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Religion and Justice
Welcome to "Religion and Justice," a podcast brought to you by the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Hosted by Gabby Lisi (she/they/he) and George Schmidt (he/him/ours), we explore the intersections of class, religion, labor, and ecology, uncovering their implications for justice.
This podcast is a space for investigation, education, and organizing around these intersections. Join us as we engage in thought-provoking discussions with experts, fostering dialogue for actionable change.
Together, we navigate religion, justice, and solidarity for a more equitable future.
Religion and Justice
From Reconciliation to Making Things Right: Indigenous Wisdom, Christian Mission, and the Work of Solidarity
What if “reconciliation” lets the powerful off the hook? We sit with theologian and former United Church of Canada moderator Carmen Lansdowne to rethink repair from the ground up—centering Indigenous wisdom, circular time, and mission reimagined as solidarity. Carmen opens a candid window into her story of sobriety, Advent, and returning to a faith that saved her life, then presses the church to pair grace with real accountability: stop harm, welcome transformation, and measure change by relationships healed, not just programs launched.
Together we trace how the language of reconciliation often hides one‑way harms and ongoing power imbalances. Carmen introduces a community vision that asks those who broke trust to turn and make things right—repentance that shows up in policy, resources, and consent, not only words. We unpack why “mission” doesn’t have to mean empire, how indigenizing decision-making widens what counts as knowledge, and why justice must replace charity when congregations hold wealth while marginalized communities carry the costs. From land back to long-term funding without strings, from dialogue-first processes to resisting extractive economics, Carmen offers a roadmap for churches that want courage without arrogance and humility without silence.
We also talk about identity and self-determination, the pitfalls of gatekeeping “authenticity,” and the futures tools that keep hope practical: envision best and worst outcomes, then act today in ways you’d be proud of in either future. Bold humility and humble boldness become a daily practice—naming harm, sharing power, and taking faithful risks. If you’re ready to move from statements to solidarity and from nostalgia to repair, this conversation will meet you where you are and invite you further.
If this moved you, share it with someone in your congregation or organizing network, then subscribe, leave a review, and help more listeners find these conversations.
Welcome to "Religion and Justice," a podcast brought to you by the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
We explore the intersections of class, religion, labor, and ecology, which bring together diverse populations and publics uncovering their implications for justice and solidarity
This podcast is a space for investigation, education, and organizing around these intersections. Join us as we engage in thought-provoking discussions with experts, fostering dialogue for actionable change. Together, we navigate religion, justice, and solidarity for a more equitable future.
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Welcome to Religion and Justice. I'm one of your hosts, Gabby Leasey. In today's episode, we're joined by Carmen Lansdowne, member of the Hiltsuk First Nation, theologian, and former moderator of the United Church of Canada. Carmen is now Assistant Professor of the United Church of Canada Studies at Emmanuel College and the University of Toronto. Her work bridges church ministry, indigenous leadership, and social impact. Her new book, Wearing a Broken Indigen Heart on the Sleeve of Christian Mission, which was released in August of 2025, invites us to move beyond reconciliation, toward the much harder work of making things right, centering relationships, solidarity, and accountability in Christian mission. In this conversation, we talk about cycles of time, decolonizing theology, charity versus justice, and why hope is a verb. Let's get into it. Carmen is a member of the Hellstook First Nation. She's passionate about creating a life with great stories and amazing adventures with her family from their home base on the west side of Toronto. Carmen, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. Happy to be here.
SPEAKER_02:I thought you were going to read the informal bio, which is also on my website that says that I was part of the NASA's Lazarus Project Initiative and worked undercover in the San Pedro Alligator Wrestling League for seven years.
SPEAKER_00:I felt nervous about reading from your voice, though, because I'm not you. I didn't know if I was gonna be able to deliver it with justice.
SPEAKER_02:That actually was written for me by a 15-year-old.
SPEAKER_00:Even better. Okay, so talk to us a little bit about wearing a broken indogene heart on the sleeve of Christian mission. You use a term, and forgive me if I mispronounced this, hail cut.
