Kay Parris meets priest, author and radical welcome campaigner, Stephanie Spellers

Stephanie Spellers’ book, Radical Welcome: Embracing God, the Other, and the Spirit of Transformation, has been a major inspiration for the radical welcome campaign currently being developed by the United Reformed Church. Her understanding is that “radical welcome” is a spiritual practice, through which one is transformed by one’s encounter with “the other”. It is less a means to an end, she believes, than a fundamental aspect of being a Christian.

When we meet for a “virtual interview” (over Skype, since she lives in Boston), the depth of her commitment to the theology of radical welcome radiates out of my computer screen, and she articulates its gritty essence with great clarity and insight. It seems she sees her very salvation as tied up in a process of loving reconciliation and powersharing with others – particularly those “other” groups who have been historically oppressed and marginalised. But her empathy for more traditionally established congregations, who might feel threatened by the process of opening up to those on the outside, is also sincere.

As founder and lead priest at The Crossing, an emergent congregation at St Paul’s Cathedral in Boston, she has presided over the flourishing of an alternative, progressive worship community. The Crossing welcomes particularly those who have found themselves outside or on the margins of any kind of faith gathering, and includes many younger and many homeless or financially vulnerable people. The congregation, which has just celebrated its fifth birthday, interacts and shares power, stories and space with diverse other groups including Chinese-speaking and Muslim congregations at the cathedral. She acknowledges that St Paul’s is a step further along the radical welcome road than the average church, as a cathedral founded to be “a house of prayer for all peoples”. Yet Stephanie Spellers is convinced most churches will find similar ideals somewhere in their history – ideals which can be honoured and built upon over time, in tangible, if challenging, ways.

 

Is radical welcome about finding a way to increase church numbers?
It’s not that we need to grow because we need to grow – it’s just that tiny numbers are a sign that we are probably not serving the kingdom of God.

A lot of church folks have resigned themselves to the view that being a “remnant” is a good thing; like there is something noble about being inside a fortress and standing against the culture and whatever is going on outside. But the kingdom was never supposed to be about a tiny group of people turning inward. It was always supposed to be about the Jesus way of nurturing inward, so that we can turn outward and invite others to discover the way of Jesus, to join us on that path, and then it continues on that inward/outward journey.

It can be hard to nail down what “radical welcome” really means, can’t it, beyond fluffy images of friendly people and cups of tea?
OK, here is the definition of radical welcome that I work with: It is the spiritual practice of embracing the voices, the power and the presence of the other, such that we are all transformed, more and more into the likeness of Christ.

Most of the time people stop with the idea of embracing: yeah, we’ll invite those people, and we’ll give them some good coffee – or for you it would be tea. But actually there is so much more. It’s a matter of figuring out what are the dynamics that have been in place culturally, socially, and especially within our congregational life, that have communicated a huge “No” to certain groups historically, systemically.

So what this requires is not saying: “Well I’m a nice person, and as long as our church is full of nice people, we are practising radical welcome, right?” Actually, no. What matters is your church looking for systemic barriers that have held certain groups – groups of a particular class background, of a particular racial background, groups of a certain age, groups of a certain sexual orientation, groups of a certain physical ability – have kept certain groups outside, or even just on the margins. The two words we have to talk about are power and oppression – and certainly those are not fluffy words.

What radical welcome says is: what if the folks who have been privileged become open to the voice, the presence, the power of the other? So that what we do in church and outside is now going to be shaped by the voices of poor people, the experiences of people of colour, the experiences of younger people, who have usually been told – if you come in, you are going to do this our way.

Most of us don’t have training in how to deal with, say, different groups of vulnerable people or people who might have behaviour issues. If all are welcome, is it “anything goes”?
We need to break down the idea that radical welcome means anyone is welcome. That’s a simplification. What we are saying is: we are going to look at what are the ways we have put up barriers. The radical part is taking those barriers seriously and removing them.

So for instance, when we talk about homeless people, and we say we want to extend radical welcome to our homeless neighbours, what that requires is not flinging open the doors and saying: “Everybody come on in! We’ll find a way to deal with you!”

It’s actually doing the training, preparing the congregation – and not just for receiving and helping those people, but also to help them figure out, are there gifts that homeless people have, is there wisdom that people who have lived on the streets have, that frankly, we who have been housed don’t have? How do we meet them? How do we create a space that allows them to flourish? Again, a space to flourish is not the same as an “anything goes” space – especially when you are talking about people who have been homeless. If anything, a space where anything goes is not going to feel safe for them.

It is about preparing a space where the other can flourish. And at the same time, a space where the folks who have traditionally been on the inside can flourish, even when there is going to be discomfort.

How did The Crossing community at St Paul’s begin to reach out to homeless people?
Some of it was because there are a lot of homeless people around our cathedral. Step one is always just to look around. Everybody has an “other”. Every congregation has some group of people who are nearby; they may be conspicuously present in the neighbourhood, but they are not actually a part of what goes on in our congregation. So the first step is asking, who is out there? Why are they not connected with us, why are we not connected with them?

