In this episode of The Social Leader, Fr. Justin Mathews talks with Rev. Adam Hamilton, founding and Senior Pastor at the The Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, KS, with campuses across the KC metro and a membership of 20k+. Alongside a diverse group of volunteer leaders and staff, Church of the Resurrection just released their Vision for Racial Justice, a courageous stance in the midst of turbulent times. In this timely and hard-hitting conversation, Fr. Justin and Adam discuss the role of people of faith in racial reconciliation, the art of communication for social progress, addressing the corporate and original sin of racism in the U.S., how to live unafraid, the change of mind, heart, and action needed to be a social leader, and operationalizing "wokeness." This episode is a must watch, particularly for white people who are struggling to discern their role in our current moment.
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EPISODE 15 — TRANSCRIPT
Father Justin Mathews: Well, hello everybody! Welcome to The Social Leader podcast, episode number 15. Our goal is to help you learn to lead with greater social impact. I'm Father Justin Mathews and real quick before we begin today's episode, I want to let you know that this podcast is presented by Reconciliation Services, a nonprofit social venture in Kansas City, working to cultivate a community seeking racial and economic reconciliation to reveal the strength of all. You can find out more about Reconciliation Services programs and even support our work at rs3101.org. Now to today's show.
Welcome today to the podcast. My guest today is Pastor Adam Hamilton. Adam is the Senior Pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, where he preaches to more than 8,000+ people a week. Adam writes and teaches from his faith tradition and his experience on life's tough questions, the doubts with which we all wrestle, and the challenging issues that we face today, Pastor Adam, it's really a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Pastor Adam Hamilton: Father Justin, it’s great to be with you today. Thank you so much.
Fr. Justin: Absolutely. And as we began, I love when people find out more about our guests. You can visit Church of the Resurrection’s website if you want to find out more. Well, Adam, I really appreciate the time that you're making, especially right now. And I really want to dive in because we only have a limited amount of time and you have so many things that I know that you've been thinking about and preaching about and that your church has been active in. But let's start with an inconvenient truth or a difficult truth. I'm a Christian pastor, I'm a priest, and I have to admit the Christian faith has not always been on the right side of race issues and many other issues. So I want to begin there. Can you level-set us? What should be the role of the church in advocating for human dignity and civil rights and other issues, Adam?
Pastor Hamilton: Sure. Well, at the very least for people of faith, and really people who have no faith, we should be people who are speaking up, standing up for those who can't speak up for themselves, but not only for those who can't speak up for themselves. We are people who believe that everyone is created in the image of God. And so if we were created an image of God, then we need to be speaking for human dignity. We need to be speaking for justice for everyone. Racial justice, social justice. That's what we should be known for. Not the opposite. Unfortunately, the church, it’s both. It should be both a progressive and an organization that's moving towards justice, but at the same time, we tend to be a conserving organization. And so we're conserving truths. We hold on to theological truths, ideas that we think are important that we're hesitant to change and so that's really important as well. Unfortunately, in our society when it comes to social justice, social issues, we tend to be more conserving of the status quo and we find it troubling to move away from it. One of my leaders said this week, we were talking about the challenges of people being upset by our focus on racial justice and they said, “people come to church wanting to be comforted, they want to be encouraged, they want to feel better,” and sometimes when we talk about things that that need to change, there are things need to change in us. Repentance is about seeing the world differently, seeing something differently, having a change of mind, which leads to a change of heart, which leads to a change in behavior. And that sometimes means that we have to deal with truths we don't really want to hear. It's hard sometimes. I was in a conversation recently with a group of pastors and they were just being honest how hard it is to preach into issues of racial justice. Like everybody agrees racism is bad, it's just that most people don't see racism, their own racial biases, their unseen biases. And so when we start talking about those things, we start talking about these larger movements in our society, they upset people. And so there’s folks like “I can't afford to lose any more members, I'm not sure how to talk about this in a way that's going to help people here.” And often we jump in because especially those who feel passionate about this, we jump in a way that instead of bringing people along on the journey actually pushes them away. If they're not quite where we are, then they feel alienated by what we said, and judged or like we're trying to lay a heavy guilt trip on them as opposed to finding a way to talk to them that causes them to go, “oh, yeah, I see that, I didn't see that before.” And so we struggle with that. I tell people when it comes to prophetic preaching, it's easy to poke people in the eye and offend them. It's harder to actually speak in a way that influences them and sees them repent and change. And that requires a different level of tact than just blasting people with what you believe is your truth at the time.
