Episode 2: “Who Told You That You Had To Fit?” with Chanequa Walker-Barnes
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Show Notes
Co-hosts
Jeff Chu
Find Jeff online: @byJeffChu on Instagram or @JeffChu on Twitter. You can also subscribe to Jeff’s newsletter, Notes of a Make-Believer Farmer on Substack.
Sarah Bessey
Find Sarah online: @SarahBessey on Instagram or @SarahBessey on Twitter. You can also subscribe to Sarah’s newsletter, Field Notes on Substack. Explore Sarah’s recent books on her website.
Featured guest
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes is a clinical psychologist, public theologian, and ecumenical minister. Her work focuses on healing the legacies of racial and gender oppression. She is a professor of practical theology and pastoral care at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia and the author of the books I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation and Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength. Chanequa began her career as a research psychologist with a particular interest in ethnic minority families, African American adolescent development, and health disparities. She was already well into her career teaching psychology at the college level when she felt a call to ministry and attended Duke Divinity School. Today, she combines those elements of her unique background in her teaching as well as in her writing and in her ministry, particularly caring for women of color who are engaged in Christian social justice activism.
Explore her work on DrChanequa.com, and follow Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes on Twitter.
“I wonder what I’m losing of myself each time that I try to fit? And that’s when the voice chimed in. ‘Who told you that you had to fit?’”
Thanks to our producer, SueAnn Shiah, who also provided the music for this episode, you can listen to her album A Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, or Bandcamp and find her at @sueannshiah on Instagram and @sueannshiah on Twitter.
Transcript
Content warning: explicit language is used throughout this episode.
Intro
We may have left the church, but we have not abandoned it. You see, our journeys may require us to remove ourselves from little-c church for a while, but we are still part of the church universal. We remain tethered to it, even if it's only through our calls for a new reformation. So occasionally, if you are inside the church walls, you may hear us on the outside, slowly chiseling away, trying to create a new opening into which we and all God's people can bring our entire selves.
<<MUSIC>>
SARAH: Hi friends, I’m Sarah Bessey.
JEFF: And I'm Jeff Chu.
Part 1: Opener
JEFF: Welcome back to the Evolving Faith podcast. This is episode 2 of season 2 featuring Dr. Chanequa Walker Barnes.
SARAH: Before we begin, we wanted to invite you to subscribe, like, or follow the Evolving Faith podcast wherever you listen—Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, all the places. And if your platform has a way to rate and review, well, we’d definitely appreciate it. Every time you rate and review us, it helps other folks find us out here in the wilderness.
JEFF: What we have for you today is really a testimony. And I love testimonies. I guess that’s just Christianese for one’s own spiritual story, isn’t it?
SARAH: It will surprise exactly no one to know that I still love the word testimony.
JEFF: Of course you do. Pentecostals gonna Pentecostal.
SARAH: I’m reminded of like testimony nights back in the day, you know, so this would be like mid-’80s, mid-’90s. There would be no sermon, just a bit of singing and then an open mic for people to talk about their experiences with God. Which, in retrospect, seems very risky.
JEFF: And long. Very, very, very long. Fortunately, today’s testimony is only 20 minutes.
SARAH: Ah, those of us in the charismatic tradition, we’re barely even getting warmed up until 45 minutes.
JEFF: Lord, have mercy.
SARAH: Yeah, I did love listening though to how other people found their way to God or found their way to one another in their own way and in their own voices and in their own way of expressing that.
JEFF: Their own really long way. Really long journeys.
SARAH: Don’t tempt me. But I agree with you—this is absolutely testimony. This is Chanequa sharing her story of belonging, her story of church—big C and little c—and even where she is experiencing God now. And I think that it is a word that will disrupt at the same time that it will heal, as most good testimonies do.
