Trinity NewsTrinity NewsTHE MAGAZINE OF TRINITY WALL STREET

winter 2014 vol. 61 | no. 4

The Archbishop of Canterbury

Cornel West Rachel Held Evans

DEPARTMENTS

1 Letter from the Rector

2 For the Record

5 The Visitor File

6 Archivist’s Mailbag

13 Overheard | The Working Poor

18 Overheard | Unequal Opportunity

26 Anglican Communion Stories

27 What Have You Learned?

28 Parish Perspectives

29 Pew and Partner Notes

Trinity NewsTHE MAGAZINE OF TRINITY WALL STREET

WINTER 2014

VOL. 61 | NO.4

TRINITY WALL STREET

120 Broadway | New York, NY 10271 | Tel: 212.602.0800

Rector | The Rev. Dr. James Herbert Cooper

Rector-Elect | The Rev. Dr. William Lupfer

Executive Editor | Nathan Brockman

Editor | Jim Melchiorre

Art Director | Rea Ackerman

Managing Editor | Jeremy Sierra

Copy Editors | Robyn Eldridge, Lynn Goswick

Multimedia Producer | Leah Reddy

FOR FREE SUBSCRIPTIONS

120 Broadway | New York, NY 10271 | news@trinitywallstreet.org | 212. 602.9686

Permission to Reprint: Every article in this issue of Trinity News is available

for use, free of charge, in your diocesan paper, parish newsletter, or on your

church website. Please credit Trinity News: The Magazine of Trinity Wall Street.

Let us know how you’ve used Trinity News material by emailing

news@trinitywallstreet.org or calling 212.602.9686.

All photos by Leah Reddy unless otherwise noted.

FEATURE STORIES

8 Economic Narratives Robert Owens Scott

10 Common Good Interview with Justin Welby

14 Evangelicals and Safety Nets Interview with Rachel Held Evans

16 Social Sin and Hope Interview with Cornel West

19 Scarcity and God’s Values Interview with Julio Murray

20 Separate and Unequal Interview with Nicole Baker Fulgham

22 When Is a March Like a Prayer? Jeremy Sierra

24 God’s Economy Mark Bozzuti-Jones

This issue is a companion to the 2015 Trinity Institute conference“Creating Common Good: A Practical Conference for Economic Equality.”

Find out more at TI2015.org.

L E T T E R F R O M T H E R E C T O R

Run With PerseveranceThere are some problems that can be solved in a generation, and then there are those that require perseverance and trust. Economic inequality, the subject of the January 2015 Trinity Institute conference, is one of the latter.

The lack of economic opportunity and adequate wages in our country and even greater deprivation around the world are urgent problems, but not issues that we can address on our own. At Trinity, through grant making, education, advocacy, and outreach, we try to confront such challenges. Nonetheless, our efforts can only scratch the surface.

A verse I have often thought of during my time at Trinity is found in Hebrews 12: “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” Like a runner in a relay race, I have taken the baton for a time as rector and will soon pass it on. Each of us runs a distance in the race and then must rely on the next generation. This is true for building up Trinity Wall Street in our work to serve those who suffer from poverty or oppression.

I hope that the Trinity Institute conference, “Creating Common Good,” and this companion issue of Trinity News, can be an opportunity for us to learn from each other and think practically about change. In this issue we hear from important voices, including the Most Rev. Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Cornel West, and author Rachel Held Evans.

Learning about the work other people of faith are doing around the world can be a source of inspiration and hope. We may not always agree on how to best address the issues of poverty and deprivation, but whatever our methods, we do have the same goal: that every human being will have the opportunity to flourish as a child of God.

In the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus says, “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

All people are invited to God’s table. There is a special place for the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast. Ensuring that all are loved and treated as children of God is an ongoing task for Trinity Wall Street and the entire Church and always will be.

Fortunately, although we may not be able to single-handedly solve the problems raised by economic inequality, we know that we are part of the Body of Christ. As such, we do not have to change the world on our own. If we seek to serve others and do all we can to eradicate poverty and injustice, we can trust that we will never be alone in our efforts.

Faithfully,

The Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper

jcooper@trinitywallstreet.org

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2 Trinity News

PAGE 2

The Rev. Phillip A. Jackson Called as Vicar

PAGE 3

An Evensong for Trinity Women

Four Congregations, One Thanksgiving

PAGE 4

Trinity Opens New Parish Center

Partners Pick Up Where They Left Off

The Rev. Phillip A. Jackson has been called as vicar of Trinity Wall Street, effective February 2015 when the Rev. Dr. William Lupfer begins his tenure as the 18th rector of the parish.

“Please join me in welcoming Phil Jackson and his wife, Page, to the family of our vibrant parish,” said Lupfer. “In Phil, Trinity will be blessed to have a warm, empathetic, and understanding priest who serves Jesus with his whole heart. I am excited to see Phil bring his gifts as pastor and mission leader to Trinity.”

Jackson will lead the mission and ministry programs of the parish, which are organized in three areas: Faith Inspiration, Faith Formation & Education, and Faith in Action.

“I am honored to have received the call to serve as vicar at Trinity Wall Street and join a fellowship of Episcopal clergy that dates back more than three hundred years. With the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the trust and support of the parish and the rector-elect, I will dedicate myself to sustaining its future and fortifying its missions and ministries,” said Jackson. “Page and I are looking forward to meeting all of the members of the congregation and becoming true New Yorkers as we strive forward together.”

The Rev. Phillip A. Jackson Called As Vicar

Jackson is currently the rector of Christ Church of the Ascension in Paradise Valley, Arizona, where he has led reconciliation, congregational growth, and community engagement in the greater Phoenix area. Since he arrived in 2007, he grew the children’s Christian education program from 5 students to 100.

In addition, he developed and taught parish formation classes; led a weekly women’s bible study and a men’s reading group; offered classes on contemplative Christian spirituality; and led a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Jackson also initiated an annual lecture series featuring prominent members of the Phoenix community.

Before coming to Christ Church of the Ascension, he served parishes in Houston and Detroit and was an attorney in Honolulu. Jackson holds a Bachelor’s Degree in History from Amherst College, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an M.Div. from The Church Divinity School of the Pacific. He is married to Page Underwood, an attorney. He succeeds the Rev. Canon Anne Mallonee, who served as vicar from 2004 to 2014. Mallonee accepted the call to become chief ecclesiastical officer for the Church Pension Group in September.

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An Evensong for Trinity WomenTrinity Wall Street celebrated 40 years of women’s ordination in the Episcopal Church with an Evensong service on Sunday, November 9.

“This is a love story,” said the Rev. Anita Schell, recalling her time at Trinity in a reflection during the service. Schell was the first female priest to be ordained at Trinity and the first woman to serve as a full-time member of the clergy on staff.

“There were challenges as a woman,” she said before the service. “Trinity was helpful to me with those challenges.”