Fr. Justin: Yeah, you make a great point that oftentimes when we talk about a truth, particularly if you're coming from a faith tradition, it's actually a lot easier to just sort of lay aside somebody else's beliefs, shut your ears to what they're saying, and just say, “well, let me tell you what truth is.” And when it comes to something that is so ingrained within, first of all, the human heart. Structural racism, racism, these kinds of things are not just issues within our politics or within the formation of our country, but they go even deeper than that. As I think you and I would agree, these are issues of human sin. This is the dark slimy underbelly of humanity that as Christians, we believe that God came to save us from and I think that the church, when we've been timid, when we haven't been willing to really live that sacrificial crucified belief system, when we haven't embraced that, we've shied away from really speaking to the injustice, the indignity, and the need for the church to actually proclaim what it believes. And we have a lot of different people, Adam, who listen to this podcast from all different traditions. And of course, I'm speaking from my tradition as an Orthodox Christian priest. But I was impressed by the fact that your church just released, I think on June 18, a statement entitled A Vision For Racial Justice. And if I can grab an excerpt from that, in that statement, you wrote: “We believe that all lives can't matter until all Black Lives Matter. As followers of Jesus Christ, we must condemn racism in every form, whether unconscious or conscious, systemic or arbitrary.” And then you went on to say this important point: “Racism is sin, and it is antithetical to the gospel.” That's a powerful statement that doesn't leave any room for that gray in between, thankfully. Tell me more about how you and your leadership team and your faithful have handled race and faith at Church of the Resurrection, especially in light of the recent protests and the murders and the news that we see today.
Pastor Hamilton: We started when we started the church 30 years ago, this was one of the things that was important to us to be able to say. We look at Kansas City, we are one of the most racially divided cities in America, and racism is a sin and we have a lot of history. There's a lot of structural racism sort of baked into the system. So I grew up here in Kansas City. The Troost dividing line where Thelma's Kitchen is located, where Reconciliation Services is located, as we know, is a major dividing line in our city for a very long period of time. So for 30 years, we've been saying, “okay, we want to be a part of tearing down that wall, we want to build bridges, we want to be a part of addressing the issues of race in our city and helping our city look more like the kingdom of God.” Figuring out how to do that is another question. So we've had task forces, study teams. We spent a lot of time listening, trying to read, study, understand. We've aimed at this a lot, in a lot of different ways. And one of the things most recently, the last three or four years, Emanuel Cleaver III who's pastor at St. James United Methodist Church, our two churches came together to create what's called Allies for Racial Justice. We've been looking at leadership teams working together, trying to get our people in relationship, all of that aimed at addressing race and racism. So every year there's sermons where I'm preaching into this. When George Floyd died, I had spoken out through my e-note when Ahmaud Arbery died and addressed that. I was in the middle of the sermon series and I thought, ‘okay, I'll address it in my e-note’ We prayed into it that weekend, but I didn't stop to preach about that. And I thought, ‘okay, that's just the deep south, this isn’t everywhere.’ Of course I know it's everywhere. Then the next thing is Travis Miller in Edmond, Oklahoma. His JB Hunt truck is blocked in by the HOA President in a gated neighborhood that looks an awful lot like south Johnson County. You watch 37 minutes of it and you see the guy crying at the end. It's like ‘yeah, this is just horrible.’ And then Christian Cooper in New York City, Central Park, the guy’s watching birds. And you're watching this stuff and you're going ‘yeah, no, this isn't just in the south, we still have problems.’ Then George Floyd becomes the climax of that to go ‘Okay, you got to say something, you got to do something.’ And so anyway, as that happened, then we stopped everything else we were doing and spent three weeks focused on what Jim Wallace calls America's Original Sin of Racism. And again, part of what I'm trying to figure out as a pastor, with the Coronavirus, we got people joining us on television, we're now on TV and we had like 30,000-40,000 people a weekend who were worshiping with us and so I'm trying to figure out I don't even know those people, how do I speak to them? And they started joining us because they're looking for hope, but I'm going to shift gears really fast and we're going to talk about something that's gonna be harder. And I told some of my team I said, “okay, the moment we step into this you're gonna watch those numbers drop, they're gonna drop because these are harder things to say and talk about.” Right after George Floyd’s death, my sermon was A Dream Still Deferred, and we jumped into understanding bias in ourselves and we all have biases. When bias relates to race, we call it racism. And there are lessons we learned and things we