Pastor Amy Butler believes that courageous communities of people who live with tenacious love can change the world, and with this outlook, she opens the Week Seven Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “Wonder and Awe — Reverence as a Response to the World” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy.
Butler grew up in Hawai’i, where she’s now Designated Pastor at the Community Church of Honolulu. When she thinks about the question “What does it take to build community that can change the world?,” she draws on Hawaiian culture and, as she wrote on her website, the deep and rich values of her Hawaiian ancestors: Aloha (love, respect); Lōkahi (harmony, unity); Mālama (to care for, to honor); Pono (goodness, morality); and Po‘okela (greatest, to excel).
“I grew up breathing that tropical air, immersed in that culture, and those values became fundamental to who I am,” Butler wrote.
In addition to her culture and childhood, she wrote, her Christian faith “has provided a professional framework for exploring the possibility and promise of that question.”
At college, “wonderful professors at Baylor University helped open my mind and heart to a wider understanding of God’s work in the world, one that embraced and included everyone, even women who felt called to lead Christian institutions,” Butler wrote. “At Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, I found an amazing faith community that licensed me to the ministry.”
But in her Baptist denomination, finding a pastoral job as a woman was difficult; Butler’s professional work in ministry began as the director of a homeless shelter for women in New Orleans. She stayed in New Orleans, becoming Associate Pastor of Membership and Mission at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church.
In 2003, Butler became the senior minister at the historic Calvary Baptist Church in Washington D.C.’s Chinatown, and then for five years the seventh senior minister of The Riverside Church in the City of New York. In both churches, she was the first woman to take on her roles.
It was challenging, and “church leadership is challenging in general,” Butler wrote on her website. “As I said in a recent sermon: ‘The church can break our hearts more often than it does the gospel work of healing us.’ That’s just the truth. But the church can also be a powerful force for healing and hope, and I’m proud to know and work alongside so many who share that conviction. My family and my Hawaiian culture taught me early about ‘ohana’ … that sticking together and learning to live what we believe is one of the most powerful and radical ways we can show up in the world.”
