Speaker: The Rev. Imani Olear

The Rev. Imani Olear is an ELCA pastor, liberation theologian, preacher, yoga teacher, strategist, and occasional holy troublemaker who has spent much of her life asking one persistent question: What does liberation look like when it actually reaches the body?

Ordained in 2005, Rev. Olear serves as Director for Evangelical Mission and Associate to the Bishop in the Upstate New York Synod, where her work moves between congregational vitality, adaptive leadership, racial and social justice, mission development, healthy boundaries, community engagement, and helping churches figure out the difference between being faithful and simply being busy.

Long before she began naming the church's “baptized grind culture,” she was exploring the relationship between justice, breath, body, and healing. As the founder of Yoga 4 A Good Hood, she challenged the idea that wellness should belong primarily to people who could afford the right studio, the right clothes, or the right zip code. Her conviction was simple: wellness is a civil right and should not be a luxury. Her TEDx talk, Healing Ourselves through Oms and Downward Dogs, carried that same message, healing ourselves matters, but our healing is never disconnected from the communities and systems in which we live.

That work has now widened into a deeper exploration of Sabbath, clergy exhaustion, ancestry, and liberation. Shaped by the Black prophetic tradition and voices including James Cone, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Cornell West, Paulo Freire, and Tricia Hersey, Rev. Olear asks uncomfortable questions about a church culture that sometimes blesses overwork, calls poor boundaries servanthood, and hands exhausted clergy another book about self-care.

Her interest in rest is also ancestral. What does it mean for descendants of people whose bodies were measured by their labor to reclaim stillness? What does it mean to stop romanticizing our ancestors' ability to survive everything and begin honoring them by building lives in which survival is not the highest aspiration?

For Rev. Olear, Sabbath is not a nap with better branding. It is theology. It is resistance. It is remembrance. It is the refusal to believe that usefulness determines worth.

Her work brings Scripture into conversation with Black theology, yoga and meditation, music, culture, storytelling, community wisdom, adaptive leadership, and sometimes whatever is happening on social media that makes her say, “Now somebody needs to preach about that.”

She believes the Gospel should make people more free, not simply more religious, or as her grandmother was known to say, "sometimes we are too heavenly bound that we are no earthly good" and she remains deeply suspicious of any spirituality that requires people to become less human in order to appear more holy.

Because a church proclaiming resurrection while working its leaders into the ground has some theological explaining to do.



And perhaps Sabbath is one place to begin.