By Ray Waddle
The Rev. Kathryn Banakis ’03 B.A., ’09 M.Div. and her congregation pursue theological inquiry, zany lawn games, and tangible ethical action—most recently joining a historic effort to provide reparations to Black families in their city of Evanston, Ill.
“For me, confession and repentance have material implications, requiring material sacrifices,” she said recently. “So we talk about money—a lot! How do we choose to budget and spend what we have? With reparations, we wanted to be a part of doing something tangible.”
Banakis, Rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, helped create the city’s Interfaith Reparations Effort in 2022. This initiative augments the City of Evanston’s unprecedented municipal decision in 2019 to devise a legal framework for providing housing grants to Black residents in order to redress discriminatory housing policies and practices across the decades.[i]
Blessed are the Beatitudes
For Banakis, one of the metrics for congregational action is the Sermon on the Mount—blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourners, the merciful, the peacemakers. The beatitudes serve as the “grading scale” in the gospel of Matthew by which all ethical effort is measured, a notion she borrows from preaching scholar Karoline Lewis.
“You could do worse in a congregation than use the beatitudes,” Banakis said, “as a standard for how we are doing as a people who are trying to respond in a world that is looking for meaning and financial stability and connection.”
Kat Banakis is an Episcopal priest, community organizer, and local interfaith denizen and dynamo. More than a decade ago, her high-spirited memoir Bubble Girl: An Irreverent Journey of Faith (Chalice, 2013) poured out her love for “that shiny, lumpy crabapple of an institution” called the church. That affection and commitment remain strong. Church is still the place where real people are “trying to find community, trying our best to raise energetic children to be kind adults, trying to learn what it will mean to have a good death, singing songs off-key, enacting the sacraments, learning to forgive one another … and in the mist of all this, hoping to know God.”
Growing up in a church-centered household gave her the curiosity to ask why the Christian story matters. Born in Chicago, she was raised by her Roman Catholic mother and Eastern Orthodox father and attended various Protestant churches. As a teenager she got interested in theology and social justice themes.
“I was just one of those people who fell in love with ideas—reading Gustavo Gutiérrez, liberation theologies, Black theologies—the idea that Jesus is on the side of those who are most marginalized, and therefore it is the job, the responsibility, of historically affluent white congregations and Christians to do our part to address the suffering of those who have suffered most.”
A formative moment came when she was 17. She attended a Lilly-funded Youth Theology Institute program at Emory University, which combined theological study, hands-on service opportunities, and field trips to historic civil rights sites. She couldn’t get enough of it.
“For a month we immersed in social justice theology and anti-racism training, and it was deeply compelling. I became a devotee who has never looked back and never lost it. I doubt all of the kids who went there came away a true believer, but I did. It was heady philosophy and theology and Bible commentary, and we were told that it mattered, and it did.”
An interfaith inflection
After finishing college at Yale, she worked three years as a federal lobbyist in Washington, D.C. This was before deciding on divinity school and YDS. That advocacy experience still comes in handy, notably in the Evanston interfaith reparations project.
“My lobbyist background made me care about bringing different parties together around an issue and moving the ball forward. For the reparations, 17 houses of worship contributed significantly to a private fund for housing grants—there’s nearly $1 million in it now. That experience has created groundwork for working together and problem-solving on other issues.”
After the catastrophic attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, those local interfaith relationships were in place to jumpstart a program of group study and conversation between local Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
“That interfaith approach to learning was parlayed into further projects we’re considering now around improving homeless shelter options and hunger ministries. We’re coordinating across multiple congregations on issues of justice and mercy.”
At age 26, after the lobbying stint, she pursued seminary with the idea of doing a joint degree in law and returning to the political scrimmage of D.C. Once she arrived at YDS and jumped into the Quad’s ecumenical experiences, she realized parish ministry and community advocacy with an interfaith inflection were her real calling: she was a Christian keen to make a difference in a pluralistic era.
“Ever since then, what I’ve discovered in interfaith work is you have to know what tradition you are standing from—what your own particular belief system is—in order to engage meaningfully in interfaith situations,” she said. “It’s important to keep your identity. I’ve also discovered that religiously observant people, no matter what their faith, pattern their lives very similarly. We try to make decisions about how much money we’re giving away instead of keeping, and about when and how and why we pray, and how we’re supposed to treat one another and why.”
Her YDS program included enrollment in Berkeley Divinity School and in the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Her Marquand Chapel experiences showed her the power of holistic worship that weaves scripture, poetry, and music to create an organic, well-structured whole. Professors taught her that preaching can have a vital pastoral care dimension. To see a minister discussing matters of the heart from the pulpit, with candor and humor, can transform church into a place where parishioners feel permission to share their own struggles.
“If our job is the speak the good news of Jesus Christ at all times and all places, we need to do it in a way that is approachable and doesn’t set such a high bar of purity or knowledge going in that you feel unworthy to encounter the scripture and teachings to begin with,” she said.
Post-Covid commitments
Banakis has been fulltime at St. Luke’s church since 2019. It’s a growing congregation of about 200 people in weekly attendance, a number notably higher than it was pre-Covid. The pandemic period, forcing parishioners to leave the buildings and rethink worship and local identity, turned out to be a revitalizing time there.
“During Covid we got people really involved in liturgy, doing it from home, and started birthday celebrations and other fun activities. By Zoom we brought in preachers from all over the world, and that’s something we’ve continued. We asked ourselves: What should be the distinct mission coming out of Covid that we didn’t have going into Covid? Since summer 2020 we’ve placed a new focus on social justice: The goal of alleviating systemic racism has become part of the fabric of the congregation. Setting annual anti-racism goals and incorporating non-white scholars and musicians in worship are now simply part of our pattern.”
Post-pandemic times and an anti-institutional social mood are stirring uncertainty about the future of church life nationally, but Banakis prefers meeting the culture’s unknowns with a sense of spiritual adventure, not fear.
“There’s a lot of Sturm und Drang about the future of ‘the church’—I can’t really impact that. What I can impact is the congregation where I serve, and my job is to be a pastor as well as I possibly can. I have the best job in the world. We’re doing good work and having so much fun. And because of YDS’s broadly ecumenical learning and teaching, I still try to read widely across denominations in order to bring the best of Christian teaching to St. Luke’s, because I feel a responsibility for understanding where the church is going.
“I’ll be very surprised to see more mainline congregations at the end of my career than there were at the beginning, and I see it as part of my role to meet those changes for the future with excitement and purpose and an open embrace, and not experience them as denominational loss. I believe churches, along with mosques and synagogues and temples, are in a position to figure out how to create meaningful connection for people. Yes, there’s hope—absolutely.”
[i] More than $5 million has been raised, in part from a tax on recreational cannabis sales. The reparations effort gives priority to descendants of Black citizens who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 or endured housing discrimination after 1969. More than 100 U.S. cities have used the Evanston model to start their own reparations programs.