TOKENS PODCAST: S3E3
An interview with justice-seeker Lindsey Glenn Krinks on her experience as an advocate for the incarcerated, the sick, and the homeless; what it has been like to be a woman interested in the male-dominated field of theology; stories she has lived as a co-founder of Open Table Nashville, a nonprofit which seeks to disrupt cycles of poverty; and her new book, Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets.
ABOUT GUEST
Lindsey Krinks (MTS, Vanderbilt Divinity School) is a street chaplain, activist, and nonprofit leader who has worked for over a decade on the front lines of social justice movements. She is the cofounder of Open Table Nashville, a nationally acclaimed interfaith homeless outreach nonprofit. Krinks has served as a fellow with the New Leaders Council, a national network for millennial leaders, and regularly speaks to student, church, and community groups across the country. She was featured in Saint Cloud Hill, a documentary about Nashville's largest homeless camp in 2019 and has been featured in dozens of Nashville news stories.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee Camp: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Lindsey Glenn Krinks: We're pretty comfortable with the status quo, but the prophets weren't. You know, Jesus was killed by the status quo system that wanted to keep itself in power.
Lee Camp: That's Lindsey Glenn Krinks, author of the new book, Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets.
Lindsey Glenn Krinks: Faith calls us to get our hands dirty and our feet dirty in the struggles of this world.
Lee Camp: And I'm proud of the fact that she's one of my former students, a former student who has taught me a lot as she has pursued her sense of vocation and service in the world. A justice-seeker who brings all manner of passion, creativity, and compassion to her work.
Lindsey Glenn Krinks: We're not called to be comfortable. We're called to be faithful. And being faithful for me meant being uncomfortable.
Lee Camp: Today, an interview with Lindsey on her new book, as well as her experience as co-founder of Open Table Nashville, which is an interfaith homeless outreach nonprofit, which seeks to disrupt cycles of poverty, journey with the marginalized, and provide education about issues of homelessness.
All this, coming right up.
Part 1
Lee Camp: Grateful today to have a special opportunity to interview Lindsey Glenn Krinks, the author of a brand new book, entitled Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets. Not only the author of a brand new book, which some people say is like putting a baby out in the world. She is also the mother of a brand new baby named Larkin Isaiah. And she is also one of my favorite former students. So welcome Lindsey, delightful to have you with us today.
Lindsey: So good to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Lee Camp: I will say for those listening, that Lindsey is one of many favorite former students, but her husband, Andrew, is also another one of my favorite former students. And, uh, we've known each other a long time now. And so grateful for you and grateful for all you've been in Nashville and in our community here. So, how is life with a new baby coming right out of 2020 here?
Lindsey: Oh man, life these days, we are staying afloat. We are sleep deprived. You know, I do homeless outreach work and I told somebody recently homeless outreach work prepared me very well for the sleep deprivation of motherhood. And I stand by that. So we're hanging in there. We love our little babe so much. She's really cool.
Lee Camp: Yeah. Your new book, a spiritual memoir, telling your story or many stories about moving from a place of, as you say, early in the book, a sort of sense of a desire for a stable, predictable, married life with kids and good middle-class life. And yet here you've been, what, fifteen years now doing homeless advocacy and homeless work and literally working on the streets. And uh, for my first question, I suppose, is describe what your experience has been like in doing spiritual memoir as a practice.
Lindsey: Writing for me is the way I process things. It's the way I process a lot of the trauma that I've experienced on the streets, with people, alongside people. I started journaling through some times of burnout actually, in this work, and then going to the Abbey of Gethsemani for retreat, really reconnecting myself with kind of who I have always been, someone that's always been drawn to healing vocations and professions. I wasn't sure for a very long time what that would actually look like. I thought I would go into a medical field or physical therapy. You know, writing, writing my story, really helped reconnect me with my faith and a God of justice. It reconnected me with the prophets, um, with the Gospel that is the most radical thing I've ever read. I could read any number of radical books or philosophers, and the Gospels and the prophets are still coming in number one for me. Writing is an act of discovery, I think is what Flannery O'Connor said.
Lee Camp: Yeah.
Lindsey: And so to rediscover my roots, both in my family history of addiction, mental health issues, and even homelessness. But also to rediscover my place in it has been a really healing thing actually. You know, I can't say that, I, writing has made me be able to make meaning out of the trauma that I've seen on the streets, but it's at least helped me to name it.
Lee Camp: Yeah.
Lindsey: And there is healing in bearing witness to the things we experience and have seen.
