Blog Posts

Church Anew 10/17/23 Church Anew 10/17/23

Leadership Lab: Winnie Varghese

We've had to rebuild all of our systems for who we are today. I don't know that we would've had permission without that kind of isolation to rethink some things that probably needed to be rethought, frankly.

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 Rev. Winnie Varghese whose name you might recognize from our Enfleshing Witness project. We are excited to share a deeper dive into the roots of her passion and the richness of her experiences serving Episcopal congregations in Los Angeles, New York City, and now in Atlanta, Georgia.

Church Anew (CA): Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Winnie Varghese (WV): I am an Episcopal priest and the rector of St. Luke's in Atlanta. I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and I served as a priest in New York City for about 20 years and in Los Angeles before that. I've been here in Atlanta for two years.

CA: Can you tell us a little bit about your current ministry context?

WV: St. Luke's is a downtown church in Atlanta. It was founded in 1864, the last year of the Civil War. This is its fourth building, and it's moved within maybe a mile downtown. This building is from 1906. 1906 was the year of the Atlanta race riots, and it was a massacre of black people by white people. That was called a riot, and many happened all over the country at that time. And so this building opened that year, and the rector at the time, Kerry Wilmer, invited W. E. B. DuBois, who was a mile away at Clark Atlanta, Spelman, Morehouse, to come and have a conversation about what had happened. I feel like that's a really iconic piece of who this church is.

We didn't move out of the city during white flight, or when the highway tore through the city during that era of segregation, of disenfranchising black people and emptying out neighborhoods. We're right at that court junction. We've had the kind of leadership that could do things, like have a conversation with DuBois, at that level of conversation in our church on the broad step in a brand new building when things like that just were not happening, but also it feels shameful to read the conversation today. We're ashamed, you know, you couldn't be proud of that conversation, but it happened.

So, I feel like we sit on seven acres in downtown Atlanta that is booming, that is ripe with development possibility, and it has the ministry founded at the church that serves people who are unhoused, that has mental health services that are very accessible and that are linked to spirituality. The food bank for the city was founded here. It has this great sense of service to the community and is thinking about what belonging means and what it means to be a powerful institution in the center of the city with access to all the leadership of the city with an endowment that's robust and booming that actually speaks the truth and creates space for the city we're becoming.

CA: What are some bright spots currently of the ministry of St. Luke's or your own ministry personally?

WV: What's really fun about the city, this church and the city, is two years out of pandemic isolation, which in our church, across the board in the Episcopal church, bishops took a really firm hand in telling people to close their buildings, to not gather in the buildings. So it means that coming from an empty building, an empty site a couple of years ago to coming back to full functioning has been a journey. We are right at the point where we now again have hundreds of people on a Sunday morning and we've got 20 babies in the nursery and we're coming back and you see people on Sunday, so happy to see each other because it's been three years and we can do that again.

It feels just really energized because people are coming back, and we've had to rebuild all of our systems for who we are today. I don't know that we would've had permission without that kind of isolation to rethink some things that probably needed to be rethought, frankly. We've tried to take that opportunity to get it right about what people need, what they can handle, and really to get back in the business of inviting people to be together because it feels good to be in community. On Sunday morning when I asked people to greet each other before we start the opening hymn, it's just raucous, which feels really good in a very big building for it to feel full. It's a really happy time at St. Luke's.

CA: What have been some of the challenges that you've faced in either your current ministry context or previously? What have been the challenges related to creating an equitable, diverse environment that is inclusive of everyone?

WV: I think one of the pieces that we might work with leadership on, lay and ordained, is to really think about belonging and equity. You've got to do your personal work.

We all carry a lot of baggage. I think what I've watched in the church is either one version where it’s kind of resigned: ‘Why would anyone want to come here? Church is so lame, so dull, we're so problematic.’ This self-defeating almost cynical version of church. Or, the other extreme of that would be scolding people that ‘y’all are just getting it wrong and that we've got to get it right.’ Whether you're the kind of church that scolds people on their personal behavior, or on the systems that we live in, and the struggles of the world that we live in.

