Leading Beyond the Walls

L ea ding Beyondthe Walls

Acknowledgements

We want to acknowledge Donna M. Johnson for her excellent writing which tells the story of Pastoral Leadership for Public Life and the pastors who gave themselves to the experience. Ms. Johnson consistently engages questions of faith and culture in her writing. She is a sought-after teacher, workshop facilitator, and public speaker, and the author of a highly acclaimed memoir, “Holy Ghost Girl.”

Pastoral Leadership for Public Life was made possible with a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.

Austin Seminary Mission Statement

For the glory of God and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary is a seminary in the Presbyterian-Reformed tradition whose mission is to educate and equip people for ordained Christian ministry and other forms of Christian service and leadership; to employ its resources for the nurture of the church; to practice and promote critical theological thought and research; to engage a range of voices and perspectives within and beyond the life of the Seminary; and to be a winsome and exemplary community of God’s people.

Pastoral Leadership for Public Life

Pastoral Leadership in Public Life began in grace, as a gift. In 2013, Lilly Endowment chose Education Beyond the Walls at Austin Seminary as one of three recipients of a grant to support the strengthening of early career pastoral leadership. Putting the gift to action, our goal was to move beyond programmatic notions and prayerfully open our imaginations to new approaches in leadership development. We began with the pastors. Those chosen as PLPL candidates have already become competent at balancing the daily challenges of worship, pastoral care, and administration within the church. Their new challenge is to apply Jesus’s message of acceptance and inclusion in the larger world. Many of these pastors are already involved in their communities. With PLPL’s help, they hone skills that enable them to more fully step into the role of pastor beyond the bounds of the church.

Education Beyond the Walls developed the PLPL framework to inspire pastors in their attention to the needs of their communities, increase their confidence in taking public action, and enhance their capacity to gather strength through theological reflection. The program’s emergent curriculum—known collectively as “Learnings”—is designed to support pastors as they carry the commitments of their Christian identities into the public arena. These are the primary components of the PLPL framework:

Cohorts

Small, interdenominational groups of pastors who meet over a period of twelve to fifteen months to share and reflect on their experiences. The extended timeline serves to foster intimacy, trust, and commitment within the group.

Learning Intensives

Field trips and meetings with civic leaders engage critical issues that include criminal justice, environmental stewardship, public education, and immigration. These engagements broaden awareness of the complicated intersections of race, class, and gender within public life. Each learning intensive includes opportunity for reflection and examination through theological perspectives.

Local Actions

Hands-on projects are inspired by and developed in response to Learning Intensives. The pastors put their PLPL training into practice by becoming more deeply involved in the needs of local communities. Local actions function as developmental laboratories, encouraging pastors and sometimes their parishioners to push beyond their comfort zones and lean into new challenges. The goal is to move beyond one-off acts of charity to build meaningful, ongoing relationships between the church and civic leaders. Pastors regularly share lessons learned with members of their cohorts, which fosters dynamic group learning and feeds back into the larger goals of the PLPL project.

National Museum of African American History and Culture

The Light Beyond the Walls

If you want to call the spirit, you have to sing. The pastors, male and female, black, white, and brown, shuffled self-consciously at this news. The sound of their movements echoed off the glass and stone of the museum entry hall. They had recently arrived at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Their thoughts pinged between Texas and DC, attending to church and family issues as well as dozens of other quotidian details. Visitors swirled around them, studying their guides, shopping for the perfect souvenir. The Pastoral Leadership in Public Life (PLPL) cohort had come to Washington DC to deepen their understanding of racism and its intersections with Christianity. That work and the reflection they would join in as a group might be difficult, but they had signed on for

it. They had not come to call the Spirit aloud in a public place. They had not come to sing.

There are places in the museum where visitors are moved to tears, prayer, and even song, places such as the Contemplation Pool or Emmet Till’s casket, where emotion builds step by step, exhibit by exhibit, until it demands release. But the PLPL Colleagues were at the beginning of their visit, somewhere between the front desk and the museum store. Yet here stood Reverend Dr. Brad Braxton, director of the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life and the supervisory curator of religion at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, an important man who had made it a priority to act as their guide—urging them to clasp hands and sing. Some remember him calling upon the role of the prophet: An African prophet opens his mouth in song so the spirit can enter him. But unlike the prophets, the small group of American pastors felt bound by social decorum. One Colleague recalls thinking the request was a little inappropriate given the time and place, so many people wandering around doing ordinary things. Another confessed her fear of becoming a public spectacle, a version

of the Protestant pastor breaking into prayer regardless of the setting. Yet because they are a curious group and PLPL is in part about stepping beyond one’s comfort zone or perhaps because they couldn’t see a way around it, they circled up and grabbed the hands of those who stood next to them.

Their voices lifted in rough harmony and transformed the most ordinary space in the museum into the thinnest of places, a holy opening between ordinary time and God’s time. Everything fell away; the people around them, their own embarrassment. When they talk about it now, three years later, their voices go soft. Everyone remembers the lightness of the moment. The odd thing is, and perhaps God really does have a sense of humor, no one can remember the words or tune of the song. They remember the simplicity of it. An African American spiritual perhaps? Reverend Daryl Horton, senior pastor of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Austin, recalls the song had something to do with light. It’s the kind of thing a musician might remember, though Reverend Carolyn Albert Donovan, a musician as well as pastor of Peace Lutheran Church, draws a blank like everyone else.

the PLPL Colleagues and the Seminary leaders who accompanied them, the rest of their time in DC—the way they remember it and the meaning they continue to make from it—flows from that forgotten song. It’s a moment they won’t forget, though they can’t quite remember it, a funny and strange and deeply meaningful moment that defies definition—the perfect anecdote for the Pastoral Leadership in Public Life program.

“In PLPL, the Spirit calls to an activism of Love.”

The important thing, says Melissa Wiginton, vice president of Education Beyond the Walls at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and founder of the PLPL program, is that the words, whatever they were, raised them up. The Spirit came, and its coming disrupted their expectations and changed the narrative of what it was they thought they were called to do in that place. For many of

Like the story of the forgotten song, PLPL can be hard to pin down. On paper it’s the Early Career Clergy Initiative, a leadership program funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. and administered at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary by Education Beyond the Walls. The Endowment chose Austin Seminary as one of only three grant recipients to pilot the program in 2013. The program gives pastors the time and opportunity to explore areas within public life where the values of Jesus overlap with social needs. PLPL calls this the intersection of the good news with the common good. Another term for this intersection is public theology, a term coined by theologian Martin Marty. Through readings and discussions, engagements with civic leaders called Learning Intensives, Local Actions taken in the community and in the congregation, as well as media-training sessions, PLPL helps pastors hone the skills necessary to lead at that intersection. That’s the programmatic definition of PLPL. Experientially it’s something more, something creative, disruptive yet communal, a way of calling and responding to the Spirit.

