Adventures in "exotic" pastoring and #decolonizeLutheranism

Said to me when I was in my first call in Oakland: “The people of your congregation must love having an exotic pastor at the pulpit.”

The external reply? “Why yes. The congregation loves having Pastor Ross at the pulpit.” (FYI: Ross was the senior pastor at my previous congregation, a delightfully wise, snarky, older, white, gay man)

At that moment, the external reply was nowhere near the internal reply. I’m not going to lie; there are times that I wish my internal response could be an external one. Kind of like this:

My internal reply involved a lot of yelling, wild and flailing arm movements, obscenities, and in general, freaking out in front of this individual at a delightful Easter dinner celebrating the resurrection of our Lord and Savior. What pains me even more was that the individual who made the comment was an ELCA seminarian. He was studying to be a leader in a church. 

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Exotic (adj.): very different, strange, or unusual; of a plant or animal: not living or growing naturally in a particular area: from another part of the world  
(definition from Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
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Exotic, in this context, was nowhere near a compliment. This was a microaggression bordering on a macroaggression. Calling a person “exotic” is othering; this is a result of having whiteness be the norm in the United States (and within mainline Protestant churches). Anything that is not white is therefore “other” and can be deemed an object and not quite human.

I never really thought of myself as exotic; I mean, I’m from Denver, Colorado. A beautiful place to live, but not what I would deem as “exotic”. I am, however, a second-generation Indian-American who was born and raised in the United States. What leads to a person calling me “exotic” is when a person sees is my skin color, which is obviously not white. That automatically deems me as other, as not American.

But an exotic pastor? This is a realm that I never thought I would write about. I am quite aware of the leadership statistics within the ELCA (I previously wrote about it here). I well know that I am far outside of the “norms” of church leadership. But those “norms” should not be what defines church leadership. Our church leadership should look like the Pentecost event: we should be from the ends of the earth proclaiming the Gospel to the ends of the earth. We should do this in the fullness of who God created us to be, comfortable in our skins, our orientations, our personalities, our languages, our cultures. Our churches should be the Pentecost event, welcoming the diversity of languages, cultures, personalities, and orientations. It is a place where in the fullness of what Home with God can be, no one is objectified. No one is othered.

This is why I am passionate about #decolonizeLutheranism; it is a community that wrestles together, that loves the church, that loves the depth and breadth of Lutheran theology, and that believes that the Pentecost event is leading God’s church be that place where the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit is with us all.

Also, Christ was never about the norms.