The House for All Saints and Sinners With Nadia Bolz Weber

Nadia Bolz Weber: my church is definitely this little island of misfit toys. These are just people who do not fit in other churches. And so they can almost be a little idealistic when they come to House for All Sinners and Saints because they really get to be themselves. They don't have to check part of their personality or part of their story at the door.

And they love that. And so we'll have these welcome to house brunches. And people will go around the room. People have been there to the church for a while, show up too. And we go around a circle and say, What drew you to this community, or what keeps you here? It's great to hear it, everyone's the singing's incredible, we're acapella, so they're like, the singing, or the community, or whatever, they go around the room, it's always pretty standard.

And then it ends with me, and I always say, man, I love hearing all that, and I love this church too, but here's what I need you to hear me say. This church will disappoint you. At some point, I will say something stupid and hurt your feelings, or we will fail to meet. your expectations. So I just invite you on this side of that happening to decide if you're going to stick around after it happens.

Because if you leave, you'll miss the way that grace can come in and fill in those cracks left behind by our brokenness and create something new and beautiful. And that's too beautiful to miss.

Srini Rao: I'm Srini Rao, and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where you get a window into the stories and insights of the most innovative and creative minds who started movements, built thriving businesses, written best selling books, and created insanely interesting art. For more, check out our 500 episode archive at unmistakablecreative.

com.

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Srini Rao: Nadia, welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks for taking the time to join us. Oh my

Nadia Bolz Weber: gosh. I'm really happy to be here. Thanks. Yeah.

Srini Rao: I came across you by way of one of our listeners and when she sent me your story, I thought, this is fascinating. This would make for a very interesting discussion.

So on that note can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background your story and the journey before the journey that's led you to where you're at today?

Nadia Bolz Weber: Yeah. I, I was raised a fundamentalist Christian, really sectarian, and it ends up that being a smart and smart mouthed girl is just not really welcome in that environment, so eventually we realized, yeah, I don't really fit here, and so I left I left Christianity with a lot of anger towards it, to tell you the truth, and then and then I had a fairly impressive drug and alcohol problem, and then eventually I got sober, and then eventually I, Ended up meeting this really cute Lutheran who was in seminary, and my previous boyfriend had spent six years in Susanville for armed robbery, so I had never gone out with somebody nice before, much less a Lutheran from Texas.

So I ended up marrying him, and he ended up introducing me to a form of Christianity I didn't even know existed. Like when, on our first date, we were talking about social justice issues, and we just saw eye to eye on all this stuff, and then he goes, Yeah my heart for social justice is really...

Rooted in my Christian faith, and I'm like, Oh my gosh, what are you, like a unicorn? Like some mythical combination of creatures that doesn't exist in reality? And so he just introduced me to this other form of Christianity I didn't know existed, and strangely I ended up... Going back to college, I was just such a fuck up, I, I didn't go to college until I was 28, didn't graduate until I was 36, and then went straight into seminary, and ended up starting a church when I was in seminary, and it's the church I still serve now, called House for All Sinners and Saints, and I was ordained in 2008, and I basically started the kind of church I'd want to go to.

I just almost never visit churches that I'm like, wow, I'd really love to be a part of this. But I believe, I loved the theology because Lutheran theology is really based in paradox rather than in dualistic thinking. And so I was really drawn to that theology because I experienced so much of it to be true already in my life.

And I just had a lot of freedom to do what I wanted with this church. It was off the grid for a while, and then the denomination brought it into the fold and made, and we became an official congregation just last... last January and we actually had to do a, an organization thing with the bishop with this sort of, really formal process.

And so we're like, Oh God, that sounds dreary. We had to write articles of incorporation and a budget and a bunch of crap we've never done. And so we did that and they had a whole list. You have to do all these things to be organized as congregation. And the final thing they're like, you should plan a celebration, a party, so we looked at that list and it was like the grownups on, on Peanuts, it was like wah, wah party. So it's we went through this whole process just to get to the party, really, and we became organized as a congregation, the bishop came, we did this whole formal thing, but we rented out a roller rink for the event, and so it was like congregational organization slash roller disco party with the bishop.

So it was awesome.

Srini Rao: Awesome. I actually want to go back to the very beginning of this, and I love, you brought up being raised as this fundamentalist person. I want to dig deeper into your childhood before we, we get, even further into the story.

How did being raised like this influenced, your view of the world? You also talked about this idea of not. fitting. And it seems like you stood up and challenged the status quo. And I'm really curious, I get the feeling that a lot of people listening to this have this sense of not fitting or not belonging.

And we're all searching for that place of belonging, which I think is probably largely what has brought you and I together for this conversation. So talk to me about that. What was it like growing up in that environment?