Schell was one of several of Trinity’s current and former full-time female priests to attend the Evensong. Each read a lesson or offered a reflection, including the Rev. Canon Anne Mallonee, Trinity’s first female vicar who recently became chief ecclesiastical officer for the Church Pension Group.

While both Mallonee and Schell recalled some of the difficulties of being a woman and a clergy person, they were positive about the Episcopal Church and Trinity.

“It’s the change that is constant,” said Mallonee. “New ways of doing the shepherd’s work are emerging from the grass roots and it is exciting. It is a very hopeful time.”

The Rev. Emily Wachner, Assistant Director for Liturgy, Hospitality, and Pilgrimage, planned the service.

Marilyn Haskel, Trinity Program Manager for Liturgical Arts & New Initiatives, chose the music, all of which was composed by women. It included contemporary composers like Ana Hernandez along with familiar hymns.

In her reflection, the Rev. Barbara Crafton reminded attendees that women had been exercising their power at Trinity for much longer than 40 years.

Trinity News 3

Four Congregations, One Thanksgiving

“The women of Trinity were very, very aware of their own power and their own sense of justice,” said Crafton.

She recalled women important in the life of Trinity, such as Lina Lowry, Pauline Dougherty, and Betty Hughes.

Crafton also considered what might be ahead for the church.

“Who knows what the future will bring?” she asked.

“In 300 years a lot can happen and a lot has. Aren’t we blessed and aren’t we joyful to have seen as much of it as we have seen?”

Following the service, photos were taken of all the women present, and the female clergy shared a meal together.

More than two hundred and fifty meals were served at the Interfaith Community Thanksgiving in St. Paul’s Chapel on Thanksgiving Day, November 27. The event was a joint effort of Trinity Wall Street; Park 51, an Islamic community center; Tamid: The Downtown Synagogue, which meets in St. Paul’s Chapel; and Lower Manhattan Community Church. A catered Thanksgiving meal was served to a wide variety of people, including congregation members and people in need from the community. The Trinity Preschool designed banners for the occasion and there was live music and hot cider before the meal. Bags of nonperishable groceries were also available.

4 Trinity News

Partners Pick Up Where They Left Off

Trinity Wall Street’s Mission and Service partners from as far as Burundi and as close as Queens came to St. Paul’s Chapel for food and fellowship on Thursday, November 6, as part of the fourth annual Travelers’ Reunion.

Joining Trinity’s Mission and Service partners were many of the more than one hundred and fifty persons who have traveled with Mission and Service teams since the program began in 2008.

“Finding people who come and try a different life and walk with us, that is really friendship,” said the Most Rev. Bernard Ntahoturi, Archbishop of Burundi. He was there with his wife and other church leaders from his African nation.

The Rt. Rev. Julio Murray, Bishop of the Diocese of Panama, and the Rt. Rev. Ogé Beauvoir, Suffragan Bishop of Haiti, also attended along with their wives and colleagues.

A group from Trinity visited northern Haiti in December 2013, and this was Bishop Beauvoir’s reciprocal visit. Haiti is Trinity’s fifth and newest Mission and Service partner.

The Rev. Edward Thompson and Happy Johnson, both of whom are on staff at All Souls Episcopal Church in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, traveled to the reunion as did Sister Tesa Fitzgerald, founder of Trinity partner Hour Children, in Long Island City, Queens. Sister Tesa brought several staff members and some of the women and children her organization serves.

“These relationships are maturing,” said the Rev. Dr. James Cooper, Rector of Trinity. “That’s what’s so wonderful about being part of the body of Christ. We pick up where we left off.”

Throughout their week in New York, the partners also spoke at a congregational forum and at a lunch with Trinity staff members.

“There was lots of sharing and learning and connecting,” said Maggy Charles, Director of Mission and Service Trips.

Trinity’s Mission and Service Trip participants.

On November 30, Trinity blessed the Trinity Episcopal Church Parish Center at 2 Rector Street during coffee hour.

The Parish Center is located near Trinity Church. While Trinity upgrades its offices and ministry space at 74 Trinity Place, community events and meetings will take place in the center.

The Parish Center includes meeting rooms, the parish library, public computers, and a counseling room. It will be open on weekdays from 12-5pm when congregants, staff, office workers, and anyone in the neighborhood can drop by to eat lunch, use a computer, or just sit and visit for a while.

“The core values are hospitality and stewardship,” said Jenn Chinn, Hospitality Development Manager. “It’s meant to be an empowering space for our congregation and our community.”

Trinity Opens New Parish Center

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Trinity News 5

MURIEL STOCKDALE

is an artist, writer, and costume designer

who lives in Lower Manhattan. She created

an exhibit of United States flags that was

displayed in Charlotte’s Place for three years,

and has been involved in several other projects.

Most recently you helped make costumes for the high school students who volunteered for Trinity’s Halloween event. That was my career for 30 plus years—costume design. I did movies, TV, theater, opera, dance, commercials, industrial shows, print, everything. I worked for many years for the Muppets. I did a lot of children’s television, like Out of the Box, Ghostwriter. I did Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women.

Then I decided I had to quit that career because it was just drowning me. It was not a lot of fun anymore and the material that was coming my way was not inspiring. I thought I would like to write my own material so now I’m writing. I’ve got an opera about The Ramayana, one of the oldest texts in the world about the Indian god Rama whose wife Sita is kidnapped by a demon. In addition to that I have a television show that I conceived with a friend of mine that’s currently in the hands of producers.

It seemed like you made a lot of costumes in a short time.I decided to do it because everything that’s come to me from Trinity has been an extraordinary blessing and a delight. It was going to be only two weeks. It was going to be tight. But I decided to meet it with the right attitude. Sure enough they were so appreciative.

The last day was my birthday. I calculated to get out by five because I was going to a birthday dinner with my husband. I was supposed to be out the door already and suddenly Kelly [a teacher at the high school] is at the door, and all the kids were there with two cupcakes and candles singing happy birthday. It was very sweet and I started crying.

How did you originally connect with Trinity? In 2010 I had a lot of shows for the flags, and it culminated in a gallery show in Fairfield, Connecticut, in February of 2011. I was thinking, “I don’t want to put them in storage. It’s the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I want them to be seen.”

The day after I’d brought them back we stepped out the door and I look across the street as we were walking down Greenwich Street and see this brand new gallery looking space [which was Charlotte’s Place]. I thought, “I’m going to call them when I get home.” So I ran around and did errands. When I got home there was a message on my machine from Doug Smith at World Trade Art and he said, “Muriel, I hope you don’t mind. I recom-mended your work. There’s a new space opening up. It’s kind of across the street from your place and they’re looking to put art in it because it’s going to be a community center. Call this woman named Jenn.”

So I called [Jenn Chinn, who was coordinator for Charlotte’s Place at the time] and she came and looked at the flags and within the same week they were hung. So it was one of those amazingly serendipitous lucky streaks.

Can you tell me more about the hand flag? I always felt like it was really a cultural project that I would like people to participate in. I’d been thinking all along of trying to find a way to make it more of a community project. Jenn wanted to do community art. So we were totally on the same page right away.