picked up when we were growing up that feed into this and we don't even understand it. We don't even think we have them. I wrote a book a year ago on fear called Unafraid. And those fears that we have, our amygdala, our body’s designed to recognize and anticipate and to imagine possible threats to our lives and we catastrophize those things. And some of our information, the data inputs that we have, have to do with what we watch on the news, it's the things we were taught when we were children. All of this stuff goes into deciding what's a possible threat and so much of racism and bias has to do with our fears and our fear of the other and how we're thinking about other people as a possible threat. Somebody who's different from me, they're a different religion, or they are a different race, or they live in a different place, or different socioeconomically. And we have to unlearn some of those things that we learned. We didn't even realize we were learning along the way. And that's part of what we're talking about the first week. The second week I thought ‘I'm going to skip vacation and I'm just going to preach on this this week.’ And then we had the protests and the President announced we were going to have American troops combating the protesters, Americans. I'm like, ‘I’m going to postpone another week's vacation because we got to talk about this.’ I went down on the plaza on Tuesday and Wednesday that week or Wednesday and Thursday that week to walk with people and to listen and to hear stories and to be able to say “this is not okay.” And so we focused on that. And then we had Emanuel Cleaver preach because after the first two weeks, I had African Americans speak at both of those sermons but I thought, I think we actually need to hear from an African American pastor. And so I asked Emanuel, who's our partner in Allies for Racial Justice, to speak. And then during that whole period of time, we're working on the statement and it started with our staff, our lead staff to our staff, and then we thought we need to speak not just to our staff, and so we got our church council involved. And there was a team of about 10 people in our church, five laity and five staff, half were people of color, working on this statement, and kind of perfected it and finally came out. So that came out last Friday and I'll just tell you, that has created no small amount of restoration for some people and created more conversations, in some cases, anger on the part of some people as well.
Fr. Justin: Well, we're gonna link to that in the show notes, but I'm going to pull it up right here and just take a look. First of all, you said some powerful things. The group came together and talked about both systemic and arbitrary racism. You called racism a sin, but you also use words like privilege, that set people off. You talked about repentance, that sets people off. You've got a lot of things in here that are really strong statements, and they're needed. They're statements that I've spent a lot of time personally working on those things and understanding them. Some of them are academic statements. Some of them are emotional, religious, or moral statements. But I would imagine that your reaction that you got from the congregation or from the community at large was pretty mixed. Let's talk about those people, though, who didn't receive it well. Those who are already in the choir, you're singing to the choir, and they're glad to see us put something strong out that they can stand on. But let's talk about those members of the congregation or of the community who've reached out to you and had trouble with it. What was their reaction? How did you handle that?
Pastor Hamilton: Well, it's a wide array of reactions, but I’ll just mention several of these. One is, for some people Black Lives Matter has to do with a particular organization. And so when they look at that organization, they may see things on there that they disagree with or that they think are too radical or too whatever. And for me, Black Lives Matter isn't about an organization. I don't know enough about the Black Lives Matter organization to say or want to say I agree with everything they've said. Black Lives Matter is just a fundamental philosophy and statement that I think is important. Somebody wrote to me and said, “I want to go to a church where all lives matter,” and I'm like, “wait, do you really think we're saying all lives don't matter? Of course, all lives matter. But in the midst of that, we're just talking Christians, the Scripture says if one part of the body suffers, we all suffer, we come alongside them.” I was thinking about a couple of years ago with the protests in the south, in West Virginia, about the Jewish community and blood and land and we will not be replaced or whatever the statements were that these white nationalists were saying and we organized events to support the Jewish community. And after shootings in the synagogues, what we needed to say then was “Jewish Lives Matter.” And when a mosque in our community was defaced a few years ago, we needed to say “Muslim Lives Matter.” And when immigrants were being characterized in certain ways we needed “Immigrant Lives Matter.” And at this point, we all know this on this podcast I'm suspecting, but part of the reason why we have to say “Black Lives Matter” is because right now a lot of Black people don't feel like their lives matter as much as white people's lives and there's an important role to say. So making that