Nadia Bolz Weber: There's this whole process when you're a kid where you don't know that like your life's weird.

Do you know what I, like you just, it's just your life and then you meet other people and you're like, you tell them about your life and they're like, that's weird, right? And so then you begin to realize, okay, it's a little. It's a little weird. So I didn't know that we were fundamentalists. I just knew that, you weren't supposed to have friends who weren't in the church.

You weren't supposed to date outside the church. We, the only people who were in our home were people from church. We lived in this kind of bubble. And you're given these messages all the time about here's what it means to belong. Here's what it means to be a good Christian. And honestly, it felt like what it means to be a good Christian means having a really particular personality.

More than anything else, it's I, and I just, I didn't have that personality. And as I got exposed to the world, which we were supposed to fear and be removed from I was like, wait a minute I'm, I was told that gay people are these horrible sinners and you shouldn't have anything to do with them, and yet, now I have gay friends, and they love me better.

than the people at church seem to be able to, so how do I reconcile that? So there was this sort of dissonance between what I was being told and what I was actually experiencing. And and that, that, that's a whole process. And so eventually I just couldn't have anything to do with it.

I definitely didn't fit. The other part of my story is I had an autoimmune disorder when I was growing up. So I was really And it caused my some of these abnormalities in my face. My, my eye, my eyes. bulged out of my head, like my eyelids couldn't close. So just bulging out of my face. And so I looked abnormal from age 12 to 16 until I could have it surgically corrected.

And I think like one of two things could happen if you have that, if you have that type of experience in those formative years, you can either become like a diminished, like person who tries to disappear, Or alternately, you can be like, Oh yeah, fuck you. And like I did the latter and not the former. And so I just, I developed this anger and this fuck you attitude.

And it protected me. It like saved me in a way until I added a bunch of sort of chemicals to it. And then it almost killed me.

Srini Rao: I love this idea that you brought up of the dissonance that gets created by, the different narratives that are playing out in our lives.

And I think that to some degree, maybe we all are experienced that. If you're talking to somebody who's listening, how do you resolve that kind of a dissonance, whether it's with your career, whether it's with your life, whether it's, with the culture that you've grown up in, because I've grown up Indian.

So there's definitely some level of dissonance that I've experienced there too. I'm choosing to do something incredibly unconventional. Yeah.

Nadia Bolz Weber: I don't know. I guess there's just like I can have this gnawing feeling like something's wrong, something doesn't fit, something doesn't fit. And I think the more self searching I'm willing to do, the more I'm willing to be really honest about myself and about what I'm experiencing in the world, the better.

Because if you if you ignore it, those drum beats just get louder and louder. And then it's the only thing you can hear. You know what I mean? I just feel I, I have a, I have this really deep commitment to trying to be as honest about myself as I possibly can. Almost to a fault, people, some people are like almost embarrassed for me for the stuff I put in my memoir.

They're like, wow, you've really... Really wrote some inelegant things about yourself, which I don't know. I don't have any shame I think. I don't, it doesn't bother me to be really honest about myself. So I guess if there's that sort of thing that's not, you can feel that tension and that, that sort of thump, thump, thump.

The sooner you deal with it and the more honest you can be about The circumstances in your life and the shit that's going on inside of you, the better. That's just what I found.

Srini Rao: I think the whole thing really is a process of self inquiry and self exploration. And, what I've found is that in that process, sometimes it'll lead you to some sort of dark places, but you have to be willing to go there to get out to the other side.

Nadia Bolz Weber: Yeah, no question. No question. It's the only, it's just the only way you get any freedom.

Srini Rao: Let's do this. So it sounded like you, you mentioned you developed this sort of fuck you attitude, which, gave you a layer of protection almost and

Nadia Bolz Weber: sleeve tattoos.

Talk to me

Srini Rao: about that. You talked to me about how that's served you and also how it has hurt you.

Nadia Bolz Weber: It's interesting. It just about the tattoos. I started getting tattooed when I was, It was the mid eighties and teenage girls weren't particularly getting tattooed in the mid eighties.

And I, it was almost a way of saying you know what, I'm not part of your tribe. You're right. It's like reclaiming that for my own and going, I don't really want to be part of the mainstream. And little did I know, if I just hung out long enough. I would become me.

I look like a fucking soccer mom where I hang out. You know what I mean? It's so common for people to be tattooed and pierced now. It's like it used to be this wild thing and now it's just like super mild. But but the screw you thing. I think it protected me because it just, it was this form of self preservation of saying there is a part of me that you can't touch.

I'm not letting you. There's something that cannot, inside of me, that cannot be violated, that absolutely will be preserved. And And the ways in which it hurt was that it closed me to certain tenderness, I think, and the ability to be vulnerable for a long time, like I was unwilling to be vulnerable, like my bit, my M.

