How to revitalize a church through music and drama
Union matters! podcast
Are worship and the arts viable methods for building community? How can music and drama support the efforts of community engagement? You’re about to learn the story of a small Massachusetts congregation that used community organizing, theater programs, and relationship building to revitalize a diminished ministry and enliven an urban neighborhood.
Fourth Presbyterian Church of Boston was near closing when it embraced a commitment to serve its surrounding neighborhood with community organizing and a variety of ministries, including a community music and art program. One piece of that program grew into a popular children’s musical theater program for the neighborhood, which then fed the congregation’s growing use of music, drama and even musical theater in its worship and congregational life.
The Reverend Burns Stanfield has served as the church’s pastor for the last 27 years and led its afterschool offerings in music, art and children’s theater. he’s also a musician and an instructor at Harvard Divinity School and Andover Newton Seminary. And he’s president of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which develops local leadership and organized power to fight for social justice.
Leadership Institute Director Tinsley Jones and Rev. Burns Stanfield on the Richmond campus of Union Presbyterian Seminary.
During a visit to Union Presbyterian Seminary, Stanfield sat down with leadership institute director Tinsley Jones to discuss the power of community organizing through music and drama.
More than 350-thousand people have died and 11 million have been forced to leave their homes since the Syrian conflict began in 2011. Since the outbreak of civil war, Dr. Mary Mikhael has been interpreting the consequences of this global tragedy for the Syrian and Lebanese people, particularly the Christian communities. In 2018, the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program sent 10 international peace activists to several U.S. cities to speak to churches and seminaries. Dr. Mikhael was one of them. She’s a native of Syria, resident of Lebanon, and alumna of Union Presbyterian Seminary. During a visit to Richmond, Virginia, she sat down with Union Professor of Christian Missions Stan Skreslet to discuss the challenges religious groups face as they seek to bring hope, peace, and reconciliation to this war-torn region.
Mikhael recently served as president of the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, the first woman to serve in this capacity in any seminary in the Middle East. A Presbyterian, born to Greek Orthodox parents in Syria, she is a 1982 graduate of the Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond (now Union Presbyterian Seminary). She earned her doctorate in education at Columbia University in New York. Returning to Syria she became the director of the women’s program for the Middle East Council of Churches. She is active in ecumenical and interfaith activities and is a noted authority on the church in the Middle East and the role of women.
Since the outbreak of civil war in Syria, Mikhael has been interpreting the consequences of this global tragedy for the Syrian and Lebanese people, particularly the Christian communities, as she serves with the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon.
She is the author of the Presbyterian Women 2010 Horizons Bible Study “Joshua: A Journey of Faith” for the Presbyterian Church (USA) and was co-author of “She Shall Be Called Woman,” a meditation on biblical women.
Top photo: Union professor Stan Skreslet, and international peacemaker and alumna Dr. Mary Mikhael
Lana Heath de Martinez, a 2016 graduate of Union Presbyterian Seminary, can, without a moment’s hesitation, name two professors who helped her to define her calling as a “faith-based activist.”
Those individuals, Dr. Carson Brisson and the late Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, were, for her, early lights for navigating a world where Christian faith can require resistance to society’s laws.
Dr. Cannon is described in an August 14, 2018, New York Times obituary as a groundbreaking scholar and “a foundational voice in womanist theology.” De Martinez remembers with gratitude that Dr. Cannon provided her with “a theological and ethical analysis of the world we live in.
“It has been a framework for the activism I already believed in and held in my heart but did not have the words to talk about before her class.”
Those words and that framework would prove invaluable for the work de Martinez undertook in 2018, advocating for a brave and determined mother who had fled a life of domestic abuse and life-threatening danger in Honduras. That woman, Abbie Arevalo-Herrera, is seeking asylum in the United States. She is an undocumented immigrant who lives now with her eleven-year-old daughter and two-year-old son in the basement of a Richmond church. If she steps outside the sanctuary of the church, she faces almost certain deportation.
De Martinez is part of the sanctuary movement, which seeks to gain documentation, security, and a new life for Arevalo-Herrera and her family.
She recalls a profound lesson from the biblical Hebrew class of Dr. Carson Brisson that has undergirded her work. In that class, she learned the Hebrew word shama, “to hear.
“But it’s deeper than that,” she said. “It means ‘to hear and be transformed.’ Hear and take this word so deep inside of who you are that you in your daily life become the word.
“I think that’s the pedagogy of Jesus.”
She remembers seminary discussions of the theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose allegiance to a higher law than Nazi Germany’s cost him his life.
“We’ve seen in our own history when people of faith have stood in resistance to the law,” said de Martinez, citing as examples the eras of slavery and segregation.
“Faith and values are greater than the law,” she said. “Laws are fluid, laws change, and there is a constant tension in this change. People of faith need always to work so that the pendulum swings toward dignity and humanity.”
These are large and profound thoughts, and the dangers faced by Arevalo-Herrera give the thoughts an urgency to which de Martinez and others of faith believe they must respond, regardless of prevailing law.
