Erina Kim-Eubanks & Communal Formation

Faith communities have the power to help give shape to people's lives, for better, and sometimes for worse. On this episode of 20 Minute Takes, Nikki Toyama-Szeto talks with Erina Kim-Eubanks. She's the co-pastor of Bethel Community Presbyterian Church in San Leandro, CA, a multigenerational church community that she and her husband have helped to replant since the Covid-19 pandemic. In this conversation, Erina reflects on what spiritual formation looks like at their church, how the their community is intentional in their imagination and praxis, and how communal practices around liturgy and scripture nourish their congregation.

You can find Erina's writing here.
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20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action
Hosted by Nikki Toyama-Szeto 
Produced by David de Leon
Editing and Mixing by Wiloza Media
Music by Andre Henry

Transcript

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20MT (SE08) - Erina Kim-Eubanks 

[Nikki]

Hello, my name is Nikki Toyama-Sito, and I'm the Executive Director of Christians for Social Action and your host for today's episode of 20-Minute Takes. Today we talk with Rev. Erna Kim Eubanks. She's the co-pastor at Bethel Community Presbyterian Church in San Leandro, and we talk about spiritual formation, Christian imagination, and practice.

Join us for this episode of 20-Minute Takes. Rev. Erna Kim Eubanks, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of 20-Minute Takes. 

[Erina]

Thank you. It's so good to be here. 

[Nikki] 

Now, I know that you and I are past cross decades ago. The first question that I have for you, is somebody who knew you 10 or 20 years ago, and then somebody who knows you now, what would be one of the biggest differences between how those folks might describe you?

[Erina]

Oh, differences. I would like to say and think that compared to 20 years ago, I feel more sure of myself and unapologetic about who I am and my own particularities, and feeling that some of those particularities are not a deficit, but can be gifts. I am introverted.

I'm a highly sensitive person. I'm a thoughtful, conscientious person, but that doesn't mean I can't be a leader. Fantastic.

[Nikki]

That's great. What a different engagement that you have with the world 10, 20 years ago. Can you tell us some about the church and the community that you find yourself rooted in these days as you're a co-pastor?

[Erina]

Yes. I am a co-pastor at a PCUSA church. It's somewhat of a longstanding PCUSA church.

It's been around for 70 plus years, but it's also unique in that it's a church that's gone through several different rounds of revitalization and growth, and then decline, and then revitalization, growth, and decline. When I came into the church, it was at that point of decline and was on the brink of closure, actually. It was down to about maybe 10, 15 people, aging congregation, unsure if it was going to survive, to be honest.

Seven years that I've been here, came in 2019, and came with the hopes of revitalization and not the certainty of it, certainly. I was not sure if it would survive, and yet in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of racial uprisings, in the midst of all the unsettled times we're living in, we have seen the church grow, and survive, and become a fairly multi-ethnic, multi-generational, queer-affirming, hybrid community that is both locally present in the city of San Leandro and has online presence. We're doing all the things, crossing all the boundaries, trying to build a community in the midst of that, but it's been just a delight to be part of something that I could not have planned or dreamed of on my own, and to see the Spirit of God move and build this community, especially in the times we're living in, has been an encouragement and a place of creativity and exploration, to be honest, and a space where we have freedom to reimagine church and to try new things in ministry.

[Nikki]

Yeah, no, that's fantastic. Your community is based in Northern California, so a little bit outside of San Francisco, right?

[Erina]

Yes, that's right.

[Nikki]

Yes. As a pastor, how do you think about the spiritual formation for your community?

[Erina]

I think that how I tend to think about spiritual formation is in two buckets of work. One is in imagination work, giving people new imagination, whether that's theological imagination or just ethical imagination, giving people better stories to live by, hope to live by, and to shape people through theology, through narrative, through liturgy. And really, even in these days, specifically as a Christian pastor, I think part of that imagination is also a different Christian imagination, because so much of our Christian imagination has been co-opted by very toxic theologies, things that have been shaped by white supremacy and Christian nationalism and authoritarianism, heteropatriarchy, Zionism, all these forces that have co-opted our Christian imagination. So I think part of my work as a pastor is really helping people to imagine differently, to explore different stories to live by.

