Becoming Pastor Katie

This is (one angle on) the complicated, messy story of my journey to Duke Divinity School, where I will begin my studies next month.

Photo by Keith Kissel

We are yawning through our Sunday school or confirmation class and we are debating what societal roles are acceptable for women. I have no desire to join the military so I could care less when we debate the role of soldier, and I am fairly certain we are going to have a woman president within a few years, so that part of the discussion seems superfluous. But when we get to pastor, I pause. I have the sense that this question matters beyond our class today. Matters to us. To me.

My teacher shows us a Bible verse: Women should be silent in the churches. And another one: I do not permit women to teach or have authority over a man. My friend protests, but I am looking at the words right there, and I take the Bible so seriously, and I can’t see a way to wriggle around it.

That night, I ask my mom what she thinks. She tells me some of her best friends are lady pastors, and if they are sharing the gospel of God’s love in Christ, she can’t see why God wouldn’t approve.

*

I have volunteered to share my testimony—the story of my incredibly unexciting spiritual journey to age fourteen—in church. I walk to the front of the congregation, grab the microphone, and talk about learning to pray, learning to trust God rather than popularity or success at school. At the end, I tell them that I want my whole life to be about serving God.

The people in the congregation smile proudly at me as I look around the sanctuary. Afterwards, a few come and tell me they enjoyed my speech.

The official teaching of our church is that women can’t preach. But it doesn’t seep down far into our culture. This feels like a good thing. Women serve and lead in almost every ministry. They are elders, they read the scripture, they serve communion, they speak in church, they lead youth group, they teach Sunday school to adults and to children. I have always felt free. I have never felt limited.

It’s just that when I start to think about serving God with my life, and what that will look like, the idea of being a pastor never occurs to me.

*

At camp every summer, I live with a community of girls for two weeks, and my I get my yearly quota of deep, spiritual conversations. On Sunday mornings, women and men speak in front of the whole camp, sharing their life stories. In Bible studies, my lady counselors blow my mind with new ideas about living life for God. During rest periods, I creep over to counselors’ bunks and ask for wisdom, and these women encourage me to grow.

It is one of my deepest, loveliest summers—a summer of stars and brownies and skinny dipping and late-night whispers—and I am exploring in this place that is expansive, open. I have started to question some of the teachings of my church, especially the political ones. “What do you think,” I ask my counselor, “about women being pastors?”

“Well,” she says slowly, “I don’t know for sure. But I do wonder whether women have the necessary qualities to lead a whole church.” She stutters a little. “I mean, personally, I haven’t gotten as much from women pastors as I have from men.”

I breathe in thoughtfully, nodding. For the moment, it makes sense. I haven’t gotten as much from women pastors either, I think. It is a safe phrase to hide behind when the Bible is ambiguous—this pretense of personal experience. For several years, it becomes my line.

But the truth is, I have never had a woman as an official pastor to “get” things from.

And yet most of my spiritual development has been guided by women.

*

I am twenty-three and working in the nonprofit field, serving God with my life by loving the poor. I enjoy my clients, but something is missing in my relationship with them, something about sharing stories and doing life together and delving into the big questions.

John has been teasing me for a couple years now. He says I need a job where I can talk about faith; therefore I should become a pastor’s wife. He says this flippantly, to mock established roles and bring lightness to heavy conversations.

When he says it, I laugh. The idea that I could take the word wife off of the phrase and then claim pastor as my calling, still doesn’t register.

Until one night I am reading Bonhoeffer, and something in the words on the page leaps out at me, and echoes of the past months reverberate around me, and I realize that pastor is a word for the things I feel most called to.

After a few excited, sleepless nights, I tuck it away. I know my personality; I am an Enneagram Type One whose deepest fear is of being ethically wrong, whose deepest hope is to be so good that I am beyond condemnation by anyone. I am still a tiny bit afraid to make waves, to become something that could possibly be against God’s plan, something that could draw confused looks from my more conservative friends.

I keep working in nonprofit, and then a church job literally drops in my lap and I think, Okay God, point taken, I will try it and see what happens.

*

In June 2012, Rachel Held Evans hosts a “Week of Mutuality” on her blog, which is a glorious bombardment of posts designed to make the case that the Bible supports equality for women in the church. I eagerly tune in each night, learning about women apostles and Greco-roman household codes and an end to patriarchy. I devour everything, and the last strands “women should be silent” are removed, and the last whispers of “I’ve never met a good woman pastor” slip away.

At the end of the week, I feel utterly free.

A few days later, I have this transcendent moment in a glorious church. I confess to God all my fears of being wrong or controversial or inadequate. The organ is echoing in my heart, and the desire to follow this small voice is now greater than my fears, and I know it is time to take the next step.

