Bridges Over Walls

The Bridge of Safety: Women in Church w/ Kimberly Bulgin (Season Finale)

Pastor Kimberly Bulgin grew up in the fellowship halls and sanctuaries of churches all her life. She’s served as a music teacher, a worship leader, and a local church pastor and her life in ministry has taken her across a variety of cities in the United States, Canada, and beyond. For over 15 years, Pastor Kim has worked to carve out spaces of safety and empowerment for marginalized people, and now serves a rapidly growing community through her ministry, the House of Women. In her new book, The Sisters Stay Dropping Gems: What the Women in the Bible Teach us about Life, Love, and Relationships, Pastor Kim challenges traditional narratives to highlight the strength, resilience, and wisdom of Biblical women. We’ll explore some of the ways Christian culture has evolved away from Jesus’ teachings and ultimately wrestle with the question, “What should we do now?” Whether you’re listening to Bridges Over Walls for the first time or have been with us since season one, we’re so excited you’re here. Thank you, from all of us, for being part of this ongoing quest for a Christianity that looks more and more like Jesus. Find more of Pastor Kim's work and order a copy of "The Sisters Stay Dropping Gems" at www.kimberlybulgin.com [https://www.kimberlybulgin.com]

The Bridge of Respect: Tolerance in Community w/ Mayor Travis Stovall

If you’ve caught even a little bit of national news this year - let me first say I’m sorry for what you’ve been through. The kind of Christianity I often see as I scroll through my social media feeds can be really devastating - and I often find myself wondering how two people can read the same Bible and come to such different conclusions about what it says, especially when it comes to society and politics.  We aren’t the first people to wrestle with this. Since the very beginning days of this country, Christians in the United States have struggled to separate their national identity and all its cultural norms from the kind of faith and lifestyle Jesus called us to. In the New Testament we find a Jesus that drew people to him - especially people who had been beaten down and hurt by both their government and their religious leadership. We find a Jesus that put His love for people above all religious laws and traditions, and even the laws of the land. It can be tough to reconcile our faith with our politics, and when Christians find themselves in positions of leadership they will always be faced with a question: “How will my faith influence how I lead?” Travis Stovall has served as the mayor of Gresham, Oregon since 2021, and made history as the first Black mayor of any major city in the Portland Metro area and across the state of Oregon. As an involved member of his community and a lifelong Christian, Mayor Stovall has had to navigate how he chooses to allow his faith to show up in how he leads the city of Gresham - and it might not be exactly how you think. We’ll have him share those experiences himself as we explore all that and more in this episode of Bridges Over Walls.

The Wall of History - Lynchings, Slave Bibles, and Justice w/ Taylor Stewart

If there’s one topic that divides Christian culture in the United States today more than just about any other, it’s the topic of justice. Despite Hebrew and Greek words for justice appearing more than 1,000 times throughout the Bible - the American Christian church is often starkly divided when it comes to how we go about seeking and advocating for justice today. While Christian pastors were prominent leaders in the Civil Rights movement and other justice work since the founding of the United States, Christianity has also been used as justification for some of the most horrifying violations of human rights. During the Civil War, the vast majority of white American slave owners used the Bible to justify slavery and racial abuse. The Confederacy was founded as a Christian organization. Many of the most prominent and violent white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan explicitly claimed Christianity as their foundation. And even today, when any marginalized group begins to advocate for fair treatment and freedom from oppression, it tends to be American Christians who are the most resistant and hostile to those efforts. When it comes to what justice actually means here in the present day, Christians tend to be sharply divided. In Luke Chapter 4:17-21, Jesus returned to his home town and began to preach. He opened to the book of Isaiah and read a list of things he had come to earth to do. Here are a few of those things: To preach the Good News to the poor. To heal the brokenhearted. To proclaim liberty to the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind. And to set at liberty those who are oppressed. In a country built on a legacy of violence and oppression, the question for each of us who want to follow Jesus is - what does He want us to do about it now? As a Black kid growing up in Oregon, Taylor Stewart was taught very little about Civil Rights or justice at his Christian school. He grew up, graduated from college, and decided to join a trip to the American South to learn more about this history. While touring Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, Taylor was especially impacted by the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which memorializes nearly 6500 African American victims of lynching documented between the years of 1865 and 1950. As he read the names and even saw people with his own last name listed, Taylor says that he realized only time and place separated him from the people named in the memorial. As the trip ended and time went by, he found himself wanting to share the history he had learned, and started thinking a lot about a quote from Civil Rights leader John Lewis that says, “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” In 2018, Taylor founded the Oregon Remembrance Project, which works side-by-side with communities that have a history of racial harm to chart a new end to their stories. Most notably, Taylor has worked with the communities of Coos Bay, Oregon, the site of the most widely documented lynching of an African American man in the state, and Grants Pass, Oregon, a former sundown town, to chart a new course toward healing, hope, and historical honesty. [Content Warning]: This episode contains a racial slur as part of a historical quote. Follow Taylor Stewart and the Oregon Remembrance project by visiting www.oregonremembrance.org [https://oregonremembrance.org/about/] or by watching their 2024 OPB Documentary at www.opb.org/article/2024/09/18/oregon-remembrance-project-truth-reconciliation/ [https://www.opb.org/article/2024/09/18/oregon-remembrance-project-truth-reconciliation/]