Step two is about building relationships, and we use a lot of community-organising principles, that encourage one-to-one conversations, where you share your story, and the story of your passions, the story of who God is in your life. But you are also opening a space for the other to say: well here is what I get excited about helping with, or just working on, in the world, in the wider community. You create a space where the other gets to share that story.

And I have to tell you Kay, churches don’t do this! We are so used to going out and saying, here is this good stuff we have. You all need it so badly! Radical welcome shifts that, so it becomes a real posture of receptivity to the wisdom, the presence, the power of the other.

How hard has it been to get started and keep it going?
This cathedral has had in its DNA for some time the idea of being a house of prayer for all peoples, from since we were established as a cathedral in the 1920s.

But you know I think a lot of churches have this in their DNA – somewhere there is a story of being for liberation, for your neighbourhood – there is also a story of not being those things. The question is, which story will we move into?

The first folks who were forming The Crossing were people who were themselves on the edge – on the edge of the Christian community, on the edge of any kind of faith community.

With every year we are a slightly different church, because it’s mostly people in our 20s, 30s, 40s. So you have people moving on because they get a job in another city, or they just had kids and they can’t come out on a Thursday night any more. So we constantly have to be connected to these practices of radical welcome, looking at our neighbourhood, noticing who is inside, who is not, and why. It’s the practice of building intentional relationship with the other.

Is there a separation between your Thursday night congregation and your Sunday congregation?
I started off as a priest, both with the Sunday morning congregation and with The Crossing community. I am now solely responsible for ministering with The Crossing community, but we have a lot of bridges between the congregations. The Sunday morning congregation also has a very healthy number of homeless people, people of colour, people of varying socio-economic backgrounds. To an extent it had that before, but now all those pieces are more missionally-focused.

Most churches don’t have core groups of leaders in their 20s, 30s and early 40s, so we’re bringing that to the bigger table. And we often do things in small groups together, so a small group might include people in their 50s and 60s who are from the West Indies, along with people in their 20s and 30s who were students at Harvard, or a few months ago were sleeping in a shelter. So we are used to seeing that kind of interaction.

In your research for your book, you encountered all kinds of problems in places where radical welcome is being tried out – churches where people are very resistant. Maybe you could give an example?
Of course. There is one in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a church that had dwindled in size – they were in a mill town, middle-class-to-working-class white people. When the town began to change dramatically, with more and more Hispanic people coming in, the church remained white and smaller, and older and smaller. But again with that sense of a noble remnant: “we will hold on to the values that these people don’t have, they need us to stay exactly as we are.” So when change started to come to that church, it was really painful.

When Latinos would come in, a number of the white members would say, well if they come, they have to speak English and they have to worship our way. It’s not just racism – these communities fear that if those people come, they will take over – we will no longer have the things that make us who we are; we will no longer have our church. And then what is the use of it? It’s not our church, the bearer of a set of values that have shaped us.

All they were trying to do was protect that – it’s not bad. Often it’s like holding a fist out here – I’m gripping my traditions, I’m gripping my church, I’m gripping God so tightly, that actually even God can’t get in. Well, that way your tradition is protected, but it will not be touched by the Holy Spirit. So what we have to do is to slowly peel these fingers apart, let people know they are loved, that we are not trying to take away your church. We’re simply trying to figure out how to respond to this changed context.

Does this question of insecurity and fear relate too, do you think, to our awareness of our own limitations? I am not going to invite a homeless person to share my house, for example. So in terms of the radical justice of Jesus, I have failed even before I have started – maybe my defences are going to stop me wanting to embark on this is in the first place?
That’s why there has to be love at the heart of this work, that’s why it is a spiritual practice. The key thing here is: you will not do this perfectly. I think it is so hard, especially for liberal church folks, to hear that; to hear that you are going to fail at this. You are going to reach out to the other and the other is going to say – do you not remember the history of this? I don’t trust you.

It will take an openness to vulnerability that few of us possess on our own. That’s why this is a spiritual practice – this is saying, God, give me the grace, by your grace, give me the power, to reach out when I am terrified of doing it. By your grace, give me the power to come back again when I have failed, to forgive myself, to forgive the other if I am resenting the other. Give me the wisdom to see a way forward and to listen to the other when I want to block my ears because what I hear hurts.

There may be instances where people feel more than just outside of their comfort zone in welcoming the other. In some instances they might feel hostile, or that some people need to change their ways before they should be welcomed. How do you respond to that?
This is a tougher one. A lot of my work comes out of the background of liberation theology, where there is this understanding of a preferential option for the poor. It’s the idea that God has been speaking in these hidden, oppressed communities for a long time, and my salvation as a person of privilege is tied up in moving into solidarity with those who have lacked privilege.

I am a straight woman from the south – I live in Boston now, but the south is the part of the States where people tend to think we are not quite as bright! I lose privilege coming from a working-class-to-lower-class black family from the south, but I gain it because I have a Harvard degree and I am fairly solidly middle class now.

There are a lot of ways I can play the privilege game, but I know that, as a Christian, straight woman, I have a lot of privilege. And one thing I know for sure is that my journey with God has been completely transformed by the presence, the wisdom, and my relationship with, brothers and sisters who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. My salvation is tied up with listening to how God has showed up in their lives.