SPEAKER_02:Pretty close for English.
SPEAKER_00:It means to turn things around and make them right again over reconciliation. Can you tell me a little bit more about why you chose this versus reconciliation or over and above reconciliation and what that means to you in this work?
SPEAKER_02:So why hail system? In part, I think because for me to speak as an or to write as an Indigenous woman, it's even though uh I make an argument for why this is not a particularly hasty study, that it's sort of like looking at the ways in general that indigenous worldviews are different from non-Indigenous worldviews and or like Euro-Christian worldviews slash Western worldviews. Um, but in in our, I am Haltzuk. And so um in our community, we have actually just passed our own constitution this year, was ratified in a potlatch in May, and I was privileged to be there. But um we have a joint leadership between the elected tribal council government that is what's mandated by the government of Canada, but then we have our hereditary chiefs and then also our Minux Council, which is the the women's council in our community, and so the those three parties make up joint leadership. And it was the joint leadership who said that even though we had participated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process, and um reconciliation is a huge industry that's sort of been an outcome of the TRC proceedings and reports in Canada, that um, you know, the definitions of reconciliation really look at repairing or restoring a relationship between parties who have hurt each other. And because the colonization of Indigenous people was such a one-way like imposition of power and dominance over Indigenous people by the state that reconciliation doesn't feel like the right word. So Hastley Stewart is more like like requiring repentance or working towards like repentance on beheart on the part of the person who made things wrong in the first place. And I think it's important, especially for non-Indigenous people, to think about what does that look like? Because I mean similarly, when we look at what's going on right now in Gaza, and yes, the attacks on October 7th were horrific and devastating to Israelis and to Jews across the world, the obligations of the State of Israel as an occupying military, like a military-occupying power, are they they're not equal to what's expected under international law by Hamas, whether it's the militants or the political party. So um I think Casey's too kind of gets at that same that same intent around there's not equal accountability on both parties between uh First Nations peoples and the colonial governments. And so um I think it I think it's an important thing to highlight because the the power imbalances between Indigenous peoples and the states in Canada and the US and elsewhere in the world are still so imbalanced.
SPEAKER_01:I was about to even ask you, like, if it because it seems like it reconciliation has an acknowledgement of maybe past power imbalances and past crimes, but it does not sort of like carry that line of power analysis through to the present and you know and even into the future a little bit. And and this term which I am going to pronounce, you know, completely accurately quiet to myself. It sort of has a sort of ongoing power analysis, it sounds like, which almost means uh something a lot more in line with uh what we do at Wendell and Cook with our own sort of power analysis, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think and that's one of the things that I explore in the book is this idea of the purpose of history and telling history in Euro Christian traditions is chronological. Like we've we've developed it into this discipline in the academy where we start in like 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and then like all this chronology of things and um somehow distances us from our past. Whereas indigenous cultures are more likely to see time as circular, which is one of the reasons you hear the sort of common versions of like seven generations or things like that, that we have to think seven generations back and seven generations forward at the same time, because what's happened in the past is not disconnected from the future. What we're doing now is not disconnected from the future. And that and our past is certainly connected to what's happening today. And I love the way that you went really liturgical there, George, and just said the word in the silence of your own heart.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'm even gonna go even more liturgical and say, you know, while church history is told very chronological, you know, this happened and this happened and then this happened, the liturgical calendar is very circular, right? That's true. Yeah. Um is there I feel I am always scared as like a chaplain to do this to people when they've produced such a a rich intellectual project to start asking like, you know, psychic personal questions. Because what you're doing here is you're doing a lot of you know, right out of the gate, you call you call for transformation, you call for decolonial decolonial uh theology of mission. You talk about anti-colonialization, decolonization, post-colonialization. What is the and you even talk about, you know, right in the title, you a broken heart. And you talk about your heart has been broken again and again by both the church and society. What makes you want to do any of this work to to even stay in such an organization or to even try and decolonize such an organization?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's a fair question. So there's two reasons. I'll start with the personal one first. Um there's a a long history of uh substance use in my family, depression, suicide, uh, like a lot of uh indigenous and non-Indigenous families. Um I had my own struggles with that, including losing an older brother to suicide um 25 years ago.