O. was protecting myself, making sure no one was going to betray me, that everyone knew that I was strong as steel, and the interesting thing is now that I'm in my mid forties and I'm a clergy person, the irony is that My actual strength is in my ability to be vulnerable. That actually is where I am strong.

And it's this sort of paradox. But if I'm preaching, just because of who I am, like, if I'm preaching and I choke up a little I'm, like, People are affected by that, and I found in my work that my ability to have some vulnerability and to tell some truths about myself can be really powerful because what it does is it allows other people the permission to do that for themselves instead of trying to hide or trying to pretend.

Srini Rao: It's interesting you bring up vulnerability and, I see that theme running throughout a lot of our cultural narrative nowadays, especially because of Brene Brown's work with books like daring greatly and all the things that she's talked about. But I want to get back to this idea of, tenderness, vulnerability and that sort of leading to strength because I think that.

A lot of us get to this point of being self protective because of the experiences that happen in our lives. And we say, okay, you know what, if I'm this way I can't be hurt. And vulnerability often will lead us to a lot of painful places. I'm really curious, how do you get back in touch with sort of that vulnerability and that tenderness if you've been through painful experiences?

I'd love, and I'd love for you to talk about it through the lens of your own stories.

Nadia Bolz Weber: Yeah. Even just recently, to tell you the truth, I'm still learning that, I've had this congregation since the fall of 2007. We started gathering with eight people in my living room once a month.

Now it's, an actual big congregation, big ish congregation, but, I just, maybe six months ago, realized that they love me. It's like this anybody who came to my church would be like, wow, your congregation really loves you. And it wasn't until six months ago that I really had that realization and realized that It's okay to allow myself to be loved by my parishioners.

Now, I don't get my emotional needs met through them. I have ways of doing that outside. I'm, we're not friends in that particular way. But it's like years of being around this before I realized They actually love me, and I just took a three month sabbatical and came back a couple weeks ago.

And just the way in which they embraced me when I returned was really beautiful, and my I just, for whatever reason, it feels like my heart gets broken and then put back together. In a bigger way, over and over in the work that I do. And but I always, I never start there. In the book I say, Look, my first reaction to almost everything is fuck you.

Now, I almost never stay there. But I almost always start there. And the older I get, the more quickly I'm able to move to something else. And I never start with an open heart, it feels it has to be it, I describe it as having this divine heart transplant. It feels like God reaches into my, into me and pulls out this heart of stone and replaces it with the heart of flesh, something warm and beating again, over and over again.

And it's always because there's somebody I refuse to like and then somehow I end up loving them anyway. It's funny, in a Q& a few months ago, this very earnest seminarian said, Pastor Nadia tell us what you do personally to get closer to God. And before I knew what I was saying, I went, what?

Nothing. Oh my God, why would I do that? That sounds terrible. So why? So I'll end up like, liking, loving someone I don't like or doing some shit I don't want to do again? No. So my experience of God is not this sort of Warm, fuzzy makes me into this sort of bland person. It's it feels like death and resurrection over and over again.

That, that experience, my

,

heart breaks and it's put back together into something bigger.

Srini Rao: It's funny. One of my friends said, she was like, these experiences, and you're talking about, heartbreak, which can happen in numerous ways. Just painful experiences should often become our greatest teachers in our lives.

Nadia Bolz Weber: No question. You kidding? I've never, I haven't learned shit when things were going well in my life. It feels nice. You know what I mean? It feels good. And the weird thing is that we judge like how good our life is by how problem free, or, if you don't have any conflict, or if, the sense of well being yeah, but you're boring, you're not learning anything, you're growing in any kind of wisdom when that happens, my, so much of my preaching, I think, has to do with suffering, and what's, What comes out of that and ultimately the thing the weird thing to me is like that's so much for me the Foundational truth of Christianity.

It's about death and resurrection. I don't know how the main message became niceness or like Some contrived version of morality, when really it's much more gruesome than that. It's like death and resurrection. It's spiritual physics. Like something has to die in order for something new to live, let

Srini Rao: me ask you this. You mentioned the idea of judgment of all these problems and suffering. And, I see so many people who they get trapped in their suffering without getting to the other side. Like you go through this thing that, that really hurts you. And somehow, my, my business partner, Greg, always says, your temporary circumstances don't have to become your permanent identity.

And yet he's seen so many people in his life where that happens. And I'm really curious to hear your perspective on, and how you let go of judgment through your suffering and how you navigate it in such a way that you do come out better for it.

Nadia Bolz Weber: And I think our own judgment of our own suffering keeps us in it so much longer.

It's or people will be like, having a really hard time in life, and people of faith, they'll have a, really be struggling, have a difficult time, and then they, what they do is they add to that, feeling bad that they don't feel God's presence. I'm like, why would you add to things already being hard?

