Megan Rohrer

Living Lutheran: Christ is the Church

2012-02-13T21:55:00.000-08:00

In a time when many congregations struggle to stay alive because they can’t afford their building or the maintenance it needs stay a warm, safe sanctuary, it is more important than ever to remember that Christ is the church.

With a promise to be present whenever two or three gather, we are assured that when we meet for worship, prayer, study, a meal or to provide care for others, that we are not only Christ’s hands and feet in the world but also that the coffee shops, hospitals, multipurpose gyms, stages, food pantries and garages we share our faith in are places where church happens.

Read the rest here.

Living Lutheran: What does peace look like?

2012-01-31T13:55:00.000-08:00

ELCA members take part in a Taize service, a peaceful time of prayer.
Photo by Dirk van der Duim

ELCA members have traditionally longed for two kinds of peace: the one that is available now (commonly called inner peace, or baptismal freedom in Lutheran lingo) and the one we have not yet seen (world peace).

The peace we see now is everywhere. I find it most in baby giggles, cozy winter cuddles with a beloved pet and soy hot chocolates. Others find it in exercise, meditation and homemade pies.

These are the roads to inner peace we are willing to admit to in public. They come from virtue, spiritual practice, communal singing that syncs our breathing, or what I like to call an Oprah lifestyle.

Read the rest at LivingLutheran.com

In the News: Windy City Times

2012-01-18T21:33:00.001-08:00

The pleasures and perils of LGBTQ history AHA CONFERENCE by Joe Franco 2012-01-18



As part of the American History Association's recent conference in Chicago, a great deal of discussion was devoted to the emerging interest in LGBTQ history. An early-morning panel discussion Jan. 8 confronted many of the problems and the successes with LGBTQ history and its dissemination to the popular masses. Lauren Jae Gutterman, the panel's moderator and a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, started the group's discussion. Professor Kevin Murphy, with the University of Minnesota, discussed his recent tribulations when putting together an oral history of the Twin Cities, saying, "We collected over 100 oral histories of the Twin Cities LGBTQ community. Historians, sociologists, geographers and ethnologists tried working together but found it difficult to create a work that would make their work interesting to the masses." The resulting book, Queer Twin Cities, was not well-received by the media or the intended target audience. Murphy admitted that not even the local Minneapolis gay press reviewed the book after its 2011 release. He said that it was "heartening to see the localized interest in GLBT history" but that, ultimately, the work seemed to alienate readers. Professor John D'Emilio, with the University of Illinois-Chicago, brought more problems with LGBTQ public history to the table. He is co-director of a website called OutHistory.org that was originally envisioned to be "Wiki-like" in that anyone could submit entries with constant updating from others. "The problem," said D'Emilio, "is that almost nobody submitted any content. Ultimately, there just was never going to be enough interest and enough content to build up steam." D'Emilio believed the upcoming re-design of the website would help: "We want to abandon the 'Wiki' concept and make the content more transparent for the user." D'Emilio's solution for making LGBTQ public history more accessible through the web involved the use of individuals and more popular features that were user-friendly. He admitted that this was absolutely imperative that academics learned to speak in a language that made what they had to teach and say more accessible. Professor Don Romesburg—an assistant professor at Sonoma State University and a curator for the recently opened GLBT History Museum (the first full-scale, stand-alone facility of its kind in the United States) in San Francisco—reported on a definite success in the LGBTQ-history scene. Worldwide attention focused on the opening of the facility, prompting Romesburg to joke, "Britney Spears was at our museum." Tens of thousands of individuals have visited the museum since its opening last January. "We've had 2,000 new Facebook 'Likes' and 100 new members in our first year alone," said Romesburg. The museum is unique in that it resisted a chronologically linear model in its layout. "The arrangement was about demonstrating belonging and making power present," said Romesburg about the museum's success. The museum's success, seen in light of the failure of other queer-history initiatives, certainly begs the question, "What did the GLBT History Museum do differently?" Romesburg theorized, "We tried to welcome everybody. The construction of a museum means that we matter. It's relevant, important and meaningful." The discussion ended with Joey Plaster, a graduate student at Yale, and Rev. Megan Rohrer, a Lutheran minister who works with at-risk and impoverished LGBT youth of the Castro and Tenderloin neighborhoods in San Francisco. Their work with the queer youth is not unlike Boystown's unprecedented problems this past summer. The gentrified Castro wanted the gay youth out of the neighborhood. A concerted effort among the residents, shop owners, bar owners and politicians began to form. Ultimately, Plaster and Rohrer used history as a way of mobilizing the disenfranchised queer youth. They used the imagery of the 1960s to propel the voices of the neighborhood queer youth. Rohrer said that "the use of tactile GLBT historical artifacts was more than enough motivation for the queer youth to spring into action." She added, "When an individual gets to see and touch something historical, something from the past, this alone is transformative."

Unsolicited Advice: Preemptive Pastoral Care for the Week after New Years

2011-12-29T11:17:00.000-08:00

For those without the patience to read this entire blog, this video meditation says it all.

My pastor persona is "Mr. Life of the Party," but my true self is "Quietly Observing the Subtle Mannerisms of Everyone in the Room and Diverting Disaster at any Moment" person.

Yes, my pastor self wears a cape, but most of the time I am Clark Kent.

For the sake of my ministry, I must have a loud enough voice to raise the concerns of the vulnerable (you know my homeless friends, I speak of them often) I work for day-to-day. In this economy when their support is the first on the chopping block, I have to have an extra big twinkle in public and be a bit larger than life (think Dolly Parton). You may have noticed.

But, what most people don't know is that I'm an introvert who spends most of my time in hibernation, archives or tuning out crowded coffee spaces with big head phones.

So now is the time when I come out of my hole, with a big Ground Hogs Day moment, and share some of my quiet musings with those I've been observing all year.

Consider this is my written pastoral care to all the fine folk in congregations who listen to my 20 minutes of pondering on a given Sunday knowing I won't be around to support them day-to-day. This is also for the socially networked misfits who don't feel connected to local faith communities or who simply find my ministry inspiring (the "I want to be you when I grow up" crowd).

[Shakespearean aside to those who don't know me well: I know that these compliments are about a desire to do fun and meaningful work in the world that makes a real difference and isn't actually about me. I hear it less as an ego stroke and more like an Atlas styled weight of responsibility.]

So here are my observations for this season (feel free to choose your own adventure below):

Everyone: Before making your New Year's Resolution ask yourself: What really motivates me to choose this goal. Then, ask yourself: Is this the best way to achieve this goal?

I think most experience a week (or two) after New Year's meltdown, because they either created a goal that enables them fail quickly (usually numerically) or because accomplishing the goal doesn't feel good (because it's not addressing the root of the change you want in the world).

Consider goals that create tangible moments that you can celebrate and then actually celebrate them - even if things aren't as great as you dreamed.

A: If you want to lose weight, please do not make a numerical resolution. Weight fluctuates naturally throughout the month (especially if you are a woman) and nature will make sure that you fail.

Why do you really want to lose weight?

To be healthier: Make sure this is actually how you feel. We think this is the only right answer so we often say this is true, but we don't really believe it. No one is looking, so read the possibilities below just in case this is a socially acceptable fib you tell yourself. However, if you really really do want to be healthier, I suggest that you make smaller goals that will actually make you healthier. You can be healthy at any weight. Focus on a part of your health you want to improve. For example, if you want to avoid diabetes make a goal based on monitoring your blood sugars or reducing all your risk factors. Or maybe, eating more mindfully should be your goal.
To feel connected to a partner or to get a date: If this is your real reason for losing weight, you must know that it will not feel good to accomplish this goal. First, if you do get a date or feel more connected to your partner after success, you may feel resentful that the person couldn't love you just as you were. Second, you have to seriously ask yourself if putting on a few extra pounds was your emotional way to communicate that you needed some space from intimacy (for whatever reason). If this is the case you have some emotional work to do before you will be able to lose the weight and keep it off. This may be a lifetime's worth of work. If the weight was your self protection, then you need to find new ways to feel internally protected. Before deciding your weight is the issue, make sure you have asked your partner what they think would help make your connection stronger. I doubt they'll say your weight is the issue. But if they do, then it is only fair to ask your partner to also work on something that will help you feel more connected to them. An obvious thing would be for them to work on being more vocal about the things they like about you and your body. If you're afraid of this conversation, a pastor, therapist or counselor is trained to help you with it. For those interested in getting a date, remember that finding someone who loves you just as you are is the goal, not finding someone who loves you only if you're skinny - otherwise this will have to be your resolution your whole life. Oh, and online dating can be a way to find people at any size and to have mean people who judge you on your looks just pass you by without any awkwardness.
Because you have guilt or shame about your body. First know that there are multimillion dollar industries invested in your insecurity. They can't sell you new stuff, if they don't convince you what you got is embarrassing. Remember when it was dorky to wear glasses? Now, all those glasses that were dorky in high school are high fashion. That's life in capitalism. A better resolution would be to learn to have a more balanced self image. Imagine how your life would change if your resolution was to give yourself three compliments about your body every time you saw yourself in a mirror. I don't care if they are the same three compliments, or if you have to stand in front of the mirror for hours just to come up with two. If that evil voice in your brain keeps telling you that you look like crap, drown it out with an even more repetitive voice that you are fantastic. Everyone has had moments of looking in the mirror and thinking they look great. But we've been taught that it's too vain to let those thoughts go to our head. Well honey, you've had a lifetime of putting yourself down and you deserve a little vanity. And don't make enjoying your body a new thing to feel shameful about... love loving yourself. Trust me it will feel better than the success of losing 5 pounds.

B: If you have some other resolution. Who are we kidding, most people's resolutions are about weight and body image. At least that's what all the magazines and news programs would have us believe right? The same principles apply to all other resolutions.

You just need to be brave enough to admit to yourself the real reason(s) you want to accomplish your goal.

Everyone: Don't make resolutions to do things, when what you really want is to feel things. Typically we are trying to achieve an emotion, not a goal. This is why even when we achieve our goal, we have failed to get what we want. Perhaps you want to feel loved, feel happy, feel self confident, feel important, feel healthy, feel like your making a difference or feel like an adult.

Ask yourself: When do I feel that way? Then do more of that or enjoy it more when it happens. Don't assume that you'll feel that way just because you complete tasks.Tasks are fleeting. Real change, real health, real self worth comes from being a balanced person who is able to love and be loved, to help and be helped, to give and receive.

Which is why I don't make resolutions. Instead, each day, each moment I try to live the prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

Living Lutheran blog post: in the footsteps of the little drummer boy

2011-12-22T12:08:00.001-08:00

I’m a scrooge of a pastor this time of the year. You may find me in stores, surrounded by excited holiday bargain shoppers, ranting to myself about the fact that it’s Advent and these carols shouldn’t be played until the 12 days after Christmas.

My least favorite holiday song has always been “The Little Drummer Boy.” It is the most obnoxious of the many long repetitive carols. Who would play a loud drum for a newborn baby?

Imagine Mary. She just trekked across the desert nine-months pregnant on a donkey. Then after giving birth in an unsanitary barn, she is exhaustedly trying to nurture a new baby who will not sleep for more than two hours at a time, when a little boy comes in with a loud drum.

What an impractical gift!

Read the rest here.

Loneliness

2011-12-19T16:03:00.000-08:00

I created this video after noticing that no one interacts or communicates on the public transit in San Francisco. It was filmed on a day when I traveled an entire day without human voices being spoken on muni. It is designed to make you feel the anxiousness that comes from a lack of collection. The only eye contact in the film is from advertisement on the side of the bus.

Transgender Advent Devotional

2011-12-17T10:09:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from my writing in the Words Matter, NCC Women's Ministry Advent Devotional

December 16, 2011

John 1:6-8, 19-28 *

When I was gestating in my mother’s womb, the doctors determined my sex by listening to my heartbeat. Through gender assumptions about athleticism and speed of my heart rate, it was determined that I was a boy. When I was born, the very first words spoken when the doctor looked at my vagina were: “Oops, it’s a girl.”

This story of my birth delights me today as a butch transgender bodied person, because it names the way I’ve felt like a boy in my heart but have the body of a woman. Believing all the after school specials and talks about puberty, I thought everyone grew up with the same discomfort in their body, so I dedicated my teenage years to loving my body when what I saw in the mirror didn’t match the desires of my heart.

Read the rest of the devotional here.

2011-12-12T17:52:00.000-08:00

Pastor Megan's Christmas present to the Community of Traveler community is a series of videosongs that narrate the life of Jesus using contemporary pop songs.

Check out this project: The Gospel According to Pop

Megan hopes to finish the project by January of 2012. Leave your comments below if you have ideas about what songs you think would help narrate the Jesus story in a way that will cause others to think or hear the gospel differently.

Reform More Than Wall Street!

2011-10-28T15:10:00.001-07:00

This Reformation week, I've been thinking about the ways Luther's actions would have been different if he lived today. Certainly, the political climate of the Occupy Movements have a similar populist gile that mimics the unrest of Luther's day. I imagine the reformation mobs that marched to abby's and churches to burn them down and distribute their riches to the poor, are similar to the longings of many angry marchers who head towards banks.

Thankfully, today's marchers are a lot more nonviolent and less likely to get themselves murdered if their top leaders flip-flop or align with political leaders, as Luther often needed to do in order to keep his head and neck attached.

Certainly the Pope and his theologians were as good at spinning bad press as Republicans are at convincing those desperately in need of health care that when the get it it will be a bad thing.

In my previous blog, I have argued that we should occupy churches and give power to the moral voices we want to have a national voice in our country's future. But, I wonder if optimism can cause Reformation if it lacks the sharp tongued venomous anger that Luther claimed as his vice.

Hatred and violence worked for our Lutheran origin, but I believe it cannot work today. At least here, from my privileged place as an employed Pastor in San Francisco, I must acknowledge that I'm nowhere near desperate enough to reform myself or the church in the ways Luther did.

That was Luther's to do.

My work is with the homeless and others living in poverty. My voice is heard by many and I hope it's because I see a vision of a more just world and deeply believe that if I do my part and you do yours we can be the society our neighbors deserve and at times desperately depend on.

As much as we may desire that others pay their fair share (whether it's bankers or seniors and those with disabilities), in the end it is up to us to roll up our sleeves, dust off our check books and feed people every time they are hungry.

Today our reformation is more likely to involve donations, cleaning dishes and toilets and loving everyone (without excuse) then it is to involve marching or pillaging.

So join me in the spirit of the Reformation and do at least one useful thing for the world, whether it's watching the kids of tired parents or raking someone's leaves - the new Reformation is one of compassion and care without an expectation that money needs to be exchanged for such things. Isn't that the heart of the historical Reformation anyway?

Feeding God's Children

2011-10-17T06:43:00.000-07:00

My earliest memory of food is of a bowl of Jell-O being thrown across the kitchen, landing on the wall and sliding down the wallpaper. My alcoholic father was having a violent fight with my mother and yelling something about how we should have had dinner at the table, oblivious to the fact that his rage had made it impossible for us to sit and eat.

My parents’ divorce was inevitable. Then, like many single mother families in the ‘80s, my mother, brother and I joined the long lines of women and children receiving large blocks of government cheese and powdered milk.

Read the rest at livinglutheran.com

Occupy St Aidan's

2011-10-16T19:13:00.001-07:00

As protests brew across the world, yesterday they raged in 900 cities, I've wondered if I should join the protests. You'd think it would be an easy choice, since I work with the chronically homeless and have dedicated my ministry to working with those living in poverty.

I love the idea of the people who have always been the majority taking back their voice and holding those in political power accountable.

I've done a lot of studying of nonviolence theory, so I'm proud when people find nonviolent ways to bring attention to important issues.

But, something about the protests have been unsettling to me. While I cheer on those street retreating and creating mass conversations in the streets, I can't help but remember that my mother is a banker and has been all her life.

In fact, she worked at the same bank since she was 18 and just retired a few months ago. As a working mother, she struggled to keep daily bread on our table. She managed the tellers at several branches of a South Dakota bank that went national. The reality is that our family was not the 1%.

As I see the images of the protests in front of banks I remember that my mothers desk and those on the lowest rungs of the banks payrolls are the ones sitting in earshot of the protests.

I also remember that the effectiveness of the civil rights protests and sit-ins came from their ability to dramaticize the injustices that existed, to force private terror to be publicly scrutinized or to clog the wheels of unjust laws by filling the jails so no one else could get arrested.

I wonder if the protests are dramatizing a solution? I also notice that we are in a precocious time when the world is listening to the protectors, but no individual voices have emerged as the leaders of a more benevolent future.

So I suggest, that we call for a shift in the countries moral compass. When we bring a mass of people to a location we give it power. But is Wall Street where we want our change to come from?

I call us to put our butts where our mouths are. Let's fill the spaces we want the world to see as the moral compass of our communities. And in those spaces, let's demand that those leaders speak for us and get voice in the halls of congress and at the CEO meetings where the 1% can actually be found.

