Emily Scott: Finding Communion in a Shattered World
About this Video
Pastor Emily Scott, author of the new book, For All Who Hunger: Searching for Communion in a Shattered World, talks about her book and how our worship extends out into our work of service and social justice.
About Emily Scott
A Lutheran pastor (ELCA), Emily believes that Christian practice holds out rich possibilities that call us to reach out across boundaries in love, learn through discomfort, and build relationships that bring God's realm close. Queer and genderqueer, she is committed to building communities of faith that dismantle fear and hate, affirm LGBTQ+ people, and confront racial injustice.
Her book, For All Who Hunger: Searching for Communion in a Shattered World, from Penguin Random House, is an “intimate and openly heartfelt debut memoir” (Kirkus Reviews, (starred review) and received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly.
Emily currently serves as the founding pastor of Dreams and Visions, an imaginative spiritual community of restoration, rooted in the LGBTQ+ community. Called to this work by the Delaware-Maryland Synod, worship at Dreams and visions is soulful and Spirit-led.
From 2008-2017, Emily served as the founding pastor of St. Lydia's Dinner Church in Brooklyn, where worship is a full meal, shared around a dinner table. Emily and the congregation were involved in combating police brutality and advocating for affordable housing with organizations such as Faith in New York. St. Lydia's sparked a wider Dinner Church movement, and is now a national model for new church starts.
A graduate of Yale Divinity School, Emily received the Alumni Award for Distinction in Congregational Ministry in 2016. She was the Director of Worship at The Riverside Church from 2007-2009, and a co-founder of Music That Makes Community. Her work at St. Lydia's has been covered by The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal.
About The Book
Emily Scott never planned on becoming a pastor. But when she started a church for misfits that met over dinner in Brooklyn, she discovered an unlikely calling–and an antidote to modern loneliness.
As founding pastor of St. Lydia’s Brooklyn, where worship takes place over a meal, Emily Scott spent eight years ministering to a scrappy collective of people with different backgrounds, incomes, and levels of social skills. Each week, they broke bread, sang hymns, made awkward conversation with strangers, and then did the dishes. But in a city where everyone lives on top of each other, yet everyone is lonely, these gatherings filled a longing that most people–even Emily–didn’t realize they felt.
Scott weaves stories and reflections from the life of her unlikely congregation in prose both beautiful and incisive. She explores how small acts of connection hold more power than we realize in a time when our differences are being weaponized, creating activism and justice work fueled by empathy and relationship. Recalling her journey as a single woman and a pastor looking for love and friendship in a city of millions, For All Who Hunger articulates the value of church as a place where people can hear not only that they are loved, but that they are good. When Emily’s congregation builds relationships with their neighbors in one of the world’s most unequal cities, they find courage and resources to begin working for a more just world.
For All Who Hunger is a story about faith that invites us to live with eyes wide open. There’s a place for you at the table.