statement, but for some people, it was, “wait, you're supporting this particular movement, but that particular organization also speaks a lot about voting out certain people in office and voting in other people.” So now it sounds like it's a Democratic thing. That it's somebody supporting the Democratic Party. I'm a pastor of a church, 49% Republican, 26% Democrat, and 25% Independent. It's an interesting group of people. So if they feel like, “Well, wait, we're linking Resurrection to a particular group that's supporting a particular political party.” And it's like, “No, that's not what we're trying to say.” This phrase and this idea, I don't know how you can disagree with this idea that Black Lives Matter. And of course, all lives matter, but when one group is made to feel like their lives don't matter, we have to speak to them. And so anyway, a friend of mine said something I thought was interesting. Maybe he got it from somewhere else, I'm not sure, but his sister has breast cancer. And he said to somebody who would challenge, he said, “I think cancer research is important in every area, but my sister has breast cancer. And right now, I'm supporting breast cancer. I'm supporting breast cancer awareness, because right now my sister’s sick and I need to be involved in that.” And I think there he said in the same way I think Black Lives Matter is important. We're saying these are folks who have been hurt, and they're experiencing pain, and right now, we need to make clear that all lives matter, but this particular group needs to know, we need to know and we need to say that Black Lives Matter to us. And so anyway, that was one piece of it, but there were others too. When you talk about white privilege, and if some of your listeners have read White Fragility and if you're doing training and your diversity training and inclusivity training, a lot of these things, these terms, can be helpful for some people and off putting for other people. So what I hear from folks is, “wait, I don't have any privilege.” Especially folks who grew up in relative poverty. “I grew up in poverty. I had to work my way. I paid for my own college. I worked my way through and I think everybody has that opportunity.” And my family lived in poverty for a period of time when I was in high school, and my step dad left, we had nothing. Literally, our home was taken away. We're brushing our teeth with water out of the back of the toilet at one point. And so, part of what I've said is, look, if you take me who was experiencing some level of poverty at that point, and you take somebody who's experiencing poverty east of Troost, who is African American, and we might both have experienced some measure of poverty, but I will tell you, I started out with advantages that I didn't even understand. And part of that's because at 87% of the population or 85% or 82% today, they have a skin color that looks like mine. And that makes a difference. And the way I was acculturated and the way the culture is set up, it all makes a difference. It gives me advantages that other folks have not had and I have to be able to understand that. That there's some people at a disadvantage. And I don't regret the fact that I have those, that I had parents who read to me, and I had economic benefits that other people didn't have. I just have to recognize not everybody started from the same starting point in that. And so I think that's important too. But those are some of the kind of things. Repentance, I had one man who spent his whole life, he's worked for social, racial justice. And he says, “I worked really hard at this, I really believe this. Why? Why would you say I have to repent? What do I have to repent of?” And I said, “well, repenting is literally, the metanoia in Greek, it is to have a change of mind that leads to a change of heart that leads to change in behavior.” And I said, “so, do you believe there's racism?” “Of course, there's racism, I've worked against it my whole life.” I said, “have you done as much as you think you could have?” “Well, yeah, yeah, maybe not.” And I said, “for me, I've been silent too many times. I've tried to speak up, but there are many times I was silent because I didn't want to have to deal with the emails I get and the people leaving the church, and people mad and so I just was kind of quiet. I was a little more quiet than I should have been. I repent of that. I repeated the fact that I have fears, innate fears, that I have to work against.” Those are the things that we were hearing.
Fr. Justin: Well, I appreciate you bringing all of that up. And I think there are a lot of leaders who are listening who want to take action, they want to move beyond silence. They want to learn, they want to repent, but it's very difficult. And sometimes people have told me that they just don't know where to begin. And I think 98% of the people in the world are of goodwill, they want to do right. And very often though, they just don't have a starting point. And they need someone to guide them. But they actually need to do the hard work themselves of listening to the lived experience of others and beginning to unpack their own issues. And that's really hard to do. And you started to share just a little bit about your story growing up, but I'd like to just learn a little more. What can you share from this experience or how you've grown in your role as a leader, how did you unpack racism and implicit bias in your own life? How are you continuing to do that?