SPEAKER_01:I didn't know that, Carmen. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Well, you since you asked, Padre.
SPEAKER_01:Um that's how it goes.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, forget careful what you asked for. So I um when I got sober, I hadn't been to church in like seven years. Like all good Gen X kids, I like graduated high school. It's like peace out youth group, and I also moved from like Vancouver Island to Denton, Texas for university. And like there's a lot in common between the United Church of Christ and the United Church of Canada. But I would say that those things in common are much more culturally the same, like in Cascadia. Like, so the difference between Washington State and British Columbia is much less than, say, like the difference between Victoria BC and Denton, Texas. And so I couldn't find a church home, even if I'd wanted one, that felt like church to me. Um and I came to understand how very like Canadian the United Church of Canada was. And so I'd stopped going to church. I was really struggling uh with using substances and primarily alcohol, but not only that. Um, when I got sober when I was 25, uh I I decided, because in 12-step programs, they talk about the need to like heal our spirits as well as our physical and our mental selves, that church had always been a safe place for me and I would go back to church. And it was the first Sunday of Advent, and I walked in and there was an intentional interim minister, and she was talking about how, like speaking to that like cyclical um liturgical life of the of the church, that we knew that um in the period of advent, like that the potential for change was coming in the in the event of the Christ child, that that change wasn't here yet. And I was like, and like balled my eyes out for the whole rest of the service, and my whole body relaxed and was like, oh good, you can be a minister now. And I was like, Hello. It was not having a hello, goddess me, Margaret moment. Like I just wanted to get sober really badly. And um, like church became part of that personal transformation that I needed in order to like make things right in my own life and in order to have a a longer lasting sobriety than I'd been able to achieve. And so for me, like that kind of evangelical, like personal conversion moment was very strong. Uh, and I believe that there is, despite the fallibilities of like the humans that make up the church and the way that the church has been co-opted by power over and over and over again, that there is like a salvific efficacy in the Jesus story, which is why any of us remain Christian. Because it's not only, I mean, there's just as many non-Indigenous people who are disillusioned with the church and and the ways that it continues to harm people. And I think that there are enough of us like within our traditions that are trying to say, but it doesn't have to be that way. Like the answers are actually in our book and in our tradition about like how to not do that. You know, we're several thousand years into imagining over and over again how to do things differently, and we're humans and we're imperfect and we hurt each other. Um and so like I don't you know what I don't fault any of my like cousins or other people from my community or other indigenous communities who have completely like outright rejected the church. Like I completely understand that. But for me, there's still that one, it was always a safe space for me, and two my faith getting like wrapped up in my own salvation and saving me from like the worst of the dysfunctions in my family and my community is that it's not like I would be Christian even if I wasn't a minister. So and I just think like there's also I'm really fascinated, and maybe one day I'll get to writing about this too, but I'm really fascinated by like theodicy and grace and like how do we how do we make space for uh healcy student or reconciliation like more broadly, not just around colonization, but you know, in my denomination, we made a decision in 1988 to allow any member of the United Church of Canada, regardless of sexual orientation, to become ordered ministry personnel. And then we extended that in the late 90s or early 2000s to people regardless of gender identity or expression. And I had the experience of hearing somebody give a testimony during a theme time at a regional conference in 2017, and he talked about how for him as somebody who he identifies, and in this particular rubric, we had like different marks of the church that people were talking about, so like evangelical, contemplative, missional, ecumenical, and ecclesial as being these like broad categories. And so he was talking about his journey as an evangelical Christian and um how for him, for much of his ministry, that had meant um, you know, preaching a like biblically centered Christian message, which included um a homophobic message. His his theology had been corrupted by homophobia, and that um 40 years later, he was like, and I hurt so many people, and that's not actually what I believe anymore. And there's nothing that I can do that can like erase the the damage that I did to my community, to my congregation, to the individuals in my congregation, in my community. And I can never fully make amends for that, except to say that my heart has been changed and thank God for this message of salvation in our tradition that teaches me that I'm already forgiven for the hurt that I've caused. And I thought like, like I mean, I still like seven years later, eight years later, I still tear up every time I tell this story because I think Yeah, I could see that like we we want cancel culture