A final reflection from my fellowship project.

I feel like I’ve started a lot of papers concerning Lutheran identity and how I have encountered my theological identity with the phrase, “The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) acknowledges that they struggle to be a diverse mainline Protestant denomination within the United States.” That struggle has become part of my faith formation and part of a personal challenge for me as well. Part of that struggle is having a sense of being “the other” within my denomination, which has contributed to a limited experience of being a member of the body of Christ. Part of that limited experience comes in naming the demon of racism. Racism, I found, was not a random occurrence, but institutional and systemic.

Throughout the discernment process, I was not only struggling to find my identity as a pastor and church leader, but also struggling to find my identity as a minority member of the ELCA, remembering that within the demographic makeup of the denomination, I represent less than 0.5% of the population within the ELCA. As such a small percentage of the ethnic makeup of the ELCA, I constantly wondered what would it mean to embody pastoral leadership? Were there others within pastoral and lay leadership that were willing to share their stories and experiences with me? Within part of my field study and academic coursework, I was very taken with testimonies and an exercise called “talk story.” It was through the means of testimony and “talk story” that the experiences of people deemed as “the other” had a very human face. Sharing stories and sharing experiences could be used as tools to create a community. With the opportunity to hear marginalized voices, I wanted to figure out ways to not only hear additional voices, but also find ways for voices to be heard throughout the denomination. With these testimonies, I wanted to think of ways to turn painful experiences into something constructive and life giving. Sharing stories is important for the church’s mission, partly to realize that we have different and rich experiences to share in our faith tradition, but also to recognize that individuals are created as special and unique beings that have unique experiences within a life of faith. Part of evangelization is through the sharing of testimony and personal stories of faith and experience. Within my discernment circle, I talked about a desire to interview Asian American pastors and lay leaders within the ELCA. It was important that the interviews take place face-to-face, as so much of a story and personality can be shared when being in the presence of a storyteller. I realized that I need to look speak with ordained and lay leaders who have had parallel experiences, sharing experience and talking to one another about those lived, embodied experiences. I had a desire to hear different stories, but to also wondering if sharing such stories would normalize my experience by getting to share my story within a community.

Part of the adventure of this project was finding interview subjects. I ended up taking a “snowball sample” of sorts. I would speak to one person, who would then refer me to more people. One of the successes of my project was the opportunity to network with Asian and Asian American pastors and lay leaders within the ELCA. Since I was lacking an ethnic community with which I could relate, this project provided me the valuable opportunity to speak to pastors and lay leaders and share our experiences with one another. There was the opportunity to find new to me brothers and sisters in Christ. Some of these new brothers and sisters in Christ shared similar experiences of confusion and otherness within the denomination. In sharing stories with one another, there was a common thread in conversations in thankfulness of meeting one another and having the opportunity to share stories with one another, face-to-face, and Incarnational, as opposed to reading words off a page or computer screen. Snowball sampling was also a weakness to the project. While it was adventurous to travel around the country speaking to new people, throughout the course of the project I heard about more people that I could have interviewed. While the project itself is over, I am still contacting people from the snowball sample.

I had personal expectations of interviewing people every day while visiting a new city. I prepared six questions used in every interview. Some of the questions were tailored depending on interviewing a pastor or a lay leader, but overall, the questions were very similar. I was surprised that many of the interviews were quite lengthy, some taking place over the course of many hours. I thought I could be mechanical in interviewing pastors and lay leaders. Initially, I was disappointed that I didn’t have interviews lined up every day, but I didn’t realize how I became emotionally invested in each interview. In retrospect, I am now glad I didn’t have interviews scheduled for every single day traveling. With some time off in each city I visited, I had time to process the interviews and if necessary, debrief with close confidants.

What did not work well in the project was part of my ingrained cultural conditioning. In speaking with older Asian and Asian American pastors, there was a sort of awkwardness with age and gender roles. Many interviews felt like a parent giving a child advice, and that as a dutiful and respectful child, I needed to follow through on such advice. I also wonder if my personal cultural issues contributed to me holding back on some of the interviews and asking more questions about the advice I received from the older male pastors.

Trying to edit a film in time to hopefully present something to the fellow’s retreat was also a mistake. I have around thirty hours of video for the interviews, as well as two hours of only audio recordings. With limited knowledge of film editing and software, this was a huge mistake. When I completed all of the interviews and returned home, I was overwhelmed with sifting through all of the video and audio to find a way to create a coherent short film. Since I only gave myself two weeks between the end of the interviews and the start of the fellow’s retreat, I realized in the midst of those two weeks that I would not be able to complete a short and coherent film in that amount of time. I’m still going through the video interviews, though, so I can have something to show my synodical office for next year.

Another aspect of the project that did not work for me was expanding the scope of my project. I went outside the scope of my revised proposal and visited three ELCA seminaries to talk about diversity education and how that was included in a seminary’s pedagogy. Since I was visiting three cities that were home to an ELCA seminary, I thought it would be a good opportunity to explore if and how diversity was being included in a seminary education. One of the three visits was successful. My time at Lutheran School of Theology Philadelphia was very valuable, but it was not necessary for me to visit Luther School of Theology Chicago and Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. I had hopes that other ELCA seminaries were including diversity within their pedagogy in different ways, but I was not adequately prepared to ask the right questions when making these visits.

