About a month ago, I started fundraising.
Everything I know about fundraising I learned from raising money for mission trips when I was a youth leader at a church. I learned how to draft a giving letter, how to invite people to join you in a mission and a vision. I learned to project what the result people could expect to see. And I learned to ask clearly and boldly.
Not a bad set of lessons… if you take away the emotional and spiritual manipulation that sometimes—often times—came with fundraising in church. I took a deep breath, took these lessons and tactics I had learned, and I began to ask for support.
I’m trying to raise just under $4,000.
It seems like a lot.
It is a lot.
But it matters.
See, I’m raising funds to pay for a cohort program I am going to be part of. This cohort is part of The Order of St. Hildegard, an unaffiliated community of practice which exists to center, celebrate and develop the interfaith cross-vocational spiritual leadership of those marginalized by traditional religious structures.
Basically, it’s a group of people gathered together around the practice of spiritual care for all people, especially those who are marginalized by the dominate practice and manifestation of Christianity in the west. Queer people. People of color. Disabled people. People with neurodivergences. Spiritually traumatized people.
You get the picture.
The idea isn’t that one person can—or should—care for the spirits of all marginalized people, but rather that together, each person bringing their story, hurts, healing, and strengths together can begin to care for all sorts of marginalized people.
The fields are ripe for harvest, but the workers are few.
If you’ve stuck around me and my writing for any amount of time, I hope it is obvious that this kind of work is where my heart is. It’s what I care about. It’s what I want to do with what I have to do it with.
A few years ago, I was an aspirant to become a deacon in the Episcopal church. While that didn’t move forward—another story for another day—the core of what drew me to pursue discernment for the diaconate remains.
A deacon translates the needs of the world to the church. This means that a deacon bridges the gap between the hallowed halls and pews of a church community and the felt needs, real hurts, and True stories of the people in the community the church finds itself in. A deacon doesn’t reach out from the church to bring people into it’s doors. A deacon reaches out from the world to bring the church into the culture, society, and reality of life outside.
This heart beat of standing in the world and asking the church to come and see with me what is in the wild places, the hurt places, the marginalized and forgotten places has been with me for years upon years. As long as I can remember working in and with churches I can remember this feeling of wanting the church to cease being a cloister and start being a place of radical hospitality, a place that gives up jockeying for power and prestige and instead sits in solidarity with the suffering, the needy, the hurting.
Jesus was at a dinner party one time, and he saw the guests trying to get the best seats in the house, the places of honor and privilege. So he turned the whole scene into a parable.
“Don’t shoot for the best place at the table. Someone more important than you might show up, and then you’ll be stuck in the very place you didn’t want to be. Instead, sit at the foot, take the low place, and when the host sees you you’ll be invited to a better place at the table.
In fact, when you do throw a dinner party, invite all those who can’t return the favor or give you anything in return. Invite the lame, and poor, the houseless, the marginalized. You’ll find your reward when justice is resurrected.”
Instead of getting a head, Jesus urges us to sit with the lowly. Instead of throwing a party to garner favor, jesus asks us to be radical in our hospitality simply for the sake of grace.
This was a straight up rebellion against the paterfamilias, the system of patrarchy that Rome was shaped around. Instead of gathering honor and power to yourself, this was giving it all away to be counted low and unimportant… like Jesus was.
This is kenosis, this self-emptying for the sake of other people. Giving up prestige, privilege, and power to be counted as one of the people the world sees as unimportant, but whom God chooses to live in solidarity with.
Giving up on power, giving up on prestige, give up on privilege means a reorientation of life, of effort, of wealth. It involves a utter rethinking of how we live and who we choose to care about.
This is why I’m choosing to take that deacon’s heartbeat and transplant it into becoming a community chaplain with The Order of St. Hildegard.
There are people outside the walls of the Christian church that need care, not to evangelize them and get them into a church, but to help them grow and thrive spiritually. For the sake of the flourishing of humanity—which, by the way, is what God wants for us all—people need spiritual leaders, spiritual companions, spiritual friends.
This is what I want to do.
But I need your help.
Ya, this is the part where I ask for support, but I hope you hear me asking you to join me in something, not throwing money at a problem. If you want to donate to the cost of the cohort, there’s a button at the bottom of this page where you can contribute to the Gofund Me.
But, more than that, I hope you’ll hold space in your prayers for the people whom God cares about, who need spiritual care, who need triage, who need love.
The Christian church has fuckd a lot of people up spiritually. People like me—straight, cis, white, middle aged, men—have done harm and spiritual violence against people. While I am under no illusion that I am the savior of those hurt—there is one Christ—I am convinced that I can be a tool of healing for these people, again, not to bring them back to Christianity, but rather to help them flourish, whatever that might look like.
I’d appreciate your support.
But I long for your companionship more.
I hope we all can take a look at where we sit at the tables of our lives, and see, truly see, who is missing from the table. Maybe then we can represent their absence, acknowledging that we can’t speak or be present for them, and that their voice, their presence is missing. Maybe our witness to their absence can begin to change the configuration of the tables so that one day all the chairs will be full with everyone having their place, presence, and voice on the table from where we can all partake of each others hospitality over the body and blood of God.
I don’t know, maybe it’s too extravagant a dream…
But that’s what dinner parties are for: extravagance.
I am in the process of becoming a community chaplin with The Order of St. Hildegard. This program is designed to help form people into spiritual leaders that lead from the margins and serve the margins. It’s for the people who don’t quite fit with the traditional church because of trauma, disability, or identity. If you, as my community, would like to help me fulfill the financial obligation this chaplaincy program has, you can give at the link below. Thank you for the myriad ways you support me.