Discover how Bishop Kristin Stoneking, the newly-elected bishop of the Mountain Sky Conference, lives into her call by striving to be an humble learner as she communicates the church's message in a changing world on a special "Meet a bishop" episode of "Get Your Spirit in Shape."
Guest: Bishop Kristin Stoneking
- Bishop Stoneking serves the Mountain Sky Conference of The United Methodist Church.
- Learn more abou the Multifaith Living Community at University of California at Davis, which Bishop Stoneking established while serving as campus minister at the university.
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This episode posted on Jan. 3, 2025.
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Transcript
Prologue
Crystal Caviness, host: It was while praying and walking along the shores of Lake Michigan that Bishop Kristen Stoneking, then a young adult discovered her call.
Bishop Kristin Stoneking: I heard the words you are called to what you're most personally committed to, and I knew that that was the church where my heartbeats is in the local church.
Crystal: Discover how the newly elected bishop of the Mountain Sky Conference listened to her call by striving to be an humble learner as she communicates the church's message in a changing world.
Conversation
Crystal Caviness, host: Bishop Stoneking, welcome to "Get Your Spirit in Shape."
Bishop Kristin Stoneking, guest: Thank you, Crystal. It's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Crystal: You're welcome. I have been learning a little bit about you in preparation for our conversation today, and I just have a lot of questions, so we're going to jump right in. But before I get to my questions, just give us your elevator pitch of who you are and what you do for The United Methodist Church.
Bishop Stoneking: I'm the resident bishop of the Mountain Sky Conference and the Mountain Sky Conference includes Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, and a little sliver of Idaho, one church in the town of Salmon, Idaho, that is really too hard to get to from the greater northwest area. So we included it in mountain sky. We're almost half a million square miles, so we're the largest contiguous Episcopal area in the United States. And I was elected in July, so I just began in Mountain Sky the beginning of September and my spouse is Elizabeth and we have two young adult children.
Crystal: I thank you for sharing that. And as I was reading about, I didn't realize the expanse of the Mountain Sky Conference and a lot of times when we have a bishop on as a guest, because this is a part of a special edition that we call Meet a Bishop, and when I have a welcome a guest, I talk about the travel and because that's what bishops do a lot is they travel to different churches throughout their conference and they travel to different meetings and usually many times it's contained to a single state. And then I was reading about this Mountain Sky conference, all the states that are, and are you just on the road all the time?
Bishop Stoneking: It does feel like that. And also it's so wonderful. I've had bishops say to me that they're jealous that I'm in such an incredibly beautiful area and it is an incredible, beautiful, an incredibly tiful area, and it's a geography that people automatically associate with spirituality. You think of all of the songs about the mountaintop experience and even the scripture of going to the top of the mountaintop and encountering God there, the transfiguration and Moses receiving the 10 Commandments, like, oh, all these things happened at the top of a mountain and that is our conference. So it's a special place, it's a very special place.
Crystal: I had not thought about that. Just the topography lends itself to all of that imagery and those verses and that really is beautiful. And something else I think about perhaps incorrectly for my own education and knowledge, but I think about the indigenous population of those states, which I also equate with spirituality and that you and I met for the first time in September. You had just come on just I think September one, and we met at the historical convocation in Bozeman, Montana, which where we talked about the indigenous population, both of the area and within the denomination. And so you were there and I appreciate you being a part of that really important meeting. Has that been something that has informed or that you see how it informs your congregations?
Bishop Stoneking: We have 11 reservations within the bounds of the annual conference. I don't know this for sure, but I would guess that that's the largest number of reservations inside the bounds of any annual conference. And we also include the site of the Sand Creek massacre. So one of the most egregiously, tragic, tragic incidents in the history of the United States was the Sand Creek massacre, which happened in 1864 near Eids, Colorado where Cheyenne and Arapaho persons had been told they could peacefully camp. And it was mostly chiefs and women and children and a Methodist minister, John Chivington led Calvary in attack of that peaceful encampment. And the accounts vary, but several hundred persons were killed and the cavalry took body parts back to Denver. And so there is now a healing run every year in October by put on the descendants of the massacre, Cheyenne and Arapaho persons running from the site near AIDS Colorado, which is now a national historic site to Denver.
