Mission Yearbook: Author discusses ‘Sacred Curiosity’

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Britney Winn Lee (photo courtesy of Britney Winn Lee)

Author Britney Winn Lee literally wrote the book on sacred curiosity, and she had plenty to tell Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe, the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to their 54-minute conversation here.

Broadleaf Books published Lee’s most recent book, “Sacred Curiosity: Wondering Our Way Toward Wholeness.”

“One of the things I discovered during my deep dive into curiosity was how incredibly accessible it is,” she told the hosts. “It doesn’t require adding a ton more to an already maxed-out schedule or nervous system.”

Instead, “the way it has been part of my journey is it has manifested as a breadcrumb trail that leads to the next question, the next healing, the next conversation, the next connection.” The book came from “how I was in a dark place, a deep well of grief.”

“As I say in the book, I hated and feared less at the end of this journey,” she said. “I would not have said that was possible before my counselor said, ‘I think maybe you might find some life and color again if you just follow a little bit of curiosity and awe and wonder.”

She said she thinks of curiosity as “a tiny change in posture, asking one more question or keeping one more conversation going.”

She’s also clear what curiosity is not, and in response to a question by Doong, she said it’s not scrolling endlessly through one’s social media feed.

“When I’m scrolling, I could call it curiosity. But a lot of times it’s really a hunt for certainty,” she said. “I have started wondering, what if none of that is actually curiosity? What if curiosity is an openness?”

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Catoe asked about the connection between curiosity and empathy. “If we are really curious, we are released from that hate and that fear,” he said.

That got Lee to remembering an immigration immersion experience she and others took some years ago along the U.S.-Mexico border. A guide took them to a place in the desert where vigilantes had shot up water stations designed to keep immigrants alive.

“I could feel the anger and hate welling up in me,” she said. Then the guide saw some border patrol agents she knew and started up a conversation. “She does this work day in and day out,” Lee said. “She came back to the vehicle and said, ‘The minute we stop being curious, everybody loses.’”

Maybe curiosity isn’t a luxury, Lee thought. “Maybe it’s strategy. Maybe it’s human,” she told the hosts. “Maybe it’s how we get to the other side together without destroying each other. Some of it feels pie in the sky, but to see it in action” made Lee think at the time, “this is how I want to live my life — not just locking into the certainty of the sides, but going, OK, what is a different story that could be possible here?”

Lee has a friend who once told her, “I just feel like God can’t only be found in being correct.”

“I think that’s an understatement,” Lee said. Theologically, we have “adopted infrastructures and systems that have bought into the idea that if I’m right, then I’m good, and if I’m good, then I’m safe.”

Catoe asked Lee to identify some ways “we can develop these curiosity muscles.”

She suggested “using curiosity to tune into yourself.” One practice Lee uses is asking herself “the five whys,” which is a way to keep one’s internal conversation going.

In the book, she talks about “coming to a point where I thought, God has to be bigger than whatever this curated box of answers I have concocted or adopted or perpetuated,” she said, adding her favorite scripture is in John’s epistle, “God is love.”

“Curiosity in our faith helps in our posture toward God. God is so big and so limitless, in our neighbor and in our enemy,” she said. “One more question keeps the conversation going and gives hope a heartbeat.”

“If hope has a heartbeat, then resurrection is possible,” she said. “We thought [death] was the end, but it wasn’t. There’s a real resurrective quality to that idea.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Ken Tolley, General Assembly Support, Assembly Operations, Presbyterian Life & Witness
Kate Trigger Duffert, General Assembly Support, Assembly Operations, Presbyterian Life & Witness

Let us pray:

Loving God, in you the whole structure is joined together and grows. Bless those who come hungry for education but also find community — and meet you — in the process. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Fathers and figures are subject of author’s podcast discussion

Patton Dodd nearly walked away from completing his memoir “The Father You Get: And the Ones You Make, Believe In and Become,” published in September. It was painful writing about his father, and even about some of the men who’d become father figures for him.

