Be the Change Breakfast 9.26.26

Excerpt of the Keynote Address by The Rev. Ethan Lowery

My name is Ethan Lowery. I'm an Episcopal priest and campus minister in Fredericksburg, Virginia, about an hour south of Washington DC. And before I was ordained. . . I was a youth minister just over the hills in Orinda, I was a seminarian at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and I was Mary Lim's intern at Genesis from 2018 to 2020. . . My story with Genesis started twelve years ago - I was an Episcopal Service Corpus intern living in an intentional community in West Berkeley and I somehow got invited to the Genesis Clergy Caucus Breakfast at St. Augustine's. . . I remember thinking that that had been the most honest room full of church people I had ever been in and that I wanted to feel that feeling again. I also remember wanting to be Mary's friend (LMAO). . . .four years later, I was a seminarian, and it came time to determine my field education placement site. . . .And I thought - I wonder if I could intern with Genesis. So I did. I remember my seminary not being exactly thrilled that I was going with a community organizer rather than with a priest. . . at the time, I had absolute clarity - that there was something that community organizers knew how to do - that Episcopal priests didn't know how to do, and I wanted to learn it. . . More than anything (as a Genesis intern), I remember this ongoing, insistent, unafraid reflectiveness that I was constantly called into:

How can we ask better questions?

How can we be more direct?

Why do you think they reacted that way?

Why do you think you reacted that way?

Are you happy with how that went?

What do you think you could've done better?

Do you have any feedback for me?

What do you think is really going on here?

Who has power here and who doesn't?

Who isn't in the room?

Are you doing your one-on-ones?

Why is nobody doing their one-on-ones?

That was the water that I steeped in during my formation to become a new priest, and I'm serious, now and always, when I say that I am the priest that I am today because of Genesis and because of Mary and the people that are under my care, are cared in the way that they are because of the way that Genesis cared for me as a seminarian.