I think being a grounded Christian leader, a faith leader that has thought about their, and worked on our own, points of pain and trauma that trigger in our own lives. What we're trying to accommodate and account for in leadership, what we're scared of, our own sense of what is good and what makes us good, which is often a very shallow place for most of us. Our desire to be good is probably why we are in church. That's actually a destructive place to act from because good and innocence and all those things are deeply problematic. Really having done the work of thinking through how we function in complex societies, are complicit in those societies, are rewarded for that, are privileged in that. Really doing that work so that we stand in pulpits and in leadership with a lot of humility work, working out our salvation as we are collectively. Speaking modestly and boldly the truth.

That's what prevents people from becoming burned out, from becoming cynical, from becoming resigned to the way things are from or not believing in the power of the gospel to transform the world or the church. I feel like I've just encountered it over and over and over. Both self-righteous and ragey leadership. They're just frustrated with the system, or really sanguine, just kind of, ‘ah, we tried and we couldn't get there’ or burned out or defeated. I feel like I've encountered that character over and over in my adult life. Clearly that's where I'm supposed to learn something about myself, and so I think the capacity to be self-reflective and learn while also being a leader, not using that to be passive, is the trick. That's the journey, and it never ends.

But I think that's the heart of it. I guess another way I'd say that is I remember meeting an older priest when I was a new priest who said that you couldn't be an effective priest unless you had had an encounter with the living Christ and been born again. And she's a mainline Anglican. What is she talking about? Right? I'm not fundamentalist or evangelical, but I think I know what she means now. She had been a priest for a while before she figured that out. If the journey of faith isn't true and active in your life, if you're not on that journey and changing - changing before God, changing yourself - you burn out.

CA: You said a lot of the people, in clergy and church leadership are coming in because they want to be good, but that's not the goal. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that idea?

WV: Often people that want to be in religious leadership…deep down what's happening is you want to be right, you want to be good. And that's often tied to a sense of innocence: that we are good, that there's bad things out there or bad ideas out there, but we are good. And I think it's really naive, and it's an American identity as well. And it's not true. And so if we do something wrong, it's a mistake where we wouldn't have meant genocide or slavery or class oppression. We're good and our hands are clean.

I think it's part of the fallacy of the American identity that because we didn't mean it then it doesn't matter, it's not part of us. I think a true Christian identity is much more about standing in the truth of who we are, and what we inherit, and what our responsibilities are, and then seeking the guidance of the gospel message; seeking to be followers of Jesus as we find our way. That's always going to be messy. There's not a way to step out of that mess.

I've had friends that talk about their call that way. Like ‘I was a lawyer, I was in finance and that was just so conflicted and complex. And so I came to the church where things were on the side of the good,’ and then they're disappointed by how there are still the same old people in the church that were everywhere else. Everywhere we go is just people trying to figure out how to be people together. There's nothing more holy or different in this space except that we're more clear that we're trying to follow this path of Jesus. But it's the same old people in the same old struggles everywhere. We are still making decisions with all the complexity of ourselves.

So I think that desire to separate ourselves from the rest of the world, and I come from that idea of a commune or a utopia or somewhere where we're not having that much impact on the land and we're not causing harm. I have that in me, and it's just not true. There's no version of life that's like that. But I think a lot of people that choose church leadership, we have that idealism in us that there's some way that we can really get this right separate from the world. And I feel like that so much of the story of Jesus is that he steps away for relief, but he's just constantly in the messiest part of the mix where we see the life of God.

CA: Where have you found support and encouragement for some of the harder work that you're doing?

WV: I remember when I was a student at Union watching James Cone, like the great James Cone. He was in his sixties still lecturing. Watching him literally learn with students in class with this amazing lecture, these amazing readings, and then asking questions in such a way that meant that we were learning, and he was learning, and we were learning from each other together.

