Green Jello Hotdish

Pastor Katrina Foster, an ELCA pastor in good standing, is no longer welcome to preach at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary (Southern).  She’s a graduate of the Columbia, South Carolina, seminary - 1994.  She’s also a graduate - 1990 - of Newberry College, a college of the ELCA. (The college & seminary are about 45 minutes apart from each other.)

Both institutions often invite alumni to return to speak to students about how having graduated from Newberry and Southern prepared them for their successful lives in the world and for their response to their call to ministry.  Alumni who are also pastors are also routinely invited to preach for chapel services at both institutions.

Such invitations were offered to Katrina in early 2008.   She was invited to Newberry College during the week of 15-19 September to present the Fine Arts Lectures which meant presenting 2 public lectures, teaching 3 classes and preaching in the College Chapel for Wednesday morning services.  After informing Southern that she would be close to campus, an invitation was made to visit the seminary, stay on campus, eat with students and faculty, sit in on classes, meet and talk with students and preach at the seminary’s Friday chapel worship.  These arrangements and constant coordination for them were done through Rev. Dr. Tony Everett, Professor of Pastoral Care.  Dr. Robert Hawkins, Professor of Worship and Music and Dean of Christ Chapel at the seminary, coordinated the text she was expected to preach on for the Friday service. Her visit was well and widely known.

Katrina was ordained in December 1994.  She is on the roster of ELCA clergy in the Metropolitan New York Synod. For the last 13 years, she has been the pastor of Fordham Lutheran Church in Bronx, New York, a congregation that describes itself as “a welcoming place to an amazing array of people. We come from Africa, the Virgin Isles, the Caribbean, Central America, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and different parts of the United States. Many of us are immigrants or first generation American. We are single parent families, widows, gay and lesbian families, young, old, somewhere between, well educated and some who have difficulty reading. One thing we all share in common: our trust and faith in Jesus’ love for us and our faithful response to this love.”  This, a church that serves its community well: the two blocks the church occupies are the only drug-free ones in the neighborhood.  This, a church that is about to begin a $22 million redevelopment project to better serve the community and the church’s ministries.  This, a church that is growing.  This, a pastor presented the ELCA’s Dr. Richard Lee Peterman “Good Steward” award, in recognition of her gifts for stewardship, and held up as exemplary at synod assembly.  All subjects that should be of interest to the seminary’s students…

Katrina is also an out ELCA pastor, living in a committed, long-term, same-gender relationship with Pamela Kallimanis, together raising their daughter, Zoia.  Katrina was among the 82 LGBT ministers who introduced themselves to the larger church at the 2007 Chicago ELCA Churchwide Assembly.   Her story and a picture of her family were published in “A Place Within My Walls,” the devotional booklet distributed to voting members and visitors at the assembly.

Until Thursday, September 18th, everything went as arranged and coordinated over the months.  Katrina went to Newberry, South Carolina, last week, participated in the Fine Arts Lecture series, taught classes, preached at the Wednesday service in the College chapel.  On Thursday, the e-newsletter for the seminary went out, reminding all that Katrina would be visiting the seminary, meeting with students, and preaching on Friday.

Thursday morning, Dr. Everett informed Katrina that the invitation to preach on Friday had been withdrawn by the President, Rev. Dr. Marcus Miller shortly after Drs. Miller and Everett had announced to the class they co-teach that Pr. Foster would be arriving on campus that day to meet with students and preach the next morning.  Subsequently, that evening, she had a conversation with Dr. Michael Root, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Systematic Theology, who said the reason that she had been dis-invited to meet and preach was that, because of her self-declared non-compliance with Vision and Expectations, she would not now be admitted as a student-candidate for ordination, and so would not be allowed to preach.

Friday morning she met with the president of the seminary, who was upset that the dis-invitation of her had resulted in lots of calls and emails to him, protesting the action.  He was dismayed, thinking that she was causing a controversy, instead of quietly accepting his dismissal and going home.  She wasn’t causing the calls and emails.  His action had.