Lee Camp: The title of your book, Praying with Our Feet, you say there in the early part of the book, you take that from Abraham Joshua Heschel. Tell us a little bit about that.
Lindsey: Yeah. So Rabbi Heschel is a mystic. He's a scholar of the prophets.
Lee Camp: Anybody who has never read his book simply entitled The Prophets is one to definitely put on the bookshelf for a long time.
Lindsey: Absolutely.
Lee Camp: It’s a beautiful book. Yeah.
Lindsey: Um, he is so incredible. He actually came to the States by way of Europe in, you know, the thirties, when he was fleeing Nazi Germany, and many of his family members were killed by Nazis. And when he came over to the States, he realized, you know, the same evils that he had experienced in Nazi Europe, Nazi-occupied Europe, were very much like Jim Crow South, right? Segregation, the evils of the Holocaust were similar, um, to the evils of segregation. So he got really involved in the Civil Rights Movement here. And one day, after marching arm in arm with King from Selma to Montgomery, he penned this beautiful quote that said, I felt as if my legs were praying. You know, marching isn't worship, but my legs were uttering songs. And this, this beautiful idea that actually a number of mystics have held over the years that what we do in the world, our actions, have a spiritual component as well. And our faith calls us to get our hands dirty and our feet dirty in the struggles of this world. You know, I've experienced a similar thing in working for justice for the last fifteen years in Nashville.
I remember, you know, after Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, joining Black Lives Matter marches where we would lay on the ground, hold die-ins on the ground for four minutes together for a minute for every hour Mike Brown's body was in Ferguson. And that dying together, and then that rising together, that resurrection of a body politic is one of the most powerful and spiritual things I've ever experienced. The chanting is like the chanting that you experience in a liturgy in a church service. So I can, I can really identify with Heschel's comments and his sentiments there. A comfortable faith, a private faith was never a faith for me. My faith calls me to act, and Heschel helped me understand what that should look like in the world, along with a number of other saints.
Lee Camp: Talk to us a bit more about some of your journey from a context of your faith supporting kind of a pursuit of a comfortable life to, where you've come fifteen, twenty years later.
Lindsey: Yeah. So I actually remember a conversation we had after some ethics class at Lipscomb. You had pulled me aside after class and said something about how I had an accurate theology or something. And, have you ever thought about, do you remember that? What do you remember?
Lee Camp: Yeah, I do. As I recollect, it was a medical ethics class because you were planning to be something in the medical profession, right?
Lindsey: Right.
Lee Camp: Physical therapist, right?
Lindsey: Yep.
Lee Camp: Yeah. And in that medical ethics class I would have y'all read some theology stuff and some moral philosophy. And I remember reading one of your papers and could tell that the theological and moral philosophy was suiting you quite well in this particular paper, and I think I remember pulling you aside after class and saying, have you ever thought about maybe doing theology instead of going to do physical therapy? And I don't remember what you said.
Lindsey: I remember!
Lee Camp: But I, I know that it, I know that it caught your attention.
Lindsey: I remember telling you, no, it's really interesting, but I'm going to do that on the side because my plan is to have a comfortable life. Haha! So at that point, you know, at that point I was, I was still running away from some of the ghosts of my past, right, in my family, the family trauma I had seen. I was pursuing a comfortable life because I felt like that was where I'd find security and salvation, right? But, through those kinds of classes with you, through rereading the prophets and the Gospel and through my own dark night of the soul. I had a terrible ankle injury and multiple surgeries during college and found myself in need, you know? Through those experiences, I realized that my calling wasn't just a calling to be comfortable.
I remember some quote that said, we're not called to be comfortable. We're called to be faithful. And being faithful for me meant being uncomfortable. It meant, I, you know, accidentally stumbled upon a homeless organizing group in town, and it meant pursuing my relationships with them, having them teach me what was really going on in our city. Having them teach me how to see the city from below, not from above, not all these shiny tourist places that you'll see in Nashville, but from the alleys, from the underpasses. And in doing that, it completely changed my life. And I was able to listen to where I was being called. And I was foolish enough to pursue that calling. And I'm very thankful that I, that I did because it's, it's utterly changed my life.
Lee Camp: Talk a bit about, as you began to do that sort of work. Draw some pictures of the Nashville that you've seen that a lot of people are unfamiliar with.
Lindsey: So the Nashville we see, um, you know, I, I am one of the co-founders of Open Table Nashville, a homeless outreach group here. And what we see on a daily basis is we see the forgotten and abandoned parts of our city. We see the foot paths behind the gas station, behind the Walmarts, behind the big box stores and the industrial areas that lead back into these clandestine, outlawed encampments, where people have resiliently made a home for themselves when our society was denying that for them.