If Arevalo-Herrera returns to her home in Honduras, she believes she will be killed by the father of her children, a man who has beaten her numerous times, threatening her with a machete.
She made the decision to “go north,” and, with her daughter, walked, took buses, and ate and slept little. In 2014, she arrived in the United States and applied for asylum. Since then, she has married, had a child here, and waits, in faith, for that asylum.
De Martinez describes Arevalo-Herrera as “fierce, nurturing, courageous, and determined to pursue healing and wholeness for herself and her family.
“The sanctuary movement said to look at someone like Arevalo-Herrera and say, first of all, that she is a human being,” said de Martinez. “And this human being is rooted in her family and in her community here.
“This is where she belongs.”
Meanwhile, people of faith are joining with Arevalo-Herrera and other members of the Latinx community to amplify her voice as she tells her story and do what they can to keep her family together and safe.
Learn more on social media at #handsoffabbie.
Pictured above from right, Union matters! interviewer Joe Slay, Abbie Arevalo-Herrera, interpreter Leonina Arismendi, Union alumna Lana Heath de Martinez, and Union matters! producer Mike Frontiero in the church where Arevalo-Herrera lives in sanctuary.
Muslims are the fastest-growing religious group in the world. Their growth and regional migration, combined with the ongoing impact of extremist groups that commit violence in their name, have brought Muslims and their faith to the forefront of the political debate in many countries, including the United States.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2017 asked Americans to rate members of nine religious groups on a “feeling thermometer” from 0 to 100, where 0 reflects the most negative rating. Overall, Americans gave Muslims an average rating of 48, lower than atheists. Half of Muslim Americans say it’s hard to be Muslim in the U.S. due to discrimination against their religion, President Donald Trump, and Americans who don’t see Islam as part of mainstream U.S. society. But an almost equal and growing number said Americans are generally friendly to them. And nearly all are proud to be American.
In our Union matters! podcast, Dr. Zeyneb Sayilgan who teaches Islamic theology and religious pluralism at Virginia Theological Seminary, spoke with Union Presbyterian Seminary Professor of Christian Missions Stan Skreslet about being Muslim and her passion to help people understand different faith traditions.
Fourteen African-American women scholars were invited to Richmond, Virginia, to participate in a womanist conference that critiqued the complex cultural histories and international globalization in today’s political domain. “Womanism,” as it’s called, has been a social movement of liberation ever since Alice Walker coined the term in 1983. Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, activist, and author of “The Color Purple.” She accepted an invitation to keynote the April 2018 conference — “Bearing Witness to Womanism: What Was, What Is, What Will Be” — and help launch the Center for Womanist Leadership. This center is the first of its kind, a place where women of African ancestry wrestle with actualizing the deepest possibilities of human existence. Co-organizer and Union Presbyterian Seminary Professor of Christian Ethics Katie Geneva Cannon spoke with her student Ayo Morton for our Union matters! podcast about why the conference matters, and her own challenges growing up black in the USA.
In the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Americans remain divided over what to do with Confederate monuments that have sparked violent protests. Can ancient history help us find an answer? Dr. Christine Luckritz Marquis, assistant professor of church history at Union Presbyterian Seminary, is writing a book about violence among Egyptian ascetics in the desert and the desecration of a monument in Alexandria — a practice that is known as “memory sanctions.” She spoke with Joe Slay for our Union matters! podcast about how her research helps us understand the power of statues, and what we should do with those of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other controversial heroes.
Union Presbyterian Seminary alumna Jill Duffield is the editor and publisher of The Presbyterian Outlook, an independent publication of the PC(USA). in 2015, she broke ground to accept a call as the Outlook’s first female editor. As the magazine prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary this year, she spoke with Jeff Stapleton for our Union matters! podcast about the big stories affecting the church, being present at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, her persistent path through seminary, and the future of ministry.
We had our phones turned off during this interview to avoid interruption. So we didn’t know that as we were talking Nikolas Cruz allegedly walked into his Parkland, Florida, school and opened fire on classmates and teachers. it was one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern history. We are indeed living in very dangerous times. The police are traumatized by it too. They have a hard time asking for emotional help because, among cops, that’s been seen as a weakness. The Virginia Law Enforcement Assistance Program (VALEAP) is working to change all that by giving officers the support they desperately need. In our Union matters! podcast, co-founder and Union Presbyterian Seminary alumnus Alex Evans, and Richmond Police Sergeant Carol Adams, sat down with Joe Slay at Second Presbyterian Church in downtown Richmond to explain, what they call, their life-and-death ministry.
One of the largest urban farms in Virginia is sprouting just a cabbage-throw away from Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond. Shalom Farms is growing food in the heart of the city’s Northside on five acres of the seminary’s Westwood Tract. It’s the second farm for Shalom, whose mission is to work with communities to ensure access to healthy food and provide support to lead healthy lives. Its executive director Dominic Barrett sat down with our alumnus Nelson Reveley to explain his vision for Shalom Farms at Union Seminary and why it matters, in our Union matters! podcast.
