Blog Posts
The Importance of Saying “Yes”
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Louis was a UCLA graduate student, working towards his PhD in engineering, when he realized that college student homelessness was a massive under-the-radar problem. It bothered him. A lot. Louis felt compelled to do something about this problem and set his mind on opening a shelter to house homeless college students. He figured there might be a church, synagogue or mosque near campus that might be interested, so he set out to meet with congregation leaders.
Each time Louis presented his idea, he was met with sympathetic ears … but the answer was always a disappointing "no."
Louis pushed on. After meeting Louis, the Executive Director of the Westside (Los Angeles) Coalition for Housing, Hunger and Health, approached me shortly after I began serving as Senior Pastor at Mt. Olive Lutheran Church in Santa Monica, California. She said to me, “Pastor, there is a young man with a dream and I would like you to meet him”
By the time I met with Louis he had already spoken with some 50 other west Los Angeles and Santa Monica congregations. I was the 51st.
And I was the one who said “yes.”
Now I knew nothing about homelessness among college students but quickly discovered that some 10% of college students in California were homeless (and 20% hungry). While those numbers are higher in California than other parts of the USA, because of the high cost of housing in our state, I also found that this is a national problem, affecting students across the USA.
Louis’ dream was to open the “Bruin” shelter (“Bruin” is the nickname for UCLA athletes and students), staffed by volunteer students. It was to be the first shelter for homeless college students in the USA and only the second shelter for homeless people run by college students in the USA (the other shelter run by college students was at University Lutheran Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a shelter for the general homeless population). Student volunteers would serve as resident assistants and provide dinner and breakfast for our residents. They would also raise the funds for the ongoing expenses. Residents would be pre-screened by the student leaders and stay in the shelter for the entire semester, or until they could find more permanent housing.
Mt. Olive Church had been around since 1942. It is a small (225 members) but very active congregation. A large (100+ students) preschool. Home of the Westside Coalition for Housing, Hunger and Health. Host to fifteen 12 step groups and monthly jazz concerts as well as many other musical and community groups.
And, in 2015, a congregation with unused space in our facilities.
We allowed the shelter to turn two unused classrooms into a large dorm room for ten residents and let them use the Parish Hall balcony area for storage. Since the residents came in each evening around 7pm and left each morning at 7am, they were able to use other shared facilities like the kitchen and other spaces for study.
So, it was easy for our Congregation Council and for me to say “yes.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, this new venture was not without challenges and setbacks. We needed to get a zoning change to allow us to be a “hotel” in our neighborhood. We needed renovations to our facilities, adding a shower to one of our bathrooms and a sprinkler system to the new dorm room where 10 students would sleep. We opened and then had to shut down for a time because of these zoning and renovations needs.
But we also had amazing support from our congregation and community. Before approving the zoning change, the City of Santa Monica solicited comments from the community and received 62 responses, 60 of them positive! We had financial support from the Santa Monica City Council, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and the ELCA’s Southwest California Synod, among many others. A local architect did all the architectural drawings for the needed building changes and even found a local contractor to donate the renovations. A Los Angeles Times newspaper columnist became our champion. People would literally stop me on the street and ask how they could help!
The night we opened it rained. We had gotten homeless students out of their cars and off the streets into a safe, dry place to sleep, eat and study.
In addition to financial support, the shelter received amazing media coverage with articles on The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times newspapers among many others plus stories on PBS and NPR and a 2019 feature story on CBS Sunday Morning (which was followed by a Sunday Doonesbury comic about college student homelessness – I wonder where Garry Trudeau got that idea?)
Since we opened the Bruin Shelter, our college student homeless shelter ministry, now called “Students 4 Students Shelters,” has expanded to include the Trojan Shelter (staffed by volunteer students from the University of Southern California) in Los Angeles and the Aggie House in Davis, California (staffed by student volunteers at the University of California at Davis). Students are ready to open the Slug Shelter in Santa Cruz, California (staffed by student volunteers from the University of California at Santa Cruz) as soon as they can find a site. We are in conversation with student leaders at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, among other campuses. All sponsored by Mt. Olive Lutheran Church.
