Spokane Valley Pastor Stands Out for Interfaith Efforts, Emphasis on Inclusive Christianity
News Story by Tara Roberts | FāVS News
The Rev. Gen Heywood’s understanding of Christianity began to form in her youngest years.
She struggled to find belonging as a child in rural Maine. Her father, charming in public, said racist things at home. Heywood wasn’t allowed to question him out loud, but her sense of justice formed as she questioned him in her mind.
When she told her parents at age 11 that she wanted to become a pastor, they told her women couldn’t do those things. If she tried, no one would want to marry her, she’d never have children and she would never make enough money.
When Heywood was 16, a family friend’s son broke his neck diving off a bridge. His Christian friends told him he would recover if he believed enough and blamed him when he was not miraculously healed. Heywood experienced a theological awakening, realizing how the young man’s friends were so focused on his body, they didn’t allow for the healing of his soul.
Amid these experiences of rejection, Heywood found another conception of God.
“We lived beside a brook, and I spent all a lot of time just walking by the brook, going fishing. I had a favorite tree,” she said. “I would sit there and talk with God, and my experience of God was of one who loved unconditionally.”
She has carried this belief into her ministry at Veradale United Church Of Christ in Spokane Valley and her interfaith advocacy work through Faith Leaders and Leaders of Conscience of Eastern Washington in North Idaho. Though Heywood doesn’t call herself a leader, she’s become a leading voice in support of inclusion and against extremism in the Inland Northwest.
Exploring on the Path to Ministry
In college, Heywood found connection. As she studied music therapy and German at Emmanuel College, a Catholic school in Boston, she began to meet women pastors who had children, proving her parents wrong.
Heywoods’ Catholic mentors supported her interest in ministry and laid a foundation of interfaith cooperation in her life. Her college advisor, a nun, encouraged her to use her music therapy work to pay for seminary.
In seminary at Andover Newton Theological School, her teachers encouraged her to explore scriptures and traditions to understand them better, while remaining open to change.
“Part of how it brings me to where I am is just an openness to say, ‘I don’t know everything,’” Heywood says. “I do know that were to treat each other with the respect and kindness and justice of God.”
Her first pastoral roles continued to shape her faith. In Maine, her church supported people experiencing poverty and hunger. In California, her congregation worked for gun reform and marriage rights and ran a food bank.
Heywood wanted to overcome every barrier between people, but soon learned she couldn’t.
“I started with that naivete, that if you could show everyone what is logical and factual, everyone will come to the same kind of conclusion,” she said. “And the answer is no, they won’t.”
She came to believe that all people should be welcome in a church, but they should not be welcome to do harm. Some barriers can’t be crossed, she said, “because there are some folk who will not be in relationship with you unless you obey them. That’s not a relationship.”
Meanwhile, her life was changing and other ways. She had two children, Henry and Hana. As they grew older, she wanted to move to a place that was better for them.
“I started searching, and (Veradale) was one of the churches that came up,” she said. “We could do the ministry that means the most to me, supporting people of all kinds to be gathered together. And my kids could have an experience of being able to easily get out into the woods.”
Finding Purpose in Spokane
The congregation at Veradale was already involved in the causes that mattered to Heywood when she arrived in 2014. They worked for racial justice and women’s rights and welcomed LGBTQ people.
The church’s role in the community deepend as the alt-right grew more active in Spokane Valley. In 2018, a group of Central Valley High School students protesting gun violence encountered counter-protestors, including other students, who identified themselves as alt-right and white nationalists.
“Some of the moms were really distressed by what they saw,” Heywood said. “So I was like, ‘Well, just come to the church. We’ll just gather everybody at the church. Bring the kids. We’ll talk, we’ll determine what we want to do about this.”
Heywood and her congregants began to focus on community building in Spokane Valley.
Petra Hoy — a Catholic, community organizer and leader of the nonpartisan group Be the Change 509 — first met Heywood at a Spokane Valley City Council meeting in 2017, when Hoy began to cry while reading testimony.
“(Heywood) came up and she put her hand on me, just to kind of settle me down,” Hoy said. “It was just so kind for this stranger to help me through this tough moment.”
The two became friends, and in 2018 Hoy invited Heywood to a local meeting of the Poor People’s Campaign. This inspired Heywood to gather a coalition of local faith leaders and others who shared their values — “everyone of any kind who wanted to deal with poverty, racism, ecological devastation and militarism,” she said.
This group became Faith Leaders and Leaders of Conscience, or FLLC. Heywood is careful to distinguish that FLLC is not a nonprofit or formal organization, but a ministry of Veradale. The people involved are participants, not members, and she considers herself a convener, not a leader.
Convening Faith Leaders and Leaders of Conscience
Dr. Pam Silverstein — an FLLC participant, retired OB/GYN and lay leader at Spokane’s Temple Beth Shalom — said Heywood is open, responsive and approachable in her role as FLLC convener. Being part of FLLC has been valuable to the Jewish community, she said, especially because Jewish and other non-Christian perspectives are often left out of interfaith groups in a “Christian-centric world.”
