Many thanks to Judy Hinck and to the lively group of Mount Olive members who spent an afternoon with me and Ron sharing their climate justice journey (so far!). Special thanks to Art Halbardier, who graciously hosted and offered extremely helpful background before our visit.
To learn more about Mount Olive Lutheran’s work, check out this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about Mount Olive’s geothermal project. You might also appreciate this document recounting the history of Mount Olive’s climate work, or these links with more about the history of their climate justice initiatives, their 2017 statement, their climate justice page, and an FAQ document about their projects:
You can also learn more about the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s statements on climate justice and about the Minnesota chapter of Interfaith Power and Light. To read Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate, visit Laudato si’.
Transcript
Judy Hinck
What are the next big things, or what are the big things that our kids are going to wonder if we did something about? I think this is going to be it. So I graduated high school in ’69. My big thing then was world hunger, and it’s a thing I got very involved in in high school and continue to be to this day. But I remember thinking, if my parents’ generation isn’t going to do anything about world hunger, then they don’t care. And I think for today’s generation, they’re saying, “If you don’t do something about climate, you don’t care for God’s earth.”
Debra Rienstra
Welcome to the Refugia Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Debra Rienstra.
Refugia are habitats in nature where life endures in times of crisis. We’re exploring the concept of refugia as a metaphor, discovering how people of faith can become people of refugia: nurturing life-giving spaces in the earth, in our human cultural systems, and in our spiritual communities, even in this time of severe disturbance. This season, we’re paying special attention to churches and Christian communities who have figured out how to address the climate crisis together as an essential aspect of their discipleship.
Today I’m talking with Judy Hinck from Mount Olive Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Judy has been a lay leader in the church since the 1970s and she’s not stopping anytime soon. Mount Olive is a center city church located just a few blocks from George Floyd Square. They’re a progressive congregation with beautiful, high liturgical worship in their 1920s sanctuary. It was their commitment to justice that first led them into climate work back in 2015—that, and a hot sanctuary and a dying boiler. I love how thoughtful Mount Olive folks have been about prompting a complete reorientation, church-wide, toward climate justice. Yes, they’ve installed geothermal and solar, but they’ve also managed to sustain congregational awareness and action for climate justice. Judy is only one of the many dedicated lay leaders, and she will share their story. Let’s get started.
Debra Rienstra
Judy, thank you so much for talking to me today.
Judy Hinck
You’re welcome.
Debra Rienstra
You’ve been a member of this church since 1974, you say?
Judy Hinck
Yes, we were gone for five years. But other than that, we’ve been here since ’74.
Debra Rienstra
And what have your roles been in the church over all those years?
Judy Hinck
I’ve had a number of roles, from being a committee member to a committee chair, to the president of the congregation, a member of the choir, working with the children in both the youth and the Sunday school. So a bunch of different roles.
Debra Rienstra
And you’ve been involved for a long time in the climate crisis impact work that your church has been doing?
Judy Hinck
Yes, I would say at least 15 years. 10 years, 15 years.
Debra Rienstra
How did it all start? We’re very interested in the spark point for churches.
Judy Hinck
Well, I would put the very first thing is when the congregation understood the role of Styrofoam in our society and decided to stop using Styrofoam coffee cups, which, for a Lutheran, coffee-drinking congregation, is a pretty big step. They took that step, and we sort of banned—didn’t ban, just stopped using—Styrofoam cups. And then for a number of years, things like lay quiet. And then, as we learned about what was happening in the world with the Paris Accords, it became clear that if we did not address climate justice, we would not be able to justify that to our children. And that really became sort of the conversation where it started. In the congregation itself, we are set up with a variety of committees that do a lot of independent work, and so our Global Ministry Committee took the mantle of climate justice, not aware that the Properties Committee was also doing some work to think about climate and the role of the congregation itself. So that’s kind of where it started, when we said we’ve got to do something. At that point, when we went to the vestry, our church council, to talk about that, we said, we don’t think it can be just our committee. We think hospitality is going to be involved in this, and neighborhood’s going to be involved, and youth, and all of our different committees. And so the vestry itself said yes. They agreed that we’re going to make this a focus for our congregation. So that’s how it started.
Debra Rienstra
I mean it’s remarkable that you in this church were aware of the Paris Climate Accords, and it looks to me like you also did a study of Laudato si’ in that same year, and not every church is aware of that. So how do you explain how globally aware people in the church were?