[Nikki]

One of the things I've appreciated, because I think people who do work or talk about Christian imagination, sometimes it feels in this idea level, but I feel like part of what you're doing is inviting your church to engage with the realities of the community around it, even as you're doing this Christian imagination work. How does that work? How do those things relate?

[Erina]

Yeah, well, I was going to say kind of the second bucket of work that I feel like we hold is there's the imagination part, but then there's also the praxis part, right? And really right now, some of that is just by bringing people together, because people are very disembodied. People are very disconnected.

They're not really connected to a sense of people and place and belonging. So some of it is just bringing people together, but then it's like practices, like shared ritual, praying prayers together, sharing liturgy, singing songs, giving our resources away, sharing our stories with one another. All of these sort of practices help us to not only hold ideas and kind of theoretical abstract concepts of a new imagination, but we get to live it out together and how we host our tables and what meals we share and how we give our resources away and how we treat our neighbors and what we do with our church property and just very practical things.

So I think part of my work in formation, I think those are the two areas I feel like, and we need to integrate those things, right? I think, like you said, some people are really good at the practice part, but there's not really understanding of the narratives driving that, or there's no interrogation of the narratives driving that, or there's people who are really doing sort of the heavy imagination, theology, abstract kind of concept sort of way, but it's not grounded in a place. It's not grounded in a people.

It's not grounded in a sense of mission. And so we try to hold those things together and integrate them.

[Nikki]

I love that. I love that. So what does some of these practices of formation look like in your community?

[Erina]

Yeah, you know, there's a lot of different things that we've done, and our church's vision statement is to be a community that's reimagining church around God's great welcome table. And so the kind of idea of reimagining church is something we carry in a lot of our practices. Some of it is in how we reimagine scriptural engagement.

So our community has intentionally taken on some practices. One of them is the practice of bibliodrama, and we actually got a grant a couple years ago from the Calvin Worship Institute where we tried to bring the practice of bibliodrama into our community, which is this very interactive, embodied, decolonial practice of scripture that brings our own lives and our own realities into conversation with the text through play, through sort of different improvisation and sort of embodiment.

And so we've done bibliodrama as a way to kind of heal people from previous engagements of scripture that were very just intellectual and heady and to get people into their bodies and to bring their stories and into the conversation. With our children, we do something called godly play, which is a sort of engagement with scripture that's very wonder and curiosity based. So even for our children at a young age, we're starting to get them to engage sacred texts through questioning and wondering and interacting and through physical kind of connection embodiment, because godly play uses a lot of, you know, different physical materials to bring the story alive.

We also have done a lot of contemplative prayer practices. And so we have had groups that do things like centering prayer, visio divina, lectio divina. We've kind of brought some of these various contemplative engagements of prayer and ritual into our community.

And especially right now, I think it's such an important thing for people to feel grounded. People just feel really unmoored in this time, you know, and so just having even centering prayer, especially just people entering into silence has been a big practice for us. And then we've also tried to reimagine sort of how we hold some of our sacraments, obviously being rooted in a tradition and a long standing church tradition of things like communion and the particular ways that we do that in like a Presbyterian space.

And also reimagining that a little bit like one thing we've done is that we right now we have a project of reimagining the communion table for various cultural heritage months. So for various cultural heritage months, we've had people in specific affinity groups come together and plan what the table would be set with. So we set we have a long communion table.

It's actually the longest longest communion table in the SF Presbytery, San Francisco Presbytery. But you know, we have chosen specific cultural textiles and items, and sometimes photos of ancestors or specific food items. For Black History Month, for example, we had hair products on the table, we had pictures of family members, we had different plants and produce and, and we have people in the community share testimonies on those days.

And then we have communion elements that are contextualized. Like this, this past month, for Black History Month, we had sorrel and we had skillet cornbread and people make these elements. And so even reimagining things like communion and the practice of certain rituals and sacraments, all of these things kind of shape our sense of community and connection and belonging to each other.