Pastor Hamilton: Well, I grew up in Johnson County and went to Prairie Elementary school. I don't think there was an African American teacher or student at the school when I was there. So, what I learned, I learned on TV. And in Johnson County, there are many folks who are like, “you're a white kid, don't go on the other side of Troost,” or whatever. I don't remember anybody actually telling me that, but somehow that was the message that I got along the way, whether it was watching the crimes on television or whatever else, so that I was afraid. And I was born in 1964. The Civil Rights Acts are just being passed. There were riots that were happening, protests, but then riots happening in Kansas City when I was a kid. I don't really remember that but it must have shaped a little bit of how I saw the world. It's just not been that long since these were part of, not only our culture, but our law and our city. When the Swope Park swimming pool shut down because now everyone had to be allowed to swim in the same pool. That was when I was a kid, I think. That might have been a little bit before I was born. I think from the time I was a kid, my teachers did a good job of “Dr. King was a hero” from the time I was little. I learned his speeches. I always felt like I had this longing for justice and racial justice. But I didn't have a clue. I didn't know the stories. And so part of this is actually listening to people's stories. And that's true in any area of life. It's true when you're talking about LGBTQ people. Like if you don't really actually take the time to listen to somebody's story and their pain and their life experience, then it's easy to have one sort of preconceived idea. There's not one African American experience, there’s not one Anglo experience or LGBTQ experience. It’s just listening to people and hearing our stories is what begins to change us from the inside out. All of a sudden, I know you, I care about you, and I've heard your story and it changes how I see the world. And so a lot of what we've done with Allies for Racial Justice at Resurrection is trying to get people together in small groups and connecting with people, just listening to each other's stories, which I find changes us. And that's not the whole answer. But that is one piece. When you actually listen to people's stories your view of the world changes. And when you try to walk in somebody else's shoes. That's where I think the real power is. I don't think it's so much in statements. We, as the largest church in the Kansas City area, we wanted to make a statement. We wanted to make a bold statement. I do wish we'd had some footnotes in it that would have said “hey, this is what this phrase means to us and this is what this phrase means” because I think it would have helped some of our people go, “okay, I get that.” You start off with a bold statement, but without helping people come along with you, bring them up to speed, it may feel off putting to some. But I think more than making bold statements and more than marching or showing up at a Pray on Troost event or whatever is actually taking the time to listen to people's stories. Asking people who are your co-workers, friends, neighbors: would you share with us your story? Here at Resurrection we've got a class right now called The Beloved Community, it's led by our pastors of color and they are inviting other people to share their stories. We have like 1,200 people signed up for this class they're doing on Zoom every Wednesday night, and then they're breaking into smaller groups after that. And there's just something that happens when you hear people's stories that helps change your perspective on life. And suddenly you go, “Well, maybe I did have some privilege that I didn't know about” or “maybe there are some biases that I have I didn't realize,” “maybe I have some racism internalized that I didn't know about.”
Fr. Justin: Yeah, it's easy to dehumanize somebody when you don't actually know who they are. And I remember, I'll just share a brief story of my own. I was in Thelma's Kitchen on Troost. And there was an African American trans woman who was in the bathroom and she was obviously having a really significant psychotic event. There's all sorts of different people in Thelma’s, it's a restaurant, not a soup kitchen. And so it was really challenging, because she was really, really suffering. And I was called down and I came to the bathroom door, and I knocked on the door. And I actually thought that she was in some sort of medical condition or a harm to herself. And so I opened the door. And when I did, she was in a fetal position on the ground next to the toilet, and just sobbing. And I sat down with her on the floor of the bathroom, and instead of rushing to call police or rushing to call an ambulance, I had been challenged recently at that time to actually listen more. And so I sat and I just began to listen and to kind of have that ministry of presence. And as I did, she was actually reliving the moments in her life when her mother had been killed and she was hiding in a closet. We so often look at people and say, “what is wrong with you?” And I was taught by some of my accountability partners to say, “what happened to you?” and to really begin to listen. And I think what you're saying is so important. It's difficult to do, though. So what do you say to a leader who works in the for-profit sector, is not a pastor, not independently wealthy, volunteering their time or not in the nonprofit sector? What do you say to them? Where did they begin? Certainly, you've got this sounds like an awesome resource with the Zoom meeting. And if you go to cor.org, hopefully you can find a link to some of those resources. But on a personal level, where do we begin? Where does someone who wants to be a social leader start to listen? And what are the mechanics of that? How do they do that?