Rev. Dr. Miller told her he had not known she was to preach until the e-newsletter on Thursday, despite announcing it in the class he was co-teaching on Thursday morning.  The time spent on arrangements from early in the year to last Thursday and that one of the classes she was going to visit at the seminary, whose students she was going to meet, was the class that Dr. Miller team-taught with Dr. Everett, raise questions about what actually caused Dr. Miller to rescind the invitation.

Emily Eastwood, Executive Director, LC/NA, said, “In an environment where bishops have been  encouraged by the 2007 Churchwide Assembly to exercise restraint or to refrain in matters of discipline, in the environment of the decades-long struggle over the issues of LGBT people and the church, in an environment where the ELCA Social Statement on Human Sexuality is going before the 2009 Churchwide Assembly and is in draft with hearings being held all over the ELCA, in an environment of dwindling membership numbers, reduced benevolent giving and shrinking numbers of congregations, you would have thought that someone at the nexus of LGBT, LGBT family, rostered pastor, growing congregation with increasing ministries, award-winning stewardship, and redevelopment to the benefit of church and community would be precisely the someone an institution trying to graduate real-world pastors would want its students to meet.”

The president of Southern Seminary can be contacted at 803-786-5150 or by mail at President, Southern Seminary, 4201 North Main Street, Columbia, SC 29203.

Social video/networking site GodTube was today’s feature story on the religion page. The idea is simple: provide a forum for people to connect, share videos and messages, all in a safe, “family-friendly” environment. Sounds OK, even good, right?

Here’s the problem with GodTube, and all the other residents of the Internet Christian Ghetto: they’ve missed the point.

Before I get into this, I want to be clear about one thing. I am, in no way, condoning all of the material on the big social media sites like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. However I am universal in my criticism: God didn’t command God’s followers to lead a safe, sheltered life in a gated community. And that’s exactly what the Ghetto is all about creating.

At work this Advent, as I’ve written about here, I’ve been recording weekly video reflections from staff members, congregational members and next week a campus pastor. They’ve been hugely successful, and are receiving mention from outside the Greater Milwaukee Synod sphere. Trackbacks on the entries show even non-church organizations are linking to some clips. This impact is due to the fact that I am hosting them on the YouTube and Facebook services, rather than GodTube.

The denominational office uses and encourages Google Video for web video content, also to a hugely successful degree.

A colleague of mine who works for a different denomination pointed out the sad irony in calling these Christian sites a ghetto — not because of the isolationist feel, but because the church (universal, not just Christian) has been establishing or supporting ghettos for different classes of people throughout history, and now it is simply retreating to the suburbs, so to speak, from the scary, untamed Internet.

From a communications standpoint, I really should be using GodTube in addition to the mainstream sites, in order to attain the largest reach of audience. But I’m torn supporting a system which is arrogant and elitist in any way. So far, no one has inquired why I’m not posting on GodTube, so I’ll keep below the radar for a while.

Jesus calls us to be in the world. The Christian faith requires a change of lifestyle. GodTube does nothing to accomplish that; but I believe the sum of its mission can be found in the last two paragraphs in the article:

Q: When do you expect GodTube to make a profit?

A:Next year, sooner than later.

I just had a revelation. OK, so not so much a revelation as a continuation of a conversation I had with a ministry colleague in a neighboring synod.

This is going to be big. (In that “I work for a mainline Protestant denomination and we’re always at least five years behind the times” sort of way.)

Before Synod Assembly this year, I’m going to go visit congregations and talk with the people. I’m going to find out what they think about the life of the church. I’m going to listen to their stories. I’m going to pay attention to their most cherished traditions. I’m going to let them “be Bishop for a day” and tell me what they would change.

And while I do this, I’m going to record it. Call it SynodTube. And broadcast it throughout the convention center at Synod Assembly.

Is this going to be a ton of work? Absolutely. But how many conversations will it start? And how will it allow us to think differently about how we do church in our corner of the world? And what things need to stay the same because they’re such a part of our DNA? And what things really need to change? And how to tell the difference? And how to live with our differences — in fact embracing them — with ourselves, with those in our theological family, with our inter-faith brothers and sisters, indeed with everyone.

I’ve heard it said before: “You’re a unique individual, just like everyone else.” Could this be a ticket to demonstrate our unity in diversity?