JEFF: Disruption and healing seem like perfect words to describe the work that Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes does. So, let me do the bio bit. Chanequa Walker-Barnes is a clinical psychologist, public theologian, and ecumenical minister. Her work focuses on healing the legacies of racial and gender oppression. She is a professor of practical theology and pastoral care at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia and the author of the books I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation and Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength. Chanequa began her career as a research psychologist with a particular interest in ethnic minority families, African American adolescent development, and health disparities. She was already well into her career teaching psychology at the college level when she felt a call to ministry so she went to Duke Divinity School. Today, she combines those different elements of her unique background in her teaching as well as in her writing and in her ministry, particularly caring for women of color who are engaged in Christian social justice activism. She’s a person of intense curiosity, tremendous heart, and, as you’ll soon hear, loving candor. She doesn’t mess around.
SARAH: Dr. Chanequa also was one of the contributors to a book that I edited and contributed to called A Rhythm of Prayer. Again, we see those themes of disruption and healing in her work there. We love Chanequa. She is just one of our people. So now before we go to her talk, though, in Denver in 2019 at Evolving Faith, a quick heads up that this episode does include profanity, that's why we have an E rating, so proceed accordingly. Now friends, join us as we listen to Chanequa. After that, Jeff and I will be back with you to chat for a bit.
Chanequa Walker Barnes
“Who told you that you had to fit?”
The voice that came to me did not seem to be my own. It was intrusive, disjointing. And most importantly, it came bearing a wisdom that I did not recognize as mine.
“Who told you that you had to fit?" the voice asked as I sat at the traffic light. It was the nonanswer to the nonquestion that I had raised as I agonized over what had happened at that morning's ministry team meeting.
At that point, for over two decades, I had been an ill-fitting Christian. A square peg trying to fit into a round hole, each of the angles representing the diverse religious traditions that shaped my understanding of the Divine. There was the race-conscious National Baptist Church in which I grew up, the neo-soul queer-friendly American Baptist congregation where I was licensed to preach, the predominantly white and liberal United Methodist congregations that I had chosen post-seminary, the radically social-justice-oriented evangelicals that have become my kinfolk through organizations such as the Christian Community Development Association. There was also the Islamic faith to which my father had converted when I was in preschool, and the Buddhist philosophy and practices that I considered when I was thinking about leaving Christianity back in my 20s. I know I just said more than four angles, but square sounds better than hexagon. So just roll with it.
This church though, it was supposed to be different. For once, I had gotten involved from the ground up. I met with the pastor for the first time before he had even signed the lease at the high school where we would begin worshiping, and at first meeting in a coffee shop—because you know, where else do Christians meet, but in coffee shops—I told him about my issues with multicultural churches. I told him that over the years, I found that most churches that call themselves multicultural were not really. If anything, they will comprise the people who look different racially, but they were all culturally white and middle class. I talked about the growing frustration that I sensed among my seminary students and my social justice co-journers about the absence of congregations that were serious about racial justice, that were serious about embracing and celebrating cultural diversity, and that were offering radical welcome to my queer brothers and sisters.
The pastor insisted that that was the type of church that he wanted to plant, that he wanted to provide a space for people who didn't feel like they had any other place to worship. You see, I live in a city that loves to serve up the prosperity gospel with the side of white mainline milquetoast Christianity.
And so he said, there are plenty of those other churches out there; we don't need another one of those. So he was committed to doing something different. And he invited me to serve as discipleship pastor, to hold him and the ministry team accountable for the vision of radical reconciliation. One of my favorite tasks in the church, once we started worship services months later, was that each Sunday I had the task of welcoming the congregation and reminding them of our mission, teaching them of our vision, tying it to real-world events. And at the time, the 2016 presidential campaign was underway, so I had no shortage of material. It was pretty easy to talk about the need for Christians who were committed to doing the hard work of participating in God's shalom.