Pastor Hamilton: I think that's great. So I do think finding the people that you can listen to in your organization is important. Inviting people to share with you their stories. I think there's plenty of books out there that you can start to read. I've just started another one. White Fragility, I was reading a couple weeks ago. Right now I just started a book called So You Want To Talk About Race, but there's a whole host of books that are out there. And in fact, we're trying to assemble a resource of things or a set of books that people can listen to or read that will help them be able to think about this, but I think the best is, again, face to face conversations with people. And we have folks in our congregation who do this training for their vocation, for their career. I've got somebody who's been doing it in the military for 30 years, a real leader. Now she is working with the Department of Defense. And part of what I'm asking is for her and some others in our congregation who do this for a living to help us design additional training so that we can help people listen, help people understand and hear. But I do think a lot of it has to do with stories and it has to do with people. I love this image of you, Justin, sitting on the floor with this woman in the bathroom who's in pain. I think that's what Jesus did. I think he spent time with people, he listened, he cared, he paid attention. That idea of paying attention, I think of the woman who touched the hem of his garment and he sense somehow there was a woman who was hurting. “Who touched me?” and he's looking around. And I just think that is really important, paying attention. I think there's a lot of times there's people out there who are saying things or doing things that just really irritate us. Like, I got emails about somebody who was talking about wanting to take down statues of Jesus, the white Jesus, “we need to take down these statues.” Well, okay, so I’m not in favor of taking down these statues. I am in favor of trying to hear what is behind that. I'm in favor of going “okay, well help me understand why, what does that mean?” And when I try to understand that then I understand that for some people Jesus has been portrayed as a white guy for a very long time and that was part of that added to the sense of, “okay, so the white people are the ones who look like God, God came in the flesh, he came as a white person.” And so, there's a whole lot that's underneath that. So I don't have to say we're going to take down The Pietà in Rome and discard it to be able to say, “okay, let me hear what this person is saying.” And to put on hold for just a minute, my immediate visceral reaction to this and to be able to try to understand why is this person saying this and is there any truth underneath. I don't have to agree with everything they say. But is there some truth underneath it? And I think it's critical always.
Fr. Justin: Yeah. I would love to hear your thoughts though, about when somebody wants to begin that journey and they begin to listen, and they begin to be overwhelmed with the things that they're learning. I think people can get paralyzed. They especially if white folks who have positions of authority begin to sort of wake up to the things that they didn't see before regarding racial and economic inequity and other issues. Where do they turn to unpack those things? Certainly the church plays a role. But where else should they turn? You've mentioned some books. What do they do once they get beyond the initial phase, and then begin to want to grow in a continual way?
Pastor Hamilton: That's a really great question. I'm not sure the answer, to be quite honest. I think a lot of it is about relationships. A lot of it is about looking to see where do I need to speak up, where I've been silent before, what are the ways that I can use my influence. Here at Resurrection, one of the things we recognized is we need to do a better job of actually recruiting and looking to hire people of color. So our pastoral staff I think, is 20% people of color, but the rest of our staff far below that. And we end up hiring people who know people. We have a position come open, we invite applications, most of the people who apply are people who know Resurrection, maybe they go to Resurrection. And a high percentage of our people are Caucasian. And so we're saying, “okay, actually, we have to work harder at this and we have to be more intentional about a whole lot of things.” So it has to do with who's leading from the chancel when we're leading worship. How are we inviting more African American voices to preach? So we're making some conscious decisions. We moved one of our pastors into a position of Pastor of Community Justice, one of our African American pastors, asking her to be a part of our leadership team where we're making decisions so she can be listening and hearing in a different way. Well, we need more than just one pastor who's on our team doing that. And we have several others who are doing the same on a broader team, but there's a lot of things that we can be doing better and I'm embarrassed that we haven't thought to do those. There's another place to repent. I feel like we could have done a lot better job over a long period of time and just have not. And so I think that's where a lot of companies are right now too. I think that's a really good place to be, to say, “okay, how do we go about recruiting, how do we go about putting people in positions to listen and understand?” We've been trying over a long period of time to say, “okay, when we're using videos, when we have photos, how are we making sure we're including everybody in those?” Because it's so easy. Resurrection reflects the community, the Leawood campus anyway, reflects the community around us in south Johnston County. We're 90%+ white. So you got to really work when we're producing interviews, or videos, or I'm talking to different people that I'm going to go out of my way to find the 10% of the congregation who don't reflect a white presence, visual presence, or even experience and invite them to be sharing their stories. And so we're trying. We've been trying to do that for some years now, but I think we can do a better job of that as well.