But complete the book he did, and he spent about 50 minutes talking about it with Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe, the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to their conversation here.

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Dodd, the executive director of storytelling and communications for the H.E. Butt Foundation, told the hosts he’s settled on presence as the sign of what healthy fatherhood looks like.

“Ideal fatherhood has a lot to do with just being present in your children’s lives, showing up over and over again in all sorts of seasons and situations, and being able to attend to them and their stories as they actually are and not what you wish they would be,” he said. “Settling on presence was in some ways a response to my own experience when I was a kid was my dad offered no presence. He was there,” Dodd said, but was “kind of absent and negligent.”

“I don’t think that’s uncommon,” Dodd said. “I’m a dad and I try to be a good dad, but I also struggle with presence.”

Writing his memoir involved researching his father’s story. He learned that his father, who’s deceased, “had tropes [about fatherhood] in mind and tried to live up to them and failed.” His father fell short in some traditional masculine ideals including competing and achieving success, Dodd said, and struggled to hold down a job. “I think he was falling short of those masculine ideals, but he never questioned them,” Dodd said. “I think it would have done him a lot of good to blow up those concepts and figure out his relationship to them instead of trying and failing to live up to them” and “transferring those masculinity ideals to me.”

Dodd and his wife have three children. “Once my kids were adolescents, I probably had more sympathy for some of my dad’s mistakes and failures. It’s challenging to be a parent,” he told the hosts. “One thing that happened over the course of being a dad is I shifted from anger to something like grief. Anger is a simpler emotion and it’s full of blame.” Being a father “humbled me a little bit” and “shifted that predominant emotion to one of grieving the loss of the man he could have been and wasn’t in our home.”

“I’m still fully aware of his faults,” Dodd said, “but I’m shifting how I respond to them.”

Catoe asked how better understanding his father has reframed Dodd’s concept of God as a father.

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“I’ve always struggled with the idea of God as a father. It’s not a comfortable concept for me,” Dodd said. While in college, “a lot of well-meaning people encouraged me to lean into this idea of God as a loving father.” At one prayer meeting, Dodd was encouraged to think of God sitting in a rocking chair, where God’s children could climb up and be comforted by God. “That person meant well, but I was totally turned off by that image,” Dodd said, “and I felt guilty for not wanting to think of God that way.”

Even though Jesus taught the disciples to pray to “our father,” “I don’t think it’s the only way to approach the loving and parental presence of God,” Dodd said.

When Dodd left home for college, “my mother made the gift of telling me, ‘you’re going to need a male mentor in your life.’ She said, ‘I’m praying you’ll find someone whose wing you can get under, because there’s a lot you haven’t gotten yet.’”

“I came to terms with my own agency in seeking and making father figures,” he told Catoe and Doong. “I turned it into a verb, ‘father figuring,’ as something we do.”

“Nurturing is something we need,” he said, “but it’s also important we have agency in those relationships.”

New installments of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Rebecca Storti, Director, Project Operations, The Board of Pensions
Shawnda Styles, Senior Accounting Clerk, Controllers, The Presbyterian Foundation           

Let us pray:

Gracious God, we give you thanks for allowing us to be a part of building a kingdom in which all people are equal. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Author shares about her spiritual memoir of coming home

When author Christy Berghoef took to the “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” microphone for a recent episode, hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe asked her what it was like for her to return to a place she once lived with “a different worldview and faith than the one you were raised in? How do we redefine ourselves when returning to places we call home?”

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That’s at the center of Berghoef’s most recent book, “Rooted: A Spiritual Memoir of Homecoming.” Her engaging conversation with Catoe and Doong can be heard here.

During the 59-minute podcast, Berghoef described the small town she was raised in, including being raised “in a pretty small container within that small town.”

“When I moved away, I was stretched in a number of ways,” that are described in her first memoir, “Cracking the Pot.”

“This book focuses on coming home,” she said. “Coming back has been grounding and very disorienting at the same time. It’s a bit like coming into a room and all the furniture has been rearranged.”