of like alive and real in the church, too. And I think like, you know, for all of the ways that we've worked to try to eliminate the unsafety that comes from allowing, you know, both sides of an issue or whatever to like say, like, actually, we need to make space for the two spirit and LGBTQIA plus community to be safe and to be honored for exactly who they are and that they are a blessing to this world and to the church. And at what point do we allow these people like my colleagues the grace to have a 40-year journey to realize that they were wrong and hurtful and oppressive? And then to celebrate when they have that moment of clarity to say that's no longer who I am or what I believe. And so I'm really like right now, I'm really fascinated by how do we like stop harm and also create liberation for people who have been the ones to cause the harm. So yeah, that I mean, that's like a question I didn't answer in my book, but that I find fascinating now.
SPEAKER_00:That was I that was one of my questions on my list for you today was was talking about both the oppressed and the oppressor needing conversion, that the church had been co-opted by homophobia, or not the church, uh, his theology had been co-opted by homophobia. And I really, really like that phrasing. Um, because I think that's part of the path to that grace. Um, is that um there is a point in which the I don't know, I was just talking about this at a bar the other night. It wasn't particularly about theology, but it was about that like both all genders need to be liberated from the patriarchy and that men are being harmed by the patriarchy, even though they are the ones who created it. Um but that and and that got some pushback at the bar, as you can imagine. They there were a couple of my friends who were like, No, I just hate men. And I was like, but they're people too. This and this vision is not that there's no accountability. This vision is that there's accountability for action and there's also grace and forgiveness that comes with. And so to think, I mean, you teared up while you were telling that story, but to think that there are thousands of other people like that out there who have changed and who have had a change of heart and who are now trying to do things differently and believe different things, um, essentially are just walking a line of consistent repentance. I don't know if that's healthy either. If that makes sense to just never let them feel free either.
SPEAKER_01:But it is also central to the intellectual work you're doing here because um this notion of co-transformation, maybe, or co-repentance, or not co-repentance, but uh mutual liberation? Mutual liberation, thank you so much. Because solidarity is so important to you and and the sort of guilt that comes from just uh laying it in the harms that you have done sort of prevents you from, you know, the major weapon that we have against sort of oppression, which is this sort of solidarity that leads and you and you talk about mission as solidarity. And mission seems to be one of those like really, really bad words in indigenous communities, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um no, there's there's like a movement in my denomination to like stop using the word full stop. And um and it's our like our main bucket of funding um that we use for all things like programmatic ministries actually called the mission and service require like rebranding all of our fundraising and everything else. And so somebody's like, well, obviously you agree with this, and I I was like, uh no. I don't. Um but have you read my book yet? It's like I have a book coming out that's like why we should like reclaim that word, maybe the same way that the two spirit and LGBTQIA plus community is reclaimed queer, right? Like um, because you know, when I I think when I was going through my theological training, like doing my MDiv, I you know, I was coming up in the church at a time where everything was like decline, decline, decline. Like all the mainland Protestant churches and the Catholic churches in North America are declining, and like how do we counter this decline? And so we had a lot of conversations around evangelism versus proselytization proselytiz now, it's my turn not to be able to pronounce that thing, proselytization. And how how do you share the good news without like forcing your faith on someone? And I took a class in my last year of my MDiv called Mission Church and Ministry, and we read David Bosch's Transforming Mission, and we read Vincent Donovan's Rediscovering Mission and oh no, rediscovering Christianity, I think is what it's called. And I was like, oh no, like mission's important, like this shit's the bomb. Also, like we've like one, thrown out the like mission and evangelism with the colonialism, like the mission and evangelism baby with the colonialism bathwater, right? It's all bad, just get rid of it. And also, like, we sort of let ourselves off the hook with the mid-century move to distinguish between the um mission ecclesiole and the mission missiodei, right? Missio ecclesiale and missiodei. So the like there's the mission of the church, and then there's the mission of God, and that when we followed the mission of the church, that sometimes because we are humans infallible, we get co-opted by the state and we operate residential schools or whatever, but that if we like know that there's like God's mission that we only can like participate and co-create in. So we sort of like moved to just talking about missio day without recognizing that we were just theologizing our own actions in a way that actually sort of buttressed the possibility to move into