Prepared to Drown: Deep Dives into an Expansive Faith
A monthly podcast featuring informative and diverse voices exploring contemporary topics ranging from religious deconstruction, anti-racism, and sexuality to holy texts, labour unions, and artificial intelligence.
Prepared to Drown: Deep Dives into an Expansive Faith
Episode 11 - A Bigger Boat: Risk, Faith, and Failing Forward
The night before General Council 45 marks a historic threshold for the United Church of Canada as it enters its second century. In this special live recording, we dive into the uncomfortable but essential question: What happens when resurrection doesn't come the way we expect it to?
Sarah Charters, United Church of Canada Foundation President and Executive Officer of the United Church of Canada Philanthropy Unit, joins us to explore the razor's edge between aspirational dreams and sustainable reality. We confront the hard truth that waiting for someone else to devise solutions is no longer an option, and that truly dreaming big remains our greatest challenge. The conversation weaves between institutional challenges and personal struggles as we examine what faithful living looks like when outcomes remain uncertain.
We tackle the false comfort of easy theological answers that try to explain away suffering and failure. Instead, we embrace a more authentic vision of God's presence—not as the orchestrator of our pain, but as the first to cry with us in our moments of grief. This perspective opens space for the concept of "noble failure"—the recognition that faithfulness itself might be a better measure of success than traditional metrics.
What emerges is a powerful reimagining of hope as something that doesn't require certainty or guaranteed outcomes. As the United Church stands at this pivotal moment, its commitment to ensuring "everyone has a place at the table" offers a countercultural witness in an increasingly divided world. This isn't just church talk—it's about how we navigate life's deepest disappointments while maintaining our courage to keep showing up.
Listen, subscribe, and join a community of people willing to wade into difficult conversations about faith, failure, and the kind of courage it takes to stay in the water when the waves rise higher than planned.
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All right, folks, here's the deal we're recording live on the night before General Council 45 starts as the United Church of Canada gathers from across Canada and stands on the threshold of its next century. This is a moment that is thick with memory, full of possibility and honest about the storm clouds on the horizon. And you know how we do it on this podcast Once the microphones are on, they stay on. No edits, no retakes, just real conversation about faith, failure and the kind of courage it takes to keep going when there are no guarantees. This one isn't about easy wins or neat resurrection stories. It's about noble failures, stubborn hope and the holy work of staying in the water, even when the waves are rising higher than you'd planned for. Hope and the holy work of staying in the water even when the waves are rising higher than you'd planned for. I'm Bill Weaver and this is Prepared to Drown. Deep dives into an expanse of faith. Settle in and let's wade into the deep together.
Bill:Welcome to this special edition of Prepared to Drown here on this gorgeous August evening here in Calgary, alberta. We are being recorded live tonight on the eve of something pretty historic, at least in my lifetime, because here in Calgary we are just hours away from the opening of General Council 45 of the United Church of Canada. It is the national gathering of the United Church of Canada and it is happening here in Calgary, alberta, this year, and it's a council that is going to mark the first steps of our second century as a denomination here in Canada. So I anticipate while I skip every minute of it possible that it will be soaked in memory and a combination of both deep nostalgia and optimistic hope for the future all rolled into one. So for those who don't know, either listening or here in the room with us tonight, there's a number of things that are going to be happening in this General Council time here in Calgary, especially and notably a long-awaited and probably long-overdue apology to the 2SLGBTQIA community for historic church harm that has happened. There's also going to be plenty of fun, policy debates and reports and visions and hand-wringing and concern and hope all rolled into one. And we're doing it in the midst of declining numbers in the North American church and certainly resistance and scalebacks to DEI on both sides of the border and a growing shadow of Christian nationalism that seems to be coming up anew, and we are all kind of coming to General Counsel 45, with all of that around us and certainly on our minds.
Bill:So there's going to be plenty of longing for certainty and longing for growth and longing for a sense of purpose and certainly longing for resurrection. And so tonight at least, the truth is I know it my experience of the church has always been that the United Church of Canada has never been a clean success story, but has also never been a complete failure, and we occupy the space somewhere in the middle of that. So as we step into the next hundred years of the United Church, I know that it is tempting to reach for theologies that say everything is part of God's plan, or maybe the church just needs to shrink in order to grow again, or out of every failure will always emerge something better. But tonight we want to ask the question but what happens when resurrection doesn't come the way we want it to? What if some things just end? And what if we can't, for instance, say that we have more franchises than Tim Hortons anymore, which was a tagline for the United Church over a decade ago, I think, during the Emerging Spirit campaign? So tonight we're asking what does it mean to live and lead and risk and act with conviction and still not know if it's going to work in the end. What does it mean to take responsibility for our failures and our lapses and the harms that we have done and still dare to imagine that we can transform well and meaningfully in the process?
Bill:And so I'm joined tonight by three guests who know what it is to work from within systems that are both courageous and sometimes a little bit flawed, and sometimes a lot flawed. Most of our listeners already know Joanne and Ricardo and myself. We've shared plenty of really deep conversations over the past year on Prepared to Drown. But tonight we are especially glad to be joined by someone who brings a very different kind of voice to this table than we have had before, grounded in stewardship and strategy and storytelling across the National Church and beyond. So Sarah Charters is joining us tonight.
Bill:She is the president of the United Church of Canada Foundation, executive officer of philanthropy, and under her leadership the foundation manages an extraordinary breadth of work. In fact, they just released a whole bunch of new announcements today of Seeds of Hope, grant recipients that fund community healing and innovation, impact investing in indigenous enterprises and green energy and ethical ventures, constant expanding networks of donors and congregations and communities that are trying to live their values through action. But even before that, sarah brings decades of experience in fund development and across the broader not-for-profit sector, and she is really good at navigating the razor's edge between aspirational dreams and goals and realistic sustainability. So her job in many ways is to hold the tension between what we long for as a church and what we're actually willing and or able to invest in for as a church and what we're actually willing and or able to invest in. So as we gather tonight on the edge of General Council 45, with all of its visioning and probably some repenting and a whole lot of reshuffling, there's no one better able to help us ask what does it mean to be faithful when success is uncertain and when outcomes are unclear?
Bill:And if you listened to last month's podcast, you also know that she's on my top three list of people to actually appear on this podcast. So I'm fanboying a little bit tonight, but I'm trying to keep it together. And I am going to begin with you, sarah, because I get to do that as the host as we gather for the eve before GC45, you sit in a rare vantage point because you get to oversee a portfolio that includes grants and endowments and ethical investing, and everything from grassroots reconciliation projects to nationwide justice initiatives. So, as we're gathering for this historic general council and the next hundred years of the United Church, I'm going to ask you what is one hard truth that you wish more church leaders were willing to say out loud? As you look at the United Church of Canada that is gathering this year, Ooh.
Bill:Start with the hard truth and the joy has faded right away. Nope, nope, just right in there.
Sarah:A hard truth that I wish more church leaders would say out loud yeah.
Sarah:That we can't wait any longer. I feel like there's a lot of folks in the church who are waiting not really for a magic bullet or some sort of miracle cure, but just almost for somebody else to come up with something that they can do that will change the trajectory. And you know, we see some of that through the granting programs, when people are putting in their applications for things that they're excited about or wondering about or curious to test, and a lot of the time I think they're just not dreaming big enough. Time I think they're just not dreaming big enough. And the idea that we have time to make small, incremental changes that will ultimately shift where we're headed. I don't have it now.
Bill:Interesting. I'm a chairperson for my kids' school parent association fundraising association and I can remember one year sitting at a teacher's meeting at the beginning of the school year and saying, like we have a ton of money right now in our association bank account that's supposed to be funding initiatives at the school. So we want you to. And I remember saying we want you to dream big. And the responses were oh, let's add like 10 more books to our classroom library. And I remember going back to the next meeting and saying I asked you to dream big and I feel like you collectively have demonstrated an inability to actually do that. So that's interesting actually to consider the possibility that, yeah, like the idea of being able to actually like waiting around for somebody else to come up with a big dream is a challenging, a challenging truth to hear. How does that? How does that land with you, joanne?
Joanne:Well, I mean it's interesting. I was thinking back to when I used to work at another church in town that has undergone a lot of growth and when I first started working there, there were less than 100 people on Sunday morning for sure, more people in the choir than in the congregation. So we started dreaming about what kind of community we wanted to have. You know, like, what are we really wanting to build here? And started thinking, well, there's got to be someone else who's done it. You know there has to be. Let's find the model and just fit into it. And we came to the conclusion that the model and just fit into it. And we came to the conclusion that, no, what we're doing is laying track and there is no one else and we have to just go forth in faith and do what we believe is right, which ultimately, you know, I'm no longer with that congregation, but it's been very successful there. So this idea of thinking big and just saying I'm laying track, I'm not waiting to see who else is going to do this, or whether it's going to work or not, is so important, I think, in ministry. But I think the other thing on the other side of it, like if I was thinking of. What I wish people would say more is it might fail, right, because particularly ministers are in the business of casting hope, right? And so you know, the congregations we serve in our team certainly have their challenges, big challenges, you know, challenges you know. And so as a team we get together, we think about, you know, how could we do this? What's the sort of growing edge of all these places? And you know, you go to the boards and to the congregation and you say I think this is the direction, and they agree or don't agree. Mostly they agree. I like, yes, churches, you know, like that's great, but in the back of my mind is always it might not work.