“It’s brought a mixture of grief and gratitude,” Berghoef said, “and a new kind of clarity.”

The grief came from mourning the loss “of shared language with the people at home, a shared identity, a shared understanding. It’s tough to come back and realize I just don’t fit anymore.”

Feelings of gratitude came from “the sense that my journey and my experience has brought me to a deeper kind of joy and freedom and compassion and, hopefully, humility,” she said. “Clarity, because when you step back and then step into it again, you can see it with new eyes, at least in my case.”

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“I saw these are systems that shaped my beliefs and I can also see why I had to let some of those things go because of the realities I encountered outside of that small container I grew up in.”

Berghoef said she still clings “to the same values I was handed. But the expression of those values has shifted tremendously because of what I encountered in the world, because of people’s hardships and because of the human struggle that I’ve seen.”

“it’s hard for me to say I’m not this person anymore,” she told the hosts. “It’s about showing up with a kind of honesty about who I am, and also showing up with a love that envelops all perspectives — and also a new kind of humility and integrity about what I believe. It’s learning to hold space for others but not shrinking away from who I am.”

She said in returning to her small town, “I had to resist this urge to ether run away in fear … and I had to resist the urge to come back like a crusader, saying, ‘no, let me tell you how it is. You should all be like me! Look how enlightened I am.’”

Instead, she returned to the place “with the mentality of a pilgrim,” she said. “I am here with open hands. Those open hands represent my willingness to give of who I am and also to receive other people and their journeys.” Reciprocal respect and mutuality were not values she learned growing up “in my small container, and so in that way it’s a different way of expressing the faith,” she said. “I think home is where we can show up with grace despite our differences.”

“That’s when I know I’m home,” she said, “when I can be who I am and they can be who they are and we have grace for each other and we try to understand each other. That’s become home for me.”

New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Watch previous episodes here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Brad Masters, VP Business Dev. and Financial Advisor, Trust Services, The Presbyterian Foundation
John Matekovic, Vice President, Income Security, Benefits, The Board of Pensions

Let us pray:

God, your compassion for all your children is reflected in the lives of so many people in your church. We thank you for their quiet faithfulness as they minister, each in his and her own way, to those around them. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Forgiveness can be elective while recovering from trauma

Amanda Ann Gregory

Trauma psychotherapist Amanda Ann Gregory, whose book “You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms” was recently published, told the hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” during a recent episode that people who’ve experienced trauma can extend elective forgiveness if that’s what’s best for their recovery.

“Can forgiveness benefit them? Absolutely it can. It can be a part of their healing journey,” Gregory told “A Matter of Faith” hosts the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong. “But it doesn’t need to be there, and I think that’s kind of a sticking point for some people — the fact that forgiveness can be elective, it can be optional.”

Listen to the episode here.

Definitions for forgiveness vary for those participating in trauma therapy, Gregory said. One is “if you get to the point where you feel apathetic about your offender or your abuser — you don’t wish them well, you don’t wish them harm — that’s forgiveness,” Gregory said. “But there are other people who say you need to love them, and you need to wish them well. If you don’t, you have failed at forgiveness. That is such a hard message to get.”

“How do I know when I’m there? A lot of these are still question marks. We haven’t narrowed this down,” Gregory said, “and I think that makes it so much harder to know in trauma recovery what we are working for when forgiveness comes up.”

That can be especially true in faith-based communities, Doong said, where “forgiveness is a place you should get to. We think that’s the moral standard someone needs to reach. If we’re not getting there, then there’s something wrong with them, when actually there’s something wrong with the situation. We have to not put the onus on the person who’s trying to recover.”

To make things more complicated, “we sometimes inadvertently perpetuate shame,” Gregory said. “If we’re saying to survivors, ‘You need to forgive’ and they can’t, then we say, ‘It’s the moral high ground. Good people forgive.’”