It was a great project. It was a lot of fun. We had some design meetings where we brainstormed and came up with the hands idea. Everybody connects to tracing their hand. It’s just a basic, visceral way of making a piece of art and it could be done anywhere.

I had no sense of how beautiful it would come out. It’s often been my experience of big projects where you’re working and working and it basically looks like nuts and bolts and suddenly you put it up and it hits you—there’s some life there, some liveliness of its own.

Do you enjoy doing community projects? It’s a lot of fun to get people involved and to kind of play together. I think one thing we lack in our culture is that sense of play. We go to work. We need to work hard to get ahead. So to invite people to participate in play is a real delight and it reconnects us to ourselves when we were inspired by anything and everything.

6 Trinity News

New York was a public health disaster. Over the next 25 years, Trinity would play a role in improving health outcomes.

In 1848, Trinity stepped up to help a young congregation, the Free Church of St. George the Martyr, which wanted to found a hospital to care for British immigrants. Trinity deeded to the city a parcel of land in the city’s downtown Fifth Ward. In exchange, the city granted St. George 24 uptown lots on Fifth Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets, with the stipulation that the land be used exclusively for a church and hospital.

The congregation of St. George set about trying to build a hospital. Trinity’s archives house dozens of letters between the Trinity parish comptroller, William Harison, Esq., and the Rev. Moses Morrow, Rector of St. George’s, who was living in England. They provide a fascinating glimpse into nineteenth century letter-writing practices. The envelopes are tiny, many just larger than business cards. The letters are written on top of old letters, with the response written perpendicularly to the original. Some are very short, the 19th century equivalent of a text message.

The correspondence did not end well. It became apparent that St. George’s congregation was unable to construct either a church or a hospital in the time allotted by the city. Trinity, concerned that the city would seize the land, threw its support behind another Episcopal group: St. Luke’s.

St. Luke’s was founded in 1845 by the Rev. William Augustus Muhlenberg, D.D., with hopes to build a hospital as soon as possible. Muhlenberg possessed a deep and progressive sense of social responsibility. After a long career as a pastor and educator in Flushing, Queens, he

served as founding rector of the Church of Holy Communion, the first church in the city with free pews.

In January 1852, with the approval of Mayor Ambrose Kingsland, the land was transferred from St. George’s back to Trinity, which then granted the land to St. Luke’s Hospital Corpora-tion. St. Luke’s Hospital accepted its first patient in 1858, and in 1896 moved uptown to 113th Street, where it remains today. For many years, Trinity funded and reserved beds in St. Luke’s for parishioners.

Trinity’s next effort at improving the health of the city came in 1874, when the Trinity Infirmary opened at 50 Varick Street, inside the former rectory. The infirmary was designed to be a clean, quiet place where a person could recover from illness. No “contagious, chronic, or obstetric” cases were admitted.

The Trinity Infirmary was a clear case of the parish taking care of its own, and its rules reveal just how much health care has changed in America: to gain admission, you had to be a poor member of Trinity parish and get the approval of the rector. If there were extra beds, other Episcopalians would receive them. The Sisters of St. Mary were in charge.

By 1876 the Infirmary Committee of the vestry was concerned about the type of patients being brought to the infirmary. It wasn’t equipped to treat accidents or acute illness. And gravely ill patients, many of whom were Roman Catholics, were wont to call for a clergyman of their own faith. The last thing the committee wanted was to wind up managing a trauma center full of papists.

But the neighborhood’s needs were great and won out over the Infirmary Committee’s concerns. Eighteen thousand people lived south

The Bodies of Men and the Salvation of Your Soul

The mid-nineteenth century was

a rough time for New York City.

More than one million immigrants

arrived each decade. The city’s

annual mortality rate in 1851

was 1 in 38; the average age of

death in the city was 20 years

and 8 months. Smallpox, cholera,

and yellow fever ravaged the city

at regular intervals. The city had

only two hospitals, New York

and Bellevue, with a total of just

900 beds.

This issue’s Archivist’s Mailbag is part of a series on Trinity and public health.

7,000 Visits to the Trinity Dispensary

1896 Trinity Dispensary and Hospital

541House calls by Dr. Bennett S. Beach

8,000 Prescriptions written

2,200 Prescriptions dispensed free of charge

Trinity News 7

of Maiden Lane, mostly in old single-family homes that had been converted to tenements or in cheap new tenements constructed in back yards. Sanitation was terrible, with outhouses in every yard and floating bathhouses discharg-ing raw sewage into the rivers. Many residents were recent immigrants, distrustful of doctors and hospitals.

In October 1879, the Rev. Morgan Dix, Trinity’s rector, preached his famous (and still relevant) sermon on the text: “that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound in every good work.”

“It is estimated, that, within easy reach of Trinity and St. Paul’s there are not less than twenty-five thousands whom we could reach… I wish to see every member of this congregation engaged in the work of this vast field.”

After reminding the congregation of the advantages they enjoyed due to the parish’s patrimony, he called for a broad range of new ministries, including “practical help to the neighborhood through medical aid.”

Dix concluded, “I have preached to you of charities relating to the bodies of men. In doing so, I have been preaching to you all the time of the salvation of your own souls.”

Thus began a new chapter in Trinity’s public health history. The Trinity Dispensary opened in 1880 in the new Mission House at 20 State Street. While the infirmary (renamed the Trinity Hospital in 1885 to reflect the work it was already doing) provided in-patient care, the dispensary functioned as the neighborhood’s family physician. The dispensary was open from 9-11am weekdays, with home visits in the afternoons. Dr. T.S.D. Fitch was hired at a “token salary” of $800 per year, a Sister of St. Mary functioned as clinic pharmacist, and

a caretaker was hired. A first visit plus prescrip-tion cost 25 cents; follow-ups or renewals were 10 cents. The Sisters had the authority to waive the fee.

Demand for dispensary services grew rapidly. An apothecary was added in 1886. The next year, it was moved and formally licensed by the state as a Class I medical facility. A social service nurse was added to the staff in 1909, and in 1916 it merged with the Downtown Relief Bureau, making it the first stop for those in need in the area. The dispensary doctor was the “private physician and friend whom [residents] could readily visit without the loss of self-respect and with little of the red tape which often mars such service.” One of the dispensary’s ongoing missions was to convince those with tuberculosis to go into a hospital, thus cutting the infection rate in the neighborhood.

Interestingly, the dispensary was very nearly financially self-sufficient. Costs averaged $1,000 per year and were borne by the Trinity Church Association, a parish organization that funded mission activities. Fees for services remained low: in 1926, a first visit still cost 25 cents.

The Trinity hospital treated: leg fractures, chronic nephritis, pleurisy, epithelioma of nose, fistula, grippe, endometritis, malaria, alveolar abscess, scalp wound, urethra stricture, tumor removal, rheumatism, endocarditis, bronchitis, contusion, fibroma, and more.