PLPL grounds itself in Jesus’s first public sermon, Luke 4: 18-19, where he quotes the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Jesus’s use of the term good news or gospel translates directly from the Greek word euangelion. When Luke penned his gospel, euangelion was used by the Roman empire to characterize the narrative around Caesar and to define his proclamations.1 As the embodiment of empire, Caesar spoke from and to power. His gospel was one of state domination. Jesus turned that narrative upside down. His good news centers the oppressed and marginalized—a perspective that remains radical and challenging today. In PLPL, the Spirit calls to an activism of Love. It is a Love large enough, bold enough, to contain and speak from a myriad of opinions and perspectives: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”2 Born of Patience and unrelenting Hope, this Love distinguishes PLPL cohorts as much as what they learn and what they do. Not every pastor, not every congregation, hears the Spirit in the same way. Colleagues are called to bear with one another and meet difference, which can be interpreted as defect or fault, with holy curiosity. One line from PLPL literature sums up this stance of radical humility: No flaw is worse than another; no gift is greater than another.

PLPL’s stated goals are to broaden awareness of public life, increase pastors’ confidence in engaging the public sphere, and enhance the capacity for theological reflection. How these goals are interpreted and processed depends on the lens of the pastor. To paraphrase Martin Marty, everyone speaks toward the common good on behalf of their own tradition in public theology. This spectrum of voices creates a prismatic structure within PLPL, stable yet shifting, best grasped through the experience and the stories of the pastors who lived it.

1 C. Clifton Black, “Good News of the New Testament”, n.p. [cited 4 Oct 2021]. Online: https://www.bibleodyssey.org:443/tools/ask-ascholar/good-news-of-the-nt 2 John 13:35.

and

Lake Drive Baptist: Leading in Dark Times

Amos Humphries

Park

With his easy demeanor, shaved head, and impressive array of tattoos (he has seven), it’s easy to imagine PLPL Colleague Amos Humphries smiling from the cover of a magazine or a blog screen devoted to hipster Christianity— envision a male version of Nadia Bolz-Weber, with less edge and a more conservative theology. Reverend Humphries has been called a rock star by his friend and fellow PLPL colleague Leslie King, a description that has less to do with his appearance than his job performance. Reverend Humphries, Pastor Amos to his congregants, has presided over what seems impossible in many mainline churches: he and his team have successfully transformed an aging all white church into a vibrant multi-ethnic, multigenerational congregation. It took a few years, but with services and Bible studies in Spanish and English, a female associate pastor, and young people of color in leadership roles, Park Lake Drive Baptist Church now mirrors the diverse community of north Waco that surrounds it.

Reverend Humphries found himself called to serve that larger community in early June of 2020, during the middle of the Covid quarantine and just days after the death of George Floyd. A twoyear-old named Frankie Gonzalez was reported by his mother to have wandered off during a visit to Cameron Park. Bordered in places with tall cliffs overlooking the Brazos River, the park is a scary place to lose a young child. The police issued an Amber Alert and called a search party. A large contingent of people, many of them African Americans and members of the Latinx community from north Waco, joined the search for Frankie. They began that afternoon around three and continued into the night. In a neighborhood where people work two and three jobs, that kind of time investment comes at a cost, but it’s what you do for neighbors. Frankie’s disappearance, coming when it did, carried an added desperation. Everyone felt wracked by grief and despair. Everyone needed a word of hope.

The morning after the all-night search for Frankie, Reverend Humphries was on his way to Park Lake to discuss safety protocols so that the church could resume in-person services. Mask mandates, one family per pew, one service for older congregants and another for younger. As he reviewed the list, a call came through on his mobile. Earlier that morning Frankie’s mother had led police to the dumpster where she’d thrown the body of her son. The dumpster was located on the property of Park Lake Drive Baptist Church. Reverend Humphries remembers this as the moment he went from being the pastor of Park Lake Baptist to the pastor of north Waco. A year later when he had the time and space to reflect, he referred to this as his PLPL moment—that moment when a pastor is called to step into the public arena. It wasn’t where he wanted to be. “I didn’t want this to be happening. I didn’t want that baby to be in the dumpster. We worked so hard to become an authentic, loving community. I didn’t want us to become known as that church where the baby was found in the dumpster,” he said.

The question of why, and why us, went through his head again and again. Why did that mother kill her baby? Why had she driven across town, from south Waco to north Waco, to throw her boy’s body in the dumpster behind Park Lake Drive Baptist Church? Why any of it?

By the time Reverend Humphries reached the church, a hundred angry people, exhausted from the search the night before, had gathered in the parking lot. Armed police, a SWAT team in fact, were everywhere. Racial tensions were running high in Waco as they were everywhere. Two police officers had been killed in Dallas a few days earlier

in riots sparked by the killing of George Floyd. The people of north Waco had expected, had needed, to find Frankie Gonzalez alive. There are times when a flicker of hope, even hope that doesn’t quite belong to you, feels as necessary as your next breath. This was particularly true in the days after George Floyd’s death. Frankie’s mother had robbed them of this hope. She’d killed her baby days earlier and let them stumble through the park all night trying to save him from the river.

As Reverend Humphries walked into the crowd, a woman began to call out, This man is the pastor, this man is the pastor. “I’m kind of in shock. So it takes me a minute. I said, ‘Yeah, um yeah, I’m the pastor,’ And then she called out again, ‘You’ve got to pray for us. You’ve got to pray for us.’

“I’m like, yeah, yeah I do. I knew at that moment it was my role. So, she’s like, ‘Everybody come on, he’s going to pray for us.’ Right. I try not to cry.”

The crowd pushed in, forming a ragged and misshapen circle. Reverend Humphries grabbed the hands of the men on either side. “I said, ‘I don’t know why we’re here. I don’t know why this happened, I don’t. I don’t understand any of this. How can a mother kill her son?’ I start to cry.”

Stunned by the tragedy, he felt his way through the prayer, voicing the shared confusion and pain, unsure of where to take it or where it might take him. Part of the thesis of PLPL is that the pastor’s theological perspective is valuable and necessary in the public space. Reverend Humphries stepped into the framework of his Christian theology. “So, I said, ‘I do know Frankie’s with you. I do know that he won’t grow up in that violence, and he’ll grow up in heaven now.’ When I say amen and look up,

the cops had come into that circle, and they were holding hands with everybody in that circle.”

The prayer soothed the raw emotions, at least for a time. Drawn to the place where Frankie’s body was found, no one seemed able to leave the church. And people kept coming. Faced with layers of tragedy, a plague upon the land, another black man murdered in the streets, and the tender body of a two-year-old found wrapped in garbage bags, north Waco discovered or rediscovered that this thing called church was strong enough to hold their rage and their sorrow. Reverend Humphries spent the rest of the morning directing traffic and ministering to strangers. Young men and fathers who had been out with the search party approached him, looking for some way to comprehend. “And they were like, ‘Man this sucks. I don’t understand, I mean, I got kids.’

And I just say, ‘I know. I’ve raised kids that age. It’s not cool. None of this is cool.’” These encounters ended with hugs and prayer. “None of them were a part of my church, not a one,”

Reverend Humphries said.

At its most basic, the Hebrew word for justice, Mishpat, means to give people what they are due. Yet, who can truly say what anyone is due?

At its best, Christianity tempers justice with love, the love of Christ. The point that day was to embody the essence of church, to care for

whoever was in need. That included the family of Frankie Gonzalez. They, too, were drawn to the place where Frankie had been found. When they arrived that afternoon, the anxiety of the crowd ratcheted up. They wanted to hold someone accountable; they wanted justice. Church leaders worked together to get the family safely into the fellowship hall. Once inside, Reverend Humphries says they ministered to the needs of the family. They were just stunned, he said. They gave them water and a safe place to come together and grieve, a place free of judgment. Associate Pastor Nataly Mora, a native Spanishspeaker, translated their needs and concerns.