What if the churches, Temples, zen centers and other places we wanted our ethical center to come from were as full as the streets?

This is our moment. Let us give to Wall Street what is Wall Street's. Keep your upside down wealth systems. Let us be people bringing a new understanding of love, hope and prosperity to the world.

So join me in occupying St Aidan's, herchurch, Christ Church, Inglesia Santa Maria y Marta and St. Francis. Lets fill the pews and the offering plates and reset our compasses. Whose with me?

Location:San Francisco

New Living Lutheran Post: Loving and Learning with Grandma

2011-09-29T18:52:00.000-07:00

The hymn lyrics, “Here I Am, Lord” and “Is it I, Lord?” bring tears to my grandmother’s eyes. “What if it’s true?” she asked me one day, revealing how ill-prepared and under-educated she felt she was to be God’s hands and feet in the world.

If you asked me, I’d tell you that most of the things I know about faith and advocacy, I learned watching my grandmother feed and care for people. No amount of education could create such an open, giving and humble heart. As a pastor and friend, I often find myself asking: What would grandma do?

Read the rest at LivingLutheran.com

See the: Questions from Grandma Videos

In the News: Butch Wonders

2011-09-04T00:48:00.000-07:00

Butch in the Clergy

I recently interviewed Rev. Megan Rohrer, a pastor in the ELCA Lutheran Church who identifies as butch, dyke, queer, and trans (Rev. Rohrer is the first openly transgender pastor in the Lutheran church). I hope you'll enjoy her remarkably candid answers--about everything from divinity to her dating life--as much as I did!

BW: How did you decide to become a minister? What was the timing re: coming out and joining the clergy?

Pastor Megan Rohrer (PMR): I never had a moment of being in the closet. I kissed a girl in college and then immediately became a poster child of all things gay - in South Dakota of all places. The backlash was primarily religious. So I began reading to be able to have words to describe what I always knew was true: that God loved me and there was nothing I could do to screw it up. After reading all the books I decided to become a religion major. I had previously been an art major studying sculpture.

BW: What college were you at?

PMR: I was at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, a Lutheran college.

BW: Were many people there out as queer?

PMR: There were a few, but it was a tough time. It was right after Matthew Shepard's death and there was a conservative Christian backlash. Folks tried to exorcize "gay demons" from us and drunk football players would knock on my door at night to "make me straight." I had to move off campus for about 3 months.

BW: Did you see a conflict between your religion and your sexual orientation?

PMR: Never.

BW: Were you raised Lutheran?

PMR: Yes, Lutheran is to South Dakota what being Jewish is to Israel. It's so engrained in the culture, the news, holidays, everything. But [being a gay pastor] wasn't allowed in the Lutheran church then.

BW: So you were a pretty religious kid?

PMR: I had had mystical experiences since I was five and always had an inner sense God was with me and for me. I used to sneak off to church when I was in middle school and not tell my family. I didn't really agree with the fundamental beliefs of the church I went to, but I loved the rituals and music. Lutheran worship is mostly sung, and I've always loved music.

BW: Can you tell us a little more about your decision to become a pastor?

PMR: When I was a senior in high school everyone told me I should be a pastor, but I wanted to be an artist. Then when I became a religion major, I wanted to be a pastor but I couldn't handle the fight after living through the violence at college. Since [being a gay pastor] wasn't in allowed in the church back then, I didn't want to fight.

BW: But something changed your mind?

PMR: Well, I became a counselor for abused children aged 3-12. When a 6-year-old who had tried to commit suicide 12 times crawled on my lap to tell me he wanted to die before he was too bad and had to go to hell, I knew I need to go to seminary and be trained as a pastor. I moved to Berkeley to become a pastor when I was 21.

BW: Wow. Did it feel like a natural fit at the time?

PMR: No, and it doesn't feel natural now. I still sometimes wish I could have another job, because it's very, very hard, lonely work. But, I am certain that there is nothing else I could do and that I'd still be the one people cry to on public transportation and talk to about God stuff. When I started working with the homeless in 2002, they always called me pastor. I used to give them a long explanation about why the Lutheran church didn't allow gay people to be pastors. They just responded by saying: "Whatever, Pastor." I think people notice that mystical things happen to me all the time. I'm the person who asks that follow up question that seems to come right out of someone's brain, helps them feel seen, or gets them to finally ask for help.

BW: When does your role as a pastor feel the most natural?

PMR: It feels natural when I get emails from people saying that reading about me helped them decide not to kill themselves, when I see my homeless people get housing, or when someone says: "I believed it when they said God couldn't love me, but you've helped me see that God's love can be big enough to love even me."

BW: In your denomination, who gets to go to heaven?

PMR: Lutheran theology is fantastic because it believes that everyone is simultaneously a saint and a sinner and there is nothing we can do about it. It holds that everyone is equally sinful and that God loves us regardless of how we live. The idea is, if you don't have to worry about your salvation, you will do more to care for the world and do justice. Martin Luther is famous for saying: "sin boldly, but believe more boldly still."

BW: What does it mean to "sin boldly?" In my mind it seems like: "Don't steal a candy bar--instead, rob a bank!"

PMR: It could mean that in its extreme. Sin boldly means, take a stance and have faith that where you stand is the right thing. It's probably very similar to a butch ethic. It suggests that in love you should be strong and act boldly. This does not mean you should be abusive or overly aggressive. But, if you have robbed a bank, regardless of your reasons, God will still love you.

BW: Are some kinds of love favored over others? For example, a heterosexual married relationship?

PMR: I don't think any kind of love is favored over others. There are many types of relationships in the Bible. The Book of Hosea compares human love to love between a heterosexual man and a prostitute, and Godly love to that between God and the Sons of Israel. There are queer metaphors, trans metaphors, kinky sex metaphors, and calls to be celibate. It's a really diverse book, but most pastors don't talk about the juicy parts out loud... I think some Christians have confused God with Santa Claus who keeps a list, or Keebler Elves that are just supposed to give us wonderful things, but I think it's more about being people trying to learn how to love and accept love from something bigger than we are.

BW: You make it sound so clear cut! Why do so many kinds of Christianity reject homosexuality or label it as a sin?

PMR: Many Christians reject homosexuality because of the King James version of the Bible. It is the first time that homophobia appears in the translations. They were created because King James slept with men. People who could not say anything bad about the king (without being beheaded) put it in the translation... Then those ideas were taught around the world by missionaries who tried to colonize and convert people.

BW: Doesn't the NIV version have some anti-gay stuff in it, too?

PMR: All the later translations got their language from the King James. The words in the original Greek are unclear. But even if homosexuality was a sin, Jesus says his anger is but a moment and his love endures forever and that nothing--neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come--can ever separate us from God's love. The tradition of acceptance in religions of all faiths is much older than this contemporary idea that it's sinful. Ancient Rabbis believed that gay people were created by God.

BW: I bet that if they were raised with you as their pastor, more gay people would be religious! Why do you think so many gay people reject religion?

PMR: There are many gay Christians--I meet them all the time. I think it's harder for people to be "out" about their Christianity in the gay community than it is for some people to be out [as gay] in society.

BW: How do you identify within the queer community?

PMR: I identify as queer, trans, dyke and butch.

BW: I've written about the tension between female-identified butches and FTMs. Do you feel that, as someone who identifies as both trans and a dyke?

PMR: I do feel that. I grew up thinking that everyone felt body dysphoria--that's what all the after-school specials said about female bodies. So I learned to love my body even when it didn't feel like the body I would have chosen. But my trans brothers are unbelievably strong, and I mourn their loss of community when the butch community rejects them. Often this happens because people are afraid to admit they have similar feelings or that sometimes it would feel good to have male privilege and not get harassed all the time.

BW: So you identify as trans, but are not physically transitioning?

PMR: I have learned never to say never when it comes to making statements about whether I will transition. This [female body] is what works for me now. I grew up watching movies where I wanted to get the girl in the end, so it meant that I had to imagine that I was the leading male. I think it's easy for my brain to go there and fantasize about that.

BW: I guess that begs the question: why not physically transition?

PMR: Currently, I don't shave my legs and I'm uninterested in shaving my face. I'm lucky I'm known as trans, because I get the best of both worlds. I can be seen as male (when I want to be) and keep my body the way it is. But when my doctors told me I needed breast reduction surgery to help with back pain, it was a long process to decide if I should make my chest more masculine or more feminine. Both felt wrong to me, so I didn't have surgery and I do physical therapy. Also, I've always felt like I physically want to have a baby, so I may feel very differently after that happens (though I'm not currently working on that, either).

BW: Do you ever present as male in your church?

PMR: Any time I wear a pastor collar people think I'm a "Father." It's because most people can't think of any butch pastors. I have bound and packed at church. Most people can't tell because the robe on top gets rid of any distinction.

BW: Do the folks in your congregation address you with male pronouns, female ones, or both?

PMR: It's a mixture. Some use male, some female. Some just say pastor. I once talked to a man at the end of the service who said until the sermon he thought I was a man, and then I became a woman. I appreciated that he had seen both natures inside of me.

BW: Who do you tend to date? Butches, femmes? Men, women? Trans people? Everyone?

PMR: I've dated all kinds of people, with all kinds of bodies. I'm very attracted to curves and soft skin. But I believe that if I transitioned that I'd likely be attracted to men. Very close to each other on the gender spectrum is the shift between a butch woman and a nelly [effeminate] man. When I present as male, it's a very feminine one. I find that when people accept my masculinity and my butchness, I can explore my soft sides that like to be comforted and taken care of. Someone recently told me I'm like a bear, without the beard.

BW: Why do you think you'd be more attracted to men if you transitioned?

PMR: It's pretty common when people transition. Some people think it's because instead of being attracted to a sex, people may be attracted to like bodies.

BW: I prefer my partner to have the same level of masculinity as me.

PMR: It's not very common for butches to be able to date each other and explore those dynamics. Perhaps if it was more common we could have a fuller sense of what we like and explore all the parts of ourselves.

BW: At what point do you tell someone you're dating what your occupation is? Is being a pastor something you put in an online dating profile?

PMR: I put a picture of myself in my clergy collar on my profile. If someone has a problem with my being a pastor, we should not date.

BW: I bet some people think it's a costume and that you're being ironic.

PMR: I think the faux hawk, tattoos, and piercings help people see I'm not a scary pastor... The picture I post in my collar is actually of me blowing a very large bubble--since I probably am more surprised that I'm a pastor than anyone else is. I also write in my profile that I'm a pastor, and about how I do things like Lady Gaga Mass.

BW: Lady Gaga mass?! I have to know more...

PMR: Martin Luther changed pub tunes into Christian lyrics. But the songs all seem boring nowadays. I followed his lead and changed the lyrics of some contemporary music. I also do Beatles Mass and a Bob Dylan Mass.

BW: That sounds fun! I just googled Lady Gaga mass and found your YouTube channel. I bet that isn't what most people think of when they think of church!

PMR: Right! It's true. Those videos are from the first time it was ever performed. Thankfully we've gotten better. We're doing a fundraiser in November where we're going to perform it with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence--that is going to be amazing!

BW: Back to dating... If I saw a pastor's profile online, I would think: there's NO way I'm getting any action for a while.

PMR: Yes, an often asked first date question is: can you have sex before marriage? I think it should go on the record that the greatest kept secret is that pastors are good in bed (when it's ethical and mutual and all that, not when it's any of the yucky stuff that appears in the paper).

BW: The record shall so reflect! So I'll take that as a yes, pastors can have sex before marriage?

PMR: Yes, we can. Oh, also: Something to think about is that a lot of kink culture comes from the sexualization of religious rituals. I'm just saying.

BW: [Laughter]

PMR: The Song of Songs is a very kinky book of the Bible. It's all about beautiful breasts and loving an ungendered person who is like a gazelle!

BW: Would you ever date someone who did not share your faith?

PMR: Oh of course. My longest relationships have been with Jews. I also feel madly in love with an atheist. I think what's important is how people live their life and how they love. There are lots of ways to share rituals and family without using words like: Jesus, God, salvation, etc.

BW: Would you ever raise kids with a non-Christian?

PMR: Yes. If I had a child I would want them to be baptized... But, it would be different if I was dating someone of another faith who already had a child. For example, Jewish traditions and rituals are where the Christian ones came from, so I think there's no need to double up. Kids are pretty smart and so much more in touch with faith than adults, so I think they are more than able to become amazing beings in interfaith families.

BW: That's interesting.

PMR: Oh, and pastors aren't allowed to be friends with people they meet at church. This is to help prevent some of the unethical sex scandals and jealousy that can come from getting to close to people in the congregation. But it means that although pastors are surrounded by hundreds of people all the time, it's incredibly lonely.

BW: Wait, you can't even be FRIENDS with people you meet at church?

PMR: It makes sense if you think about it. We act as counselors and know more about people than they do about us. And you can't really confide in them because people often confuse the faithfulness of their pastor with how God feels about them.

BW: That's got to be hard.

PMR: It is. Developing a strong group of friends is important. I find making friends with people of diverse faiths, or no faith at all, is important. It's great to have people who could care less about church, so we can be reminded that the whole world doesn't revolve around who spilled wax on the carpet.

BW: Do you belong to a community of butch pastors?

PMR: I don't know if there is a community of butch pastors, but I go on retreat every year with a group called Proclaim. It's the group of all the out queer pastors in the Lutheran church. It's like my family--to be able to spend time with them and have people around who understand the pressures of being a queer pastor.

BW: What are those pressures?

PMR: Being newly included in any community, there are pressures to be perfect. You can't talk about what is hard or ask for help in the same ways. But there are also ways in which I've been given a bigger voice and responsibilities because people want diversity and there are few queer pastors they can put in leadership.

BW: Do you ever get any flak from the Lutheran Church about the stuff you do outside of church?

PMR: Oh, no I haven't gotten any flak from the Lutheran Church. They actually hired me to blog for them because they like the way I write about advocacy issues. As the first transgender pastor ordained in the Lutheran church, there isn't really any precedent for how I ought to behave, so I get a lot of freedom. I'm very, very lucky!

BW: I was thinking of your (excellent) photography work, "Everyday Drag" that was in Briarpatch earlier this year.

PMR: I wondered how they would feel about that essay, but I got a lot of feedback, particularly from female clergy, that it captured some of the pressures they felt like they couldn't complain about in church.

BW: What pressures do you think female clergy experience?

PMR: As a female pastor, I've never been to church and not had someone comment on the outfit I was wearing, or my hair. Some male pastors talk over me, literally. And... my menstration will not stop during certain parts of a church service. There is something mystical that happens during communion and the sermon where I become afraid I will bleed more than is safe. I can't explain it or describe it, but it feels sacred. In Jewish tradition, menstruation is sacred because it is connected to life. I never understood that before I became a pastor.

BW: That is intense.

PMR: Ironically, it is menstruation that made it so that women could not be pastors for so long. There was a sense that we are unclean and couldn't have a ritual given to others during that time. But, I know deeply in my body that the in-church rituals I do during that time are so much more sacred. Sorry bio boys!

BW: How does it feel to have a job that helps so many people?

PMR: It feels humbling and I'm extremely grateful for the opportunities I've been given, for my health, for the luck and inner drive I've had that helps me be joyous when others are depressed. It reminds a bit like how it feels to get dressed up in a suit and tie. There is this power that I can take on that taps me into this greater energy.

BW: That is the second analogy you have drawn between butchness and being a member of the clergy. It sounds like the two things are really symbiotic for you.

PMR: Yes, I think there is a connection between the way that butches embody strength and giving. Pastors have a lot to learn from butch culture.

BW: One last question: what advice or reading recommendations would you give to queer people who are interested in exploring queer-positive Christianity?

PMR: There is a queer Bible commentary that is really great. Jay Baker, Sara Miles and Anne Lamott write some really good stuff that isn't as queer focused, but is queer affirming for a general audience. I also recommend Peterson Toscano's plays - they're hysterical. He has one about his failed attempt to become ex-gay and one about transgender Bible characters.

BW: Thank you so much for your time--I learned a lot!

PMR: It was great to chat with you.

BW: This was way juicier than I expected.

PMR: Fantastic!

Questions From Grandma

2011-07-06T13:03:00.001-07:00

While on a continuing education trip in England, Scotland and Ireland, visiting religious pilgrimage sites, my grandma was gracious enough to ask me questions.

I like her questions because they are similar to the questions thousands of other Lutherans have but feel too embarassed to ask their pastors.

I find that when I talk about faith in a way that my grandmother can understand, it's also more understandable to the typical person in the pew.

So please ease drop on these conversations and enjoy. I hope it inspires you to ask more questions about your faith and to begin talking out loud about what you believe with others.