348 Patients treated at Trinity Hospital

7,994 Days of hospital care

7,411 Days provided free of charge

98 Operations performed

The vestry paid for the expenses of the Trinity Hospital, and the committee mem-bers were active in day-to-day maintenance of the facility, inspecting water pipes in the basement and loose tiles in the halls. By 1902, the hospital was dedicating more than half of its time to treating non-parishioners. Patients who could afford it contributed toward their care; on average about 15-20% of patients paid something. Records of the Trinity Hospital note every gift received: Sir Percy Sanderson donated strawberries, twice, in 1903. Margaret Yuengst, a grateful former patient, donated flowers. Parishioners from St. Agnes performed a “musicale” for patients.

The Trinity Hospital was closed in 1907 due to the structural inadequacy of the building. The Dispensary lasted until May 1955. In its final decade, the dispensary primarily provided vaccines and check-ups to downtown office workers. The neighbor-hood’s residential population had dwindled, and the Beekman Downtown Hospital could manage the area’s medical needs.

A friend who worked in advertising once summed up

his job for me this way: “Give me $800,000 and I can

get America talking about your product.” That was 20

years ago, so the price tag has surely gone up, but it’s

truer than ever that a vivid use of media can create

awareness and stimulate conversation on a national

and even global level. I’ve been thinking of my friend’s

comment recently in light of the Occupy Wall Street

movement and the term it made famous: “the 1 percent.”

The frequent complaint against Occupy has been that

the occupiers provided no demands to be met—no

program to alleviate the problems they highlighted—

and therefore had no chance of (measurable) success.

But that criticism misses the point.

BY ROBERT OWENS SCOTT

It’s no accident that Occupy sprang from an idea in Ad Busters, a journal and website dedicated to using modern media for anticon-sumerist purposes. Based on my friend’s definition of the goal of advertising, Occupy achieved precisely what it set out to do: it brought the facts of economic inequality out of the obscurity of government reports and tedious articles and into the broadest possible levels of public discourse in terms we can all understand. The “product” is our awareness that economic inequality in the United States has reached levels not seen since the notorious Gilded Age, itself named by proto-media- wizard Mark Twain as a time when a thin layer of gold disguised a dense web of serious social maladies.

Zombie ConsumersWhat happens now depends on us and our willingness to examine, reflect, and take action based on what we know. The media have picked up the topic enthusiastically. For example, in a recent New York Times article titled “Dream-boat Vampires and Zombie Capitalists,” David Castillo and William Egginton tie the prolifera-tion of the undead in books, movies, and TV to underlying economic fear in our society. “The Marxist identification of the vampire with the predatory practices of capital has proved to be as enduring as the undead monster himself,” they write, offering a unique explanation why a book as dense as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century has sold in numbers more frequently associated with Stephen King novels than with tomes from academic economists. The walking dead, they suggest, embody another current of distress. “Today’s zombie hordes may best express our anxieties about capitalism’s apparently inevitable byproducts: the legions of mindless, soulless consumers who sustain its endless production. Perhaps our fixation with images of the zombie apocalypse is ultimately tied to the conviction that there is no possible alternative to capitalism as a worldwide economic system, paired with the realization that the logical evolution of global capitalism leads to nothing but destruction.”

When it comes to apocalypses, zombie or otherwise, theological history tells us that this literature—with its imagery of pitched battles between titanic forces, good-versus-evil dualism, and world-ending clashes—emerges in periods of intense oppression and injustice.

They serve as pleas for alternatives, narrative renditions of the prophet’s cry, “How long, O Lord?” (Habukkuk 1:2).

A Biblical NarrativeApocalyptic literature has religious roots, so it’s interesting that today the sensibility is emanating from popular culture. Rachel Held Evans, a widely read author and blogger, told me recently, “One thing I always find fascinating is when Ezekiel is talking about the sins of sister cultures, he says, ‘This was the sin of your sister Sodom.’ We’re talking Sodom and Gomorrah. Serious stuff, right? ‘That you did not care for the orphan and the widow in their distress, that you were overfed and unconcerned’ (Ezekiel 16:49). That doesn’t really get the play that other passages around that story do. I think that’s telling.”

As Ezekiel makes plain, what we call social justice today has been a concern of the church for ages as a primary religious act. If it has been most identified with mainline denominations in recent years, opportunities seem to be arising for broader ecumenical partnerships. Evans, who identifies as an Evangelical, allows that Evangelicals have been overfocused on individual sin, but she sees many, particularly the young, reclaiming their passion for social justice and recognizing the need for corporate repentance.

That’s good news, because churches are uniquely qualified to offer images, myths, and practices that draw us into a different story from that of the commodification of everything, even human dignity. From the perspective of faith, human beings are not “mindless, soulless consumers” but beloved children of God, not zombie hordes but a beloved community.

In a society that tends to valorize the rich, the Gospels speak of the coming of God’s kingdom from the margins—the very place occupied by Jesus. They ask us to see the poor not as a burden but as a resource, a reminder of what’s important and where God is to be found. What’s more, they provide a vision of reconcili-ation in which the rich need not be demonized but rather are invited into a community of reconciliation in which all have enough. And they embody a clear-eyed understanding that the work is not easy but requires passion, patience, and sacrifice.

Do What You CanAddressing a problem as potentially over-whelming as economic inequality also requires a heaping measure of good old-fashioned faith. “Part of the exciting thing of Christian faith is sometimes you do things that you sense that God is calling you to do without any really clear idea of what the outcome will be,” Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, told me. An ethicist and former businessman, Welby came to the United States to address the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting in October. The very model of a grounded visionary, he looks for spiritually inspired ministries to effect real-world transformation. “One of my greatest heroes is Saint Benedict. Saint Benedict set out to find a few communities who would draw closer to Jesus and love him more in their lives. He accidentally saved European civilization. So who knows? Once it’s in the hands of God, who knows what we’re going to do?”

As for how to get started, Welby has a typically pragmatic answer. “Just because you can’t do everything, it doesn’t mean you should do nothing at all.” He advises local church communities, “Start with prayer. Engage with prayer about your local commu-nity. Contemplate, listen in silence. Allow the spirit of God to speak.” When it’s time for action, he urges, “Be outward looking and engaged and take risks.”

Churches—and communities of faith of all kinds—have the motivation, the inspiration, and the formation to tackle the issue that Occupy raised so indelibly in our national consciousness. They have the metaphors— the stories, images, and symbols—and, quite literally, the pulpits needed to affect the inner transformation that leads to action. Faith communities have the hands and feet and networks of relationships essential to building an embracing sense of common good. They understand what it means to walk in faith, without guarantees of success. They can follow the advice of Nkosi Johnson, a South African boy born with AIDS who, before he died at age 12, inspired millions to fight the disease: “Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place you are.”

Robert Owens Scott is the Director of Faith

Formation and Education for Trinity Wall Street

and the Director of Trinity Institute. He conducted

the interviews in the following pages.