We've come across phenomenal camp sites where people are taking care of each other, where they have generators, where some people have hospital wings, and they take in uninsured people who can't get the services they need in our city, because they don't have insurance because they have been cast out by our political establishment, denying health coverage to them.
They're being taken care of in these places. We also see tremendous suffering and need. We see, we see the seventy year-old woman in a wheelchair who can't go to the Mission because she can't take care of herself, but can't get in anywhere else, shivering under a bridge in the winter. Two weeks ago on one of the coldest nights, there was a man laying out on the sidewalk. His hip replacement surgery was pushed back because of COVID, and he had a broken hip and a walker and was laying out on the sidewalk in the freezing cold weather.
We see the mother renting a storage shed with her two children because she doesn't have housing anymore. She was evicted. We see the families that are doubled up in motels that are infested with bed bugs or wreaking of urine. These are the places that we go and the places we see, um, on a daily basis. And it is, it, it’s abysmal. It's, it's unbelievable that it's right here in our own backyard. You don't have to go to another country to see the kind of poverty that will make your heart just utterly hurt and that breaks the heart of God. So that is where we choose to go. That's where I believe Jesus would be going if He were here.
Lee Camp: You address in the book stereotypes or false presumptions about the nature of poverty or about the nature of what we call homelessness. But tell us a little bit about what, what are some of those common stereotypes. What are some of those common presumptions? And then talk to us a bit about your experience of challenging those presumptions.
Lindsey: Absolutely. You know, our society looks at people experiencing homelessness, and they see what's on the outside, right? But when you look at what's on the outside, it's like looking at the tip of an iceberg. You see the tip, but you don't see all the things underneath who make that person who they are, who got the person where they are. And I'm not talking about personal, you know, problems or decisions. I'm talking about systemic issues. I'm talking about federal defunding of affordable housing for the last thirty years. I'm talking about the mass incarceration of black and brown bodies in America. You don't see these things, you see the person and how they are right there. And it's so easy to judge where people are. But how many of us have made mistakes? How many of our friends and family members struggle with addiction issues, mental health issues, other issues? And are still in housing because they had the resources because we had the privilege to access what we needed, right? Without falling out…
Lee Camp: Yeah.
Lindsey: ...of these systems of care. I also think that when our society looks at people that are on the streets, all they see is need, and all they see is deficiency. But when we look at people that we meet, we see strengths. We see people's incredible abilities to keep going, their resilience, their creativity. Um, people survive things that I don't think so many of us could survive. I don't think I could survive. So I think it was Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the fathers of liberation theology. He said, you know, the poor not only have needs. They have abilities. They have strengths. They have capabilities far beyond our imagining. There are nurses out there. There are college and graduate students out there. There are folks with doctorate degrees. There are skilled carpenters. The people that are building our city are living in camp sites. I see their hard hats and, and security vests, um, when I go to the camps. They're building our city, but they're not making enough to afford the housing here. So, you know, people aren't just lazy. They're not people that, um, just have needs and are sick. It's folks that have been cast out of these systems of care and of a life that, that could be flourishing. And our job is to build back community, build back relationships, and open up pathways for healing, whatever that looks like on a personal and a systemic level, right?
Lee Camp: What, what's your suspicion about why the notion of the systemic seems threatening to some folks?
Lindsey: That’s a really interesting question. You know, those of us who might not have experienced, some sorts of systemic discrimination might not understand what other folks have experienced. I remember one of the first times I realized that the police don't protect everyone equally.
When I was a very young outreach worker, I was going to tent city to check on my friends there with some other outreach workers, and police officers were arresting one of the men there, and they were nailing up “No Trespassing” signs. Our people on the streets who are poor, who are black, who are brown, they get arrested for petty things like trespassing, like obstructing a passageway for sitting under an awning, like public intoxication, when the tourists downtown and the college students gone wild, right, are walking by them, stumbling over themselves, being more of a public nuisance than our friends sitting on a bench. Yet, they are still the ones who get charged. They are still the ones that get arrested.
What is happening here? This is social profiling. This is racial profiling. Those of us who haven't experienced that, those of us who haven't, who haven't ever been in such a vulnerable place might not be able to understand that. So, it's harder for us to realize that the system isn't built for everyone. The system is built for some of us who are white, who have a certain level of social standing. We're pretty comfortable with the status quo. But the prophets weren't. You know, Jesus was killed by the status quo system that wanted to keep itself in power, wanted to maintain its own lordship, right? So, so it can be uncomfortable for us to see the system that benefits us, not serving everyone. And it's easier for us to think it's, it's their fault for not thriving in this system when really the system was never built for them.
