Leadership Lab: Erika Spaet
Over the past year the Church Anew team has been working to connect and build resources for church leaders to see what their colleagues are doing around the country. With that the Leadership Lab was born. We have interviewed several church leaders doing innovative and amazing things, and we want to share their knowledge and wisdom with the world.
Church Anew recently caught up with Pastor Erika Spaet in Bend, OR to discuss her ministry and the Story Dwelling community that she has helped to build there.
Church Anew: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Erika Spaet: Sure. I'm an ordained pastor in the ELCA, and I live in Bend, Oregon. I would say it’s a rapidly growing small city, maybe you've heard of Bend. I don't know. It's kind of a hot thing right now.
I am married, and I have two very young children. I have a three year old and a three month old. I moved to Bend in 2017. This is my first call, I moved to Bend as a mission developer under a call through both the Oregon Synod and the United Methodist Church. So those two denominations invited me to come to Bend because it's a quickly growing city and to listen since I have some background in community organizing, particularly in the criminal justice system and local politics. They wanted me to come and weave some of my organizing experiences along with a call to word and sacrament, to uncover what the longings are here in this place, particularly among young people and working people and queer folks.
I was really open to what the call might evolve into. I didn't know if a faith community would be the thing that this place needed. And what has emerged is Story Dwelling, which is a faith ecosystem. We talk about it as a web, or a network of people, who are walking together with shared commitments around liberation and real relationships that care for one another and for our neighbors.We have a Sunday morning gathering, but we also have these other kinds of gatherings and other ways that the work expresses itself as a faith community. Not everybody would describe themselves as Christian. Many people would describe themselves that way. But what brings us together are these shared convictions around relationship and justice.
One of the pieces of work that's grown out of that, (I wouldn't say I’m bi-vocational for me it's all connected), is the midwifing of childcare organizing. We set up childcare co-ops in churches, and part of that has been getting these co-ops off the ground and figuring out what it looks like to build that organization for more equitable, affordable childcare here in this place. Because as we were listening, not only was “meaning making community” something that people were longing for, but childcare was an urgent, urgent need, as it is everywhere. So that’s what my days look like, I'm a pastor and a childcare organizer. Yeah, that's me.
CA: You've talked a little bit about how your faith ecosystem started and evolved. If you had to encompass what makes Story Dwelling different on a day-to-day basis from an average ELCA Lutheran congregation, how would you describe that?
ES: Yeah, I think the question for any congregation, whether you're the average traditional or you're a mission development, is like, ‘oh, this particular group of people, what's our work to do together?’ And so that's kind of how I think about it. What's our vocation together as a group of friends and as a group of people walking together? What's our work to do? And I think our work to do is increasingly around three perspectives that are really centered in our community. Those three perspectives are working families with young children, queer folks, and people who, in church jargon, we might say they're ex-vangelicals.
Bend is a place with unbelievable wealth disparity. And so the focus on working families is really intentional, and there's a lot of overlap. We have a lot of queer ex-vangelical young working families. So those three groups of people, what is their work to do together? I think it is to center their experiences, as well as the experiences of other people who have been wounded by church, or who have never experienced church or people who feel like the church is called to do actual tangible in-the-flesh work in the world and in our neighborhoods.
So our work together is to make that a reality. It’s to center the perspectives, our own perspectives and other people who have not found their place in traditional western Christianity. And out of that comes a real commitment to childcare, for instance. Childcare is a faithful issue because if we don't feel supported, if we don't have a place for our children to be nurtured, then I think that's a matter of faith, a matter of community, and a matter of love and justice. To center walking alongside local efforts to elevate and be accomplices alongside BIPOC folks. What does racial justice look like in a very white city, in a very white-centered city?
When we prioritize and center those voices, working families, queer folks, and ex-vangelical voices, what emerges is our own kind of special vocabulary of faith, our own theological vocabulary: What do the sacraments look like for people who didn't grow up with communion? What do rituals look like as our children are growing up? How do we come alongside them with ritual? What kind of music do we sing? I mean, I'm the only one who would identify as Lutheran in my congregation. So what kind of hymns are we singing? What's our musical kind of expression in the world? Our work builds out of our own experiences as working families, queer folks and ex-vangelicals. Cultivating that work in the world together and practicing a liberatory theology that comes out of our experiences is the goal.
CA: You’re creating an individualized faith community that is so centered on the people and the individual experiences of the people.