“But there are so many reasons why trauma survivors struggle to forgive, or maybe can’t forgive,” Gregory said. “That forgiveness process might still be difficult, absolutely. I’m not saying it’s easy.” Trauma survivors “need to feel they are safe enough to forgive,” Gregory said, and that includes both physical safety and emotional safety. They also need to have a sense of self-worth to be able to forgive. “If I’m in shame, it’s going to be tough to forgive my offender because I can’t see the value of myself, and so it’s going to be hard to empathize with them. There are things that survivors need in this process that I think people just aren’t aware of.”

Catoe said it’s spiritual bypassing or even gaslighting to offer advice like “just trust God” or “give it to God” to a trauma victim. “It may be the only thing they know to say, but it does bring harm,” he said. “Who’s saying you don’t trust God in these moments?”

“What I tell people — and you usually can’t go wrong with this — is if somebody you know is a survivor or is just contemplating forgiveness, and you want to be helpful, ask them” what they need, Gregory said. “They may not know, but at least they know you’re not the person who’s going to tell them what to do.”

A recovering person’s anger “can actually be so vital in trauma recovery and emotional processing,” Gregory said. “When we are the loved one of someone going through this, it’s devastating because we witness it, and we want it to go away. We want to fix it.”

For the person in recovery, Gregory said feeling safe can mean “feeling safe enough with a therapist” or “feeling safe enough to go out into the world.”

“A lot of times, survivors will need to lean into their faith and explore forgiveness and other things,” said Gregory, who has invited rabbis, priests and pastors into therapy sessions “to be that support system and talk about forgiveness to help the survivor navigate that.” New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop each Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

 Let us join in prayer for:

• Donald McKim, Writer/Editor, Theology, Formation & Evangelism, Interim Unified Agency
• Sally McKinsey, Managing Editor for Call to Worship, Theology, Formation & Evangelism (Term)  

Let us pray:

Loving God, we are mindful that you have called your people to sit together in the kingdom of God. We are thankful for new ministries within our midst that give witness to that calling. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - The limits of forgiveness

Author and lecturer Kaya Oakes is the most recent guest on ‘A Matter of Faith’

September 18, 2024

Kaya Oakes

Kaya Oakes’ new book “Not So Sorry: Abusers, False Apologies, and the Limits of Forgiveness,” which was published by Broadleaf Books, made her the logical choice to recently appear on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” to talk about forgiveness in faith communities.

“One thing that doesn’t happen a lot in faith spaces is we don’t talk about what we mean when we say ‘forgiveness,’” Oakes told hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. “We assume we’re all on the same page and we know what it means to say, ‘I forgive you’ or ‘I’m asking for forgiveness from somebody.’ What does that actually mean? Does it mean severing a relationship? Taking space from somebody? Moving past something? Forgetting?”

Furthermore, considering deep societal issues such as racism and the nation’s incarceration rate, “What do we mean when we talk about, ‘Can I forgive an institution?’ Churches are wrestling with this, too,” she said. “I think it helps to define what are we talking about when we talk about forgiveness.”

Oakes is an author and senior lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. Listen to the 52-minute conversation Oakes had with Catoe and Doong here.

Catoe asked her about how she classifies what he called “cheap forgiveness.” He asked Oakes: What does the process of forgiveness look like for you?

“I’m glad you used the word ‘process,’ because a lot of the time we expect forgiveness to be instantaneous,” she said. “We don’t realize when you ask someone for forgiveness, you’re putting the burden on them, and they have to decide pretty quickly whether to give it or not. We don’t give people a lot of time to decide if they’re going to forgive, and that’s a really big problem.”

Forgiveness is a spiritual and psychological process, and sometimes it’s a physical process, too, “because trauma resides in the body,” she noted. “Sometimes when people are asked for forgiveness, they have to revisit the traumatic experience, which can be very difficult.”

“I can imagine one can forgive somebody but also want to see that person held accountable,” Doong said. If the institution isn’t able to do that, it can impact people’s willingness to enter into the process, he said.