Judy Hinck
I would say my knowledge of this parish as being globally aware has been true since I’ve been here. So where it happened before 1974—they were there when I came in, the idea of global awareness was there.
Debra Rienstra
So there’s a long tradition of that. And they got over the Styrofoam cup. It all started with the Styrofoam cups.
Judy Hinck
It started with Styrofoam cups. Yes, yes. It started there. And then the Properties Committee, as many of us did in our homes, started moving toward the lights, which in a congregation is a big deal and expensive, but in the Global Ministry Committee, we started saying, “How can we engage all segments of our congregation in thinking about climate and climate justice, and what resources do we have?” At that time, we were at a point of reviewing each of the global ministries that we support, and so at that time, the person who was chair at the time said, “Who could we best go to to have a global ministry that’s talking about climate justice?” At that point, we did a bunch of research into a bunch of different organizations, and really decided that Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light was the organization we wanted to connect with, and so that became the ministry that we decided to support and use as a resource for us. And so that was a decision that was made as a part of a ministry review for our committee.
Debra Rienstra
So it sounds like there’s a convergence of this global awareness, this climate justice awareness, and the fact that you had a very hot sanctuary and a dying boiler at the same time—sort of a divine convergence of things. And Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light could help with both those things.
Judy Hinck
With both of those things. And what we didn’t know on our committee is that Properties was already in discussion with Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light. As the congregation was complaining about the heat in the summer, and the congregation was looking at a variety of ways to cool, all of which seemed unworkable and expensive, they started looking at a number of things, from…were we a solar panel kind of congregation? Was our building possible for that? And what other methods might there be to lower our carbon footprint? So yes. So those two committees, kind of, when we realized that we started actually talking to each other, which was a good idea.
Debra Rienstra
Always a good idea for church committees to talk!
Judy Hinck
And Mark, whom you met, was on both committees, so he came and said, “You guys, we’re talking about this over there. Maybe we should talk to each other.”
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, you had a bridge person. So then you created this climate justice report, and it’s so good. It’s simple, it’s forceful. So talk about that process and about the theme “gentle with the earth.”
Judy Hinck
We asked a number of people who we knew were interested, or some asked to be on the committee, if they would do the legwork to give us a basis, a foundation of footing. This was about the same time that Pope Francis came out with his work, and so that became part of their review. So this committee looked at the ELCA faith statement in regard to climate and a number of other things, and came up with a document that we felt fairly represented the faith basis for what we wanted to consider. And at that point, we didn’t know where it was going to lead us at all, but we knew we had to do something. This was an issue that we needed to be involved in.
Debra Rienstra
So talk about—there was an action plan that came out of that report and three goals. And I think the goals were really smart too. So one had to do with carbon footprint reduction. One was to create a permanent Climate Justice Task Force. And the third one, and this is my favorite, to reorient all the church’s decisions to include creation. So the carbon footprint one, that’s obvious, but talk about why the permanent task force was important, and why that statement to reorient all decisions was so important.
Judy Hinck
I’m going to flip that around. The statement to reorient became the most important because then we kept bringing that up in our vestry meetings. How is what you’re doing in that project going to influence the climate? The Climate Justice Task Force was established to be a resource to each of the other committees in regard to climate. That didn’t work. It was a great idea, and it worked for the first round of talking to each of the committees. But then it didn’t maintain because there wasn’t actually a home for it that could reach out well enough. We hope we are going to fix that this year by establishing a committee position on the vestry. The task force was supposed to be separate from the vestry that would look over the whole thing, and they just didn’t have a good way to manage that. It was much more manageable for us to do the reorient and then bring that up at the vestry, rather than having sort of a task force monitoring that. Does that make sense?
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s always the question of how to get everybody in leadership involved in thinking in ways they haven’t thought before. And there’s lots of ways to do it, and it sounds like you just did some trial and error. Yeah. The other thing I noticed in that particular report was the word “beauty.” And it seems like beauty is really important to you in this church, in your worship, in your music, but it’s also here. And I think it’s really remarkable to connect climate work and creation justice with beauty as a principle. How did that come about and what has that meant?
