How have you seen change happen in a congregation? What is the role of a minister in that change?
So my first year in Lincoln delegation from the congregation made an appointment to talk to me in my office, and they sat down and they told me that they wanted us to add a land acknowledgement to both our website and the worship services, and I said no. That first year because we did not have a relationship with the community, that the land acknowledgement was acknowledging that relationship didn't exist yet. That was back in probably 2018, 2019, somewhere in there.
I've preached on it a bunch over the years, and in the first years I was here, one of the things that I spent the most time on was building relationships with other congregations, with activists in Lincoln with the Indian Center, which is one of our community centers here in town. That was mostly work that I did on my own, but throughout it I was clear with the congregation through preaching and monthly reports to the board and annual reports to the congregation that that was work that I was doing, that that was work that I saw as a priority to build up those relationships and work that I thought was important for the congregation as a whole to do too. So fast forward to the summer of 2022, the spring of 20 22, 2 things happen at the same time. The first is that we had a major disagreement, fight, controversy, however you frame that around a potential development the city of Lincoln approved that would be right across the street from one of the only sweat lodges in city limits down near Wilderness Park. I got involved with that fight as part of the group of people that I had formed relationships with and was at protests and marches and demonstrations for that at the same time.
But independent of that and that this is the important part, that this happened independently, a similar group of three or four people came to talk to me in my office, but this time they said, okay, we want to do a land acknowledgement, but we've formed these relationships and here's how we want to build on them. We want to do an eight week series over the summer where we do worship for eight consecutive weeks and one congregational activity every single week, a workshop, a movie, an event in town, all building on this idea of our institutional relationship with the native community here in Lincoln. And so we did that. We spent an entire summer on it, and after that summer, the congregation in Lincoln became one of the hosting institutions for annual visits from the Otto Missouri delegation. This is the folks on whose land we live.
A few of our members are on the advisory council that's building that relationship between the Otto Missouri tribe and the city of Lincoln. We're putting in grant applications here to expand that. That's how change happens by establishing those relationships and then following up on them when the moment is right. That's subtle work, right? Because in some ways, in that case, leading change looked from the outside, like saying no, that no was a way of saying not yet. And because of that, not yet. The change isn't just a thing that the minister imposes, but something that the whole congregation owns.