Christian nationalism or whatever. It wasn't a simple move either. And I became very and I just had this really creative professor, his name was Richard Leggett, and um he started that class by saying, like, is there an is, right? If like I was like, what? And it was just it was mind-blowing the con kinds of conversations that we had uh in that class about like what is what is mission, what is church, what is ministry, and and really getting into like these long philosophical conversations about it that made me think that maybe throwing mission out the window is not the best idea, and maybe was a little bit at the heart of like why we're in decline, because we couldn't talk about the good news of the gospel as being good news anymore. And we're still busy doing lots of good things, but we couldn't talk about like how that was motivated by or supported by our faith as Christians, right? Like that we're just the hands and feet of Christ, but like don't ask us to talk about our faith, because that could be proselytization and that's bad, and colonialism is bad, and therefore we just like if I just ignore it, it's not there. And I think it kind of ripped the heart of the church a little bit.
SPEAKER_01:Could you talk a little bit more about your method of decolonial uh decolonizing mission? Uh or just maybe, maybe could you say a little bit about decoloniality?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean it's a it's it's a tough subject because it's not an easy thing to do, right? At at very best, we are all continuously impacted by colonialist thinking, because that is the power structure that has governed how we've operated in terms of industry, government, politics for the last 500 plus years, 1,300 years, if you want to talk about colonialism starting with the conquest of El Andalus. But so it's not if I was going to indigenize Christian mission, it would be more focusing on relationships and solidarity. Talking about indigenizing is more attractive to me than decolonizing, and maybe that's shifted since I wrote the book. I'd have to like go back and reread it and see if I still agree with myself. It's understanding the holistic relationship between faith, people, the environment, our politics, that those are all interconnected when we make decisions as a denomination or as ecumenical movements, that decolonizing means actually centering non-Euro Christian ways of looking at the world and saying, like, does this depart enough from the status quo that if you sat down with a 95-year-old elder who grew up in a big house in the temperate rainforest of British Columbia, that they would say, yeah, this is actually like really consistent with the way that we see the world. Or if you sat down with a young activist from the Amazon in Brazil, who's fighting the devastation that's happening through clearing the rainforest that they live in, that they could say, like, yes, you've taken enough relationships into account between like between humans, but also between humans and all of God's created order to make an informed decision. Like so much of Euro-Christian worldviews are an informed decision is like data according to like one particular discipline and not looking at all of the impacts of the decisions that we make on each other. And we're seeing that like writ large in Canada right now, where everybody kind of rode the liberal wave under Mark Carney, and he had this big groundswell of support because there was this assumption that after Justin Trudeau that we were going to go back to having a conservative government, and then the leader of that party was starting to sound more and more like your president. That scared a lot of people. And then we had this brilliant economist who came in, and people were like, oh, thank the baby Jesus. We're gonna vote for him and his party. And now he's like, how we're gonna be elbows up against our big American neighbor to the south is to invest in massive infrastructure projects the same way that the Americans did after World War II. That's what's gonna bolster the economy, which is like technically not wrong. And we have nearly 60 years of common law legal precedent where Indigenous communities in Canada have taken projects like that to court and said you have to uphold what's now the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People to have free, prior, and informed consent. How are you gonna do free, prior, and informed consent in this massive infrastructure bill? And they were like, we don't have time to worry about that. And it's like, well, okay, so way to roll Indigenous rights back like 60 years. And that happens over and over again. Like those are the systemic things are the things that break my heart. I mean, there's the microaggressions and the times very infrequently that I encounter somebody who's like very overtly prejudiced or racist, but it's like, oh my God, you guys still don't get it. We don't just think about what's going to create the best outcome for our GDP. Like that's not the way that Indigenous people in general think about things. There are some mostly men, indigenous leaders in this country who've been like, well, if people are going to be making money off our resources, it might as well be us. And so have tried to replicate that economic success through extractivist industry in traditional territories. But for the most part, people are like, if they have to choose between poverty and colonialism or not poverty and colonialism, they're going to probably choose and not poverty and colonialism. But then there's a growing group of folks who see this middle way of being able to say, no, we can manage things differently.