Initially, I felt that I was adequate in networking in a new community. When starting seminary, I did not know of the existence of the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Ministry within the ELCA’s Office of Multicultural Ministries. This project gave me the opportunity to meet many pastors and lay leaders involved with AAPI. When I initially started my seminary education, I was lonely and felt like a misfit toy on the island of misfit toys. I was no longer in solitary with my thoughts of being an Asian American woman seeking ordination and how that seemed to be an outlier of sorts within the ELCA.

I can share the conversations I had with AAPI pastors and lay leaders with my fellow seminarians, and hopefully with more people within the ELCA and other mainline Protestant churches. Through my seminary coursework, I have been repeatedly exposed to the dominant western European narrative of the Lutheran church and the European Lutheran migration to the United States. Part of my project was to explore my personal narrative and the narrative of Asians and Asian Americans within the ELCA. In getting to hear the stories of other Asians and Asian Americans, I was discovering new and unheard narratives within the church. I heard a dominant voice and a dominant story, but I was coming into conflict with some parts of the dominant narrative. I wanted to listen to voices that were within an underlying narrative. Part of me was seeking out people to tell their versions of their faith formation and faith journey. I was seeking a story that was maybe parallel to my own, but also a voice that was lying underneath the dominant narrative.

Much of the story telling and building community will continue past the life of this particular project. In the adventure of “snowball sampling,” I continue to hear about more conversation partners and storytellers. Even after presenting at the fellow’s retreat, I continue to meet with Asian and Asian American pastors and lay leaders to talk about lived experiences in ministry. I am continuing to meet with contacts and references in the San Francisco area because the process of community building and sharing stories will continue past my proposed FTE project.

Another continuation of the project is to nurture the relationships I’ve made throughout my summer travels. Part of continuing relationships will occur at the American Academy of Religion/ Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in San Francisco this year. This will be the first year the Asian Theological Summer Institute will host a reunion. I will be able to attend this reunion and grow relationships with professors and doctoral students I met at the conference, as well as meet with previous institute alumni.

One of the consequences of my project involves a form of truth telling. While the ELCA struggles to be a diverse church body, there have been various actions of attempting to be a welcoming community. The ELCA will not name the demon of racism, yet still struggles with being a predominantly Caucasian church. Many within the ELCA do not want to talk about racism because it is an uncomfortable subject that reveals incredibly unfair power dynamics. While conversations about racism are incredibly uneasy and uncomfortable, avoiding such conversations is avoiding a root problem that prevents a church becoming a welcoming and diverse representation of the body of Christ.

One of the themes prevalent within my project that greatly impacted me was the use of voice. Using one’s voice to communicate love, pain, gratitude, and injustice can be a powerful act. One of my struggles was the actual use of my voice; part of my apprehension of using my voice came from cultural conditioning. In joining the church, I thought if I simply stayed quiet, problems would disappear. In seminary, I came to the realization that while using my voice was initially scary, voice was needed to talk about issues and ideas that were lying beneath the dominant narrative. I continue to form and reform my personal voice, and I wanted to explore my personal narrative within a greater denominational narrative. Mental models that greatly struck me were listening to as may voices as possible; the use of voice can be empowering, and if multiple voices come together, there is an incredible amount of strength that can come in delivering a message.

This project has been a transformational exercise for me. I joined the church with a certain naïveté; that naïveté transformed to something different when I entered seminary and was exposed to the institutional racism within the seminary and the systemic racism within the denomination. I remember reading Hauerwas’ Resident Aliens, calling the church to be counter-cultural against a secular culture; I started to compare the insular culture of the ELCA, and that such a culture conflicted with my definition of community, encompassing the diversity of imago dei found in the world. With this project, Hauerwas’s words became an Incarnational reality as there is a need to move from “church culture” in an insular guarded sense to a greater “Church Culture” to be representative of the diversity of the body of Christ.

I still truly believe the entire church, not just the ELCA, is called to evangelize and share the Gospel. The ELCA must re-examine being the “Evangelical” Lutheran Church of America if it is to be a diverse church body representative of the diversity found in the world. In questioning the issues of racism and my personal struggle with identity, I believe much truth-telling needs to take place within the denomination. Truth telling is a relational process. I believe that there is a need to honestly speak about contextual definitions. There is a need to openly and honestly talk about racism, but with the realization that such conversations need to happen in love. While I am still uneasy with conversations about racism, I am called to speak truth to the matter, but also to be in conversation with members of my denomination. speaking truth when it’s uncomfortable, awkward, and challenging the status quo is a drastic action. What does it mean for the denomination to talk about the face of God’s church? What happens when the face of God’s church bumps up against my notions and the notions of others concerning the face of the church? Are we listening to the petition in the Lord’s Prayer of “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven?”

Truth telling comes with continued sharing of experiences and story telling with one another. In telling stories of personal experiences, there is an opportunity to build community. With the story telling process comes the exposure of new narratives. In sharing our experiences in an embodied way, there is the potential to further discover and discuss the story of the church and the world. God’s work is that we are all the body of Christ.