It takes three days. And Mountain Sky has been a partner in that at first, not a welcomed partner frankly, and the person who has been one of the main leaders of that, a man named auto braided hair honestly says at first I didn't want to have anything to do with the Methodists. But now we're a partner in many ways and in many ways growing that relationship as we heal that relationship. And so the larger question of the relationship to the conference to indigenous persons, it's very much interwoven into the work we do. We have several churches that are either on or adjacent to reservations and pastors who claim full Native American ancestry or at least in part, I would say in my first three and a half months, one of the things that I have focused on most has been Sand Creek in particular, but in larger part our relationships with our indigenous siblings.
Crystal: I didn't, didn't anticipate, this was not one of the questions I had written down, but I just felt like it is a part of what's happening throughout the church, but specifically because it's centered in your conference. And so I appreciate you sharing that, just that piece of education and desire to grow that relationship. And I do know in 2025 there is a more concerted effort, I believe to get additional annual conferences involved in the healing run. So I sure there will be more exclamation coming for that. So thank you for your leadership in those healing spaces that's so needed for the denomination. Well, something that I did write down is that you came into your role as bishop from an academic role. I believe that you were a United Methodist studies professor at the Pacific School of Religion. So when I was reading about that one of what you said when you were elected and do you hate that somebody quotes back to you something I just have always wondered, do you just say, what did I say? I don't know. But what you said is may we all be humble learners. I commit to you to be an humble learner and to love. And I thought, Bishop, that was so beautiful, such a beautiful sentiment and it really did speak to you coming, I believe coming out of an academic setting. But I'd love to hear you speak more about that. What does that look like to be an humble learner?
Bishop Stoneking: Well, thanks for the question. And I was only at Pacific School of Religion for a few months. I started there in April after coming off of the conference staff in a faculty role in United Methodist studies and leadership. So I can't claim that I had a long academic faculty career, but one of my earlier appointments was at the campus ministry at the University of California at Davis. So that is also an academic setting, but I was in a different kind of role and learning is always really important to me. And I think especially in coming into the role of Bishop, the United Methodist Church's structure creates, we are a connectional structure, but we also do have these hierarchies. And I think we suggest that bishops know everything and are all wise. And really I hope that all of us are always learning, and particularly those who lead that we never stop realizing that there's more of God's revelation to understand and that God is always manifesting God's self in more particular ways that we can grow in our understanding and consciousness.
And also I recognize I'm a person who is of dominant culture. A white person grew up with access to certain kinds of resources. My father's a Methodist minister, my mother a teacher. So I'm not saying I grew up with tons of economic privilege, but I certainly had access to lots of resources and that is this a privilege? So there are ways that I want to and need to continue learning. And in my early career as a campus minister, one of the things that we did was to build a multi-faith living community. And that was in response to the fact that there was a housing crisis on the campus of uc, Davis and the campus ministry had some vacant land and the student community was very small about four students. And for that ministry to continue, we were going to have to create a ministry that had relevance and also had its own economic engine.
So at first I pitched a student intentional community of Christian students, but then nine 11 happened and everyone was trying to figure out how to respond in a positive way so that such a tragedy could never happen again or at least be prevented. And so I said, why don't we make this a multi-faith living community? And everyone really embraced that idea. And so we did shift the vision of the intentional community to a multi-faith intentional community. And that led me on a journey of really trying to understand other faith traditions and understand how to articulate myself as a Christian for whom Christianity and particularly Methodism is essential to my life, essential to my life. But doing it in articulating that what I held in a way that did not diminish someone else's faith tradition was a journey of learning how not to just be. There's a way in which I sometimes think, well, the most respectful thing I can do is just be quiet and not say anything about what I believe or who I am because it's different from someone else and I'll just give them space. But really I think what we're called to do is to do the work to give the space and really listen and learn, but also learn how to present ourselves.
And this is what it means to be a Christian and this is why this is essential to my life and this is how it's changed me. And then if the setting includes persons who have no faith tradition, then to make that invitation. But the space between the respectfulness and our evangelistic imperative is a space that I think takes skill and nuance to navigate. And so that was a place of learning in those days, and I could say more about that. That's been a thread throughout my life and did a fellowship at the Pluralism Project at Harvard in looking at multi-faith relationships. And then that led me to wanted to do more research and I wound up getting a PhD in comparative theology. I didn't stop doing ministry. I did the PhD simultaneously.