ES: Yeah. We're doing life together based out of our own experiences for sure. And that's part of the name, Story Dwelling. A lot of what is important to us is not only drawing upon ancient stories, biblical stories, and ancient wisdom, but doing a lot of our own storytelling and being in touch through one-to-one conversations as well as through a public kind of storytelling. But to see those stories as sacred, there's nothing that's not sacred.
CA: You moved to Bend for this project in 2017. What have you found to be the biggest challenges in establishing Story Dwelling and keeping it alive?
ES: Maybe there are three that are coming to mind right now. The first is walking alongside people who are coming out of, to be frank, patriarchal, homophobic contexts (church contexts), but who long for a ritual and community and maybe don't want to identify as Christian ever again. There are challenges, but also there's a lot of beauty inherent in creating community out of what we don't want. So I think, again, I would describe that as a really beautiful, really rich fertile challenge is how do we create community about what we're for? Not just what we're against, but both are very important. It's very important to know what we're saying no to. And to be really clear about our no. But then the evolution of this community has been what are we saying yes to? So that's one I would say a beautiful challenge.
A couple of challenges that are contextual about here, but probably a lot of places in the United States, are, and these are not so beautiful challenges, space and resources in a city that is incredibly expensive to live in. Our people, some of them struggle with whether they can continue to call this place home because it's so expensive to live here and the values of this city can be so different from the values we are trying to live as people and as a community. So gathering space, for example, is very difficult to find gathering space that we can afford. We met in homes for a long time, but at a certain point it was very difficult to pay a pastor and to have a gathering space and to have enough resources in this very expensive city. And that's connected to the final challenge that I would say. And I think that other mission developments are struggling with this, but this is a question for the church, for any denomination who's doing new church plants, is if we create community and accompany young working families.
Millennial families on the whole, I would say, cannot afford to pay a pastor. And so there's a rub there of calling pastors to new church plants. Beautiful, vibrant work, as you said. We have lots and lots of children in our community, which I would say the average typical ELCA church would say like, wow, that's wonderful. And yet if you don't have wealth in your congregation, you cannot pay a pastor. And so that's a rub that I think that the denominations will have to reckon with. It can be a beautiful challenge because perhaps we discern in the future that we're going to rely more heavily than we already do on lay ministers and elevating the leadership of folks in the community. I find that millennial working families are pretty at capacity, so it's valuable for us to have a full-time pastor. So there's a tension there. And it's not just a bad one, it can be a very good one to discern, but I think something for the denominations to get really serious about. In the United State to be an ELCA congregation, do you have to have wealthy membership to survive? And so far up to this day, the answer has been yes. And do we want to change the answer to that? And that the question of the hour.
CA: What would you say when so many pastors are feeling burnt out, especially with the pandemic and all of these growing questions and concerns about the church dying out? Where have you found support and encouragement to keep going and keep working towards something better?
ES: I don't feel burnt out. I feel lucky enough to be pastoring a young, excited, and imaginative group of people that is growing. I think of one woman in our community, and their family's pretty new. They've gotten really engaged over the course of the past year, I would say. I met them last summer. The mom in the family and I are about the same age. Her parents moved to the United States while her mother was pregnant with her from Vietnam. They were refugees from Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and they moved to the United States. She grew up Buddhist, and is now in what she might describe as an inter-faith marriage. And they never knew what church or any of that might look like for their family until they found Story Dwelling. And now she feels like this just feels like the right fit for her family. And for me that’s one of the greatest joys of my life to be pastoring in a context where I have a multi-faith family looking for friendship and community and mutual support and church is where they have found it. And to get to be the priest or the pastor of a family like that is a great joy for me. So I would say I'm not burned out around that. My friendships and my people, we have more that we want to do at the end of the day, but we just don't have the energy to do. But we have a lot of excitement, and a lot of conviction. But I'll come back to the previous question of fundraising, grant writing, hustling to just make ends meet for this beautiful group of people for their sake. That does kind of burn me out.
We have more community than I have the capacity to pastor to. I have more children than I certainly have the capacity to pastor to. Having to use my time grant writing, fundraising, hustling for resources does not feel like it brings me life. Yeah, that is the only part. I mean,there are so many granting agencies that are so generous and such great partners. The Synod, my Synod, I love my Synod. But yeah, that doesn't feel like at the end of the day what I want to be using my time to do. My people give me life , hustling for money does not.
