Lisa Talbott grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. She arrived there with her family in elementary school with her father involved in the air cargo industry.
“I remember, even as a small child, stepping off the airplane and leaving the airport and feeling like I was at home, like seeing the mountains around us and flat top and O'Malley peak, and just like feeling that embrace of the scenery around me and I, it was like I had this huge exhale and felt like I was home.”
She began a career as a teacher in the Anchorage School District where she taught English at Bartlett High School and Clark Middle School that Talbott describes as two of the most diverse schools in the United States.
“When I taught there in the early 2000s we had 98 different languages spoken in the school district, and so it was wildly diverse. It was just so such a rich experience, because the students brought so much culture with them and so much family support that looks different than family support in our more dominant culture. For a lot of them, they were the first students who were going to be completing high school. They may have been the first generation of their family who was on a college track. And so it was just really amazing to see the dedication of the students themselves to their own education, but also the kind of cheerleading and support that they got from their families as well. So it was really a wonderful experience….Anchorage is an immigration hub. It's it's just one of the entry points into the country. And so there's just a huge diversity of cultures that come through, like there's a huge Pacific Islander population in Anchorage, and Tongan, Samoan, you know, it's, it's even diverse within that population, but it is. We had a large number of Hmong students who were part of some resettlement projects. I think Minnesota is the only state that has a larger Hmong population than Alaska and so yeah, as as an immigration hub and as a refugee resettlement location, it's just a beautifully diverse place.”
Talbott explains her long time interest in Homer and how she eventually got into ministry and made her way to the Homer United Methodist Church in 2013.
Homer had always been one of my family's vacation spots, and after we got married, it was always one of the places that we brought my step kids to go camping, and just loved it here, and so we always were keeping an eye on the school district down here, and it seemed like there was never an English and a science position open at the same time. But as teachers, we wanted to come to Homer, and didn't have the opportunity to do that, but we did have a family tragedy. I. Have three stepchildren, and my youngest stepdaughter, Carrie, was diagnosed with brain cancer her first year in college, and it was a highly aggressive form of cancer that for for most people, it's about six weeks from diagnosis to death, and she lived for a year, and it was a beautiful, painful, difficult year that brought our blended family together in ways that we didn't anticipate.
After her daughter’s death, Talbott and her husband began attending the United Methodist Church in Anchorage.
In just a couple of years, I began to feel the call to teach in a different way, which is how I saw ministry. It was. I loved teaching. I loved being in the classroom. I loved serving my students, but I saw that there was a bigger way that I could serve as well that would, that would be, it would be more overt in the ways than the ways that I was able to take care of my students. I knew I had students who were homeless and who were struggling, and I could provide them with coats, and I always kept a crate of water bottles in my classroom, and I always had granola bars for the kids that didn't have enough food at home, and, you know, I could minister to them in certain ways, but it had to be, you know, within the constraints of my professionalism as a teacher, and when I felt that opportunity to serve in a in a more overt way, where I could really focus on people's spiritual lives and their physical needs as well as their continued development. You know, that was a call that just really spoke to my heart.
Talbott attended the Duke Divinity School in North Carolina and it took her three years to complete and her first assigned position was in Homer and she explains how that process works within the United Methodist system.
“...in our United Methodist system, pastors are appointed. They're not hired by the local church. So the bishop and the superintendent get to know the local congregation. They know the pastors that are available, and they kind of act like matchmakers of where are the personalities going to fit, where are the gifts and graces going to fit with the needs of the community, and I was assigned to Homer, and it was just magical. It was just such an incredibly good fit. I fell in love with the congregation and the community, and I felt embraced, not just by the congregation, but by the community as a whole. Maybe my second week in Homer, a member of the map steering committee stopped by the church and asked if they could take me out for coffee, and four hours later, I was all in when it came to community health coalitions and wanting to be part of that steering committee. So that's been my longest serving community organization that I've been a part of in Homer, and it was really hard to say goodbye to that when I stepped out of the church here, because that's a role that's more appropriately held by the current pastor, rather than me now.”
Talbott explains features of her new role and some elements of diversity within the United Methodist Church system.
