Pastor reimagines a multi-college campus ministry

By Catherine Ferguson SNJM

Emily Kuenker was installed as the pastor of Grace Commons Spokane in November 2023.

Emily's position is a reimagining of campus ministry, which builds on the legacy of Lutheran Campus Ministry at Eastern Washington University but also incorporates a wider focus on serving students and young adults throughout the greater Spokane area.

During her installation, ELCA Bishop Meggan Manlove cited the passage from Ezekiel where God asked, "Mortal, can these bones live?" and Ezekiel replies, "O God, you know."

"It is a wonderful passage for a ministry embarking on something new, full of hope and possibilities, recognizing that what we become will be similar but not identical to what we have been," commented Meggan.

Tasked with creating a new faith community for students and young adults, Emily has been at work for the last two years building relationships.

Even today, Emily has no office. 

"My work is meeting people where they are, whether that is classrooms, coffee shops, protests or community organizations. The goal is to build a relational faith community that is galvanized by a common desire to act for the good of our neighbor," she said.

Prior to coming to Spokane, Emily was pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Logan, Utah, her first call. She was installed in that parish in early 2020 and her first experience with pastoral ministry was learning how to pastor in the pandemic.

"It was about learning how to be nimble, how to make one plan but be willing to pivot quickly as needs and circumstances change," she said.

This experience was good preparation for her work in Spokane, where Emily is called to innovate, to be creative and to experiment with new expressions of young adult ministry.

Emily was born in Aurora, Colo., and grew up in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, but as she began to develop an interest in social justice as a teenager, she began to question church teaching.

"I started to hear how the congregation spoke about people who were different from us, especially those who didn't share our faith," she said. "By the time I left for college I had a lot of questions about whether my faith fit in my church of origin."

Emily attended Gustavus Adolphus College, an ELCA institution in Minnesota, and majored in classics.

"I loved my major, I was a big word nerd, and I loved studying Latin and Greek," she said. "Seminary wasn't even on my mind yet at all, but I think some of my professors and friends recognized the direction I was heading in long before I did."

Seminary would come years later. After graduating from Gustavus in 2010, Emily returned to Colorado. During a year in the Urban Servant Corps, a service program in Denver, she was introduced to House for All Sinners and Saints Lutheran Church.

There she was moved by the preaching and the central teaching about God's grace.

"It wasn't until then that I had the realization that God's unconditional love was for me. I heard the gospel for the first time when I was 22, and of course, that was a transformative moment, a life-changing moment," Emily explained.

She attended Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., where, as part of her training, she spent one summer of intensive clinical pastoral education at the University of Minnesota Medical Center. She served as a chaplain in pediatrics with a focus in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and learned by experience that, as the director of her Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program told his students: "You have 90 percent of what you need already." 

An article about her in the seminary's newsletter reported that Emily was skeptical but during that summer she learned that "the more I was myself and the more I trusted being Emily was good enough for the people I was working with, the more I trusted just by being a good listener, just by doing things that came naturally, offering a reassuring touch, praying what was on my heart, all of that was good enough. It took me three months to figure that out."

By the end of that summer, she had also come to another realization about herself and her call, which serves her well in this "something new" she has taken on as pastor of campus and young adult ministry:

"When God called me, God called me with all my gifts and talents and also with all my imperfections and deficiencies," Emily said. "It is in remembering that and being who I am that my talent at being a pastor lies."

When she finished her master of divinity, she received a post graduate fellowship, allowing her to travel to study Christian communities in conflict zones.

Over the next year and a half, Emily spent time in the occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank, Northern Ireland, Colombia and the Southern states of the U.S.

This experience changed her life.

What she learned impacted her profoundly both in her preaching and in her commitment as a follower of Jesus.

"I learned how essential it is to tell the truth. Truth is necessary for peace to exist on any level. We can't heal what we can't name," Emily said.

She goes further. 

"These Christian communities that exist outside the culture of the white American church invited me to ask questions about what it means to lead a Christian life. What unites them is this idea that life is lived for others. We belong to one another, and the well-being of my neighbor is absolutely my business," she commented. 

"This idea became central in my pastoral identity. For me as a person and as a pastor, living a Christian life means that when there are children in my city who will go hungry, it's my business to care about that and do something about that. When my immigrant and refugee neighbors are being taken from their homes and jobs, it is my business. When the people in power enact policies of cruelty in the name of a malformed Christianity, it is my business. Apathy is a privilege we can no longer afford," she said.

Armed with these learnings, Emily is shaping an emerging young adult faith community.

"The work of Grace Commons Spokane is forming faith that is embodied in public life," she explained.

Combining the elements of traditional campus ministry and community organizing, Grace Commons Spokane aims to equip young adults to bring the convictions of their faith to bear in civic life.

"If we look at these big social movements like Civil Rights, we see the church present and active as a vehicle for positive social change that moves us toward a more just and more equitable world. Faith communities have a role to play in shaping a better society where all people can thrive, and we want to make sure that we are showing up for that," Emily said about her hopes for the future of this new ministry.

In addition to her work with students and young adults, Emily works as a faith leader with the Spokane Alliance and is currently convening the Clergy Immigration Table, an ecumenical group of clergy and lay leaders from local churches working together on a faithful response to shifts in federal immigration policy.

"It's incredibly important," she said, "that as Christians we stand in opposition to policies that tear families apart, use violence and intimidation to make people afraid and try to exert control over people."

She hopes that as Grace Commons Spokane grows, young adults will be drawn into this work as well.

"The hope is as we engage with more young adults, we can bring them alongside the work we're already involved in, but more than that, I want to hand them the tools they need to be able to take action together on those issues that are most important to them," she said.

"Our young adults are powerful, passionate people, who care about integrity and about the church living up to its values, and if we let them, they can show us how to be a church that does good in and for the world," Emily affirmed.

For information, email revemilykuenker@gmail.com.