L. Roger Owens and Mary Clare Owens: There’s no right way to pray

During a car ride four years ago, L. Roger Owens asked his 12-year-old daughter, Mary Clare, “Do you want to write a book with me?”

Roger, a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, is the author of numerous books on pastoral care and spiritual life. He and his wife, the Rev. Ginger Thomas, live in Pittsburgh and have three children.

Yet despite his experience teaching and writing about faith, Roger realized that he didn’t always know how to translate the lessons he shared in classrooms and churches at home. He thought Mary Clare could help.

In the Owens household, bedtime is more than just a nightly routine. For many children, bedtime signals the end of the day’s fun, but for Mary Clare, it was something to look forward to.

It was a time to play with stuffed animals, reflect on the day and talk. She often asked about life after death, how the world came to be and other big questions that don’t have simple answers. Roger began wondering how he could encourage his daughter to have a prayer life where she felt comfortable bringing her questions, doubts and feelings before God.

Mary Clare already was wrestling with big questions by writing her own meditations on them. Rather than seeing the book project that her father proposed as intimidating, she saw it as both a challenge and an opportunity to grow her skills as a writer and thinker.

“Praying Their Way: 24 Prayer Practices for Kids and the Adults Who Love Them” combines personal storytelling with practical spiritual guidance, inviting young readers to see prayer as a natural part of everyday life.

In the back corner of a furniture store I picked up an end table to test its weight. The first was too light, so I moved to the next. Working through the next five, I pushed each one to see if it would topple. The sixth one held steady: heavy with blunt edges. Strong enough to withstand a tantrum.

This is one of many decisions I make as a mother raising a child with emotional and behavioral challenges. It’s a weight other parents carry too, but for those of us who pastor and lead church ministries, there is an unspoken expectation: Hide the pain and be composed during church, even when we’ve spent the week in crisis.

Across the body of Christ, I’ve watched fellow leaders carry versions of the same heavy heartbreak. Some, like me, spend our days trying to keep our children from unraveling into meltdowns they can’t control. Others I know have watched their grown children struggle with addiction or mental illness. Adult children may reject faith, which is its own kind of loss.

As leaders, we have to stand up on Sundays, lead worship and preach, and then go home to households that are falling apart. It happens every week. But almost none of us will admit it.

This was brought to my attention by a question on an ordination recommendation form I filled out for a friend. The form covered their beliefs, spiritual formation and prayer life. But one question stood out: Do they have well-behaved children?

I know what people would write about me. Her child doesn’t listen to anyone. He’s always bolting away. And underneath it all, the real question: How can she lead us when she can’t even seem to lead him?

That question, particularly in the context of readiness for ordination, reveals a theology of ministry many of us have absorbed without realizing it: that our households are evidence of our fitness to lead. Scripture calls leaders to manage their households well. But scrutiny and unspoken judgment have twisted that standard into something else: the belief that our children’s illnesses and personal choices are a referendum on our calling.

When our children are thriving, we feel affirmed, not only as parents but in our Christian calling. When they are not, we bear the burden of shame. We feel like failures, not only as parents but also as ministers. That shame keeps us silent.

But here’s the problem: When we model a faith with no room for honest struggle, we teach families managing their own crises at home that the church has no room for them either.

I am still learning that our children’s struggles do not disqualify us as leaders in ministry. I have prayed two prayers while holding a thrashing child: that God would calm his mind and that God would show me what it means to love even in utter chaos.

If we let shame go, our persistence — rather than the absence of conflict — can deepen our understanding of the gospel and our relationship with Jesus. As a pastor who has sat with their child through a psychiatric evaluation, I personally know a God who does not abandon us in our darkest depths. We can sit with prodigals and with the parents waiting for them to come home, because we also know how to wait and carry radical hope. We can confidently assure our congregants that God will never give up on us, because, despite everything, we have never given up on our children.

For ministers who carry private family pain, I offer two pieces of advice that can make the difference between leading sustainably through suffering and being undone by shame.