I think those are some things that come to mind. And I think ultimately, too, we are also always thinking about reimagining our church space. And so in terms of who uses our space, is it just for church programming, and we have a food pantry that we host, we have a community garden on our campus, we're doing a lot of climate resilience work, and viewing our, our church as part of a resilience hub in our neighborhood, always trying to also engage our neighbors in the midst of everything as well.

[Nikki]

So I love this contradiction or this tension that you live in, of pressing into some very old ways of being and ways of spirituality, these very contemporary ways of being present in a community and a part of the social fabric. And then also pushing this kind of creative engagement with scripture and other things. I don't know, I just love that tension that you all live and navigate in a lot of different places.

In our socio and political environment these days, what do you consider like the things that are really driving spiritual formation? Yeah. Like the things that are forming our people spiritually, which may not necessarily be Christian formation.

[Erina]

Right, right, right. I think, to be honest, I think in American Christianity, one of the dominant forces of formation really is our economy, our capitalist economic system. And I think because so much of our society's sort of, the things that we struggle with, you know, the addictions to consumption, to commodification, individualism, kind of this impulse towards numbing and being satiated.

I'm not sure if this is because I'm reading Walter Brueggemann right now for Lent where we're reading Sabbath as resistance and going through a series on Sabbath. But I think there is this constant drive in our society to do more, to produce more, to have more, to make more profit specifically. And yet we also know that this system is failing.

So many of us are struggling. We all kind of see how it's really only profiting the, you know, the top 1% billionaires, most of our society. I think we see that we're on the brink of collapse in so many areas in our society.

And so I think we're in, we're out of this really critical point, I think, where some things really need to die is what I feel. And I think the pandemic sort of exposed some of that. And, and we are in these sort of days of unveiling, people talk about apocalyptic times that we're living in things that are being unveiled.

And I think these systems that have shaped us and continue to shape us, I think people also are dissatisfied and know that they're not serving us. And we're yet also not fully free of them. And I think intertwined with that sort of when we talk about the economy, I think you have to also talk about technology.

And I don't know, partly, I'm, you know, I'm in the Bay Area, where, you know, a lot of people I know, are in the tech industry in some way. But I think really, this shift to the attention economy, and sort of this idea that our attention is now a currency for targeted advertising. And we are now sort of drawn into the never ending news cycle that we can just open our phones and see all the problems of the world.

Algorithms are the things that are shaping what we see, and we are becoming more divided and more echo chambered. And all of these things, I think, these things affect our spirits. They affect our sense of hope.

They affect our sense of groundedness and rootedness and who we are. And when our attention is so much on everything external to us, and we are not paying attention to what's happening in our spirits, what what, you know, the divine is saying and doing in our midst, I think that is leaving us hopeless and anxious and disembodied and overwhelmed and all the things that we're experiencing right now. And so I just I do really see that the economy and particularly driven by technology is really shaping us today.

[Nikki]

Yeah, I think that's so interesting. Even as you're talking, I'm thinking about the pressures for more, more, more shape our understanding of our relationships is becoming more transactional, or the like the shielding you might do and not being vulnerable, because, you know, it's sort of rewarding more and more and ever bigger. And I'm definitely reflecting a lot on the relationship with technology and how it is actually biologically shaping us.

So I appreciate that you all are kind of pressing in on that. You know, Erna, one of the things I really appreciate about your particular leadership is you write really beautiful liturgies, something that I feel is in the line of a very long tradition within faith communities. And at the same time, I feel like when I read your liturgies, it unpacks or helps me understand the times around me in new ways.

Can you say something about the role of liturgies? And maybe how did you come into this practice of writing liturgies for your community?

[Erina]

Yeah, it's a great question. I think for me, the writing was my way of processing what was happening in the world, and taking some sense of agency, right? I think, like, you know, I think with technology, when we're just consuming so much passively, there's a way that you could just not really process it.