Let that part go, judging where we're at often just keeps us there. And then sometimes, honestly, We if you're somebody for whom everything's just so hard, then people don't have permission to call you out on something, or they don't have permission to expect something of you.

And sometimes, I think posturing so that nobody has any, nobody has to expect anything from us is a very comfortable place to stay. If, and it's scary to to have to move out of that because then, oh, you might have to actually find full time work or you'll have to show up for your friends or whatever it is, so in a way, there's, there can be something cozy about just staying in a place that sucks because then nobody has to expect anything from you.

Srini Rao: Yeah. It's really that's an interesting observation. I've never really heard it put that way, it's, I feel like there's so little progress that occurs in those places where we stay comfortable take us back to that point, that we were making earlier that, it's the difficult things that actually cause you to grow.

You don't really learn anything from, life being

Nadia Bolz Weber: easy. Oh yeah. And also I've never learned anything from being right ever. Someone said what's your next book about? I'm like, Oh my God. It's another collection of my personal humiliations for the general public's enrichment.

Basically, it's like chapter after chapter of me either being wrong or being an asshole or both. But that's how, that's where I learn. That, that's where I you bump up against something and you go, oh man, now I, now what, right? And it, that shit keeps happening to me.

I, it's not like I've grown so much that now I never am wrong about, I continue to be wrong about things, and continue to learn something bigger than what I thought I knew.

Srini Rao: Let me ask you this I see so many creative people who are so afraid to be wrong and to try things.

And I only know this cause this morning, I sent out a piece that we're working on for a bunch of feedback and it was amazing to see the wide variety of feedback. Some people like, I love this. Other people like this is disjointed. Other people like, I hate this. It screams, agony.

And I was like, wow, this is confusing as shit. What do you do with that? I'm like, I don't even, I'm like, okay, I'm going to discard some of it, getting past this sort of idea of, being wrong and saying, how do you get to being okay with being wrong and actually use it for your growth?

Oh my

Nadia Bolz Weber: gosh. You know what I think. I think the fact that I'm I don't feel a lot, I guess I don't carry around a ton of shame about being wrong, so it doesn't bother me. And I think that actually allows me to have authority as a clergy person in a community filled with people who are suspicious of authority.

Because they never feel like they have to look behind the curtain, and see what's there. I just say, wow, you know what, I fucked this one up, or I made a bad call, or... I made a mistake, forgive me, and and then it's just out in the open and we can move on. But I feel like a lot of people in leadership and in positions of authority do a lot of things to try to pretend that they're not wrong about something or they do a lot of things to not show that they're weak or don't know something.

Whereas if you're just out with it, there's a whole population of people that are more likely to trust you than if you try and pretend. Because here's the thing about mistakes. Other people see them. They know they're happening. And if you're like trying to, you just lose credibility, I don't know.

It just doesn't it's funny because people can be a little, my church is definitely this little island of misfit toys. These are just people who do not fit in other churches. And so they can almost be a little idealistic when they come. to house for all sinners and saints because they really get to be themselves.

They don't have to check part of their personality or part of their story at the door. And they love that. And so we'll have these welcome to house brunches and people will go around the room. People have been there to the church for a while, show up too. And we go around a circle and say, What drew you to this community or what keeps you here?

It's great to hear it, everyone's like the singing's incredible. We're acapella, so they're like the singing or the community or whatever. They go around the room. It's always pretty standard. And then it ends with me. And I always say, man, I love hearing all that. And I love this church too.

But here's what I need you to hear. hear me say. This church will disappoint you. At some point, I will say something stupid and hurt your feelings, or we will fail to meet your expectations. So I just invite you on this side of that happening to decide if you're going to stick around after it happens.

Because if you leave, you'll miss the way that grace can come in and fill in those cracks left behind by our brokenness and create something new and beautiful. And that's too beautiful to miss. So just try and stay after that happens. And I've literally had parishioners email me and go something will happen or I'll make some mistake or I'll screw the pooch in some way.

And they're like, this is what you were talking about. And I'm like, yeah, it is. What decision are you going to make here? You're going to stay or go? And they're like, I'm going to stay. Some people go, but I I'm not an idealist at all. Mostly because I just know myself really well. And I'm I think I'm I'm suspicious of myself.

And that makes me not an idealist when it comes to human projects, but then there's a lot of freedom in that. You can discover things you can be surprised,

Srini Rao: I love the idea of being suspicious of yourself, you know I think it might have been in Danny Shapiro's book still writing where she says, you know Be wary of those times where you think you know what you're doing.