Just as Reverend Humphries and his team thought the day was winding down, someone informed them a local news outlet had posted on Facebook that the church planned to hold a candlelight prayer vigil at six that night. The post was shared two-hundred times by the time the pastoral team discovered it. None of the church leaders had authorized the vigil. It was late afternoon. Everyone was tired and sweaty. They had two hours to come up with a plan. Reverend Humphries and Reverend Mora changed the lettering on the marquee in front of the church to read, in Spanish and English, “We mourn with you for Frankie Gonzalez.” Reverend Humphries grabbed a piece of scrap paper and he and Reverend Mora scratched out an ad hoc service. They needed the sound system stored in a locked garage on the church property. Since neither had keys, they broke in. By the time the vigil began, the crowd

had grown to about three hundred. All three news stations were present. The crowd’s mood toward family members had swung during the afternoon from anger to compassion, making it possible for Reverend Humphries and Reverend Mora to accommodate the family’s request to pray with them next to the dumpster. By this time balloons covered the clunky receptacle and the ground around it was ringed with candles. The family stood in a small tight clutch, their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders and waists. With the smell of Frankie’s death still in the air, the crowd encircled them and joined in the prayer.

Following the prayer, members of the Park Lake Baptist team read pieces of the worship program in Spanish and English. Everyone heard a message of hope in a language she or he could fully understand. The diversity of the worship team,

black, brown, and white, matched the diversity of the crowd. A more organic way to think of it is that when things go wrong, when tragedy strikes, we are drawn to be with family and friends. That day, when the people of north Waco and the family of Frankie Gonzalez found themselves steeped in sorrow upon sorrow, Park Lake Drive Baptist Church looked a lot like family.

Park Lake dealt with the fallout from Frankie Gonzalez’s death for weeks and months afterward. The story went national and the leadership team felt pressured to issue formal press statements.

They resisted and put a simple statement on the church Facebook page instead. “We did not want to be seen as profiting from this tragedy in any way,” Reverend Humphries said. Each decision

“When it all blows up, people still need pastoral leaders.”

made by the leadership team during that time came under scrutiny. When word got out that the dumpster had been removed, criticism flared on Facebook. The church planned to replace the dumpster with a place for reflection and prayer. A concrete rectangle now frames where the dumpster stood. Two curved benches flank the donated memorial stone that reads, “In memory of Frankie Gonzalez and all victims of violence.”

The memorial faces the street, allowing easy access. A large mural painted on one of the church outbuildings also commemorates the life of

Frankie.

Frankie’s death took a toll on Reverend Humphries. He began therapy to deal with the trauma. He says he’s better now, though when he talks about what happened, tears still come. When he felt the tragedy most acutely, he told a friend, “I don’t want to be here. This is the last place I want to be.” He brings the experience back to PLPL. “You’re a pastoral leader in public, and sometimes public life sucks. When it all blows up, people still need pastoral leaders. All you can do is be there and try not to get in the way, try to let God come to the fore,” he said.

Although he knows God had nothing to do with the death of Frankie Gonzalez, he finds meaning in what came next. “Maybe God had something to do with leading that woman to us. She must have passed fourteen churches as she drove across town. Maybe out of all the churches in Waco, she chose us, because somehow she knew she could trust us.”

Reverend Humphries looks back on this time in the life of his church with relief that it’s over and also with a deep awe that after years of nurturing a space for different kinds of people to come together, who they were was exactly who they needed to be in the moment. “In times like this, there is no room for theological reflection. You are who you are. We couldn’t suddenly become a multi-ethic congregation. There was no time to manufacture or manage optics. We were the community.”

Facing Our Monuments

Whether preaching, engaging in pastoral care, or participating in civic life, an unstated job of a pastor is to derive and communicate meaning from the human story. Pastors are fundamentally meaningmakers. Reverend Erica Knisely, EBW director of educational design and PLPL co-leader, says, “We’re story people, right? We were shaped by stories. Words shape how we understand ourselves, how we understand ourselves in relation to other people as well as the arc of our life. And pastors are hopefully trying to connect the arc of our lives within God’s story and help us, you know, understand where we fit into this larger story.” An understanding of how

our stories connect with God’s story rests in part upon a familiarity with the frameworks that shape the world we are called to serve.

“...understanding how our story connects with God’s story...”

Through a series of Learning Intensives that include presentations on the history of structural racism within the housing market, the allocation of natural resources, social injustice, sustainable growth, and other issues, PLPL Colleagues investigate how the legacy of social policy has given rise to false assumptions around race, class, and gender. The Washington DC trip was first added as a Learning Intensive in 2018. Themed as A Pilgrimage of

Tangled Roots, this first trip took pastors deep into the heart of slavery, often called our country’s original sin. In addition to visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture, PLPL Colleagues worshiped with students at the Howard University School of Divinity Chapel, spent an afternoon with Reverend William Lamar at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest continuously operating church in Washington. They also visited a Presbyterian church located on what was once the border between free and slave states. That church now sits in an area with a large homeless population.

Dr. Asante Todd, associate professor of Christian Ethics at Austin Seminary, raised the issue of the theology of the monuments erected on the National Mall. The monuments preach, according to Todd. They communicate values that define the core of American identity. He asked the pastors to reflect ethically and theologically on the values the monuments communicate and how those values relate to their religious commitments. For Reverend Josh Robinson, pastor of Hope Presbyterian in

Austin, analyzing the monuments through the lens of public leadership, thinking about who helped pay for them and when and why they were erected, helped clarify his understanding of how the monuments may help enshrine a white-washed version of history, directing our attention away from the more difficult stories we want to bury or run away from.

Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church

Washington Monument, Washington D.C.

A Journey of Immersion

Reverend Daryl Horton found the 2018 trip life changing. The placement of the African American Museum on the National Mall spoke to him of how far his people had come. The Smithsonian African American Museum and Cultural Center embodies within its architecture the arc of the African American story. From the entry hall, PLPL Colleagues descended into the darkest part of the museum to begin the tour. There they encountered artifacts of suffering and hope—slave ships, slave cabins, Harriet Tubman’s prayer book and shawl. They moved through the Civil War, the role of the Black Church, the Civil Rights Movement, the role of sports in African American life, the rise of hip hop and the election of President Obama. Each exhibit, each stage of the story, builds on what has come before and connects to what comes after. As visitors progress through time, they spiral up through the floors of the museum into areas increasingly filled with light. The message rings prophetic; we must reckon with the darkness to get to the light even as it testifies to the power of the Light to overcome that darkness.

Daryl Horton

As Reverend Horton walked through the exhibits, a question began to form in his head. It had to do with the lineage of the African American people and the role he would play in that history. He thought about his ancestors and the sacrifices of past generations and the role of the Black church:

“I had the feeling as I looked at these pictures, these artifacts, that there is a reason why I’m here. There’s a reason why I’m standing on their shoulders. There’s a reason I came out of those who survived, and this is the purpose that God has given me—to be their voice, to be the voice of those who have died, who are represented in these artifacts.”

During the Washington trip, he began to sense a realignment and deepening of purpose that would later develop into him becoming the senior pastor at Mt. Zion and that is still at work in him today.