Fr. Justin: I think you've actually hit on a couple things, whether they were consciously formulated or not. One of the things is just being intentional, to try to be authentic, and making that a purpose. I think the second thing is you acknowledge the deficits and have done that publicly, you've done that openly, and you've gone about the process of repentance or metanoia, changing the mind, turning around. I think the other thing that you did is you've said today that leaders need to move beyond sort of charitable intention, and workshops, and awareness, and they need to get to operationalizing these priorities. And you did that by lifting up somebody to really lead in that area. And I think those are a lot of things that companies need to start with. There are a lot of things that leaders can do. They're not that complicated. And I don't think you have to have everything perfect. You don't have to know everything before you begin. Do you?
Pastor Hamilton: No, absolutely not. And part of what you've got to recognize, I think, is whenever you start to do something, there will be somebody who is critical. And I actually find that both on the left and the right. Methodism is sort of this via media, this middle way, where we're trying to hold together in tension the left and the right. And so I found when I started into the sermons, we had an evening conversation one night with three of our pastors of color, and I just wanted to try to listen. Well, I asked a question that somebody said, “you shouldn't have asked that question.” They're probably right. But eventually I get blasted and that's okay. That's just part of it. My first sermon I preached I had several people like “you've missed an opportunity, you should have said this or that.” I'm like, “hey, that sounds like a great sermon you had in mind. I'm trying to shepherd this congregation the best I can as a senior pastor.” I'm going to blow it. I'm going to make mistakes and I think that's also part of where we get stuck. Especially, white folks, we get stuck because we're afraid of making a mistake. Like what if I say the wrong thing and then somebody gets mad because I was insensitive here, I said the wrong thing. And there will be people who will criticize you and will just tell you how you just blew it, you know? And so we get defensive about that. It's like, well, it's better if I don't say anything to be criticized there. And then on the other side we have people who are critical that you're even saying anything at all. And I think somewhere you’ve got to find a voice and say, “okay, I might mess up on this, I might get it wrong, but I'm still gonna, I need to say something.”
Fr. Justin: In business and entrepreneurship, we sure embrace the kind of modern idea of fail fast pivot. And I think we need to make room for that for ourselves in these really difficult conversations, whether they're racial, religious, economic, political. Don't be afraid to say you're wrong. Well, we're bumping up against time, and I really appreciate it. But I always end every podcast with this question, and that is that I want to know what advice would you give to leaders in any sector when they want to embrace the idea of increasing their social impact. If they want to become social leaders in their leadership lane, what are two or three things that they need to do that you can share from your experience?
Pastor Hamilton: That's a great question. First of all, before I answer that question, I just want to be clear that doing this is not easy and it requires a little modicum of courage to well up, to say I'm going to address things that are issues that face our society, places where things are broken in our society. And then you've got to figure out, especially if you're in the business sector, but in the church world, you got to figure out how do I address this in a way that helps people hear and how do I make sure I've done my research and I've done my homework so I'm not just blurting out my latest conviction or my soapbox, but how do I actually study to know what I'm talking about? And then say it in a way that helps people come along, because you either say things in a way that alienates them or you say things in a way that brings people along, and I've done both. I've tried very hard to say things in a way that helps people go, “oh, wow, I hadn't seen it that way before” and they have a real conversion. But sometimes it happens where you've actually pushed people away. And sometimes people are going to leave. I'm reminded of John 6:66, that’s an easy verse to remember if you think of 666. And in John 6:66, it says that many people turned away from Jesus, many of his disciples turned away. And so he knew what it was like to say things that people were offended by and they turned away. It hurts when you have customers who send you a note and say, “I'm not going to do business with you anymore because I don't like what you said there.” A lot of times they don't even tell you but they just stopped doing business with you. It hurts when your members tell you “I can't come to this church this week.” I had a note from a woman who said, “what happened to the pastor who led me back to Jesus? I want to take notes every time you preached about the Bible, but now you seem to be preaching about these issues. You have this need to be a civic leader in this area.” I'm like, okay, I don't think that was what was motivating me. But it was painful. You read that you go, really? I think Jesus cares about all this stuff. I think this matters to him. If he doesn't care about this, then what does he care about? But those are the kind of comments you're going to get sometimes and you’ve got to be okay with the fact that people will sometimes be upset and sometimes they're going to reject you. And