Judy Hinck
I think you’re right, that it is a principle. It is a concept that’s been sort of foundational in the congregation long term. The very practical way that came about is that it was Susan Paulo Cherwin—one of her big lines, her big things, is, “Is it beautiful, is it necessary, and is it kind?” And so that became something that she pushed for. And when we talked, for instance, about adding different things—solar panels, the geothermal—are we going to do it in a way that enhances both our physical facility and the work that we’re doing, as opposed to just slap it on? So that became one of the things that we needed to talk about.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, so at that point you got different forms of funding. So maybe we could just go over all the funding. This is all happening in 2016, 2017. It all moved so fast. January 2016 through June 2017—by then you had done solar, geothermal, you were breaking ground on geothermal. How were you getting the congregation to come along to that? And maybe this is a place to talk about financing it too.
Judy Hinck
Sure. The idea of solar panels was hitting the waves. You know, people were being very interested in that. And we have a flat roof on our church that seemed just right for it, and Minnesota was offering some financing for it, and offering that financing to faith communities. They were running it by a lottery, and we found out about it through Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light, and they helped us to craft our application for that, which we got in just under the wire of the deadline, and amazingly enough, we won that lottery. So that helped us to install and get going on the solar panel portion. And I think that was very energizing for the congregation. I mean, nothing like telling a congregation, “Hey, you want to do this first step, and you can do it pretty much for free.”
Debra Rienstra
Everybody loves that.
Judy Hinck
Right? Who’s not to love that. And you won. It took longer than we anticipated to actually make it happen. But that was a real energizing kind of thing, whereas then we could say, “Okay, but what’s next?” In fairness, behind all of this was the—it’s too hot in the summer in our congregation, in our building. And our furnace is about ready to bite the dust. So the solar things were helping with the electricity, but it wasn’t doing anything for the cooling. And there was certainly a very strong groundswell in the congregation to do something about the heat in the summer in the parish. And yet, because of the structure of our building and the age of our building, it was going to be difficult and very expensive to do any traditional kind of of air conditioning, especially— since this is a congregation that is very musical—especially when our organist said, “Then you’re going to have to run it 24 hours a day during the summer, or the organ will continue to go in and out of tune.” You don’t get to run it just two hours on it, you know, whatever. And then it became even more expensive-sounding. But at that point, then the Properties Committee, and this was entirely the Properties Committee, started looking at what might be other possibilities. And again, Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light said, “Well, we can help you think about geothermal.” And in that process, we have some wonderful engineers in our congregation who could look at and evaluate that, and they did and came up with a staggering price tag.
Debra Rienstra
What was that staggering price tag?
Judy Hinck
In the end, it was 2.1 million, 2.2 million, which is a staggering price tag for our size parish, and our size parish that, at the time, did not have a mortgage. So we know we were celebrating not having that mortgage. So we got our solar pretty much free, and then we could think about something else. If we hadn’t had that, we would have it would have taken longer. I think we would have done it, it just would have taken longer. So that when geothermal became a possibility for heating and cooling, for the church, and we have a parking lot that could house enough wells to do that, and enough wells for future possibilities for the rest of the building. Then it sounded pretty exciting.
Debra Rienstra
You still need to raise 2.1 million.
Judy Hinck
Well, we didn’t—we needed to borrow. They didn’t need to raise it right away. But at that point, our foundation got on board. Well, not until the congregation voted on it. But Art Halbader did an amazing job of education for the congregation: numerous adult forums, numerous education hours, keeping everybody very informed about what it would mean and what they were learning. I think communication was a huge part of that.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. And when I spoke with Art about this very thing, he said early on that one of the best decisions that the Properties Committee made was to be absolutely transparent about every step. And that meant a lot of communication. So that was partly how the congregation got on board.
Judy Hinck
Yes, yes, it really was. It really was. And then that spring, because we knew that’s what they were working on, our committee got very involved in trying to find a way to involve the whole congregation in thinking about climate justice. And that upped the interest when we did the Passport to Climate Justice, so that by the time we came to our meeting to say whether or not we wanted to vote on this, everybody had been thinking about climate justice for a year in a bunch of different ways. And when we came to the congregational meeting, those of us who’d been working on it thought we were going to have to fight hard and answer a lot of questions, and we didn’t, because the communication work had been done so well.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. Were there any resistances or obstacles along the way that you had to deal with?