Episode 1: Streull Healing Wells (Downpatrick, Ireland)
Episode 2: St. Patrick (Downpatrick, Ireland)
Episode 3: St. Giles (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Episode 4: St. Aidan (Lindisfarne, England)
Episode 5: John Knox and the Reformation (Edinburgh, Scotland)

New Living Lutheran Post: Lutheran Freedom

2011-07-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

Some scholars argue that the most significant archeological find of the Reformation happened when they discovered Martin Luther’s toilet.

Calling it his “secret place,” it is thought that Luther did most of his writing while he battled chronic constipation.

While modern science may have been able to cure his reformational angst with pills and tonics, it was fear that paralyzed his bowels.

Luther carried the fear that he would go to hell deeply in his gut.

So when Luther had his breakthrough realization that he was freed in Christ to serve, that there was nothing he could do to screw up the salvation promised to him in his baptism and fulfilled by Christ on the cross, I imagine that the “a ha” came from inside his guts, which started to become unloosed (the literal translation of the Greek word used by Jesus for forgiveness in the Gospels).

Read the rest at: Living Lutheran

New Living Lutheran Post: On Living Lutheran

2011-06-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

When I was a student at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, training to become a pastor, it seemed like there were two types of students:

1) Cultural Lutherans who were raised Lutheran, are often from the Midwest and who hold many strange and wonderful German and Norwegian dishes and customs in high esteem. These Lutherans often call themselves “womb to tomb Lutherans.”

2) Those who chose to be Lutheran. These Lutherans often knew more about the sayings and teachings of Luther and spoke poetically about their conversion moment or the congregations that shaped their faith.

Of course, neither one is the right or wrong way to be Lutheran.

I grew up in Sioux Falls, S.D., where it seems that even the Catholics are Lutheran, because Lutheran culture there is so integrated into the speaking styles and expected customs that I find it hard to separate any of the things that I do in my life from my Lutheranism.

Read the rest of the blog here.

Honorary Degree from Palo Alto University

2011-06-05T01:01:00.000-07:00

Today I was honored to receive an honorary Doctorate of Human Letters for community service from Palo Alto University a graduate and undergraduate university of psychology.

Below you can watch video from the ceremony-

President Allen Calvin Introduces Me:

My Acceptance Speech to 600 students, faculty, board members and family of graduates:

Receiving the degree:

HRC Clergy Call in Washington DC

2011-05-25T10:16:00.001-07:00

This past weekend I attended the Human Right's Campaign's Clergy Call in Washington, DC. On Sunday afternoon I was part of a panel on LGBT Homeless Youth. You can read more about my experience at clergy call on the Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries blog. I've included excerpts below:

Blog 1:
“Last night I presented at the Human Rights Campaign Clergy Call in Washington DC on LGBTQ Homeless Youth with Jeff Krehely, Director of LGBT Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress and André Wade, Program and Policy Analyst at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Jeff and André outlined the policy issues that currently affect LGBT homeless youth and I talked about ways that pastors and congregations can listen to, interact with and advocate for homeless youth in ethically and faithfully responsible ways.

Jeff and André shared alarming facts and stats that are compelling. I was shocked to learn that the US only spends $200 per homeless youth each year, which is supposed to pay for their education, housing and reconnect them with healthy families. Yet, this amount doesn’t even cover their food needs. They also talked about their work with Sen. Kerry, who for the first time is introducing a bill that earmarks funds for LGBT youth.

Read the rest of the blog here.

Blog 2:

Yesterday hundreds of clergy and faith leaders, including about fifteen Lutherans, went to Capitol Hill as a part of the Human Right’s Campaign’s (HRC) Clergy Call. Their goal was to remind their elected leaders that progressive faith leaders who preach and teach that equality is a right for all people stand with the majority of Americans. In fact, a new poll from HRC shows that 86% of Americans of faith reported that their faith leads them to believe that all people, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals, deserve equal protections under the law.

These faith leaders represented millions of parishioners, members of denominations and individuals whom they’d prayed with and for. Some of the most moving pleas at the press conference were calls to end the funerals that pastors had been doing for gay youth who falsely believed they had no other options. Leaders urged congress to pass the Safe Schools and Anti-bullying Acts that could provide nationwide support for these youth.

Read the rest of the blog here.

In the News: Bay Area Reporter

2011-05-18T22:34:00.001-07:00

'Encampment' brings attention to homeless LGBT youth

NEWS

Published 05/19/2011

by Matt Baume



	Homeless youth and their allies staged a "street sweep" in the Castro last Saturday to bring attention to budget cuts for social service programs. Photo: Matt Baume

The May 14 encampment was part of a nationwide demonstration to raise awareness of homelessness among a demographic known as transition-age youth. Homeless and foster youth between 16 and 24 years old can face unique housing challenges, particularly as they age out of the foster care system and learn to navigate services for adults.

"We're here to engage the community on homelessness, and specifically queer homeless youth issues," said organizer Beck, who uses only one name. "We're in kind of a state of emergency, saying, 'hey community, wake up.'"

Saturday's action started at Civic Center with games, an unveiling of protest banners, and hot meals served by Food Not Bombs. A march proceeded to Harvey Milk Plaza, where speakers read poetry and called for improved access to services to get off the street.

Their requests included housing with kitchens, rather than single room occupancy hotels with no facilities for food preparation; employment opportunities for youth who are unable to complete school; and an end to the sit-lie ordinance.

According to local organizers Trans Youth Rise Above, there are 5,700 homeless youth in San Francisco, of which at least 1,000 are queer.

Operation Shine America, which coordinated similar rallies in other cities, estimates that there are 2 million homeless youth in the country. Queers for Economic Equality Now also organized the San Francisco event.

Beck explained that organizations like the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center and Larkin Street Youth Services' Castro Youth Housing Initiative have faced repeated budget cuts, reducing services that can prevent youth from living on the street.

Jodi Schwartz, executive director of LYRIC, agreed that times are tight. "There has been a sizable decrease in investments in LGBTQ youth services," she told the Bay Area Reporter. "Just for LYRIC, if we were to lose the last piece of dollars for transition-age youth workforce, our decrease in funding would be 72 percent over the last four years."

Larkin Street Executive Director Sherilyn Adams told the B.A.R. that the extent of cuts won't be known until Mayor Ed Lee releases a budget later this month.

"There's no proposed cuts to the Castro Youth program," she said, but added, "it does not begin to meet the need."

To address the potential consequences of such cuts, Lee recently convened a stakeholder group consisting of representatives from organizations that advocate for homeless youth. Based on feedback from that group, the mayor asked that the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families prioritize funding for LGBT and undocumented youth.

While organizations hope to turn around the recent budget cuts, local organizers are seeking ways to demonstrate how the city's rate of youth homelessness could worsen.

After Saturday's protest concluded, about three dozen homeless youth spent parts of the night camped out around the Muni station, according to organizer the Reverend Megan Rohrer, director of the Welcome Ministry, a coalition of 12 churches that seek to provide a faithful response to poverty.

Rohrer is currently working with the GLBT Historical Society to raise visibility by drawing inspiration from past struggles. She incorporated a "street sweep" into Saturday's protest, in which participants swept Castro Street sidewalks with brooms to evoke a similar 1960s-era protest.

In that action, LGBTs protested the city's negligent sanitation and police roundups by pushing brooms through the Tenderloin.

New Living Lutheran Blog Post

2011-05-05T06:46:00.001-07:00

As an ELCA pastor, you’d think I’d feel more comfortable praying in public. But I confess that nearly every time I pray in public, I feel self conscious, like my words weren’t moving, poetic or spirit-filled enough.

Because it’s my job, I can’t refuse to pray during worship or when someone in tears pleads for private prayer. Thankfully, I’m required to practice praying out loud.

I’ve found it helpful to read the Psalms, which show me that prayer can be an expression of awe for God and the wonders of the earth, confusion about injustice in the world, cries for help and healing or even anger at God, when God seems to have forgotten to be as present as is promised.

I’ve also found it helpful to memorize some of the beautiful prayers that almost always touch people’s hearts. Words like: “Now I lay me down to sleep,” “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” “God grant me the serenity” and “Our Father, who art in heaven.” Recently, I’ve enjoyed using hymns and spirituals as prayers and find that they touch my heart in a particularly moving way. Some of my favorites to sing are: “Jesus loves me this I know,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

Read the rest of the blog here.

Help Megan Win the Citizen of Tomorrow Award

2011-05-01T07:25:00.000-07:00

Megan has been chosen as a finalist for the Bay Area Citizen's Citizen of Tomorrow Award, for her work using community gardening to help the homeless and individuals with severe mental health issues to improve their quality of life.

Of the 5 finalists for the award, 3 will receive cash prizes for the projects of their choice. The winners are chosen through internet voting.

If Megan wins, she will use the prize money to buy seedlings for the garden she helped create at Bethlehem Lutheran in West Oakland, to buy bicycle powered smoothie machines for 3 community gardens and food and supplies for SF Refresh events.

SF Refresh is a project that Megan created and coordinates as Project Homeless Connect's Growing Home Community Garden Manager, in collaboration with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, which coordinates free whole body health care at community gardens throughout the city. You can learn more about SF Refresh here.

Please vote for Megan (#5 SF Refresh) - you can vote once a day until May 16th.

Tree, another finalist for the award is one of Megan's co-collaborators on the Free Farm project. Tree will be donating any prize money that he wins to the Free Farm. So, if you choose not to vote for Megan, please vote for Tree!

Be Afraid: The Great San Francisco Sleep-In

2011-04-28T17:38:00.000-07:00

Dear people who think it's a liability risk to have a sleep-in event:

Thank you! The fact that you think it is unsafe for people to sleep on the streets, even when it is supervised, well organized, rehearsed with the police and led by leaders who have gone on street retreats for years - means you have the ability to understand how much more vulnerable it feels for 100's of thousands of people (and particularly the young adults) to sleep on the streets every night of the year.

Part of the reason that I'll be sleeping on the streets on May 14th as a part of the Great San Francisco Sleep-In and part of the reason I'm encouraging others to join me is not so we can feel comfortable - but so that you and others can worry about us and be moved enough to respond to homelessness. I imagine you will be inclined to do more than if we slept in our beds that night.

How would our country change if we truly understood the part we are playing in the homelessness of our brothers and sisters? How would our country change if we thought every person who slept on the streets was a liability risk and we decided to no longer stand for it?

Whenever I sleep on the streets people care and worry about me, in a way that they do not worry about the others who sleep on the streets each night. If enough of us sleep on the streets on May 14th, we can get the whole country worried about those sleeping on the streets. Join me in person, or virtually (I'll be blogging about this night on the streets). Even if you're busy, don't forget to worry about it - for the purpose of inspiring you to give money, speak out and make change!

You can also read my blogged experiences of some of my past street retreats.

Thanks again for being uncomfortable. Please never get used to me sleeping on the streets. Let's get un-numb to the poverty and homelessness in our country.

Blessings to you all whether you'll sleep in a bed or on cardboard tonight.

Pastor Megan.

Living Lutheran Post: World Malaria Day

2011-04-25T21:56:00.000-07:00

The last time I visited my mother’s farm in Minnesota, I remember her laughing hysterically as we carried in the groceries, luggage and items we had just bought in town.

My mother and I were inching our way from the car to the front door, each trying to balance about 10 grocery bags in addition to rolling suitcases, when my mother turned and said, “We come from a long line of German women who refuse to take more than one trip from the car.”

We laughed for a long time wondering why we thought we needed to do everything all at once.

Read the rest of the blog post here.

Gaga Mass & Vanguard Tour

2011-04-21T15:14:00.001-07:00

I'm excited to announce that the Lady Gaga Mass will be traveling to select locations along with the Vanguard Traveling Exhibit and Speaking Tour. With the Vanguard Talk at 7pm (featuring Joey Plaster Oral History Chair at the GLBT Historical Society and Mia Tu Mutch trans youth activist) and the Gaga Mass, arranged by Pastor Megan Rohrer (Executive Director of Welcome and co-pastor of the Community of Travelers) at 8 pm. The Gaga Mass offering will raise money for local LGBTQ youth ministries and shelters in the area of our tour.

We'll be adding tour dates, times and locations to this site soon. Start getting excited!

Washington DC - May 22, 2011: HRC Clergy Call
New York - May 27-30, 2011

7 pm: Saturday, May 28: Vanguard Talk at Trinity Lutheran Church of Manhattan
8 pm: Saturday, May 28: Lady Gaga Mass Fundraiser to benefit Trinity Place (shelter for homeless LGBTQA youth) at Trinity Lutheran Church of Manhattan
11 am: Sunday, May 29: Pastor Megan Rohrer preaching at Trinity Lutheran Church of Manhattan

Los Angeles - June 10-11, 2011
Portland - June 18-19, 2011
San Francisco - June 23, 2011: GLBT Historical Society Museum
Chicago - January 5-8, 2012: American Historical Association Annual Meeting

Copyright permission for the Lady Gaga Mass obtained through PERFORMmusic License#6400
Mad love to the Gaga!

Forgiveness Letters

2011-04-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

On April 16th, I'm coordinating the first of six SF Refresh events. SF Refresh will provide free whole body care activities in community gardens throughout San Francisco. A number of art projects, created by Melissa Lareau and Ilyse Magy, will appear at The Free Farm, Hayes Valley Farm and the Growing Home Community Garden throughout the day (see the calendar of events). These projects are designed to beautify the garden/farm spaces, inspire wellness and to help us work towards more loving, peaceful, green lives and communities.

The We Forgive You Papers, is a project that I'm particularly excited about. On April 16th we'll be transforming the letters into pots for seedlings that will then be planted into the earth and will eventually compost into the soil. Check out the call for letters to learn how to participate even if you can't make it in person.

Here is my forgiveness letter:

Maya Angelou said, "you do what you can, until you know better."

I forgive myself for not knowing better sooner. I let go of the sense that I ought to have done more in situations where it was perfectly normal to just be a kid, to be afraid or to simply be human. I cherish the fact that I now have a voice and life that is strong enough to not only protect myself, but to speak out for others - particularly those thought to be the most vulnerable.

I forgive the angry men and women in my life who have created a sense in me that chaos is manageable and that I must carry more than is mine to carry. I understand now the systems of violence and generations of baggage that you are carrying. I do my best to not take yours on as my own and forgive myself when I walk the rutted roads of my ancestors that lead only to fear and shame.

I release myself from the useless debates in my brain that think: humility is opposed to achieving my dreams; trivial actions and speech are correlated to the amount of love I experience from the world and loved ones; about what life would be like without my disabilities; and the ways in which I stumbled the past.

I resolve to do what I can, until I know better.

I forgive you and I am forgiven.

Megan Rohrer
San Francisco, CA

In the News: NBC Bay Area

2011-03-29T15:31:00.001-07:00

Urban Farming About to Sprout in the City

Tuesday, Mar 29, 2011 | Updated 10:30 AM PDT

Joe Rosato Jr.

Pastor Megan Rohrer helps plant vegetables in the Urban Farming community garden near San Francisco Civic Center. "Gardens are some of the most self-care devices that we have," Rohrer said. "It gets you kind of rooted to the environment."

By Sajid Farooq

Farms in San Francisco? It's about to happen.

Technically it has been happening for a long time but the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is about to take the next step in urban farming.

Mayor Ed Lee and board President David Chiu are pushing a a measure that would update zoning regulations in the City allowing residents to apply for permits to grow gardens anywhere.

The measure would allow residents to not only grow fruits and veggies across the City with a permit but also sell the food.

The City is hoping the measure will promote residents' access to healthy, locally grown food.

Reposted from: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/the-scene/food-drink/Urban-Farming-About-to-Sprout-in-the-City-118851314.html

In the News: SF Examiner

2011-03-28T17:54:00.000-07:00

San Francisco urban farms closer to legitimacy
Linked by Michael Levenston

Pastor Megan Rohrer helps plant vegetables in the Urban Farming community garden near San Francisco Civic Center. “Gardens are some of the most self-care devices that we have,” Rohrer said. “It gets you kind of rooted to the environment.” Photo by Joe Rosato Jr.

“Our legislation would place San Francisco at the forefront of urban agriculture policies nationwide.”

By: Brent Begin
Sf Examiner Staff Writer
Mar 28, 2011.

Reposted from: http://www.cityfarmer.info/2011/04/03/san-francisco-urban-farms-closer-to-legitimacy/

The Board of Supervisors is one step closer to turning the phrase “down on the farm” on its ear.

“Urban agriculture” legislation sponsored by Mayor Ed Lee and Board of Supervisors President David Chiu would update zoning regulations to explicitly permit gardens in all areas of The City and allow for the sale of produce from those gardens.

The legislation breezed through the board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee on Monday.

“Urban agriculture not only increases people’s access to locally grown, healthy and sustainable food, but it also converts unused land to productive green spaces, revitalizing neighborhoods and creating green jobs,” Lee said in a statement.