Crystal: I would venture to say that few of us learn how to navigate that space properly because actually when you started talking I picked up, and nobody can see this because it's a podcast, I have this bright yellow that says curiosity versus certainty. And it's a reminder to me and maybe back off a little bit about those things that I come at it with such certainty when maybe I need to be a little more curious. And I think when you say the word evangelism, I think maybe sometimes we approach that with less curiosity than with full uncertainty, which doesn't leave space to learn perhaps. And I could be speaking, I might be the only person that that's true for, but
Bishop Stoneking: Oh, no, I totally agree. I mean, I think you mentioned the relationship with indigenous folks and I curiosity versus certainty that at the root of some of the harm we've done, we were so certain that our worldview was the only worldview. And now one of the ways back into relationship is through curiosity to recognize that we are in relationship with the people who have a unique and distinct and spiritual worldview that has its own integrity where there are resonances with the Christian worldview, but there's a distinction and a uniqueness. So I agree with you that curiosity versus certainty is a good guide.
Crystal: So throughout your ministry, you've been in a local church, you've been in campus ministry, you've worked for the conference, so you've had a lot of roles, but I'd love for you to share that your call story is what we call it kind of in the church language of how you knew this was the path for you.
Bishop Stoneking: Yeah. Well, as I mentioned, my father's a Methodist minister, so I grew up as a preacher's kid. And I think it's not an uncommon experience for preachers kids to have people ask them, do you want to be a minister like your parent? And I would always say absolutely not. I was very involved in church, I loved church. I was a kid who was at church whenever there was anything happening, loved youth group. And yet the reason for my answer was I think as a child whose parent is a pastor, you see some of the harder things. You see the stress that your parent carries, you experience the absence. And what you don't see is how life-giving and how beautiful ministry can be because often that happens in small spaces. It happens when you get to be at a time of joy when a couple is considering marriage or you get to be present in the holy and sacred moment of death or you get to experience the joy of baptism or all of these kinds of things or just the quiet times in preparation too, the Bible study or those kinds of things.
Those are show life giving, but kids of parents who are pastors don't see those things usually. So it didn't look attractive to me. And I was an English major in college and after college I went to Washington DC and worked at Georgetown University in the Center for Immigration Policy and Refugee Assistance, just entry level job, working with bringing students from Central America for training through the church who would return to their communities to be leaders. And that experience was so formative for two reasons. One, the program was largely run by priests and some nuns. And so what I had access to through that was a vision and a picture of people who had religious vocation and who were working professionally, but who were not pastors of churches. And so it opened a door of a different opportunity and then George Georgetown allowed staff to take one free class.And so I was not going to pass that up. And so I looked at the catalog and saw feminist theology. So I thought that sounds really interesting. This was 1991, and I took that class and it just blew my mind and it was my first opportunity to really deconstruct theology and think differently about who God might be. And I just wanted more of that. And so I applied to PhD programs. I wanted to study with one of the leading feminist theologians. So one of those was Rosemary Radford Ruther who happened to be teaching at Garrett. And my hope was to teach to get a PhD and teach. I applied to Garrett, wound up being offered a room in Rosemary Ruther's home, which she and her husband had bought a big home to create an intentional community and was headed to Garrett to study. And right before the summer before I was offered a position as an intern in a big suburban church in Kansas City, which is where I grew up. And I said, okay, that'll be a good thing. I had finished my job in Washington DC and it was so life-giving, transformative really, that I got to create a young adult program. I created a metro wide program for women called Wisdom Wakening Women. The people on the staff were so generous. I had this idea and they kind of looked at me like, well, she'll learn These things are really hard to pull off.
And I proceeded and we had almost a hundred women show up on a Sunday afternoon for this event and that it felt so exciting and I felt like the local church is really where it's at. This is where you can be with people and put things together and make things happen and grow and be in community. And so I switched my degree program from PhD to MDiv and felt such a deep sense of peace around that decision
Crystal: That was really brave of you to have a path, kind of this certainty and then it felt like at the last minute shift to something really different.
