It's getting to be the time of year when synods electing new bishops start to identify candidates they think might be a good fit for the call. Since 2018, I've been approached by young women seeking to know how I balance this work with the demands of motherhood. The good news is that there are many young women contacting me--it means that people are looking beyond the "typical" bishop candidate to individuals who have historically been overlooked. But it means I spend a lot of time answering individual emails with the same information--and while I'm deeply honored to be consulted as part of a discernment process, I am also aware that due to my schedule: sometimes I don't respond as quickly as I would like.

I thought a Facebook post might be a good vehicle to share my perspectives as someone who entered into this work almost four years ago as a very non-traditional bishop.

My family has a rather unique Black Friday tradition. We wake up, in homes all over eastern Washington, and we bundle up in layers and climb into our cars several hours before dawn. We scrape ice off windshields, we load blankets, sweatshirts, pillows into the trunks of our cars. Probably most of us stop by McDonald’s for breakfast on our way out of town. And then, accompanied by the faintest sliver of light in the east: we head for the family homestead near Colton, in order to process several hundred pounds of pork in to “Grandpa Becker sausage”. Many of you have similar traditions—you may call it sausage, you may call it “wurst”, or you may call it something else—but the act of processing an animal into a freezer full of delicious sausage is something that is more common in our region than I ever realized.

Beloved of Christ,

By now you may know that in Churchwide Assembly the ELCA declared itself to be a sanctuary denomination.

I am writing to you all because there is a lot of misinformation out there about what this means, particularly if you get news from Fox, who unfortunately did not portray this in any accurate way.