“Our legislation would place San Francisco at the forefront of urban agriculture policies nationwide,” Chiu said in a statement. “My hope is that this is the first of many changes The City makes to increase the viability and scale of urban agriculture in San Francisco.”

The proposal allows for gardens of less than one acre, while gardens one acre or larger would require a special Planning Commission exemption.

The full board will vote on the legislation April 5.

Story here.

In the News: Indie Stories

2011-03-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

Sunday, March 20, 2011

MAKING HISTORY: "VANGUARD REVISITED" HAS A CONVERSATION WITH THE PAST

In San Francisco, the "Vanguard Revisited" project is doing some of the most exciting work in community history that I've seen in quite some time. Initiated by oral historian and radio producer Joey Plaster, and activist minister Rev. Megan Rohrer, the project "resuscitates the history of the 1960s queer youth organization Vanguard and explores the ways in which its history is embodied in the present," according to the new project magazine. Programs in oral history, youth development, and other areas may have a lot to learn from the model of "Vanguard Revisited." Besides, the project's magazine, blog, audio program, and walking tours are just plain fun, vital, and provocative.

Let's step into the way-back machine for a moment. As far back as the 1960s, San Francisco's Tenderloin district has been a hangout spot for runaways and street youth, many of them LGBT or queer. Queer youth had flocked to San Francisco because of its growing reputation as a haven for outcasts. And the Tenderloin district was where many of them would gather; not coincidentally, it was also home to the "Meat Rack" area for young sex workers, the offices of the early "homophile" organization the Mattachine Society, an urban ministry in Glide Church, led by the Rev. Cecil Williams, and more. It was here in the Tenderloin in 1966 that queer street youth formed "Vanguard," a group for fun, socializing, and mutual support. They held street protests, put on weekly dances, and produced a magazine that covered sex, drugs, theology, loneliness. A 1966 statement protested police harassment, economic exploitation by adults, and drug problems to which adults seemed willfully blind. A hostile letter to the magazine (with the oddly affectionate salutation of "Darlings") said that the writer had "bought your filthy magazine from a street seller much to my dismay. I find it is nothing more than a rag for low-grade perverts, dope addicts and pacifists." At least he was in agreement with Vanguard youth. An underground 'zine that same year, 1966, ran a story headlined "Young Rejects Form Own Organization." The kids were doin' it for themselves!

Until fairly recently, this group -- which disbanded in name within a year or two -- was just a memory for surviving members to recount, and some faded papers in the archives of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. But that organization's oral history program coordinator, Joey Plaster, learned of the group, and saw a special resonance with today's youth. He joined forces with local minister Megan Rohrer to put the past in conversation with the present.

It would be a perfectly nifty little project to, say, republish one of the old "Vanguard" magazines. But what distinguishes "Vanguard Revisited" is that the history duo teamed up Larkin Street Youth Services and other local organizations to assemble a group of today's queer youth, who then submitted their own stories, poetry, and art in response to the contents of the original magazine. In "Vanguard Revisted" magazine, content from the 1960s "Vanguard" is paired with writings and art from today, often on similar themes. There's also a project blog, a series of oral histories, walking tours that feature clips of oral histories from original Vanguard members, and an upcoming tour to other cities.

Instead of simply delivering history to queer youth, "Vanguard Revisited" actually enlists today's queer youth to quite literally make history -- to document history, and become a part of it. Youth draw a historical (or, in a sense, genealogical) line from themselves to homeless youth of the 1960s and before, perhaps even to the outcasts in the Bible. And in time, today's queer youth may become the ancestor's of tomorrow's fighters, writers, poets, and preachers.

Intrigued? Go visit the project website, where you can listen to an audio documentary with clips from oral history interviews of original "Vanguard" members, and download the "Vanguard Revisited" magazine. Also be sure to check out the project blog, with video clips of Tenderloin walking tours, and more.

Reclaiming the 'e' Word

2011-03-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

I confess that when I was asked to write for LivingLutheran.com, I expected to simply have a virtual pulpit where I could share thoughts that might not fit into the lectionary or community I was sharing a Sunday morning with.

I’m glad to say that it has become more than that to me. Recently, I’ve been logging onto the website regularly to read tips about how to minister to diverse populations or in difficult settings and to read the thoughts of Lutherans across the country.

What is new and exciting about this site, is not that Lutherans are living out their faith in creative and justice-centered ways, but that we are beginning to learn how to talk about it.

The members of the ELCA are very good at doing. I’ve been proud of my church’s response to natural disasters, poverty, human suffering and all the seen and unseen ways we are fulfilling the gospel call to “go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).

We are truly an active church, but sometimes we are like a family that shows kindness and supports each other but never says the words “I love you” out loud.

Read the rest here.

Evangelism and Scabby Crosses

2011-03-17T08:27:00.000-07:00

Last night, I taught an intersexed youth how to properly bandage her arm. She had cross shaped scabs on her arms that were not nearly as deep as the pain they were trying to make visible.

Across the country, congregations, groups and even our presiding Bishop have made videos as a part of the "It Get's Better" campaign. The message is important: life is precious, all should be loved and GLBT individuals sometimes grow up to be healthy productive members of society - sometimes even to become famous.

But, when we fail in our evangelism, this is not always the case. When the Lutheran church was slow to respond to the AIDS crisis, arguing about the sexuality of the individuals rather than sharing the deep gutted gospel message that proclaims baptismal love, thousands of gay men died before it got better.

Later when the Lutheran church was slow to evangelize to GLBT individuals and got caught up in arguing about the sexuality of pastors, dozens (possibly hundreds) of pastors and would be pastors killed themselves. Countless youth and young adults fled the homes and the churches they grew up with, in search of families that could love them without hesitation.

You may be like many Lutherans who wonder why they have to extend a special welcome or evangelize to GLBT individuals. Shouldn't they know that the phrase all are welcome includes them?

Perhaps if there wasn't a 31 year delay from when Lutheran college students began demanding the church evangelize to GLBT individuals and our ability to fully do so, a need to evangelize in a special way would not be needed.

Having worked with the chronically homeless in San Francisco for that last nine years, I am convinced that we will never be able to deal with homelessness in San Francisco until congregations like yours begin evangelizing loudly to GLBT individuals.

Nearly all of the homeless folk I work with left their homes and families (predominantly from the midwest) because they experienced or thought they would experience homophobia from their communities. Even if their church never said anything about GLBT individuals, the voices of media and television personalities became so loud that they were confused with the voice of all Christians.

Or maybe you did try, but it didn't seem big enough to counteract the feelings of the rest of the community or the GLBT folk missed that Sunday.

If only to save the life of one youth, our evangelism voices must raise to the same volume and frequency as those who have negative things to say.

Evangelize like the prophet Isaiah. Speak from the longing for and demand God's justice now. Assume that more is possible and be people ready to act boldly.

Someday your evangelism will pay off and your welcome to all will be heard by all. Until then, your congregation is much better prepared to hear "It gets better" than a youth considering suicide.

If your congregation is worried about bullies who may get angry or upset if you evangelize to GLBT individuals, imagine how hard it must be for youth who lives with this experience daily and who feels they must face it alone.

Thankfully, I was able to be a pastor to the intersexed youth who needed someone to remind them that we celebrate lent as a community so that we can voice the pain and suffering of the world. And thankfully, our beloved Lutheran church is big enough so that there are pastors and congregations across the country willing to evangelize to GLBT individuals.

But, let us all work together during this Lenten season to let the whole world know that we have old rituals to embody the same feelings that may be new to the young adult who carved into her arm. We're not afraid of pain or suffering and we march towards the cross because we know Easter is waiting just around the corner.

As it is said in the echoing refrain of taize: darkness is never darkness in your sight, the deepest night is clear as the daylight.

We know the light and we must share it though loud rainbow proclaiming evangelism. It will be.

In the News: LCNA - RIC Sunday with the Metro Portland Chapter

2011-02-09T22:10:00.000-08:00

Lutherans Concerned: RIC Sunday with the Metro Portland Chapter:

The following is a guest post from Vicky Charlston of the Lutherans Concerned/Portland Metro Chapter. Vicky shares her experience of the chapter’s worship celebration of Reconciling in Christ Sunday.

“We Shall Overcome Someday…”

We sang this verse as part of the seventh RIC worship service sponsored by the Portland Metro Chapter of Lutherans Concerned/North America. Lutherans from Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington gathered for the RIC Sunday celebration at First Immanuel Church in Northwest Portland. Pastor Megan Rohrer preached and spoke of the beginnings of Lutherans Concerned thirty-six years ago around the same time that a group of gay youth in San Francisco yearned for a Lutheran worship service where they felt safe and welcome.

Pr. Megan Rohrer preaching the Gospel

The service was a time of remembering how far the ELCA has come in its relationship with the GLBT community and how far is left to go before everyone feels truly welcome in our churches.

Megan also spoke of the ELCA pastors who were called to serve even though they were gay and partnered and how they were subsequently dismissed from the ELCA. Many of them, along with Pastor Rohrer, were recently welcomed back by the ELCA in Rites of Reception and reinstatements over the past few months. Yes, “We Shall Overcome Today…”

Some time for fellowship with Pr. Rohrer and Regional Coordinator Paul Jolly

Pastor Rohrer spent Saturday with chapter members and friends as well. At a catered dinner at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Vancouver, WA, she spoke at length about how she ministers to those who can’t (or won’t, or simply don’t) come inside the church walls. By coordinating community gardens and feeding homeless people in San Francisco as well as by listening to their needs, she creates community with them. Megan continued her story at the adult education class on Sunday morning at Central Lutheran Church in Portland.

Captivated listeners as the RIC celebration continues!

One person summed up the weekend this way: “Megan’s story, from her growing up in South Dakota through her recent reception in July onto the ELCA roster as a transgender Lutheran pastor, brought tears to my eyes—tears of frustration for what was endured and tears of joy for what was accomplished. Add her incredible ministry to the street people in San Francisco and her new venture into community gardening, and I was left with a sense of ministry that meets people where they are and provides what they need. What a “wow” experience.”

Thanks to Vicky and to Jim Morrell for providing the blog post and accompanying images! To hear Pastor Rohrer's sermon, visit http://sermon.net/sfwelcome/sermonid/2598159 (sorry, no transcription is currently available). If you’d like to learn more about the Portland Metro Chapter, sign up for their mailing list.

Frozen-Turkey Evangelism: Living Lutheran Blog

2011-02-07T07:20:00.000-08:00

Very well-meaning Christians of a congregation in San Francisco, whose yearly hunger ministry budget is over 4 million dollars, go on television and radio every Thanksgiving and Christmas to encourage people to help the homeless have a festive holiday.

They ask themselves, “If I were homeless what would be something that I would want?” The answer is, of course, a turkey. They collect funds and give out thousands and thousands of frozen turkeys to the homeless.

The rub is that the homeless do not have ovens. This is the folly of thinking that we can imagine what other people need or want.

Well-meaning congregations across the country discover that their really great ideas to help others or to get people in the door is “frozen-turkey evangelism.”

Sometimes these attempts serve only to remind the neighborhood that the congregation is out of touch with the very people and communities the congregation is trying to do outreach among.

I wish that I could say that when it comes to evangelism ELCA congregations are better at listening and being truly useful to the communities around them. But, Lutherans often get both stewardship and evangelism backward.

Read the rest of the blog at: http://www.livinglutheran.com/blog/2011/02/frozen-turkey-evangelism.html

the runaway youth that flee congregations

2011-02-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

You may have heard about the work that I'm doing in San Francisco with runaway and throwaway youth who have fled congregations, families and communities that they thought they would or actually were rejected because of their sexuality and gender identities. If not, you can read about it at the Vanguard Revisited blog.

Today, I'm thinking about the youth that flee congregations without leaving town or their families. When I talk to congregations about the fact that youth are long known for fleeing congregations after their confirmations, they chuckle nervously and wiggle in their seats with the kind of nervousness that comes from not knowing what to do or of having tried for years without any sign that their work has helped.

In 1963, the World Council of Churches faced a similar dilemma when the heads of the Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Methodist denominations gathered to come up with ideas about what to do about the fact that the baby boomers were all becoming teenagers. The denominations believed that if they lost the youth that their churches would die.

Sound familiar, contemporary churches?

So, the denominations trained pastors and lay leaders to create youth lead programs and ministry opportunities. College ministries created leadership programs and youth around the country were empowered to become a major part of the church. Theology and bible study became interested in the way that Bible spoke to people's every day lives.

This is something that people often tell me they are longing for when I visit congregations around the country, so why did this stop? The problem was that no one knew how to have boundaries and individualism at the same time. People worried that if they had any boundaries at all that the youth would flee the church and never come back. So, the individualism went way to far and church stopped looking like church.

In response to all the individualism, members of congregations began to crave structure and rules about what to believe and how to behave and churches across the country responded by reigning in on individualism and by preaching mainstream communal faith that could appeal to the majority.

Now, in the midst of unpopular wars and congregations that are falling behind the conventions of society it is time to revisit the theologies and youth led ministries that the 60's popularized. However, as people who are able to learn from our past, we need to find a balance between communal activities and extreme individualism.

So what is stopping us? Perhaps it's the fact that the youth whose individualism went too far are now the bishop's and members of church council who are afraid to trust the youth and ministers of today who want to be a part of youth led worship and groups.

So, consider this an open letter to those leaders, funders and pastors who lived benefited from youth led programing but worry that it will again go to far:

Please, forgive yourselves and the generation you were a part of. Be leaders to this new generation who deserve the chance to make the same mistakes you did. I believe that this important time in your life is what led to your ability to be strong leaders. You got to experiment, have patience with those who need to do so in order learn. Be mentors to me and other pastors who want to empower youth to lead their own activities and worship experiences. And remember that we can't do it for free. The 60's were only possible because they happened during a good economy. We need your money, without strings, to create the next generation of bishops, church council members and pastors. Please help!

In the News: Bay Area Reporter

2011-02-02T21:33:00.001-08:00

Political Notebook: Queer youth revive 1960s magazine

Published 02/03/2011

by Matthew S. Bajko

m.bajko@ebar.com

San Francisco in the 1960s was a beacon for LGBT youth from across the country. Yet it was far from being a safe haven for those young adults who were runaways and landed on the streets of the city's Polk and Tenderloin neighborhoods.

Back then that area of town was the Castro of its day, with numerous gay bars and residents. It was also a magnet for the queer youth moving to the city.

Once there, some turned to prostitution as a way to earn money, while others became addicted to drugs. Homosexuality was still considered a criminal act, and a sense of community was lacking for many of the youth.

The increasing numbers of queer kids on the streets soon caught the attention of both community organizers and local religious leaders. They formed some of the first gay liberation organizations as a way to provide support and services to the youth.

One such group that emerged in 1964 was the Council for Religion and the Homosexual. A collaboration between the early homophile organizations and urban ministers, its leaders secured federal War on Poverty funding that was used to start several programs for Tenderloin youth.

One of the first projects was Vanguard, the nation's first GLBT youth organization, which debuted in 1966. The following year saw the launch of Conversion Our Goal, an early transgender group, and the social services nonprofit Hospitality House, which remains in operation today.

"Vanguard was a street gang that was established. When I came the church adopted Vanguard as its youth group," recalled former Glide church pastor Larry Mamiya, who was 24 years old at the time. "We hosted dances and socials Friday and Saturday nights in the church basement. It was a mixture of straight, gay, lesbian. There were also transvestites and some transsexuals."

Looking for an outlet to express their feelings of isolation, abandonment and rage at the society at large, the Vanguard youth published their own magazine. The zine-like publication was a mixture of artwork, essays, and news reports. It sold for 25 cents.

It covered everything from opposition to the Vietnam War and the emergent hippie culture to the struggles and challenges the youth faced. Many, using pseudonyms, wrote first person accounts of their lives.

"I think Vanguard was one of the groups in the forefront of the gay movement that helped to push society to re-examine its views of gay people," said Mamiya, who is straight.

Copies of Vanguard from 1966 through 1969 remain in the archives of the GLBT Historical Society. They had been mostly overlooked, until now.

A new project has unearthed this important period of LGBT history, and a group of youth has revived Vanguard . They produced a new version of the publication called Vanguard Revisited that mixes vintage artwork and writings from the 1960s editions with their own contemporary pieces.

It will be officially released at a launch party tonight (Thursday, February 3). The 1,000 copies of the new 60-page edition will then be handed out to young adults from across the city for free.

"These aren't scripts from movies. It is real life. This is how some of these young adults are feeling about this," said Sergio Sandoval, 21, who moved to San Francisco five months ago from Atlanta.

While Sandoval, who is gay, doesn't have housing, he said he is "sheltered," meaning he relies on "nice friends" who offer him a place to stay.

He is also an artist, and created several artworks for Vanguard Revisited, including the cover art. He also interviewed a fellow youth and penned an "Open Letter to the Fags" using the alias Gotti.

The project was a way for him to express both his frustrations with the larger LGBT community and his hopefulness for the future.