But beyond that moment in worship, over time, there was a disconnect. You see, our mission communicated a radical social justice orientation but very little else did. The language, the music, the worship—they all screamed that our real vision was to be an evangelical megachurch. It might have something to do with the fact that only one song in our worship rotation was by a Black gospel artist and that was sung by a young white guy on our praise team who sounded a lot like Michael McDonald. It might have had something to do with the way that my regular Sunday assignment was inexplicably sidelined after Election Day.
Granted, my social media postings had become a little pointed after November 8, 2016. But the pastor and I had talked about that, and he confirmed that he didn't want me to tone it down. I might have read that wrong. I'm not good with passive aggressiveism. So through it all, I kept pressing forward. I was content to be the square peg if it meant that I could gradually expand that round hole and create space for more oddly shaped pegs. And that's what I thought I was doing on that Friday morning during our weekly staff meeting, when the pastor suggested making a change to our worship service that did not seem to fit with our mission. Now, I tried to bring both my pastoral and therapeutic skills to bear when I suggested that our services were becoming pretty white-oriented despite having a Mexican immigrant senior pastor, an African American female discipleship pastor, and a Mexican American outreach pastor. I tried to be gentle in the way that I pointed out that our music was largely white, that our services were completely in English, and that while we always had Black families in the congregation, they were never the same Black families from month to month. Black families aren't staying, I told the team, and we need to talk about that. I was relieved when Michael McDonald backed me up, saying that he had noticed the same thing. And he thought it was a problem. The pastor's response was to tell us that we needed to pray about our support for the ministry. And that we should consider leaving if we were not all in. What the unholy fuck kind of response is that?
As I drove home, I was fuming. Nobody was talking about leaving. Nobody was thinking about leaving. I wasn't thinking about leaving. But I sure was getting tired of always swimming against the current, whether it was at work or at church or in board meetings of national evangelical organizations. I mean, can a sister get a break? Why do I always have to be the square peg trying to fit into a round hole? And then I had a thought. It was that nonquestion: “I wonder what I'm losing of myself each time that I try to fit?”
And that's when the voice chimed in: “Who told you that you had to fit?”
Like I said, at that point for nearly two decades, I had been trying to fit into all manner of church spaces. Some people would call me a church hopper. I think I heard Jeff this morning call us surfers. But my hopping, it's never been random. And it's never been an indication of a lack of commitment to the institutional church. If anything, it bears out my unwavering desire to fulfill my baptismal covenant. You see, I grew up at this Baptist church where the word creed was rarely uttered. But on the first Sunday of every month, we would have a communion and baptism service where we will extend the right hand of fellowship to the newly baptized members.
Now there was one part of that service that, it got me every time, the pastor would say, “If you should move from our community, will you promise to join a church in the place where you live and serve Christ faithfully there?” I took that so seriously that when I left my hometown of Atlanta after college, I begin a 25-year odyssey of trying to fulfill that promise. Sometimes, I would go to a church just once or twice before I joined, I was so eager to be in relationship. All it took was one good sermon and some indication that the church was involved in the community.
But eventually, I learned that I hooked up with the wrong partner. And so I’d leave only to very quickly get involved in another relationship and start the process all over again. It was like dating perpetually on the rebound. There was the guy that I had to leave because he turned out to be Southern Baptist, which obviously no self-respecting Black person would do. There was the guy whose ID said he was United Church of Christ, but he turned out to be unaffiliated. He had no way to shepherd me through the process for ordination. Now to be granted, there were a few decent relationships that terminated because I moved to another city, and you can only be under watch care for so long.
And I won't even talk about that really traumatic relationship that involved a secret meeting and a vote. And then an article in the local newspaper informing me that the divorce was finalized, even though I had never been served papers. I was used to being fitless; I didn't mind being fitless. I mean, it hurt every now and again, and by every now and again, I mean, all the time.
But that's what we do as good Christians, right? Especially when we're helping to usher in God's kingdom. Because church isn't about us, after all; it's about God. So what if little bits of me get shaved off each time that I tried to fit in?
Except, what if those little bits are pieces of me that God had created me with?