Joanne:And then what you know, and I think, when I decided to be a minister, instead of just sort of a spectator working on staffs, I remember very distinctly and I may have told this story before, but recognizing that the church was in decline, that there were fewer and fewer communities of faith that could hire a full-time minister, all those things were true and I really very strongly thought and said to other people I'm investing this time to become a minister and going to serve a church that could very well fail, eyes open.
Joanne:It could very well fail, and all I could say to myself and what kept me going was I believe it would be a noble failure, and this is to me. In building communities of faith, how do we, as faith leaders and community leaders, how do we go forward? We give it everything we can, we dream big and in the back it's like it could fail. But it will be a noble failure and that, to me, that's what inspires me. Even if the work in the end doesn't bear the fruit you hope it does, if it's done in faith, with the right heart and recognizing you've given it everything you can. You just have to leave that there and know that God is with you, even in the failures.
Bill:Yeah, yeah, so you, you said that, uh, the the other congregation that you worked at before um when, you when you'd gather, when you were much smaller. Uh, you had that conversation about what kind of a community do we want to be? Yes um, do you think we can have that conversation as a denomination right now?
Joanne:what kind of denomination do we want to be? What?
Bill:kind of a what kind of like? Like. There seems to me a certain almost identity crisis that we're kind of facing right now. And don't get me wrong, I love, I love the United Church of Canada. There's nowhere else that I would want to serve, but the social justice movements that used to be so easy to kind of look at and see and identify are much harder to, much harder to engage in now and much harder to wade through and much harder to find our place in now than they used to be. And there's a certain kind of church identity crisis that I think has happened, certainly over the last decade, around how we even relate to one another as a denomination. I remember a prophet we both had at seminary actually laughing quite hysterically when the United Church restructured itself in 2019 and saying you know, the congregationalists have finally been vindicated, after almost 100 years, this idea of the vision of one national Christian Protestant denomination.
Joanne:That was kind of the hallmark of our founding, the hope of our founding, but has never managed to really gain the traction that we had hoped for back in 1925. Yeah, but in 1925, institutions were trusted right, institutions were trusted right. And so being an institutionalist in 1925 and saying we're going to be the social imaginary in one of the textbooks I think it was Peter Short who said this but the social imaginary of the United Church was that they would be sort of the counterpoint to the Catholic Church, that there'd be this one Protestant denomination and that the Anglicans would join us, and too bad about that, 25% of the Presbyterians, but someday. And that the Anglicans would join us, and too bad about that, 25% of the Presbyterians, but someday. But institutions were trusted and it was what the 70s or the 80s, where institutions were entrusted I mean Eaton's failed. I mean what's more Canadian than Eaton's? The Hudson's Bay.
Bill:Hudson's Bay company failed. The Hudson's Bay has failed.
Joanne:Like institutions fail now they're not trusted. Professionals are not trusted in the same way. We are in a completely different environment. So that social imaginary that says we're going to be the big Protestant church in Canada is something we got to let go of because that's institutional thinking. However, I do think that the latest sort of you know, public relations or advertisement they did where they had the table. You know that looked like the Last Supper and they had a lot of diversity there.
Joanne:That idea everybody has a place at the table is something that is countercultural, because right now we all think our tables should be exclusive. It's countercultural. It's expansive because we live in silos, and it proclaims the faith that we embrace. And so the United Church ethos is this to me it might be 10 people sitting in a congregation somewhere, but the hope is it's not always true for sure, but the hope is that we put forward is if you come here, you have a place here. We are not exclusive and we believe that God's grace is for all people and we try to live that even interfaith-wise Like, rather than being exclusively Christian and only Christians are gonna receive grace or whatever our conversations with other faith traditions are held with integrity because we believe humanity is the beloved of God. The earth, the earth and all that is in it is beloved and, if we can lean into that as a denomination, it's a message that resonates with the world right now.
Joanne:But, unfortunately, you know, like I say, I love the churches I serve because they're, yes, churches, but I know a lot of no churches.
Joanne:You know, I remember I was actually at the 100th anniversary, sitting at a table with some people that went to a church and I said you know what, in that first church that I served, and even now the people who are outside the doors are more important than the people who are inside the doors. And she said to me why? Why should they be more important than us? Do you know? Because we fund it and you know we've been there a long time. Shouldn't we be the more important thing and having that conversation about? Well, of course, the people who are in your congregations and who support financially. They're really lovely and need to be taken care of. But if you don't have a mission orientation, that there's people outside there who could benefit from being part of a community and knowing the divine in a different and freeing way, then you know we're a community center and we don't need to be. We don't need any more community centers, you know.
Bill:So incrementalism is something that we actually wrestle with a lot in our conversations. Sarah talked about this idea that maybe we never actually had that time for incremental expectation or hope. So when we talk on the ministry team, it's constantly you believe in incremental change. I'm tracking the length of the runway left before the time has run out. Ricardo, you probably know more than anybody else sitting at this table about the tension between incrementalism and burning it all down in a hurry. So I'm going to ask you how do you navigate the space where the language of transformation is there but the systems remain largely intact?
Ricardo:It's interesting. There's three different aspects in society that I see now that affect what we do me as a union organizer and you as ministry, and anyone in the US or even Canada will tell you churches and unions are natural allies in the fights that we have. We all face declining numbers. We all are actively trying to seek new people to enlighten and to help, to help. And we also sell. We don't sell vacuum cleaners or anything. We sell possibilities and we sell possibilities and we sell hope based on a collective ideal and a collective being where individualism is sort of not really going to be a successful way to build our movements and to build our spaces. And so when we sell possibilities, we sell incremental changes and big picture stuff based on individual relationship building and conversation, based on individual relationship building and conversation.
Ricardo:And what I find is that having a one-on-one conversation with somebody these days is so much more harder when they have these things in their hands. And for those of you listening, it's a cell phone, right, it's a smartphone, right? I mean, my dad is funny. He found this like age-old computer in the basement and God knows why he kept it. When he moved houses A and he had it there, I was like, what do you have this for? He was like, oh, I want to get the photos off. I was like one day I was like, dad, you know, my phone in my hand is like four times more powerful than that computer you have in the basement and so we need to keep up.
Ricardo:And it's so hard for us to keep up with the world when it's when our own systems and our own sort of um, uh, our own movements are bogged down in either like uh, uh, change systems that are really really really really like archaic and so like when we when I when I say that I mean like um, like we have to keep up with like technology and keep up with community and building and people aren't interested in going to community centers anymore, even right or even like they rely on their phone for everything.
Ricardo:So how do we digitize that while being innately, organizations that require human contact and human interaction, right, and so, if you think about ways we can do that, like I think about, like there was somebody talking about the advent of AI now the other day and how, like you know, just a hundred years ago people could go through years of their lives with very little technological change, very little years of their lives with very little technological change very little.
Ricardo:And now it's daily that people are facing changes and technological changes in their world and the information superhighway is so, so intense and sometimes, often damaging that how does our message resonate with people in order to find that healing and that growth? So, on my side of the fence, I say well, the union can offer you a collective way to earn higher wages and better benefits and stuff like that. Oh well, how long will that take? Well, the bargaining process is bogged down with the labor relations code and we serve notice to bargain, and maybe a year down the road you'll get a collective agreement that might improve your wages and benefits. Yeah, okay, but daily they talk about inflation numbers, daily, right, so if you can't help me now, what am I going to do?
Joanne:right, it's the same thing with salvation, I guess in a lot of ways right Wow. If you can't give me heaven today.
Ricardo:Yeah, yeah, right, like it's. I was just looking at books and chapters the other day and there's this new book that's front and center in chapters called the anxious generation and obviously I haven't read it because I just saw the cover there. But just looking at the cover you can tell exactly what they're.
Ricardo:It's a little kid sitting there with headphones on and those headphones are all over the place now and just looking like this, at like, like, very, very cautiously at the world and it makes you wonder, like, would that person see a home or even um, spiritual help in a congregation? Right, so does the united church need to be more app based? I don't know. Does building a bigger boat mean we digitize ourselves and, you know, be like the Pokemon Go of peace and love where, like, if you walk so many kilometers, you'll find, you know, you'll find a scripture that'll help you.
Bill:I don't know there was a time actually, that even churches would angle to be sites for Pokemon Go. Back when it first came out. We were right, we didn't even ask for it McD to be sites for Pokemon Go.
Ricardo:Back when it first came out, we were right. We didn't even ask for it. Mcdougal was a battleground, or?
Joanne:something like that or whatever it called it. Right Still is today Like I know yeah, that's right.
Bill:Do you?
Joanne:know what I find interesting, though, about this conversation about how everyone's on their phone and incremental change and all that is that like there's one place in the world right now where change is happening so fast we can't keep up with it, and that's in the us, because someone came along and said I don't care about the rules anymore, I'm going to break them. And, um, they are rebuilding their society. They have a vision of what they want. They are rebuilding it. They don't care who gets in the way. Um and it. And it strikes me that unions and churches and incrementalists like what do they say? You bring a knife to a sword fight.
