When I was an FTE Ministry Fellow in 2010, I was at a crossroads in my seminary education and in my faith journey. I was coming to realize there were very steep consequences as a woman of color being on the track to ordained ministry within the ELCA; I felt very much like an outsider. I was feeling discouraged and alone, and I was seriously questioning my call to the church. In my fellowship application essay, I wrestled with the question, “Ultimately, how can my incredibly different eastern Asian faith tradition of Hinduism come into communication with my current western European based faith?” To be entirely honest, I still wrestle with that question to this day. I also wrestled with the meaning of “life together” within a denomination that needed to reexamine and reevaluate the meaning of these words. I was seeking for a lived out and Incarnational form of “life together” where I could wholly and fully be the brown woman God created me to be in a theology that made my heart sing.
Discerning the course of my fellowship project had to be done within community; faith formation takes place within the resurrected Body of Christ with fellow siblings and sojourners. In that first fellowship gathering outside Greensboro, NC, I was introduced to five individuals who would walk an untrodden path with me as we all discerned where God was calling us into faith formation. We were such different individuals with a variety of interests, but we had a strong commonality: our passion to profess the Good News of the Gospel.
Over the course of a year, I was in constant conversation with Matthew, Michael, Callid, Nathaniel, and Rebecca. We wrestled with discernment, with where God was leading us in our formation to be followers of Jesus. I personally wrestled with my identity and racism within the church body. I remember telling the small group that I was thinking about participating in a variety of anti-racism trainings around the country and creating a lessons learned list. This was coming off a disastrous anti-racism training that had taken place at my seminary. I recall Callid’s question to me in this conversation: “Will this give you life?”
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| L to R: Michael, Nathaniel, me, Rebecca, and Callid |
What would give me life? I knew I craved like-minded people and desired sharing stories of lived experiences. The premise of my fellowship project was fairly simple: find a community. Find people that had a shared lived experience of being people of color within a primarily white mainline Protestant denomination. Find Asians and Asian-Americans, have them share their stories with me, and find a vocabulary to describe and name my experience as a person of color exploring meaning and identity in a place where I was desperately searching for a place at the altar table as someone labeled as “the other.”
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| Presenting my fellowship study at the closing retreat, August 2011. |
“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 from becoming a welcoming and diverse representation of the body of Christ.”
Six years after this journey began, I find myself reading and reflecting over my fellowship project. Racism within the greater church, and not just the ELCA, is a problem. But it is more than the demon of racism. It is the demon of so many –phobias and –isms that hold God’s church back from its full potential. There is much work to be done, and that work must be done in Christian community. That work must form our faith and our identities as Christians. I find that the work I did six years ago empowered me and gave me a voice. I believe that through the works of the Holy Spirit, I was led to a new community of co-conspirators within the #decolonizeLutheranism movement. It is within this movement and within this community I have felt God’s greatest pull on my heart and voice. It is within this movement and this community where I have felt Lutheran theology sing in my heart in a way that I have not previously experienced. It is within this movement and this community where I better understand just what I am willing to risk for the sake of the Gospel and for the liberation of all peoples.
Thank you, Forum for Theological Exploration, for planting those seeds through the course of my discernment and my fellowship study. Thank you, co-conspirators in #decolonizeLutheranism, for helping me live out God’s call on my life, for holding me accountable, and for inspiring me to do good and risky work to profess a crucified and resurrected Christ.