Bishop Stoneking: Well, I struggled with it. I kept asking people, pastors, and there were several seminary professors related to St. Paul who are in and out of that church. How did you know that your call was either pastoral ministry or academic ministry? And they just kept saying, it's your call. There's nothing I can tell you. It's your call. So I prayed and prayed, and really it was one morning walking along the shores of Lake Michigan where I heard the words you are called to what you're most personally committed to. And I knew that that was the church, not the academy. I love the academy and I have now taught, and I was also adjunct at Claremont School of Theology. I do love teaching and I do think the academy is a necessary institution and an important institution, but where my heartbeats is in the local church. And so it was that moment where I was, I just understood what all of the people had been saying to me, it's your call. It's your call.
Crystal: Thank you for sharing that. That is really beautiful. I do believe such that God puts a unique call in each of us and what a blessing when we discover what that is and then to get to live into it on a regular basis. I did want to talk, you mentioned the Pluralism Project, and I did not know what that was until I started reading about the work you had done and it's at Harvard University and just the snapshot of it is that it interprets changing religious landscape of the United States through research. You were a fellow there. And then my understanding is you still work as an advisor. Where do you see, I was curious when I was just learning just a little bit about how do you see the United Methodist Church kind of fitting into this changing landscape?
Bishop Stoneking: Yeah, that's such a great question, especially as we approach regionalization. And the Pluralism project was begun by Diana Eck, who is a Harvard professor, a United Methodist who happens to be from Bozeman, Montana. So I love this kind of full circle connection now. And I think it's no mistake that she came out of a deeply United Methodist background and from Montana, traveled to the east coast and became a professor of religion. But what her heart was really drawn to understanding the broad landscape of people in relationship to one another, and like I said, how to articulate one's own faith commitments within a diverse faith environment and have integrity and clarity around who one is. I think those skills are just becoming more and more important and serving, I served for 14 years on the campus of University of California and came out of a local church and got to campus and realized all of the things I relied on as a local church pastor to give me authority, my title, the Row by Wear on Sunday mornings, sort of the trappings of having an office inside of a church, the shorthand language we use inside the church.
None of those things have any currency in this campus context. And so if I'm going to establish myself as a spiritual leader here, I'm going to have to figure out a new kind of language about what we're really offering and what meaning making looks like and what it means to be a spiritual person grounded in Wesleyan theology in this context. So that's the increasing landscape that we're in, is to be able to communicate to a world that absolutely needs and wants what we have to offer, but is turned off by a lot of the language that we have traditionally used. And so we have to, one phrase is code switch. We have to learn new ways of describing what we're offering that don't use words that have become connotated in particular ways that people by and large are not interested in or view negatively. And then when we think about the global context, the worldwide context, there's some of the same kinds of skills. They take a lot of humility and they take the capacity to deconstruct what we do believe, but have that be in conversation with what's happening in a new context or a new landscape.
Crystal: Yeah, I've heard a lot of times we do in the church tend to have this, well, one, we speak in acronyms, everything is an acronym, and we also have this kind of insider language and it is off putting. I can go into, I think this is true, that I can go into most or maybe every United Methodist church perhaps in the world, especially the English speaking ones where I'm going to feel I'm going to be recognized, the liturgy, I'm going to recognize the standup, the sit down and all of that because I grew up in The United Methodist Church that I have often kind of put myself in the seat of, what if I didn't grow up in the church? What if I don't know when to stand up? What if I stand up and everybody else has sat down? I mean, we do have to, I believe, put ourselves in another look at what we're doing through another lens in order to be our most welcoming.
Bishop Stoneking: Yes. Yeah. Yes.
Crystal: Well, thank you for when I was reading all about that, I was very curious to learn more about it. We are finishing up. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to make sure we talked about?
Bishop Stoneking: This has been a great conversation. I feel like we could keep talking for hours and it's an exciting moment in the United Methodist Church. We've come through a period where there were multiple barriers to doing the ministry that we felt called to do whoever we may be. And I think we've moved beyond some of those barriers now. And so the question for us is, will we truly embrace the new freedom that we've been given to do ministry and not find another excuse to not do? I'm not saying that the barriers were excuses, they were real, but they created real reasons why we couldn't do some things we hoped to do. So now will we move into the new space that's open and how will we show up with love and compassion and invitation?
Crystal: Yeah, that's right. And there was actually a question that I had not asked you. As you've moved throughout your conference and you've met United Methodist in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and that sliver of Idaho, what excites you the most?