Bill:Knife to a gunfight, Gunfight. Okay, that's it Well not Canada.
Joanne:We don't have guns. No-transcript Like this is one of those.
Bill:This is we're headed for failure because we don't have people in the world who are committed to justice and everyone has a place at the table and wages that are fair and benefits that work we don't have champions that are willing to break the rules and the you know, stepping over the corpses of the people who get in the way of the vision that there's an injustice that happens in that right so that the end can't justify the means. Right In every scenario, right gunfighter, to find that equal footing or that equal kind of whether we champion or just even like momentum and drive and you know outcome that you're looking for. You're not playing with the same toolkit to make that happen.
Joanne:And it's hard to punch through all the noise for your message to even be heard. I mean, this is the thing all the dreams in the world, sarah, with the, you know the best grant application we can make and you give us like $25,000. Convincing people out there that this is the place, like even getting the message out, is very difficult, because the contrary voices to everyone has a place at the table. Peace through justice, love is the bottom is all the voices that say no, take care of yourself. No, self-interest motivates us, and those are very, very powerful messages that are hard to counteract.
Bill:Yep, and have a way bigger budget.
Joanne:Yes, and when we don't want to break the rules in any way which I'm not saying we should go out there and, you know, rip up the British North America Act or anything like that. But it is like to know how you can be successful when you can't even get your message through to people, is a very. It's disconcerting, and what's the word I'm looking for? It's depressing, sometimes thinking, you know like, oh, proclaim from the mountaintops really.
Ricardo:It's even the world we're heading towards in the US. The world we're heading towards, and even south of the border, is that if you proclaim your message and it's not the message of the person in power, then you're going to get in trouble. Yes, you know, like even people who proclaim themselves as nonpartisan or nonpolitical, he's attacking them, like the Department for Labor Statistics. Sorry, they're just giving you the numbers and now he's attacking them.
Joanne:Yeah, he's going to find someone who will give him the numbers he wants. It doesn't have to be true. This is the other thing I've been reading about the brain. The brain believes what is repeated, not what is true, and what's said simply. Yes, that's right.
Sarah:I think where we often fail, if I can say it that way, is that we try to be very nuanced. Yes, fail, if I can say it that way, is that we try to be very nuanced, right, and it's the simple thing that's easily repeatable, that three-word soundbite Jesus loves you. Well, yes, and then we're afraid that we're going to be confused with those people who say Jesus loves you, but only if X, y and Z.
Joanne:That is absolutely right.
Sarah:And I think about the fear that you were talking about earlier about trying something and it not working, and like that's fear, right, like if it doesn't go forward, and I think, man, we need to be brave, like I really think we do, and they will know us by our love, right, right, absolutely, really think we do, and they will know us by our love, right, right, absolutely. So I I just yeah, I think there's there's something about that fear that we really the the fear of getting it wrong, the fear of not doing it right, the fear of being mistaken for what we are, not we. We have to find a way to be brave enough to be bold enough to counter that.
Joanne:It also comes down to how do you measure success too, right? Yes, and that's a big issue, because if you are always comparing yourself to other traditions, you know.
Sarah:Or history.
Joanne:Or our history. That is a big problem with the United Church right now is they, you know, say, well, you know, back in the 50s, the glory days of the church. Yeah, the moderator used to have lunch with the prime minister and all the cabinet ministers at least once during a term. I you know, I didn't know that when I joined the United Church, but I've heard it oh, so many times since I have right.
Bill:Last week someone told me about it.
Joanne:Yeah, so the glory days are something that we compare ourselves with. You know the thousand kids in the Sunday school.
Bill:Gotta rent out the school gymnasium because there's none in the space in the church.
Joanne:I've heard that several times too, you know, and it is demoralizing for leaders to be constantly reminded of when the church was great, because you can't help but think, oh, how come I can't do that right.
Bill:Well, but I would say that it's not even just church leadership, like it's demoralizing for congregations who sit and go where did we go wrong?
Joanne:Yes, that's right, which is, yeah, that's exactly right. So our measurements of success have to be different than attendance on Sunday morning and children in the Sunday school, like it just has to. And if we truly are a faith community that says everyone has a place at the table, our measuring stick should be something like how have we engaged communities that are marginalized? You know, how do we spend our resources on alleviating poverty or other things? How do we spend our resources on alleviating poverty or other things? How do we partner with organizations that are also trying to bring justice, peace through justice? Those kinds of things are success, and if we go down doing those things, that is a noble failure that I can get into. But if we go down because we try to have more contemporary music, I'm all for contemporary music, everybody knows this.
Joanne:More contemporary music we water down our message so much that we're indiscernible what we're really talking about. If we end up just being wishy-washy about stuff. You know that verse. I would wish you were hot or cold, but you are neither, so I spew you from my mouth. That's what you know in the book of Revelation. I think about that all the time If I'm going to go down. I want to go down fighting. I don't want to go down, you know, with an innocuous message that doesn't change the world or a person or doesn't touch the hearts and minds of people. I'm not interested in that. You know, if it's a noble failure, it's worth pursuing different measurements of success.
Bill:Yeah, so I've been on the receiving end of one of those letters from the United Church Foundation that says you know, not that it's not a worthy project, but you were not selected. You know, in this grant cycle we wish you the best in all your—so what is the message? Where is the hope? I guess we know that we are. You know, the North American church is in decline, not just the United Church of Canada. The North American church is in decline and we are asking people to certainly at least live in the shadow of this fear that we have been talking about, this fear of failure, this fear of or this competition with the way things have been. The incrementalist has said you know, we need to go down fighting.
Joanne:One step at a time. One step at a time.
Bill:Fighting one step at a time.
Joanne:We don't want a revolution on our hands, a bloody revolution.
Ricardo:I disagree.
Joanne:I'm being persuaded to that. The further we go down the road of everyone else is breaking everything. Why don't we too? Yep, yep.
Bill:But certainly like what is the message of hope for people, I guess, when we know that we're asking people to do more with less, not saying that? I mean I will admit that I have flowered up language on the United Church Foundation application in my lifetime to really try to— Do you lie on your resume too?
Bill:No, I don't lie on my resume because I will be asked to speak all four languages, right. But yeah, I mean the challenge—I think the challenge—everything you have talked about, joanna again, about like the noble failures of you know, partnering, and all these still speak to me of like these are the offshoots of knowing who you're trying to be as a community right, commitment from your community of faith to actually live into that reality. I'm not sure there's anything noble about that failure, right.
Joanne:See that's—okay. So when I say I'm an incrementalist, that's because if you go into a community of faith, they love each other, they have worked together, they built that church, and then you say these are how we're measuring success now and we're going to do all this stuff. The disruption in the lives of people. Because remember I think it was last week we said, like people last month, people go to church as a spiritual practice, right? So? So I don't believe in an incremental vision. I think you have the end result in your head, like this is where we want to be. I believe in a pastoral process to get there, but I don't think that faith leaders do their congregations any good if they don't push them a little bit at a time right. A time right, like if I came to the congregations that I serve and I thought, oh, what's your theological statements here? Oh, maybe, well, inevitably more conservative than I am, but if I decided to preach a watered-down gospel because it was easier for me and my congregation, that is not going down fighting. My hope is that incrementally, and hopefully by thinking deeply and having deeper conversations about faith and God, that we would be moving together towards a place where we're all willing to say yes, this is how we're going to judge success. It's your way of success, joanne. And we judge success by the number of my friends who come to coffee after the service. Right, nothing wrong with that at all. But if we're in the business of transforming the world and hearts and minds, coffee after church is not a measurement of success, no matter how many people stay. But I'm not interested in going into a place that people call their spiritual home, where they're fed and where they get their nourishment for the next week in a spiritual practice and setting a bomb off. I don't think that's helpful either. That's why, as derisively as you say it to me all the time, bill, I am an incrementalist.
Bill:So, ricardo, I'm going to come back to you then, because you've agreed that the revolution is the way to go Burn it down
Bill:burn it down um, how do you, how do you, as a union leader, um lead people through the very real reality that, in some cases, some of these things that they are hoping for, we've? We've listened to a lot of commentary on safeway here, um over the past several months and, and some of the most um surprising things that are still on the list of do not haves for workers in not just Safeway.
Bill:I don't want to just permanently, I don't just want to say one In Alberta, compared to the rest of the country too, yeah, and so I mean there's a tangible reality that some of these things simply will not happen in their lifetime in the organization, right? And how do you lead through that? How do you lead people through the reality that this ask that we know should be a very reasonable, realistic, attainable ask will not happen in their lifetime in the organization?