Lee Camp: You've pointed to a few already, but tell us three systemic realities that you wish could immediately change.
Lindsey: So, absolutely the mass incarceration of black, brown, and poor people, and folks with mental health issues. The reality of what's happened in the United States for the last thirty years is that we have defunded affordable housing. We have defunded systems of care, like mental health care, like food stamps, like other things. And we have given funding to these criminal justice systems. And you can't see my hands, but I'm quoting justice, criminal justice. We have thrown money into incarcerating people and to policing people and to the system that profits off of incarcerated bodies.
Lee Camp: And appears to further propagate the problems it purportedly addresses in many ways.
Lindsey: Absolutely. It's, it's literally not working. If it were a business, it would be shut down tomorrow. It's not rehabilitating people back to the community. It's incarcerating more and more people and separating more families. And instead of asking the deeper questions, it's addressing some symptoms, but never the root cause, economic inequity.
Lee Camp: Yeah. A favorite book on, um, mass incarceration?
Lindsey: The New Jim Crow is a go-to, a solid go-to. Michelle Alexander. I'd highly recommend that. And in 13th there's a, you know.
Lee Camp: Yeah, the documentary.
Lindsey: It’s a documentary that's very accessible for people.
Lee Camp: Yeah. Both of those books are very troubling. And it's fascinating that Michelle Alexander starts saying how her premise that she develops in the book, namely that mass incarceration is in fact, a systemic continuation of practices of Jim Crow that, that earlier in her career, she explicitly rejected any such possibility. And then she actually starts investigating it. And then she becomes deeply convinced that this is what's going on. So yeah, it's fascinating from that perspective as well. Another system? Or systemic policy that you wish you could see changed?
Lindsey: Um, I truly believe, and I'm going to lump two together here. I truly believe that both housing and healthcare are basic human rights. And I'm not alone in that, right? The United Nations declared that housing is a human right as well in some of their declarations. But, you know, to live in this society without access to, to dignified housing. To live without access to healthcare is to live in subhuman conditions. I see that on a daily basis. I have held the hand of someone who lost their feet because of frostbite. I have stayed at the bedside and visited the hospital day after day after day of people who are dying for want of housing and healthcare that was actually going to be proactive for them.
I got a call from a mother a few weeks ago. Her twenty, I think it was twenty-four year-old son, died of an overdose on Nashville streets. He had been going to ERs seeking detox and rehab, but because he didn't have insurance in Tennessee, he was turned away, and she called me weeping. She was like, how do I find his body? I've heard he's died. How do I find his body?
Lee Camp: Oh.
Lindsey: These don't need to happen in our society. We can do more to make access available to both housing and healthcare. And what people don't understand is that it's actually cheaper to provide housing than it is to keep people unhoused.
You know, you look at the, um, all the emergency costs and all the jail costs that folks who are being spun in and out of these institutions, enormous bills. You know, charity is a, it's a whole industry, and I'm in the nonprofit world, and I understand the nonprofit industrial complex. What I mean when I say that is there's a whole, there's a whole system that benefits from keeping charity in place when what we need is justice. And one of our goals at Open Table Nashville is to work ourselves out of a job, you know, it's to, is to actually end homelessness, and not just to perpetuate the need. So that's why we work on issues of housing justice and housing rights.
Lee Camp: Yeah. I'm a big fan of Davidson County Drug Court and its approach, which is doing something similar to what you're saying is that rather than criminalizing drug offenses, it's this very fascinating, progressive sort of approach to saying you don't need to go to prison. You need help and access to resources that can help you not have to live under the lash of addiction.
Lindsey: Absolutely.
Lee Camp: And you know my understanding of that is that both the left and the right can love it, right? The left can love it because it fits all the things that the left loves. The right can love it because it's, it's much cheaper, it requires individual accountability and responsibility, and all of those get brought together, and it costs less money and it's more effective. And it seems like we desperately need more and more possibilities of looking for those sorts of solutions to our systemic problems.
Which raises another sort of thing I wanted to ask you about, because I remember, I don't remember how long ago this was, but I remember some years ago bringing one of my ethics classes down to spend a half a day with you downtown. And one of the things that struck me that day was that on the one hand, you talked about systemic issues out of all your experience and awareness of policy in this very informed way. And yet, I also watched you talk about things that people on the, on the so-called right would also have loved. Namely, you talked about responsibility and accountability, and I don't remember if you used the language of virtues, but it's just sort of people got to take account for their own lives and the choices that they do have available to them. They have to do that kind of stuff too.