The Wall of History - The Place We Make w/ Sarah Sanderson

Relationships can be tricky between any two people, regardless of their backgrounds. Any time two people come in contact with each other, they bring together very different sets expectations, norms, and experiences. Some walls between people are the walls we create through our actions and choices - but sometimes the walls were built long before either person was even born. They were built by the generations before us - our forefathers and foremothers - and continue to remain an obstacle between people today. One of these walls is the history and politics of race. For centuries in the land that would become the United States, race-based slavery was a legal and accepted practice. And even after slavery ended officially, it wasn’t until about 60 years ago that racial discrimination was made illegal thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The scars created by slavery, racial abuse, and discrimination remain with us today, and as Christians many of us are left to wrestle with the question, “How would Jesus want us to wrestle with this legacy of trauma?” In the Bible, when a person or group of people had sinned, we see that God called them to repentance. One way God did this was to call individuals to repent. In the story of Zaccheus we see a man recognize the harm he had caused others and change his behavior, doing all he could to pay people back for the wrong he had done them. But we also see examples of entire groups of people repenting and changing together. In the book of Jonah, the entire city of Ninevah realizes that they have been wrong, and everyone from the King himself down to the poorest person apologizes for their behavior and they change their ways. What can we learn from these powerful stories, and how might those stories apply to us today in the United States? Early in her adult life, Sarah Sanderson found herself wrestling with these questions. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer in 2020, she found herself once again exploring her role as a Christian woman and a white American citizen, and she discovered that members of her own family had been part of enforcing racism just outside of the town she still lived in through Oregon’s Black exclusion laws in the 1800s, which stated that no Black person was allowed to enter or live in Oregon. Sarah published her findings and experience in a book called “The Place We Make,” which challenges white Americans to reckon with their history, repent of the ways they still benefit from that history, and to work toward a more just and honest future alongside the people around them.

The Bridge of Presence w/ Emily Cortez

When you hear the word “Ministry” what do you think of? I know for myself, ministry used to mean telling other people about what I believed. In my early understanding, ministry was informational - it was leading Bible studies and passing out literature and preaching sermons. Ministry meant defending my faith well and having better arguments about topics like creation, lifestyle choices, and salvation than the other people around me. What I didn’t learn until later is that perhaps the most powerful form of ministry isn’t informational - it’s incarnational. We learn a whole lot more from watching how other people live their lives than we do from what they say to us. It’s how we learn whether to trust someone. It’s how we decide whether we want to listen to the things they say in the first place. Incarnational ministry is all about embodying the character of Jesus and introducing the world to Him through our actions. As a former local church pastor who now works as a hospital chaplain, Emily Cortez has been learning incarnational ministry for the past several years. When people are experiencing some of the most vulnerable parts of their lives in the hospital, what does it mean to minister to them?