“A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” with the Rev. Lee 

Catoe and Simon Doong drops each Thursday.

A recent op-ed from a member of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission “talks about this very topic: what is forgiveness, and who is it for?” Oakes said. The op-ed argues that being forgiven “is the beginning of systemic change,” but Oakes has her doubts, especially in institutions including the church.

“Christians unfortunately use forgiveness as an excuse to sweep things under the rug, and as a result, accountability is ill-defined,” she said. “I think we need to be more specific in our conversations about accountability, whether that’s an individual or an institution.”

Because our society is so litigious, often “the outcome is settled in a court of law, and so much of it is financial,” Oakes said. The message becomes, “Here’s some money and that should solve the problem. There’s a gap that happens between thinking about it and actually doing something.”

“From what I know about your denomination, there’s a lot of different people involved in the decision-making process, and as a result it gets more complicated and it takes longer for action to happen,” she said. In her book, Oakes explains the Mennonite process of bringing people back into the community after they’ve wronged somebody. “It’s more time-consuming, but it’s more specific, she said. “The end goal of forgiveness is bringing the person back into the community. Other denominations are not that specific about what the action is going to be.”

“I think we put pressure on marginalized communities to forgive wrongs because it enables us to feel like history is over and it doesn’t continue today, and the legacy of these historical harms is done. It’s tragic,” she said, “because it makes forgiveness feel like something that ends a story, rather than being the beginning of a bigger conversation about grace, compassion, and individual and systemic change.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: Author and lecturer Kaya Oakes is guest on ‘A Matter of Faith’

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Elizabeth Sanders, Customer Service Representative, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation 
Natarsha Sanders, Associate for Intercultural Leadership Development & Recruitment, Racial Equity and Women’s Intercultural Ministries, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Holy God, thank you for the privilege of planting and watering the ministries that you give to us. We marvel at the growth you provide. Give us a hunger to live in the fields and to bend down low to gather the fruits of the Spirit you provide as we move in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - The PC(USA)’s Acting Stated Clerk shares her thinking on helping congregations and mid councils navigate change

The Rev. Bronwen Boswell is a guest on ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’

March 15, 2024

The Rev. Bronwen Boswell

Historically, Presbyterians “are used to being on a bigger stage and having what we say mean something,” the Acting Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Rev. Bronwen Boswell, said during a recent episode of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” “We get caught up in that decline thinking rather than saying, ‘What is it we still have? What are the resources we have plenty of, and how do we need to look at the way ministry is going into the future?’”

Boswell was a guest of hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. Listen to their 45-minute conversation here. Boswell is introduced at the 18:07 mark.

While many congregations and mid councils are working to adapt to changing realities including the growing body of people who worship remotely, our thinking “isn’t quite there yet. It’s going to take a while longer because of generational change that’s happening.” Some presbyteries, including Shenandoah Presbytery, which Boswell served before her one-year commitment as Acting Stated Clerk, include rural congregations with little or no internet access. Other faith communities “do nothing but being on the internet,” Boswell said. “We are straddling a wide swath of what it means to be Presbyterian.”

Boswell characterized the many accomplishments made by faith communities during the years following World War II as the work of “the voluntary society. People joined in to do things, and churches were at that time social centers in many ways.” Many included bowling and basketball venues open to the public, and community dances were often held there.

But for children raised during the late 1960s and in the decades that followed, “faith development didn’t seem to be as organized or as emphasized,” she said. “You had youth groups and Sunday school, and yet we started adapting those things to make it easier for people to be there, and it didn’t change” the longstanding membership decline, especially among mainline churches. “We still don’t have a number of young people in church anymore.”

“A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” with the Rev. Lee 

Catoe and Simon Doong drops each Thursday.

One development Boswell laments is churches offering Sunday school and worship during the same hour. “We lost a couple of generations of people who knew how to be part of a worshiping community because they were in Sunday school,” she said. Then, “when we expected them to come into worship, they didn’t feel they had a place there at all.”