I remember thinking, I want to be an adult like that. I want to be someone who's always curious and knows how to learn, that can know how to draw teaching out of people.

I learned this in my third congregation. I wish I had learned it earlier, to talk to other leaders here. And it's really interesting to me to watch them guide me and guide themselves to a better solution than I would've come up with myself. And if it is something I might come up with, it's faster and better than I would've done if I had been sitting by myself trying to figure it out. Staying in a real, solid relationship with the people in our community.

I'm answering this very differently than I would've 15 years ago, I would've said, ’here's my colleague group of people that are not attached to where I work’, or ‘here are my friends who are not church people or not in ministry who are my safe place.’

I find that now in our lay leadership, in our staff, like our people, but importantly not just clergy people. Being as inquisitive as Dr. Cone was, and inviting that from them, and being curious brings so much clarity. For me it's really important that it's within the context I'm in, that it's not like a little cabal of clergy are the only people that have answers, or that a little group of people so separated from the church are the people I can really trust. That we do that here, I'm finding, is really important for me.

CA: What words of encouragement, advice, or challenge would you have for ministers and church leaders right now?

WV: There's this beautiful writing: “the response to anxiety is awe and wonder.” [In] our baptismal prayer, we pray for a sense of awe and wonder in God's creation. We are in such an anxious time – for very good reason. What a clown show of a world we live in right now, just hate everywhere. Fascism everywhere. All around us are such strong reactions that feel violent and are violent. We are right to feel anxious. And I think part of being a church leader is that you feel the anxiety of your people. It is so important that we stay in the awe and wonder space. It doesn't mean that we deny anxiety, but that we notice those things that facilitate our being, and those things that make us thankful, and that we make time to notice in those ways.

We don't counter anxiety by repressing it or denying it. We counter it by noticing the great beauty of life. You need creativity to feel courageous. It's not like I have a moment where I think, ‘oh, I'll be brave and say some brave words. I'll be courageous.’ I have moments where I think, ‘oh, this is what needs to be said. This is the truth. This is actually a beautiful truth.’ And I can do that with some humility, say something that feels true. When I get that right, the community comes right back with, ‘oh yeah, that's so true.’ And some people will be mad at us, but we've got to feel creative to do those courageous things. We can't do them out of anxiety, so we have to find ways to step out of our things that take us out of our anxiety. Sometimes that's speaking it, but, often it's getting myself to a more creative place.

I often don't feel confident, but I want people to feel like we can be calm, and go together. That we can make mistakes, and we can come back. Everything in our culture is designed to make us feel like we're alone, and that we need to buy stuff to feel less alone. Whether we're alone or not, really deeply, it's a choice we can make. If we can invite people to be with us, even in those things that we think are our decisions alone, and be with us in those things where it's obvious, we don't have to be alone. To me, that's where courage comes. It's where the spirit works when two or three are gathered. And I think we should resist everything that tells us we must be alone or isolated.

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!

Winnie Varghese

*The Rev. Winnie Varghese is the rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta. She co-hosts the (G)race podcast with The Rev. Azariah France-Williams.*

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.

Church Anew 10/12/23 Church Anew 10/12/23

Leadership Lab: Erika Spaet

A one on one interview with Pastor Erika Spaet exploring the challenges of planting a church and building relationships between the congregation and the community in an ever-changing 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.

Church Anew 9/14/23 Church Anew 9/14/23

Leadership Lab: Jessica Liles

A one on one interview with Jessica Liles exploring the challenges of planting a church and building relationships between the congregation and the community in an ever-changing world.

Church Anew recently sat down with Jessica Liles, Deacon and Director of Faith Formation and Education at the Neighborhood Church in Bentonville, AR. She has also been recently named as the Director of Youth Ministry for the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) and Director of the 2027 Youth Gathering.

