This weekend, Working Preacher posted a short interview excerpt from Bishop Yvette Flunder, minister at City of Refuge UCC in Oakland, CA, and movement mother in the global LGBTQ/SOGI Christian justice community.
Flunder reflects on why she preaches the way she does: to “discourage people from spending all of their lives trying to pull to be accepted by the center” of their religions or society.
Instead, she invites her audiences to imagine what they can create together in on the margins that will improve the wider world while they live and after their deaths.
This point of view goes to something Flunder addressed in another clip posted this March: we’re each part of a multi-generational story. While “what about the children” can only motivate some of us so much, the lengths of our individual lives aren’t all that’s worth taking into account as we engage the world and handle whatever resources flow to us.
What we do… we do for seven generations that follow us, and we need to think that way when we are working on stewardship.” —Bishop Flunder
This principle isn’t just about effective stewardship of money. It’s also about effective stewardship of our energy and attention, our creativity and collective power.
I’m on board with Flunder’s encouragement of marginalized people, people “in exile” as John Fortunato once described them. These are people who need to internalize the truth that they—we—don’t have to be remade in the center’s image in order to make good of our gifts, talents, and vision of a world that is just and whole.
We don’t have to spin our wheels in the breezeway just because this gatekeeper or that refuses to let us in the house. We can pitch a tent. We can show up for one another and keep each other warm.
And we can make sure that, unencumbered by the “mortgages” and other attachments of the center, we stay free to move wherever we’re called.
This is not everyone’s work, but it is Flunder’s, and increasingly I’m sensing that it is also mine.