As members of the voluntary society depart this world or diminish their church involvement, many congregations “have not yet found their legs on how they go about deepening their own faith and what it really means to follow Jesus in the midst of what’s going on in the world today,” she said. “One thing I’ve been thinking about is this idea of how is it we are making space? How are we training and bringing up leadership of all ages?” Church nominating committees owe it to the congregation “to look at the broad breadth of the folks who are in the congregation. How do we bring along that leadership and transfer leadership? We haven’t done that in some places as well as we could have.”

Boswell said she was raised in a small church where she was asked to serve as a ruling elder while still in high school. “When I came back from college, I went back on the session to do the work that needed to be done. How do we open those opportunities for that to happen? Folks need to be able to say, ‘I am willing to hand it over to other folks and have them do it their way.’”

Boswell told Catoe and Doong she encourages Presbyterians “to be open to questions and exploring, and to the reality that God alone is Lord of the conscience. Beyond that, everyone is made in God’s image. If we embrace that, we’ll help grow folks of a deeper faith and we’ll go out there and do what Christ is calling us to do.”

New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Go here to listen to previous broadcasts.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: Rev. Bronwen Boswell is a guest on ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Amanda Craft, Manager, Immigration Advocacy, Office of the General Assembly 
Octavia Craig, Treasury Assistant, Purchasing, Administrative Services Group (A Corp) 

Let us pray

Compassionate God, thank you for strong witnesses. Unify your body through genuine affection and mutual support so that all may know that we are Jesus’ disciples. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’ looks at raising kids beyond the binary

Author and activist Jamie Bruesehoff is a guest of hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe

February 21, 2024

Jamie Bruesehoff

Jamie Bruesehoff, a recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” recalled the first day her transgender daughter, Rebekah, came to church as herself. The one person whom Bruesehoff feared might cause problems for her and her husband, the pastor of the church, made a beeline for her following worship.

“I held my breath,” she told “A Matter of Faith” co-hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. “He said, ‘Listen. I don’t understand this whole transgender thing, but she used to hide behind you and refuse to say hello to me on a Sunday morning. Today she ran up to me, twirled in her dress and gave me a high-five. What more is there to know?’”

“That is the foundation for the work we do for creating that space,” said Bruesehoff, author of “Raising Kids Beyond the Binary: Celebrating God’s Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children.” “How do we move this from issues to human beings, to seeing the humanity in each of us and creating space where we don’t need to check all the boxes and say the right things, but we’re still trying to keep people safe.”

“That’s what’s cool about communities of faith,” she said. “I think they’re one of the rare places where we are in community with people who believe differently. That’s a beautiful gift but only if we have a mind toward safety.”

Listen to Catoe and Doong’s 41-minute conversation with Bruesehoff here. More information about Rebekah can be found here.

The hosts opened with this question: What specific gifts or opportunities do faith communities bring to the table in terms of inclusion and acceptance for transgender and gender-diverse children?

“Before I answer, I want to flip the question on its head: What specific gifts do gender-diverse and transgender children bring to faith communities?” Bruesehoff said. “The world right now … is a pretty scary place, especially for transgender and gender-diverse children. People of faith have done and continue to do the most significant harm to this community, personally and politically,” but “people of faith are in a unique position to mitigate that harm. It is up to people of faith to boldly, loudly and faithfully celebrate transgender and gender-diverse people of all ages, but especially young people — to change the narrative and to say these young people are not mistakes, that God does not make mistakes.”

“These children and young people were created in the image of God to be exactly who they know themselves to be,” Bruesehoff said, “and that is a beautiful gift to everyone in relationship with them and to their faith communities.”

“There’s so much to be celebrated,” she said, “in the way that we are made better by being in community with all kinds of God’s people.” Bruesehoff called herself “a cisgender parent of a transgender child who has taught me more about what it means to be in community with people, to love the person in front of me for who they are and not who I thought they were or who I expected them to be and has taught me more about the God who created us.”

