Pastor Bethany Cseh pulls three folding chairs around a table and grins. "I love being helpful." Her church is quietly tucked into a retail storefront, and its neighbors include a surf shop and a co-op.
Cseh co-founded Catalyst Church with her husband and another couple in the hopes of ministering to people on the margins of religious orthodoxy. “There was a large swath of people that we felt were being missed, namely college students and oftentimes people who are disenfranchized through institutional measures - just not wanting to be part of the system,” she says. 19 years later, she continues to work with people she describes as ‘outsiders’ to mainstream religion.
In the first part of this two-part episode, Cseh unpacks the big ideas informing her work: theology, patriarchy, and inclusivity.
TRANSCRIPT:
ANNCR: Some people work with their hands and some people work with their head. But when you work as a faith leader, it's not cut and dry.
CSEH: I'm not there to save them, but just somebody who can walk literally and spiritually walk with them.
ANNCR: This is Talk Humboldt. Bethany Cseh is a pastor in Arcata. She tells Keith Flamer and Michael Spagna that she and the co-founders of Catalyst Church in Arcata recognize a segment of people who weren't interested in dogma, but still wanted to share an expression of faith.
CSEH: When you go around Arcata, there's a church on every corner. Why would anybody start another church when there's already so many churches?
ANNCR: What does it take to keep a church going? Sitting on folding chairs in the middle of her makeshift church across from the Arcata Co-op, she unpacks the big ideas that inform her work spanning theology, patriarchy and basic inclusivity.
SPAGNA: I'm Michael Spagna, interim president of Cal Poly Humboldt, and I'm here with my friend and colleague, Dr. Keith Flamer.
FLAMER: It's a pleasure being here with you, and I always enjoyed my time.
CSEH: And I am Bethany Cseh and I'm a local pastor in Arcata, California, and it's really wonderful to be here with you guys. I feel very honored to be asked to to talk with you today.
SPAGNA: The honor is all ours.
FLAMER: Ours. Oh, my gosh, I feel good to be here with you. Awesome. Thanks.
Talk about your journey. How did you get to where you are today?
CSEH: Thanks for asking. I pastor a couple different churches. One is Arcata United Methodist Church and the other is Catalyst Church.
FLAMER: Which is where we are…
CSEH: We’re at Catalyst Church, Humboldt. And it's, non-denominational church. I helped start Catalyst 19 years ago. We started the church by husband and I with another pastor couple, named Dan and Rachel, and they were from Fortuna.
We met them in college, and they wanted to come back up here and start a church. Now, Jason and I had never been up here before. We had never seen Humboldt. And when we first came up here, it was a little bit of a culture shock.
We were oh my gosh, how are we going to connect with this culture? And specifically, the church was supposed to get started in Fortuna. when we were in Fortuna, we were oh man, this is going to be really hard to know how to connect with people that are different from the ways that we think, at least on the surface. once you get to know people a little bit deeper, you can get there pretty easily. But we were what's north? And since Dan and Rachel had never really been anywhere but Fortuna and the Bayshore Mall - they're, like what’s north of… Costco?
SPAGNA: That's that was the boundary? [LAUGHTER] That was the boundary of the northern experience…
FLAMER: [LAUGHTER].
CSEH: Yes. Yes. There's some weird college up there up the hill….
CSEH: We drove into Arcata and we were like, “Oh this is it”. It was weird because when you go around Arcata, there's a church on every corner. Why would anybody start another church when there's already many churches? The churches were great, but there was a large swath of people that we felt were being missed, namely college students and oftentimes people who are disenfranchized through institutional measures, just not wanting to be part of the system.
There's this idea that if you don't believe these certain tenets of faith, that you can't belong fully, you have to check every single box in order to belong. A lot of the people that we felt we were called to minister to were no longer wanting to be a part of those systems any longer, but still desiring to have an expression of faith and experience a faith community that they could be more expansive in their minds with, if that makes sense. Is that helpful?
FLAMER: Yes, very.
SPAGNA: I noticed in many of your Instagram posts, you have an invitation: it's “walk with me”. And that resonates with me. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it seems very consistent with that philosophy you just shared.
Feeling… I'm not fitting in to the institution and some of the tenets. Versus walk with me. Let's journey together.
CSEH: I always felt I was an outsider. I grew up homeschooled. I felt socially awkward. I felt connected to the outsider because I'd experienced it. when it comes to walking with people, my hope is that they know and can sense that they belong before anything else, that I love them, that I care for them, that I want to listen to them.
I'm not there to save them, but just somebody who can walk literally and spiritually walk with them. And when I came to be a pastor, I grew up very conservative, where women were never allowed to be pastors. They never even prayed in the front of a church. to be a pastor was something that I did not receive easily. Being a woman pastor is already a gray area in a lot of churches.
FLAMER: Still?
CSEH: Still. Oh, very much because the church is very patriarchal. It's just that our whole world is patriarchal.
FLAMER: There. There's a theme with all your writing. You are the champion of of outsiders, and all of your writing is that accurate?
CSEH: Oh, that's very sweet of you to say. Whenever I write for public, that's a really important thing for me, because I think what the public needs to hear more than anything is that there are a lot of people in our communities that are overlooked. And but the apostle Paul writes in first Corinthians 13 that if you are not working through with love, then you're just a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. I don't want to be more noise.
There's so much noise. We are getting bombarded with noise day in and day out. that way the noise that we are making in this community isn't just more condemnation and self-loathing. It's actually beauty and justice and truth.
FLAMER: What message do you want folks here that are listening to pick up from this conversation? What do you want people to take away?
CSEH: I think I just want them to see a different way forward. I feel we live in a world, especially at this current moment, that feels Christianity is clanging some drum that says we are oppressed. In the process, they're bulldozing over people -Christians are- through Christian nationalism, through this belief that Christianity is the only way to do life.
And if you don't subscribe to this form of Christianity, because it's not biblical Christianity, it's not Jesus Christianity... it is a very clear form of dominance and control for what they believe is the good of the nation. I believe people are altruistic in their ways. I don't think that the people that are fighting for Christian nationalists over Christian dominance are evil or horrible humans.
I think that they believe that they have the ‘right’ and the ‘right’ for all that, in and of itself, is wrong because you can't have the’right’ for all people and assume that your ‘right’ works for all.
FLAMER: Explain to us then, about how your message is received by your fellow pastors.
CSEH: It just depends on the pastor. It just depends on the church. Typically conservative churches wouldn't listen to my voice to begin with because I'm a woman. I'm friends with a lot of conservative Christians who would listen to my voice to some degree, but wouldn't necessarily agree with me, which is great.
I don't think that we all need to agree. I think that the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think the most subversive thing that we can do as humans today is to make friends with people across whatever aisle that we are a part of.
ANNCR: This conversation with ArcataPastor Bethany Cseh continues next time as she gets into the weeds of the day-to-day work of being a community faith leader in modern America.
CSEH: What I found is, I could preach a banger sermon and people will not even remember any of it.
ANNCR: In the meantime, you can hear more episodes on the Talk Humble Podcast or@wksu. org. Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.