“Churches are uniquely qualified to offer images, myths, and practices that draw

us into a different story.”

10 Trinity News

“ The common good starts with the intrinsic value of each human being.”

An Interview with the Most Rev. Justin Welby Archbishop of CanterburyAndrew Dunsmore/Picture Partnership/Lambeth Palace

Trinity News 11

From your perspective, what do we mean by “common good”?Common good is a phrase that comes out of Catholic social teaching, developed since the end of the 19th century by the popes, starting with Leo the 13th, as they began to address the issues arising out of an industrialized economy. It is not what the economists call “general interest.” The general interest is what is going to increase GDP, or what is going to make things happen in a way that raises the total value of wealth in a community, a nation, an economy. The common good starts with the intrinsic value of each human being and looks at policies that will maximize the opportunity for each human being, with his or her limita-tions or advantages, in relationship with other human beings, to flourish.

Are the theological and secular ways of talking about common good separate? I think there is an elision of them, which is dangerous because common good springs out of a theological understanding of the human being created by God, in the image of God, saved through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, of infinite, intrinsic personal value. When we allay that into something more general, you begin to lose that focus on the individual in community.

As you travel, and from where you are, do you see economic inequality? First of all, there’s a global inequality. Last January I was standing in an internally displaced persons camp in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, surrounded by people who, for reasons of shortfall of resources, were not being fed—25,000 people on a lava surface in the last extremes of desperation. You go from that to where I live in London—now one of the richest bits of the world—walk across the river, see people in the restaurants, in Parliament, in the city of London with incredible wealth, extraordinary power. But even within very wealthy countries—in the UK, I had four years of ministering in Liverpool, where there is huge deprivation, and all the northeast of England where the mines were shut down in the 1980s—yes, you see it absolutely in your face. One of the things I remember when I was given the curacy, my bishop said, “You’ve spent your life amongst people who do things. I’m going to send you to somewhere where people have things done to them.” It was such a learning experience.

As a theologian and ethicist, would you use the word “sin” when you’re speaking about inequality?Yes, I would. Emphatically. But we have to be aware that inequality has different effects in different parts of life. In some areas inequality is deeply sinful and wrong. That’s where it diminishes the human being. For instance, inequality of health care seems to me to be like inequality of lifeboats on a sinking ship. Inequality of education is a very, very serious problem. It’s not just waste of potential resources: it’s actually saying that the intrinsic value of a human being is somehow different because he or she is from a wealthy or less wealthy background. Now that becomes sinful. Because it, again, does not recognize the common good. It does not recognize God’s creation of all things, for the universal benefit of all people. In other areas, for example, inequality that means someone has a flashier BMW and someone else has something that works perfectly well—has a wheel at each corner—is not a great problem.

Does this relate in your mind to what the prophets were talking about when they critiqued Israel?The whole tone of the prophets is, “remember where you came from.” You didn’t make yourself great. Who thinks you’re great? You were given greatness by the grace and love of God. So you then have a responsibility, as the wealthy, to care for those around you. It’s given to you for a purpose. There’s a vocation, a calling, in it.

Now in our modern society, there are very, very, very few people who become wealthy entirely because of their own efforts. I mean, even people like Bill Gates depended on a million software engineers around the world doing incredible things. Therefore, this sense of responsibility that comes with wealth is something the prophets were getting at. They weren’t saying all wealth is wrong. They were saying the clinging on to wealth, the piling up for personal advantage, inequality, is the problem.

How do you work with that?We have structural sin in which we’re all caught up. If you happen to live in an area where there’s a very good hospital, you go to the emergency room, and it just happens that the doctor on duty is a particularly highly qualified ER consultant who’s done this for years, is well-known, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you don’t turn around and walk out and say, “Actually, I need a worse doctor. This is unfair.” In that sense, I’m careful about applying personal sin.

When we’re caught up in structures of sin, our responsibility is to engage with the structures. Those can’t be dealt with individually. As a church, as Christians, as people of faith, as people who believe in the intrinsic value of the human being, we have to engage with those structures in order to change the structure.

We’re creating classes that are so different, we can’t even recognize one another as human. How do you talk about common good in that case? There is only one way to this, which is internal transformation. I say that with some confidence, having again been discussing that this morning on a panel in front of a bunch of central bankers—the process of internal transformation, of recognizing who we are and our own collective power as groups of the particularly powerful and being willing to allow a change to happen as we contemplate our self-centeredness and move to other-centeredness.

To use a phrase I saw in a book the other day—we move from the sword and the shield—i.e., you conquer things and then you guard them—to the towel and the cross—you serve the towel of Jesus at the Last Supper and you sacrifice. You serve and you sacrifice. The latter is the way of joy. The former is the way of fear. Now that move has to be collective, but it is something that we have to choose to allow to happen within us.

You have an extensive background in business, along with your theological studies. Where do you see those things coming together?I think a key part of it is leadership. Particularly political leadership. One of the periods in modern history that most fascinates me is the period in Europe and the United States, between 1945 and the late ’50s, early ’60s: the formation and creation of what we now call the European Union.

An Interview with the Most Rev. Justin Welby Archbishop of Canterbury

12 Trinity News

These were things done to overthrow a system that had resulted in Germany and France fighting each other three times over three generations, that had killed four million of each other’s citizens in 35 years. Political leadership and vision—based, incidentally, in a strong Catholic tradition of social teaching—led to a change in national attitudes, a new way of being. Yes, you can be as cynical as you like and say it was long-term self-interest. Well, it wasn’t in their minds at the time. If it was, it was unconscious. [Our leaders said], “We cannot let a continent starve. So we are going to do something.” It was an extraordinary moment.

These moments of political leadership, which need to be supported and encouraged by the church, that are always complex, always muddled, always have an element of mixed motives, are crucial to changing the way we live. It can be done. When we do it, the change in society is utterly invigorating, utterly joyful.

What is the church’s role in bringing that about?I think one role of the church is always to challenge cynicism. I think a second is to set a framework of understanding of how human beings work—the understanding of fallenness. We tend to forget fallenness, that people go wrong because we have a predilection to go wrong. We’re selfish. We need liberating from that by the love and grace of God and Christ.

Then there are particularly applied things. We’re one of the few institutions around the world, particularly across the United States and

Europe, that have professional people on the ground in every region, in every community, who are capable of making a difference, who have a leadership role and a framework of understanding for exercising that.

What advice might you give to a local parish or other group that’s trying to discern where its call is? First of all, just because you can’t do everything, it doesn’t mean you should do nothing at all. There’s a sort of sense [that says], “I can’t solve the problem of world poverty and inequality, so I won’t do anything.” Do what you can. Not what you can’t. That comes out of prayer. So for a local church community, pray. Start with prayer. Engage with prayer about your local community. Contemplate, listen in silence. Allow the spirit of God to speak, and look and see what happens.