Church Anew: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Jessica Liles: I live here in Bentonville, Arkansas. I'm a deacon in the ELCA, married to a pastor. We started the Neighborhood Church about 11 years ago. We planted this church straight out of seminary. We have two kiddos. I particularly love traveling a lot, and national parks are our thing. Joe and I get to do a lot of other fun work for the larger church. We've been part of Mission Developer Training and helping lead the church planning component. We've been doing that since 2018. I've been connected to the Youth Gathering since 2009 and working in the Interactive Learning Center. I've been recently working on a special project with a network called Formation Co-Op, to think about reimagining youth ministry and what that would look like.

CA: Can you talk a little bit more about your ministry context?

JL: Yeah, absolutely. Joe and I planted the Neighborhood Church. He was called here in 2011. We started in an elementary school in a Cafetorium [cafeteria/auditorium], and we rented the space for three hours. We had three hours to get in, set up, have service, and then tear down, but one of the neat elements that we kind of wrapped into worship was fellowship in the middle of service, kind of also holding to the larger framework of worship that gathers the word at meal sending.

And we took the elements of that, and the Lutheran hymnals, and revamped it to feel kind of non-denominational. When folks walk into worship at the Neighborhood Church, they're like, wow, this is non-denominational. And you have these great songs that you hear on the radio with a great prayer and a great message. After the message, we roll right into traditional worship including the Apostle's Creed and the Lord's Prayer and communion. Lots of folks find this is engaging when we have this mix of hitting their spiritual needs in a variety of different ways.

CA: What has been a bright spot in your ministry, whether it be through the Neighborhood Church or through your work with Churchwide, statewide, or synod-wide kind of work?

JL: Being a deacon is this interesting space where you act as the bridge between the church and the world, or the larger context of the church. I think one of the brightest by spots of my ministry is living in that space.

I think another one of the bright spots is the Youth Gathering. You just plop in a city, see 30,000 youth participate and embrace the unknown, embrace the city, embrace everything. I really love interactive learning. It’s amazing to watch young people walk into that space and be able to try to tangibly interact with their faith. They get to see other places in this world where they might connect that maybe they don't see in their home congregations, or they learn about a new ministry and make connections with other folks in other parts of the country, or the world.

CA: What have been some of the challenges in your journey of building the Neighborhood?

JL: Building a church from ground up is some of the hardest work you will ever do. I think part of that challenge is trying to figure out and navigate the space in which you land. This is where you're going to plant a church. You’ve got to get connected to the right ministries, other churches, and create a support space in and around everything you do.

I think for mission starts, one of the bigger challenges often is the movement of people in and out of the building process. The first couple years you have these really impactful, involved, and crucial leaders that helped you start this thing. And then you realize that they must go on to their next thing. That's a really unexpected challenge that I don't think Joe and I were prepared for at the beginning. Now we realize that every ebb and flow of folks within the ministry has come and gone at the right time. The spirit is just moving in this ebb and flow of people because of the gifts they bring are what we needed at that moment to move us to the next spot.

As you grow, just sustaining is a big challenge for mission starts. Part of it is that movement from the pastoral congregation to the programmatic congregation because when you're the person that has done everything and then you start to move into the next phase things get tricky. There are other people that are doing the work and allowing the congregation to see them as knowledgeable and as important as the pastor and the other leaders. Navigating some of those components gets to be a challenge, not just in a mission start, but in a lot of churches that are growing.

CA: So, throughout all of this, where have you found support and encouragement?

JL: I find that camaraderie with other mission planters, people that are in a similar space as you, creates a really supportive and encouraging space. Pastor Anna Johnson at Churchwide has been one of our biggest supporters, encouragers, and cheerleaders. Reuben Durand has also been another one that has just been a phenomenal support for us, as well as some of the other staff at Congregational Vitality. But really getting in and getting connected to other folks living it really has been super life-giving for us. It feels like you're not the only one living these things. They understand the bigger picture of what's happening and are willing to give you compassion, and support, and encouragement. That's been huge to have folks that just have your back and understand the hard work of starting a thing from scratch.

CA: What spurred you and your husband to start the Neighborhood Church? What hole in the community were you trying to fill when you originally decided to create a church plant?

