Stay in the City
Until you have been clothed with power from on high
I attend Saint Clements Seattle. We are an Anglo Catholic parish with an African-American heritage. It’s a wonderful community of people. Our worship is earthy and intense. A community of prayer and love.
There is a part of our history that I experience with great sadness. In 1958 the African-American attendance at Saint Clements significantly increased because the Diocese closed the Church of the Advent ( People coming to St. Clement’s was a good and lovely thing. Closing the Church of the Advent was , I believe, sad and mistaken.). The bishop explained it in financial terms “the question all of us have to keep asking is whether our energy and our dollars are being used wisely.” The diocese was given some cover by the Seattle Urban League in a letter congratulating the bishop “on the closing of the Church of the Advent.” The understanding that has come down over the years is that the parish was closed because the right pathway was then seen as integrating parishes. It was done out of the best progressive and liberal thought of the time. The fact is the congregation of the Advent weren’t really considered in the decision. It was an act of ideological purity. You can read more of the story – here.
The story isn’t over. There was a recent article on the Episcopal News Service about the closing of black parishes. At the Diocesan Leaders for African Descent Ministries conference they “discussed how to address the ongoing crisis in Black congregations as many of those churches have been forced to close over the last 15 years.” Father Ricardo Sheppard said, the church tends to “do nothing but sit back and wait until a Black church is already dying before coming in like some saving grace.” He noted how another parish hasn’t had a full-time priest in years. “You can’t say you didn’t know. You helped get an air conditioner on the roof, but you didn’t get them a priest,” Sheppard told ENS. “That’s where the problem lies, equity and seeing value in those Black churches. It’s waiting until it’s too late versus respecting and valuing them as much as the predominantly white churches.”
It’s also a very old story. From 1940 to 1980, the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania closed the average of one parish per year within the city of Philadelphia. And if you took the story back to 1900 the total would be 60 city churches closed in 80 years. Of course, that story and the story told at the Diocesan Leaders conference are not exactly the same. But they are overlapping and interrelated stories.
Today I received an email from my seminary. I’m an alumnus of the Episcopal Divinity School. The truth is I’ve never much identified with it. I’d graduate from the Philadelphia Divinity School some years prior to the merger. But I’m happily on the mailing list and today’s message caught my attention.
It mentioned the work of Dr. Fredrica Harris Thompsett’s and her description of some parts of the religious enterprise, “a lethal combination of clericalism, racism, and economic exploitation which turns religion into a tool of the status quo.” And that caused me to remember a letter Fredrica sent me in 1981 after Forward Movement had published Stay in the City
I loved her “Your ‘what it takes’ section is full of theological and practical wisdom.” I had a swollen head for most of that day. My head has returned to an almost normal size since then. But I still have a headache from the failure of this progressive and kind church to not really come to terms with its blindness. Many of us have a difficult time understanding what Thompson was saying, or grasping the concerns of the Diocesan Leaders conference, and seeing what Stay in the City pointed to. In part it’s the narrowness of progressive ideologies in our time. Those who see themselves as “on the right side of history” (another way of saying God is on our side) may find it impossible to acknowledge their bias. For example, to play on another hobby horse of mine, it seems that we on the left can never see our antisemitism.
How is it that when the right wingers marched through the streets Charlottesville carrying lit tiki torches and screaming "You will not replace us" and "Jews will not replace us" we all understood that was racism. Hell they wanted us to understand it. But when the protesters walk through the streets chanting “Globalize the intifada!”, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, and “resistance by any means necessary”, we fail to understand that this is antisemitism. The fact is that those on the left have always had a hard time acknowledging this (see section in “Antisemitism is like crabgrass: A time for humility” on”Progressive antisemitism”) [1}. This isn’t about our sophisticated and well off downtown and center city parishes. It’s about the poor and working class parishes, the African American and African ethnic parishes, the Latino parishes. And maybe it’s also about all the rural and isolated parishes. How common to all these communities is what Father Sheppard pointed to regarding Black parishes - that our dioceses tend to do nothing but sit back and wait until they are already dying “before coming in like some saving grace.” Okay, I’ll get off that horse now.
It may be that a large element in this is our lack of skill in developing and implementing mission strategy around urban parish ministry. Many bishops and clergy have never even give it any thought. And most that do haven’t got the training or experience to offer much beyond a few ideas they’ve brainstormed. I don’t think that Stay in the City can just be dropped into the current scene and made direct use of. It’s over 40 years later and the context has changed. But we do need several pieces of thinking along those lines. And my guess is that we will not see what is needed coming from some diocesan task force or a desk at 815. Maybe one of you will begin that conversation.
Finally, I’ll suggest two stances that more bishops can act on right now.
The first is what I understand to be the position of Bishop Poulson Reed, OA in Oklahoma — the diocese is in the business of helping congregations become as healthy and faithful as possible and is not looking to close any church. I know that Brother Poulson has taken seriously the idea that any diocese has three core purposes, the first one being the renewal and revitalization of parish churches. (For more see The Three Primary Tasks of a Diocese and the last section of Chapter One in An Energy Not Its Own: Three cycles of parish life and the purposes of the parish church.
The second, is what Bishop Daniel G. P. Gutiérrez of the Diocese of Pennsylvania has done in several situations. For example at the Church of the Crucifixion in Philadelphia the bishop reopened the parish that had been closed (their Facebook page). Some years earlier the same was done in the Diocese of Newark with Grace Church Van Vorst. Both are examples of bishops thinking ahead and holding onto church property waiting for the right moment to reopen and begin again.
This abides,
Brother Robert, OA
The Feast of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1253
[1] For example Pro-Palestinian Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas: Columbia University Apartheid Divest has withdrawn an apology it made last spring for a member who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
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