Kristofer Lindh-Payne

Beatitudes Society Summer 2008 Fellow at Interfaith Worker Justice—Beatitudes Society chapter co-convener at Seabury-Western

This summer’s fellowship experience has been a critical element of my spiritual and pastoral formation thus far. As I enter the third and final year of seminary at Seabury-Western in Evanston, IL, I realize that I have been hungry for an experience such as this. Through our Beatitudes chapter events and actions, I have been able to connect with this passion in an on-going manner, but I have found that there are real limits to what time will allow when you are in a seminary. This fellowship enabled me to integrate the ministry of service and social justice into my overall educational and formational experience.

The ministry of service and social justice is at the core of who I am as a baptized member of the Body of Christ and as a person who has discerned a call to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. After this fellowship experience at Interfaith Worker Justice, I can more clearly articulate a bi-vocational call to be both priest and organizer. The priest calls people to the table to be fed, spiritually, be transformed, and go out into the world in service to God. The organizer calls people to the table to dialogue with one another and together work for change in the world—to call forth the Reign of God—the Kingdom that is to come. Both priest and organizer are integral aspects to my call to ministry. I had a sense of this direction before the fellowship began, but the experience enabled me to live more fully into this ministry.

As a seminarian who has worked closely with community organizing methodologies that I have learned through various trainings with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), I was not new to the concepts proposed to me in our week-long training on Interfaith Worker Justice’s (IWJ) religious-labor organizing. Having worked closely in the past with other ecumenical development corporations and interfaith not-for-profits, I was not new to the effective mobilization of the religious community around social and economic justice issues. What was new to me was the way in which the Beatitudes Society and Interfaith Worker Justice complemented one another in grounding me in my own theological perspective, while simultaneously calling me to reach out to others in their unique point of view. This fellowship has served to situate me in my own faith experience and social location, in my scriptural foundations, and in my own particular religious tradition. I am forever grateful for this clarity of call and for this rich experience of empowerment in the Holy Spirit.

Strengthening the progressive Christian network for justice, compassion, & peace