Secondly, be outward looking and engaged and take risks. Take risks, but risks that are based out of a life of prayer in your community. We are based in a relationship of love for Jesus Christ, so start with what we know and see what he calls us to do.

What’s your hope for the common good? I think my hope of a church that becomes so much more confident in Christ that [its members] are braver in being Christian.

The Most Rev. Justin Welby is the Archbishop of Canterbury and a speaker at the

2015 Trinity Institute conference.

credit unions vs. pay day loansThe Rev. Rosemia Brown, Vicar of St. James the Great Church in Hackney, a community of greater London, is recruiting in her congregation and community for the local credit union.

The movement, sponsored by the Church of England, is aimed at supporting credit unions as an alternative to the growing popularity of “payday loans”. Companies advertising the payday loans charge interest rates as high as 3 or 4 thousand percent per year.

Brown led a group of about thirty marchers through the business

district of Hackney, stopping periodically to hand out applications to people on the street. Brown submitted 132 applications to the credit union and promised to reach a goal of 500. The effect of the payday loans on families struggling economically led the Most Rev. Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, to urge churches to support local credit unions. Welby also authorized the Church of England to establish a credit union of its own for church employees and retirees and hopes to eventually expand those operations to include loans to church members.

“We’ve got churches all over the country now setting up credit advice and credit unions to make reasonable cost finance accessible in local communities, where it will get local money back into circulating in those communities,” said Welby. “That’s using the structures and networks in expression of the love of Christ.”

Similar initiatives are taking place elsewhere. The Episcopal Diocese of New York, for example, resolved to establish the Episcopal Diocese of New York Credit Union at its 2014 general convention.

Trinity News 13

overheard | THE WORKING POOR

The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed,

are in fact the major

philanthropists of our society.

They neglect their own children

so that the children of others

will be cared for;

they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect;

they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.

To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed

“ Christians are called to be safety nets for one another and for the people around us.”

An Interview with Rachel Held Evans Author and Blogger

When does inequality become an issue?The problem that I see as the most serious is when people can’t make a living wage. When they’re working full-time, maybe 40-plus hours a week, and still can’t afford to meet those basic needs. When people have to work two, three jobs just to make ends meet, just to provide for their families, that’s oppressive, that’s unjust.

Would you use the word “sin” for some kinds of inequality?I definitely think so. I know a lot of people are uncomfortable with the notion of corporate sin, or a shared sin, or a cultural sin. In the United States we have a very Western notion of individuality, and sometimes even in faith and in religion we have this inflated sense of individuality instead of thinking in terms of how it affects the whole community and the group. Throughout our history, we’ve had these corporate shared community sins, these injustices, the oppression of people, and I certainly think that that is a sin and one which we must acknowledge, lament, repent of, and change.

It scares people sometimes to hear it referred to as a sin, because a lot of times—and I relate to this—we feel really helpless to change it. So I get a little defensive when people start saying, “Well, this is a sinful situation,” or “You’re oppressing other people,” when I don’t feel like I’m actively oppressing anybody. But when we look at the ways that we can be complicit in the system and how little decisions can affect that system, then I think we realize that we do all have some shared responsibility. If it’s a shared sin, then we have to work together and make it a shared redemption, and work together to make change happen.

Do you see places where the Bible addresses this?Yes, certainly. The Bible doesn’t have just one thing to say about poverty or wealth. It’s the Bible, so it’s got a million different things to say about it. But you do see a common theme throughout Scripture, particularly in the prophets and in the Gospels, where it grieves the heart of God to see people oppressed. To see the wealthy get more, and more, and more, and the poor get less, and less, and less. And, of course, Jesus comes along and says, “I have been anointed to proclaim the good news to the poor.” It’s the first group he singles out. If we’re going to be Gospel people, if we’re going to be Evangelicals, which I identify as Evangelical, central to the Gospel message is that this is good news for the poor.

Do you think that that piece of evangelicalism is coming back?I’m seeing great changes in Evangelicalism where there’s a real interest, particularly among young Evangelicals, in social justice. They’re interested in climate change, they’re interested in addressing income inequality, they’re interested in all sorts of social issues. I feel a little bit new to the conversation. I find myself making mistakes that more seasoned people are kind enough to point out, in how I talk about poverty or about racism. I’m learning.

What effect does extreme inequality and class difference have on us as a human family?More and more we think of our neighbors as the people who share our values, and our opinions, and our politics, and our theology. We all huddle up into tribes based around those things. When we don’t have those relationships P

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Trinity News 15

small town povertyDayton, Tennessee, has quiet down-town streets, small shops, and a tourist attraction, the courthouse that hosted the 1925 Scopes Trial. Not the kind of place you’d associate with economic inequality. However, Karla Grun, who works at the food pantry run by We Care Community Services, serves people who struggle daily for the necessities of life.

“We see homeless people on a daily basis. We’ve seen mothers with children living in their cars who just need food. We see people who need help with their electric bill. They’ve just been laid off or just had a baby,” Grun said.

In a county with 38,000 residents, more than one in four comes to We Care each year for food, to shop in its thrift store, or to receive temporary housing assistance.

Rural poverty has a distinct look. As the number of homeless residents increases, the community’s 24-hour laundromats fill with people pretending to do laundry but really just seeking a warm place to spend the night. And because small towns don’t offer public transportation, losing access to a car makes it almost impossible to hold a job.

Grun is a single mother of three daughters whose own experience includes an escape from domestic violence and temporary homelessness.

“My own struggles help me to relate and help them get comfortable enough so I can give them the assistance that they need,” she said.

with [people who may disagree with us], we begin to think that the whole world looks like how we see it. I see it happening in my own life, where I’m traveling a lot, speaking a lot, writing a lot about things like income inequal-ity or gender equality in the church, but it’s been a while since I’ve really sat down with my neighbor or really hung out in my community and learned what the needs are here. We just don’t know our neighbors anymore, we don’t know our communities anymore, and that so narrows our world view.

What can Christians do about that?I think there’s a lot of things the church has always been doing that we can bring into this, like Communion. Taking Communion outside the church setting and making Communion and Eucharist about gathering together with people from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds, all sorts of political viewpoints, theological viewpoints, men and women, and bringing Communion into a space of real community is something that I see more and more people doing. There’s a church in Brooklyn, St. Lydia’s, and it’s a dinner church, where they basically just invite people over for dinner and do Eucharistic prayers around it. Sara Miles is doing this cool thing at [St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco] where they have this enormous food pantry and they serve this food to the community from the altar. I think it’s really beautiful.

Do you have any thoughts about how to go about this without creating new enemies? Telling other people’s stories makes a huge, huge difference, and listening to other people’s stories. Making spaces in our churches, in our lives, at our dinner tables for people to share their stories. Because as soon as you’ve come up with a system, somebody’s story breaks your little system down and causes you to question it. As soon as you’ve come up with a caricature for one type of group—for rich people, for Republicans, for Democrats, for liberal Christians, for Evangelical Christians— somebody sits down, tells their story, and it changes everything. We can create spaces where people are given the opportunity to share their stories, where we’re given the opportunity to listen well to one another.