Ricardo:I think when we sell the possibility of what can be achieved in collective bargaining, collectivism is the main word that we focus on, right, and what we then have to do is to manage people's expectations in the sense that, okay, look, we didn't get everything that we asked for, but we've opened the door now and the company's opened that door and what we have to do is we make sure we never take our foot out of that door and maybe next time we bargain we have our whole leg through that door, right, but what has to happen in, in, in contract negotiations for unions is not to put all of our effort around just bargaining, it's. It's the relationships you build throughout the life of that collective agreement and the support you build. So to give you an example of something that's been very novel in Alberta is the notion of a walking steward. So in our meatpacking plants we have full-time paid stewards, and if no one knows what a steward is, it's basically a worker in the plant who's also a union activist and supports and assists their co-workers in anything contract-related, including disciplines and stuff like that. But now they have someone who's full-time. They just walk around the plant and they assist people with their questions. They represent people in disciplines, they file grievances. It just takes a lot of it's a lot of hands-on work right there and they've never had such a program at a grocery store.
Ricardo:So our local and leadership decided we need such a thing at grocery stores because in grocery stores I mean I'm sure everyone in this room can remember a time where working at Safeway was a really good job. Working in a grocery store was considered a very good, middle-class job and over the years that dream has been whittled down to something that we used to consider entry level, like fast food. What a lot of people don't understand is that the turnover in grocery stores, while it still exists at quite a high number. The people that work in grocery stores and in fast food are single mothers, new Canadians, people working additional jobs in order to make ends meet. It's not just the teenagers who just want summer money, right, and so walking stewards were novel for us to be able to have company paid full-time people just roaming the city, going from store to store, educating people, and the company refused to do it for years and just this last contract at Safeway.
Ricardo:They said, okay, we'll try it for one contract and we'll see. And it's been a massive success for us educating the members, and it's been a massive success for us educating the members and we do big events in the stores and people find out about their benefits and they find out about their rights for scheduling. And the contract at Safeway is expiring at the end of this month and they've already given us notice that they're eliminating the program Right, and so this is what we have to fight for. So now we have to make sure that everybody in between these contracts are are ready to fight and are engaged and and educated the same way. Um, in churches you can't just build your support around Christmas and Easter Right.
Ricardo:The the the relationships are built um through uh through a time, through that contact and it's troubling that the rise of individualism is sort of tandem with the rise of like income inequality inequality of humanity in terms of equity seeking groups and people are now pitted against one another instead of being pitted against the people that are making them, keeping them in those places.
Ricardo:So, while I could say that, okay, collectivism, if you're in a unionized workplace, collectivism is important. We need to support each other, we need to vote properly, we need to vote to strike, we need to all be on strike, blah, blah, blah. If you don't have a union, the people representing you and creating rules around your life of work is the government in power, okay, and so if your work is not working for you, then the collectivism you need to find out about and educate yourself on is who you vote for Right. And if governments are also, in the life of the church, supporting religious factions that are actively hurting other people and religious sects that are hurt, you have to understand, then who do you vote for right? And this is where we're at in Alberta right now, too, with the big separatist movement that's coming out and all that sort of stuff. Is this the way you want to live? Then you have to educate yourself and build those relationships, and unfortunately, it falls upon us that, like, really don't have a lot of time, right, excuse me.
Joanne:I want to go back to the question about the people who don't get funded, Like what are the kinds of things that you consider? Like, what makes an application successful? We have webinars about this.
Bill:I've watched the webinars about this?
Sarah:No, so it really does vary round to round and congregation to congregation. And you were asking about where is the hope in that? And for me, I have the great pleasure of being able to go out and talk to a lot of different congregations, and even those ones that are struggling are doing immense good work. It might be their lunch program, it might be they've got some sort of after-school care that they're still able to run Like they are a service to their community, and I think that's really positive. And when you talk to them about that, they're like oh, that's just something we do, Like no, you have to recognize that you're offering something amazing to your community congregations risking doing things differently, coming together in different ways and being willing to really think about that.
Sarah:To think about, like you were saying, it's not just Sunday mornings. That can't be the measure of our success, but it's how are we creating that United Church presence from coast to coast to maybe even coast, and how are we showing up? And I think we have done and are doing a pretty good job at that. But we need to recognize that. We need to recognize that and I think there was something you said earlier. There was something you said earlier, Bill, that just made me think. Those disciples, 2,025 years ago, they must have thought that was a big failure.
Sarah:The kingdom did not come in the way they thought it would.
Ricardo:And here, we are, 2,000 years later, still carrying that message and still loving and serving our neighbors. It's interesting how I came from the Catholic Church before I joined the United Church and so it was always like no Sunday, right. I mean, my parents do other groups outside of it, but it was always focused around the church and coming to the United Church. The church is important, but it centers around the community that's involved around it, right? So when we did things like Souls in Sync or Messy Church things on like Tuesday night, I was like what Isn't that the minister's day off? Do they only just work on Sundays, right? The minister's day off? Do they only just work on Sundays, right?
Bill:But there was an entire like when I was in youth ministry. There was an entire sort of acknowledgement and movement and just recognition that you had to find ways to not compete right. So, and the things you at least like in youth ministry, the things you had to compete with or had to not compete with, were, like, community sports programs right.
Bill:Anything where you had to choose between like I pay hundreds of dollars for my kid to be on this hockey team or come to this free church event, and like there was never, you would lose that competition every single time because there was no skin in the game financially for that kind of stuff to happen. So you started to learn really quickly. Tuesday night or Sunday evening was always if you could get people away from um, like Sunday evening television programming, that was the only fight you had to fight. And by then there was no wonderful world of Disney, there was no hockey night in Canada, there was no beach comers right Like um, that had all already died.
Bill:And like family Sunday evenings weren't really a thing in the same way that they were when I was a younger kid. So like if you could find a way to harness the energy of Sunday evening, there was never a contender for that time. And like you could do whatever you wanted. So like the Catholic church missed out clearly, Um, if, if it was always Sunday morning because Sunday morning was one of the one of the hardest times to get people to show up for anything that was going to be anything more than like a quick in and out 30 minute Sunday youth group kind of a thing, Because there was the sport thing to get to, or, you know, the weekend job, or whatever the case may be. There were always competitors for that time. How do you choose?
Ricardo:Like how do you like what's your focus right now in terms of the foundation? Like, I think to myself like there's a lot of novel things that are happening right now, and you know this.
Bill:Well, and, to be clear, the United Church Foundation. The reason why Sarah is like one of my number one people to be on this podcast is because the United Church Foundation does it better than most as far as saying, like these are our clear priorities right and I'm going to screw some of them up, but I'll get some of them right, like indigenous programming and leadership. What else is there Like? There's a fund for innovative seniors ministries. There's leadership development. I think there's an educational expansion or growth or whatever component. What else am I missing? You're doing great.
Bill:I think there's two more still. Right that I'm missing One more, two more.
Sarah:Yeah, well, we ask people to consider how they're caring for climate and what can they be doing Climate.
Bill:that's the one I was yeah, and anti-racism.
Ricardo:I'm not saying you personally signed off on this podcast. But like when we first started this podcast, I was like Bill, we got a lot of chairs here but, like two podcasts ago, people were standing in a room like that.
Bill:Standing in a room like that Amazing, right, yeah. And we have hundreds of listeners now, right?
Ricardo:I'm not sure that our friend who listens to us from Japan holler right.
Bill:You are fixated on this guy. I love that we have one Japanese listener and they're my best friend, right.
Ricardo:I'm not sure that's going to get more butts in the seats, right? Well, you know, if I want to go back to the Sunday morning metric, I'm not sure it's going to increase revenue. I don't know what it does. It does amazing for outreach, for people we can't see or talk to. But like that's my real question. Like Bill must have just been an amazing grant writer first of all.
Bill:So we didn't get a grant for the podcast, oh sorry. We got a grant for the Soul Seller, which is, which was our innovative ministries.
Ricardo:Let me rephrase my question Would this podcast?
Bill:Oh, my goodness, Do not answer that question, sarah.
Joanne:Let's just start peppering Sarah with all the programs we want.
Ricardo:I'm not asking for a yes or no question based on this podcast, but now that you know what we do, would something like this be something that the foundation would consider, like these innovative sort of different things that are being done? Or is the basis like the pillars that Bill talked about, or congregation growth? That's really. What I'm asking is, like, what uniqueness do you look for in these things? Right?
Sarah:So like uniqueness can depend right. So if a church, Messy Church, is a well-known program.
Bill:Yeah.
Sarah:And sometimes some church in the far reaches of nowhere that's got one kid is like we really want to do Messy Church and we're like, well, maybe that's innovative for you where you are and so it's not new, but it's new to you and you're, and you're all in like there's a demonstration that the community of faith is going to be all in on this. Then that's something that could be considered unique.
Sarah:I want to say time has warped ever since the pandemic, but I want to say seven, eight, maybe even longer years ago we did fund a podcast out of BC and that was like unique and it was drawing in. So I think what the committee and that reviews all the applications and the board are really interested in is how are congregations collaborating, how are they pushing themselves, how are they stretching, how are they going beyond what they normally do? And can we be a good partner for that?
Bill:So when you talked about what I love about the United Church Foundation, when you talked about the rise of individualism, right, you said like it's unfortunate that the rise of individualism and sort of the rise of, you know, like self interest and all those kinds of things that are happening, like, my response in my head that I didn't say out loud because I didn't want to interrupt you was are you surprised by this? Right, because individualism and the idea that the individual is the pinnacle of society, right, and the pinnacle of human achievement, honestly, is the individual. You can see the mirror in some congregational responses. Right, that you start to get into this mindset of what we're all legitimately facing. Right, if something does not change in the trajectory, we can conceive on paper, tangibly, a time when we can no longer be a community of faith. Right, either through decline in numbers or decline in finances or decline in just even ability to engage in our wider community, we can almost become so irrelevant that we just disappear.