Nadia Bolz Weber: Oh My gosh, no question

Srini Rao: let's go back to another piece of this in the beginning, you know this period of drug and alcohol abuse I mean it talked to me about that period of your life, what was going on, what prompted it? How did it affect every other area of your life mean? Talk, talk to me about the, that seems like your dark night of the soul almost.

Nadia Bolz Weber: Yeah, for sure. And it was pretty immediate. That was just a bet, like my personality plus like booze is terrible combination. It happened pretty quick and I became pretty dependent on. On not being sober, in whatever form that ended up taking. And it's like there's a switch goes off inside of me if I start.

And then no one knows how to turn that switch off, I don't know. I'm grateful. I've been in a 12 step program for 22 years. And it's really formed. Who I am, and and, boy, talk about, you know what qualifies you to be in that? Failure. What other institution in America could that be said, and then, and people have to be honest about that in order to get better. So I think it's really influenced who I am as a person. And that, and you know what? I still feel like that monster's in me. When Philip Seymour Hoffman died that, that took me down for a few days, to tell you the truth.

Because... First of all, he's a brilliant artist, and I was devastated that we weren't going to get any more from him. But more than that we were the same age when we got sober. We'd been sober the same amount of time. We both have, some success. I'm not obviously a Hollywood star, but and had been in the program and stuff.

And then, and I have a back injury, and, some doctor prescribed him some painkillers, and then all of a sudden he's dead with a needle in his arm. And it made me go I'm not better, it's not like that monster isn't there, like at any point in time, it I just have to respect the monster, is what I feel like, it's not gone I was in a coffee shop yesterday, and somebody had two prescription bottles on their table, and they had gone, I don't know even what they were, and they'd gone to the bathroom, and then I was fixated on it while I was walking by, this is 22 years clean and sober, I'm like looking at this going, oh, I wonder what that is, You just have to respect the monster, I think.

Srini Rao: Let me ask you this and I've asked a similar version of this question to so many people. What separates people who, in your mind, who come out the other side better off and those who actually let it take them into the downfall, and ultimately to places where they can't get out of?

Nadia Bolz Weber: I have no answer for that. I don't. I, it's a mystery to me. I feel like it was this just incredible grace that I had. And I describe it as that movie La Femme Nikita, or that there was a terrible American remake Point of No Return. She was like this. She was this, part of this gang of sort of drug addicts who were knocking over drug stores, and then there was a big shootout with the police, and all of her friends died.

She almost died, but they nursed her back to health. And they were like, look, we pretended you were dead, and we had a funeral, and here's your choice. We can make sure you occupy that grave that your name's on, or alternately, you can work for us. And we'll train you, but that's the deal. You're, you work for us.

And I feel I feel like that I feel like I got my life back, but now I have to work for God or something, I, I wanted to call my memoir God's Bitch, it's I'm just I have to do this thing, and that's the deal that's what it feels like.

Let's do this. Sorry, just to circle back. Why are my friends dead? And I'm not? Like, why do I bury people who I got clean with, but then they went back out or they never got sober time or whatever? I don't know, man. I'll the only thing I can do is be as grateful as I can for what I have now, but I have no explanation.

What? Like I worked the steps better than them? Bullshit. I don't, I just, I don't, it's a mystery to me. I don't know.

Srini Rao: Let's do this. Let's let's shift gears a bit and actually start talking about the the church for saints and sinners. Because it's such a fascinating concept to me.

And that's what, that's why I was so intrigued as somebody who has had a lot of strong opinions about organized religion. And, my parents were super religious and, I'd always said I'm not. Even though I've grown up in a very, a fairly devout household what are, you talked about an island of misfits.

So first I want to talk about the core messages behind, what you guys do and, and then I want to talk about the kinds of people that come in and what these services are like and all of that. Talk to me about, how you came to this conclusion of this church for saints and sinners and, what the message and mission behind your work is.

Nadia Bolz Weber: Yeah, I, like I said, I just, I wanted to start a church that I'd want to show up to. And I just got seven, seven, eight other people and said, What do you think? What would that look like? Because I think there are a lot of people who would be involved in religious communities if they looked different.

And and like most of the people who come to House for All Sinners and Saints weren't going to a church with any regularity when they showed up, some people had never been to a church before. Most of us, including me, are baffled every Sunday that we're even there at all. Every time I look around the room, I'm like, yeah, it's like kind of a miracle that these people are here being a church together, it just feels unlikely and gorgeous. But I think the best way to say what we believe is to say what we do. So we don't have a what we believe thing on our website.

Because, honestly, people believe all kinds of shit in my church. I don't feel responsible for what they believe at all. I feel responsible for what they hear. And I'm the preacher and I feel responsible for what language is in the liturgy and what the message is. But, gosh, what they believe is influenced by all kinds of things I have nothing to do with.