Separate your children’s story from your identity

When our children struggle, no matter their age, our shame as parents becomes so entangled with our ministerial identity that our entire sense of self feels under indictment. We must do the work of disentangling our worth from the outcomes we cannot control.

The God who called us into ministry was not surprised by our children’s diagnoses or the decisions they have made. Our children are not our credentials but part of our ministry. If we understand that our own behavior does not change who God is, why do we apply a different standard to ourselves and our children?

When we anchor our identity into who God says we are rather than in how our families appear, something releases within us. We can become more present to our congregations. We can become more loving to our children. When we do this, it will make us better parents and better ministers.

Learn to lead from the middle of an unfinished story

Ministry culture loves a testimony with a clean ending. We have been trained to tell our stories of struggle in three movements: problem, faith, resolution. Many of us believe that we cannot testify until we reach the third one. But mental health struggles do not always resolve.

Addictions can be a lifelong battle. Some of our children may be in and out of crisis for decades or perhaps for the rest of our lives. My son is on a long waiting list for cognitive behavioral therapy to help manage his emotional dysregulation and sees three other specialists every week. No simple cure is in his future.

We do not need our children to be healed before we lead. Our calling does not require all our problems to be solved but demands our faithfulness and obedience in what’s left unresolved.

The people we serve are in the middle of their own unfinished stories. Our congregations need to know they are not carrying these burdens alone. God will complete what he has started in us, and within our children, but for today we are called to do the work until our time here is done.

Our churches were never meant to be museums of perfect families. We are part of a broken community being made whole. God loves our children more than we do, and God will not forget them. When we remember that, we can minister from a place of depth rather than weight.

Don’t tell the Rev. Luis Cortés that Esperanza is something special.

It is, of course. And he appreciates the compliment. But he doesn’t think that an institution like Esperanza, which serves the Latino community in North Philadelphia, should be special.

“A place like Esperanza should be normative. We have 30 neighborhoods in the city; there should be 30 Esperanzas,” he said. “There should be 30 places where you can participate in the arts, where you can learn about and play music, where you can experience different forms of dance, where you can learn photography, where you can learn how to add and subtract.”

Just because people are poor doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the same things that everyone needs for a good life, he said.

Founded in 1987, Esperanza seeks to help the residents of Hunting Park, a majority-Latino neighborhood, have the same opportunities that other residents of the city enjoy. It focuses on education and economic development, including affordable housing, schools, housing counseling, immigration legal services, workforce development, youth leader training, and a fully accredited branch campus, Esperanza College of Eastern University.

The organization — its name means “hope” in Spanish — has more than 600 employees and a budget of more than $70 million and is a model for other institutions across the country.

Cortés, who is a Baptist pastor, worked with Hispanic Clergy of Philadelphia to found Esperanza. He earned an M.Div. at Union Theological Seminary and a master’s degree in economic development from Southern New Hampshire University. 

In this interview, he talks to Faith & Leadership’s Sally Hicks about why he founded Esperanza and why he thinks institution building is key to social change. The following is an edited transcript.

Faith & Leadership: You have a goal of building an “opportunity community.” What do you mean by that?

Luis Cortés: Our ontology has a set of concepts and categories, and the relationships between these are fundamental. There is a Creator, and there are the created. Those are givens, as fact. So we start there. The other thing that’s given, as fact, is that all human beings are equal in God’s eyes.

If you believe that, then you must believe that we should try to provide a great opportunity for everyone to become that which God would have them become. To be in service to humanity is to assist everyone to develop to their highest potential. That’s our modus operandi.

This understanding then is followed by the question, what do you do with the poor? The mission work is to create a place where you provide all residents the opportunity to live a quality life. What must you provide for people to reach their ultimate goals, to be able to serve humanity better despite their economic situation and to have them feel they have a good quality of life?