Bishop Stoneking: Before I got to Mountain Sky, I thought, oh, this is a perfect place for me because I grew up in Kansas City, so formative years as a mid-westerner, and then all of my adult ministry life has been in California. So I thought, oh, this is a great melding of those two cultures. Well, not exactly, there are elements to Midwestern culture that exist in mountain sky because the eastern plains of Colorado and Montana and Wyoming have some resonance with the Midwest, and definitely we are in the West, but the mountain states are unique and they're very special. And you can't live in that geography without a deep kind of resilience spirit because it's a challenging geography. You have to have courage. They call the Rocky Mountains the backbone of the continent. And I love that image for the Mountain Sky Conference, that idea of the backbone being the place from which life flows, and also a metaphor for courage to be able to do the things that need to be done for justice and hopefully to create peaceful world.
Crystal: Yes, I do love that imagery. Yeah.
Bishop Stoneking: And if we think of ourselves as a body and if we think of our world as a breathing our earth as a breathing entity, then a body always has to have a backbone. So I love the way those metaphors flow. Yeah, that is beautiful.
Crystal: Well, now Bishop, I'm going to ask you the question we ask all of our guests on “Get Your Spirit in Shape”: how do you keep your own spirit in shape?
Bishop Stoneking: Yeah, I love this question. Well, several ways. I think it's ongoing and constant. For me. Time with friends and family is really important and laughing in this role. Sometimes there can be sort of a distance who are on the road a lot, and I especially am in the large geography of mountain sky. So to just kind of relax and laugh and sort of be reminded of my own toils and humanity is really important. And I also, in thinking about this question, I realized I have this practice of going back to my own sermons, and in part it's to remind myself of who I have been. If you listen to a sermon, what you're hearing in part is that a pastor working out their own theology and working out their own questions and struggles with God. And I know you interviewed Calvin Hill who is from Mountain Sky, and he has shared the Navajo practice of saying your name and calling yourself back to yourself. I say, Kristen, I am here. And for me, reading previous sermons is kind of that practice of remembering my own voice at a different time in ministry in a different season and calling myself back to myself and conversation with God and thinking about, oh yeah, I was really struggling, or I was really thinking about that then, or I was trying to work that out and recognizing that God is always moving in and through our lives and things resolve.
Recently I looked back at a sermon series I did in 2022 for Advent, and the worship team had settled on The Good Shepherd is our theme, but nobody was very excited about that coming out of Covid. And I think we settled on that theme because everyone felt like we needed comfort. And then I realized, you know, what we really need is joy. We want to go beyond just feeling comfort to the joy of Christmas. So we switched the theme to joy, question mark, joy, period and joy, exclamation mark. And really were honest about the ambivalence we had in that moment about the word joy and what it could mean after such a hard time at the pandemic. And those sermons really to me, are such a reminder. I go back to them of that arc of being honest. I'm struggling to find joy and recognizing that hope is the anticipation of joy. It's another way to say that. And then the advent arc towards through faith, joy, and then peace and love, all of those ideas were contained in those sermons and brought me so much joy to return to them. So those are a couple of ways.
Crystal: I love that it almost must feel like your sermons are a form of journaling or maybe just looking back at an I biography perhaps of how you were feeling and what you were going through. That's exactly, yeah, I love that. Well, I agree, Bishop, I could just keep talking for the next hour or two or three, but I am definitely going to respect your time and we're going to finish up. But I do appreciate you being a guest on Get Your Street in Shape and just sharing with us, and thank you for your ministry across the years, the ministry that in your leadership now as we lead the United Methodist Church into it, what I believe is a new and exciting place and space. Thank you for that.
Bishop Stoneking: Oh, thank you, Crystal. It's been a pleasure.
Epilogue
Crystal: That was Bishop Kristen Stoneking, resident bishop of the Mountain Sky Conference of The United Methodist Church. To learn more, go to umc.org/podcast and look for this episode where you'll find helpful links and a transcript of our conversation. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me at a special email address just for “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listeners, GYSIS@umcom.org. If you enjoy today's episode, we invite you to leave a review on the platform where you get your podcast. Thank you for being a “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listener. I'm Crystal Caviness and Happy New Year to all of you.