"The whole project it has been super emotional," he said. "Being the transformer that I am, I just think people really need to realize that everything is not just how it seems. They really need to open their minds. People are so shallow; I need them to be a little deeper."

The genesis for the Vanguard Revisited project grew out of the Polk Street Oral History project spearheaded by Joey Plaster , 32, a consultant to the LGBT historical society and the volunteer director of its oral history program. His research led him to the archived Vanguards .

"I was immediately struck by their beauty and bluntness, and by the ways they combine themes of poverty, sex, and religion. I was also struck by how familiar the people were: I could imagine a modern-day Polk Street equivalent of each 1960s Tenderloin figure I read about in the archive," wrote Plaster in an e-mailed response to questions.

Plaster approached Megan Rohrer , 30, a transgender dyke and pastor in the Lutheran Church, about exploring the Tenderloin's queer history. They then decided to revive the Vanguard magazine and worked with Larkin Street Youth Services to find young adults interested in being part of the project.

The youth, assisted by Rohrer and Plaster, spent three months to "create a magazine that spoke to their expressed desire to enlighten youth, celebrate the queer history of the Tenderloin, and create a voice for the unheard," explained Rohrer.

They raised $23,500 from various foundations and LGBT agencies to fund their work. And the LGBT Community Center, through its youth program, signed on and provided space for the youth to meet each week.

The center and the Faithful Fools Street Ministry will continue to work with the youth Monday nights through June to determine how to move forward. One possibility is creating a second issue of Vanguard Revisited.

"If San Francisco's LGBT community knew what it was really like to be homeless queer youth, they would get motivated to fund organizations and to protest unjust laws and to give voices to those who are the most vulnerable in our community," said Rohrer, who with Plaster will bring a traveling exhibit about the Vanguard project to other cities this summer. "We were able to do that during the AIDS crisis. There are still problems happening in our community and we can do something positive about it."

Tonight's magazine release party will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. at St. Francis Lutheran Church, 152 Church Street across from Safeway. It is free and open to the public.

For more information about the Vanguard project, including PDF versions of the original publications and the 2011 edition as well as recorded interviews with the youth involved, visit http://www.glbthistory.org/Vanguard/.

In the News: ELCA News

2011-01-28T11:02:00.000-08:00

ELCA NEWS SERVICE
January 27, 2011

ELCA Launches LivingLutheran.Com for Sharing Stories and Conversation
10-008-JB

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- LivingLutheran.com, a new website for members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), offers a daily blend of stories and conversation about what it means to "live Lutheran."

LivingLutheran.com is the companion site to ELCA.org, the official website of the ELCA churchwide organization. The site is at http://www.livinglutheran.com.

"We really wanted to create an every-member publication but with a new twist on the concept," said Scott J. Hendrickson, ELCA director for marketing and public relations. "We could either print and mail a publication to all 4.5 million ELCA Lutherans, or we could leverage new technology to create a living, breathing publication where members can explore and talk about their faith experiences."

"It's really the first of its kind," he added. "We thought we'd take a page from Martin Luther and try our hand in new technology."

Hendrickson said one particularly significant aspect of LivingLutheran.com is the blog section, featuring members from throughout the ELCA who have "very different perspectives and life experiences."

"It's time for us as ELCA Lutherans to show the world that dialogue is possible, that there is room in our world for voices that represent faith without rushing to judgment and closing off discussion," Hendrickson said. "We're really fortunate to have people like Megan Rohrer and Erma Wolf lend their voices."

In addition to the blog entries, LivingLutheran.com visitors will also find personal profiles written by ELCA members; articles from Seeds for the Parish, the resource newspaper for ELCA congregations; stories about members and their ministries; short videos designed to inspire and amuse, and more.

The concept behind LivingLutheran.com was researched and tested with members, Hendrickson said. New content is posted daily, including stories about members and congregations, weekly text studies, and messages from leaders. The site employs social media tools to enhance member engagement with the site. Members can use their Facebook profiles to connect to LivingLutheran.com, he said.
---
About the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA)

The ELCA is one of the largest Christian denominations in the United States, with approximately 4.5 million members in more than 10,000 congregations across the 50 states and in the Caribbean region. Known as the church of "God's work. Our hands," the ELCA emphasizes the saving grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ, unity among Christians and service in the world. The ELCA's roots are in the writings of the German church reformer, Martin Luther.

For information contact:
John Brooks, Director (773) 380-2958 or news@elca.org
http://www.elca.org/news
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/elcanews
Twitter: http://twitter.com/elcanews

In the News: SF Weekly

2011-01-18T21:27:00.001-08:00

Get to know S.F.'s community gardens with SF Refresh
By Karen Macklin Wednesday, Jan 19 2011

Urban environments are great places for bars, nightlife, arts, food, and culture. They are also great places for neurosis, stress, and isolation. Why? Because people in cities keep fit-to-bursting work and social calendars that often ignore the daily and seasonal rhythms of nature, are constantly surrounded by machines and artificial light, and go home to apartment buildings where no one knows their next-door neighbors. The gist of it is that people in cities are detached from the natural environment. And those people in cities are us.

But guess what? We don't have to be. There are pockets of nature everywhere in San Francisco. They are our community gardens. There are more ways for you to get involved with those gardens than you could possibly take advantage of, but most of us don't know where to start.
Details

Enter SF Refresh, an initiative that will create all-day events in participating community gardens on six days in 2011 (see list at end). On those days, these local gardens will host free whole body care services and classes, including yoga, acupuncture, art-making, and food-making.

Inspired by Sunday Streets, SF Refresh was created by Megan Rohrer, manager of the Growing Home Community Garden in Hayes Valley. The project is being developed in partnership with the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance, a new organization created to connect the city's community gardens, and partly funded by the Mental Health Services Act, since the point of SF Refresh is to encourage stronger community and improved mental health.

"Community gardens have through scientific studies been proven to be therapeutic places that lower anxiety and help people come out of isolation," Rohrer says. "They have the ability to heal you in all of the ways you can think of. You're putting your hands in earth, so you're having a tactile experience; you're looking at beautiful flowers, so you're having a visual experience; and you're eating food, so you're having a nutritional experience. Gardens are a place that can speak to us on lots of different levels."

A man who goes by the name of Tree, a founder of the Free Farm community garden in Richmond, which will also be participating in SF Refresh, says that gardens remind us of how we are all connected. "When we think about soil, we are really aware of what's living in the soil — the microbes, the fungi, the protozoa — all of those things are connected in a web of life," he says. "And the people above the soil have to look at life in the same way. That's what this event is really about: connecting with other people in the city, and with what sustains us and brings about life."

Art, food, and soft edges
Head volunteer artist Ilyse Magy is recruiting other volunteers to lead art projects, focused on building community, beautifying the chain-link fences around the gardens, and creating other adornments. These group projects, she says, are a great way to try your hand at art, which can also be therapeutic. "I think self-care is about doing things that make you feel good, and I think art is just one of those things," she says. "Making art is an amazing way of being totally present. You get out of your head and are really there creating something." In the garden, she adds, nature functions as a muse for the artist: "What's more beautiful than flowers or plants?"

SF Refresh will also be offering classes in food-making, hosted by the local nonprofit Urban Kitchen SF. In these classes, which include pickling and kombucha-making, you can use ingredients grown right in the gardens and leave with starter kits to continue the process at home.

"It's incredibly empowering to learn these skills," says Kateryna Rakowsky, the executive director of Urban Kitchen SF. "You take something from the raw unfinished form, create something, and take that knowledge home." Also an environmental lawyer, she says that working with food on this level also teaches people to be curious about what's in their food and to read labels more carefully. "You're basically taking charge of your own sustenance," she says.

Other offerings in the gardens during SF Refresh will include yoga, acupuncture, massage, lectures and kids' activities. Kevin Bayuk, a permaculture designer and teacher in San Francisco, says it's the soft edges of a garden that make it the perfect environment for restoring yourself. "In San Francisco, 70 percent of our surfaces are paved over and impervious to rain," he says. "We have a lot of built environment, so we have a lot of hard edges. Gardens are mostly soft. The softness tends to harmonize with opportunities to become vulnerable or open to connecting through things like yoga or healing."

Although plans are still under way, the first event is slated to take place in April, a great time to revisit the promises you made to yourself — in January. "I think April is the time when people have given up on their New Year's resolution or realized they've failed or forgotten about it completely," Rohrer says. "Coming to a garden to participate in an event like this — or even to watch other people participate — can be the first step in an entire lifestyle change."

GET SF REFRESHED

SF Refresh will take place in community gardens around the city on Saturday, April 16; Saturday, May 21; Sunday, July 24; Saturday, Aug. 20; Sunday, Sept. 25; and Saturday, Oct. 15. All events are free. Some offerings, like the food-making classes, will require preregistration. As of press time, these five gardens had confirmed their involvement.

Details

Growing Home Community Garden: 250 Octavia (at Page) Hayes Valley

Visitacion Valley Greenway Community Garden: Arleta (at Rutland)

The Free Farm: Gough (at Eddy)

The Hayes Valley Farm: 450 Laguna (at Fell)

Garden for the Environment: Seventh Avenue (at Lawton)

SF Refresh is also looking for volunteers, including general helpers, artists who would like to lead art projects, yoga instructors, and others who work in therapeutic modalities. If you would like to be part of a think tank for the event and offer ideas and suggestions about what else to include, visit http://sfrefresh.blogspot.com for more information and contact details.

In the News: The Sacramento Bee

2011-01-16T00:33:00.000-08:00

At Free Farm in S.F., all veggies are given away

By Katherine Seligman
The Sacramento Bee

Published: Sunday, Jan. 16, 2011 - 12:00 am | Page 3A

SAN FRANCISCO – There was one common reaction when the Rev. Megan Rohrer said she wanted to start a farm in a weedy, glass-strewn vacant lot a few blocks from the Civic Center.

"People told me I was crazy," Rohrer said. "They said it was the wrong kind of space, you'll never be able to weed it, no one will come to work on it."

Yet the Free Farm will celebrate its first anniversary today, a year in which it grew and gave away more than 2,500 pounds of vegetables, making it the most bountiful of six gardens planted on Lutheran church-owned space in the Bay Area.

In an age when farmers markets are sprouting in every urban California neighborhood, the Free Farm is an unusual tale of success. Its "Hecka Local" brand produce, from tomatoes and zucchini to dwarf kale, pineapple sage and watermelon radishes, is prize-worthy, but is tended by volunteers and donated, no questions asked, to anyone who wants it.

"We want to provide an example of how to live based on generosity and sharing, instead of everything being seen as a profit," said a farm manager, who calls himself Tree.

He is joined Wednesdays and Saturdays by a dozen or more willing workers who mulch, shovel, weed and eat a communal vegan lunch. The volunteers come from all corners. There are students, teachers, members of a local temple, gardening mavens, food justice activists, the unemployed and people who describe themselves as living off the economic grid.

"We have eatings instead of meetings," said volunteer Pancho Ramos, as he sat with a bowl of bean stew and rice at the farm one day recently.

Ramos, who says he lives "without traditional currency," has watched the lemon and fig trees start to bear fruit and neighbors come by to get vegetables, surprised to find they are free.

"One woman took some zucchini and came back an hour later with empanadas," he said. "That's what a church should be."

Rohrer, executive director of Welcome, a faith-based nonprofit that works on poverty issues, saw the farm as a way to bring quality produce to inner-city residents. She had worked with the chronically homeless for about a decade and saw them struggling not only to keep housing, but also to afford good fresh food.

"The city wanted community gardens, but there was all this red tape," she said. "Everything was taking years, so I started talking to different Lutheran pastors about getting space."

One of the available spots was the lot on Gough Street, one-third of an acre that had had been unoccupied since a fire destroyed St. Paulus Church in 1995. Like much of the city, it sat in close proximity to wealth and poverty, blocks from the ornate Opera House, expensive condos and public housing.

Rohrer, who grew up in South Dakota, knew backyard gardens and had learned community organizing, but she turned to local experts for farming help. Tree and Lauren Anderson, founder of Produce to the People, which harvests food from backyards and community gardens, joined her.

Together with volunteers they built a ramp from recycled Christmas trees. They scrounged for old pallets, buckets, concrete and hardware. They fertilized the sandy soil and built a labyrinth with bricks salvaged from the burned church.

Today's scheduled celebration includes a greenhouse-raising. Tree hopes to use the structure for seedlings to plant and give away.

"I want to inspire people to pay attention to where food comes from," he said.

The Free Farm continues the work he's done since the 1970s, when he first started gardening and planting avocado trees in the Mission District. He took his name because of his connection to trees, he said, but prefers not to talk about himself. ("It's not about me. It's about the work we can do," he says.)

He started the Free Food Stand in the Mission District in 2008 to give away vegetables from community gardens and surplus collected from other farmers markets. The stand, which has given away more than 12,000 pounds of produce in the past two years, now also gets vegetables from the Free Farm. "Hecka Local" always goes first.

MLK Day Living Lutheran Post

2011-01-15T12:42:00.001-08:00

The words and the life of Martin Luther King Jr have inspired millions. I imagine that tales, sounds and video of his life and ministry will be passed from generation to generation for centuries to come.

However, sometimes when we tell the stories of great leaders, prophets and priests, we remember all the qualities that are rare or vitally needed in contemporary society, but we forget all the bits that make that individual truly human.

In the days following the assassination attempt in Tucson, in our 10th year at war in Afghanistan, with racial disparity, racism and violence still an issue, King’s work to bring an end to the Vietnam war, his impassioned cries for racial justice and his example of how to live life to the fullest knowing that death is around the corner, are certainly things worth remembering today.

Read the rest of the blog.

In the News: McGuire Real Estate Blog

2010-12-08T22:31:00.000-08:00

Urban Free Farming?

Blogged on 12/8/2010 by Robert Merryman

The seeds for sharing have been planted in a vacant lot in San Francisco. Located at the corner of Eddy & Gough Streets you’ll find something unofficially tagged as the Free Farm. It’s on the former site of a Lutheran Church, St. Paulus, which was destroyed by fire in 1995 and needed a make-over. After sitting vacant for nearly 15 years and slowly filling with debris, the lot presented an interesting opportunity.

A Mission District resident, a man who calls himself Tree, saw the chance to make a change in the landscape. The 1/3 acre lot is now the home to the Free Farm, an all-volunteer effort to make life a bit easier for those in need of quality food. Granted, the volunteers acknowledged they won’t solve hunger, but make a concerted effort to provide those in need with accessibility to quality organic produce which they otherwise might not be able to afford.

This is not something new for its founder, Tree. In 2008 he established the Free Farm Stand in his neighborhood. According to Tree, together with a team of volunteers, he’s grown and given away more than 6,000 pounds of food to people who otherwise don’t have the means to buy, or have knowledge about, the benefits of quality produce.

As a result, the shepherd of the project, Reverend Megan Rohrer, executive director of Welcome, a non-profit working to end poverty, has convinced six other Bay Area churches to allow vacant lots to be used as urban gardens and farms.

So as you languish in the celebrations of the holiday season, remember there’s always someone with less. Make a difference and volunteer or make a charitable donation to improve the life of another in your community throughout the year.

New Living Lutheran Post

2010-11-27T14:52:00.000-08:00

How can people go hungry in a world of plenty?
November 23, 2010 5:00 AM
I challenged Lutheran congregations to feed the hungry in their neighborhoods and to trust that the resources needed would be found. | Read the blog »

Transgender Religious Leaders say "It Get's Better"

2010-11-23T10:11:00.000-08:00

GHCG Wins 2010 NEN Award

2010-11-15T18:00:00.001-08:00

The Growing Home Community Garden, which Megan has managed since May, has won the 2010 Neighborhood Empowerment Network (NEN) Best Community Challenge Grant Project Award which will be given out on November 17th, at City Hall at the 2010 NEN Awards in the North Light Court.

Event Details:

6pm to 7pm - Reception (A light supper buffet will be served)

7pm to 7:45pm - Awards Ceremony

7:45pm to 8:30pm - Reception

The event is free. You can register here: http://2010nenawards.eventbrite.com/
We hope to see you there!

Reformation manifesto against poverty & homelessness and for pastor self care

2010-10-22T12:17:00.001-07:00

10/22/2010
Times Square New York

My last night indoors before my 7 days and 7 nights on the street this year I'm spending in Times Square. It wasn't planned to be an intentionally poetic thing. I'm doing a panel talk at CUNY's Graduate Center tonight for Out History. I fly back in the early morning and then head immediately to Davis, CA to preside at the closing worship of the Sierra Pacific Hunger Network's gathering. Then, I'll head immediately to Old First Presbyterian for the Saturday Community Dinner which will feed about 300 people. Afterwards I'll be joining the group of fools (no really, that's what we call ourselves - Faithful Fools after St. Francis of Assisi) and I'll be one of the huddled masses sleeping on the concrete outside of First Unitarian Universalist Church.