All because the leaders of Mt. Olive said “yes.
Lots of congregations have unused space, often nearly empty for six days each week. And the housing crisis affects every community. No one left Mt. Olive because we opened the shelter. On the contrary, Mt. Olive membership grew because of our shelter ministry. People joined our congregation because they wanted to be part of a church that served the community in this way. Our Congregation Council was unanimous in support for this effort. We did not feel we needed to go the congregation for an approval vote. The shelter paid/pays its own way. There was/is no financial burden for Mt. Olive because of the shelter ministry.
Maybe it is time for your congregation to say “yes?”
More information on Students 4 Students Shelters can be found at www.s4sla.org .
Rev. Eric Shafer
The Rev. Eric C. Shafer was Senior Pastor at Mt. Olive Lutheran Church in Santa Monica from April, 2014 until his retirement in July, 2022. He is currently the “Pastor in Residence” for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
All you need to lead your community through a meaningful Lenten journey.
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.
PKs are people too!
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One of the things I vowed to myself when I got ordained was that my kid would not hate the church just because I was a pastor.
My daughter was so proud of me on my ordination day, it was so sweet. She knew something important was happening, but at age 5 she didn’t really understand that the path ahead of her had just gotten a lot more complicated because her mom became a pastor.
Pastors kids - or PKs, as they are sometimes called, have a reputation.
They are either so good and careful under the weight of all those expectations, or they shed them completely by acting outside of each one.
Like I said - PKs have a reputation.
But I’m not sure it’s fair. Even if it’s true in many or even most cases, it’s not fair.
After all, the pastor is called to live a life worthy of the calling, to live above reproach, but our families are not.
They do not make the same vows as we do, do not sign up for the pedestal we are placed on. They most certainly are not called to the church as we are.
And yet, if we’re honest, there is a kind of secondary pedestal we put these clergy kids on.
One they certainly didn't ask for, and one that is easier to fall from because they are just kids. Regular kids.
Learning, growing, making mistakes, all under the watchful eye of an entire community or congregation because they happen to be related to a public figure.
So then how do we care for these kids?
From both sides of the equation too - clergy and congregation.
As clergy, how do we let them just be themselves - and as congregation members, how can we make sure we’re not applying our expectations of the pastor onto their children?
(This would be a good time to reflect on the unreasonable expectations congregations have set on their pastors but that’s a blog post for another day.)
I recently asked my daughter, now 12 (going on 20) what she liked about being a pastor’s kid. She had only one answer, and that was “I like the privilege of going into the pastor office area.” It made me laugh but also broke my heart a little bit.
That’s it? I thought. That can’t be it.
When I asked her what things she didn’t like, the list was a lot longer.
She said that people assume a lot of things about her, like that she knows a lot about the Bible, or that her faith is really solid, or that people think they know her just because they know me. “People talk to me like I’m supposed to know them and I don't,” she said. “They don’t know me either, they talk to me like I’m you but I’m not you.”
I’m not you mom.
Oooof.
Tweens are the reason they call it the “brutal truth” I am certain.
But she’s not wrong
I wonder if we can hold spaces for PKs in ways that we haven’t thought of before. I wonder if we can honor them for who they are, how they are unique and wonderful, and let them be those things outside of the public eye.
I hold the promise I made to myself when I was ordained close these days. I don’t want my daughter to hate the church. I want to pass my faith down to her just as much as any other parent does. And I also know she is at the age where creating space from her parents is natural, where wanting to have her own faith and her own values is normal and a part of what she is trying to navigate.
Covid had the unintended consequence of giving my child space from being the pastor’s kid in front of everyone. She doesn’t come to church in person anymore. She attends at home, in her pajamas, on the couch. “No strangers talk to me at home mom” she says. And who can blame her?
As a pastor, and a parent, I’ve had to ask myself, what is more important to me? Is my child’s in person attendance at my church more important to me than her faith, her boundaries?
As a clergy parent, here are other questions I have been asking lately:
Do I have the space for this? Can I let her be herself?