Empty words and love enfleshed

Photo by Eric Dufresne

I duck my head under the rafters I climb up and sit cross-legged on the end of her bunk. She is sprawled out on her side, resting her head on her arm. One of the cabin’s two dim light bulbs has gone out. “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well,” I say.

“My stomach hurts,” she confirms.

I don’t think until later to wonder if she is really sick or if she was just made uncomfortable by the mob of campers crying as they scrambled down the aisles of the campfire, after Jesus was betrayed, beaten, crucified in front of them by dramatic torchlight earlier this evening—if she didn’t want to respond to the altar call but knew she would be the only one still sitting on the benches. I don’t think until later to wonder if I was made uncomfortable by the spectacle, if there was a subconscious reason I volunteered to walk back to the cabin with her.

They call her Bubbles. She’s the one who put my hair in corn rows yesterday. She is thirteen.

“So how have you enjoyed the week?” I ask her. “Crazy you’ll be going home in just a couple days.” I feel no small pressure to make this time with her spiritually meaningful, considering we are missing the altar call and her chance to pray the prayer, to make a decision for Christ.

She adjusts her bandanna and props up her head on her elbow. It doesn’t take much before she launches into it all. She doesn’t much want to go home. Her mom is always pushing her too hard, and she doesn’t do well in school. She misses her dad, who’s in jail. Her uncle is in a gang; lately he has gotten into trouble with members of an opposing gang, and she is worried about him.

I don’t know what to say. I am nineteen and the urban kids who have come for this last week of the summer have experiences and sorrows far beyond my realm of understanding.

I am still young and insecure enough to be afraid of silence. I steer the conversation back to a topic in which I will know what I am supposed to say.

“What did you think about the cross talk at the campfire?”

*

It’s safe to say that even then, I was uncomfortable with these veins of conversation, the forced feeling that I had to always be looking for a door to insert Jesus into—as though Jesus needed me to awkwardly insert him into any place or moment. I thought the discomfort came because I was an introvert, because I was shy, because I was not a good enough Christian, because I was ashamed of my faith. I thought I needed to push through and be bold.

In high school I felt that tension constantly, and sometimes I would notice an opening in the conversation—after an English class about Jonathan Edwards or Dante’s Inferno, after the anxiety-riddled college-application season, as we sat around dreaming about our futures and the purpose and meaning of life. I should say something about Jesus, I would think. Mostly I felt guilty, and sometimes I wrote convoluted emails and letters explaining my beliefs, which usually didn’t get any response.

I wonder what it would have looked like if I hadn’t tried so much to force these words, words I usually failed to say anyway. I could have focused on the gifts and sensitivities I did have, the desires for justice and action. I could have brought tiny pieces of God’s realm right there to my little high school. I could have been a symbol of what heaven looks like: loving my enemies, refusing to climb the American ladder, befriending weirder weirdos than me, raising money to fight malaria, ending human trafficking. I could have shown them what it was like to be unafraid to be myself, unafraid to live by the Spirit, to live free.

*

The last morning of camp, while the others are playing in the waterpark, Bubbles and I sit and watch from the hill (she has her period, which maybe explains the stomach ache a few days ago, or maybe not).

“Have you thought any more about accepting Christ?” I ask her.

“Yeah, a little,” she mumbles.

“It’s a big decision, more than just saying one prayer,” I concede. “Not something you should do if you aren’t ready to dedicate your life to Jesus,” I explain.

This probably isn’t what she was expecting when she started telling me her problems. The things I am saying about Christ are just words, completely distinct from the secrets she shared with me the other night.

She shrugs. I tell her to keep thinking about it.

*

It is so cringingly blatant, now—that every privileged word I could have said to her about Christ being enough, about God being the answer to her problems, was empty. Not because God couldn’t be a source of strength and comfort and guidance, but because I didn’t, couldn’t know how to relate that to her. Because God’s love wouldn’t change the fact that it wasn’t fair that she lacked a supportive family, that she lacked good role models and a community that could buoy her up through the hard times. Knowing that Jesus died for her sins wouldn’t give her the tools she needed to find a way out.

I see now that what she needed, more than an empty idea of Christ being enough, was incarnation—for God’s love to take on flesh. For a community, a family, a friend, a church, to enact in her life a model of real Love.

Lately I am finding that for me, one way to speak authentically is to write, here in this space, to “witness” to the renewal and life God has worked in me.  Another, perhaps harder, challenge is to let Love come into flesh through me. Complaining, being angry, and being sullen are all much more “natural” than the awkwardness of loving where no one else is, spending time with an outcast, reaching out to people I barely know to offer help.

But that awkward kind of love is what makes words come to life.