This street retreat, I'll be working on and off while I sleep on the streets at night. While this is a little different from past years, I think it will be a revelatory experience. First, I always find it helpful to feel how it feels in my bones to participate in the typical activities that I regularly ask homeless volunteers to participate in. Experiencing it helps me to understand what are unhelpful rules or just make life more difficult and painful for folk.

Another purpose of my continuing to work is to highlight the struggles of the working poor. This time in our economy more than ever, there are so many people working jobs that don't pay all their bills. Even I, someone very well off compared to the lives of those living on the streets, is currently working more than one job in order to get out from under debt, to pay my exceedingly high mortgage and because I haven't had a raise in three years.

And though there are a million reasons that my working while on street retreat can be illuminating, the final one I'll give here, is that during this week before the anniversary of the Reformation I want to highlight the way that pastors that chose to serve those with the least are consistently overworked and underpaid.

Without the ability to get good self care (through vacations, time off to think, time away from crisis and time away from bill worries both at work and home.

So for all these reasons, and all those that will come to me along the way, I officially declare my street retreat (from October 23 - 30) a call for a reformation to: solve domestic poverty; to pay living wages for individuals and families; and to provide self care and support with our prayers, money and priorities for pastors, particularly those engaged in community ministry or the diaconate, to get the self care they need.

Join me on my street retreat/reformation at: mystreetretreat.blogspot.com

And since I will beg on the streets, and in most of these notes, you might as well get used to me begging you to support the vital work that I'm able to do at Welcome. (via the mail: 1751 Sacramento St., San Francisco, CA 94109 or via the interwebs at: www.sfwelcome.org).

I get the privilege of developing creative ways for folk to respond to poverty - whether they live in it or not. If you feel like my blog will entertain you as much as a movie, give $11. If it makes you think like a book would, give $25. If it feels like church, consider tithing %15 of next weeks salary. If you learn as much as a college class consider donating $255. If it changes your life, or at least your perspective, how much is that worth to you?

Since most of my time is spent finding ways to make things free that people in poverty can't afford, I won't be upset if you don't give. But, anything you do give will help me spend less time begging (and more time helping those living in poverty improving their quality of life) when my street retreat is over.

Blessings upon blessings to you and yours. May you be warm and fed, today and all the days of your life.

Pastor Megan

Location:Time Square, NY, NY,United States

2010-10-05T17:27:00.000-07:00

This week the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America launched it's new online forum full of video and interactive ways to ... well be Lutheran.

My blog entry was the sites first of the staff bloggers. I hope you'll check out the site and my first entry. I'll be contributing a post each month on the topic of advocacy.

$300 Raised for Transgender Equality!

2010-10-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

Royalties from the sales for Letters For My Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect enabled us to send our third royalty check for $100 (for a total of $300) to the National Center for Transgender Equality. %20 of the proceeds for Letters For My Brothers will be contributed to NCTE.

The National Center for Transgender Equality is a national social justice organization devoted to ending discrimination and violence against transgender people through education and advocacy on national issues of importance to transgender people.

By empowering transgender people and our allies to educate and influence policymakers and others, NCTE facilitates a strong and clear voice for transgender equality in our nation's capital and around the country.

Thanks to all who bought books this first month! You have helped us to prove that creativity can make a real difference in the world!

Are you a mushy Christian?

2010-08-23T20:46:00.001-07:00

This recent poll about young adults and their faith was really strange to me. This silly little paragraph that stood out the most:
"Among the 65% [of young adults] who call themselves Christian, 'many are either mushy Christians or Christians in name only,' Rainer says. 'Most are just indifferent. The more precisely you try to measure their Christianity, the fewer you find committed to the faith.'"

I don't know what a mushy Christian is. I imagine from the context of the article that it's people who use avoid words like "Jesus is my Lord and Savior" or who do yoga. The author of the article concludes that because old school notions of Christianity don't work for young folk that they are in fact not very solid in their belief(s).

As a 30 year old pastor, I must confess that I am often the youngest person at most church services I preach at or lead. I often feel like I'm not actually an adult at these meetings and gatherings because of the marked age difference. Yet, I often hear that the church wants to engage young folk (read those 30 and below) and become more welcoming and diverse.

Yet, when we young folk with our full diversity of sexuality, gender expression, body art, piercings, ADHD, physical abilities and yearning to mash up some of the spiritual practices and experiences from other faith traditions that help us understand our Christian stories and rituals better show up in their pews, very few churches are willing to let us be fully who we are. Or if they do, they stare, make comments or smoother you.

In the early 60's the National Council of Churches faced a very similar reality. Young folk were not interested in church and worship that did not speak to their experiences. As a result, churches adapted, experimented and were transformed by the contributions of young folk. The sixties also brought a lot of experimentation and over-indulgence that the church still seems to be recovering from. Perhaps the boundaries got pushed too far in the 60's, but I hope that the baby boomers who got this freedom when they were young will be gracious enough to trust a new generation with the future of the church.

Like it or not, we are the future (and present) of the church.

I invite anyone interested in exploring ways we can claim the moving and meaningful parts of the ancient Christian tradition while making it fresh and relevant to our daily lives, to join me and the fabulous Tommy Dillon as a part of the Community of Travelers (starting September 12th at 5pm).

You can participate in person at St. Aidan's Episcopal or join us online via live stream. Mushy or not, all are welcome to worship with us!

Gardens, Mental Health and City wide solutions.

2010-08-03T20:44:00.001-07:00

Those who have been following my activities may have noticed that in addition to my work at Welcome, I'm in my 9th year of working with the chronically homeless in San Francisco, I have started to work part-time for Project Homeless Connect (PHC). I initially began working at Project Homeless Connect during a time when foundation support of Welcome wavered and I needed a bit of job security. Of course, the idea of working with an organization that had such a city wide impact to their work was appealing to me as someone who has been advocating for the homeless for so many years.

Thankfully due to a major gift from St. Paulus Lutheran Church, Welcome's funding for this year is back on track and I continue to do the one-on-one work with our homeless guests, to preach and teach about hunger issues and to help organize volunteers and groups to feed hungry people through dinners and community garden at Welcome.

But, I'm also delighted to continue my work at PHC to create opportunities for free mental health care in community gardens throughout San Francisco, enabling people to share skills and improve their quality of life and to help individuals learn employment skills.

At Welcome I'm able to work with people individually over the long term, to be their pastor and work with congregations. At PHC, I'm able to work to find solutions to some of the root causes of homelessness on a city wide level. Below, I've included information about the Seeding Resilience program that I created and am leading at PHC's Growing Home Community Garden. I hope you'll be as excited about it as I am!

Seeding Resilience is the Growing Home Community Garden's (GHCG) new project to increase access to mental health services and increase employment opportunities and skills. A two year innovation project with major support provided by the Mental Health Services Act (MHSA), the Seeding Resilience project is 75% focused on the GHCG (Octavia & Lily) and 25% on Urban Agricultural leaders in San Francisco to build a citywide network of support for mental health consumers.

Outcomes of the project include:

3 weekly skill share opportunities for individuals to learn about: 1) cooking & nutrition; 2) garden skills; and 3) health skills and stress reduction [click on the links for notes and photos from these skill shares]
4 educational opportunities for urban agriculture leaders to increase their awareness, create collaboration opportunities and employment opportunities for mental health consumers
regular support groups, workshops and events on topics recommended by garden members and skill share participants
information about the learnings of the project that will be made available so that the successful parts of the project can be reproduced in other locations

Sermon: Servant or Sucker?

2010-08-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

Listen to the sermon: Servant or Sucker?
or download it here.

Free Farm Harvests 1045 Pounds!

2010-07-31T21:19:00.001-07:00

Amount of produce harvested and given a way at the free farm since February: 1045 pounds!

SPS7 Rite Raises nearly $7,000 for the Joel Workin Scholarship

2010-07-31T20:06:00.000-07:00

To date, the offering for the SPS7 Rite has raised nearly $7,000 for the The Joel R. Workin Memorial Scholarship!

Twenty years ago when Joel Workin came out as a gay, Lutheran seminarian, he and several others helped spark the current movement supporting openly gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) persons in ordained ministry. Following Joel’s courageous and faithful act, his certification for ordination was vacated when Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) bishops refused to place his name on the roster of approved candidates waiting for call. The Joel R. Workin Memorial Scholarship was established in 1995 by the generosity of Joel’s family, colleagues and close friends. Joel died of AIDS, before he could see this day when GLBT pastors would be received into the ELCA.

The Joel R. Workin Memorial Scholarship supports seminarians who have been admitted into the Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries candidacy process; and encourages them to persevere in their preparation for ordained ministry. The recipients must be enrolled as an openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender student, have demonstrated gifts for Word and Sacrament ministry, and seeks to fulfill their vocations as publicly identified sexual minority persons. The recipients demonstrate academic excellence, integrity and courage in response to the ELCA's discriminatory policies, a passion for social justice, faithfulness to Jesus Christ and potential to become an effective leader in church and society. The early witness of Joel Workin and several other gay seminarians led to a larger movement within the Lutheran Church. Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries, a result of this witness, credentials and rosters openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people for ministry; supports these pastors by working with congregations that will call them and providing mission grants to support their ministry; and provides a network of support to the congregations and pastors.

If feel moved to support GLBT seminarians, please send a donation to Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries. Please note in the memo line that you would like your funds to support the "SPS7 Workin Offering."

You can make a secure online donation here:
1)Donate via the ELM website
2)Donate through facebook causes here

Thanks for your support!

Rev. Megan Rohrer

In the News: The Underground

2010-07-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

Lutheran ceremony admits gay “Bay Area Seven” to clergy roster

Posted on 30 July 2010

Seven gay pastors were reinstated recently into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America after having been barred from service for some 20 years.

The pastors, also called the “Bay Area Seven” are Reverends Jeff Johnson, Paul Brenner, Dawn Roginski, Ross Merkel, Megan Rohrer, Craig Minich and Sharon Stalkfleet.

They will be officially recognized on the ECLA clergy roster, making them eligible to serve in any of the denomination’s 10,500 Lutheran churches.

In September, three more gay pastors will be admitted and in October, one gay pastor in Chicago and two in St. Paul-Minneapolis will be welcomed. All in all, a total of 46 openly gay pastors are slated to be welcomed to the clergy roster.

The ceremony, which was held at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco, is the first of many more that have been scheduled since the ELCA decided last year to accept non-celibate gay ministers who are in committed relationships.

In the past, gay men and women could become Lutheran pastors only if they took a vow of celibacy.

According to The New York Times Rev. Johnson said, “Today the church is speaking with a clear voice. All people are welcome here, all people are invited to help lead this church, and all people are loved unconditionally by God.”

Johnson said the ECLA’s former policy “ruined lives, destroyed faiths.”

Rev. Rohrer said she viewed the ceremony not as her first day as a pastor but a day when “the church gets to receive me as a pastor.” She is a missionary for the homeless and serves in four churches, the San Francisco Chronicle said.

The ECLA, which has 4.6 million members, is the largest Protestant church in the U.S. to admit non-celibate gay clergy. The decision has led 185 of its 10,396 congregations to separate from the denomination.

The United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church permit gay clergy, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) may soon follow suit as its general assembly voted to allow non-celibate gay clergy to serve, however this needs ratification by a majority of the PCUSA’s 173 regional presbyteries.

New blogging gig.

2010-07-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

I just got my first assignment today to write for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's new "Living Lutheran" blog. They've asked me to be their advocacy blogger. I'll be contributing to the site once a month. Stay tuned for more info about the blog.

In the News: Bay Area Reporter

2010-07-29T20:25:00.000-07:00

Photo: Lydia Gonzales

The Reverends Craig Minich, Megan Rohrer, Sharon Sue Stalkfleet, Dawn Roginski, Jeff Robert Johnson, Paul Richard Brenner, and Ross Donald Merkel are welcomed into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America during a Rite of Reception ceremony held at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco Sunday, July 25. The national Lutheran Church last year revised its policies, dropping the requirement that LGBT pastors need to be celibate. Those taking part in last weekend's service are now full-fledged ministers.

In the News: Ms. Magazine

2010-07-28T20:30:00.000-07:00

Lutheran Church Reinstates Gay Pastors

Seven openly gay and transgender pastors were welcomed back to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) on Sunday after having been excluded from the church's ministry for the last twenty years. The pastors, known as the "Bay Area Seven," were previously banned from the church for refusing to comply with a church policy that said all gay pastors must take a vow of celibacy. According to the Associated Press, the ECLA voted to overturn this policy last year, but Sunday marks the first reinstatement of gay and transgender Lutheran pastors since the celibacy ban was lifted.

The reinstatement ceremony took place on Sunday at St. Marks Lutheran Church in San Francisco. Reverend Jeff R. Johnson, one of the returning pastors, said in a news conference that the Lutheran church was sending the clear message that, "all people are welcome here, all people are invited to help lead this church, and all people are loved unconditionally by God," reports the New York Times.

According to the Times all seven of the pastors had previously been ordained and had been serving in the Bay Area, but were never officially recognized by the ECLA. Megan Rohrer, another reinstated pastor, said she viewed Sunday as the day "the church [got] to receive me as a pastor," not the day she became one, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

With 4.6 million members, the ECLA is now the largest Protestant church to permit non-celibate gay men and women to serve in its clergy. According to the New York Times, since the celibacy ban was lifted, 185 of the 10,396 congregations nationwide have voted to leave the denomination. Reverend Mark Chavez, who leads a coalition of conservative Lutheran churches, told the Times that his group plans to start a new denomination in August.

Lutheran churches across the country, however, continue to plan ceremonies to welcome the 46 gay pastors that have been excluded back into the ECLA. Three more ceremonies are already planned for this fall, reports the Times.

See original article.

Media Resources: New York Times 7/25/10; San Fransisco Chronicle 7/26/10; Associated Press 7/25/10

In the News: The Advocate

2010-07-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

Lutherans Welcome Reinstated Gay Pastors

By Michelle Garcia

The Reverend Megan Rohrer

Seven gay and transgender pastors in California who were barred from serving in the Lutheran Church were reinstated in a ceremony on Sunday.

The pastors, all from the San Francisco Bay area, were folded back into the church a year after the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America decided to allow gay pastors serve as clergy. The church previously only allowed gays to serve if they adhered to a vow of celibacy. The "Bay Area Seven" were Jeff Johnson, Megan Rohrer, Paul Brenner, Craig Minich, Dawn Roginski, Sharon Stalkfleet, and Ross Merkel, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 1990 two San Francisco churches saw the policy as discriminatory and ordained Johnson and a lesbian couple. The churches, First United and St. Frances, were then expelled from the denomination.

In the News: San Francisco Chronicle

2010-07-26T11:22:00.000-07:00

Gay and transgender Lutheran pastors reinstated

Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, July 26, 2010

Lacy Atkins / The Chronicle

Megan Rohrer (right) and Craig Minich are reinstated at the service.

Images

View All Images (4)

Seven Bay Area gay and transgender pastors were reinstated into the national Lutheran church on Sunday after being barred for two decades from serving in the denomination.

It was a day of mixed feelings for the "Bay Area Seven" - the Revs. Jeff Johnson, Megan Rohrer, Paul Brenner, Craig Minich, Dawn Roginski Sharon Stalkfleet and Ross Merkel - who saw the event as an act of reconciliation with the church that once shunned them.

"We finally got to the direction we knew the Lutheran church was heading. It just took it longer to get there," Johnson said.

The pastors were welcomed almost a year after the national assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America - the largest Lutheran denomination in the country - voted to allow gay men and women, with partners, to serve as clergy members, making it the latest Protestant church to allow such ordinations.

Gay men and women were previously allowed to become Lutheran pastors but had to take a vow of celibacy. Some within the church saw the rule as discriminatory, and in 1990 two San Francisco churches, First United and St. Francis, defied the policy by ordaining Johnson, a gay man, and a lesbian couple.

As a result, the two churches were expelled from the denomination. In the last 20 years, more than a dozen pastors nationwide were ordained in defiance of the church, three removed by trial and many denied the possibility to serve.

It was "a policy that ruined lives, destroyed faiths," Johnson said.

Rohrer, who serves in four churches and as a missionary for the homeless, said she did not feel Sunday was the day she became a pastor, but the day "the church gets to receive me as a pastor."

In an extension of that spirit of reconciliation, on Sunday the St. Francis congregation also overwhelmingly voted to return to the national Lutheran church.

"It's like an individual who was separated from his family after his mother kicked him out," said the Rev. Robert Johnson, head pastor at St. Francis. "The mother church has come around and said 'you were right.' "

E-mail Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera at amartinez-cabrera@sfchronicle.com

This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Posted by Rev. Megan M. Rohrer at 1:34 AM

In the News: KRON 4

2010-07-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

Photos by Vicki Kane Risner

Footage of the service appeared on all the news stations in San Francisco. The photos above and video below is from a KRON 4 story, where I was actually interviewed after serving communion to the folks in the over flow room as I was trying to make my way back upstairs and waiting for the upstairs communion to finish. Click here to see video of the full press conference that was held about an hour before the service.