Turning the Story Inside Out

Designed by Wiginton and Knisely to center the African American experience, the 2018 DC trip flipped the dominant culture experience. Ms. Wiginton admits she felt nervous about their efforts. “I knew we had this one opportunity to get it right, and I wasn’t sure we had,” she said. When she later heard Reverend Horton talk about the trip, she realized their efforts had born fruit. Horton characterizes the trip as black culture heavy. “So even in Texas, even here in Austin, there is definitely an African American culture within the church, a social culture as well as a political culture. All of that is present. But for me, this was my first time to be in a place like Washington, D.C. and to experience

the religious, the social, the political culture from an African American perspective in a way that I’d never seen it before.” He remembers the trip as one

“There’s a reason I came out of those who survived, and this is the purpose that God has given me—to be their voice, to be the voice of those who have died, who are represented in these artifacts. ”

long moment of elation: “I felt like I was at a buffet, running around and taking in everything I could.”

As Reverend Horton celebrated the centrality of his African American culture, he wondered what his white colleagues were thinking and feeling. For them it was a rare opportunity to reckon with the effects of whiteness, to see the African American story from the inside out. It was revelatory and also at times uncomfortable. “I have never been more aware of the whiteness of my skin than I was in the museum,” one pastor said. Horton remembers his roommate on the trip telling him that the things he was seeing and learning were opening his eyes to realities he had never had to deal with as a white man. He’d heard similar comments, expressions of shock and dismay, during the earlier Learning Intensive on structural racism within the Austin housing market. “I could tell that for many of them, it was the first time they were hearing these things and it touched them in a way that they had not anticipated. And so they were asking what I thought were great questions,” he said.

One of the themes the cohort returned to as they processed and discussed the trip to Washington focused on representation—whose voices are present in the nation’s seat of power and whose are not. Reverend Horton recalls a discussion after the trip when a PLPL Colleague of Latinx ancestry reminded the group that there is no museum of Latinx culture on the National Mall. The question was raised again at the end of the 2021 PLPL DC trip by Reverend Nicole Cruz Talkington, the chaplain at Rocks prings Behavioral Health

Hospital in Georgetown, Texas. “My people have been here a very long time. We’ve yet to have luck in getting a (Latinx) museum, but not for lack of trying,” she said. Raising issues of exclusion within a group in which one is in the minority requires a prophetic courage that can be construed as disruptive and annoying. PLPL welcomes and thrives on the outsider perspective. Making room for the experience of others offers an opportunity to examine how exclusion intersects with Jesus’s call in Luke 4 to set the captives free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. It’s difficult to feel the Lord’s favor when who you are is neither acknowledged nor valued.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Monument, Washington D.C.

Supporting the Courage of Conviction

Pastors enter into the PLPL program through a process of nomination and invitation. Reverend Carolyn Albert Donovan decided against applying when the first invitation arrived because the timing didn’t work for her schedule. Asked what prompted her to reconsider, she travels back to June 21, 2015—three years before her cohort began and her first Sunday as the official pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Austin. It was also the first Sunday after the massacre at Mother Emanual African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Congregants had welcomed the twenty-one-yearold gunman as a visitor to the Wednesday night Bible study. They did not know he was a white supremacist. As the meeting closed and the group joined hands to pray, he began to shoot.

Like many pastors that Sunday, Reverend Albert Donovan spoke out against the racially motivated mass murder. The killings felt particularly close for her. The murderer of the Emanuel Nine was a member of the Lutheran church, which she says is one of the whitest denominations in the U.S. She was aware, too, that one of the people he killed graduated from a Lutheran seminary. “I couldn’t not talk about what had happened in South Carolina. I didn’t know how to not talk about it,” she said.

Less than a month later Sandra Bland died under suspicious circumstances in the Waller County Jail west of Houston. The question of what happened to Ms. Bland and the search for accountability around her death propelled Reverend Albert Donovan into the public sphere. “When I had the opportunity to be

with people who were asking questions about that, I just didn’t feel like I could not join them.”

Reverend Albert Donovan hesitates to speak in detail of the work she did in the aftermath of the AME shootings and Sandra Bland’s death. She does not want to be portrayed as heroic in any way. When it comes to the practice of public theology, she says she has done far less than others. “So, in the inner landscape of my formation, the work I did is a huge thing. In the landscape of working for justice and doing public witness, it is not a huge thing, but it is one of the experiences that crystallized in me a set of core convictions … that this public theology is part of the work,” she said.

“This conviction to speak up and act isn’t something I made up. I’ve been taught by wise leaders, thatfellow pastors are looking to live into this, everyone finds difficult.”

part on the desire to avoid divisiveness; church remains one of the few places where individuals of different political persuasions still come together. Reverend Ellen Williams-Hensle, associate pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Austin and a member of the 2019 cohort, said pastors and churches have not done a good job of explaining how policies lead to systemic problems such as racism, homelessness, and hunger. It’s easier, and safer, to make these issues about individual choices, she said.

When Albert Donovan reflects on her efforts, she says she feels as if she went skydiving. She describes the experience as terrifying. While mainline churches emphasize missional work, many are reluctant, if not resistant, to move from performing specific acts of charity to working to change the system that makes those acts necessary. This perspective is based in

Speaking out publicly against injustice within a church culture that values silence and neutrality can isolate pastors. So when PLPL issued a second invitation, Albert Donovan welcomed the opportunity to explore the work she was doing in community with other pastors. “One of the things the program did and continues to do for me, is to remind me that this conviction to speak up and act isn’t something I made up. It’s something I’ve been taught by wise leaders, that fellow pastors are looking to live into, and that and everyone finds difficult. The collegiality of that breeds courage and accountability. My PLPL Colleagues know that I know that this is part of my work. Hopefully they will help me remember that when I’m less courageous,” she said.

A Reckoning of Roles

PLPL’s emphasis on public theology raises questions around the traditional roles of church and pastor: Why does the church exist? Is the role of pastor confined primarily to those who gather within church walls? How far does Jesus’s charge in Luke 4 extend? PLPL founder Melissa Wiginton points to John Wesley as someone who extended the role of pastor and the work of the church beyond church walls. Wesley set up health clinics, worked in debtors’ prisons, preached at the coal mines, and wrote a book on physical healing. He taught and

believed in an active personal holiness as well as what he called social holiness. “You could be pious and have your prayers, worship, confession, partake of the sacraments, all of these things for the goodness of your soul, but you also needed to do something that showed the world the goodness of God. It took both to be a Christian,” Wiginton said.

Reverend Williams-Hensle referred to Luke 4 as precedent for public theology. “When Jesus says let the oppressed go free, I don’t hear him referring only to those in prison at that moment. He’s issuing a call to stop oppression. That requires systemic work,” she said. She also finds the call to public theology in the work of the prophets, particularly Jeremiah and Isaiah. “They talk about how society is failing the everyday person by not doing God’s justice and taking care of the widow and the poor. They are calling those in power to care for the weakest,” she said.

Sharolyn Browning and Christ Lutheran: Leading with Courage

Sometimes the Kingdom of God arrives at the most inopportune time, changing everything around it. Sharolyn Browning had logged less than two weeks as provisional pastor at Christ Lutheran Church in Georgetown, Texas, when she was asked if the church would host the kickoff for the Poor People’s Campaign and march. Subtitled a National Call for Moral Revival, the campaign advocates for a fair minimum wage, voting rights, protections for undocumented workers, and eliminating the filibuster. The call came in on Friday, July 23. The march was scheduled for four days later, on Wednesday morning, July 27. Organizers asked the church to host an outdoor press conference and prayer service on the Tuesday evening before the march and to allow the march to get underway from the church campus on Wednesday morning. Organizers would provide all the security and resources for the events. The church would provide the venue.