On “a more nitty-gritty level, when we look at raising gender-expansive kids, it’s listening to them, following their lead, and letting them be who they are. … When my daughter transitioned, I think both for myself and my spouse there was never any question of loving and supporting our child for being who she was. But we had a lot of fear about the world around her — about what life was going to be like and about how people were going to respond to her. That’s real.” She said the book includes “practical stuff about how to navigate that, how to talk to families, your church and your school, and how to make sure you’re centering that child and not putting that fear on them.”

Listen to previous editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Diana Burgos, Cook, Stony Point Center, Presbyterian Mission Agency (Term)
Erica Burns, IS Specialist, Presbyterian Foundation

Let us pray

Gracious God, we give thanks that you call us to share Christ’s message of salvation and liberation with all your people. Help us to encourage and enhance each other’s’ efforts, just as you multiply the gifts we share. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’ looks to help people who have been burned by religion

Matthias Roberts, who wrote ‘Holy Runaways,” is a podcast guest

February 17, 2024

Matthias Roberts

A queer psychotherapist who wrote a book about how people can rediscover their faith after a harmful church experience was a recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to the 35-minute conversation that hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe had with Matthias Roberts, author of “Holy Runaways: Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion,” by going here.

Roberts was asked if it’s possible for other faith communities to help a person harmed by a particular church experience to help get the person back in touch with their religion.

“In many ways, I think the answer is, ‘It depends,’” Roberts said. “It depends on the person, and it depends on what happened.”

“For many folks, I don’t know that prescribing ‘Just go find another church or a different [faith] community’ is necessarily going to work,” he said. “Every person has their own needs for healing.”

In the book, Roberts said he borrows from theorists including Abby Wong-Heffter to talk about three categories of attachment: attunement, containment and repair, which he said “need to be present in order for healing to take place.”

Attunement is “this knowledge that other people are actually paying attention and reading what is going on in the situation,” Roberts said. Containment is “creating a space that is safe enough where even if strong emotions come into the picture, there is a sense of stability, that this space is being contained.” Repair is “when those things break down, using attunement and containment, we can start to fix what’s going wrong. We have to attune to what’s gone wrong in order to be able to contain and repair it. We have to. Otherwise, it’s not a true apology. It’s not a true step toward healing.”

There are “some forms of harm … that are so significant that people do need to step away,” Roberts said. “If we’re part of those communities and we see folks stepping away, can we trust that person may know what’s best for them, and can we honor those decisions even if we don’t understand why or we feel the community should still be safe for them? Do we have enough respect, enough ability to honor people’s choices when that happens?”

Following completion of his undergraduate work, Roberts found an affirming church he was excited to attend. “I thought I had found my new church home,” he said, but during that initial worship service, “I noticed I was getting more and more uncomfortable. I left as quickly as I could.”

“It didn’t have anything to do with that church. They were doing everything well,” Roberts said. “It was the fact that I wasn’t ready yet. … I think that’s one of the complexities of this healing process. Time is a huge component of it.”

Catoe asked how people can “take the things [about a faith community] that give us life and get rid of the things that don’t?”

“I think for so many folks, the ‘all or nothing’ is what we have been taught,” Roberts said. “You’re either in or you’re out. There’s no in-between. … There’s no such thing as a gray area. It’s all black and white.”

It can be important to work on our understanding of faith, Roberts said. “Is faith certainty? Is it all or nothing? Is it a system we have to ascribe to or plug everything into in ways that feel airtight and complete, or is faith this expansive thing that we’re in the process of discovering?”

“Can [faith] be individual in the sense of figuring out what works well for us, that may not be the same for other people? Is God big enough for that to be true? Can we trust God to hold us in these processes? Working with that helped me to sift through in ways that felt more life-giving and peaceful,” Roberts said.

