Walker pastor was role model

by Betsy Barnum

Role models for living a life that is fully aligned with one’s deepest values are rare. Seth Garwood, who committed suicide on July 21, was one.

As pastor for the past few years at Walker United Methodist Church in Minneapolis, he led a congregation that shared his compassionate commitment to social justice and peace, to inclusiveness and an open, welcoming practice of the gospel messages. Pouring himself into pastoral ministry, he also continued Walker Church’s long practice of opening its building to community peace and justice organizations for meetings, dinners and fundraisers.

I had contact with Seth in his role as Walker pastor because of the many meetings I attended there; but I knew him best as a leader in the Green Party of Minnesota, one of his most significant volunteer activities. As with his congregation, he offered his skills and wisdom abundantly to the party.

As a member for three years of the party’s central decisionmaking body, the Coordinating Committee, his extensive interpersonal skills helped the committee get through long agendas and emotionally charged rough spots during its six-hour monthly meetings. In the almost two dozen such meetings at which I sat with Seth, I always saw him as an anchor who could be counted on for deep listening and wise interventions.

Seth embraced all the values of the Green Party, and its value of grasssroots democracy was especially dear to his heart. He was a passionate advocate for consensus and other decisionmaking processes that honor everyone’s voice. At the biennial convention in 2004, he was the main designer and facilitator for a grassroots process to amend the Green Party platform, leading a ballroomful of Greens from all over Minnesota in considering hundreds of proposed changes.

Seth also was the minister-of-choice to officiate at a number of Green Party weddings, two of them within the past month. His sweet tenor voice and accompanying guitar-playing were often heard at social events and celebrations.
Family members attribute Seth’s suicide to depression. As someone who has witnessed family members struggling with depression, as well as having a few brushes with it myself, I feel deep sadness about the loss of this generous and compassionate man to a disease that makes no distinctions between the people it takes into its grip. And I empathize with everyone who, like Seth, continues to hold a vision of how society could be more just, and feels despair at a world that seems unable to find its way toward peace and justice and ecological sanity, and instead appears, at least on some days, to be moving toward a grimly violent and repressive future.

From the outpouring of sorrow expressed by Green Party members from all over the state during the past week, I have no doubt that Seth will be missed and remembered by Minnesota Greens for a long time. Remembering him and honoring his life must mean, for us who continue the struggle into which he poured so much of himself, seeking hope and supporting each other in the day-to-day work for a better world, even if—especially if—things do become more bleak before they get brighter.

Betsy Barnum is State Chair of the Green Party of Minnesota.