There were reasons to say no: The timeline was tight and Reverend Browning had neither history nor social capital with Christ Lutheran. Perhaps the prudent response would have been to pass the request along to another church. Yet Browning knew

organizers had asked her because area churches more involved in advocacy work were not well suited to host the events. And then there was the matter of personal and religious conscience. She felt the pull of history and the call to do something that mattered. Her time in PLPL had clarified for her that civic and ecclesial life must intersect if the church is to remain relevant. And then there were the vows she had taken as a pastor, vows that compelled her to say yes. “I couldn’t choose to say, Oh I’m not going to speak to this because essentially I’ve vowed to advocate for the poor,” she said.

She contacted staff members and the church council that Friday and they said yes. The announcement went out to the congregation on Sunday afternoon. Reverend Browning acknowledges the decision was made quickly, but says it was made in good faith. With the exception of the filibuster, she said the campaign’s goals intersect with the values put forward by Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The decision to host the events was not partisan, she said. At least two congregants disagreed. By Monday morning those congregants were pressuring her to cancel

the events. She refused and the dissenters rallied others to take up the cause. The events went on as planned, but a rift opened that Reverend Browning said is still present in the church.

A crowd of around two hundred people gathered for the prayer service at Christ Lutheran on Tuesday evening. Clergy from diverse churches and faiths across Central Texas mingled with members of the press, past and present civic leaders, volunteers, social justice groups, and perhaps even a few people who wanted to pray before the march the next morning. As she prepared her

welcoming remarks, Reverend Browning remembered her PLPL media training. She made a brief mental note of talking points and thought about her purpose, her real purpose, for being there. When it came time to speak, she acknowledged that everyone there stood on land formerly inhabited and stewarded by indigenous peoples. “I had a very strong understanding in that moment that as a transitional pastor I was a temporary steward of that place.” The irony of welcoming people to a place where she had so recently arrived was not lost on her. “I wanted to place all of us as temporary stewards of the places we inhabit. Wherever we are, we’re there temporarily. We care for places temporarily.”

One thing that doesn’t seem to change are power dynamics between the rich and the poor. Many of the issues Jesus called out in terms of power and oppression are still with us today. Reverend Browning recalls the prayer service and march as Kingdom of God moments that elevated the poor along with the privileged and powerful. “One thing I appreciate about the Poor People’s Campaign is it’s not about finding the big church in town and putting their pastor on the podium. I was there, but only for a short time. Mostly it was person after person after person who might be delivering for Amazon or working at Dairy Queen or for some restaurant for minimum wage or less. Those were the amplified voices,” she said.

Understanding the provisional nature of relationships can free us even as it calls us into a more considered perspective

of the other. Reverend Browning said the clash over the Poor People’s March exposed unhealthy communication patterns early on, patterns that involved triangulation and bullying. “I can imagine a situation where these kinds of patterns would take years to come to the light,” she said. A few congregants threatened to leave and take other members with them. About eight did leave. “That was met with, ‘We wish you well and God’s blessings go with you … we’re grateful for our time together, but sometimes the differences that cause this kind of division need to happen.’”

Several said that in their long life at Christ Lutheran (many had been there for thirty years), they had never felt more a part of the church than they did at that moment.

“She felt the pull of history and the call to do something that mattered.”

What happened at Christ Lutheran can be characterized as reformative and transformational, the kind of thing that occurs in times of great cultural change. It highlights the tension between those who need the church to remain fixed and those who long to see the church engage in a more relevant way. Reverend Browning empathizes and tries to be mindful and attentive to those who feel betrayed by the choices she and other church leaders made. “When it feels as if your whole world is moving and shifting, that’s disorienting, and you need the solid ground of the church. But then some of what the Poor People’s Campaign stands for goes back 2,000 years,” she said.

Key leaders at Christ Lutheran Church were helpful in breaking long patterns of triangulation. A lot of people responded with, “I don’t agree with every point here, but how can our congregation not host something like this?” Most congregants expressed excitement and pride that the church was involved.

After months of critically evaluating and re-evaluating, Reverend Browning said she feels at peace with the decisions she made, even as she finds herself surprised to have become the kind of leader who can make those decisions. She credits her ability to stand up to the pressure with being firmly rooted in her own theology and in understanding the intersections between the Poor People’s Campaign and the larger Lutheran Church. “It also comes from synthesizing the conversations, presentations, and ideas of PLPL,” she said.

“I think to take the risk of advocating for who Christ demands the attention for, advocating for the poor—instead of people who seem like my dad or grandfather—while I might have longed to be able to do that, I don’t know if I had would have had the chops to do it before.”

Letting Go of Preconceptions

PLPL helps break down the barriers that can keep pastors at the edges of public life. Learning Intensives introduce pastors to issues and resources and gives them an opportunity to talk with civic leaders in a low-key social environment. Reverend Albert Donovan recalls meeting a criminal defense attorney during a PLPL Learning Intensive on criminal justice reform. Like many of us, she carried an idea in her head of the main players in the system—who they are and why they do what they do. As the attorney explained that she became a lawyer to mitigate the harm done to people by the criminal justice system, Albert Donovan reassessed. “This wasn’t a picture of a criminal justice lawyer that I knew how to paint in my head until someone was sitting in a room with me and explaining their purpose that way. And so, it changed and

nuanced how I saw the different players in this really complicated system and why they might do what they do,” she said. These kinds of encounters in PLPL humanize public figures whom we may think of as remote and one dimensional. It’s easier to pick up the phone and ask for a meeting once you’ve spent the afternoon talking with the person behind the title.

Pastors are often surprised to learn that civic leaders welcome their input and consider their moral leadership vital to the process. Reverend Tracey Beadle, then pastor of Manchaca United Methodist Church, discovered the “power to convene” while in the program. “I heard someone, I think it was Melissa Wiginton, say in a talk that pastors underestimate their power to convene. It was a

lightbulb moment for me, especially as I saw it play out,” she said. Beadle put the idea to the test. She invited a group of civic leaders to lunch and asked for input on the needs of the community. She learned that a high percentage of students in the area’s Title l schools were homeless. The reasons varied. Some were homeless with their families, others had aged out of the foster system, still others who identified as LGBTQ had been kicked out by parents. Out of that meeting came the idea to organize a 5K race to buy items deemed necessary by school counselors, things like backpacks and toiletries and bags the students could use to carry their belongings as they bounced from couch to couch. Beadle and members of her church took on the task of going doorto-door and asking businesses for donations to support the race. While congregants had a mixed success rate, no one could turn down the pastor. “I thought I’d be just another solicitor, but that’s not what happened,” she

Relationship: The Foundation for Change

PLPL stresses connection as integral to change. During the first PLPL cohort in 2014, a young pastor, we’ll call him Tom, lamented that wealthy congregations seemed weirdly preoccupied with painting the walls of his mostly poor and Hispanic church. He related the anecdote with wry humor, but the situation was very real. Located on the Texas-Mexico border, Tom’s church had many needs; a new paint job was not among them. Had church leaders established a relationship with Tom and his church, if they’d had an opportunity to move beyond preconceptions about poor churches, their good intentions could have translated into relationship and real assistance.