Judy Hinck
Well, certainly the biggest one was that price tag. How long would it take us to pay it off? How were we going to pay it off? Could we do it? But I think, yeah, that was certainly the biggest one. However, Susan’s thing about beauty came in there. What are you going to tear up? What’s it going to look like when you’re done? Are there going to be weird boxes all over the place? So all of those questions had to be answered, and were.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, there’s a document that one of you sent me that had to do with answering. It was an FAQ document, basically. And the concerns were noise, and how things were going to look. And then there was also a concern in one of the newspaper articles about this whole process for you, that some people were saying, “Well, why are we spending that money on this when we could be spending it on our ministries?” And how is that objection addressed?
Judy Hinck
In a couple of ways. One was, if we’re going to do this, then let’s make sure we use that space more in our ministries if we’re going to do this. Another one was, if our goal is to become climate neutral, we have to do something different. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing if we want to become climate neutral, which, you know, we said we did. And part of our commitment is to both the neighborhood and the earth, you know, our global earth, and this is an issue we can’t ignore.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. So you didn’t have to deal with climate skeptics or climate doubters.
Judy Hinck
No, not that I recall.
Debra Rienstra
That’s remarkable.
Debra Rienstra
Hi, it’s me, Debra. If you are enjoying this podcast episode, go ahead and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. If you have a minute, leave a review. Good reviews help more listeners discover this podcast. To keep up with all the Refugia news, I invite you to subscribe to the Refugia newsletter on Substack. This is my fortnightly newsletter for people of faith who care about the climate crisis and want to go deeper. Every two weeks, I feature climate news, deeper dives, refugia sightings, and much more. Join our community at refugianewsletter.substack.com. For even more goodies, including transcripts and show notes for this podcast, check out my website at debrarienstra.com, D-E-B-R-A-R-I-E-N-S-T-R-A dot com. Thanks so much for listening. We’re glad you’re part of this community. And now back to the interview.
Debra Rienstra
Okay, so talk about the passport to climate justice. This is a genius idea, so describe what that was and how that works.
Judy Hinck
It was a thing we did during Lent of 2017. And we put together a passport, that every person or family who ever wanted it could have one, and it had a number of areas that you could—steps you could take. It begins with a statement of a pledge to take part in a seven week journey to climate justice together as a faith community. And so your Climate Passport book gave you oodles—many, many suggestions of things you could do, in your home, at your work, influencing people in your daily practice, engaging policymakers. You could take, you were encouraged to take, at least 21 actions during the seven weeks, and you would bring your passport back every week and get it stamped with what you did with a Passport Journey stamp. Yeah, it says right on there, “Mount Olive Climate Justice Journey Passport Number,” and you got your passport stamped. And that engaged the kids in a big way. They’re all about stamps, you know. And we made sure that under each category there were things that every age person could do, from turning off lights to changing shower heads to writing senators, to talking to your school principal about whether or not your school is recycling. So we tried in our committee, we would sit and think, “Okay, now this person, what could they do? This person, what could they do?” So that we would make sure that in the passport there was something that everybody could do to take some sort of work. And so this was just leading up to, or part of the whole leading up to the congregational vote on geothermal. So it had everybody engaged.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, yeah. So we’re in spring of 2017 at this point. You’ve got a state grant to do this.
Judy Hinck
To do the solar.
Debra Rienstra
You’ve got a big loan from the ELCA, their loan branch, and then you raised $1.25 million dollars.
Judy Hinck
Not that spring, I wouldn’t say, but over the three year pledge period, yes.
Debra Rienstra
Yes, there was quite a contribution. People did make sacrificial contributions to this too, because they felt it was so important. All right, so we’ve drilled the geothermal now, and that was all 2017, the geothermal is operational now, solar panel’s operational.
Judy Hinck
Yes.
Debra Rienstra
Not all of the building is heating/cooled by geothermal yet, and that was a long time ago, now. So what’s happened since then? What happened next? How is this all going to be sustained?
Judy Hinck
How is it going to be sustained? Well, one of the fun things about doing this kind of stuff is that there’s payback. So our solar panels are earning us money, and geothermal probably will. There were hiccups in terms of having to get things, having to get the air circulation right, but one of the big ways it was sustained is that everybody was cool in the summer.
Debra Rienstra
Nothing beats that!
Judy Hinck
So especially for the, I would say the majority of the congregation for whom the cooling was an important factor, it actually happened. Because, of course, the question was: yes, but will geothermal really do its job? And it really has, and to such an extent that we can forget about it too much now. I think we have to keep reminding ourselves about it. But you know, that became a big—we had to do a big capital fund appeal, and we had to find different ways to engage people in the capital fund drive part of it, and we continue to engage with our foundation to get them on board with that. So is that what you’re asking, or are you asking about…?