This is what becomes an opportunity community, the development of all things needed for individuals to reach their potential. As an example, we built a theater and we have cultural pieces, like teaching dance, teaching music, all from a cultural perspective.

All people come from and have a culture. We have a language, we have music, and for Latines, we are in exile — we’re away from where our culture was based.

What do we do to create an opportunity community — a community that understands your class and your culture and helps you build so that you can have a great life staying here in this neighborhood or you can use what you learn here and have a great life elsewhere?

F&L: How did Esperanza begin?

LC: I was the founder of Hispanic Clergy of Philadelphia in 1981, an outgrowth of developing a field education system for Latine students at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. It was about 26 clergy from about 18 different denominational entities.

These clergy were all in the same Philadelphia neighborhood, and they had never really worked together until we organized as a field education consortium. As a group of clergy, when we would get together, like any group of highly motivated concerned citizens, we inevitably become active on challenging issues of the day.

We were getting together to discuss field education, quite mundane. And then all of a sudden, conversations shifted to, “They shot a guy here last week” or, “The police did or didn’t perform,” and we just moved in the direction of the conversations and became a civil rights organization.

During that time, Pew Charitable Trusts did a study on religious institutions, and as a result, we got funded for three years to start Esperanza and to work in clergy education. The clergy hired me to do it, with the mandate to do the clergy education and create a proactive organization, Esperanza.

In the beginning, the more we helped an individual family, the more it hurt the local church. As we helped individuals, the family moved farther away from their church, eventually joining a suburban congregation.

What we learned as a group was, it doesn’t matter if our people leave to improve their lot, as long as we create an institution that remains to assist those that stay or can’t get out.

Our philosophy became that we will work together to create Hispanic-owned-and-operated institutions. We began working on that theory of institution building where we could control the mission and agenda of our community, as opposed to the present-day external control.

We as Hispanic people in this nation have never focused on this on a large scale. We’ve never created our own institutions. What we do is we assume that we will inherit the institutions of America as we become a larger part of America. But that is not how it works. The institutions that provide for and control our neighborhoods are all managed externally: police, fire, schools, streets, most businesses.

So we decided we only wanted to create Hispanic-owned-and-operated institutions. We had enough Hispanic institutions that were doing social service, so we decided to not compete with our follow Latine agencies. We focused on education and economic development.

We wanted to do education because education is the first step and we understand institution-building as economic development.

When we first got started, it was like, “How do we help people?” Now it’s, “How do we help our institutions help people?”

F&L: How did you come to appreciate institutions in this time when there’s a lot of cynicism, a lot of distrust, a lot of anger around institutions?

LC: Since our nation’s beginning, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that it is associations and the institutions that they create that make Americas unique.

We’ve got to think positive. We serve our communities and our neighbors. So if everybody would do as well as they can at their community-serving job, whatever that is, we should be headed to a better place.

As the religious population lessens, there will have to be alternative institutions that defend the rights of the poor. Historically, the church has responded to the poor first through charity, then the development of institutions like hospitals or schools. Advocating to change unjust laws.

If that faith role dwindles, we have to figure out who or what replaces that. I see that as a major problem for the future.

F&L: In addition to the institutions, you are making change in individuals. The documentary “Esperanza: Hope for Our Cities,” for example, shows that commitment. Why do you stress self-belief, grit and confidence?

LC: I went to public school in Spanish Harlem. When I got to elementary school, they said to me, “You can be president of the United States.” And I looked around, and it’s old, it’s decrepit, it’s dirty, it’s outdated, and I’m like, “Nah, no way.”

For many people, it’s hard to self-motivate if you don’t see anyone else around you achieve success. We need our youth to “make it.” Last year, in our graduating high school class, we had MIT, two people at Carnegie Mellon, and one girl went to Wellesley, among a plethora of state colleges and universities. It is now normative.

Part of our model is we must have modern equipment. The space must be super clean. Visitors come to our place and they say, “Wow, this is so clean.” It’s a compliment. I understand. But it also says something about their expectation.