PLPL presentations and Learning Intensives give pastors a working knowledge of social justice issues

and help them identify relevant areas of need. Some address these issues directly through Local Actions taken at the church level. They may start new programs, or they may use what they’ve learned in the Intensives to inform and shape existing initiatives. The larger goal is to move beyond the programmatic into the relational. PLPL emphasizes listening deeply to those whose voices have long been silenced. This active listening requires letting go of what we think we know to enter into the experience of another. We open ourselves to their reality, see the world through their eyes, their history, their strengths and privations. This somewhat spiritual definition of relationship turns out to be deeply pragmatic.

The 5K organized by Reverend Beadle and Manchaca UMC represented the beginning of an ongoing relationship between the schools and the church, a relationship that continues in the wake of Beadle’s move to another church. After the success of that first venture, Reverend Beadle and church leaders asked the high school counselor to dream big. They wanted to know how they might partner with her and the school to change lives. These discussions revealed that the school treated seniors with the highest grades to a free tour of Texas colleges. A high percentage of those students made the transition to college. The homeless students’ preoccupation with finding shelter meant they rarely had the grades to qualify for the trip. The counselor longed to find a way to make the college tour available to these students.

“...it’s more effective to ask what they need.”

waived the grade point requirement and planned the trip to include four-year schools that offered high levels of financial aid, as well as community colleges and trade schools. The trip included restaurants, museums, and zoos—places few of the students had visited. The results surprised both church and school. Every student who went on the trip applied to one or more institutions and most were accepted. The church then worked with the school counselor to supply laptops and school supplies and to decorate dorm rooms.

Reverend Beadle’s experience with PLPL taught her there is power in listening and in building relationships. “Instead of making assumptions about what people need, I’ve learned it’s more effective to ask what they need. People appreciate the chance to participate,” she said.

Manchaca Methodist worked with the counselor to plan and fund a college tour trip appropriate for this particular student population. They

King and First Presbyterian Waco: Cultivating Holy Curiosity

Leslie

Reverend Leslie King, a member of the 2014 cohort and senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Waco, recalls one Learning Intensive in which Austin demographer Ryan Robinson talked about city growth and development. He said everyone wanted to talk about Austin being the fastest growing city in the country, but no one wanted to talk about sustainable growth. As she remembers it, the demographer spoke of what the city might look like, might become, if in neighborhoods with houses valued at $500,000, there might be houses that cost much less, as well as multi-family dwellings. He was curious whether this kind of neighborhood planning could begin to undo the pocketing of wealth and poverty within the city and lead to a more equitable development of infrastructure. The demographer connected his interest in equitable growth to his faith. King recalls he delivered his presentation with a certain amount of angst. “Part of his agony, which perhaps I was projecting on to him, was that he couldn’t get his experiment run. He couldn’t get that kind of diversity into neighborhoods.”

Reverend King sensed an intersection between the demographer’s concerns and her own

discomfort with popular ideas of religion. She sees overlap between the values that drive city growth—social capital, pride, the pocketing of wealth and poverty—and the budgetary concerns and cultural hegemonies that can drive and shape church growth. “I’m not judging it. But I’m saying, if I’m pulling some strings and using phrases that function for the budget, I will not necessarily be as curious about people,” she said. She views sustainable church growth as a slow process that welcomes and learns from the people who are drawn there, for whatever reason. This model stands as a corrective to the colonizing history of the church, a history that takes its current shape in valuing assimilation and the maintenance of church culture above all else. “Culture has its middle finger up on that paradigm. One option is that we would not be a conquering church, but a curious church,” she said.

Reverend King and First Presbyterian cultivated a kind of holy curiosity as they put in place their own version of the demographer’s plan. For seven or eight years, the downtown church lived in relationship with the residents of Oak Lodge, an eyesore of a motel located across the street.

The residents were primarily homeless or would have been without the motel. The demographer’s ideas of sustainable growth and PLPL’s emphasis on public theology helped shape a Local Action that continued long after Reverend King’s time in the program ended. There were shared tacos at Easter and Thanksgiving meals. The church gave out bus passes and made a point to learn residents’ names. When residents couldn’t afford a room at Oak Lodge, they camped on church property. Sometimes they attended church services, though not often. King wrote in a recent article, “We Expect Too Much of New Buildings,” the Oak Lodge residents “exercised diplomacy and sought to communicate past issues of job loss, compromised mental health, substance addiction.” In one of her favorite memories, a congregant and a resident share photos and stories of grandkids—an

experience across class lines that is extraordinary in part because of the ways in which we are hidden away from each other within pockets of wealth and poverty.

The city of Waco demolished Oak Lodge in recent months to make room for a new condo and retail development. The former community of residents are now scattered across Waco. While the destruction of the motel is viewed as a positive in the redevelopment of Waco’s downtown, Reverend King wrote that it also represents loss. “We will be another city that trades, upon a city block, important complexity for a more ordered, albeit expensive, simplicity. In the trade, we will have to work harder to understand the human condition, its vulnerability, and its possibility,” she wrote.

Seeing the People Not the Point of View

At a time when differences of opinion often correlate with the word enemy—or worse, evil—a recent survey of PLPL Colleagues revealed that many are drawn to the program by the opportunity to learn with and from pastors whose viewpoints differ from their own. The program gently encourages pastors to share views that may not always correspond with those of their colleagues. It does so by creating an environment that fosters intimacy, vulnerability, and respect for difference. Cohorts number from six to twelve and are kept small by design. The meetings convene early Sunday evening at Austin Seminary, though pastors can show up earlier to nap or decompress. Like most aspects of the PLPL program, the meeting day and time are intentional. The thought is that with responsibilities fulfilled for the day, pastors can

bring more of themselves into the present moment. After a shared evening meal, the Colleagues each read aloud one of twelve statements from Parker Palmer’s Commitments of Presence. Adapted from the Circle of Trust Touchstones used by the Center for Courage and Renewal, these commitments offer a framework for sacred community and for entering into difficult conversations. Statements include Be fully present, Listen generously, No fixing, Suspend judgment, Turn to wonder, Welcome discomfort and dislocation, and Love the questions. In the silence that follows the readings, Colleagues share aloud the commitment that spoke to them—the one they feel convicted by or need to pay attention to. It’s the kind of situation a pastor could navigate without revealing much about herself. Yet, Ms. Wiginton said, they always surprise her with their openness

and candor.

PLPL’s 12-to-18-month timeline gives pastors an opportunity to get to know each other across a variety of situations. It allows them to confront their own biases and prejudices. During her cohort, Reverend King noticed that she had a tendency to make fast judgments of colleagues based on administrative style and theological interpretations—the kind of micro judgments many of us make every day without much thought. She said the process of sitting in the round with the other pastors over a long period of time allowed her to see beyond her own judgments and made her a better pastor and leader. “Not because I don’t have my judgments and my preferences, but because I know there’s more there than what my judgments and preferences are diagnosing. And that’s just, you know, a very humbling thing to admit, but that’s a lasting impact. That’s huge.”

homosexuality. Reverend King places no caveats around welcoming and affirming LGBTQ people.

“...it did allow me a clear picture of the humanity of those on the other side.”

