Five clergy speak about their unexpected callings – The Presbyterian Outlook

I still practice Christianity, but I was looking for a community that was a bit more open.

The community of Jedis is chiefly online, although Johnson meets up with fellow California Jedi. Johnson interacts with members of the temple daily via an online chat forum. Each week theres a service on Discord.

Like other religions, the Jedi Temple ushers members through important life rituals. Their ministers can perform weddings and funerals and give blessings. Jedi doctrine, Johnson said, can help members find meaning.

A lot of people have a lot of questions the big questions, like: Why am I here? Whats going on when I die? We can help people explore the answers, Johnson said.

So, what is a Jedi service? Basically a sermon, Johnson says. In the most recent service she led, she preached on corruptibility and integrity. About 15 people tune in to the live service, but many more watch the recorded sermons.

Many members are drawn to the temple seeking a religion thats more accepting and more welcoming. The Jedi community is syncretic, blending together spiritual and philosophical practices that inspire them.

In some Christian churches, its difficult to be your authentic self, said Johnson. Here, you dont have to fit a mold.

Johnson attributes her parallel Jedi religion with helping her seek a job that is others-centered, not self-centered: She currently works with people with disabilities, helping them find employment.

To address the Ewok in the room: Have most of the members been evangelized by Star Wars?

Johnson contends the temples adherents are fans of the Jedi philosophy rather than the Star Wars movies and are searching for real wisdom popularized by a fictional universe. While some are very into Star Wars, more are seeking a community studying and practicing the philosophy that George Lucas attributed to the Jedi knights.

Johnson has a set of Jedi robes she will wear for ceremonies. But she doesnt wear them often. I dont think society is ready for me to walk around in my Jedi robes.

The Rev. Karla Kamstra was born in Kentucky, which she calls, Gods country. Farming and pastoring are in her heritage.

I come from a long line of Southern Baptist preachers, she said.

She credits her fascination with religion to her Southern Baptist grandmother.

If my grandmothers car was heading for the church, I was with her. I was there Sunday morning, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, she said.

Those early experiences left her captivated by the Bible and its teachings and in awe of preachers.

But she also remembers some of the harsh rhetoric and vengeful depictions of God with anger she heard in childhood sermons.

I think that even at that age, I said, thats not a God that I want to worship.

Today, Kamstra tends a digital flock onTikTok, where she distributes videos that address religious trauma, LGBTQ affirmation and help the spiritual but not religious find their path to God.

She is currently closing in on 500,000 followers on TikTok. Her videos feature messages of affirmation, short sermons about religious trauma, ministering as a woman and takedowns of misogyny, racism and homophobia.

Her TikTok ministry came about after a long journey of spiritual seeking.

Kamstra and her husband searched in Baptist, Presbyterian and nondenominational churches for a spiritual home. After searching for years, Kamstra began going through a process of combing through her previous beliefs to find a spirituality that felt authentically hers. It was a process she describes as untangling rather than deconstruction.

I kept putting God in too small of a box, she said.

Her search for God sent Kamstra to Christian college and then to an online degree in world religions at Arizona State University. A year into that online program, she felt the call to seminary. She began attending One Spirit Interfaith Seminary in New York City and was ordained in 2017. She found the experience deeply healing:

Its like, I came full circle and fell back in love with Jesus again. With a healed heart.

Kamstra felt that her journey has been a process of claiming space for herself and freeing herself from the expectations of former faith leaders. She has found on TikTok a community of people who have left religion but are still seeking spirituality. She wants to walk alongside people and give them the freedom she found by going on a very individual journey.

She believes Christ has room for her, even if Christian churches dont.

You cant kick me out of the Jesus club because my experience doesnt look like yours.

Roger Grace is an ordained Methodist minister, who, since the 1980s, has been part of the Rural Chaplains Association.

A rural chaplain is anyone who feels a call to minister to people living in rural areas. The chaplains can be a layperson or someone ordained, like Grace.

Many times people will come see the pastor or talk to a trusted lay person before they will go see a psychiatrist or psychologist, he said.