So will you talk a little bit about that? Because I, again, I think that breaks down this kind of false presumption that it's a reductionistic approach to a problem, but a multi-faceted approach to a solution to serious problems.
Lindsey: Yeah, totally. I'll, I'll say that I don't believe that these social, economic, and racial issues that are deeply dividing folks, I don't believe they're a right or left issue.
Lee Camp: Yeah.
Lindsey: I believe they're a human issue. And I truly believe if we as Christians believe that the image of God is in every human being, then it is up to us to really take that seriously and to put our faith into action, creating a more just and equitable world. That shouldn't be, you know, a political tennis ball that's thrown back and forth. You know, the folks I meet on the streets have agency. They are not helpless. They don't need saviors. They need friends to come alongside them to share the journey, and to push the barriers out of the way with them. I am as far from a savior as you could ever get on the streets. My friends on the streets are saving me. Like literally, I feel like I'm a more liberated person because of the relationships I have formed and how much I've seen the hospitality, the radical hospitality, and the faith on the streets. People, people need to have the barriers taken away. They need to know people are in their corner. They need the support and relationships that are, in and of themselves, healing. And they need to be empowered with the strength to tap into their own healing resources and the power that they have within them to take back their lives.
This is not a charity approach, and I am not giving the power to someone else to do that, right? I am waking them up, helping to wake them up to their own power and agency. And that is, that is healing.
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens: Public Theology, Human Flourishing, and the Good Life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us. Remember, you can find links, photos, books, and related videos from our extensive YouTube channel all at tokensshow.com/podcast.
And, you can catch us for our special public radio episodes on Sundays here in Nashville, 2:00 Nashville time, streamed all over the globe at wpln.org or in Middle Tennessee at 90.3 FM.
This is our interview with Lindsey Glenn Krinks on her new book, Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets.
Coming up, we talk about the role healing and liberation of self can play in our work of seeking liberation for the impoverished and marginalized, as well as hear some powerful stories from Lindsey's own experience seeking justice in the streets of Nashville. Part Two in just a moment.
Part 2
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens and our interview with Lindsey Glenn Krinks, author of Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets.
Your language there of avoiding a messianic complex, which I'm grateful for. As I was preparing for the interview, I remembered this encounter I had, I don't know, it's been a lot of years ago, but I was in a group of folks sharing our various forms of powerlessness, struggles, and so forth. And after the, after this evening, I was talking to a man who at the time was experiencing homelessness. And, he asked me, he said, what do you do for a living? And I somewhat sheepishly said, I teach theology. And given how vulnerable I had been that night about my own brokenness, I felt this kind of embarrassment about, you know, being a teacher of theology and how messed up I am. And so I kind of acknowledged him and I said, I guess that's kind of ironic, isn't it? And he just very, um, gently said, Well, no, that actually makes perfect sense to me. You have some sort of longing to make sense of your brokenness. And so it would make perfect sense to me that you would teach theology for a living.
I've remembered that for years now, you know, and further along the path of dealing with my own brokenness, I've heard people talk about how very often it's people who are in helping professions, who are actually often trying to deal with their own stuff. And so you've kind of intimated that in your book, but talk to us a little bit about that. In what way have you seen both in writing the memoir and also in doing this sort of work, in what ways are you addressing your own brokenness, and in what sorts of ways have you seen particular kinds of brokenness that you had to deal with?
Lindsey: So, I think you're exactly right. I think, I think all of us are always on the continuum of wanting to move toward healing, wanting to move toward wholeness. What that's looked like in my own life is, I'm prone to overfunctioning. I am prone to overworking. I am prone to running myself down and damaging relationships because of this tendency to always be doing. I learned that I think I have it in my blood from my maternal grandmother who was always over-functioning. She always needed to be needed. She was always, you know, doing more, making herself everything to people and allowing them to kind of latch onto her for that. That's a really destructive tendency, especially when you're trying to live in healthy relationships. And I found myself a couple years in to outreach work doing that and being that. And you know, I wasn't showing up in my marriage in the ways that I needed to, which I write about in the book. And, I wrote in the book, I was like, I can't believe Andrew married me. Like, did he know it would be like this? I'd come home and stare at that line between the wall and the ceiling for hours on end cause I was so burned out, and not be there for him. You know, one of the things I learned through, not only, um, therapy, which is very healing. I would highly recommend everyone do it and not just say, oh, you know, gardening's my therapy or biking's my therapy. Like, no, like you need therapy too. We all need therapy too.