So, what’s your hope for Creating Common Good?In one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, he’s trying to help [members of] this community learn to live with one another. The early church included Jews and Gentiles, slaves and their masters—it was everybody all thrown in together. Of course, there was conflict and there was strife, but they came together around the table and came together around their faith.

Paul, in many of his letters, and the [other]authors of the epistles were trying to help these communities sort all this out. At one point Paul says, “The goal is equality.” That’s a verse that sometimes makes people uncomfortable, but I think it represents what it means to be a little picture of the kingdom in the world. And he says, “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.” It’s not a slam against working hard or gathering much. It’s this sense that we’re watching out for each other. We’re going to be one another’s safety nets. Not everybody has a safety net, and I think Christians are called to be safety nets for one another and for the people around us.

What do you think the kingdom would look like?Jesus always said, “The kingdom is like this, the kingdom is like a pearl that’s been hidden away, it’s like a treasure that’s been buried, it’s like seeds that have been planted and are growing in the dark.” So, I know it when I see it, the kingdom, growing in our midst. I think you feed people, and if you’re feeding people, you’re doing kingdom work; if you’re clothing people, you’re doing kingdom work; if you’re loving people, laughing with them, hearing their stories, crying with them, you’re doing kingdom work.

How does the church support people when it seems like change is going to take a long time? This is a very Anglican response, but Commu-nion keeps me going. The notion of Jesus bringing the bread of life, given for the life of the world, for the whole world. When [John] says, “For God so loved the world,” the word there is cosmos. It’s for everybody, for every-thing, for every institution, for every culture. That notion, as unbelievable as I find it sometimes, is what inspires me. When I take Communion, I’m always reminded that this body and this blood is enough, and I believe that it’s enough to be the life of the world and to be food for the whole world. So when you know that there is enough, there will always be enough, it changes your attitude. It makes you less concerned about hoarding things for yourself, whether that’s your time, your money, your resources, your energies. There will always be enough. This bread is everywhere, this life is everywhere, available to all if we would only recognize that and be better stewards of it.

Rachel Held Evans is an author of books, blog

posts, and articles. She is the author of the books

Evolving in Monkey Town and A Year of Biblical

Womanhood and a panelist at the 2015 Trinity

Institute conference.

16 Trinity News

“If a church is going to be worth its salt, we will always have a lot of enemies.”

An Interview with Cornel West Professor at Union Theological Seminary

You’ve said, “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” How does this inform your understanding of common good? Well, I think when we talk about mustering the courage to create common conversations, you’re talking about a love of truth, you’re talking about a respect of neighbor, and you’re talking about a love of a cause that’s bigger than our own atomized egos, our own individual projects. The connection between courage and love is fundamental in any talk about creating.

I love the title “Creating Common Good” because it’s a process. It’s not a matter of reaching a particular end. It’s an endless process in many ways. I think love, in the end, has got to be at the center of it, because justice is intimately connected with love, but it’s not identical with love. Love cuts much deeper than justice.

Could you say more about the relationship of love and justice? Well, love’s usually much more personal and interpersonal, and it takes us beyond ourselves. Justice is much more a specification of a relation between individuals, but it doesn’t necessarily pull from the deep passionate side of who and what we are. As mortals, in the face of death and disease and despair, you really need to be able to cut deep into hearts, minds, and souls. Love cuts at that level.

Where do you see inequality? Almost everywhere you look in America. Begin with the prison system, the new Jim Crow. Americans constitute 5 percent of the population of the world, [yet] we’ve got 25 percent of those incarcerated in the world. Disproportionately poor, disproportionately black and brown. So you could start there.

Then you move to public education. My God, the levels of inequality there are just overwhelming in terms of quality of education available to the well to do vis-à-vis poor and working-class kids. But it’s not only that. I think it’s also when you look inside of the souls, especially of young people, where you see a kind of soul murder that’s too often committed when it comes to decrepit and disgraceful school systems. Young people finding it difficult to believe in themselves, have confidence in themselves, respect themselves, so they don’t have access even to that most intangible but most significant item, which is some sense of self-worth.

Would you use the word “sin” for inequality in some cases?There’s no doubt about it. Yes. These are structures of domination that in the language of the great Walter Rauschenbusch would be

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Trinity News 17

the social gospel“Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus,” wrote Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the leaders of the social gospel movement in the early 20th century, in Christianity and the Social Crisis. “Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.”

The spirit of the social gospel is carried on by theologians such as James Cone. In his seminal book, God of the Oppressed, Cone writes, “We must continually ask, What actions deny the Truth disclosed in Jesus Christ? Where should the line be drawn? Can the Church of Jesus Christ be racist and Christian at the same time? Can the Church of Jesus Christ be politically, socially, and economically identified with structures of oppression and also be a servant of Christ? Can the Church of Jesus Christ fail to make the liberation of the poor the center of its message and work, and still remain faithful to its Lord?”

social sin. It’s a violation of what it is for God to make human beings in the image and likeness of God’s self. To have to live in such a belittled condition, that’s certainly a violation of what God’s will is for each and every one of us. It takes social forms as well. Walter Rauschenbusch, all the way up to James Cone and Beverly Harrison and the others, teach us that we are to be attentive to the various ways in which we violate the imago dei, the image of God, inscribed in each and every one of us.

What do you think are the forces that brought us to this point?Well, I think we have to tell a long historical tale about how we are who we are. America was founded not on fraternity but on cupidity. From the very beginning, Jamestown, we were a corporation before we were a country. People came here looking for resources, tied into moneymaking for kings and queens and so forth in Europe. From the very beginning, we’ve been very much a market-driven civilization.

Coolidge said the business of America is business. We’re anti-intellectual. We have a deep suspicion of those values that go beyond pecuniary gain, and yet, at the same time, we’re also the most religiously saturated of modern societies. We end up with religious institutions [that] are tied to nonmarket values like love and justice and mercy, and yet, the religious institutions somehow have to accommodate themselves to the market-driven civilization in order to survive. At the same time [they] know that to be true to themselves, they’ve got to bring some prophetic critique to bear on the dominant tendencies of a market culture, which is, of course, a form of idolatry. It’s chasing the golden calf, as it were.

That tension between the golden calf and the culture, on the one hand, and the critique of the golden calf, which is preached in most churches and mosques and synagogues or temples, creates a fascinating cultural schizophrenia in the history of this nation. [In] the moments in which you can see major moves towards empowering poor and working people, you can see churches awakening to the true message of their own teachings. [In] those moments in which the weak and vulnerable are pushed to the side, you can see those churches becoming thoroughly well adjusted to the injustices of any moment in our history.

So it can feel overwhelming, as if we’re paralyzed. Do you see paths forward? It’s good to feel overwhelmed, because it means you’re in touch with reality. Every moment in human history is shot through with forms of barbarism and bestiality and brutality. It’s overwhelming in that sense, but it’s not

overwhelming in the sense of paralyzing us or debilitating us, because we can always make choices, make decisions, choose to be decent persons, decide to be persons committed to justice, regardless of what the context actually is, and regardless of what the conditions are.