When I’m told, “Wow, this place is clean. This lab is so modern,” what are they saying? That in their preconception of economic poverty, they did not expect a first-class lab here. They did not expect, because of the economics, this place to be spotless. They do not expect your top five students to go to those schools, and you have one of the top college-graduating high schools for Hispanics. They do not expect that.

Whatever prejudice they brought in begins to be challenged, right? It’s like — look at this: MIT, Harvard, Penn. When they see that, they say, “Something special is happening.”

While there may be truth to that, it’s only special because other people won’t do it. Our team at Esperanza figured out how to do it, creating a culture of opportunity.

I believe there’s nothing that we can’t do. It’s just about how much time you have and what are your priorities. People ask me about this all the time — “How did you do it?”

Well, you find the need and fill it. And once you fill it, create an institution behind it, then find the next need and fill it. And once you fill it, create an institution that survives until it can thrive.

F&L: You mentioned the cleanliness, and you also insist on giving Esperanza’s students and other participants the best in other ways. Why is that important?

LC: We start with the concept that we should have what any community has. If you look at most communities and the arts, for example, they have access to experiences and ways to learn; they have ways to experience music, acting, dance and painting or visual. We have to create the avenues.

First we got the theater, and then through the theater, we do dance. But we also brought the best of the region. So the Philadelphia Orchestra plays at our theater; Opera Philadelphia sings in our theater; the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra plays at our theater; Philadanco and the Philadelphia Ballet dance in our theater.

We communicated to these arts institutions, “When you come to our neighborhood, it has to be your A team.” Normally when they go to a community, they send the B and C team so they can work and practice as they serve a neighborhood project. At Esperanza, if the A team ain’t coming, you don’t come.

The artistic talent also has to give time during the week to work with students. Not just Esperanza schools, but there are about 10,000 public school children in our neighborhood. They do workshops and our community youth interact with them. After their theatrical performance, they sit and answer audience questions for 15 minutes. We have found the arts groups love these interactions as much as our residents do.

F&L: You also work on gentrification. How much of an issue is that for you?

LC: The bottom line is that urban communities near centers of our American cities where working-class Spanish-speaking people live are being dismantled by an upper middle class and above who wants their land and their housing so they can capitalize economically and culturally. It is happening everywhere.

Cities are happy with the gentrification or displacement of our neighborhoods, because it means a better tax base for the city. So when the city gains, the economically disadvantaged lose. That’s a constant struggle.

We need to build up equity in Black and brown communities. The No. 1 equity builder in Black and brown communities is not giant companies; it’s mom-and-pop commercial shops and home ownership. What we can show is, as we lose the housing, these mom-and-pop shops are destroyed.

So, the real question is, do we really want to help Black and brown people, or are we just saying we do while we actually cash in on their assets?

In America, they’re taking our neighborhoods under the guise of mixed income communities. In St. Louis, Black neighborhoods are being bought up by universities. West Philadelphia, it’s universities and science centers. North Philadelphia, it’s another university and the corporate needs. So they push people out of their long serving neighborhoods.

Today, young professionals don’t want to spend money on a car to live in the suburbs. They prefer to live in the city, not have a car. They’ll just Uber and use the money saved on transportation for restaurants and recreation, which is fine. But the economic burden falls on the economically disadvantaged, who need to move farther away to more expensive housing, losing the businesses that cater to their needs.

It’s interesting that progressive communities are the ones that gentrify Black and brown neighborhoods. It’s not the conservatives. Conservatives avoid minority communities, while progressives enjoy moving into a culturally mixed neighborhood until they extinct the original ethnic group that was there.

Progressives move in during their early professional career, purchase housing cheaply, live there for five years and make six figures on their “investment.”

It’s a real interesting dynamic where we fight the conservatives on one side and we have to fight the progressives on the other. They do have one thing in common: they’re white.