JL: It goes back to our calling together in seminary. I came from a super small town in the northeast corner of North Dakota where our pastor was shared with two congregations. It was a two-point parish. Joe came from Phoenix and Las Vegas where his dad was a pastor of large, massive churches. We kept trying to figure out how we would do ministry together when we came from such different places. For us, it ended up being a great space for us to think about how to merge our experiences.

When we got in the space of starting a church, we needed to just sit and listen for a while. There’re some really important conversations you need to have with city planning, with school districts, school boards, a variety of the other nonprofits in the area, and other churches in the area to figure things out: Where are the gaps? What do we need here? And I think what we intended to bring to Arkansas was this idea of a church for young families, partly because we were in that space and stage of our life of having young children. We embraced that idea of ministering and focusing on young families. Just this idea of providing something new and something different in the lens of the Lutheran world.

When we got to Arkansas, there were all these churches that didn't have any particular denomination in their name. That was a component that we both thought was super important. We don't have Lutheran in our name, and that was intentional because we wanted folks to not be afraid to walk in our doors if they didn't understand what Lutheran meant.

CA: What makes Neighborhood Church so approachable?

JL: Yeah, you walk in and everyone's going to say hello to you. It’s that sense of hospitality and welcome that is so important to us. When you start a church, you think all about what the culture of the church is going to be? What are we going to do? Our folks have realized that at one point they were a visitor, and someone walked up to them, and said hello, and had a fantastic conversation with them that made them feel welcome. Then they feel empowered to go and do that for the next person. Anyone can walk in and be welcomed.

Also, we’re super focused on kids in regard to our worship. We greet the kids and try and engage with them. Then we talk to the parents. If you're focusing on young adults, you have to engage in conversations with young adults, not with their parents. That's been a big part of us really trying to be a welcoming, approachable congregation.

CA: Many parents struggle to get their kids interested in to church. How can adults foster a love of faith and community in their kids?

JL: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's so foundational to faith going beyond the childhood years into the teen years, into the college years.

Our catchphrase is this: parents don't bring kids to church; kids bring parents to church. If you think about that it means that you are engaging, and you're tailoring the experience to children. On Sunday morning when mom and dad are tired, and the kids wake up excited for church, mom and dad will go to church because the kids want to go to church. Think about walking into the space, from the parking lot all the way in. What elements screen children? What elements engage children?

We have a super engaging children's ministry. Again, a lot of this has changed because of COVID, but I think what was so successful for us was that in our form of worship, if you will, families start with worship together. We do this two or three song opener where families are together worshiping. Joe comes up and does a welcome. He invites kids forward for a quick sermon. He provides a super engaging children's message, and he does a fantastic job getting the kids excited. He engages the kids and asks them to bring their parents up. So, if we're doing a pushup contest, Joe's not going to ask the kids to do the pushup contest. He's going to ask the kids to go grab their parents, and their parents are going to have a pushup contest engaging the family in worship. We also create opportunities to keep children engaged in the traditional aspects of worship.

Some people love it and stay forever, and some people are mortified and will never come back, but I think being comfortable in that is an important piece. We're not trying to keep all the sheep; we're trying to feed the flock. If they are not being fed here at the Neighborhood, we know all the other pastors in the area, so we can help find the place where you're going to worship and be connected the most.

I think another successful thing that we've done from the very beginning is expanding church use. Walking into church is a super scary thing for a lot of people, so we built the church as space to be used for more than just a Sunday morning service.

We do popcorn theologies on Friday nights. We would play whatever popular Disney or Pixar movie was happening at the time. We would have food and they would watch the movie as a family. And then the only thing we did at the end of the movie was ask the question, “where did you see God in this movie?” And we wouldn't let the parents’ answer. We wanted the kids to answer, and then we circle up and we pray and that's it. It was easier for families to invite friends to something like that rather than on a Sunday morning. It was an easy stepping point for an experience of the church without it being a worship service.