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Kim Brown, Operations Administrator, Operations, Presbyterian Foundation
Lorraine Brown, Associate for Finance & Building Operations, Presbyterian Historical Society

Let us pray

Teach us to be faithful, O Lord, in hearing your call day by day and in responding with heartfelt obedience, that we may help establish your kingdom in every heart, within each community and all around the world. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Church of Scotland’s moderator of the General Assembly takes a turn on ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’

The Rt. Rev. Sally Foster-Fulton, who grew up in South Carolina, compares the Scottish church with its U.S. counterpart

January 26, 2024

The Rt. Rev. Sally Foster-Fulton is Moderator of the 

General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. (Photo 

courtesy of the Church of Scotland)

The Rt. Rev. Sally Foster-Fulton, moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, recently took her turn in front of the “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” microphone, chatting with hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe about some of the ways the “Mother Church” and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) are similar and yet different. Listen to their 53-minute conversation here. Foster-Fulton is introduced at the five-minute mark.

Born and raised in South Carolina and married to the Rev. Stuart Fulton, a fellow Church of Scotland minister, Foster-Fulton shares at least one thing in common with Catoe: Both hail from South Carolina. “I expect my accent’s going to get thicker and thicker as we talk,” she joked early on in the conversation.

Like the PC(USA), the Church of Scotland is working to be “as ecumenical as we possibly can be,” Foster-Fulton said. Seven years ago, the Church of Scotland and the Church of England signed the Columba Declaration, which Foster-Fulton described as “a declaration of friendship and partnership and an acknowledgement of our desire to move closer together and to work more intentionally in partnership.”

It’s also signed the St Margaret Declaration with the Catholic Church of Scotland. “We are meeting more regularly together, and we are working more closely together,” she said.

The Saint Andrew Declaration signed during the most recent General Assembly “moves us toward ecumenical partnership and working very closely together” with the Scottish Episcopal Church. “We have a similar partnership with the United Reformed Church,” she said.

“I’m incredibly inspired by this,” Foster-Fulton said. “What lights my fire is there’s a lot of potential for interfaith work.”

The Church of Scotland is moving from 43 presbyteries to 12, “and we’re moving the resourcing from the center into those more local spaces,” she said. “That’s not without its challenges. It also means that buildings will be closing, and churches will be amalgamating. It’s not a very good witness to our environmental commitments to have five Churches of Scotland you could throw a rock and hit from one place.”

“It’s about making those difficult decisions so that we can kind of put our money where our morals are,” Foster-Fulton said.

“A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” with the Rev. 

Lee Catoe and Simon Doong drops each Thursday.

Denominations on both sides of the Atlantic are in different places on their journeys to environmental justice, she said. The Church of Scotland has divested from fossil fuel companies and is “trying to get our carbon footprint down to zero” in the next few years. “We’re trying to get our own house in order because the big house is on fire,” Foster-Fulton said. It helps that “the climate targets for the Scottish government are well ahead of other spaces.”

She said churches must be “on the forefront” of racial, gender and climate justice. “It matters what we do and what we say. That makes us relevant and gives our voice accountability and authenticity in those spaces. If we’re not actively working to bring justice for the poorest and most marginalized, then what are we about?”

In the runup to the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, Foster-Fulton helped create space for respectful dialogue between campaigners on both sides of the debate.

In conversations that can become “quite fraught,” it’s important to say, “We are never going to find common ground if we spend too much time defending our corner,” she said. She told the story of one facilitator who asked everyone gathered to stand up if they could, telling them, “In your mind, think of all the baggage you’re bringing here with you. And he said, ‘Put it down. Let’s come clean into this space and really deeply listen to each other. There are so many things we are not going to agree on, but there are many things we do agree on already.’ It was a phenomenal experience.”

Find previous episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Shelby Andrews, 1001 Apprentice, 1001 New Worshiping Communities, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Jeffrey Arnold, Executive Director, Association of Presbyterian Colleges & Universities (APCU)

Let us pray

Loving God, we know that the church is not a building but the congregation that worships within. Help us to live this truth. May we honor you by giving what we have while trusting that you will provide what we need. Amen.