Bill:Right, and so in the midst of all of that, some congregations will respond with stop all the external stuff. We got to keep the lights on. We got to keep the people here you know, cared for, and they're like to be clear. I don't want to sound too pejorative about that, because I actually, I think, believe even more so than you would that there is actually profound dignity in being clear and saying we are going to take care of the people who are here until we can't anymore, and then that will be the end of our church it's called death with dignity, and there's nothing wrong with it there is nothing wrong with that at all.
Bill:Right, but that is again coming back to what kind of a community do we want to be right, I was listening to Morgan Bell's yeah, and not that I'm going to try to speak for him or recreate that, but if you ever want to hear a really compelling orator addressing the United Church Foundation at their, was it your AGM?
Sarah:Yeah, in.
Bill:June, and you can find most of it, I think, on social media now. But the United Church Foundation not only puts their skin in the game on these things, they put other people's skin in the game on these things as well, right? So the legacy gifts, the bequests, the endowments, the partnerships, like all of these different sources where all this stuff comes from? And the foundation says what can we invest in that will not just maintain or sustain something that's already there, but will actually? Was it cast hope? Was that the phrase you used at the beginning? Was it cast hope? Was that the phrase you used at the beginning?
Bill:And more often than not, even I would say that will be in some way directly tied to collaboration. Right, the individual does not work in the systemic kind of understanding of things. An individual will never be out for anything other than the individual's best interests, right? So even in our shared ministry here, we spend a lot of time talking about the idea of like, will people summon their better angels for the collective good, or is it going to be everybody trying to sustain themselves at the expense of whatever it needs to be to keep themselves going? Right, Because that trajectory, we all know where that leads.
Bill:We all know what that leads to and, to be clear, I'm definitely not going to poo-poo resurrection, but we spend a lot of time talking about, oh, out of the death of this, something new will like. We have phoenixes in our back pocket everywhere we go, and I hate to break it to you, but more often than not, nothing rises from the ashes of that right. More often than not, it's closure, it's grief, it's like, it's sadness. And that's difficult, right, you can. Do everything right and still fail.
Bill:That's difficult, right, you can do everything right and still fail, and more often than not, that in my experience now is the case right, that you can do everything right and it will fail, and it may be a noble failure. Noble failures eventually start to feel good, but they suck in the moment just as much as anything else. Right, it is still painful, it is still grief-inducing, it is still like it is really difficult and really disheartening and really discouraging and you spend a lot of time asking why bother, like, what was it for? Right? Yes, there's something lovely about being remembered, right, when you're gone, but it doesn't help with the gone-ness of it all in the moment, right. And so, at the crux of all of that, the United Church Foundation tells people no, but also tells people yes, right, and does it with, from my limited experience, a really great blend of like sometimes we say yes to the thing that dies in utter futility at the end of it all and you go.
Bill:Yeah, okay, you know we didn't see that coming. Um, but other times where it's like like, look at this story of this thing that started with a $10,000 grant and grew to be like a community, changing, transformative, amazing endeavor, right, and it's a crew of people sit cloistered nameless behind closed doors and review all these applications. And you even said like, as we gathered here tonight before the mics were turned on, we were kind of joking here about like yeah, every church is looking for money, right?
Bill:now right, and it really comes down to I'm not going to say cost-benefit analysis, but risk-reward assessment. That may be oversimplifying it. So that's the difficulty. I think right Is not everything has to be a new idea. There are some good ideas that are like collective bargaining you don't need to reinvent the wheel on collective bargaining, right. It was a good idea. The people who first thought of it geniuses right. If it isn't broke, you don't need to reinvent the wheel on collective bargaining, right. It was a good idea. The people who first thought of it, geniuses right. If it isn't broke, you don't need to fix it. Right.
Bill:It's had to shift and change, I'm assuming, over time We'll talk about that in September but certainly the idea that we are better together. We're still living the reality of that. I think we don't have to collect a bargain as the United Church yet. We're still living the reality of that. I think we don't have to collect a bargain as the United Church yet, but certainly we're even realizing, like congregationally and like as far as communities of faith and even regions and, you know, like groups in the United Church and beyond, are recognizing there's solidarity and strength and sustainability in expanding our relationships with each other rather than constricting them.
Joanne:I think there's a lot to be said for people too, Like if I bring this down to just individuals, like it's really hard as an individual to take a risk you know, especially in our world, where so much is precarious already. And we do have this. You know this message that you, as an individual, need to succeed on your own, which I think is just propaganda from the people that have everything and want you to vote against your self-interest.
Bill:So what a great segue, because I got it written right here. We're going to take an intermission right now.
Bill:And when we come back, we are going to turn from the institutional and the corporate and we're going to start looking more at the personal and the individual, because sometimes it's not systems that are failing, it's not structures and governing bodies, it's like life, it's the things of life, it's the diagnosis or the relationship or the dream or the job or any of those kinds of things. So when the thing that we hope for doesn't happen, as individuals.
Joanne:What?
Bill:then Right, so we are going to take an intermission and then we will be back shortly. We will see you shortly. Stay with us.
Sarah:Thank you.
Bill:And we are back with our second half of Prepared to Drown and we're going to jump right back into it.
Bill:But I want to shift from the corporate and the institutional and the systemic and look a bit more at sort of the individual and life and living kind of components of what we're talking about here, Because we can talk about the grit and the determination and the grief of losing and failing and noble failures in and of themselves, and there's a lot of those kinds of contradictions that certainly exist in our structures, but they also exist in our lives. In our lives, and sometimes the struggles are not about policies or programs but about something that you care for or something in your life that is important to you falling apart or failing or or changing for for things that are beyond your control. Your job ends and it has nothing to do with your performance. The healing that you're hoping for doesn't come, the relationship breaks down and you're left wondering was any of it worth it? Was I foolish to hope for something different? And what do I do now that resurrection hasn't shown up?
Bill:and that the phoenix has not risen from the ashes. So, ricardo, I'm actually going to start with you on this one. Dun, dun dun.
Bill:We got to figure out a way that people don't look at me with like fear every time I say hey, I'm turning to you, I don't know, because you've spoken before on this podcast about the emotional toll of the advocacy work and the cost of being vulnerable in public life, and I'm wondering if you could share a time, share a time when the strategy that you deployed in your advocacy work or in your personal life, if you so wish was sound and the vision was clear, but still, even then, it fell apart. And what did that failure do to your sense of your conviction or your sense of calling yeah?
Ricardo:I'll leave the fact that COVID happened aside, because that killed a lot of my soul um. He said soul when I, when I, when I got involved in the labor movement, uh and I said this the last podcast it was a lot more ideological than realistic from what I knew. Like this, big collection of workers is marching with pitchforks and torches, and you know that beautiful vision of revolution that I still have Winnipeg general strike, Exactly exactly.
Ricardo:What I noticed is that every community group and social justice organization, including churches and unions, operated in silos, like quite often we'd be working on the same project or the same vision in just different areas of the city, and so community engagement was really something that I wanted to do, like there had to be. I had to figure out a way to find this nexus between people where they work and going to their union and their community groups, because people were going to the community groups more than the union that represented them and the dues they were paying. But it's not their fault, it's ours. And so I said to the leadership at the local we have to be out there in the community and we have to build these connections. And so my big project for years before covid hit was to be have a booth at every single like cultural event that took. So we had a pride parade booth and float. I put booths in like carry fest and latin fest, and, and we had volunteers at global fest and in the hopes that something would latch on and maybe we get organizing leads for new workplaces or the leaders of these groups would come to us and say, hey, let's build a partnership outside of this right. So that was my hope and my dream, and what it ended up being was that they just thanks for coming right and it was our job. You know what the the failure was? That it was just more and more money like for us just putting toward booths and sponsorships and stuff that never really came to a tangible effect. And it wasn't because that wasn't a good avenue, it was because our approach was still very we're paying you like your fee. And what I realized was that you know, we could put any amount of money towards fees and having booths, but our money is better spent just building community. So, like, let's have one-on-one conversations with the leaderships in these organizations and say, okay. So I'll give you an example.
Ricardo:We started a small partnership with Action Dignity and June was here talking in one of our podcasts and Action Dignity said, well, we had a lot of people from one of your workplaces come to ask for help, especially during COVID, because they didn't know that the union could help them right during COVID. Because they didn't know that the union could help them right. And so I said, okay. Well, you know, it's nice that there's this big circle of you go to Action Dignity and then you say oh, you have a union called the union where we can just be with you side by side and do that, right?
Ricardo:Or there was a situation years ago at JBS in Brooks where there was a. It was owned by not JBS, it was owned by XL Foods at the time and there was an E coli outbreak in the plant and the plant shut down for two weeks while they deep scrubbed it and people were going to the church like crazy for food bank donations, right, because they work without pay. Lo and behold, like why didn't they come to our office? But that next, you know? So community engagement was my big thing at the local and I wanted to be involved in the community, which is why organizations like the Calgary Alliance for the Common Good make sense, where not-for-profits, churches and unions get together to build approaches on collaborative issues. But that approach really killed it and it killed my whole summer, because I was the only one.
