Leadership Lab: Winnie Varghese
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!