Can I be only a parent and not a pastor for my kid? Can I separate the two?
Do I trust her to seek out faith in safe spaces?
Do I believe that she knows herself well enough to know what is safe and what is not?
Can I stay with her in this messy space as she figures it out, just as I did?
Can I handle the judgment that is sure to arise when my tween does not attend worship with me?
Here are some questions to consider if you are a congregation member:
Do you know the pastor’s child/ren’s name?
Do you know the name of any of the other children in your congregation?
Do you talk to the pastor's kid more than you talk to any other young person in your midst?
What do you think you know about the pastor’s child?
Have you placed any expectations on the pastor’s child that you haven’t placed on other kids in the congregation?
Can you let your pastor be a parent outside of your purview?
None of these questions are easy for any of us.
But asking them matters a lot.
It matters to pastors, yes, but it really, really, matters to those PKs.
Rev. Natalia Terfa
Natalia is a Lutheran pastor and author who lives in Minneapolis with her hubby, kiddo, and kitty babies. She loves to bake, to read, practice yoga, and find nature adventures. She is passionate about the church of the future, one with no boundaries and filled to the brim with love and grace and laughter and snark and a lot of fellow “not that kind of Christians.”
Natalia co-hosts Cafeteria Christian, a podcast for people who love Jesus but aren’t so sure about his followers.
All you need to lead your community through a meaningful Lenten journey.
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.
Preaching and Teaching with Love and Respect for the Jewish People—Introducing a New Resource
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This article will introduce readers to a newly-published resource titled, “Preaching and Teaching with Love and Respect for the Jewish People.” This publication is a product of the ELCA’s Consultative Panel on Lutheran-Jewish Relations and was written under the leadership of Dr. Peter Pettit. The title of this new resource echoes the ELCA’s 1994 “A Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to the Jewish Community,” which names an “urgent desire to live out our faith in Jesus Christ with love and respect for the Jewish people.” I was but one contributor to this important work. What follows is my own sense of this document’s significance, goals, and contents. I’ll begin with some reflections on why it is needed in 2022.
Significance in 2022
In measurable ways, Christian-Jewish relations have improved—whether one thinks in terms of public denominational statements, interfaith collaboration, or deeper attention to Jewish sources in Christian circles. And yet corrosive (and often subtle) currents continue to flow through Christian communities of all theological and ideological stripes. Anti-Jewish attitudes and practices are not unique to the political left or right. They are Christian problems with deep historical roots in some of our most cherished understandings of God.
None of this is surprising. Christianity has many dark and disturbing chapters in its history. In far too many cases, those chapters have involved the Christian mistreatment of Jewish neighbors. Lutherans have a particular stake in this conversation, since our namesake (Martin Luther) represented Jews in profoundly disturbing ways, even calling for rulers to adopt explicitly violent policies. (1)
Concern for the impact of Christian theology on Jewish lives remains of critical importance in contemporary America. The FBI gathers data on hate crimes, which are defined as “a committed criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias(es) against a: race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, gender identity.” The data are unambiguous: Jews remain at risk in America today. In fact, of all the religious groups the FBI tracks, Jews are the most at-risk religious group in America. According to the 2020 report, there were 683 anti-Jewish incidents (a 28% drop since 2019), 110 anti-Muslim incidents (a 38% drop since 2019), 15 anti-Buddhist incidents (increase of 200%), and 89 anti-Sikh incidents (82% increase). The Anti-Defamation League also does a yearly audit of anti-Jewish incidents. In 2020, they reported 2,024. The numbers tell a shocking story: The Jewish community bears the brunt of anti-religious hatred in America.
Given these contemporary realities, I was eager to accept an invitation from Dr. Pettit to contribute to “Preaching and Teaching with Love and Respect for Our Jewish Neighbors.” His vision for this project and his resolve to see it to its conclusion animated the writing team’s work at every juncture.