Belief is not a sort of requisite for belonging in this community. So I think it's if you want to know what we believe, come and see what we do. The way that ends up playing out is that we're, our liturgy is actually very traditional, it's just not conventional. We are suspicious of things that are really modern in a sense, so I think there's, in a way, this is a community that's more comforted by mystery than certainty. And there's a lot of mystery to be accessed in ancient sort of liturgical practices. And people find it counterintuitive how traditional the liturgy is at house. But anyway, so you walk in, first of all it's in the round.

So the altar table's in the middle and we're in concentric circles in these sort of quadrants, right? So Most churches, the way that the space is configured, like about a third of the space is for the two special people who get to stand up front. And then everyone else looks at the backs of each other's heads face, in rows, facing the two special people.

So we've totally democratized the space. There's no, there is no front. If there's, these are people who are suspicious of institutions, and suspicious of presumed authority. Just to have the space democratized helps that a lot, right? And then, The other thing that's just crazy is that we like to say we're anti excellence, pro participation.

So we don't really care about doing things well nearly as much as we care about doing things together and having all the voices in the room. All of the jobs, there's all these jobs in the liturgy, like there's the... The colic to the prayer of the day and the post communion prayer and serving communion and reading the gospel.

There's 15, 18 different things that are almost always done by clergy. And I've given all of those to the community. They don't belong to me. They belong to the community because the word liturgy means the work of the people. And so when

,

people walk in, all of those jobs are lined out and someone says, They could be there for the first time and someone goes, Hey do you want to do one of the jobs?

And so they'll, from where they sit, they just stand up and lead that part of the liturgy. So it's very communitarian. So in Lent, this very large transgender woman who doesn't look like not transitioned, you know what I mean? Not a transitioned transgender person, but like a man in a dress and very large shows up first time.

Now most churches would freak out, right? Like they're, they'd just be like weird about that. We don't care. We have trans people about, probably. 25% of the church is queer. So anyway, this person shows up. The first thing they're asked is, do you want to do a job? And they go, oh I'd love to read.

And it's Lent, and so they said do you want to read the gospel? Now, In most churches, the gospel is only read by the clergy. Read, this person takes this gospel reading, it's really long, and they read it so gorgeously that it's like I had never heard that text before. The way in which this person reads was so beautiful.

And the way we do things, we have to give up predictability and control by, in the way that we function as a community. We give those things up, but then what we get is like this large transgender woman reading the gospel beautifully the first time they ever show up. Everything's very communitarian.

And then even the music is made, the music in our liturgy comes out of the bodies of the people who showed up. We don't have an organ, we don't have a band. And it's full four part harmony, like rich, loud singing and it fills the entire space. So there, I mean there's a bunch of other sort of stuff that goes on, but it's we believe in that all that None are worthy and all are welcome.

That's like our deal. And and it's hard to live that out. It's hard, we have this value of welcoming the stranger. But you know what, sometimes the stranger looks like your mom and dad. It's not like welcoming the stranger, Oh, the homeless person, I think that's easier for us.

Then, when my church was overcome with baby boomers from the suburbs, they started showing up, and now we had to extend welcome to them, and that was the struggle. These are beloved members of our community. That's what makes it weird. I thought when the like normal looking people showed up that it was going to dilute the weirdness of the church.

Oh my God. So much weirder now because now you look around, there's like a statewide elected official next to an ex convict next to a soccer mom, next to a gay couple. You're like, this place doesn't make any sense at all. It's. It's beautiful,

Srini Rao: as I listened to you describe this, I can't think, help, but think that this isn't just about a church, but this is a role model for building communities at large.

And this kind of way of being could be carried into all sorts of other communities. And I'm really curious, especially because a lot of people listening here are building communities of different sorts. I'm telling you, I'm going to steal some of your ideas for our next event but I'm very curious how we would carry out this sort of model of a community into the things that we're doing in our own efforts and into other areas.

If you're building, entrepreneurial ventures are, if you're building creative ventures, because it seems like this kind of a community model could be approached there too.

Nadia Bolz Weber: I think we're we're so fierce in our commitment to grace, and I think that allows us a lot of freedom.

You know what I mean? We can try stuff and have it not work, and we just think that's funny. Or I just, the idea of grace, I think, is really huge in Sort of allowing a lot of freedom. So I think that's first. Second of all, it's interesting when you're talking about community.

The community of House for All Sinners and Saints is unbelievable. The way people show up in each other's lives and take care of each other. It's beautiful. And I see it all the time. We have a closed Facebook group. So the way people are showing up for each other and helping each other, giving aid, praying for each other.

Just it's incredible. And I didn't create that. I think that if I had started out wanting to create what it is now, I would have failed. I don't think it would be what it is. Meaning, my focus is on what we call word and sacrament, right? As the founder and as the clergy person in this community, I have a very clear focus.