CA: What does your gathering space look like right now?
ES: Well, in the pandemic, we had a lot of really cautious folks in our congregation and a lot of children. So we met outside at our local Unity community. They have a fire pit and a labyrinth. So we met outside all winter, and Bend is probably just as cold as Minnesota. This past winter was the first winter we gathered inside at our local Latino Community Association. They have a community hall where they do events. So we rented space from them and in the summer we meet in a public park that's got a playground. So that's really wonderful. And then we're hoping that this fall for the first time, we might have a semi-permanent partnership gathering space at one of our local mental health counseling facilities. So we will see. It's been a very flexible adaptive group of people.
CA: What is a bright spot in your ministry area?
ES: Yeah, maybe something that I haven't mentioned yet that is definitely a bright spot is partnership. Story Dwelling doesn't think of itself just as Sunday mornings. This is a kind of web of relationship. We are also in relationship with other congregations and other entities in our city, and that feels like exactly the way that it's meant to be for us. We're partnering with three other congregations to do ecumenical youth group work, which has been so valuable. We partner with two other congregations to do our childcare work. And so to be doing all of this in teamwork, not only for my congregation, that feels really good. It's not just us. We've got other groups of people who are following their vocations in the world. It takes all of us. One church is not better than the other. Hopefully we are listening to where Spirit is calling us. As a pastor it offers me a lot of grace in my life, relieves a lot of pressure in my life, and together we've been able to do some pretty incredible things that no one congregation could do by themselves. So that's a bright spot.
CA: You talked a little bit about your background in community organizing. What lessons did you learn from that background that you would want to share with other ministers and leaders in the church?
ES: I think the primary one from these really fundamental points of community organizing is listening. I think that's something that I've tried to really center rather than being a kind visionary who's got a vision for a church that I want to make. It was really important to me to come and listen. It was less like casting a vision and more like putting my ear to the ground. That feels like a skill I learned in community organizing. You don't pick an issue and then try to get people to work with you on that. You listen and then people will say, ‘come on, let's get together and work on this together’. The fundamentals of basically one-on-one relational conversations is a lot of where that listening happens. Listening for what people need, what gets them up in the morning, what keeps them up at night, what stresses them out. Really thinking of everyone as a potential leader and accomplice together. I don't think of myself as being in service to the people in my congregation. I think of us as a bunch of leaders together listening to one another and operating out of that listening. So leadership, listening, one-to-ones.
CA: You talked about the idea of ex-vangelicals and people who have been hurt by the church, whether it be queer folks, people of color, women in general, or people who identify as women, or people assigned female at birth. If somebody were to come in, whether it be a congregation or a faith collective or just a minister's life, what are tips that you would give to try and make them feel more welcome and comfortable in a space that has hurt them in the past?
ES: So one of the ways that we think about this in Story Dwelling is not so much that ‘you are welcome here’, but that ‘we are welcome here’. We need all of us in order to feast in the spirit of Jesus. That's our affirmation statement, we don't have a welcome statement. We have an affirmation statement. And part of the spirit of that is, and I've heard this, I didn't make this up, not like you are welcome here to join this thing that we're already doing, but that this was designed with you in mind, and this is designed with your experiences in mind. So that's one piece of the way that we talk about the space that we create together.
Another piece that felt like the right thing to do, that spirit was calling us to do, was to invite people with all of those experiences into leadership, so that they are making the decisions and they are designing the spaces with their own experiences in mind. We have people on our board who might not describe themselves as Christian because we want to make sure we have spaces, and we want to have people making decisions with that perspective. It's a little bit of a shift from “you are welcome here” to this thing that's already happening, but we are designing this out of our own experiences with people with similar pain or similar joy.
Special thanks to Elizabeth Schoen, one of our Church Anew interns over the summer, for her work conducting many of the Leadership Lab interviews and getting the series launched!
Erica Spaet
Pastor Erica Spaet is an ordained pastor in the E L C A and the founder of Story Dwelling, a faith ecosystem in Bend, Oregon. She moved to Bend in 2017 as a mission developer to listen and uncover the longings of the community, particularly among young people, working people, and queer folks. Story Dwelling is a network of people committed to liberation, real relationships, and care for one another and their neighbors. They have a Sunday morning gathering and also focus on issues like childcare and racial justice.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