Audience and Usage
As the title indicates, this guide is for anyone in the church who has a teaching or preaching role. At first glance, that might seem too narrowly construed. But it all depends on how one defines preaching and teaching. As I see it, this guide was written for anyone involved in the church’s public witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
With this definition in mind, the audience for this guide includes everyone from pastors to digital content creators, from youth leaders to musicians, and from confirmation teachers to adult education facilitators. Regarding content creators, it is especially important to note the significant role played by visual media in the perpetuation of anti-Jewish concepts and sentiments. This observation was true in the period of the Reformation and remains true today. Anyone charged with the task of teaching children (camp counselors, youth workers, teachers) would benefit from this guide, since many of the most problematic anti-Jewish ideas creep in (often unintentionally) when we are very young.
The guide itself can be used in a variety of ways and contexts. As a starting point, it is divided into ten major sections (more on this below), making the document easy to adapt into a curriculum, whether in the context of individual or group-based study. Given the abundance of bibliographic references, the guide can also serve as an entry point into the larger world of Jewish-Christian dialogue. With the slow rise of Jewish-Christian dialogue, an abundance of resources now exist that can help a person navigate both the joys and complexities of this important conversation. And finally, the guide could easily provide scaffolding for a sermon or teaching series. Many other options exist, but these can at least serve as a starting point.
Content and Organization
The guide is structured around 10 topic areas. The first six emerge out of Scripture itself and include the following:
Prophetic language
Pharisees, scribes, priests and Jewish elders
Jesus and the Jewish law in the Gospels
The historical settings of the Gospels
Paul among Jews and Gentiles — and later readings of Paul
Judaisms of the first century and 21st century.
The final four pay attention to key theological categories that have a special place within Christian (and especially Lutheran) theology and liturgy:
Law and gospel; promise and fulfillment
Where sin divides (Luther’s notion of sinner/saint)
The old/new rhetoric of the Letter to the Hebrews
Misleading lectionary dynamics.
Each of these topics is covered in a mini-essay (typically just a few pages long), which begins with a section we title, “Problematic” and “Better.” Here we describe problematic ways the topic of choice has been engaged in the church, followed by a proposal for a better way forward.
Regular call-out boxes draw attention to key biblical texts, practical insights, and other notable facts. Each essay is intended to be theologically rich and eminently practical.
A Handful of Hopes
As a scholar and teacher of the Old Testament, I take great delight in introducing Christians to the fascinating world of early Judaism. This is, quite literally, the matrix of Jesus’ own religious and cultural identity. But more is at stake than mere historical curiosity. Christian love and respect for Jewish people is not simply grounded in the fact that Jews are human beings who bear the image of God—they certainly are, as are all humans. The Jewish people bear an additional mark of dignity: they are a covenant people whose members are the recipients of unbroken divine promises. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection do nothing to alter this. When Christians deny the covenant status of the Jewish people, they undermine the very foundations of Christian hope. Anti-Jewish theology is anti-Christian theology. My first hope is that this guide will encourage a similar conviction among its readers.
I am regularly troubled by how effortlessly we, as Christians, slip into anti-Jewish ways of interpreting the Bible and especially the person and work of Jesus. My second hope is that readers of this guide will develop a deeper awareness of how anti-Jewish currents are still very much at work in Christian churches today—and probably also in their teaching, preaching, and theology.
Finally, I hope this guide will inspire interfaith cooperation. Jewish people are often members of our communities. Jewish children play on soccer teams, participate in 4-H, and make music in the school band. Jewish adults run for local office, manage local businesses, and donate to important causes. It’s one thing to speak more accurately and generatively about Jesus’ Jewish heritage and quite another thing to see Jewish people as important partners in the making of a more fruitful and trustworthy world. Working toward the latter will require Christians first to examine how their own theological tradition works against just such a future.
Footnotes:
(1) Gritsch, Eric, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism: Against His Better Judgment (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 2012).
Dr. Michael J. Chan
Dr. Chan is the Executive Director of the Center for Faith and Work at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota. Prior to this position, he was associate professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University and is a graduate of Luther Seminary (M.A. in biblical theology) and Pacific Lutheran University (B.A. in elementary education).
Host: Gospel Beautiful Podcast
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.