As King remembers it, their friendship began when she confessed to the cohort that she was afraid to return home after a PLPL meeting because a few of her congregants were angry about her recent decision to join the Planned Parenthood board. King, who describes herself as “not very touchyfeely,” said the revelation was out of character for her. “Amos picked up on the amount of anxiety I was feeling, and the whole group slowed down. They were very kind about it,” she said. The friendship between the two pastors continued to grow after PLPL. They have the “Waco thing” in common and kids around the same age. She served as a pastoral advisor for his D.Min. program. He jokes that he will preach her funeral because it will be his best chance to save her kids.

King’s friendship with PLPL Colleague Amos Humphries grew out of their time in PLPL. Reverend King identifies as theologically progressive. Reverend Humphries, senior pastor of Park Lake Drive Baptist Church in Waco, is theologically more conservative than King, though he places himself “somewhere in the middle.” They align on most social issues, with the exceptions of abortion and LGBTQ issues. Reverend Humphries says he accepts though does not endorse

Given their known differences, it would have been easier to avoid the topic of abortion and Planned Parenthood. But Humphries continued to bring it up, and King continued to engage with him on the issue. One evening in his church Bible study, Reverend Humphries shared his thoughts on how divine providence works across our current cultural divide. “I was talking about how God works to move his people to different sides of the matrix to accomplish his divine will and that we need to recognize that people on whatever side of the

argument can and do represent God and have dignity and value and should be treated with love and respect,” he said.

He mentioned his friend Leslie and that she served on the board of Planned Parenthood. The discussion prompted a member of his church to reveal she had undergone an abortion. For her, the admission was a moment of catharsis, the release of a burden carried too long. Humphries watched as friends and congregants offered comfort and solace. Without the friendship between the pastors, without their willingness to engage in difficult, honest conversations, his congregant would have carried her burden home yet again. That experience and the talks that led up to it moved him to tour Planned Parenthood with King. It was time, he thought, to check out the situation for himself. “My experience with PLPL allowed me to see the value of entering into the Planned Parenthood space, sitting down and listening, having constructive dialog with someone I love and respect, and seeing the organization through Leslie’s eyes. The experience didn’t

change my moral stance on abortion, but it did allow me a clear picture of the humanity of those on the other side. That humanity triggers love and respect in my theology and social ethic and brings clarity to how I should communicate my stance as a pastor in the public square,” he said.

Josh Robinson and Hope Presbyterian: Leading from the Middle

Hope Presbyterian Church occupies what must be one of the more purple addresses in Texas. Located on Anderson Mill Road, the church sits on the boundary between the very blue Travis County and the traditionally red Williamson County. On any given Sunday the composition of the congregation may run 60/40 in favor of the progressives or the conservatives. The church straddles the social and political divide in ways few places do in our polarized times. While the congregational makeup can make preaching more challenging, Pastor Josh Robinson finds the complexity inspiring. “If I make everyone mad, I know I’ve done a good job,” he said.

“...taking a stance helped church leaders claim their voice in unison...”

stakeholders within the larger community— principals, PTA presidents, superintendents, volunteers, business leaders. He invited them to speak at church council meetings and share what they thought were the most pressing needs of the community. The stakeholders attended council meetings every month for about seven months. At one point they moved the meeting to the Title 1 school nearby to discuss the needs of the school.

Reverend Robinson reached out to the City Council representative for the church’s district and began attending town halls as well as city council meetings. Soon the district representative, too, was showing up at church council meetings.

While navigating the political differences at Hope Austin, Reverend Robinson has used his PLPL experience to launch the church into public life. As part of an early Local Action designed to get the church involved in life beyond its walls, he spent almost a year researching and contacting

Stakeholders began to view Reverend Robinson and the Hope Austin church elders as an integral part of the community leadership. When it came time to choose a new school superintendent, they asked Reverend Robinson to serve on a panel that offered input to the search agency on the caliber of

person who should be hired and what the vision of that person should be. Racial equity was at the top of his list, and he was pleased to find other panel members placed the same concern at the top of theirs.

The 2018 PLPL trip to Washington DC inspired Reverend Robinson to elevate the church’s civic engagement. “Part of what I learned on that trip is that even though you get an automated response when you contact your elected officials in DC, staffers are cataloguing those messages as feedback for the elected official,” he said. The knowledge that his input was getting through, even without a personal response, empowered Robinson. When he returned to Austin, he set up a spreadsheet of all the elected officials in the area where he lives and in the area where the church is located. He added each contact number, website link, email address, and online portal. Anytime he feels the need to voice his opinion or offer a suggestion, he goes to the spreadsheet, and with a click becomes an active participant in democracy. “I wouldn’t have done that prior to going to DC and realizing that yeah, I’m a part of the system. I have a responsibility to be a part of that.”

When the Trump administration instituted its family separation policy at the Texas-Mexico border, the church overcame its political differences and spoke out against a practice it considered contrary to the teachings of Christ. The church council wrote a letter in opposition to the policy and sent it to their elected representatives. Reverend Robinson said he thought this was a first in the history of Hope Austin. As expected, they received a form letter in response. Still, Reverend Robinson believes much was gained from the experience. He said going

through the process of forming a collective opinion and taking a stance helped church leaders claim their voice in unison against something that runs so deeply counter to their values as Christians.

Hope Austin’s relationships with civic leaders continues to grow and deepen. These days, when the church hosts events that engage the larger community, it’s not unusual for elected officials to participate. Texas State Representative Vikki Goodwin and her staff volunteered at Hope Austin’s drive-through flu clinic last fall, after publicizing the event on her web site. Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez showed up for a presentation at one of Hope Austin’s mental health initiatives with twenty officers. When asked what the Sheriff’s Office needed from the church community, she requested that they pray for her and her officers. “More than anything, we need to know that churches are praying for us and for our humanity because we are humans first,” she said.

Reverend Robinson said he is unsure where Hope Austin would be in terms of vision, mission, and engagement if he hadn’t participated in the PLPL program. “PLPL invested a tremendous amount of leadership training in me. Dividends from that training are realized not just by the church, but by the community we serve.” Perhaps the larger implication is that PLPL principles can help bridge the gap between red and blue as we strive to live out of our calling as Christians.

Moving Beyond Simple Narratives

Most Colleagues agree that if there’s one thing PLPL does well, it’s to complicate the story. In an era that prizes narratives simple enough to fit into a pithy tweet, one could be forgiven for questioning the need for complex stories—except that reality is layered and nuanced. The story changes depending on where it is entered and who is doing the telling. There is always more than one version of a story.

After months of meeting online during the Covid quarantine, the 2019 PLPL cohort gathered in San Antonio in late September of 2021 to investigate narratives that have historically defined Texas identity. They began with a tour of the Yanaguana missions (also called the San Antonio Missions) led by guides descended from the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan nations. Yanaguana is the indigenous

name for the San Antonio River. Historians have traditionally cast the mission stories in the mold of the white savior narrative: the Spanish built the mission system to convert the indigenous population to Catholicism and to civilize them into “people of reason.” This story was part of the Texas school curriculum for decades. It portrayed the indigenous as hapless and childlike. In more recent years the story morphed to include the understanding that the mission system acted as an arm of the Spanish state, victimizing indigenous peoples and obliterating their culture. Both stories contain threads of truth. Neither includes the perspectives of the indigenous people.