“It was important that that no group isolates itself from larger groups,” she said. “And it’s also important, then, to have the ability to have dialogue to describe how it is that your particular faith group, or non-faith group, (views) the world.”
FLLC’s activities are wide-ranging: they’ve hosted interfaith dialogues and vigils and published statements on issues including police reform, natural gas pipelines, school policies and more. They’ve sought ways to support others in response to violence against people of faith.
“The first thing is to ask the leader of … the places of faith that have been harmed, what would they need from us, what would they want from us, how can we be with them,” Heywood said. “We don’t have to speak. We want to be in solidarity.”
Heywood and her FLLC collaborators have also opposed controversial pastor and former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea. Heywood said she feels responsible as a Christian to stand up against people who “speak about Christianity as having the right to kill other people, harm other people, deny other people their human dignity and human rights,” referencing Shea’s “Biblical Basis for War” document.
FLLC was part of a 2019 vigil at Spokane Valley City Hall to “mourn the damage done to the reputation of our city by the words and actions” of Shea and work to change the city’s image. This became a series of “Truthful Tuesday Vigils” meant to “move the city council to have integrity in their work, to move away from white supremacy and Christian Dominionism, to serve everybody,” Heywood said.
The group called for Shea’s resignation and awarded Leadership of Conscience medals to two people who leaked messages related to Shea.
Most recently, FFLC helped inspire a Spokane City Council resolution to formally denounce Mayor Nadine Woodward for appearing alongside Shea at an August 2023 event.
Hoy said Heywood and FLLC are a counterexample against “weaponizing Christianity,” Christian nationalism and white nationalism.
“That is just a small faction of Christianity,” Hoy said. “I think it’s such a good reminder that Gen’s a Christian, Gen’s a Christian pastor, that there’s other Christians in the community that aren’t like that and don’t believe in that. I think it’s really important to have other Christians stand up to that extremism and say, ‘Hey, that’s not what we’re about. We’re about love and inclusion.’”
Facing Criticism and Crime
In 2019, during the era of Truthful Tuesday Vigils, then-Spokane Valley Mayor Rod Higgins told KHQ that local progressives were “a subset of Antifa” and “probably funded by George Soros.”
Community members encouraged KHQ to follow up with Heywood. She refuted the conspiracy theories in her interview, and continues to.
“Now, George Soros is welcome here anytime. His check would be welcome here anytime,” Heywood said with a laugh. “But we’ve never seen him or his funding. And to say Antifa — to equate us with violence — is completely counter to who we are.”
Actions that appear to be against the church have recently grown more serious.
On the night before Palm Sunday 2022, Veradale’s sign, which included the words “End systemic racism,” was shot with an automatic rifle. Police said the incident was not targeted, but Heywood remains skeptical.
This year, early on June 25, security cameras captured people stealing several flags from Veradale, including Black Lives Matter and Pride flags. They sprayed diesel on the lawn, spelling out “LEV 2013,” a reference to Leviticus 20:13, which some people interpret as condoning the killing of gay men.
Spokane Valley Police are investigating the incident as “a possible hate/bias crime,” according to RANGE. Heywood said she feels the police are taking the incident seriously.
The church hosted a “Love Is Greater Than Hate” party a week later. While the crime was frightening, Heywood said, she will continue share her faith and use her privilege as a cisgender white woman to speak up.
“I’m a Christian who believes in the Jesus of love and justice,” she said. “I have to do it.”
Finding Inspiration on Sabbatical
Heywood has found time for rest and renewal alongside her ministry. She received a sabbatical grant from the Lilly Endowment in 2022.
In a globe-spanning trip, Heywood photographed puffins while learning about green energy in Iceland and explored New Zealand on a photo tour. In Germany, she was inspired by how the country has owned the crimes of its past by making history “unavoidable.”
“It’s just it’s there in your path: ‘In this place, this happened,’” she said
Heywood shared her sabbatical experiences in “Learning from Other Countries: The Powerful Art of Communal Repentance” on Oct. 21 at Veradale.
She shares her photos from this trip and others on Instagram — and occasionally during worship at Veradale, when she captures an image she can use as a metaphor or to celebrate the mystery of God and the beauty of creation.
Photography is a time of prayer, she said, and a time to clear her head.
“When I’m out looking at these things, I can’t be reflecting on what the mayor has done or what’s happening with the lawn or what’s going on at the border or something,” she said. “I need to be in the moment.”
Still, she can’t help but tie it into her ministry. She’s planning to start a community photography class at the church.
“What I was hoping is that photography could be a way to cross boundaries,” she said. “If you are of whatever political persuasion — honestly of whatever bigotry persuasion — you could come together to share a common love or interest, and maybe meet people who are differently persuaded and see their humanity.
“That’s a big part for me. I just want people to recognize that common humanity.”