We had an experience before we planted the church. Like I said, I think I was pregnant with Landon. Kaleigh was probably year and a half, almost two maybe. And we were sitting in a church in the area, a traditional Lutheran church, and she's a year and a half. She does not sit still. She won't go to the nursery. So, she's literally crawling up and down the pews, and then a lady turned around and shushed us, and I thought Joe was going to lose his ever-loving mind. Then we walked out of the room, he's like, we will never ever have that happen to the Neighborhood. That is a no-go for me. Kids are a huge part of our life. So yeah, it's playful.

CA: The Neighborhood has really innovated in using the internet and social media. Especially since the pandemic, when everything was shut down.

JL: Yeah. Joe does a great job being aware of what's happening next. We were streaming when COVID hit in March. Joe knew how important it was to be there and to be streaming from that very first Sunday. It was supposed to be our largest Stewardship Sunday of the Neighborhood's history. And it was that Sunday we chose to go completely digital.

We realized how hard it was to pivot for a lot of other congregations. By that May, we had reached out to, I think, all 65 synods at that point offering to teach them how to use streaming tech. I think we had between 100-150 churches join in on that. That's where a big catalyst for our outreach towards that ministry started. We met Matt Short, who's at Milwaukee Synod, and he got us connected to a grant with the Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod churches in Milwaukee.

We did a tech conference for them. We did three lead-up events, and then a big one-day conference on Digital Reformation, that’s what we called it. And then helped install tech into probably 15 different churches in Milwaukee. We’ve continued to install tech, and cameras, and switchboards, and all the things that you need to stream. So not only was it important for us to be there, but it was also important for us to help others to get to that point because the larger Church understands now too. Your reach is now farther beyond your town or even your county. You have people watching from all over the country, from all over the world.

It is so important to continue this ministry in the digital sense, whether it be streaming, or social media, or little video clips on YouTube, whatever it is.

CA: As we wrap up, what words of encouragement and or challenge would you share with other leaders in your faith community or in another city?

JL: What we've taken as the vision of the Neighborhood is grounded in Philippians 3:12-14, and it is that we strive to change church and create relationships. If those are two foundational principles that church leaders or churches can live by, it gives them permission to do a lot of things that I think folks might be nervous about. It empowers you. Creating relationships foundationally with God is so important. And like I said, the foundation of all of that is so that you can go out to the community and build relationships there, and then build relationships within the congregation. That changing church isn't scary when you're doing it, when you've created relationships on a great foundation. Change is hard. And we went through a lot of change in 2020 and beyond.

My encouragement would be to continue to embrace change and to try something different and to think and move outside the box. Joe and I did the keynote speech at the North Texas North Louisiana Synod Assembly this spring, and we like to do this paperclip activity. We call it “clip art”. So, we all know that the paperclip has one use, but we want you to tell us as many uses you can have for the paperclip. Write 'em all down. Now apply that process to the church: What are the uses of the church? How is your church building being used? How is your ministry being used? Then we give you a pile of paperclips, and you to build something out of paperclips that's functional, or art, or whatever.

Church leaders should do the same thing for ministries. It’s okay to stop doing something. It's okay to do something completely different. Try something for six weeks. If it doesn't work, try to fix it and move on, or scrap it. Always being willing to change, to move, and embrace the culture and the world around you.

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!

Jessica Liles

Jessica Liles has served in many different roles; children's ministry, youth director, admin, and overall master organizer of all things church. Ordained as a Deacon in 2021, she is the extension from the church out into the community! She currently serves as the Faith Formation and Education Director guiding people to understand how to live out their relationship with Jesus!

all you need for a meaningful CONVERSATION ABOUT MONEY

Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Church Anew 9/1/23 Church Anew 9/1/23

Leadership Lab: Wesley Morris

Our first interview in the Leadership Lab series with Rev. Wesley Morris.

Our first interview is with Wesley Morris, who was involved in our Enfleshing Witness project. He has roots in community organizing, and is currently serving as pastor of Faith Community Church in Greensboro, North Carolina. We were honored to have a Zoom conversation chock full of wisdom we wanted to share.