“So my new role has a rather wordy title. It's called assistant to the bishop for equity and intercultural competency. So the assistant to the bishop part means that when the bishop is unavailable to attend events, or if he would prefer to assign me to something, I can show up with his authority and speak with his voice, that in some ways, I can be an extension of his office so that he can be in more places at once then he could be all on his own. So I work directly for the bishop. I am carrying the baton of Christina Gonzalez, who was a lay person in the Pacific Northwest conference, who for 25 years taught intercultural competency around the Pacific Northwest Conference, which is part of our four state area. And so she laid a lot of foundational work using a tool called the IDI, the Intercultural Development Inventory. And so it's an assessment tool that we can use to see where our current skill set and mindset are, but it's a developmental model that encourages continuous growth, and that really speaks to our United Methodist theology. Because the founder of this particular Methodist movement, John Wesley, always talked about how we're going on towards perfection, and so we're always growing in faith. We're always growing in the holiness of heart and life. And so to have a developmental model where we can always learn more skill sets, where we can always develop our mindset and our heart set so that we can be more open and welcoming and understanding of diverse people and opinions and values, it theologically fits really well within our denomination.”
The current Northwest United Methodist bishop is Cedrick Bridgeforth and his seat is located in Seattle, Washington. Talbott provided some comments on equity and intercultural competency in the context of the current political environment.
In our current political environment, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are being removed from government, from educational institutions and from corporations, and I found it to be a really interesting coincidence, that a timeliness that did not seem accidental, that the day it was announced that DEI efforts were going to be removed from government departments, that my role was announced across our greater northwest area, and I find that delightful and timely, because the church can step into a role now in our world that can make A really significant and positive change, not just in our local churches, but in all the places that those local churches touch. Because a congregation is not just a group of Christians, it is a group of business owners, local politicians, teachers, leaders, retirees, people who touch almost every aspect of a community. And so when we focus on training congregations and encouraging, you know, a focus on diversity and inclusion and equity and how do we tangibly love our neighbors in ways that make their lives better and make our lives better, that really does have a ripple effect across communities. And so churches don't have the same constraints. We don't get federal funding. We're not bound by the same rules of grants or red tape. And so there's a freedom in being able to teach that which is forbidden in other realms of the world right now, or those things that are under threat in education and government and corporations. And so I think one of the changes. Things that I feel right now in this role is an urgency and a real necessity to step up and be an advocate for diversity and inclusion and equity. And one thing that I really like about the model of intercultural competency that I have been taught and that I'll be using to train is the definitions of diversity, inclusion and equity. So we say that diversity is you count the people. How many people of color are on this board? How many LGBT people participate like you put numbers on people. So diversity is a step, and it's a good step and a positive step, but really you're just counting the people, the bodies that are in the room. Inclusion means that the people count like their opinions and voices actually matter and they're actually heard, but equity is the outcomes count, and equity means that those voices that are in the room can actually change the systems and change the outcomes so that things are done differently. We talk a lot as well about universal design, which is from the disability movement. And so just like having ramps go into buildings are good for everybody, not just people who use wheelchairs. Universal design when it comes to things like providing language translation, that's good for everybody. Everybody gets to participate at a greater level. Everybody gets to learn from everybody's experience. And so we do use a lot of universal design principles as well when we talk about equity, and how do we change the outcomes so that people are not just counted, their voices are not just heard, but their voices actually change the way we do things for the benefit of all.
Talbott concluded her conversation with the radio with various features of gratitude towards the community.
“I want to end with gratitude. I feel an enormous amount of gratitude for this community and the way that the community has supported my ministry here. Over the years, I have been so honored to be invited to speak at the Women's March, at the pride parades, at Civil Air Patrol with facilitating a city council roadblock. I've prayed here at this radio station after the murders of journalists in France, I've been invited into places of business and to nonprofits to help support community members who would never and will never set foot in the church, and the fact that I have been sort of embraced as a community chaplain has really been a role that I have loved to fill and hope to Continue, in some ways, even though my role will need to change and the current pastor will will step up into some of those community positions, I am just so grateful for the way that this community has embraced me and encouraged me to be A public theologian in ways that I never anticipated.”
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