All I can do is witness that, tell that story with my straight friends and colleagues who are not inclined to see gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people as bearers of God. There are a lot of people who don’t see LGBT people as people with a valid relationship with Jesus Christ. I have seen that the opposite is true. People who have persevered in the faith – even though they are on that margin because of their sexual orientation – they have had to fight for that relationship with Jesus; they’ve had to claim Jesus when everybody was trying to take him away.

What radical welcome calls me into is kind of a dual posture. On the one hand I am loving, welcoming and being transformed by the experiences of LGBT people; on the other hand I am listening to people who don’t welcome that. I am listening to their stories. What is it that they think is true – because of the Bible or maybe because of experiences they have had? How do I share my story of being transformed by relationship with LGBT people, and hope that maybe, down the line, this person who is resistant maybe transformed?

My radical welcome of that other group, that more conservative group, has to work alongside my radical welcome of queer people. That is something I have learned much more recently. I used to be much more strident, much more like – too bad for them! Now what I try to do is say, that same practice of stories, of listening to the other…

You have to apply it both ways
Exactly – though not compromising the way I welcome LGBT people; I don’t feel I have the right to compromise that. I am not the one who is up against the wall; I am not the one who is being bullied; I am not the one who is committing suicide or contemplating suicide. I don’t feel I can be the one to say: Well, lesbians, gay men, transgender people, bisexual people – you are going to have to hold up, and stay on the fence, or on the cross, a little longer.

But what I also can’t do is just turn to the people who are more conservative and say, since you are wrong, I am walking away from you.

If you are in a church that sits in a relatively monocultural area, is it less important for you to get involved in radical welcome? Take a white, middleclass church in a largely white, middle-class area
That white, middle-class church needs to look around the neighbourhood and ask, who is here around us but not among us? They might discover it is pretty much white people as far as the eye can see, but where are the young people? Maybe our teenagers left at 13 and they are not coming back. Or look at the secular families where the parents are in their 30s and the kids are small – they didn’t grow up with church; they are among us, but feel in no way connected to church, and yet they are seeking something. We need to find those who have a deep yearning, but no place to put it.

Or maybe we always assumed this area was middle class, but actually we find there are some pockets of poverty and struggle, and frankly even some middle class struggle, that has been ignored. How do we radically welcome people to be broken, to not have the middle class façade that says everything is fine?

How can churches start to make those connections?
Go to their organisations, help out, be present. About one block away from our church there is a place called Bridge Over Troubled Waters. It’s a homeless drop-in centre for people aged 18 to 23. Now we could go to Bridge and say: Hi, could we help out at your Thanksgiving meal? Could we provide overflow space when you need it for various events that you are hosting? And again, we could ask, what is your story of relationship with church anyway?

We’ve done this with a group called the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC). You better believe, they have never had a church come to them and say they wanted to be in relationship! We could just have opened our doors and said: Hey, transgender people! We like you! But nobody would hear it. What we have done is, we have gone to the MTPC and we have marched in their various gatherings. We have gone to the state house and agitated for a civil rights bill for transgender people.

I have stood at the state house in the chambers, arguing about why it is a Christian value to stand for the right of transgender people. And transgender people have seen me in my collar, in the state house, standing beside them. So they are like, that is a different kind of church down there!

We showed up, we have presence, and often, when I sit down with a transgender person, the stories they tell about what church people have done to them are horrific. Yet my role is to listen to that story, and in the listening we become reconciled.

Last year we hosted here at the cathedral a gathering called the Transgender Day of Remembrance. It’s the largest gathering probably in the world of transgender people and their allies, coming together to remember those who have been killed or who have taken their own lives. It’s been going for eight years, but they’ve never done it in a cathedral before. Four hundred people came to our cathedral in November and our bishop addressed them and said: “I am glad you are here, because my salvation is wrapped up in us being together.” Crying people everywhere. That’s radical welcome.

What might you say to someone who is, maybe, a lot older, or maybe just not any kind of activist; who might feel this simply isn’t something I can contribute to or be part of?
Honestly, my experience of church life is that the older folks understand something about hospitality that the younger ones can really learn.

Older folks bring so much; they bring that spirit of hospitality, that sense of perspective – that experience that says, church has been around a long time, it was around before us, it will be around after us. Older people can bring that sense of perspective that makes fearlessness possible, because they have been aroundand seen it all.

What we need is to ask them, what is the relationship that you, as an older person, notice the absence of in your church community? And what an older person might say is, I wish my kids were here; it breaks my heart that my children, who are in their 40s, have nothing to do with church. Then the question becomes, how can we build that relationship? There is not one person in the church, not one person in the Christian community, who cannot ask that question and come to a really fruitful place.

This article appeared in the November 2011 issue of Reform.

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Related articles:

1. Editorial – Kay Parris: Radical welcome
2. A radical welcome for all
3. Graham Cray Interview: Fresh expressions of church
4. Kirsty Thorpe and Val Morrison interview: Moderators in waiting
5. John Sentamu interview: When the toe hurts

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