In the News: New York Times

2010-07-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

Lutherans Offer Warm Welcome to Gay Pastors
Noah Berger for The New York Times

The Rev. Sharon Stalkfleet, center, was one of seven gay pastors at a welcoming ceremony Sunday at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco.
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Published: July 25, 2010
With a laying on of hands, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on Sunday welcomed into its fold seven openly gay pastors who had until recently been barred from the church’s ministry.
Enlarge This Image
Noah Berger for The New York Times

The Rev. Dawn Roginski, center, in white, one of seven gay pastors at a welcoming ceremony Sunday at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco.

The ceremony at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco was the first of several planned since the denomination took a watershed vote at its convention last year to allow noncelibate gay ministers in committed relationships to serve the church.

“Today the church is speaking with a clear voice,” the Rev. Jeff R. Johnson, one of the seven gay pastors participating in the ceremony, said at a news conference just before it began. “All people are welcome here, all people are invited to help lead this church, and all people are loved unconditionally by God.”

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, known as the E.L.C.A., with 4.6 million members, is now the largest Protestant church in the United States to permit noncelibate gay ministers to serve in the ranks of its clergy — an issue that has caused wrenching divisions for it as well as for many other denominations.

Since the church voted last summer to allow noncelibate gay clergy members to serve, 185 congregations have taken the two consecutive votes required to leave the denomination, said Melissa Ramirez Cooper, a spokeswoman for the church, citing a tally that she said was updated monthly. There are 10,396 congregations nationwide.

The Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ also allow gay ministers. And the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s general assembly voted at its convention earlier this month to do so, though the vote will become church law only if is ratified by a majority of the church’s 173 regional presbyteries. Two smaller Lutheran denominations, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, do not ordain ministers in same-sex relationships.

The seven ministers welcomed at the ceremony on Sunday had already been ordained and have been serving at churches or outreach ministries in the San Francisco Bay Area, but they had not been officially recognized on the clergy roster.

“The effect of them being brought onto our roster is they will now be part of our national database of pastors who are available for service in any of our 10,500 churches,” said Bishop Mark W. Holmerud, who leads the Sierra Pacific Synod, which includes San Francisco. He noted that while some congregations were open to consider hiring openly gay ministers, others were not — and each congregation is free to choose.

The Evangelical Lutherans designed Sunday’s special “rite of reconciliation” to mark the formal inclusion of gay ministers who were ordained in “extraordinary rites” that were not recognized by the church but were conducted by a group called Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries. Three more gay pastors will be welcomed at ceremonies in September and October, two in the St. Paul-Minneapolis area and one in Chicago, Ms. Cooper said.

Amalia Vagts, executive director of Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries, said, “It’s been a long and hard journey for a lot of people, and it feels like this is a new beginning in the history of the E.L.C.A.”

She said that all together, there were 46 openly gay ministers who had previously been excluded from the church’s clergy roster and would now be accepted.

The change was made possible after the Churchwide Assembly, the Evangelical Lutherans’ chief legislative body, voted at its meeting in 2009 to allow the ordination of noncelibate gay pastors who are in monogamous relationships. The denomination appointed a task force to study the issue in 2001, and spent the next eight years in debate. In the end, the proposal to permit openly gay clergy members won just two-thirds of the votes, the minimum required for passage.

Some who opposed it are now poised to leave. The Rev. Mark Chavez, director of Lutheran CORE, a coalition of theologically conservative Lutheran churches, said his group expected to form a new denomination, the North American Lutheran Church, in August.

He said of the ceremony on Sunday, “It’s just another steady step taken by the E.L.C.A. to move the denomination further and further away from most Lutheran churches around the world and from the whole Christian church, unfortunately.”

Before the ceremony, one of the gay pastors, the Rev. Megan M. Rohrer, said it had been a long journey from her home in South Dakota — where fellow Lutherans regarded her sexuality as a demon to be exorcised — to being finally welcomed as a minister in the Lutheran church.

“It’s an invitation,” she said of the ceremony, “to join us in the pews every single Sunday, where not a single one of these pastors will care if you agree with us or if you think our families are appropriate. We’ll serve you communion, we’ll pray with you and we’ll visit you in the hospital.”
A version of this article appeared in print on July 26, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.

In the News: AP

2010-07-24T12:07:00.000-07:00

Gay Lutheran Pastors To Join Church Roster

by The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO July 24, 2010, 11:13 pm ET

Seven pastors who work in the San Francisco Bay area and were barred from serving in the nation's largest Lutheran group because of a policy that required gay clergy to be celibate are being welcomed into the denomination.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will add six of the pastors to its clergy roster at a service at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco on Sunday. Another pastor who was expelled from the church, but was later reinstated, will participate in the service.

The group is among the first gay, bisexual or transgender Lutheran pastors to be reinstated or added to the rolls of the ELCA since the organization voted last year to lift the policy requiring celibacy.

Churches can now hire noncelibate gay clergy who are in committed relationships.

"It's going to be an extremely glorious and festive ceremony because it's the culmination of decades of work to welcome LGBT people into the ELCA," said Amalia Vagts, executive director of the Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries, a nonprofit that credentials openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people for ministry.

Megan Rohrer, one of the pastors who will participate in Sunday's rite of reception service, grew up in South Dakota and attended a Lutheran college where she said students tried to exorcise her "gay demons" by throwing holy water on her. Some of those people are now Lutheran pastors in South Dakota, she said.

Rohrer, who is transgender and a lesbian, was ordained by four congregations in San Francisco in 2006, but could not join the ELCA roster until the denomination's national assembly approved the new policy in August.

"I didn't really believe the policy was going to change as quickly as it did," she said.

Rohrer said she is hopeful Sunday's service will be a "symbol" to young people that the Lutheran church is working toward becoming more welcoming of people of all different backgrounds.

Jeff Johnson, another one of the pastors who will be added to the roster, said the ELCA's position for years of not accepting the choice of some congregations to ordain gay clergy was painful and disappointing.

"The actions the church is taking on Sunday affirms the decisions of those congregations," Johnson, pastor of the University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley, said. "The church is respecting our family, our partners, the choices we're making."

A small number of congregations have voted to leave the ELCA in response to the August vote. Johnson and Rohrer want Sunday's service to heal some of the rifts.

Johnson said the goal, in part, is to show people the church has space for many different opinions.

"There's room for them," he said. "It's a tolerant church."

The special rite of reception that will be used for the first time on Sunday was developed specifically to welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender pastors, said Melissa Ramirez Cooper, a spokeswoman for the ELCA.

Two more rite of reception services are scheduled for September in the St. Paul-Minneapolis area and another will follow in Chicago, Cooper said.

This article appeared online and in print in more than 300 media outlets, including: NPR, The Miami Herald, The Washington Examiner, the DC Daily Caller, the Fresno Bee, USA Today, Yahoo News, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Houston Chronicle, Manchester UK Guardian News, SFGate, Fox News, Star Tribune, Newsday, Seattle Times, ,

In the News: Bay Area Reporter

2010-07-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

Lutherans receive LGBT pastors

Published 07/22/2010

by Matthew S. Bajko

m.bajko@ebar.com

The Reverend Jeff Johnson

Twenty years ago two San Francisco Lutheran congregations ordained a lesbian couple and a gay man as pastors in defiance of their denomination's ban against non-celibate LGBT people becoming clergy.

The two churches' decision in 1990 set off a two-decade fight over the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's anti-gay policy. While the congregations were ultimately ejected from the ELCA for their decisions, 15 additional LGBT people became Lutheran pastors in the ensuing years through an extraordinary ordination process.

Although their local congregations considered them to be pastors, in the eyes of the national Lutheran Church they were deemed unofficial clergy. Church leaders subsequently disciplined many of the churches that ordained them.

Last year the national Lutheran Church revised its policies and dropped the requirement that LGBT pastors need to be celibate. This weekend six LGBT pastors ordained extraordinarily and two pastors who had been dismissed from the ELCA clergy roster will be received as full-fledged pastors in the church at a ceremony Sunday, July 25 at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco.

"I think this is a very significant step for the church, which has been in this two-decade process of studying gay and lesbian people and talking about finding ways to include us. That process has now come to an end and the church has decided that LGBT people are to be welcomed fully as leaders and members of the church, so it is a huge step that the church has taken," said the Reverend Jeff Johnson, whose ordination 20 years ago as an assistant pastor at the city's First United Lutheran Church sparked the internal dialogue within the national Lutheran Church.

Johnson, 48, now lives in Oakland and is the pastor at University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley. He will be taking part in the formal Rite of Reception service this weekend presided over by the Reverend Mark Holmerud, fourth bishop of the Sierra Pacific Synod, which covers northern California and northern Nevada.

"I am deeply grateful to the [extraordinary] pastors, and the two pastors who were removed from the ELCA roster, for their grace and good will in being a part of this process," Holmerud said in a statement about the ceremony. He added that the actions of the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly "have brought us to a new day."

At the Sierra Pacific Synod assembly in May, Holmerud lifted a public censure and admonition placed on the Berkeley church in 2000 after it called Johnson as its pastor even though he was not on the ELCA clergy roster. At the meeting Johnson was also elected to serve on the regional synod's council pending his participation in this weekend's rite.

The other extraordinary Lutheran pastors taking part in the service are the Reverends Craig Minich, pastor of youth ministries at the Oakland-Berkeley Lutheran Youth Program; Dawn Roginski, pastor of parish programs at St. Francis Lutheran Church; Megan Rohrer, executive director of Welcome, which feeds the homeless in San Francisco; Paul R. Brenner at St. Francis Lutheran Church; and Sharon Stalkfleet with Lutheran Ministry to Nursing Homes in Oakland.

"I think you can't go through this kind of wilderness walking in the church and not be stronger because of it," said Rohrer, 30, who identifies as a transgender dyke and was extraordinarily ordained in 2006 by four San Francisco Lutheran churches. "It feels like coming out to your parents and having them react really poorly for a long time and then one day they change their mind."

The two pastors being reinstated this weekend are the Reverends Ross D. Merkel, pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Oakland, and Steven P. Sabin, pastor of Christ Church Lutheran in San Francisco. In 1998 the ELCA removed Sabin from its clergy roster after he admitted to being in a committed, same-sex relationship while serving as pastor at Lord of Life Lutheran Church in Ames, Iowa.

"For two decades, many have been grieved and alienated by the ELCA's exclusion of gay and lesbian pastors blessed with loving spouses. I hope and pray that they can, like me, lay aside the hurts and take hope from the gracious power of God to renew and direct the church into evermore faithful and effective proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ," stated Sabin.

Retired Revered James DeLange, who was the senior pastor at St. Francis Lutheran Church in 1990, called this weekend's service a "vindication" for those who fought against the church's discriminatory policies and the beginning of the healing process for many Lutherans impacted by that struggle.

"For those of us who have been just staying with the struggle and have tried to work to try to change the policy this is a vindication of our efforts," said DeLange, who is straight and chairs the San Francisco Interfaith Council. "I am just glad I lived long enough to see the change of policy."

As for the lesbian couple his church ordained the same day as Johnson, the Reverends Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart, DeLange said they now live in Minneapolis and are expected to have their own rite of reception sometime this fall.

Also this Sunday St. Francis will vote on whether to return to the ELCA. In a nearly unanimous vote, the 300 delegates at the Sierra Pacific Synod assembly this spring adopted a resolution inviting both First United and St. Francis to rejoin the national church. First United has yet to schedule a similar vote.

Johnson expressed mixed emotions about how long it has taken the Lutheran Church to fully embrace LGBT pastors.

"I think that the church's taking this step does not change the difficult things the church has done over the past two decades, so it is very important for people to tell the truth about the discrimination they have taken part in as we celebrate this momentous, wonderful happening," he said.

The formal Rite of Reception for the pastors is open to the public. It will begin at 4 p.m. Sunday, July 25 at St. Mark's Lutheran Church, the corner of Franklin and O'Farrell Streets in San Francisco.

You'll find the original here.

In the News: Argus Leader

2010-07-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

Callison: Embracing the Church

Transgender minister to be received as ELCA pastor

Jill Callison • jcalliso@argusleader.com • July 22, 2010

evious Page

When Darlene Audus was a teenager, her Lutheran father discouraged his daughter from dating Roman Catholic boys.

She didn't understand that kind of prejudice then, and the 76-year-old Clark woman today doesn't understand the prejudice directed at her granddaughter, Megan Rohrer, a lesbian.

"I back her all the way," Audus says. "She's a super gal."

Rohrer, 30, is the first openly transgender Lutheran pastor ordained in the United States. Transgender is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity or gender expression differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. Only a very few choose to change their bodies through hormones or surgery.

On Sunday, Rohrer will be part of the first rite to receive gay pastors into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

"She's had a tough struggle to get where she's at," says Audus, a retired county auditor. "I'm proud because she kept at it. It would have been easy to give up. But I wished I could protect her from all those things."

"Those things," as Rohrer tells it in a telephone conversation from her home in San Francisco, include horrifying tales.

After graduating from Lincoln High School, Rohrer enrolled at Augustana College. In the aftermath of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, the campus became a hostile place, she says.

"Aggressive football players would knock on my dorm room door and try to turn me into a straight person in violently sexual ways," she says.

In an attempt to exorcise Rohrer's "gay demons," students in her religion class threw holy water on her and sang hymns as she walked to class.

Rohrer moved off campus for three months, fearing for her safety.

But college faculty supported her, Rohrer says, and it also was the place where she discovered her calling and first fell in love.

"I would never wish an unsafe space for anyone, but sometimes having to take a stand helps push a person into a leadership position," she says. "I was able to find the determination to be a pastor in a church that wasn't yet ready to welcome me."

Rohrer entered seminary on the West Coast. She never considered joining a denomination that would welcome her as an openly lesbian pastor.

"Growing up in South Dakota, everything about my culture was Lutheran," she says. "I spoke Lutheran. A lot of the theology Lutherans proclaim and are excited about is kind of the natural way people live. It's hard to leave a culture behind."

Although her home congregation, Hope Lutheran, wouldn't fill out the necessary paperwork to allow Rohrer to pursue her calling, she says, she found support from the South Dakota Synod office.

Rohrer appreciates both sides' honesty.

"When you're in South Dakota, sometimes the person who disagrees with you most is your closest friend because they're honest with you," she says. "In bigger cities, it's different. If you disagree, you don't have to talk again."

Rohrer, who now runs a nonprofit agency for the homeless and serves four churches in San Francisco, was ordained outside the rules of the ELCA in 2006 - an extraordinary ordination. On Sunday, she will become a pastor in the ELCA.

That became possible when in August 2009, representatives of the ELCA voted to allow congregations to call pastors who were in "publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships."

Rohrer knows how difficult that vote was for many Lutherans. At the Churchwide Assembly last August, she and a Canton woman who opposed the change would pray together before every vote.

"Even when they're hoping the vote will go the other way, I really think God is bigger than this decision," Rohrer says. "I think our faith lives are bigger than this decision. I'm excited to be part of a diverse church where we can pray together."

Rohrer is in a committed, same-sex relationship and, for the past eight years, has served as a pastor to the homeless.

Many of the homeless she works with come from the Midwest. They left home either because their families rejected them or they assumed if their sexuality became public, they would be shunned.

"They left out of fear and never gave anyone the opportunity to accept them," Rohrer says. "That's another reason I continue to be engaged with congregations in the Midwest. We'll always have homeless as long as people can't openly welcome gay and lesbian people into families, church and school."

Audus could never reject Rohrer.

"It wasn't like you could go, 'That wasn't my granddaughter any more,' " Audus says of learning Rohrer is a lesbian. "It was just that the path would be a little harder."

Rohrer, however, might not agree that the path was any harder for her than anyone else. What she does acknowledge is that this is a world where secrets about sex lead to abuse of power.

"I want to be part of a church that holds me accountable, that asks me tough questions," she says. "I want to be part of a group of pastors that are honest about how they're forming healthy relationships. Being gay or straight doesn't matter. What matters is if you're in a loving relationship."

Jill Callison's column runs Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 331-2307.

You can find the original story here.

In the News: Mission Local

2010-07-09T20:44:00.000-07:00

Feeding the Mission, in the Western Addition
Your reporter squealed like a little girl when she realized she had actually found a potato.

By: Heather Smith | July 8, 2010

It starts with a Lutheran Church on fire. St. Paulus at Eddy and Gough burned to the ground in 1995 and has remained a vacant lot ever since. Then, this year, an improbable alliance came together. Case Garver, a 22-year-old Lutheran Volunteer Corps member from Ohio, and Megan Rohrer, a local pastor, were negotiating with local churches to open up unused property in the city for farming.

