The evening of May 26, parishioners from St. Elizabeth’s, Ridgewood; All Saints’, Glen Rock; and Christ Church, Ridgewood gathered to celebrate a service of Closing Eucharist and a fellowship potluck dinner to mark the completion of Sacred Ground, a five-month dialogue series on race and faith produced by The Episcopal Church.
The Sacred Ground series is one of many fruits of Becoming Beloved Community, a long-term, strategic vision and commitment to the Church’s work of racial justice, reconciliation and healing. As of April 2022, over 20,000 Episcopalians across the country have joined dialogue circles to study and reflect on this issue.
After St. Elizabeth’s parishioners Catherine Olivo, Wendy Broadbent and Sandy Sullivan joined Bishop Carlye Hughes’ online study group in January 2021, the three joined heads to create a series of conversations, in hybrid format, over the next year, based on the PBS series The Black Church, the documentaries 13th and My Name Is Pauli Murray, and a tour of the historic Old Paramus Church in Ridgewood.
As a next step, we decided to explore the larger and deeper commitment to the Sacred Ground. In an effort to expand the conversation, we offered the experience to two other congregations and to our delight and surprise 51 people registered. Five circles were formed – two in-person and three on zoom – led by two facilitators for each group.
Sacred Ground was a big commitment; the five circles met every other week to from January through May to read, view and discuss a film-based curriculum. The material was based on our country’s history of race and racism, family story, economic, political and regional identity and the histories of peoples of Indigenous, Black, Latino and Asian/Pacific American descent as they intersect with European American histories.
Often challenging and uncomfortable, the readings – which included Howard Thurman’s landmark work Jesus and the Disinherited – prompted us to consider how we, as faithful Christians, can’t be the body of Christ unless all people are accepted and acknowledged as beloved children of God.
So how do we continue the journey? Hopefully, recent participants will emerge to offer to lead another round of the series, with its recently updated and expanded curriculum. Following a discerning next steps meeting this summer, the Sacred Ground alumni hope to engage parishioners within the three congregations that were unable to participate in the series.
How might God be calling you to the work of racial justice and healing?