The role of the church should be different. How do we talk to progressives to say, “Listen, I know you can make money by moving into my neighborhood, but you’re hurting us. How do we really build a mixed income community?”

There’s a dynamic that’s happening in our country. San Bernardino, Phoenix, Calle Ocho in Miami, San Antonio, Philadelphia. Chicago, with three distinct Hispanic neighborhoods. They’re all under the same pressure.

F&L: How do you keep from being overwhelmed when everything you describe is extremely complex? It’s difficult. Yet almost 40 years later, you’re still hopeful.

LC: I am a minister. I believe in God. And in the end, we are all called to serve others. Despite all the problems, our job is to persevere and pursue. And persistence is the name of the game.

The Rev. Jo Nygard Owens did not set out to be a graphic designer. She was a Presbyterian pastor first.

As the mother of a toddler in a busy family where she and her husband were both clergy, she saw the opportunity to reevaluate her call when their  young family moved to a new city.

“We had one child who was 1 year old at the time, and we were constantly playing ‘trade the kid,’” Owens said. “It was not a very fun way to live. And when we moved, I took a step back.”

As her family settled into their new life in Greensboro, North Carolina, a church approached Owens with an unexpected offer that would lead to what has become Vibrant Church Communications and a new path for her to support others in their ministry.

The North Carolina native and University of Georgia graduate now lives with her family in Cleveland, Ohio, where she runs her own graphic design business focused on the needs of faith communities. She spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Micah Edwards about her work. The following is an edited transcript.

Faith & Leadership: Can you tell us about your switch from pastor to graphic arts designer?

F&L: Was the switch from pastor to graphic designer difficult?

JNO: What I do with my work is that I create stickers, but I call them “stickers with a purpose.” There’s some sort of spiritual tie-in, no matter what the sticker is. I do back-to-school stickers, and those come with blessings and children’s sermons. I try to pull in ministry as much as I can in my digital resources. I use my theological training as a pastor to write them.

I get to do some ministry, but I don’t get to be a pastor. I miss being with people. One of the really beautiful things about being a pastor is that you get to walk alongside people through both really wonderful moments and hard moments. You’re present with them. And you get to be God’s representative in those moments. I really miss those pastoral moments and having a community.

F&L: Did you have to make any adjustments to your life?

JNO: I’ve had to learn a lot about what it means to run a business and about paying taxes, marketing. I’ve had to learn a huge number of new skills to do this, a lot of which are very useful in ministry.

Not working on a [church] staff is one of the hardest things, because one of the beautiful things about being on a staff is that you have lots of people to trade ideas with, and you get feedback.

People will say, “Oh, well, this is good, but maybe work on this piece.” And now I’m just all alone. I’m like, “OK, who can help me?”

I’m reaching out to friends. And it’s hard, because there really isn’t a duplicate of myself. When you’re a head pastor, you can reach out to other head pastors at other churches and learn from them, but there’s no one else doing exactly what I’m doing. There are similar people, but then you’re in competition with each other, and there’s less collegiality.

F&L: How does your graphic design work still help people in ministry?

JNO: A lot of what I do is create social media graphics, and churches always want to have something on social media, and they don’t have the time to create it, to make it look good or find the resources.

I’m able to create things that not only can teach people; they can provide faith formation. They give you something to think about, and they provide engagement on your social media page.

F&L: Was there any point where you wanted to give up while creating your business?

JNO: There have been many, many times. For entrepreneurs, you see all these people make all these graphics of what success looks like, and it’s the typical iceberg. There’s so much that happens below the waterline, but all you see is a little point at the top. The point at the top looks wonderful, but underneath the surface is where everything else is happening.

I started the business in the fall of 2020. I’d had all sorts of chronic health issues. I went to a new doctor in the spring of 2021, and they totally changed up all my medications and my diagnoses. I had to get sicker before I got better. I spent about three months laid out on the couch.