Ricardo:I was also like the trading card of the local, being the brown, young, gay guy. Let's put him at the front there, right? And it just never got any traction. And so we actually had to take a step back, cancel all of our sponsorships, and we canceled our sponsorships. That was the budget we had now for sponsorship how do we use that money better? And we regrouped an entire thing where we built it in from the ground up, where we got more active in the stores and in the workplaces we represent and see which of our members were active in their community but not active in their union and help draw that nexus there so we could have it in on the community and build partnerships that way. Um, and it was a successful idea. And then I think it was six months later that the first COVID cases started again and so everything just stopped.
Ricardo:And now we're in the process of rebuilding that, that strategy to figure out like, how do we reintegrate? And in the US they are way better at this community organizing in terms of unions than we are in Canada and as much as I hate the term right to work and as much as I hate what it brings about, it's out of necessity that they build partnerships. You know where? In Canada we have almost a guaranteed income for due structure as a union, in that sense Like the more members we have, the more money we get. But in the US, the more members you have, not necessarily the more money you get, because they have to still elect to pay dues. And so when I say churches and unions are natural allies, community groups are natural allies. They all work together, they all do the soup kitchens together, they all work in the community together, and that's what we need to do as a whole, especially with the way the world is acting right now.
Sarah:The most vulnerable are the ones that are going to suffer Right.
Ricardo:So that was my hope. That hit the mark with the story. Yeah.
Bill:So, sarah, I'm going to turn to you not so much as a foundation executive now so much, but you do work in a space that's constantly balancing impact and limitation, and I'm wondering if you've ever poured your time or your heart, or your soul into something that didn't produce the result that you needed.
Sarah:I can think of a couple of things. Actually, this is a work related came to mind.
Sarah:Fair enough. So the United Church has a reputation of being more open than some other denominations the 2SLGBTQIA plus community and we thought, well, we should work at sharing that information, reminding folks that this is, you know, one of the things that they know about the United Church, because I'm sure you all have run into it. You say, oh, you know, I'm part of the United Church. And they're like oh yeah, and you guys did that great stuff, and so we tried this ad campaign. So flat, so absolutely flat, like I think our QR codes got, like one hit.
Sarah:And we had a donation from somebody who was already a donor, who happened to see it, so like not a bad idea, just something we, it was the timing or it was the way we presented it or something just didn't work. But it's also expensive when you do that right, when you're when you're getting ad placements in um like Zoomer magazine. They were very good to us but but still like that's, that's pricey and so um. So I think about that and I think about how, um, one of my really big hopes, not just for the foundation but the church, is to think. Really big hopes, not just for the foundation but the church, is to think and I know people do this but to really think about how we use all of our resources to align them with our values.
Sarah:And so the foundation has made a foray into impact investing, where you expect a societal good or environmental good alongside your financial return. So you've got your financial return and then some sort of social or environmental return that you can measure as well. And that's a steep learning curve on how you go about that and how you measure that and how you talk about that. And I think we still struggle because you know we can say we've got these great investments. We have an investment that helps immigrants and newcomers get their canadian accreditation in their chosen field. Amazing work, um, is it having all of the impact that we want? Well, we're not quite sure. We know how to tell, like we. We know what it means for the families and communities that are now have these folks to, that can provide services and support. But, like, what does that mean overall for the church, for example?
Ricardo:And that would be a prime example of a collaborative effort that could happen between unions and churches?
Ricardo:Yeah, right, because most of the people okay, I'll rephrase that, most of our members that work as new immigrants from the plants would seek a program like that. You know, like our meat plants in Brooks alone, 300 plus people are temporary foreign workers actively seeking PRs. We can't offer that program alone, right? And if someone is creating that program, why beg to the foundation all the time for the money to support the program, when we can collaborate with the union that represents the workers that are looking for the service, right? So that that's, that's yeah, we'll talk.
Bill:I would love that, so one of the things that happens certainly in church circles, but also also I've experienced it on sort of the individual level as well, joanne, you've you've probably experienced it too in your ministry is how we theologize these things when they happen, right?
Bill:So whether it's the committee or whatever sitting around the table after the failed attempt, right, you'll hear things like you know, oh, this is just preparing us for something better, right? Or again, even the idea of, like there's a you've worked your butt off for this job and you finally get it, and then you're laid off three months in because the company goes under and you've sunk everything you have into being ready for it and suddenly you are left destitute in the food bank line and people will say, oh, you know, this was just God's plan for you and there's something better coming. You know, this was just God's plan for you and there's something better coming. Or like these really kind of messy, done with the best of intentions, I'm sure, but really not helpful, messaging from the standpoint of learning anything or addressing the reality of the failure, right, so when things inevitably will go wrong, not everything will always be a monumental success. Does the foundation have fun little, not helpful theological explorations that it goes through?
Sarah:I got to believe they do.
Bill:I got to believe they're like everywhere else in the church, like there's got to be some messaging that's less helpful than Like as we talk amongst ourselves about what.
Sarah:So I think Part of what we do is we work really hard to see ourselves and to actually be a learning organization. And so while in some of the examples that you gave, like nobody did anything wrong, circumstances being what they were, something didn't go right and so is there a way that we can learn from that to either avoid or do better or what have you. And so probably somewhere in there there's a little bit of that not so helpful stuff. But anybody who knows me well knows I am a bright sider and so, well, this part of it didn't work, but this part actually was kind of cool and there was something good there. And how can we use that? Who else needs to know about that so that somebody else can be more successful than we were? So it doesn't work for everything. Some things are just terrible.
Joanne:But your loss is terrible.
Sarah:Yeah, and everybody was trying their best and everybody had the best intentions, but it just didn't work. And so there's still that sort of deconstruction. I was reading Chris Hadfield's book and that's fascinating, talking about how astronauts and space agencies break everything down. You can't go over something enough, whether it went right or whether it went wrong, and I found that so intriguing because everything is something to examine and to look at and to learn from if at all possible, and so I really. As an organization we try to keep that mindset and it does mean you have to sort of be brave every now and then, and the grants committee sometimes talks about that amongst themselves and the board too, about like, can we do this, Should we do this? Can we do this, Are we going to do this? And you know it takes a bit of guts sometimes. Yeah.
Bill:I'm worried that Joanne wrote down bright cider no.
Joanne:It's interesting.
Ricardo:You should. You know that we recognize Joanne for her incremental success model, but that's also like, I think, that we as humans especially those of us in community organizing and social justice want that big success that we targeted for at the end of it all and we very often neglect or ignore the incremental success that we had. And I think our biggest problem, whatever side of the table we're on, is that we don't celebrate those incremental successes nearly enough to build upon that and sometimes, if it's only incremental, we give up instead of changing that approach. It's funny you talked about Chris Hatfield's book. I recently went to Houston, to that space center, whatever it was, and they said NASA's prime directive has always been the safe return of our astronauts home. That's always been the goal, and they say every single project that they embark on, the number one goal is the safe return of our astronauts to Earth, and then they work backwards from there based on the goal that they have Right. So and that's what we should, we need to be doing, we need to celebrate our wins more and we need to celebrate so like.
Ricardo:An example would be general counsel and the historic now apology to the 2SLGBTQ community, and the impact of that would be very profound for somebody who understands why the apology was necessary. Who understands why the apology was necessary? Because there's a facet of United Church congregation that knows the history of the United Church, especially over the situation in the 80s right and all the fallout of congregation from there, and there's also a facet of society that understands fully how some churches treat the 2SLGBTQ community and continues to do so. And there's a facet that just says who gives a crap? We're growing. Dei, as much as it's under attack by leadership south of the border, is growing. Acceptance of our community is growing and if churches want to just continue their hatred, let them all just die right.
Ricardo:So I think that this is a grand opportunity for the United Church, with this apology, to keep celebrating that openly and advertising that openly. And while they don't have to have lunch with the prime minister and the ministers once a term, I think celebrating side have lunch with the prime minister and the ministers once a term, I think celebrating side by side with governments and politicians and businesses and organizations that openly do that is a great way to celebrate that incremental success. And when the foundation does stuff that, yeah, the grant was great, we gave the money for that and they only achieved 50% of what it was. Let's celebrate that right. Celebrate that loudly, because it still did a lot of good right.
Sarah:Absolutely.
Bill:That is still not how I'm wired Ricardo.
Joanne:It's not nothing.
Ricardo:It's not nothing, it's not. Yeah, you're right. You're the guy that sees how much runway was left before the plane landed, right?
Bill:And the goal right, not the steps along the way it's. I mean, we were talking during the intermission about drivenness, right, and yeah, I mean it's, maybe that's my cross to carry, I don't know. But, joanne, you certainly have, you know, sat beside a lot of people going through a lot of different things in their lives and you've experienced a lot of the harmful messaging done with the best of intentions as well, right In the midst of losses and failures, breakdowns of relationships, all that kind of stuff, right?