I'm not trying to create that. The community, I'm focusing on what are people going to hear in the liturgy? What are the actions going to be? How can we live into these values? I'm establishing the DNA, I'm maintaining the culture, right? And then the, that incredible community piece, that flowed out of that.

Do you see what I mean? I think sometimes we want to try and do things head on that can't be done head on. They're always a result of something else. And I've just kept that focus and then these other things have come out of that.

Srini Rao: That's a really interesting way to look at it because I think about the community behind Unmistakable Creative and then everything we do with Unmistakable Media and it sounds so similar.

I always say I didn't build anything. I just connected all the parts.

Nadia Bolz Weber: Exactly. Exactly. And what's interesting is I do CrossFit somewhat obsessively and my gyms behind my house and I hang out with these people all the time and the coaches at my house all the time. And I talked to him a lot because he started that.

Jim and I started this church. And so we talk about being founders a lot and what that means and the same thing with him That's an incredible community. We hang out all the time with each other I just there were 20 of us who went to Colorado Springs this weekend to watch three or four of people Competing in a weightlifting event, right?

And I said, Neil if your focus was trying to create that it wouldn't happen His focus Is like top notch coaching and being really playful and welcoming at the same time. So that's his absolute focus there. And that other stuff follows.

Srini Rao: I love that. So let me ask you this, let me ask you about the people who, come, you've made some reference to them and, I'm really curious, like what types of people show up to your church?

What makes them stay? Because I always tell people, I'm like, my big issue with organized religion is that it takes too much time.

I'm like, why is it a three hour service? My parents will try to make me go to a temple and I'm like, I don't like to go because it

Nadia Bolz Weber: takes too long. Ours is like 55 to 60 minutes. So it's we get it. We go in we do it. We're done Partly because my sermons are 10 minutes if you can't say it in 10 minutes You're definitely not going to say it in 45 minutes, right?

It takes me about 15 hours of work to write a 10 minute sermon, because I believe in economy of language. Anyway yeah, but the irony is that the people for whom it's the most transformative, the people who get the most out of it, the people for whom it's the most meaningful are the people who do make a time commitment to it, some people just pop in and go to liturgy and leave, we have that, but but the people who are We're really experiencing, I think, personal transformation in a way, are the ones who also show up to the other stuff, or they do work. One of the values of our community is we share work.

It takes a lot of people. We, it's like a flash mob every Sunday. We don't own our own space. We have to, we set up and break down. We start and end with a blank space. And 200 people at two different liturgies. We had to start, we have two now on Sunday. It's like incredible barn raising every single week.

There's a way in which we share. Work, that's a value of the community to you.

Srini Rao: You mentioned that people experience personal transformations. I'm really curious do you have any stories of personal transformations that you've seen people experience in their lives as a byproduct of this?

Nadia Bolz Weber: Yes, but it's not as dramatic and Hallmark card channel as you might imagine I mean for instance like okay this guy I wrote about in past tricks Rick Strand law He and this is public information, so I'm not you know violating confidentiality.

That guy is an ex convict. He's a pathological liar. He is a con artist. So he had a us Supreme court case with his name attached to it. And in the book, I'm like six months ago, Rick Strandloft came to us a homeless unmedicated bipolar pathological liar. And now six months later, He's our homeless, unmedicated, bipolar, pathological liar.

It's just ours now. But being ours, having people who love him, even though he's an enormous fuck up I think that has allowed him to make some better decisions. He's definitely living indoors now, and I think he's even employed. But anyway, I think a better one would be this one woman who has a really had a really abusive mother who's not stable and has a lot of issues with her.

Now this woman had, my parishioner, had been in like evangelical churches where they were like, you just need to forgive her and you need to work really hard to be a good daughter. And they were just this coercive sort of here's what it looks like to be a good Christian. And she always felt bad.

She couldn't do that with her mom. Instead, now she's been at house for years. And the main message is like, God's grace is freely given, you can't earn it, like nobody else can tell you who you are, like all this stuff about identity and that love and grace of God, like this is this main message, the destabilizing grace of God.

And she emailed me, she goes, my mom posted something crazy on Facebook, and normally I would have just launched into this thing about how crazy she is. But she... In the Facebook post, my mom's I'm going through this and that, but I feel God's love and presence. And she said, normally that would spin me out because this woman's a nutter.

She goes, but instead I thought, of course she feels God's love and presence. That's God's nature. She believed it so much for herself that she was able to believe it for her mom. That's beautiful. She's not spinning out into this crazy, judgmental thing. Because she just really is clear that it's God's nature to be present, to me, that's a beautiful, that's a beautiful story, that's the kind of transformation. It's not a sort of... Prostitute becomes a librarian story, but but it's yeah, that, that changes people. So

Srini Rao: you mentioned the memoir. Let me talk to me about the byproducts and sort of transformation and outcomes in your own life that have been the

Nadia Bolz Weber: result of all of this.

