How Liturgy Creates and Shapes Collective Liberation

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. This week features a guest interview by Sojourners audience engagement manager Heather Brady. Subscribe here.

Two queer pastors, Anna Blaedel and M Jade Kaiser, were having dinner together in 2017, when they posed a question to each other in the spirit of meaningful fun: What would it be like if they could create a public space for conversations about and liturgical resources for transformation, at the outer margins of Christianity and beyond?

They knew there were plenty of pastors, scholars, and community members having (or wanting to have) similar conversations, and they knew the conversations weren’t going to happen within the context of larger church institutions. They also knew that resources to support this sort of work were scarce.

Kaiser says that conversation helped each of them come alive, at a time when they saw both pastors and lay people in the LGBTQ+ community routinely experience burnout and mental health problems at a higher rate than the general population.

Enter enfleshed. The brainchild of Blaedel and Kaiser, who were each United Methodist pastors when they launched enfleshed, the collective seeks to provide resources for spiritual nourishment for the work of liberation, both within the church and for related movements beyond faith spaces.

In our interview, I spoke with Kaiser about what was missing from the institutional church that sparked the idea for enfleshed, the role of liturgy and poetry in creating change, and how they work to provide resources for faith-based and nonreligious communities alike.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Heather Brady, Sojourners: How would you describe enfleshed’s work in public theology, for those who aren’t familiar with it already?

M Jade Kaiser: It’s always evolving, in some ways. But I think lately, I’m thinking of it and describing it often as a collective of people that are interested in freedom work and wondering what and how spirituality shows up in that as a resource.

What are the origins of enfleshed’s liturgy resources, poetry, and blessings?

At our earliest days, we were located in the fringes of Christianity, so [we were] strongly within the tradition and just on the edges of it, and really feeling connected to a lot of liberation theologies, a lot of those marginal perspectives within Christianity. [We were] recognizing the massive gap between the theology and biblical scholarship and movements, and then the actual liturgy that speaks to those things.

Things have changed quite a lot since then, but at the time, words for worship that even, bare minimum, didn’t center masculine language for God on a weekly basis [were] nowhere to be found, frankly.

Taking that further and bringing a feminist perspective — not just gender neutral — bringing in queerness, a racial justice lens, all these other pieces. [We knew] there are so many different pastors and worshiping communities who are rooted in all of those things [who do not have] access to those words readily available each week. That was part of what we really wanted to [address], because of course, so many of the pastors doing that kind of work have the least time and the least resources. That was a big motivation.

What was missing from the institutional church as you worked to create this space?

Back in 2017, [co-founder Anna Blaedel and I] were not aware of many places to turn for that. Both of us had done a lot of years of work in the church centered around changing the perspectives of those closest to power, centering all the narratives, all of the work, everything, towards the privileged positions, drawing on the resources of all the different kinds of people on the margins.

I think there was a reckoning with, like, how are we, in all our different social locations of marginalization, supposed to sustain this? Who’s resourcing the edges, the fringes? And what happens if we start ideas of transformation from those edges and not from the center of these institutions?

What if all our theological work was committed to first starting there and trusting those ripples? What if we could create that space to bring everybody who is already invested into that idea, into us as collective?

I think we were really craving that meeting, that it was a necessity, and so creating out of our own needs and desires has been a big part of how we’ve developed [enfleshed]. It’s like, what do we know we don’t have that we need? And as enfleshed has grown, that question and the answers to it have expanded.

Are the people who are searching for your resources centered in traditional churches or are they in a different kind of Christian community?

We have about somewhere between six and seven hundred traditional — so to speak — traditional churches [that are involved in enfleshed]. I think a lot of people would say many of those churches are not doing “traditional” theology, of course, but they are brick-and-mortar worshiping communities, and they want to do that differently.

There are seminary worshiping communities, there are people gathering in their homes, there are movement spaces that are not religious, just a wide variety of uses that people are applying the words to, but definitely a good number of churches.

For the spaces that you mentioned that are movement-focused and less religious, how does that work if what you’re providing has a religious, Christian base?

Two ways: One, we have a weekly liturgy that goes out, and that is very intentionally rooted in Christianity.

And then we also have our poetics library, which is more our work that is written without specific religiosity, without creating those boundaries. There’s one piece about mourning following anti-trans violence, doing that grief work together.

We’re trying to offer up some words for articulating in community some of these things that we’re all feeling, that are helpful to feel together in a shared space. We’re trying to really do the “both, and,” continuing to resource those on the edges of Christianity and also holding the liminal space of resourcing people unrelated to religion or formerly religious who are longing for sacred words. Different venues of language, but shared ideas.