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, this sort of ongoing—how has this original goal of reorienting all decision making at the church to think: how is this gentle with the earth? How is this beautiful? How are we keeping in mind the needs of the rest of this creation? How is that being sustained?
Judy Hinck 28:49
We work. We try to make it an ongoing conversation in a number of ways and then take little steps. So one of the next things that happened after that was that we got involved in composting. We’d been involved in recycling, and we got involved in composting as kind of a next step. We continued to redo the lighting in the church, which is amazing to me, what a big job that can be. And we just finished finally getting everything done over. I think the idea that it still remains top, we make sure that care of the earth is in our prayers weekly, as part of the weekly prayers. In our congregation, congregation members write the prayers. And you don’t have to put climate justice in there in any way, but care for creation has ended up being one of the things that’s prayed for, I would say, nearly weekly. And so it’s always in our consciousness. We’ve made commitments to compostables whenever we have to use disposables. We also wash a lot more dishes than we did for a while there.
Debra Rienstra
You also need a good dishwasher, yeah.
Judy Hinck
So we continue to do that kind of thing, and I think we’re always kind of asking, “Okay, what’s the next step?” What we would love the next big step to be would be to get geothermal in the whole building. That’s a big ask. That’s a big ask, but we’ll do it, and we’ve planned for it so that the wells are there to handle it when we’re ready to do that.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. And in fact, I remember in our larger conversation earlier, there was this sense of surprise that people were willing to say, “Even if it costs more, we want to do this, because this is the right thing to do.” And it’s hard to get to the point where a lot of church people will say that.
Judy Hinck
Well, yes. But I think if you want to think about what are the next big things, or what are the big things that our kids are going to wonder if we did something about, I think this is going to be it. Yeah, so I graduated high school in ’69. My big thing then was world hunger, and it’s a thing I got very involved in in high school, and continue to be to this day. But I remember thinking, if my parents’ generation isn’t going to do anything about world hunger, then they don’t care. And I think for today’s generation, they’re saying, “If you don’t do something about climate, you don’t care for God’s earth.” And I think this will be a telling moment for them that I think will live with them as they go forward.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, are the people in the church of younger ages aware of all this? Are they involved? Are they conscious of what the church is doing?
Judy Hinck
I think probably not. And I think when you have a big thing like this, like the passport that engages them all, the passport was in 2017, that’s a while ago now. We need to reengage. And I think that whole thing about…as adults, we think, well, we just did that. But for kids, it’s not true. And I think keeping it always in front of you and re-engaging all the time is a very difficult thing to do because other things come up, other concerns, other projects come up. So no, I don’t think they’re aware. And yes, we have to do more about that.
Debra Rienstra
So you mentioned earlier, too, that you discovered some interesting data when you did the passport as far as what kinds of actions people were comfortable with and what kinds of actions they shied away from. So describe that a little bit.
Judy Hinck
Very comfortable with looking at what they could do in their home. I mean, I think if you think about the kinds of rebates you can get and the kinds of very easy things you can do, turning off lights and that kind of thing, very willing and very engaged in what they can do in their home. Very engaged in what they could do in their personal life. At that time, it meant things like, carry your own water bottle, don’t use plastic water bottles. Share your recipes. We had a recipe board going—share your recipe things. The engaging with influencing other people or influencing the government or the power brokers, that was the hardest engage. Advocacy kind of work was certainly the hardest engage. People were willing to try it. But it was much less than the personal and family involvement in their homes and daily lives.
Debra Rienstra
Why do you think that is? How would you explain that?
Judy Hinck
It’s scary. I mean, you know? One of the things we had was: go talk to your principal at your school about whether or not you’re recycling. I remember kids saying, “Are you kidding me?” But then, when we talked, talked about and then if they came back the next week and said they did it, they were just proud as punch. So that was really fun. I think in terms of engaging influencers, people aren’t sure it makes a difference. And I think we have to convince them that it does make a difference.
Debra Rienstra
So justice has been a key word in all of this from the very beginning. And the church has been very involved in justice issues. You’re very involved in serving your neighbors here in this neighborhood. How are you creating that connection between climate work and justice?