in the end, looking back over the 30 years of pastoral ministry here at Resurrection, most of the things that I'm actually most proud of, proud is not the right word, but that were places where it took a little bit of courage, I had to screw up my courage to be able to speak about something that was hard. And there were some people who were mad. And yet, in the end, I think it was the thing that God wanted me to do. And I would say for civic leaders, business leaders, sometimes it's figuring out how do I address that in my realm? So in your area of influence, using your influence for the maximum good. All of us have influence. We have people, we have a platform of somebody and using that in a way that can bring about the most good. I think about Ronald Heifetz at the Kennedy School at Harvard. He wrote a book called Leadership Without Easy Answers. And he has this way of talking about how you go about finding places where you need to step in. He talks about the world as it is, and then the world as it’s supposed to be. And the goal is to close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it’s supposed to be. So part of what you’ve got to figure out is how's the world supposed to be? Jesus talked about that as the kingdom of God. If you're a business leader, what do you think the world is supposed to look like? Put your best thinking into what should our city look like and then where are the places where there's a difference between how the world is and how it's supposed to be? And then what are we going to do as a business? What are we going to do as a nonprofit? What are we going to do to close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it's supposed to be? And I think those are the places. I’ll tell you, your employees and your shareholders, especially your employees but your stakeholders. When you've done something selfless, to help the world look more like it's supposed to look, people go “that's the kind of company I want to work for. That's the kind of leader I want to work for. That's the kind of company I want to do business with. They actually care about our community and it's not just about selling more products and increasing shareholder price, but it's about actually doing good while doing well.” In the end, when you retire, and you can look back over your career and say, I helped to make this city a better place, I helped human beings know that they were valued, I helped solve problems, I helped children get an education, whatever it might be. You guys are doing a great job of addressing one of those needs at Reconciliation Services. You saw a need and you said, “okay, we want to close the gap here.” And that’s what we're trying to do at Resurrection in a lot of different ways and when we all do that, that's leadership and then our city has changed in positive ways. So I appreciate your podcasts and I appreciate Father Justin, what you're doing, what you guys are doing to try to help Kansas City look like God's kingdom. And I just commend you for it and grateful to have a chance to know you to watch and see what y'all are doing.
Fr. Justin: Well, the feeling is mutual. And thank you for giving us so much time today and dropping the knowledge that you have, but also sharing your vulnerable journey, that you've screwed up, that you've repented, that you're trying, that you've said hard things, that you've been silent. All of those things are necessary to admit as we journey together and hold one another accountable. Iron sharpening iron. So, Adam, thank you for your time today and I look forward to possibly having you on the podcast again. And I'm definitely going to go and check the listening series that you have. Can you call that out one more time?
Pastor Hamilton: It's The Beloved Community and it should be on our website. I think they post it after each Wednesday night. It started a week ago. And your folks might be interested in checking out the sermons too, from the last four weeks. A Dream Still Deferred. And then the second one was called Jesus, Protests and Repentance. And then Emanuel Cleaver preached one the third week of that series. So this was the first three weekends of June and those are on our website too. You can find the sermons there. You can find The Beloved Community sharing there. You can find a Tuesday night Vespers service that I did that has three of our pastors in it, people of color who shared their stories as well.
Fr. Justin: Well, Pastor Adam Hamilton, thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much.
Pastor Hamilton: Thanks, Father Justin, good to see you.
Fr. Justin: Yeah, likewise, hang with me for one second. We'll be right back. Hey, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I have a favor to ask of you if you did. If you would go onto YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, wherever you listen to this podcast and smash that like button, follow us, hit the little bell icon. It's going to really help us to share this podcast out with more people who are desiring to become social leaders and to further their journey towards these values that we've been talking about today. And also, I'm excited to tell you about a new e-course that's getting ready to launch. It's called The Social Leader. And it's designed especially for people who want to advance their knowledge about the core fundamentals, the essentials of becoming a social leader, and embracing the things that we talk about every week on this podcast in their own life. You can find out more by going to TheSocialLeader.org and fill out a few questions for us, and one of our team’s gonna reach out to you, and see if this course is right for you. So until next week, thank you so much for joining us on The Social Leader podcast. I look forward to talking to you very soon.