Lee Camp: I agree. I agree with you. I agree.
Lindsey: So like in addition to doing my own work, and in trying to ask, what am I running from? Another question that comes up in the book. In all of this overwork, what am I running from? I realized I was trying to prove my worth to people by what I did. And what I learned through the radical acceptance of my friends on the streets and the ways they took care of me in the midst of all of this is that my worth is not determined by what I produce. It's in who I am. I don't have to be good all the time. In fact, that desire to do everything and be everything is actually incredibly detrimental. We could look at white savior complexes. We could look at all kinds of things. I learned that I was worthy as I was because I was a child of God, because I was human, not because of anything I did. It's my friends that encouraged me to rest, to take a break, to try to be more whole myself.
So, I truly believe that our liberation is bound up in the liberation of the poor and oppressed. And this kind of idea of co-liberation, we find our liberation together, I have certainly found my liberation in my relationship with people on the margins. And that's one aspect of it. One way that that's happened for me.
Lee Camp: I know in doing the kind of work I do, especially in my twenties and thirties. You know, I still have to watch it, but especially in my twenties and my thirties, reading theology that was grounded in history and lived experience of the brokenness of the world oftentimes, um, led me to immense anger and deep resentment. And in time, of course, I found out that living with that kind of anger and resentment doesn't work too well. So is that part of your experience, or are you, are you one of those good souls that doesn't have to process anger that way?
Lindsey: Oh, I am not a good soul that doesn’t have to process anger that way. I, um, you know, I don't believe anger is bad.
Lee Camp: Yeah.
Lindsey: But I do believe that we have to find ways to channel the anger we feel. I believe that some anger is righteous, but the problem is that I remember reading in seminary, reading about a book that distinguished between hot and cold anger. The author said, and I write about this in the book as well. The writer said, you know, hot anger is that anger that will burn you up to bitterness, to resentment. It will burn you in your relationships. It will burn bridges. It will burn others. It bounces around. It’s chaotic and destructive. And sometimes there's a time for hot anger, right? Sometimes things need to be burned to the ground.
Lee Camp: Right, yeah.
Lindsey: And I truly believe that. Um, and there's this other kind of anger. There's a cold anger that we can cool our anger, and we can channel it into something that's constructive, that's productive, that's effective. And I believe in channeling, not only individual anger, but also collective anger. And through community organizing and activism, we try to channel that anger into cool ways, right? Into targeted ways that will change policies, that will change our city, that will change the hearts and minds of our decision makers and make it better for people on the bottom.
I do believe that bitterness will eat us up from the inside out. Resentment, cynicism. These things will leave you high and dry. There is nothing healing that can come from them, but anger is a very interesting and dynamic emotion. The question is in what we do with it.
And, you know, it's been said, if we're not angry, we're not paying attention. So what, what will we then do with that anger?
Lee Camp: Talk to us a bit about - you and I both come from a Christian tradition in which women typically are silenced in various ways and in our tradition, we didn't practice ordination generally, but if you were to ordain someone, you wouldn't ordain a woman, I guess we'll put it that way, right? What's kind of been your experience in having that in your background and then in time being ordained, and then in time, processing the sort of hierarchies that are in your past and your hierarchies that you continue to encounter as a woman doing the work you do.
Lindsey: Yeah. So, I, I grew up in a very conservative church in the foothills of South Carolina. And, it's really interesting because that church was the place that I learned how to love God and love people, right? I remember taking casserole dishes to people who were sick. I remember my parents dropping money to people who were struggling. Like, I learned that kind of care at church. And I fell in love with God at church. I was the kind of kid and even into like middle school and high school, I was sitting on the front pews. I was scribbling sermon notes. I was talking to the preacher afterwards. I was really into church, everything church. But there is a darker side too, right? That, that same place where I learned how to love was the same place that I felt immense exclusion. That I learned how to exclude people who are different from us. I learned how to exclude people in the LGBTQI+ community. I learned how to exclude folks that our church deemed as sinners who are going to hell or whatever. Even my Catholic friend, Mary, I remember hearing well she's, she may be great, but she's not going to heaven. So anyway I was like, oh poor Mary. But you know, that kind of mixed messaging, right? God loves everyone, but God excludes people who aren't good enough. And God excludes me cause I was a woman through certain roles that I would have been interested in pursuing.
I was so interested in theology, so interested in ministry, but I couldn't even be part of. I would help plan the high school worship that the boys were going to do, right, at our church. I, like, basically orchestrated it. They didn't care. I, like, did all the behind the scenes work, but I couldn't, I couldn't actually participate in leading that worship because I was a female.