You mentioned grief work. How else does poetry help undergird the work of social justice?

It’s a great question, one that I’m still seeking the answer to every day. But I often think about the words of Toni Cade Bambara, who said, “Make revolution irresistible.”

I think poetry is part of how we do that. It’s transforming ourselves in the world. Transformation is a beautiful thing and it’s complex, and I think poetry helps us be honest about the whole story, of both what is currently happening and then also what we want to dream of, what the longings are, what we’ve experienced in the past that is hard or beautiful or both.

Especially for those of us raised in white, Christian-doctrine kinds of spaces, poetry moves us more into getting in touch with our bodies, our feelings, and the mystery, the kind of beyond that I think a lot of us are craving right now. Poetry plays a really critical role for some of our most neglected parts of ourselves, particularly as white people in movement work.

The overlap between the mystery involved in Christianity and the mystery involved in poetry — that seems like a natural intersection point.

Yes, and the mystery of transformation, right? Whether it’s an individual person, a community, the whole world. How change actually unfolds — we can name pieces, we can try to make it a formula, but if it were a formula, we would have figured this out long ago. There’s mystery there.

Part of the evolution we have ahead of us is leaning more into the maybe. There are things we’re missing here that are mysterious, that we’re really needing to lean into as a species.

Is there significance to saying scripted words together, like we do with liturgical words, in this work of liberation?

I think so. It’s certainly complicated, and I always hold the tensions in my own heart and head, the danger of putting words in other people’s mouths. Ideally, there’s always consent there, but it is a danger and a risk. But it’s the smallest little bit of actually embodying something. It calls us into our bodies, using our mouths to feel the words in our skin.

Doing that in community, being able to both voice it and hear it at the same time, seeing how it feels when that’s happening — how does that land? What is that? Am I moved? Am I uncomfortable? Do I hate that? Does it ruffle my feathers? And in what way? That’s possible in just reading something in isolation, but I do think it’s different.

In a group setting ideally what that’s doing is reinforcing a commitment to the values that a community is proclaiming. It’s a profession together, and I think that holds a little more accountability, a little more weight, a little more significance, than just reading something privately all the time.

That makes me think about how change happens, and how everybody saying the same things together can propel change.

It highlights the importance of a community having space for there to be that wrestling. It’s not just people providing the words and then everybody having to be on the same page. How can there be space for a chance to be like, “I was mostly with that, but I don’t know about this. How does that fit with who we are?”

I don’t feel like the church has done a great job of creating that space generally. But I do think there’s a lot of potential for some more robust tensions of being on the same page and engaging with the complexity of differences at the same time.

Is there a resource from enfleshed that sticks out as one of your favorites?

One is the queering of Psalm 23. I love playing with some of these most beloved pieces of a tradition and bringing the love and passion of something like queerness into it and seeing what happens when they mix. For some people, that’s not going to feel right for them, but for others, it’s, “Oh, gosh, this is closer to me than anything has been in my tradition.” It makes an entryway, an opening that isn’t often there. I have my own insecurities about my own writing, so I don’t tend to return to my own work very often, but every now and then I’m able to connect with it differently when it’s coming from outside. I enjoy getting to hear other people resonating with a queer Psalm 23.

Similarly, during the very beginnings of the “don’t say gay,” “don’t say trans” bills, there’s a piece that I wrote about the power and significance of using queer lexicon as much as possible, as an act of love for each other. I have been invited specifically to read that on numerous occasions, and I’ve been so moved by that particular ask. It’s a chance to embody the love that I felt when I was writing it, and then engaging with other people, it’s like, “Oh, you’re feeling this love, too.”

I saw that you create works of stained glass, too. Do you think that stained glass, which is a fairly historic element of an institutional worship space, maintains relevance in the modern age? What impact does it have on liturgy if you’re seeing these very old-school depictions of faith?

I started in 2018. It’s a hobby for me, and it’s been very nice to have something that is not word-centered in my life. Part of the original draw was the tension of being a queer and trans person playing with this old-school, institutional medium, and what can happen when these two things come together.

I have been fascinated by how many people are drawn to it in its modern form. It’s so delightful to see people’s delight when they encounter stained glass that is different than what they’re used to seeing, is not white Jesus. It took a long time before I was able to even discover online the many other young folks doing stained glass in wildly creative ways, and it’s all very cool.

There is always potential with something — even if it’s been captured by some of the most confining of systems or ideas or lack of resources — for that to become something interesting or powerful or alluring. To free it and see what happens.