SPEAKER_00:I think you were sort of touching on it a little bit. You presented bold humility and humble boldness, and I may have gotten those mixed up.
SPEAKER_02:Bold humility and humble boldness.
SPEAKER_00:I'm curious about what you're hoping for, what your vision is with bold humility and humble boldness, both in the mission context and also in this sort of societal, socioeconomic, late stage or end stage capitalism context as well.
SPEAKER_02:So, first of all, those are not my terms. If they didn't come directly from Bosch's Transforming Mission, they came out of the body of missiological discourse that was happening in South Africa after Transforming Mission came out. It was the South African missiologist that really kind of teased those two things out of Bosch's work that we have to be humble in our boldness and boldly humble. I'm always a big fan of both and ways of approaching things. It's completely understandable by why any indigenous person would just be like speak to the hand, uh, I don't have anything to do with you. But that I also am required, as it says in the epistles, to like be willing to give an accounting of the hope that is within me as a result of being a Christian disciple. I need to speak that truth boldly, but also with humility. What I keep saying to everybody, especially the indigenous church or like non-Christian folks in my indigenous world, is like this book is not for everybody. It's not for everybody because it is a scholarly monograph. And for the church community, like a lot of little old white-haired ladies are buying my book because they loved me as moderator, and I'm like, oh, you're not gonna like this book. My mom called me one day and she was like, Can can you for our congregation, which has like six people, and she's like, for our congregation, can you like create a study guide and can you also have a book club with this so we can add it? Because we don't understand your book, but we want to understand your book. And you know, I'm busy working on this other research project around leadership development that church has nothing to do with indigenous theology right now. And I was like, Yeah. That's like it might take me, it might take me like a year. Um, these guys are laughing because you couldn't hear it, but I'm like shaking my head when I said yes. Like I'm like, might really want to say no, but like who says no to their 80-year-old mother and who really wants to read your book? And uh, and then I had this moment where I was like, wait a second, this could be a thing that like I don't actually have to struggle with. And so I sat down with like notebook, Google Notebook AI and was just like, I just did a whole bunch of like conversations with the AI because Google Notebook will like work with only like set, it's not scouring the internet like Chat GPT. So you I plugged PDFs of all of my own, writing in a PDF copy of the book in there and like asked it to develop a study guide and like a glossary of terms for like a general readership of like things that they people who were educated in theology or philosophy wouldn't necessarily understand and created this beautiful like little 20 20 page study guide that my mom my mom woke up the next morning, she's like, How did you do this? I'm like, I didn't do it, and I did it. But like I also know my work well enough to know that it's like half decent. And so surprise, here you go. And then I put it on my website because I was like, actually, this is like you know, for I know that there's at least a couple of congregations that have big book clubs and are just like, we're gonna read your book, and I'm like, you should use this alongside my book. So yeah, I don't know. My book's not for everybody, but uh it's definitely for people who study theology. But if you're in pastoral ministry or you're um an 80-year-old grandma who just like really wants to understand and you don't know what epistemology is, then you might want to use the study guide in addition to the book.