A journey, part 4: Whispers and campfires

This is part 4 of a story in five parts. Catch up here:
Part 1: Waiting for a sign
Part 2: A sinking feeling
Part 3: April showers

Photo by Doug Beckers

Quemahoning was the kind of camp Professor Stansell might have mocked as too evangelical. It was here at age ten my counselor told me I better say an official prayer to “accept Jesus” into my heart to be sure I was going to heaven. It was here at age fifteen I experienced a community of high-schoolers who weren’t afraid to lie under the stars and ask big questions of God and of themselves.

My first week back, I took twelve-year-old Bailey to play ping-pong. I asked about her family. When she didn’t say much, I launched into the easy diatribe I thought I was supposed to share: “God loves you so much; there is nothing you can do to separate yourself from that love.” The words, like a dented ping-pong ball, didn’t bounce. They landed flat at my feet and I saw that I still didn’t believe them.

I picked my way that summer through the ponderous book of Jeremiah—full of prophecies of sin and destruction—holding my grudge against God for being confusing and wrathful (if he was even real). I woke in the mornings and stared at the sun coming up over the lake. I asked God, why?

One evening, all the counselors huddled in Ellen’s apartment. Someone spoke about how Jesus died for our sins on the cross, how all our failures are accounted for. This is the core tenet of Christianity and the emotional heartbeat of evangelicalism. Many of the counselors cried tears of release and joy. I sat unmoved, bored.

The next afternoon, Ellen caught my arm as the campers rushed off to activities. “How are you doing?” We sat on the benches by the lake. For the first time, I let myself be angry. I thought of sitting alone in my room in in the spring, wishing someone would stop by.  “I don’t feel like a sinner!” I told Ellen. “I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong that Jesus has to die for. I just feel broken.”

Ellen reached for my hand and waited a long time as we watched the leaves quiver against the still water. Finally she spoke. “That lack of love you feel,” she began, “that is sin. Christ bore that pain, too.”

*

Trying a different approach, I shared the story of my difficult year with 14-year-old girls around a campfire on our overnight biking trip. “God is big enough to handle questions,” I concluded unconvincingly, pausing to blow on the coals of the campfire and down another roasted marshmallow. “Don’t pretend you don’t have any.”

The conversation returned to beef stew and farts. As the girls trickled off to their tents, I stayed to watch the fire die down. I shone my flashlight around the campsite to make sure all the food was put away. One girl continued sitting at the fire, staring at the coals.

I looked at her. “Not tired?” I asked.

She shook her head.

I poked at the coals again, and sat down to stare at them with her. It’s a good pastime.

“How can you believe in God,” she asked me, “when you aren’t sure he’s really there?”

I was suddenly acutely aware of my the pace of my heartbeat. This was important. Without knowing it, I had been waiting for a camper to ask me this question all summer.

“I want to believe,” she said, “but I don’t know if I do. And I could just say all that stuff is true, but maybe I wouldn’t mean it.”

I stabbed at the coals. I felt the pain still raw inside me. It hurts to want faith and not have it. To feel that a personal, loving God is both the most beautiful and preposterous of notions.

“Have you read the gospels?” I asked. She shook her head. “What I’ve found,” I said, “is that Jesus is a genius. Someone I want to follow. There’s something real in those stories.”

But it was only people who wrote the Bible. When I pray it feels empty. My life isn’t exactly the best right now. I want to be independent.

Her objections were mine. As I listened to her, I was listening to myself. “I don’t think it’s something anyone can figure out for you,” I finally copped out. “We all have to find God on our own.”

My heart hurt when I said goodbye to her a few days later.

That summer, it was 14-year-olds who reminded me that honest seekers yearn for God. It was music and campfires and whispers by the lake that reminded me there is a world apart from academic criticism. That honesty and vulnerability can be met with love.

By August, I could look out over the lake and see beauty. I could fall asleep content at the community of lovely people around me. I could pray quietly, thank you.

“This is how we know that he lives in us,” the apostle John writes. “We know it by the Spirit he gave us.”

My favorite part of the story happened in the beautiful land of Tanzania in East Africa.  Read about this in the final installment, Part 5.

Coming out, part 1: The summer of '08

This post is dedicated to the brave and wonderful people who allowed me to include their stories as a part of mine. I write this in hopes that this piece of my journey will help to break down walls rather than create new ones.

Sex was a concept I picked it up slowly in elementary school, starting with the words my friends used, the movies I saw unwittingly at sleepovers of more worldly-wise friends, and the giggles whenever our fifth grade teacher said “do it.” It was in the same way that I picked up “gay”—first the language only, from my friends, usually used as a derogatory term for the boys who pierced their right ear or the girls whose hand-me-down clothes were a few styles too old. Then, slowly, that it had something to do with girls kissing girls or boys kissing boys.