Who told me that I had to fit? And what would it look like if I stopped trying to fit? What would it look like if I embraced being fitless?
For starters, it would mean that I would stop being in relationship with communities whose welcome and acceptance seem to be conditional upon me shaving off my God-given angles so that I could fit into their neatly round ideas of what Christians should look like, how church should look, how we should act, how I should interpret Scripture.
It meant that I wouldn't try to fit in communities that weren't willing to accept my feminist angles, my queer ally angles, my pro-choice and anti-war angles, my unapologetically Black as fuck angles. It would mean no longer being in communities that required me to deny the parts of me that find more practical guidance and how to cope with the uncertainty of a cancer diagnosis in Buddhism than I find in Christianity. It would mean that I get to claim the parts of me that call my Muslim father and asked him to send me one of those posters that list the Arabic names for God, because “God” just doesn't do enough for me. It would mean I wouldn't have to deny the parts of me that know without a doubt that my West African ancestors knew the Divine, before, long before, they knew the white supremacist, heterosexist, capitalist religion that told them that their enslavement was part of a God’s design for them. It would mean not denying the parts of me that know that when Jesus said that he came to set the captives free, he was talking about my Black-woman-in-America self, and that any church that isn't about setting me free is bullshit. And it's my duty to call bullshit when I see it. That's what the prophets did, after all.
So that's who I am. And truthfully, I couldn't have told you that on that day, at the moment, as I sat at that light, trying to figure out why church had become so painful to me. I couldn't do that until I made the decision to do what I did that day, to leave church. Not just to leave that church but to stop attending weekly worship or any other regular church service in any congregation without feeling guilty about it. And without having any idea about when and if I would return.
You see that day I realized that my beliefs about who God is and what God intends for humanity were so distorted by a colonized and capitalist Christianity that I needed time and space away from church to figure out what God was actually saying to me and what church needed to be for me. I needed space away from patriarchal Black spaces, from racist white liberal spaces, and from both patriarchal and racist evangelical spaces.
So from that point on, my family and I began to spend our Sunday mornings at home. Sometimes we prayed or read Scripture together, inviting our son to share his thoughts and questions about what we read. Sometimes we’d talk about church; we’d talk about the types of worship communities that we wished existed in our city. Occasionally, I would live stream the worship services of congregations that I admired in other states. Most of the time, though, we just sat leisurely around the kitchen table or the patio table. And not once did I feel that God wasn't with us or that we needed to go to a particular building to find and celebrate God.
For two and a half years, I gave myself the freedom to explore how I most experienced the Divine, instead of having others package that experience for me. I began to claim the pantheist beliefs that were in my cultural DNA, having somehow survived the physical and spiritual enslavement of my West African ancestors. I began to deepen my meditation practice, no longer concealing my Buddhist leanings but exploring them openly. And I started gardening and spending time outside, trying to heal the hostility with nature that was developed in my family as a result of generations of forced servitude as slaves and sharecroppers in the US South. And over time, I began to express my spiritual identity in terms that feel more authentic to who I am.
So today, if you ask me, “What's your spiritual tradition?” I'll tell you, I am a post-denominational Christian, whose influences span the historical Black church, mainline Protestantism, social-justice evangelicalism, and non-Christian traditions such as Buddhism, Islam, and increasingly, West African spiritual traditions.
I am fitless. But being fitless doesn't mean that I am alone.
I am part of a global community of fitless Christians who are devout followers of Christ but who believe that the church is infiltrated with white-supremacist heterosexist patriarchal capitalism. And some of us, quite frankly, don't like being unequally yoked. A few people I know have found congregations that welcome our angles, even if they don't quite understand them. But many of us have left the church. Sometimes we find local alternative communities that maybe meet for brunch or in cigar clubs or in yoga studios or in reading groups. Sometimes our church are the people with whom we connect online. The people whose podcasts we listen to. Or sometimes spaces like this become church, these occasional gatherings such as Evolving Faith or Liberating Evangelicalism or Mystic Soul.
