By Ray Waddle
The Rev. Kathryn Banakis ’03 B.A., ’09 M.Div. and her congregation pursue theological inquiry, zany garden video games, and tangible moral motion—most lately becoming a member of a historic effort to offer reparations to Black households of their metropolis of Evanston, Sick.
“For me, confession and repentance have materials implications, requiring materials sacrifices,” she mentioned lately. “So we discuss cash—rather a lot! How will we select to funds and spend what we have now? With reparations, we wished to be part of doing one thing tangible.”
Banakis, Rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, helped create the town’s Interfaith Reparations Effort in 2022. This initiative augments the Metropolis of Evanston’s unprecedented municipal choice in 2019 to plan a authorized framework for offering housing grants to Black residents so as to redress discriminatory housing insurance policies and practices throughout the many years.[i]
Blessed are the Beatitudes
For Banakis, one of many metrics for congregational motion is the Sermon on the Mount—blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourners, the merciful, the peacemakers. The beatitudes function the “grading scale” within the gospel of Matthew by which all moral effort is measured, a notion she borrows from preaching scholar Karoline Lewis.
“You possibly can do worse in a congregation than use the beatitudes,” Banakis mentioned, “as a regular for a way we’re doing as a people who find themselves making an attempt to reply in a world that’s in search of that means and monetary stability and connection.”
Kat Banakis is an Episcopal priest, neighborhood organizer, and native interfaith denizen and dynamo. Greater than a decade in the past, her high-spirited memoir Bubble Lady: An Irreverent Journey of Religion (Chalice, 2013) poured out her love for “that shiny, lumpy crabapple of an establishment” referred to as the church. That affection and dedication stay robust. Church continues to be the place the place actual persons are “looking for neighborhood, making an attempt our greatest to lift energetic youngsters to be variety adults, making an attempt to be taught what it can imply to have a superb dying, singing songs off-key, enacting the sacraments, studying to forgive each other … and within the mist of all this, hoping to know God.”
Rising up in a church-centered family gave her the curiosity to ask why the Christian story issues. Born in Chicago, she was raised by her Roman Catholic mom and Japanese Orthodox father and attended numerous Protestant church buildings. As an adolescent she bought concerned about theology and social justice themes.
“I used to be simply a type of individuals who fell in love with concepts—studying Gustavo Gutiérrez, liberation theologies, Black theologies—the concept Jesus is on the aspect of those that are most marginalized, and due to this fact it’s the job, the accountability, of traditionally prosperous white congregations and Christians to do our half to deal with the struggling of those that have suffered most.”
A formative second got here when she was 17. She attended a Lilly-funded Youth Theology Institute program at Emory College, which mixed theological examine, hands-on service alternatives, and discipline journeys to historic civil rights websites. She couldn’t get sufficient of it.
“For a month we immersed in social justice theology and anti-racism coaching, and it was deeply compelling. I turned a devotee who has by no means appeared again and by no means misplaced it. I doubt the entire children who went there got here away a real believer, however I did. It was heady philosophy and theology and Bible commentary, and we have been advised that it mattered, and it did.”
An interfaith inflection
After ending school at Yale, she labored three years as a federal lobbyist in Washington, D.C. This was earlier than deciding on divinity college and YDS. That advocacy expertise nonetheless turns out to be useful, notably within the Evanston interfaith reparations challenge.
“My lobbyist background made me care about bringing completely different events collectively round a difficulty and shifting the ball ahead. For the reparations, 17 homes of worship contributed considerably to a non-public fund for housing grants—there’s almost $1 million in it now. That have has created groundwork for working collectively and problem-solving on different points.”
After the catastrophic assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, these native interfaith relationships have been in place to jumpstart a program of group examine and dialog between native Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
“That interfaith strategy to studying was parlayed into additional tasks we’re contemplating now round bettering homeless shelter choices and starvation ministries. We’re coordinating throughout a number of congregations on problems with justice and mercy.”
At age 26, after the lobbying stint, she pursued seminary with the thought of doing a joint diploma in regulation and returning to the political scrimmage of D.C. As soon as she arrived at YDS and jumped into the Quad’s ecumenical experiences, she realized parish ministry and neighborhood advocacy with an interfaith inflection have been her actual calling: she was a Christian eager to make a distinction in a pluralistic period.
“Ever since then, what I’ve found in interfaith work is it’s important to know what custom you’re standing from—what your personal specific perception system is—so as to have interaction meaningfully in interfaith conditions,” she mentioned. “It’s essential to maintain your identification. I’ve additionally found that religiously observant individuals, it doesn’t matter what their religion, sample their lives very equally. We attempt to make choices about how a lot cash we’re making a gift of as a substitute of retaining, and about when and the way and why we pray, and the way we’re imagined to deal with each other and why.”
Her YDS program included enrollment in Berkeley Divinity Faculty and within the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Her Marquand Chapel experiences confirmed her the ability of holistic worship that weaves scripture, poetry, and music to create an natural, well-structured entire. Professors taught her that preaching can have an important pastoral care dimension. To see a minister discussing issues of the guts from the pulpit, with candor and humor, can rework church into a spot the place parishioners really feel permission to share their very own struggles.
“If our job is the communicate the excellent news of Jesus Christ always and all locations, we have to do it in a manner that’s approachable and doesn’t set such a excessive bar of purity or data moving into that you simply really feel unworthy to come across the scripture and teachings to start with,” she mentioned.
Put up-Covid commitments
Banakis has been fulltime at St. Luke’s church since 2019. It’s a rising congregation of about 200 individuals in weekly attendance, a quantity notably greater than it was pre-Covid. The pandemic interval, forcing parishioners to depart the buildings and rethink worship and native identification, turned out to be a revitalizing time there.
“Throughout Covid we bought individuals actually concerned in liturgy, doing it from house, and began birthday celebrations and different enjoyable actions. By Zoom we introduced in preachers from everywhere in the world, and that’s one thing we’ve continued. We requested ourselves: What ought to be the distinct mission popping out of Covid that we didn’t have going into Covid? Since summer season 2020 we’ve positioned a brand new give attention to social justice: The objective of assuaging systemic racism has change into a part of the material of the congregation. Setting annual anti-racism objectives and incorporating non-white students and musicians in worship are actually merely a part of our sample.”
Put up-pandemic instances and an anti-institutional social temper are stirring uncertainty about the way forward for church life nationally, however Banakis prefers assembly the tradition’s unknowns with a way of religious journey, not worry.
“There’s quite a lot of Sturm und Drang about the way forward for ‘the church’—I can’t actually impression that. What I can impression is the congregation the place I serve, and my job is to be a pastor in addition to I presumably can. I’ve the most effective job on this planet. We’re doing good work and having a lot enjoyable. And due to YDS’s broadly ecumenical studying and instructing, I nonetheless attempt to learn broadly throughout denominations so as to convey the most effective of Christian instructing to St. Luke’s, as a result of I really feel a accountability for understanding the place the church goes.
“I’ll be very shocked to see extra mainline congregations on the finish of my profession than there have been at the start, and I see it as a part of my position to satisfy these adjustments for the longer term with pleasure and function and an open embrace, and never expertise them as denominational loss. I imagine church buildings, together with mosques and synagogues and temples, are able to determine the right way to create significant connection for individuals. Sure, there’s hope—completely.”
[i] Greater than $5 million has been raised, partly from a tax on leisure hashish gross sales. The reparations effort offers precedence to descendants of Black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 or endured housing discrimination after 1969. Greater than 100 U.S. cities have used the Evanston mannequin to start out their very own reparations packages.