SPEAKER_01:You point out that the global north still holds money and power and indigenous and marginalized communities remain dependent on those. Yeah. I often hear in my work with churches the very paternalistic aid conversations still coming out.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:What is like sort of genuine interdependence look like from pure perspective? What does that solidarity sort of look like for a for a progressive church that's really trying to get its shit straight? I mean, is it like is it land back?
SPEAKER_02:The the answer to is it land back? Always, yes. But I think one of the cultural features of colonialism is this idea that you can just be like ripped up from your roots and transported somewhere else that is really damaging to our bodies and to the earth. Just like you can have intercultural conflict, like say in Japan, you don't know that you're supposed to cover your teeth when you laugh because you don't show bones. Bones are associated with death. So if you don't know that and you go around smiling at everybody, it's you can cause offense. And then how do you make decisions that like manage all of those relationships that we talked about earlier? We're like 1300 years into colonialism, so it's probably gonna be at least another thousand years before we start to get at interdependence. I do think we have to have more explicit conversations about the difference between justice and charity in the church. I see that happening a little bit in the denominations, but not very much. We we like to do things that allow us to pat ourselves on the back, denominationally speaking.
SPEAKER_00:That makes me think about the section of your book where you talk about indigenous cultures often prioritize di dialogue over outcomes and how much is lost because people are just focused on responding and treating responses as outcomes. Well, we can fix the problem instead of looking at where the root of the problem is and how how many relationships and communities are impacted and how that problem even came to be. I feel like a lot of our society is just addressing symptoms of bigger problems, and there's no encouragement in a lot of communities that I'm in of talking about and having that dialogue of why does this even exist? Why are we just responding to a runny nose when we've got full body chills and could probably trace where this came from?
SPEAKER_02:So when the United Church of Canada was eliminating their presbyteries like seven, eight years ago, nine years ago, there was an indigenous response called the Caretakers to the Church, and they issued this document that was basically saying, like, we will say how we do indigenous ministry in the church. And in that document, it says, like, we will say who we are. The concept of identity is complicated and is a complicated issue with the indigenous communities. The very notion of being an indigenous person is a European construct. Prior to European contact, the people of Turtle Island identified themselves as members of their own tribes, nations, or communities. Intermarriage was common, and many children were mixed blood in terms of how we would say it in Euro Christian language. Many nations have always practiced traditional adoptions, self-determining who is part of their communities. And with European contact, these many nations and tribes became lumped into one homogeneous group known as indigenous, aboriginal, or Indian. This has caused indigenous people to be viewed as a single nation, erasing the reality of many nations with different social, cultural, and spiritual beliefs and traditions. Eurocentrism introduced identity politics based on race, blood, quantum, and what people look like. And so we basically said we're gonna, in the indigenous church, allow people to self-identify or communities to self-identify who they are. So now we've got these like two targeted ministry personnel who are accused of being pretendians. So there's this conversation happening in the church, and like Tarwatts would be like, okay, we're gonna replicate the, we're gonna replicate the Ontario process for like vetting indigenous heritage. And I'm like, but you can't do that because we've actually also in our polities said that Indigenous church gets to self-determine, and we've said that self-identification is okay. It's amazing watching this institution trying to wrap its brain around how do we live into our commitments to allow self-determination for the indigenous church and also protect the reputation of the church and our ministry personnel? What if they are lying and is it a reputational risk? It's just crazy. The problem isn't the right checklist to make in the hiring process. The problem is like, how do we allow grace for the indigenous community within the church to self-identify who they are and then represent that to a world that is becoming increasingly polarized around what it means to be indigenous, in part because it pits people against each other because it's perceived you know, competition for scarce resources when that's tends to be a root of a lot of our problems as humans are we like to end our interviews with asking people a question that was inspired by St.
SPEAKER_01:Augustine. He said hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to change them. And I'm wondering like what gives you anger and that courage today.