I had been building all this momentum. It was going great, and I knew what I was doing. Then I literally didn’t have access to my brain. I could barely move my body. I was very sick. I lost all this momentum. It’s really hard to be like, “OK, I did all the hard work of getting the gears going, and now I have to do it all over again. Do I want to do it all over again?” It turned out that I did.

There are a lot of gifts to running your own business, and there are a lot of downsides. You have to earn all your own money. It is not necessarily a daily commitment, but it is a very regular periodic commitment, especially with the size of my business. It’s meant a number of times sitting down and saying, “Is this still worth it to me?” And each time, I’ve discerned that it is.

F&L: What are some of your plans to continue to expand your business?

JNO: I have been working with a coach. Part of my problem is I can come up with a million ideas, but it’s a matter of sitting down and taking those ideas and turning them into reality.

Conferences have started happening again. That was a big part of my problem in terms of growth. Going to conferences and being a vendor at conferences is a really big way to continue to have that growth. I made it to my first conference in January and saw a big increase.

My hope is to keep going to conferences and setting up booths and finding places to send out stickers.

F&L: How did you come up with the name Vibrant Church Communications?

JNO: I went through a lot of iterations. There are all these naming resources out there; I worked through some of them. But my goal with what I do is to bring life to churches. So many churches can start to feel stagnant.

We’ve done things the same way — and with the rapid rate of how our society changes, churches have to stay on top of that. It used to be that churches could open their doors and say, “Hey, I’m Presbyterian” or, “I’m Episcopalian” or whatever denomination you were. And people would say, “Oh, I’ll go to that church.” Or, “Hey, 10 of my friends go to that church; I’ll go too.”

They didn’t have to do any marketing or things like that. As nondenominational churches and more evangelical churches pop up, they realize that they have to do marketing to get people to come, because they’re not a household name.

You start getting great graphics and catchy messages, and our mainline churches are not keeping up with that. I really wanted this vibrancy, because there’s so much life in the Bible and in our spirituality — there’s so much life that’s happening — that I really wanted churches to capture that and to be able to show that to everyone, both in their congregations and those that are hoping to come to their congregations.

F&L: Describe your creative process when making these different designs.

JNO: There’s a lot that happens in my head, for sure. I go to a writing group most mornings. Some people who are in there are pastors, some people work at colleges and seminaries, and then there are actually a number of people who are writers or run their own businesses.

We all gather for an hour every morning and take some time to write. I find that that is a really great time of grounding. Some days I have a little notebook that I write down all my ideas in and things I’m researching.

The first year, the theme was given to me. It was “Blessed with hope,” a passage from Jeremiah (Jeremiah 29:11).

The next year, we had been in this COVID world. Some schools were back, not all schools, but we were really itching to get back into this place where we could be together. That was when I did “Go out in joy; be led back in peace” (Isaiah 55:12). It’s kind of this blessing and benediction to go out into the world.

Then last year, I brainstormed with a friend. We came up with “Be the light.” Again, this message of, “You have a presence for the world.”

This year’s theme — the one that kind of rose to the surface — is “Together.” There are so many things in our world that tear us apart, that divide us. Not that we want to be just a homogeneous mess, but all of our individualities and uniqueness can come together to create something beautiful. It’s using the idea of stained glass, with all these multicolored pieces and lots of different shapes all coming together to make something beautiful and be the body of Christ in the world.

As inspiration strikes, you’ve got to write it down, but also as you’re reading and praying and doing the regular disciplines, they’re all a big part of it.

F&L: Is there anything else you would like people to know?

JNO: I’d like to talk about creative languages. There are so many different creative languages, and I say that my first creative language was dance. I am a dancer by training.

Even though dance and graphic design are very different, there are a lot of creative principles that overlap. And so I just encourage people to find their creative language, what feels natural to them.

That is one of the truest ways that we connect with God. I am so lucky that I have multiple ways to do that, both through dance and through graphic design. When we share our creativity in a holy way, not only does it bless you as the creator, but it draws others to God.