And I, I started to find myself wanting to, like, intentionally resist that passive consumption and think about how to put into words what I'm actually feeling, what I'm actually needing, what I'm actually desiring in this moment. And so it really started as just a personal survival. And it really kind of started the pandemic, actually, for me, of just wanting to put to words things and articulate things.

And the articulation requires reflection, right? And so for me, it was a way of reflecting and processing. But I think I really appreciate how you frame the liturgy, the role of liturgy, because that's, that is kind of how I see it in terms of it being rooted in sort of more longstanding tradition and practice, and knowing like these practices of saying prayers together, or call and response, or even things like Christian seasons, Lent, Advent, or, like, sometimes writing particular prayers for the Feast of Epiphany, or for Maundy Thursday, or Pentecost, you know, knowing that I'm joining in, in this chorus of saints who have prayed prayers throughout the generations, makes me remember that I am rooted in a longer tradition that I'm not alone, that there's this sort of cloud of witnesses who've gone before me that I can kind of join into. And it makes me feel a sense of belonging.

But, and then also beholding that intention with sort of what is happening in this moment, in this day, in this age. And, and I do find myself, you know, writing in response to very current events, you know, just just this past week, writing a prayer for peacemaking in the midst of everything happening. And so I think it also helps me to remember that feelings are okay in our life with God, and expressing emotion through words, and allowing other people to access their feelings a bit, when I think it's easy to feel numb and overwhelmed, is an important expression, and a communal expression, and a way to stay hopeful, and build a sense of trust in a God who is bigger than just me, and the world that I see in front of me.

[Nikki]

So I love that. How do you know which things to hold on to, and to sort of stay in the long story of, and which things should be shaken up, broken, and totally reformed? How do you discern?

Are there certain things that you look for, or your community looks for?

[Erina]

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it really is just communal discernment, I think. And, you know, it is interesting, for example, being in a PCUSA church, and being in a longstanding denomination, but also having a lot of people in our church who don't come from this background, or don't come from this denomination.

And in some ways, I think just paying attention to what is serving us, and not serving us. But then also, I think being connected to a broader denomination, and body, and tradition keeps you honest, and sort of in a way where I think, you know, so many churches these days that are sort of independent churches, for example, they can kind of just do whatever is comfortable, right? And there are certain things, for example, in the Presbyterian Church, we have a book of order that I am held accountable to, you know?

And in that way, there is a communal discernment process that happens in a broader body, that I submit myself to, quite honestly, you know? And so in that way, there's a communal discernment that happens. It's not just an individual who's just saying, you have to do it this way.

There's a whole community of people who've debated, and contested, and wrestled, and discerned together. And so I do submit myself to that. But in our local church specifically, I think there's a little bit of that where, you know, we are accountable to a tradition.

And then we also, like you said, expanding upon it, I think when it feels like, okay, that's not quite who we are. How do we contextualize it? How do we update it?

How do we experiment with it in a way where we, you know, two of our church values actually, one of our values is that we honor our roots. And then one of our values is we move with expansiveness. So it is a little bit like this dance, right?

Of like, we are rooted, we're rooted in something, we have a place we come from. And we are not just in a vacuum, we're not just standing alone, rootless. And we also try to be flexible, like, because we are rooted, we can actually move and bend with the winds and not fall over.

But we're not so stiff and inflexible that we just break. So I think maybe that's kind of how I think about it, like, an image of a rooted tree that's also flexible and able to move. And I think there's a lot of communal discernment that goes into that.

It's not, it's not just me deciding. It's paying attention to other voices, other leaders, other people in our community, and where we're experiencing life and where it feels like things need to be revived and refreshed.

[Nikki]

I love that. That's great. Erina, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of 20 Minute Takes.

[Erina]

Thank you for having me. It's a delight to be here. Glad to chat.

[Nikki]

20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action. Our music was created by Andre Henry, and this episode was mixed and engineered by Willowza Media. If you like this episode, spread the word by subscribing, reviewing, or sharing.

I'm your host, Nikki Toyamasito. If you want to find out more about our work, visit the website at christiansforsocialaction.org.