And those of us who are fitless, we may have left the church, but we have not abandoned it. You see, our journeys may require us to remove ourselves from little-c church for a while, but we are still part of the church universal. We remain tethered to it, even if it's only through our calls for a new reformation. So occasionally, if you are inside the church walls, you may hear us on the outside, slowly chiseling away, trying to create a new opening into which we and all God's people can bring our entire selves. Thank you.
<<<<TRANSITIONAL MUSIC>>>
Part 3: Conversation
JEFF: Sarah, what is it that you Pentecostals do when you hear a testimony that moves you? Because my people just sit and feel a faint fluttering in our hearts.
SARAH: Listen, it is embodied. You are clapping your hands; you’re gonna hollar, shout a bit, stand up. There might be some pointing. You’re gonna point at someone. There’s gonna be—there might be tambourines. It just depends, right. It's all there.
JEFF: I will do all those things in my heart.
SARAH: Hey listen, I was doing all of them on the day that I heard this in 2019. Okay, as hard as this will be, let’s try to talk about this together because—let’s start with her self-description as an ill-fitting Christian square peg trying to fit into a round hole, each of the angles representing the diverse religious traditions that shaped her understanding of the Divine. And that is so relatable for so many of us who are experiencing a faith shift or finding themselves in the midst of an evolving faith. I’m wondering what, for you, are all the angles that make up your shape of “trying to fit”?
JEFF: So okay, before I answer that, and also so that I have a minute to stall and think about it, it’s important to say this: For some of us coming to a message like Chanequa’s, the grief of this is that we once did fit and we once really did belong. But for others of us, we’ve never fit and we’ve never belonged, perhaps because of some indelible aspect of our identity. And then there are the folks who have had both experiences. And I wanted to name that, because there are different scars that come from those different experiences.
SARAH: Yeah. Yeah. They’re very different wounds, right, and so it will be a different story and experience when you approach a message like this or have these sorts of conversations. We’ve talked before about the difference between choosing to walk out of the city gates into the wilderness and the reality of never having been welcome inside the city to begin with. But you’re still not getting out of my question either, so…
JEFF: I know, I know, of course. I promise I’m going to answer it in a second. Chanequa talking about this actually right away made me feel a sense of belonging—which is perhaps a little weird to say because she was talking about not belonging. But isn’t that the experience so many of us have had? That we’ve longed for belonging, we’ve wanted to fit in, yet some aspect of us, or maybe several aspects of who we are, have made that seem impossible. So I felt in an odd way seen by what she said, embraced by what she said. For me, the friction between the culture of the church and me has had different layers and textures. At times, it’s been my Chineseness; at times, it’s been my gayness; at times when I’ve lived abroad, it has been my Americanness; at times, especially in the US, it has been my reserved nature and my shyness; at times in my work as a journalist, it’s been my inability to speak whatever the local language is. So not all “fitting in” or “not fitting in” is the same.
SARAH: Yeah, there are different layers and different complexities, and those come with different costs. In a lot of ways, I have felt like the spot of belonging in most white evangelical churches is tailor-made for someone like me—white, straight, married, mum with kids, etc.—and yet even I feel that sense of angles, the sense of not fitting. And so you know, for sure, sometimes it was because of political or theological beliefs, how we raised our kids. Sometimes it's just being outside of the white American evangelical machine experience because, you know, I’m Canadian but—anything really.
JEFF: It’s so interesting to me that you say that you have a sense of not fitting in, because I think first of all, you’re gifted at making people feel embraced. And I so often see how people gravitate to you because they relate to you. They see some aspect of themselves in you, and quite honestly, I’ve occasionally been envious of that.
SARAH: Aw, well, that's just the gift of an Enneagram 9; we’re just able to identify with everyone except ourselves. It’s fine.