Church Anew: What is your ministry context?

Wesley Morris: I am the senior pastor of Faith Community Church. The second pastor of this church, the founding pastor, and pastoral team emeritus are my elders, my mentors. I still see them, and they are members of the church. I came to this work of pastor through being a youth pastor and a child of the church, and also being someone who effectively became disenchanted with the church for a while. Then I had a journey of self reclamation, raising my awareness of who I was, and who I was becoming. And so a lot of that was exploration into religious engagement, and understanding that when I came back to the church it was really under the salvific scripture of Matthew 11:28. “Come on to me, all you who are heavy laden and burdened down with care. and I will give you rest”. So that is part of my scope of ministry. There are folks who live in the continual need of rest. These are some inner needs that I think about when I think about our ministry. Our ministry is geared towards children, number one. Creating and having a sustainable viable environment where children get to be children. and don’t have to rush into adulthood.

Another aspect of our church is geared towards a justice ministry, a ministry of fairness, a ministry of looking that is not abstract, but practical. Attending our city council meetings, and protests [if need be], and calling in when you have the opportunity to speak out, and proclaiming liberty for those who have been bruised. That's the Lukean [Luke is often viewed as the social justice gospel] approach to Jesus’s ministry that we take in here. It's generational in nature, but also by circumstance because we are an older congregation. The Beloved Community Center is in our church, as well. It is a nonprofit that we have a very close relationship with. Sometimes people even say, Beloved Community Church, even though we are the Faith Community Church. Beloved is anchored in the truth and reconciliation work of the city of Greensboro and so is our ministry.

CA: What have been some challenges in your ministry area?

WM: The model of churches and of being a senior pastor. I was in seminary learning, and I thought a lot about Christian education and how I would deploy what I learned. But then it came to a point where I realized there are 52 weeks in the year, and that's 52 sermons. If you're one pastor, and then there's Bible study, and there's pastoral care. A lot of my peers, myself included, have to be bi-vocational.

There's a strong cultural impact of emerging as a church anew within a church that has a very strong, a very powerful ministry and history, and so I think I would name the challenges as the stretching, the tugs, and the pulls that happen in the pastoral position. The setup of a church, and the many roles of a pastor, are struggles that I still deal with.

CA: When did the Matthew passage really become part of your call and your ministry?

WM: Before I joined the Church in 2008, I had left and gone with other spiritual and faith communities. Those spaces I still highly honor, and they became integrated into what I do now. I was physically worn out. Looking at my life, I was zipping around traveling, organizing. I was intimate with burn out. That was an invitation from Jesus to let me speak with you and sit with you and talk with you. I often relate to the the man who was possessed. He was chained outside the the city limits by the tombs. The conclusion of that story was that Jesus related to him and just sat with him, and then they said he came to himself. Basically just sitting down and talking and acknowledging who he was, he was released from some of that burden.

I found myself needing rest for my body and rest for my soul, because while I was greatly impacted positively by my time with other spiritual traditions, it felt like I was kind of on a road trip. It didn't feel home. Coming back to that Scripture was where I found a renewed sense of self, and that helped me to start seeing my mentors living the Word of God differently. They told me, “We're gonna be rewiring how you understand some of the things that you hear and the things that you see, and that rewiring really was this re-description of love. In practice, what does love do in a housing struggle? What does love do in the middle of a tobacco field? When there are folks coming together? When people’s human rights are being abused? What does love do in the middle of street conflict?” Those are literal examples that I actually have by way of being with this community.

CA: Can you share some of the wisdom that you learned from your time at Union Theological Seminary either from mentors or your own spiritual journey?