SPEAKER_02:Interesting. I just spent the last three years as moderator of my church, and my church has been very dispirited because of this you know decades-old narrative of decline, and then COVID just like kicked the crap out of everybody. It was no picnic trying to figure out how to run a homeless shelter in a pandemic, but the sheer amount of pivoting and existential threat that congregational ministry personnel had to face was like you now you have to learn how to stream your services and operate all this tech stuff and do that within like public health guidelines via force for calm, even when you're scared and your own parent just died in a nursing home. It was crazy times. So I developed um along with Bloom Leadership in San Diego project called the Flourishing Project. And we did a workshop that we took around, I did it like 13, 13 or 14 times across the country. In that workshop, we talked about how hope is productive. It's not just a feeling, like you hear all the time that love is a verb. Hope is also a verb. We we do things that cause hope that comes from anger and courage and like envisioning that the world um could and should be better, and that God wishes for us that we would have life and have it in abundance, um, and for all of the created order, not just for humans. So um dreaming, like spending time dreaming and like dreaming big audacious goals is one of the things that gives me hope. One of the privileges of being moderator of the United Church of Canada is you get to choose the theme for the general counsel that you're gonna chair. And that was the theme that I chose. It was visions and dreams. We came up with this beautiful logo that's got like a dove descending over the mountains in the lake with a rainbow above it, and it's sort of like reminiscent of the all the stuff from the Rocky Mountains in Canada at the moment, but you know, it was really inspired by the texts from Joel and Axe that the spirit would pour down on God's people and that their elders would dream vision or elders would dream dreams and their uh children prophesy and their young people would see visions. It gets really hard to break out of the status quo. And for us living in like late-stage capitalism, you guys know this really well at Wendell Cook program, that we have to imagine radically alternate ways of living in the world in order to disrupt the status quo that it's so on built on these really oppressive systems that feel like they're way too unruly for any one of us to change, and they are. Jane McGonagall did this, she's a futurist and game designer in in California, and she talks about in her book, Imaginable, how we have to envision like the best future possible, but also the worst future possible. Because exactly never do things always work out either way, right? And so the challenge with only thinking about the worst case scenario is that sometimes when things start to go well, you don't believe it. And so you don't get some energy behind like momentum behind like making things change. But if you only think about the best case scenario, then like you get disheartened when the worst happens. And you can see that playing out all over the place in North American society right now, and I'm not just you know, not just talking about the US, but Canada too. And so I think like having this like healthy sense of dreaming about like what's the best that could happen, what's the worst that could happen, because we have to she she asks this really these two really important questions, and I think they're good ones that we'll leave with your listeners, which is like, what are the things that I can do today that I would be proud of that will help to mitigate against that worst case scenario that I don't want to see happen? And what are the things that I can do today that I would be proud of that will help to contribute to the future that I want to see for the future? Because either way, like we either get angry at the oppression or we're courageous and like charting a new vision, but we need both of those things. And we need to break, do we have these big audacious schools and then break them down into like lots of iterations and not be scared of failure? Like I think the church has become so risk-averse because of all of that colonial baggage and all of the harm that the church, the institutional churches have caused. But like, it's also okay to fail and to learn sometimes. Yeah, those are the things that bring me hope right now.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much, Carmen. Thanks for being with us today.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Carmen. Yeah, you're welcome. A huge thank you to Carmen Lansdowne for sharing her wisdom and for calling us toward bold humility, humble boldness, and a more just church. You can find her book, Wearing a Broken Indogen Heart in the Sleep of Christian Mission, through CMU Press, or wherever you get theology that matters. And check out her website for a free study guide if you're reading in community. If this episode moved you, send it to someone in your congregation or organizing network. And if you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe and leave a review. It can help others find these conversations too. Religion and Justice is produced by the Wenland Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. I'm Gabby Leasey, one of your hosts, and I thank you for listening. May your week be filled with both anger at what is and courage for what can be. Until next time, remember the path to justice is when we navigate together, you can see the first time.