JEFF: It's fine. That’s Sarah’s guideline. “It's fine! Everything is fine.” So I don’t think it’s just in white evangelical churches, by the way, that there is this particular kind of person, with a particular demographic profile, being the template for what “fits,” and that can be really troubling and really dangerous. I think it’s true in many of our social media circles and even at times in the context of the Evolving Faith community. I think it's something that’s important to be aware of. People look for commonality and shared identity, and there can be wonderful upsides to that, but there can also be painful and debilitating downsides.
SARAH: Yeah, absolutely. You know, isn't part of the takeaway from Chanequa’s testimony the reality that we have to discern, as wisely and as carefully as we can, when a community space is actually asking us to change or remove some essential aspect of who we are, right? And of course, there are circumstances and situations when we are trying to mold and change our behavior in healthy and, you know, hospitable ways—some might call it “etiquette” and you know, you and I, we both value manners probably more than we should—and then there are those settings that will refuse to accept us as we are and as we are meant to be. And it’s a difficult thing sometimes, especially given all the emotions and the deep feeling that can be swirling around, to figure out which one is which. Which one is an act of hospitality and which is hostility?
JEFF: I think it takes hard work and it takes nuance. I wonder if the thing that might make that work not just possible but also good is the kind of self-awareness—and not even just self-awareness but really self-respect—that Chanequa exhibits as she tells us about those different aspects of herself and her story. She knows the goodness of those facets. She is rooted in their richness. And I wonder whether the knowledge of that goodness, that rootedness, is what could open you up to new possibilities for relationship. You’re not looking for affirmation or acceptance or approval in the way that perhaps you might have before because you don’t need it.
SARAH: Yeah, absolutely. You're stepping into every space with the fullness, that fitlessness, but it's the fullness, right. You aren’t earning or striving. I’m reminded—I mean, churchy words, you know me and how much I love churchy words—of abiding, right. You’re abiding in your belovedness. And I think that's that true home, that place of abiding in love and belonging and then living out of that. So when Chanequa spoke about her weariness of always swimming against the current, I think a lot of us felt that. I think most of us have some sort of an experience with the exhaustion that comes from trying to constantly swim against the current and affect meaningful change, often in spaces where we actually do love people and we love what we’ve been part of in some way or what we were part of, perhaps, in some way. And it is. I’ve been there and it's exhausting. Soul-crushing even. And you know, oftentimes when it comes time to leave a place behind, it’s not even with a slammed door but more with this exhausted “fine, then.” You know, you just you walk away.
JEFF: You’re going to get mad at me a little bit for being all Reformed here because a core question for me is: Are you relying on your own strength to swim against that current, or do you believe that there’s something more or someone more? And maybe that might have been a Jesus juke or an aquatic version of a footprints poster, and I’m sort of sorry.
SARAH: You are not sorry one single bit, and that is absolutely a Jesus juke, and since you are only allowed two per season, you are now on the clock.
JEFF: Okay, maybe there’s a better way—a less Jesus juke-y way—to frame this. So I strike my previous comment from the record, and I reserve my quota for a future episode. Let’s try this: Maybe the key question is the one that Chanequa asks: Who told you that you had to fit? And underneath that is, who set the template for fitting that really matters?
SARAH: That to me was the point when we all exhaled. And even relistening to this right now, just exhale. Who told you that you had to fit, right? And what would it look like if you stopped trying to fit? And to me, there is an invitation from the Holy Spirit there to reimagine our belonging and our fitness. From Chanequa there, it is a breath but also an invitation.
JEFF: Can I just pause for a second, though, and confess that this is a little bit hard for me? In my upbringing, there were a lot, a lot, a lot of people who would take their opinion and say it was God’s. So what’s to stop us from excusing our bad behavior by saying that “Oh, this is just who I was made to be”? I just think it's a really complicated question sometimes, and I’m not sure I have good answers for it.