Bill:So, like, what is your advice? People always want to help. So what is your advice? People always want to help. People always want to. I honestly believe people at their core are decent, kind, caring, compassionate people. By and large, there are always exceptions to every rule, but they want to help. They don't consider the impact of telling someone who's lost their child God needed another angel, right, and what that actually says about God in that moment to somebody who is grieving that kind of a loss right.
Bill:So how do you suggest people consider messaging that reminds people that God is present, even when the outcome doesn't change?
Joanne:Yeah, I mean, I have a great story about that. Before I was ever a minister, I was like a temp at a law firm in Toronto actually at the time, and I was taking over a mat leave for a woman who she hadn't had good prenatal care I don't know why, but she'd never had an ultrasound and she went and delivered a child and the organs were on the wrong side, I think, and the baby died and I went to the funeral. She was Catholic, went to the funeral. The priest actually said at the funeral God needed another angel to that mother, right. And then later I just felt it was so important to tell her that that was just wrong and her response was when he said that to me, I said why is it my baby? Why did God need my baby? He could take another baby, do you know? And that stuck with me and has. And that stuck with me and has been with me since I was in my 20s at the time when that happened.
Joanne:Just the idea, because people don't know, they have this idea of God as the puppet master in some ways right, and when one door closes, a window opens or something like that, there's all these platitudes that we've learned historically. I remember someone was dying and you know I used to get these emails about what God is teaching them through the slow, you know, death of their spouse and just being infuriated by this. Why can't God just grieve with us? Why do we have to learn from all these things and coming to the conclusion? There is a difference between God teaching us something through our, or needing to teach us through our struggles, and God who is with us and us learning in the process. Those are two really different things. So when failure happens, first of all we learn more through failure than through success. That's just the way it is Like when, sarah, when you say we go through, well, this worked, but this didn't, so how can we build on that?
Joanne:So that's, I think always reminding people about those small successes or that there is still joy is really powerful. You know, like joy can be found in the midst of failure, and it might not be redemptive joy, it might just be a beautiful flower. Do you know what I mean? But for that moment, things there is hope in this, like it's not all despair, and then God's the first to cry, god is the first to shed a tear when that baby died. Not I needed another angel. It's like God was. If we could reorient ourselves towards God is in this moment and there is love even in this, and it is a tragedy that does not need to be explained. Right? Human existence has tragic sorrow built into it, and for us to try and bring ourselves out of it by saying somehow God has a plan in this. No, no, there is nothing redemptive about a young person who will take their life because of their despair. There's nothing redemptive in that. I'm sorry.
Ricardo:Nothing to be explained either.
Joanne:Nothing to be explained either. Sometimes you just have to sit in the chaos and the messiness of life, but know that God is sitting there with you as well. That's sort of the only message that I have in tragic times is God is here. God is here, right, you know.
Ricardo:And God is trying, yeah Well, god is trying, right, you know. And God is trying, yeah Well.
Joanne:God is trying. That's an interesting way of putting it.
Ricardo:I look at it like I agree with what you're saying fully, completely right, god is here. But how do you explain to somebody like what's God doing with Gaza? Right, you know what. I'm saying. I think that there are pockets in the world right now that are revolting and screaming about what's happening there, and that's God Right when I say God is trying oh yes, god is working through humanity.
Joanne:Yes, I'm not a God who changes history.
Ricardo:Yeah, I'm not the God that's going to smite all the soldiers and move them back across the border.
Joanne:Well, and you know, to be fair, lots of people left faith because of things like Gaza, like evil in the world, and you're like, if God was really a God of love, would this be happening?
Joanne:right, there's a lot of theological ideas that say that God is limited you know, like God is not can do anything right, and I sort of tend towards that open and relational. There's an open and relational theology that God is limited by rules of nature and things like that, but God works through us. You know Like we can pray for peace in Gaza, but unless we work for peace in Gaza, that prayer is useless. You know what I mean me? The certainly like maybe evil leadership that is deciding to starve children to win a war. Right, I wish, I wish.
Joanne:But the thing about God is God works in relationship with us and God calls us to be people who work towards a world that is renewed. That's our call. And if we want to abdicate our call and our responsibility in this and just say, oh, god needed another angel instead of comforting that mother and being with her and finding joy even in the midst of that sorrow, that's abdicating our responsibility. And that's what those things do. They abdicate the responsibility of each of us to carry each other. Don't bring God into it to make it easier for you to deal with it, because I think that's what it is. I don't know what to say. I'm just going to say you know, god works everything out in the end, because not true, actually, sometimes there is a failure and it's not even noble.
Bill:You know, absolutely, and there are alternative paradigms. So I would say I used to rail against the church, even the United Church. I'd go to church meetings, I'd go to conferences, whatever, and everything would always be tethered to resurrection narratives, right, like there will be something new that will happen, like the pruning for abundance and all this kind of stuff, these messages. And I would say there are other paradigms in our scriptures besides constant new life. Right, and I get that we are a resurrection people by nature. But there are times like Paul never loses the thorn right and it afflicts him for the entirety of his days. The fig tree never grows, despite all of the work that actually happens to try to make it, and so there's just kind of this reality like we need to broaden our ability to understand our relationship with God and our relationship with the world around us that doesn't constantly rely on like a redemptive. You know, resurrection arc to the end of the story.
Joanne:Well, and I remember when I was taking English literature in college and university and doing the Great Gatsby right, and at the end there's something about beating against the waves. There's some boat, you know, and the idea was that there is meaning in fighting the waves. You know, there's meaning in the work and I think that's kind of the perspective we have to take in the course of failing and learning. When there's despair, is that there is meaning to be found not just in the success at the end and the bright, shiny I won the Oscar kind of thing but in the work that you put in to get there. You know, like you were saying it's funny. You said like you lost your job and it wasn't because you weren't good enough. What about when you lose your job and it is because you're not good enough? Do you know what I mean?
Bill:That is more devastating in a lot of ways right.
Joanne:You're just like I was not good enough, and that really sucks.
Bill:I remember my first job at Toys R Us. You bastards that, like I, was a seasonal hire through the Christmas season and they said you know some of you, you know depending on your performance or whatever we may decide to keep you on, you know full time afterwards and when the season was done.
Bill:I was the only one out of everybody. Everyone else got a job except for me, and it was only me who had to do the walk of shame on the day that the seasonal hires finished. I still carry that with me to this day. I was not good enough for Toys R Us.
Joanne:I mean, yeah, you just weren't a good fit, apparently.
Bill:No, but that's the thing I had a plan for me. Yeah, that's right.
Joanne:Yeah, but that's the thing is that there are times in our lives where we try our hardest. It's just not good enough, right?
Bill:Yeah.
Joanne:There's something redemptive in that trying, you know. There's something redemptive in learning and growing and figuring out where we do fit. Learning and growing and figuring out where we do fit Because sometimes, like being fired from a job you hate is a great gift in the end, even though it's scary at the time, because you're given an opportunity to think again what about that job was okay, and what did I really hate? And what will I not sell my soul for ever again? I always think not necessarily that it's resurrection in all the time, like we can't always look for oh yes, the sun shining. I think that's the problem. We move too much to the rosy picture, and there's nothing wrong with being a bright-sided person. But figuring out how the living of life and the failures that we have and the successes we have, the love that we find, the questions that we ask, all those things go together to provide meaning for our existence and we create a narrative of our life based on all those things right.
Joanne:And some people create narratives where all they see is the failure right. So they come to the end of their life. My kids don't talk to me anymore. I never made enough money. I'm dying in debt, you know, like every bad thing that ever happened to them compounds and they create this narrative I'm a failure. But hidden amongst all those things, I'm sure, are moments of love. I found joy here. I did this job well.
Joanne:So what are you going to focus your attention on when you create the narrative of your life? Are you going to focus on all the things you did wrong, all the bad things that happened to you, all the failures? And you should not erase them by any means, by any means. But again, the brain believes what it repeats and if you repeat throughout your life I'm a failure, I'm a failure. Look at all these times I failed. You will get to the end of the life and say I'm a failure. But there is always those moments in between that could create a different narrative. And our meaning in our life is found by extracting the things that create a narrative of love, of companionship, of God with us, and I guess, as a minister, that's what I try to convey to the people in my congregation God with us.
Bill:Well, and that might actually be the messaging that I would hope would also be at the core of the gathering of GC45,.
Bill:Right, you can look at the long arc of the United Church of Canada and everything from 1925 forward and say, like we've got these moments where we were blazing the new trail and things were great, affirming uh, ministry, um, because some people see it as this, this great cause of justice, and and, uh, and, and, like, true, you know, expanding the table, um, or expanding the seats of the table.
Bill:Others can't get past the person who sat beside them faithfully for five decades, who suddenly stopped showing up, and the loss of that relationship or the loss of that sort of sense of the glory days or whatever, right, and so there still really becomes like.