So, no one encouraged those gifts. I had no idea that I could have done more early on to prepare me for a life of chaplaincy and ministry that I'm doing now. I was told you can be a secretary or a, you know, children's teacher, and those are great things, but it's not what I wanted.
So, it wasn't until I moved to Nashville, and I started seeing women in other roles. I started seeing people like Becca Stevens from Thistle Farms. Right? I started seeing Jeannie Alexander who's a dear friend of my heart and a fiery minister for people who know her, you know, living into their calling.
God uses women just as much as God uses men. God uses everyone that's willing, right? And I think it's very sad that the tradition that we've grown up in has basically, basically pushed out their future leaders. I am deeply, um, still in love with that denomination, but not a part of it because there's no place for me there.
My church is on the streets. You know, Andrew and I do attend a church here. It's virtual right now, of course, because of COVID. But my church is on the streets. My calling is to the people who are cast out. It’s to the folks on the frontline of social justice movements. It's to the people who don't trust institutions that are living under bridges and are pushed out and have records longer than anyone can ever imagine. Those are my people, and that's where I find God. Trying to figure out what my calling looked like was very difficult because I was pushed out for so long. And I had to do some deep reckoning and realized that I was worthy of that calling and that indeed it was a calling from God.
You know, I, I, I just am sad about the people that are still excluded, and I, I truly believe that Jesus would be breaking every boundary and barrier if he were to drop in to Nashville in 2021. Like we, He would be offending all of us because He is so radically and scandalously loving, you know? Um, so I think we can learn from that in our own interactions too.
Lee Camp: Yeah. You tell in the first chapter of the book about Charlie Strobel, who had become a good friend of yours and a mentor of yours, and this important moment as an undergraduate when you're at this kind of a challenging moment to just try to decide what to do. And Charlie talks to you about the formative moments of facing fear. Because it's only through the formative moments of fear that we begin to be courageous people. And I can just imagine hearing Charlie say all those kinds of things you record there. But as you look back on the last fifteen years or so, what are some moments of your facing your own fear, um, that then in turn allowed you to grow in courage?
Lindsey: You know, one moment that stands out to me when you ask it like that is, um, you know, I remember. Folks, um, that are listening from Nashville might remember a few years back when the city was trying to close a very large encampment at Fort Negley, and that's the public park that's right next to the Adventure Science Center. That's been there for decades.
Lee Camp: It was actually where the, when the battle of Nashville happened in 1864 of December that year, right? That the Union had taken that, and they would fire their big, long guns all the way south.
Lindsey: Right.
Lee Camp: Seven, eight miles south of Nashville to the Confederate troops from Fort Negley.
Lindsey: Yeah, it was a Union stronghold and conscripted and freed slaves actually built that fort and died building it that winter. So, the history there of people longing for liberation and dying in those shadows is long and certainly still continues in different ways. But, um, but the city was trying to close that camp down, and we knew that it was probably not going to be a successful effort to try to keep that open. And yet, the housing waiting lists were astronomical. Most housing waiting lists were closed. There was nowhere for people to go. Couples, pet owners, people that didn't fit into the Mission’s boxes. And we, we made a promise to the residents there that we would stand beside them, no matter what that meant for us at Open Table. Politically or socially, we would stand beside them.
I tell the story in the last chapter of the book, but I remember before the closing of Fort Negley, there was a Parks board meeting. And these meetings here, you know, in a stuffy, packed, you know, tight room, and there's a table at the front with all the board members, and they're all wearing their professional gear. And we were like, they have to change their mind. Like, they have to give us more time for these people that will have nowhere to go. And we're going to take people, and we're going to disrupt the meeting. And that was terrifying to me. Like, I was literally like, my hands were shaking because it's the Parks board. And so we went in and, um, you know, we listened to the agenda and they weren't getting to the camp. They weren't getting to the camp. All of us are packed in there. There's thirty, forty people, advocates packed in there, and they're not getting to it. And so Ingrid and I, one of my colleagues, Ingrid McIntyre, a fiery Methodist, um, minister. She, um, she and I, we went up and we stood with two of the camp residents, and we interrupted the Parks board meeting, and they said, you know, we have an agenda here. And Ingrid said, you know, we understand what your role is, but our role is to advocate with our friends who are about to be displaced. So we are going to interrupt this time so you can hear from them. And you know, for the next fifteen, twenty minutes residents spoke about what that place meant to them and their home. And we stood by the residents until the very end. We risked arrest with them. We looked foolish probably, but we knew that that solidarity and accompaniment mattered. We worked with a lot of other service providers to get a lot of folks into housing. And then the rest of the folks got hotel vouchers instead of, you know, being booked into jail, which was a huge win. But then the city still demolished the camp. They took out almost every tree. They left it looking like a wasteland. They demolished everything.