Yeah, you mean the success of the book?

Srini Rao: Yeah,

Nadia Bolz Weber: the success, your own personal success and was going to happen. It was on the New York Times bestseller list and then all the media went crazy, like the Washington Post wrote a two page feature and then it was like CNN and NPR and all this stuff. Then the weird thing is then you get news outlets that are writing stories about stories.

You know what I mean? And it's not even... And then they take things and make them inaccurate, and it makes... I really try to be honest about myself, so it was making me nuts that they were... Like, okay... I've competed in Olympic style weightlifting a few times, right? Pretty good at Olympic weightlifting, but you couldn't say Nadia Bolzweber, competitive weightlifter, right?

That, that's a different image. And like I'm an alcoholic, but they'd be like drug addict. And it just made me crazy. And so that, that part I disliked. And then I didn't like some of the bold headlines like can Nadia Bolzweber save liberal Christianity? I'm like, okay, that fucking makes me want to go back to bed.

You can't write something like that about someone. And then, there were all these TV production companies that wanted to do like reality show with me. I'm like, What, like Lutheran Duck Dynasty? But, do you know, or real lady pastors of Denver County? I'm just like, it's insane! So the whole celebrity thing, I find really unsettling.

And so I've said no to a lot of stuff. I just say no. Because my parish is overrun with tourists as it is, I don't like signing my book at my church, or like getting, people get selfies with me on the way out. It's gross. So there's some great stuff like I have. I've got a decent platform if there's stuff I love or things going on that I think people should know about, I get to share that and a ton of people learn about it I love that.

I'm, so that piece is awesome, but the other stuff's weird, I get recognized a lot, because, I'm 6'1 and heavily teched, there just aren't that many women like that I get recognized in weird places and... When I'm with my kids and I don't know look if you're in a band Like you in the back your mind might think oh, maybe one day I'll be really successful and famous right or if you go to acting school.

I went to seminary this is not what I was thinking was gonna happen Nobody prepares you for that. So I'm just trying to keep my integrity intact and boy with these weird offers I've been getting if I wasn't Pretty grounded and rooted at this point in my life. I could see how I could just go down a really weird path, yeah Cause they offer you money and they offer you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

Srini Rao: yeah I really appreciate that you've drawn a line in the sand and have said no to things and that's not easy to do. I think that's actually really hard to do when and that's, I've realized, I think as you grow in your career and as you reach some level of success, there are always these sort of tests of your values

Nadia Bolz Weber: and your integrity.

Exactly. Oh my gosh. No kidding. No kidding.

Srini Rao: It's hard. Wow. Nadia, this has been really fascinating. Like I said, when my friend Yana told me about you, I was like, yeah, we got to do this. This sounds like a conversation I want to have on the air. So I'm going to wrap things up with my final question which we close all our interviews here with an at unmistakable creative with what do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Nadia Bolz Weber: Wow, that's an interesting question. I think that I think you can only come to a singularity through freedom. Through really the freedom, like I said, to be wrong, to express yourself, to be creative. I would say, even maybe more than me, it feels like my congregation is unmistakable.

And And I think it's because we're not self conscious about trying to be something, right? We're not trying to be queer inclusive. We just started with a bunch of queer people and then they just keep coming, right? It, there's a way that self consciousness about trying to be something is, you can smell it, right?

And it's not compelling. So I think when you have that freedom, we didn't people, we do all these weird things, like we have a blessing of the bicycles. It's like this huge event where we have this thurible with the incense that is made out of parts from a vintage Schwinn and we're like sensing the bikes with incense and, and people are like, why would you do that?

And I'm like, because It just makes sense to us because we're free, and this is what we love and If you want a theological statement, I think God is four bikes. There you go. Print that right? Do you know? So I think not trying to be anything you know and just doing what totally makes sense and not having to judge it and not having to be afraid of failing and I think that makes you unmistakable.

Awesome.

Srini Rao: Yeah. Nadia it's been my absolute pleasure to have you here as a guest on the Unmistakable Creative. And I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share some of your insights and your story with our

Nadia Bolz Weber: listeners. Oh, it's really fun. I'm really glad you asked me. Thanks.

Absolutely.

Srini Rao: And for those of you guys listening, we'll wrap the show with that. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. While you were listening, were there any moments you found fascinating, inspiring, or inspiring? Can you think of anyone, a friend or a family member who would appreciate this moment?

If so, take a second and share today's episode with that one person, because good ideas and messages are meant to be shared.