Bill:You can choose the lens through which you view the hundred years of life of the United Church of Canada, right, but how you choose to do that is going to dictate what you're telling yourself as you're sitting, as a commissioner, at one of these tables, you know, at the Dallas Convention Center this coming week, and you can choose to look for the grace or you can choose to look for the failure, or to just ignore or wash away the things that we clearly need to work on or learn from, or let go of, or make some decisions about, but to recognize that again, as I said at the very beginning, neither a perfect success story nor a complete and total abysmal failure is the United Church right, but a church that has lived and I say lived in like capital letters, lived the human experience of trying to make the world a better place and bring new life and hope and light, if I dare say, to every corner of certainly Canada.
Bill:But the world at large, I mean our global partnerships as well, are pretty substantial. So I am aware of time and I want to be sensitive to that because I know that at least some of us are not skipping general counsel tomorrow.
Bill:And that is not me, but we always do like last thoughts here on the podcast and I'm going to start with Sarah on this one, Because we've talked about all of the heartbreaks and the failures and the you know didn't quite go as plans and all that kind of stuff. But again, what do I love about Sarah Charters and the United Church Foundation in general? They still show up, they're still here, they're still doing the work, they're still trying to push the envelope and find new ways not only to invest in bringing about real meaningful change in the world and United Church presence in the world, but to do it in ways that also do it ethically and sustainably and finding new ways to quantify impact. Um, so, uh, I'm going to ask for our closing. Um, where have you caught a glimpse of hope? Um, not failure, not because, but also not because things got fixed or because of some triumphalist, you know success story, but, um, because something, something showed up anyway.
Sarah:Yeah, I believe it was our former moderator, the Reverend Jordan Cantwell, in Newfoundland, and she was speaking and she said hope and despair are not mutually exclusive. We can hold them both together. And, to what you were saying earlier, we really need to hold those two things together, particularly as we think about the future. And so where I'm seeing hope, there's a lot of places, frankly, across the church there are a lot of places.
Sarah:But last year, in 2024, the Foundations Board decided to set aside $100,000 in grants specifically to help congregations and communities of faith celebrate the centennial, and we thought that'll be maximum $5,000, so there'll be at least 20 grants there. That would be great, and we were kind of wondering what was going to happen, because there was a lot of stirring around the church. Should we be celebrating? Should we be commemorating? Can we be joyful in this moment, given some of the history of the church?
Sarah:And the board increased the amount for those grants twice, and so we had up to almost $200,000 that we could have awarded and in the end, I think it was I should know the number, it was, I should know the number, but I think it was like somewhere around 150,000 to over 60 different organizations, I want to say and so like to me, the fact that there's that many congregations out there trying stuff and a lot of these are working with other congregations it wasn't just one, it was many getting together to do things Like I think that is a real sign of hope. It means we can do it, and I think that's what we really need in the next decade definitely yeah.
Bill:Yeah, joanne, how about you? Sign of hope.
Joanne:Well, I, you know, every time I have a conversation with somebody who's found the United Church, has felt left out and marginalized in another place of faith and we're not perfect by any means and feels like they can have a place. That's hope. I'm a big place at the table. Everyone has a place at the table and when we live that out, that's faithfulness and hope in a capsule to me. On Sunday I was at the McDougall site and there were a couple of younger people and most United.
Joanne:Churches it's hard to find younger people. And one of them said yeah, I'm really trying to get more young adults here. I really want to get more young adults here. I just find it so joyful here. And she'd brought a friend who said the same thing and I'm like, oh, here's these people in their 20s surrounded by people in their 80s and they live the joy and that is hopeful to me. You know, that is when we hang on to our faith. Like I would say about the United Church, it's been faithful, because success, faithfulness is not measured by the kinds of successes did it succeed or not? It's like, were we faithful? And if I can come to the end of my life and go as much as I can be, I have been faithful. That is a win to me.
Ricardo:Ricardo, the next Onward Christian March. Hey, I think it boils down to the individual changes we can make with people, one-to-one, while still harnessing the power or the scope of size that the church holds, or even the union or whatever group. I think connecting with our grassroots even more over the next little while is important. Somebody was telling me the other day that I don't know where I heard it, but they said during the time of World War II, when the Nazi movement was great and huge and seemingly unstoppable and Jewish people were disappearing like crazy, everybody knew this was happening. And so many years later, later, the people that are remembered are the individuals who help jewish people hide and escape persecution and death.
Ricardo:So I think that while the world is the way it is right now and people are dying on mass daily and and growing, nationalism and right-wing crazy movements grow and hurt people and hurt communities, when churches and individuals help each other, it's like a spider web, that network grows that way and that's the impact that we have.
Ricardo:And while, as I said earlier, and while we may not reverse the course of this movement in this foreseeable future I mean I think we have three and a half more years with him right, this foreseeable future I mean, I think we have three more, three and a half more years with him right, it'll be the stories of people that were helped that will start creating a movement of change. And I think getting back to our grassroots again is what's going to have to happen, because couple that with the way the world is now right, paper boys on the corner don't exist anymore because they're 24 hours behind on a on an hourly news changing world that we live in now. Right. So meet people where they are and and create change on a on a grassroots level is, I think, where it's going to happen. Right, the church doesn't have to be a building, but it can definitely be a movement.
Ricardo:Right and I think I think what moved me towards the United Church was the ideology and the principles that it carried. Otherwise I was ready to leave organized faith altogether. But the more I joined the church I realized it's less organized and more faith and I come from the Catholic church which is pretty top down.
Joanne:They have more franchises than Tim Hortons. They have more franchises than Tim Hortons. They have more franchises, definitely, exactly.
Bill:But they also have a Monopoly on Sunday morning.
Joanne:Yeah, oh no, they have a Saturday night mass and a mass every morning at 8.30. You can always find your way to mass, and that's a good thing. I'm not, please.
Bill:Don't send in the hate mail.
Ricardo:That's right. So I think, building roots, and if people have left the notion of Sunday service, then let's meet them on Tuesday afternoon, and I think our church. The United Church of Canada, is the church that will understand that need more than anything right now.
Joanne:Here's hoping, here's hoping yeah here's hoping, here's hoping.
Bill:Yeah, for me. I've always kind of held to the idea that in the gospel, in what it is that we are called to do and be as God's mission of love in the world, there is great joy but there is also great challenge, and that we are kind of called to both. And so anytime that I can have a conversation that embraces both the joy but also the great challenge, there's great hope for me in that Because, as we talked about even in this podcast, we recognize that in some cases the rules are played differently in the world that we currently live in and in some cases they're broken, broken altogether and not even held to. But you know, in encountering that kind of directional trajectory towards like break every rule and build the world in your own image, we respond with everyone's got a place at the table. We respond with everyone's got a place at the table and and that there is something very, very counter-cultural to that. But in all honesty, for me it's almost like the most violent thing you can do in the face of the messaging against it is to hold that up as, like the the more, the more you try to separate people and put people in their place and tell them they don't belong. We are just going to push that circle ever, ever wider, right? Um?
Bill:So, as a guy who really loves an image of love that is not the touchy-feely but like the gritty, you know, like stand stand up and fight kind of approach to it, that challenge that like, are we prepared in the next hundred years of the United Church of Canada, to really embrace the challenge of making sure that every person actually has a place at the table and recognize that eventually the floweriness of that is going to wear off and the real challenge and the real work is going to begin?
Bill:That, for me, is where I find the most hope that we are actually talking now about expanding that circle and doing it intentionally and doing it denominationally, and doing it not just for ourselves but for others as well. So that, for me, is where I find the most hope that we might actually start to, as Joanne said, work toward a world renewed and far more in the image of what God intended for God's creation, rather than in our own image and our own echo chamber. So thank you to everyone who's been here tonight, but thank you especially to Sarah, because Sarah got off a plane and drove basically straight here, and on the eve before a really long week of general counsel.
Bill:So all I want to say is that if you are listening right now and carrying something that hasn't healed in you or hasn't resolved in you or hasn't made sense in you, you don't need to try to explain it away and you don't need to tie it up with neat theological statements about God having a larger plan for you, because that is not how God works. God is with you and you are not alone. Hope isn't always about answers. Sometimes it's just about having the courage to look more deeply for the moments of joy in the midst of it all, because we all have moments in our lives and in our work and in our faith when we realize that we are going to need a bigger boat to weather the challenge that's ahead of us or to deal with the failures that we cannot control and the elements that we cannot control. So we start where we are and we stay in the water and we reach for one another, because we are better together and always have been so with that, thank you, Sarah.
Sarah:Thank you.
Bill:For everything and for being here tonight and take care of yourselves, but also maybe take care of the people around you as well, because the world sorely needs it. And with that we are out until next month. All right, friends, what we've shared tonight isn't just a theory. It's about lived faith in real time. It's the risks that we take, knowing that they might not work, the heartbreak of watching something you love falter, and the quiet resolve to try again anyway. We all have moments when we realize we're going to need a bigger boat. What matters is that we don't face those moments alone, that we keep showing up for each other, even when success isn't promised.
Bill:If this conversation stirred something in you, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or join us on Patreon. You can find past episodes and blog reflections and more at preparedtodrowncom. Prepared to Drown is supported in part by a generous grant from the James Robertson Memorial Trust Fund at the United Church of Canada Foundation and is recorded live at MacDougall United Church in Calgary, alberta. Until next time, stay curious, stay kind and remember grace holds even when the waves rise.