And so I would say, I feel like I've taken a vow to stand on the side of the poor, no matter what that looks like or what, what will come from that. I believe that that's where Jesus is. I believe Jesus reveals himself to us today in the guise of the poor, and what that looks like in the face of homelessness in Nashville is that sometimes we do campsite defenses with people. Sometimes we place ourselves in risk of arrest too. Sometimes we make ourselves very unpopular with the powers that be and look foolish, and we are willing to do that again and again. I believe that God loves a good holy fool. The prophets were were holy fools too. They were pretty pushed out of their, their towns too, but, um we've got good company there maybe. But yeah.
Lee Camp: Yeah. I would love to hear maybe a story or two, as you think back about. You said a moment ago, you think that a lot of us couldn't survive what a lot of your friends on the streets have survived. Who's a friend of yours, currently, or a friend from the past that you think of when you think of someone who has, against all odds, persevered and, uh, kept on going?
Lindsey: One of the people that I think about as a man named Ken. And I write about him. Ken Gosselin. I met him when he was in his late forties. He was sitting in a wheelchair at the library park on a very hot summer day. We were both dripping with sweat, and he held up a piece of paper to me, and there was a word on it that said “Help.”
And I went over to him, and I realized that Ken couldn't talk, and he couldn't walk because of a tumor. So picture a man on the streets. He cannot communicate. He can't talk, and he can't walk, and this is not an accessible city. And we formed a relationship. I said, okay, we're gonna figure this out. You write to me on the paper, and I'm gonna do what we need to do. And I gained his trust. Ken told me more about his story. You know, he was born to a mother out of wedlock. His mother was sixteen or seventeen, and she put him up for adoption, and he cycled in and out of different foster homes. He endured every abuse, every abuse you can imagine. Had stints where he was locked in the basement alone without food or water for days at a time when he was young. He hit the streets at fourteen. He left home, and he traveled the country working. He was a chimney sweep, you know, he went East to West coast. And then the tumor took away, in his forties, took away his ability to work. So he was confined to the wheelchair on the streets.
Despite this, Ken had a wicked sense of humor and taught me more about resilience than anyone. You know, I think I remember when he finally got a phone, he would text me and say, you know what people like about me? And I was like, what, Ken, your mullet? And he was like, no, that I can’t talk back, they like that. That's why people like me. And I was like, I'm pretty sure that's not, cause you do talk back. It's interesting because you wouldn't think of Ken as a success story. Like we never got to write down on a piece of paper to put in a grant that Ken was housed. Ken died in a hotel off, off Murfreesboro Pike when he was never fully housed. But he died a freed man. He had us play “Free Bird” at his memorial because he, through his death, he found community in those last months and acceptance and belonging because of his own healing resources. And because of those of us who had come alongside him.
People never know when they look at someone from the street, what they have gone through, the horrors they have endured and survived. People are survivors. I am humbled and amazed. I also just want to name, you know, all the people that have literally nothing in terms of earthly possessions, literally nothing, yet they open their hands again and again and again to the people around them in need. I have seen more faith and hospitality from homeless encampments in Nashville than I've seen in most of our churches. And from most of our churches. I've seen people open their tents to people who had just gotten out of surgery, people that share their canned goods and their food stamps when they have nothing. And those of us keep clenching our possessions with tight fists, right? Every day we're given a choice to open our hands or close them to our neighbors, and the people I've met have encouraged me to open it wider and wider and wider. And that is humbling. So humbling. It's the widow's mite, right? It's that story told today living itself out among us.
Lee Camp: Yeah. I've been talking to Lindsey Glenn Krinks, a recent, brand new author of Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets. Thank you, Lindsey. I'm grateful for you, and I'm grateful for what you do, who you are in our community, and for your friendship.
Lindsey: Yeah, so good to be with you, so thankful for you too.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: Public Theology, Human Flourishing, and the Good Life, and our interview with Lindsey Glenn Krinks, street chaplain for Open Table Nashville, and author of Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets.
Lee Camp: Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and refer us to a fellow podcast listener. Got feedback? Well, we'd love to hear from you. At least we love hearing from most of you. Email us, text, or attach a voice memo, and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, Leslie Thompson, and Tom Anderson. Our engineer Cariad Harmon. Production assistant Cara Fox. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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