SARAH: Well, there's one thing you and I both know, and it's that we rarely have good answers. I come from charismatic churches. I have heard more garbage in my lifetime than any one person should have to about people insisting that they are speaking for God or God is speaking through them. It can be bad theology at best and super traumatizing at worst. I’ve been there. So I think the thing you’re saying here is actually really important, in that pause, or that catch that you had, especially once we find ourselves outside of the structures or hierarchies or boundaries of our previous comfort zones or the tidy little boxes that we had for how we know we have “heard from God.” And then that becomes a conversation, not just a question for me and Jesus—because, as we have both learned the hard way, this way danger lies—but it’s also the invitation for the other aspects of what Chanequa discussed. She’s bringing discernment, history and training, wise people, community, all into that conversation with us as we discern. And I think that’s really necessary for the wisdom.
JEFF: I do really appreciate that she doesn’t allow us to equate fitlessness with isolation. Because she’s very clear that we can remain tethered to the universal church, the worldwide body of Christ, the big-C church, even if we aren’t in that moment in the pews of a small-c church. And she does remind us of our need for community.
SARAH: Well and even how she broadens the boundaries and opens up the doors to the fullness of her fitness, right? The Buddhism and Islam and West African spiritual traditions right along with her evangelicalism and mainline influences and the Black church, all those things. It all belongs because she belongs and carries all of those influences and stories within her. I also loved that part at the end when she said that she has left the church but not abandoned it. In the past, you know, 15 or 20 years, I’ve been both. I’ve been straight-up church lady, you know, the pastor's wife sometimes, committed Sunday school teacher, and then found out that I was fitless there or my—I shifted and learned and changed and then been the one on the outside, right? Trying to create new openings and then back again in church again and back outside again. I still love the small-c local churches so much, and yet God, they can just break your heart over and over again, too. And I think that’s an experience a lot of us have had. Some of us are still in church, others of us aren’t; some of us wish we were and others are super relieved to not be. There isn’t one way to navigate fitlessness.
JEFF: I’d go further and say that there was a time for me maybe 15 years ago, not long after I came out, that I couldn’t say I loved small-c churches like you just said or the big-C church at all, unless you mean the kind of love that is very ragey and angry. But, of course, it's me, so it's always on the inside.
SARAH: Listen, I have found that repressing emotions is an entirely healthy way to deal with things, can confirm.
JEFF: Highly recommend. Anyway, I had my time entirely away from church and then I tiptoed back in. And now I find myself in a denomination I don’t entirely fit in, but I still feel called to it. And I say “called to” because I don’t think I can or should impose on anyone else or you can or should impose on anyone else how I’ve felt called or you’ve felt called to move through this weird thing that is church. It's so personal. Someone with a very similar profile and story to mine might even have been called on an entirely different path.
SARAH: Well, and I know you’d be the first person to bless that. I think my definition of church has certainly been expanded and broadened, as has my experience of belonging. And now that belonging includes all of us who are outside, as Chanequa said, those who remain tethered to the church even if it’s only because we demand more and better and truer things of her. And it includes those outside the church walls, those, you know, like she said, chiseling away to create those new openings so everyone can fully belong.
– – – –
SARAH: You can find all of the links mentioned on today’s show as well as info about Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes and her work in the world and a full transcript of this episode in our show notes at evolvingfaith.com/podcast. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @Evolvfaith on Twitter and Instagram. You can find me at sarahbessey.com for all my social media links, my newsletter Field Notes, and, of course, my books, all those things.
JEFF: You can sign up for my newsletter at jeffchu.substack.com and there are always plenty of pictures of my dog, Fozzie, and once in a long while, one of me, on Instagram @byjeffchu. The Evolving Faith podcast is produced by us, Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, for better or worse, along with the wonderful SueAnn Shiah, who also provided the music.
SARAH: And please join us next week as we are going to be listening to and responding to my favorite preacher, Jeff Chu himself.
JEFF: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Evolving Faith podcast, friends. And until next time, remember that you are loved.
[ Instrumental Music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]