WM: I went wanting to step back and to be more invested in the reading and research aspects of seminary, which was totally blown up in my first month because of the killings all throughout the country. My first month was 2014, and Michael Brown was killed by the police in Ferguson, and then Eric Garner was killed in New York, and that's where our school is. My first semester, they interrupted our studies, and we went out to Ferguson, Missouri by bus to bear witness and to answer a national call to join them. During this time, I'm studying with Dr. James Cone as my advisor, and he's teaching black liberation theology in this context. It was the election of Donald Trump, and the embattling of Republicans and Democrats, and all that. So my seminary experience was bookended by a city in total uproar, and a nation and a country pretty much full of conflict. Sandwiched there, I'm reading Bonhoeffer and the traditional seminary text and getting real-time application. That's one thing I took from this super-concentrated experience. It was a super experience, for folks who care about social justice for sure, but I learned there are so many nuanced ways of approaching liberation. That to be able to learn what liberation looks like in this part of the country, and to listen to classmates who came for that call was eye-opening. What I realized is that it's not the place. It's actually the people that venture there, and the spirit that they believe is there.

CA: How has your other vocation of community organizing informed your ministry?

WM: There's a phrase that I got when I was younger, that everything is one thing. When I'm doing a diversity of projects, or wrangling a multiplicity of ideas, I can settle back and say this is about community, or this is about building relationships. That's the one thing. It's about building relationships, quality relationships. So when I was a community organizer, it was on the front of homeless hospitality. It was on the front of economic justice and housing justice and peace treaty work, but in all of that we're just building community. I'm not shrugging it off, but it helped me to dial back, to focus.

CA: What advice do you have for pastors and ministers who are trying to broaden their outreach with congregations who may be more insular?

WM: I love this question because I always say the same thing. Go to the library, and look at the bulletin board, and see what people have questions about. Ask librarians what's their sense of the community? What's their sense of what's been going on or what's happening? The other thing is, I'm a child of working in community centers. The person that runs the community center, that's another person. Go talk to them. If you can just spend 30 min with them and talk about what's their sense of the neighborhood? Also watch the local news or the public access channel. Those are the things that have helped me when I go to other places and want to be respectful. The last two are things are something I just do. I don't necessarily recommend them. Whatever you like to do, whatever you want to do, it's happening somewhere in the place, and it's probably not too far away from you. And so when we're in meetings we can talk about these things and understand where everyone is coming from.

CA: What words of encouragement or challenge do you want to share with other church leaders?

WM: Do the best you can. Others have experienced what you're experiencing right now, so you’re not alone. Try to read. I read Howard Thurman and Renita Wes. They were writers out of the pastoral tradition that I think squeeze a lot out of it. It's like, you know, you squeeze an orange and a lot of juice comes out, but if you squeeze a little bit more, a little bit more will come out. I think they do the extra squeezing on the pastoral experience because I'm trying to be as gentle and nice as I can on understanding that part. Also, remember that it's okay to stop, and not do something. That it's okay to change your course. All those things, I think, should be said much, much more. Failure isn't what you think it is, you know. Don't think of yourself as a failure.

Special thanks to Elizabeth Schoen, one of our Church Anew interns over the summer, for her work to get the Leadership Lab series launched!

Wesley Morris

Wesley Morris is the Senior Pastor of Faith Community Church in Greensboro, NC. Also, he is a dedicated coach, facilitator, community organizer, chaplain and internationally recognized leader who uses his dynamic speaking talents to inspire all who have the opportunity to hear his voice.

all you need for a meaningful CONVERSATION ABOUT MONEY

Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Blog Posts

Leadership Lab: Winnie Varghese

Winnie Varghese

The Rev. Winnie Varghese is the rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta. She co-hosts the (G)race podcast with The Rev. Azariah France-Williams.

Leadership Lab: Erika Spaet

Erica Spaet

Leadership Lab: Jessica Liles

Jessica Liles

Leadership Lab: Wesley Morris

Wesley Morris

Wesley Morris is the Senior Pastor of Faith Community Church in Greensboro, NC. Also, he is a dedicated coach, facilitator, community organizer, chaplain and internationally recognized leader who uses his dynamic speaking talents to inspire all who have the opportunity to hear his voice.