The Yanaguana version of the story presents the indigenous people as shrewd and exercising

agency. In this narrative, the tribes worked with the Spanish to build the missions to protect them from the Apache and the Comanche who, with the introduction of the horse by the Spanish, were able to extend their range and raid the Yanaguana. The people bided their time within the mission walls, waiting out war and drought. “This is not where my culture came to die,” the young guide named Manny said. “This is where my culture came to hide. They left clues.” He pointed out frescoes on the walls of Mission Concepción that contained hallucinatory images of peyote buttons alongside Catholic iconography and a painting of Jesus tending his flock. When a PLPL Colleague remarked that he was reclaiming the story of the Spanish Missions, he corrected her. “These are Indigenous People’s Missions. Our people built them.”

Past events often mean one thing to one generation and another to those who come after. Meaning and perspective shift over time. For the young guide, the missions represent empowerment, even celebration. He attended mass there as a boy and celebrated birthdays, quinceañeras, and graduations on the mission grounds. His grandparents sneaked a first kiss and later married inside the mission walls. His take on the story challenged PLPL Colleagues who expected his narrative to emphasize oppression and victimhood. Complexity calls into question the assumptions we make about others, the ways in which we turn them into one-dimensional characters to fit the narrative in our heads.

Later that afternoon as pastors sat discussing and parsing what they had heard, Melissa Wiginton

asked how the Yanaguana story of the missions intersected with the Christian story. Reverend Ellen Williams of St. Martin’s Lutheran Church in Austin offered a powerful parallel between the guide’s story and preaching. “It’s about letting those who listen

“Complexity calls our assumptions about others into question.”

make sense of the story instead of telling them how to understand it,” she said. Someone asked whether the Yanaguana narrative is a story of what happened in the past or a story about how we continue to live with the past. Williams-Hensle suggested the guide wasn’t telling the story of the pain of what had happened, but of the culture itself. Wiginton cast the narrative as one of acceptance. “It’s not a story of defeatism, but one that seems to say, it is what is. Some stories are more adequate than others,” she said.

Weaving a More Adequate Story

Reverend Nicole Cruz-Talkington found parallels to her own story in the Yanaguana narrative. Her Mexican ancestors also hid elements of their culture to survive. She said her father, who had a lighter skin tone, realized as a young boy that white teachers treated him better than the students with darker skin. “And so, he had this really early revelation that if you looked white, you were safer than if you looked Mexican,” she said. Punished for speaking Spanish in school, her dad didn’t become fluent in English until his early teens. Once he

mastered the language, he erased all traces of his accent. He spoke only English to her as a child. She mourned the loss of a deep and fluent connection to Spanish even as she came to understand that her dad had made these decisions out of consideration for what he thought was best for her and her brothers.

The guide’s perspective that the hiding of cultural artifacts in plain sight came from a spirit of resistance and hope inspired her. “Because what my dad did not give me in language, he gave me in our culture. He’s always, always, always telling stories about who we are, whether you want him to or not, and so I had that very strong sense culturally of who I am, but I didn’t have the language to rub up next to that in a nice little perfect connection,” she said. “So it was just really life-giving to hear somebody else talk about something that’s always kind of swirling in my brain about identity and culture and our ancestors and the choices they had to make and focusing on strength instead of just grief. Because while there is grief, there is also stubbornness and persistence in the Latino community.”

The trip to the Yanaguana missions was in part a journey of reckonings for Reverend Cruz-Talkington. There was the history of all that came before—the loss, for the Indigenous people, for her father, for herself and her community, as well as the moments of recognition she experienced walking through the missions and later sitting with her mostly white PLPL cohort, a group she says who understood she was holding within her several realities at once. She sums up the entirety of the experience as brutiful, a term borrowed from Glennon Doyle that encompasses the beauty and the brutality of life. CruzTalkington works to bring this fullness, this complexity, of experience into the spirituality groups she facilitates for psychiatric patients at Rock Springs Hospital. Her patients, she says, are often people who have come to define themselves as horrible and worthless, usually as a result of great trauma. She reminds them to remember their strengths alongside the areas they need to improve, so that there is balance in how they view themselves. She says her work is animated by a question she doesn’t pose outright to patients but that lends potency and meaning to her interactions with them: What stories are you telling yourself about yourself?

PLPL calls pastors to examine the stories we tell as a society about who we are; One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. In the program they look at the ways in which these stories have pushed us forward and the ways in which they function as a projection behind which we hide other long-silenced narratives. As these voices, these once hidden histories, push their way into consciousness, the question becomes how do we listen, how do we respond, how do we together begin to weave a more adequate story?

An adequate story may seem paltry compared with the heroic and aspirational myths to which we’ve grown accustomed, but it can offer a tapestry that expands and grows to accommodate new threads of narrative. It can provide a process of understanding rather than a single fixed viewpoint. It can live alongside and balance our national myths, informing how we interpret and reinterpret their meanings through time. In this way an adequate story can be more than enough.

Toward a New Communion

hungry, they made their way over the dry dusty ground toward a distant Live Oak, the only respite available from the sun. A traditional indigenous meal was to be served under the tree. As it turned out, lunch was more of a tasting than a meal, consisting of a couple of tablespoons of sweet bison and nopales on each plate, washed down with a sweet prickly pear drink. You could call it a disappointment, though no one said so.

The morning of the mission tour started out cool for a September day in Texas. As the morning unwound into early afternoon, the air turned hot and sultry. The masks worn inside the missions to protect against Covid intensified the heat. As the PLPL Colleagues exited the close, stuffy quarters of Mission Concepción, the last stop on the Yanaguana tour, they fell into groups of two and three. Tired and

“in PLPL they acquire and hone tools that enable them to respond to Jesus’ charge...”

As the pastors made room for each other around the picnic tables, Ramon, a young man of Coahuiltecan ancestry, announced he would issue an invocation in song and dance. He would call his Ancestors, his Spirits, and they would join us. He began to shake a handheld rattle and shuffle his feet. The irony of an indigenous man performing for a group of mostly white pastors after the Yanaguana tour weighed heavy. Yet folded within that irony existed the possibility of a more profound experience. To be offered such a gift in this place.

To be invited to the table after such a history. Who could turn away? As none of the pastors spoke Coahuiltecan, the words of Ramon’s prayer were lost. Yet in the sound of his voice and the generosity of his offering, meaning prevailed. The wind picked up as he danced. It shook the leaves on the tree and cooled the sweaty faces of the pastors. With it came the recognition of grace and communion.

The communion of PLPL pushes pastors into deeper relationship wiith Jesus’ claims in Luke 4. Relationship defined as the way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected. PLPL pastors assume the responsibilities of those connections—with each other, with God, and with God’s created world. They see themselves, and by extension the church, as the ones to whom Jesus speaks; to bring good news to the poor, to set free the captives and all who are oppressed. In PLPL they acquire and hone tools that enable them to respond to Jesus’s charge, tools that implode boundaries imposed by power structures in the form of race, class, privilege, hierarchical roles, and easy assumptions. They learn to question, confront, and resist the limitations imposed by society as well as the limitations they’ve placed

on themselves. PLPL pushes Colleagues and offers support and encouragement as they sojourn beyond church walls proclaiming in celebration the year of the Lord’s favor. And the Spirit says, Amen.

Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary 100 East 27th Street

Austin, Texas 78705-5711

www.austinseminary.edu