The Rural Chaplains Association was organized in response to the farm crisis of the 1980s. Family farms were going under, and farms were being sold.

The suicide rates were very high, said Grace. When a farmer loses his or her farm, not only do they lose their source of income, they lose their home, their heritage, their identity.

The association was founded to create supportive community ties and to advocate for supportive policies. We try to provide hope and healing for those who are experiencing pain and having difficulties in their lives, said Grace.

The association also helps train and educate clergy and lay people in the issues of rural life, which Grace says has supplemented his work as a minister and helped him understand the crises and struggles of his community better.

The Rural Chaplains Association iscelebrating 30 years of active service this year. The first cohortof which Grace was a memberwas certified as rural chaplains in 1991.

Grace grew up in rural Ohio and worked on family farms during the summers his uncles farm in central Ohio went out of business in the 80s. After seminary, Grace began serving in rural churches, about two dozen in all.

During the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, smaller rural churches were the last to shut down and the first to reopen. But some of Graces colleagues used creative means to reach parishioners who couldnt come to church and didnt have internet access.

One of his fellow pastors typed and printed out his sermons and mailed them out to families.

That was quite a compromise, even in his case, because he always just wrote an outline and gave his sermon from the outline, he said with a chuckle.

The primary requirement is that a chaplain has a heart for rural life, Grace said, and the ability to draw isolated and spread-out communities together.

Lending a listening ear canif not make things betterat least let people know theyre not alone, he said.

For Lance JiGan Kaplan, one of the biggest challenges in becoming a Zen hospice chaplain was overcoming his imposter syndrome. Although he was raised, as he describes, a secular Jew, he identified as an atheist since he was a teenager. Who am I to be offering this spiritual support? he wondered.

His journey from atheism to Zen began about four years ago, when his father died at 91.

Kaplan took care of his father in his final days and stayed with him immediately before and after his death.

I didnt realize how transformational those moments would be, Kaplan said.

Around this time, Kaplan was beginning to practice meditation and study Buddhism. Kaplan was put in touch with the Village Zendo in New York City and began serving with some of the Zendos prison ministries.

When his father was dying, Kaplan witnessed the dedication and care of his fathers hospice caretakers. At first, he thought: how could I do what they do?

I was really inspired by the hospice workers who had taken care of my father at home, Kaplan said. But I thought I could never do what they did. It just seemed way beyond me.

Kaplan has been a cinematographer for 20 years, and he still freelances part time. But after volunteering at the Village Zendo, he decided to enroll in the Zen Center for Contemplative Cares foundations in contemplative care course and completed their clinical pastoral education. In the fall of 2020, he did clinical hours at the palliative care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he has been volunteering this past summer.

Opening himself up to Zen as an atheist, Kaplan said, was an exercise in not knowing. After he encountered Zen, the certainty of atheism seemed less interesting, he said.

Although he slowly began to open himself up to getting sucked into suffering, Kaplan said he had to overcome fear in his clinical pastoral education.

Death is this terrifying thing that comes up in movies. So it just seemed, like, ominous, he said.

Kaplan said that the essential Buddhist practice that has helped him accept death was the Dyad an exercise that trains the practitioner not to shy away from whats happening.

The exercise is designed to tune you into your own discomfort, and then not run away from it, but to actually explore it instead of asking, How do I reflect whats really happening? Kaplan found that encountering death has helped him accept discomfort. And accepting that discomfort has helped him accept being in the presence of death.

One day during his training, his supervisor at Brooklyn Hospital asked him to attend a palliative extubation a family was removing a family members breathing tube in order to let the family member pass away.

A hospital chaplain is required to offer every family the opportunity for prayer. Kaplan said he was nervous about leading prayer, but his supervisor offered a simple framework of concrete communication.

Dear Lord, Im here with X and Y at Brooklyn Hospital. This is what Ive heard is important to them.So were praying to you for this.

Kaplan was struck by how grateful families were for this simple act of prayer and the power of that communication to create openness. Not just to me, but openness to themselves, and to the moment.

by Rene Roden, Religion News Service

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Five clergy speak about their unexpected callings - The Presbyterian Outlook