Judy Hinck
Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light was very clear because we began climate change. Climate change was our verbiage. And then when we talked to them, they really talked about it as a justice issue, and that we needed to think about it more as a justice issue. And as we got involved with different groups, different activities, we needed to, we wanted to realize what does this mean for people—not just in our congregation, or not just those who could afford it in our congregation—but what does it mean for everybody? And so I think that’s become a conversation. We intentionally changed that language.
Debra Rienstra
And how are we seeing that right now, if at all, in the work with your neighbors, for example?
Judy Hinck
Well, we’re trying to think about that. There is a group that is asking congregations to think about how they could become a climate refuge point so that there’s a climate issue of flooding or whatever, how is your church going—think ahead of time—how is your church going to be involved in helping the people who might be in that situation? So we’re right now in the process of trying to think about what that means. That’s one of our next steps.
Debra Rienstra
Climate Resilience Hub. Because you were helpful in the aftermath of the George Floyd summer in lots of fascinating ways, in partnership with other churches, which I think was one of the secrets that you had talked about before about being part of a network.
Judy Hinck
I think that’s been true of this congregation. For most of the justice work—in a big neighborhood in justice work, is realizing that we are not a large congregation. We can’t do some things alone. So in terms of housing, there was a talk of, “Do we want to try to buy the neighbor’s house and build affordable housing?” Well, we realized that there were other people, other organizations, doing that way better than we could ever do it, and so we joined with them. And I think we have sort of a history of doing that, of joining with others. Now, whether that’s because we’re considered a central city church, and there are a lot of central city churches, and they’ve joined together to work together, that that could be. I mean, we work with a shelter that a different congregation close by runs, and so that idea of working together has been part of our congregation for a long time.
Debra Rienstra
I’m really impressed with the amount, and this sounds strange to say, but the quality, the skill and inspirational aspect of lay leadership. So talk a little bit about the pastoral leadership and how so many of you amazing lay leaders are working together with the actual pastoral staff here.
Judy Hinck
Yeah, well, we certainly work together. This congregation has always been very strong in lay leadership and in fact, the way our committees are set up, the pastor has said, “You guys are in charge of that. You don’t need permission from me to take action.” Now, do we seek approval, permission, from our vestry, for things we’re going to do? Yes, but have we asked our pastor to be out front or leading those kinds of any kind of effort in the congregation? I would say the answer to that is probably no. We have been clear that our pastor is here to preach, teach and guide and so that’s his main goal. And so we work wonderfully together, but it’s distinctly lay person-led in the sense that if there’s not lay energy forward, it doesn’t happen. So none of us feel like we’re being bullied into it, which I love.
Debra Rienstra
What advice would you have for other churches who are sort of at the beginning of their climate justice journey?
Judy Hinck
It seems trite to say baby steps, but I think, for instance, if we had come barreling in saying, “Let’s do geothermal,” before we took some of those other baby steps, it never would have happened. So I think looking for what’s the next small step, what’s the next big step that you can take? And where is your congregation at in terms of its understanding and willingness? It took us a lot of education, both about climate justice and about the practicality of geothermal. So, you know, a lot of education—and the practicality of financing. So I think education and communication is really key. And being willing to take a first step, I think so often we get scared, and so instead of taking a first step, we say, “Well, we’ll try for the big thing and if that doesn’t work, clearly we shouldn’t do anything.” And I think instead, we should say, “What’s the first step we should take, and then what’s the next big step that might be our goal?”
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. So it looks like you moved really fast, but in fact…
Judy Hinck
But in fact, it wasn’t.
Debra Rienstra
It was a lot of groundwork beforehand. Yeah, that’s great. Anything else you want to add?
Judy Hinck
No, except to say that it’s so much fun that someone else is interested! You know, it’s a thing we took on, but to know that other people and other congregations might be interested is so fun. And the other thing I would say is that we’re hoping to learn from other congregations too. What’s the next step that we haven’t thought of, that another congregation might have thought of? I look forward to hearing about it.
Debra Rienstra
Thank you. Judy, it’s been such a pleasure.
Judy Hinck
Thank you.
Debra Rienstra
Thank you for your time.
Judy Hinck
You’re welcome.
Debra Rienstra
Thanks for joining us. For show notes and full transcripts, please visit debrarienstra.com and click on the Refugia Podcast tab. This season of the Refugia Podcast is produced with generous funding from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Colin Hoogerwerf is our awesome audio producer. Thanks to Ron Rienstra for content consultation as well as technical and travel support. Till next time, be well.
