find a new home.

I served this country as a military chaplain for 21 years and held the hands of brave warriors as they entered life triumphant, and people still tell me to go home.

I supported and defended the Constitution while rocket-propelled grenades exploded around me, and people in this country still tell me to go home.

I moved up in the ranks of the military chaplaincy, higher than but for one other Asian in its history. Yet when I see that among the 37 senior ranking chaplains, there are only three chaplains of color, I hear them saying to me, it’s time for you to go home.

When I disagree with siblings in our church who tell me that the historical western theology, ecclesiology, vestment, and style of worshiping is normative, I feel like they are telling me to go home.

But America and this church is my home…the home I love, the home I’ve suffered in, and am willing to die for, the only home I really know.

When can I be home without people telling me to go home?

My story is one of many in the landscape of AAPI experiences in the ELCA, and in our nation.  Covid times have simply confirmed how so many do not view us as fully American. In fact, the surge in anti-Asian harassments and assaults solidified how this destructive view is still deeply embedded in the American psyche. Yet, with deep roots in the history and culture of our nation, our voice and contributions are very much a part of the American experience.

Together we can build toward a world where people of every background can be safe and can thrive. May God’s people show what church together means, in our actions for justice, and for peace.

bio  The Rev. Herbert Shao is a Director of Evangelical Mission for the Northwest Washington Synod.  He is also a member of the Association of Asians and Pacific Islanders-ELCA, one of the six ethnic associations of the ELCA.

In his Daily Meditation of February 6 on 1 Corinthians 12, Rev. Richard Rohr writes “Humanity consistently has to face the problem of unity and diversity. We’re not very good at understanding it. We habitually choose our smaller groups, because we don’t know how to belong to a larger group. That demands too much letting go.”

He notes that Paul’s doctrine of the Body of Christ “isn’t easy for Westerners to understand, because we are deeply trained in cultural individualism. So much so, we don’t even recognize our lack.” It seems impossible that anyone with eyes and ears open could fail to recognize the pervasive individualism in our country. For many, the synonym of “it’s a free country” is “you can’t tell me what to do.”

One advantage of belonging to a large group with internal diversity like the ELCA is that we can see varied cultures within a group whose defining culture we share. During Arab American Heritage Month, I would like to discuss an element of Arab-Middle Eastern culture that might help elucidate a different way of being in a group, a way of “letting go.”

For most of my life, the common translation of the Transfiguration story in Mark included a voice saying, “This is my beloved Son.” In more recent translations, we hear, “This is my Son, the Beloved.” These two versions may sound pretty much the same, but they are not. In the first, “beloved” is an adjective describing the son; in the second “beloved” is a name for the Son, an identification by relationship.

Almost anyone who has grown up in an Arabic-speaking family – even a person who didn’t master Arabic – knows the Arabic (and Aramaic) word for “beloved.”  It is a word we have heard dozens of times a day as parents and grandparents call to us and our siblings: habibi/ habibti. “Ya habibi, tha,” they might say. “Oh, my Beloved, come here.” While it sounds stilted in translation, it sounds quite appropriate in context. Importantly, it constitutes the replacement of a name by a relationship.

For many of us represented by the groups of color in the Church, our personal cultures insist that one’s identity is, at least in part, other-oriented. We shape identities based on our family and our community. In the case of those of Arab and Middle Eastern heritage, there is a sense that we are nothing without a family and community to help define us.

The internal relationships of Arab families reflect this cultural reality. Imagine, for example, a young Arab man named Ibrahim and his wife Mariam who have their first child, a son, whom they name Yusuf. From Yusuf’s birth he will be called Ibn Ibrahim, “the son of Ibrahim,” but his parents will also take on new names. They will be from that point on called Abu Yusuf, “father of Yusuf,” Um Yusuf, mother of Yusuf” by friends and family.

I have heard non-Arabs denigrate this custom: “Why should I give up my identity just because I became a parent?” But that is really the crux. This approach is not giving up one’s identity but expanding it in terms of relationships. In Arab culture, one is not defined in isolation but in connection, in relations. And that is a lesson those of Arab-American heritage can share with the Church: we cannot be fully who we are meant to be if we remain isolated individuals.

In his prayer at the Last Supper in John 17, Jesus describes how he views the ideal relationship with us: “that they may all be one, even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us … that they may be one even as we are one.” Here, I believe, is the core of Jesus’ prayer and its most complex and mysterious part. When Jesus suggests that his followers can be one as he and his Father are one, he takes us directly to the mystery of the Trinity. In distinction from the other Western monotheistic religions, Christianity alone posits the person of God as built on relationship, a unity without uniformity. In praying that we be one as Jesus and his Father are one, he is envisioning a future in which his followers will take their identity in part from their relationships with others, unified but not uniform.

Dr. Ryan A. LaHurd is a spouse, father of two, and grandfather of five. He served as president of Lenoir-Rhyne University, Hickory, N.C., an ELCA higher education institution, from 1994-2022. Dr. LaHurd, an Arab-American of Lebanese ancestry, has served as a teacher, administrator, author, and leader in many capacities, including with the ELCA Association of Lutherans of Arab and Middle Eastern Heritage. He and his spouse Dr. Carol Schersten LaHurd are members of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Chicago.