My parents cornered me in about fifth grade, on a car ride home, and started telling me about menstruation and the reproductive system. When we arrived home they were just getting to the juicy part and were going to show me some diagrams in a book, so I excused myself to use the bathroom. I emerged and my mom yelled down the hall, “Don’t you want to know how the egg gets fertilized?” Embarrassed, I told them I was too busy arranging my Celine Dion and Backstreet Boys cassette tapes.

Later, when they were out, I snuck the book from their room and devoured it. I learned in depth about sex, masturbation, pornography, and homosexuality, those fascinatingly forbidden topics. I still remember the wording: “When a man and a woman are married, they go somewhere by themselves and start kissing and hugging…” After reading it, I went to bury my face in my teddy bear.

From the book, from church, from my community, I drew the implicit assumption that it was only between a married man and a woman that sex should occur. Implicit is what it always was; for me there was never an angry sermon about gays destroying the culture. At summer camp in high school, we had long and deep discussions about sex and dating and relationships, which did not mention but certainly assumed that everyone was straight. We now know from Facebook this was not true.

I realized my uncle was gay when I was 13, in a sudden burst of insight. My uncle's partner (his "friend" I thought) mentioned in a card that they were taking a trip for their anniversary. This was my first encounter with real live gay people. By the time I got to high school, my straight assumptions were entrenched enough that I was scared of the high school gay club, LeTsGaB. Honestly, it was less repulsion and condescension than it was discomfort. I was nerdy, quiet, and decidedly evangelical, and the gay club seemed to represent a loud and proud discussion of sexuality I was not ready to have at all. My church had never told me to hate gays, but it had certainly never told me to love them.

So in college, I made mostly evangelical friends, steered clear of yet another gay club, and mostly tried to ignore the idea. Until senior year.

*

In 2008, three women came out to me.

Kate was a college friend. One night she asked me if we could talk. She told me she felt terrible for not being honest. I had asked what she was doing over the weekend, and she said she had a training for work. Another day, she told me she was going into the city to meet some friends from her trip abroad. She was tired of lying to me. The truth was, she was bi, and dating a woman for the first time. She wanted to be out, but she was scared to tell some of our other friends for fear of judgment.

I tried to listen compassionately. I told her nothing changed about how I felt about her. But I felt it would be dishonest if I didn’t share my perspective. I asked her if she had a sense about how this new revelation about her sexuality fit with her faith. She said she felt pretty good about it. I mumbled something about how I still wasn’t sure whether or not it was okay to be gay. I told her that I wanted to be supportive, but I was trying to figure out where I stood.

We graduated a couple months later. I’ve seen her only twice since then.

A couple weeks later I arrived at my fourth and final summer as a counselor at a Christian camp. The whispered conversations of pain and trust and Jesus seem even more beautiful five years later. The last two weeks, Lana and I were counselors for Cabin 12, the oldest girls in camp. It was the clearest night of the summer and Lana and I took the girls up to the soccer field to gaze into the soul of the universe. I asked everyone to share about their relationship with God over the past year. Each girl told a story, but Emily didn’t want to talk.

“You don’t have to share,” we said, “but this is a safe place.”

She waffled. “I really don’t have anything to share.”

“Emily, it’s okay, you can say it.” One of the girls encouraged her, and she continued.

“I mean, I can’t have a relationship with God.”

I was not the only one on the field to jump in immediately. “What do you mean? Everyone can have a relationship with God!”

She took a deep breath. “I mean, I’m gay.”

That was not the explanation I was expecting, and I was silenced momentarily. The stars were bright with beauty. The other sixteen-year-old girls began to respond with acceptance and love. I was proud of them. I think Emily felt free.

When we returned to the cabin, Lana and I met on the porch, as we did every night. There were tears in her eyes as we prayed for the girls.

I sat on Emily’s bunk and we whispered into the night. She told me when she first knew, though in a way she had always known. She told me about coming out to her mom and sister, but not her dad who would be furious. She told me it was hard coming out to her girlfriends, because some of them started acting weird, like they were afraid she would be attracted to them.

I prayed for the Spirit to give me the right words, and the words that came were of God’s unconditional love.

I woke the next morning and I knew clearly that my role was simply to show grace. To let her see she could reconnect with God. To emphasize that the central message of our faith is God’s surprising, consuming, boundary-breaking love.

Lana and I went out to the porch for our morning prayer. “I knew exactly what Emily was going to say as soon as she started,” said Lana. “I knew because I’ve been there, in that exact conversation. I’ve said those exact words.” She was quiet for a while as I took in what she was saying. “And the hardest thing is that no one knows. I couldn’t work here if they knew. And I can’t talk with Emily about it because I signed a statement of beliefs.”

This time I just listened.

When it was time to pray, I prayed, thank you God for your great love, greater than our love.

 ____

Part 2 is up! I would love to hear your thoughts. Please keep comments charitable.