It was more than just a quaint idea — Rohrer is director of Welcome, an organization that deals directly with the poor, and food banks in San Francisco continue to be stretched to their limit. Rohrer secured permission for the St. Paulus lot. Then came the tricky part.

“Neither of us knew anything about gardening,” says Garver. “Then we found Tree.”

Tree knew how to garden. A Mission resident whose history stretched back decades, Tree had been growing and harvesting food from gardens mostly in the neighborhood, cultivating a group of local gardens and distributing the bounty to a variety of groups. In 2008 he began the Free Farm Stand at Parque Niños Unidos at 23rd and Treat. “People trust him,” says Lauren Anderson, an artist and gardener who runs the foraging nonprofit Produce to the People. “Which means a lot. It’s not easy to invite someone into your backyard, even if it’s just to pick fruit.”

Tree agreed to help run the farm with Anderson and some other nonprofit groups, with the idea that some of the produce would go to the Free Farm Stand in the Mission. The Lutheran synod that owns the church site agreed to cover the water and electrical bills. And so the farming began.

Your average burned-out foundation is not necessarily ideal farmland. The site was sunny, and as Garver puts it, the soil was equal parts sand, KFC buckets, Häagen-Dazs containers and used syringes. When asked if the crew had to use special safety gloves to clear out the soil, Garver deadpans, “It depends on how you define ‛special.’ Or ‛safe.’”

“We did have gloves,” he adds.

“There are so many different urban agriculture groups,” says Anderson. “They all believe in slightly different things: Teaching people how to garden. Getting people community garden plots. Greening the city. Working with youth. Our priority [was] getting food out of the ground and to the low-income people who needed it. The secret was manure. Lots and lots of manure.”

Planting in the basement of a burned-out building turned out to have its advantages — the plants were sheltered from San Francisco’s gale-force winds by the remaining walls. The terrible soil is producing more food than anyone expected.The first harvest at the plot they named The Free Farm — 5.5 pounds of produce — came out of the garden on April 11, just a little over three months after work began. A second mini-stand was established outside and began passing out food to residents of the immediate neighborhood. By the end of June, the free farmers had harvested 784 pounds of produce in six months, the most of any garden in the network supplying the Free Farm Stand.

On a Wednesday afternoon, a volunteer sits outside the farm behind two galvanized tubs of gargantuan, prehistoric-looking collard greens, offering them to slightly confused passersby. The quirks of the landscape are still being discovered — carrots have been challenging, collards and cabbage have done astonishingly well. There is fortune in this: Collards have been one of the most popular crops in both neighborhoods. Attempts to push kale have been met by resistance.

Inside, volunteers are elbow-deep in the dirt, feeling around for the first crop of potatoes. They range from a very enthusiastic visitor from southern Japan to Steve Pulliam, a recent transplant from Atlanta who found the place while walking his dog. When he began, he had no gardening experience. Five months later he is speaking confidently about duck droppings.

“I wanted to be outside. In the sunshine. Not around kids,” says Sarah Hale, a schoolteacher. “So much has happened this year: Haiti, the Gulf. I wanted to do something where I knew that I was doing good. Something small, and effective.”

Anderson, meanwhile, admits to aspirations beyond the small. “This is a terrible, terrible analogy,” she says, jokingly. “But we’re trying to decide if we want to turn this into a franchise.”

Letters for my Brothers raises $200 for NCTE in less than a month!

2010-07-08T20:04:00.000-07:00

Royalties from the three weeks of sales for Letters For My Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect enabled us our second royalty check for $100 (for a total of $200) to the National Center for Transgender Equality. %20 of the proceeds for Letters For My Brothers will be contributed to NCTE.

The National Center for Transgender Equality is a national social justice organization devoted to ending discrimination and violence against transgender people through education and advocacy on national issues of importance to transgender people.

Thanks to all who bought books this first month! You have helped us to prove that creativity can make a real difference in the world!

More than 783.57 pounds of food grown!

2010-06-29T21:03:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged about our gardens in a while because I've been so busy. But, I wanted to send an update that 783.57 pounds of free produce have been given away from the Free Farm. Bethlehem Lutheran has also been enjoying harvests lately.

Beyond the food, we've also worked with more than 566 volunteers in the garden this year.

I'm someone who is usually moved more by personal stories than numbers, but these numbers are very impressive.

Thanks to all the great volunteers and leaders at the Free Farm!

Resume

2010-04-29T20:32:00.001-07:00

Megan Rohrer, MDiv, DHL

EDUCATION

1994-1998 Lincoln High School in Sioux Falls, SD
1998-2001 BA at Augustana College in Sioux Falls SD
2002-2003 Student at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, CA
2004-2005 Master of Divinity from the Pacific School for Religion in Berkeley, CA
2009-Present Candidate for Doctorate of Ministry from the Pacific School for Religion in Berkeley, CA

TRAININGS AND CERTIFICATIONS

2011 CPR/AED for the Professional Rescuer & Healthcare Provider, American Red Cross Bay Area.
2010 - Received onto the roster of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Diocese of California
2008-2011 Somatic Experiencing Training, Foundation for Human Enrichment: 216 hours in how to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
2006-2011 Ordained & Rostered Minister, Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries
2005 Clinical Hospital Ministry Training, Sojourn Chaplaincy, San Francisco General Hospital, San Francisco, CA
2004 Reiki Master, Care Through Touch Institute in San Francisco, CA
2003 Nonviolence Facilitator Training, From Violence to Wholeness Curriculum, Pace e Bene, Oakland, CA
2001 Counseling Training : 50+ hours including: MABS; safe holdings; sexual abuse; and prevention for sexually active children.

WORK HISTORY

2010-Present Contributing Blogger, Living Lutheran, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Chicago, IL.
2010-Present Growing Home Community Garden Manager, Project Homeless Connect, Department of Public Health, San Francisco, CA (Growing Home Community Garden won the 2010 NEN Best Community Challenge Grant Project)
2002-Present Executive Director, WELCOME- a communal response to poverty, San Francisco, CA
2001-2002 Child Care Counselor, Children's Home Society , Sioux Falls, SD
1998-2001 Summer Conference Staff at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS, PUBLICATIONS, AND CURRICULUMS

2012 Featured Speaker, Equality Talks Workshop – Human Rights Campaign, Western Regional LGBTQIA Conference, University of California, Merced and the University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA.
2012 Presenter, A Faithful Response to LGBTQ Homeless Youth, Creating Change, National LGBT Equality Conference.
2012 Panel Speaker, The Pleasures and Perils of LGBTQ History, the American Historical Association Conference.
2011 With Open Arms, Documentary.
2011 Panel Speaker, LGBTQ Youth: Improving Our Response and Gaining Community Support, National Alliance to End Homelessness Conference
2011 Panel Speaker, LGBT Homelessness & Youth: Religious Advocacy and Accountability, HRC Clergy Call
2011 Photo Essay, Everyday Drag: The Aesthetics of Gender and the Pressure to Perform, Briarpatch Magazine, May/June.
2011 Co-editor, Letters For My Brothers, Wilgefortis
2010 Co-editor, Designer and Contributor, Vanguard Revisited Magazine. (exhibited in the 2011 National Queer Art's Festival's Exhibit - Queer it Yourself: Tools for Survival)
2010 Associate Curator, Our Vast Queer Past, GLBT Historical Society Museum
2010 Street Power: The Story of San Francisco's Vanguard, National Queer Arts Festival, GLBT Historical Society
2010 Curator, Man-i-fest: FTM Mentoring in San Francisco from 1976-2009 (online exhibit on Out History and physical exhibit at the GLBT Historical Society)
2010 Queer Public Histories of the Tenderloin, Queer Studies Lecture Series, Sonoma State University
2009 Queerly Lutheran, Wilgefortis
2009 Finding Your Spiritual Path, Philadelphia Trans-Health Summit
2009 Polk Street Stories Project, Hobos to Homeless Exhibit: California Historical Society
2009 Faith and Gender: A Congregational Guide for Transgender Advocacy, Facilitator for the Human Rights Campaign
2009 Out in Season: The Church Year through Transgender Eyes, Online sermon resources for pastors following the lectionary to talk about transgender themes and issues, Human Rights Campaign
2009 “Queering Soteriology,” Stand Boldly: Post Modern Lutheran Theology- A collection of essays from young Lutheran Theologians. Three Trees Press
2008 Queer Spirituality, Class taught at the Faith and Feminism conference at HerChurch/Ebenezer Lutheran in San Francisco
2008 Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries – Creative Ministry to, for and led by queer people, Lutheran’s Concerned North America biennial assembly
2008 “Eye of God,” Schmap Berkeley Guide: Fifth Edition, – Photograph.
2008 Testimony - Documentary intersecting faith and coming out stories.
2007 Out of the Extraordinary: Benefit Album for Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries- Megan co-produced, contributed and designed this CD that includes Bread for the Journey, the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, Dakota Road, Jonathon Rundman, Carrie Newcomer and the Indigo Girls and raised more than $7,000
2007 Bound for Glory- Solo CD where Megan handled all aspects of production and creation.
2007 Simul: Lutheran Voices in Poetry, Ed. Odland, Mark, Xulon Press
2005 Gender Plurality and the Church: Serving Transgendered Individuals in Communities of Faith, Pacific School of Religion’s Earl Lectures
1998 Homosexuality, the Church and Reconciliation, Augustana Symposium, Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD
1997 The World Would Be a Better Place if Everyone Were Naked, American Academy of Religion, Luther Seminary, Minneapolis MN

Awards:

2011 honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Palo Alto University for community service.
2011 Finalist in the Bay Area Citizen's Citizen of Tomorrow Award. (The Bay Area Citizen is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of the San Francisco Bay Area for The New York Times.)
2010 Winner of Out History's Since Stonewall Local History Competition for the online exhibit Man-i-fest: FTM Mentoring in San Francisco from 1976-2009
2007 Honorary Black Belt, Triangle Martial Arts Association, San Francisco, CA

Community Work and Activities:

2007-2011 Member of the Board of Directors for Sojourn Chaplaincy at San Francisco General Hospital
2006-2010 Director of Candidacy for Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries
2007-2008 Communications Chair Covenant Circle Member for Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries
2006 Tenderloin Community Health Fair Planning Committee Member
2007 Member of the Steering Committee for the San Francisco Trans March
2006-2007 Member of the Goodsoil Consensus Circle
2000-2001 Member of the Board of Directors for Pride on the Prairie, Sioux Falls, SD

In the News: San Francisco Chronicle

2003-12-03T11:35:00.000-08:00

SHAME OF THE CITY / Homeless 'mascots' find niche in tony neighborhoods

December 03, 2003|By Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Find the original here.

'Mascots' can live well -- by homeless' standards -- if they become accepted in an upscale neighborhood. Chronicle photo by Brant Ward
Credit: BRANT WARD

For a homeless guy, Mike Carreiro has it made.

He lives in alleys and side yards on a trendy stretch of Polk Street, has all the clean clothes he needs and never goes hungry. That's because shopkeepers and residents take care of Carreiro. He is, as some put it, their "mascot."

Across town on Potrero Hill, Charles has a similar arrangement. He spreads his shoeshine kit outside a fashionable market every morning, and while he shines, shopkeepers give him sandwiches and odd jobs. At night, he sleeps beneath a freeway, and if he's not back the next day, the neighborhood worries.

"He's our Potrero 'mascot,' " said Alison Hotchkiss, who lives on the hill and tosses Charles -- who never gives his last name -- a dollar most times she sees him. "I mean that in the nicest way possible. He's been here forever, and he's a nice guy."

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There are dozens of "mascots" like Carreiro and Charles throughout the city -- quiet, friendly homeless people who have been in the same spot so long they have become part of their upscale neighborhoods.

Most of San Francisco's 8,600 to 15,000 homeless cluster around downtown's social services and main panhandling routes, but by living in the outlying neighborhoods, "mascots" avoid the turmoil, competition and danger of that central nexus -- and have a comparatively decent life.

The technique for becoming a "mascot" is this: Pick an upscale area, stick to it, stay polite and unobtrusive, and shoo off any competition. Residents of these neighborhoods admit they'd rather not have any homeless around, but they say at least "mascots" help keep out the less desirable ones.

"Mascots" can be found in the Castro, where one man lived seven years in a parking lot near the All American Boy store, and in Noe Valley's 24th Street shopping district. They are also in parts of the Sunset -- and, in the case of Carreiro and Charles, Russian Hill and Potrero Hill.

"He's a good man, a real staple of the neighborhood," Jason Coleman, the barista at Tully's Coffee on Polk Street, said one afternoon. Nearby, Carreiro sat at the cafe's marble-top counter sipping a warm cup. "He helps out sometimes, never causes trouble."

Carreiro, 47, is a squat man with a bushy black beard and glasses as thick as an ashtray. He grinned as he listened to Coleman.

"Good conversation, too, eh?" he said, and the two laughed. "It's true!" Coleman shot back.

The cafe was full of the Dockers-wearing office-worker set, and Carreiro chatted for an hour with several customers before strolling outside to take up his usual station on the sidewalk. There he sat on a milk crate holding two signs: One, a flyer asking for donations to the homeless charity at a local church -- which he helped start -- and the other, a cardboard scrap reading, "Just 23 Cents."

"It's a good marketing ploy," he said with a wink, waving the 23-cent sign. "Catches their eyes, then I can talk to them about the fund at the church."

Carreiro lost his last janitorial job three years ago, and once his savings and support from friends and family ran dry, he hunted for an area he knew would be safe. Polk, near Vallejo Street, had churches he was familiar with and he figured the residents would be easygoing.

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And they are -- as long as he is, too.

Carreiro can panhandle about $20 on a good day from those strolling the boutiques and gourmet shops. And by picking out-of-sight spots between the churches and expensive houses, he can sleep peacefully through the night. Sometimes he gets handyman work; one man let him sand his floor for $10 an hour.

"We've kind of adopted him in this neighborhood," said Megan Rohrer, director of the Welcome Ministry at the Old First Presbyterian Church. "A lot of people just love him." Carreiro helped found the S.F. Neighbors Foundation at the church, she said, and he arranges more donations of clothes and blankets than anyone else.

But he can't seem to abandon his outdoor life. "He has this amazing drive to do things for other people, but not so much a drive to help himself," Rohrer said. "It kind of breaks your heart."

Not everyone's.

"We'd rather not have any panhandlers at all," said Mimi, a worker at a local laundry who didn't want her last name printed. "But there's no real trouble, so what are you going to do?"

Carreiro said he is sensitive to that viewpoint, and that's why he works hard to fit in. It's a matter of survival.

"Back down the hill with the other homeless, you get all those dope fiends, people whacked out all the time," Carreiro said, smiling as a pinstriped passer-by dropped $5 into his cup. "They don't come out this far. That's why I'm here. We keep things nice."

That's what 59-year-old Charles says, three miles away at the corner of Texas and 18th streets.

There, on the northern slope of Potrero Hill -- where gentrified Victorians overlook art galleries and coffee bars -- Charles has little problem eating or finding bus fare. That's because for the past three years, the neighborhood has given him a helping hand -- and most of all, respect.

He sets up his tiny box of supplies on the sidewalk outside the New Potrero Market and shines shoes every day for a buck or two a shine. A thin, bearded fellow with a shy smile, he is quiet and polite.

When not at his corner, Charles sleeps in a cardboard refrigerator box under Interstate 280, and he showers at a nearby soup kitchen. He appeared one day three years ago, and has rebuffed any offers to hook him up with social services so he can live inside.

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"I was born and raised in this city, and I've had a full life," he said one day as he carefully laid his cans and brushes. "I built houses as a young man, worked on ships, and now I just do this.

"People are nice here. Someday, I'll get off the street, but this is my life today."

Workers at the New Potrero Market and the cafes bring Charles lunch, and some mornings they let him help unload deliveries. Delisa Heiman, who owns the Collage art gallery on Charles' block, has hired him to clean her windows for $10.

"He's not all there, always, but he's very sweet. We take care of him," she said. "Other homeless guys come and go, but they leave fast. This is Charles' territory."

A few blocks away at Martin De Porre's homeless "House of Hospitality," counselor Jim Haber has seen several "mascots" like Charles over the years. Perhaps the most tragic was the "Voodoo Man," who was taken under the wing of dot-com workers at 16th and Utah streets for about three years.

He had a bad habit of standing in the street trying to cast a spell on oncoming cars -- and in December 2000, one hit him. He died and was recorded at the city morgue as John Doe No. 135. As with Charles, nobody knew his full name.

Most "mascots" don't meet that drastic an end. Their relationship with their neighborhoods can go on for years, Haber said, as long as nobody has unreasonable expectations.

"People have to realize what they are doing out of the goodness of their hearts is not a jobs program, and they shouldn't get mad if the homeless person doesn't get up off the street," Haber said. "If that's clear, things go fine."