Oh… in case you missed it, the GMS is doing an Advent vlog. Check out Amy’s reflection!

She went and visited the Lutheran church recently.

This is an excerpt from an e-mail I sent to my parents and some friends, reflecting on my day. I started the day teaching some communication workshops at a youth leadership training event at a church in the synod. The topic of the day was utilizing effective online community to build ministries. (I’ve edited the excerpt to protect identities, and removed some of my “artistic flair” just for job security!)

A little background on the Episcopal connection. Today was the investiture (”installation”) of the Most Rev. Katharine Jefforts Schori as the 26th Presiding Bishop. It is the first time in history that a member church of the Anglican Communion has installed a woman as its Presiding Bishop, Chief Pastor, and Primate. I’ll post more about that later.

Today’s teaching was interesting. First with the youth leaders — so much fun. This one lady hit it on the head in the large group when the leader was discussing e-groups and effective Web tools. He had planned this huge presentation, and then told me, “Oh, feel free to jump in with examples of how others are doing this as I’m talking.” He’s a nice guy. He was talking about how the group should imagine what it would look like to share our resource online, to have a Web site devoted to youth ministry where anyone could upload files, share ideas, and come together in a community.

Uh, we already have that. The concept is older than the Internet. We’ve had that for a while now. It was one of the first things I set up.

So I put it up on the screen, people were looking at it, and people thought that the only thing we had was an e-mail group. It’s SO frustrating!

So he went further in their brainstorming, and people came up with a lot of good ideas — not new ideas, mind you, nor things that are really intuitive — but good ideas. Then he was looking to get people together to form a committee (can you feel the blood pressure rising?) so they could “take this slowly to do it right.”

Then this lady, out of nowhere, interrupts him and says something like (seriously, it was profound, I wish I remembered it word-for-word because it hit the nail on the head), “I’m sorry, but I disagree with that. When you look at places like the Willow Creek Association who are getting millions of hits on their Web site a day, who monopolize the media, who have seemingly unlimited resources at their disposal and are attracting people with their cheap, shallow theology… the ELCA has missed the boat. Entirely. We do need to do this now. We need to do this yesterday. We need to do this five, ten years ago.”

What upset me wasn’t what she said, because it’s what I’ve been SAYING since I started. It’s that, in typical Lutheran fashion, nobody said “that’s right.” Nobody clapped. It was just a desire to “move on” to something else.

So after that, I transitioned my lesson plan into Google Groups (I was originally going to talk about MySpace). And sure enough, the question came up, that churches had to be cautious using this because it “validates” all the bad uses of the Internet.

I almost wanted to lose it. I’m so sick — SO sick — of the church not doing anything because either a committee has to be formed and nothing gets done, or because the church refuses to get involved in something until it’s too late. It’s no wonder that we’re losing members — or that the mainline church is losing members while the evangelicals are growing. Their theology, yes, is shallow, individualistic, decision-based, and flawed. But they’re the ones who are MEETING PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE. They’re the ones who are embracing the media, who embrace the Internet and technology to a nauseating degree. They’re the ones who, truthfully, pioneer accessible worship and structures, with their auditorium-style sanctuaries, big-screen lyrics, and video projection of speakers.

And what do we do? We argue that the new hymnal is red, because the old hymnal was red.

At least the Episcopal Church stood out on a limb today and pissed people off. They took a stand. Moderates don’t accomplish anything but a false sense of security. I don’t agree with conservatives, but at least they push the envelope and get people talking. I agree with liberals, and they push the envelope and get people talking.

I’ve never been so excited for my own generation than when I talk with kids from Carthage who have never voted in their lives, and during a midterm election, they’re asking how to register to vote and making sure that they’re able to vote on Tuesday. I’ve never been so excited for my own generation than when I see the reports that this could be the highest voter turnout from 18-24-year-olds since the voting age was lowered in the 1972.

I’ve never been so excited than today, when I hear youth talk about how they’ve joined MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking groups that are conducted by Campus Crucade, InterVarsity, Willow Creek/Elmbrook, and other fundamentalist evangelical organizations, and watch leadership squirm and feel uncomfortable in their chairs as they fear what is going to happen to our church and realize they’ve missed the boat.