What’s promising to you right now? Well, we’ve got an awakening right now among young people around ecological catastrophe. It’s a magnificent movement.

There is a wonderful awakening among young people of color. Ferguson and the impact of Ferguson have generated a shattering of a lot of sleepwalking among young people [who have become aware] of arbitrary police power and the militarizing of these police departments and the trigger-happy policing that has gone on and on. Here in New York City, “stop and frisk” has been in place now for almost twelve years, and almost 5 million young people [have been] stopped, and only 3 percent of them had anything to do with any kind of crime.

Those kinds of realities are generating magnificent expressions of resistance, especially among young people. That’s a sign of hope.

Do you see a role for churches in this?Well, churches need to shut down if they can’t speak to issues of sin. What is the very purpose of a church other than spreading the good news? The good news means you’ve got to live a life in such a way that you’re highly sensitive to your neighbor, and, of course, as a Christian I’m talking about also loving not just the neighbor but loving the enemy, which is to say, if a church is going to be worth its salt, we will always have a lot of enemies.

That’s what it is to follow Jesus. [You’ll] have a whole lot of enemies coming at you, because when you love the enemy and when you love poor people, the powers that be will generate a lot of Pontius Pilates as well as a lot of Roman centurions.

So what advice would you have for a faith community that wants to discern where its call is?If we’re really concerned about being a people of integrity and honesty and decency, then as Christians, trying to inculcate and imbibe in our own lives, trying to enact and embody in our own witnesses, the faith, hope, and love that we see there in the New Testament, it means that we’ve got to wrestle with creating common good.

You’ve written, “I cannot be an optimist, but I am a prisoner of hope.” What’s the difference?I think a prisoner of hope is always hypersensi-tive to the darkness in human history and the darkness of our own souls. I think that just to be an optimist in a world of such overwhelming suffering, of wreckage, of wasted potential, of [the loss of] precious lives of every generation, optimism just seems just so naïve. Hope allows us to generate our agency and our action and our witness and our work, but it’s always against the grain. Always. Because the darkness is fairly thick. It’s like Shakespeare, that flickering candle against the backdrop of the night, and his art against empire, and those 39 magnificent plays that he wrote. I think that he’s got something to teach us.

So what’s your hope for creating common good?That we continue to raise our voices, come together, provide our analysis of power, be willing to live lives of serious example, generate strong judgments in the direction of the weak and vulnerable, and keep a smile on our faces.

Dr. Cornel West is Professor of Philosophy and

Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary

and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He is

a speaker at the 2015 Trinity Institute conference.

“At some point inequality

also makes mockery of the

ideal of equal opportunity.

It’s far more likely now that

a child born into a poor family

will be poor as an adult and

a child born into wealth will

be a wealthy adult.” Robert Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future

overheard | UNEQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Trinity News 19

Does liberation theology say anything about the present situation?Liberation theology makes a tremendous emphasis on God’s reign. God’s purpose. God’s kingdom. God’s plan. So the systemic sin has to do with systems that do not help the purposes of God. The distribution of the wealth—not making it possible for each and every one of God’s children to have enough—is not responding to God’s plan. The human being has been taken out of the equation, and when the human being is taken out of the equation, everything revolves around material goods, position, struggle for power.

Countries in Latin America have all been experiencing the changes within the system. In the ’70s and ’80s, we lived and worked under the military regime. We had to become very creative, because human rights and human beings were being affected. But now that we are living in a democracy, it is not so easy to find who is causing the system to work against the benefit of the human being.

I might see myself as very virtuous, my behavior might be fine, but I’m complying with a sinful system. The problem of the systemic sin is also based on relationships. There’s a relationship between the person and God, there’s a relationship between the person and other persons, and there’s a relationship with myself, and the relationship with the environment. Anything that breaks the relationship, that doesn’t make it function, is sin.

When a person says, well, I’m a fine person, I don’t do this, but I see that my brother is suffering, I see that my brother is excluded, I see that my brother is really treated unjustly, and I don’t say anything or I don’t look for the reasons why this injustice is going on, then it makes me an accomplice, as well.

What are ways to reverse injustice?If we understand where the problem is coming from and who is being benefited in the long run, then we can identify forms to correct the

“ What the church does is create the space so the people living on scarcity can be seen and heard.”

An Interview with Julio Murray Bishop of Panama

system. In Panama, for instance, we have been in conversation with economists, and they identify that the economic growth in Panama responds to a plan and a project, a project that has to do with using our geographical position to offer more services and transportation of goods.

Now in doing this, which is not a bad thing, the needs of the people are not being met. Yes, we have a lot of income, and we are growing. We are the second-fastest-growing economy in the region, but we are also the country with the second-largest inequalities in the region. We have honored the economy, but we have not been paying attention to aspects of education, access to health care, access to housing. I’m not an enemy to growth, but I think that economic growth needs to be hand in hand with human development, as well.

What can the church do to make a difference in this area? I think the church plays a crucial, prophetic role, not only denouncing that the system is producing death, but also announcing that there are people within the system that have come up with some creative solutions. Where people are living on scarcity, this scarcity has made them creative. What the church does is create the space so the people living on scarcity can be seen and heard. They can bring to the table new ideas and new practices that need to be implemented to transform this economic system.

Have you found opportunities to do that or see that in Panama?The church has taken a decision to walk with those who have been on the margins. Within the Republic of Panama, there are groups of people living in marginal situations and marginal realities—the indigenous groups, people of African descent, campesino or farmer groups. Those are the groups that are more and more affected by an economic growth that is unbalanced and unjust. We are seeking for the system to be not only changed but transformed.

How does a common good encompass everyone?If we could just make the values of the kingdom of God our everyday values. Values of justice, values of respect, values of inclusion, values of love, values of life. If we can make those values the values which mirror our actions and mirror our structures and mirror our systems, we will be able to identify the correctives that we need to offer for each one of these systems that are producing death instead of life.

The Rt. Rev. Julio Murray has been the Bishop of

Panama since 2000. He is a speaker at the 2015

Trinity Institute conference.

20 Trinity News

Would you describe the achievement gap in U.S. schools? My grandparents, 60 years ago, lived through the Brown v. Board of Education decision. They were in segregated schools in the South, as was my father. One of the things they thought would happen with that landmark decision to eliminate separate and unequal schools is that we would eliminate this disparity for generations to come. But we’re celebrating the 60th anniversary of that decision in 2014, and unfortunately we still have two very separate and unequal public school systems in our country, largely along the lines of race and class.

So you find schools like [those in] the neighborhood where I grew up in Detroit, where half of the kids in my neighborhood high school dropped out before getting their diplomas. My brother and I are two of the three kids we know of in our entire neighborhood that went on to college. And you’ll find the schools like the ones where I taught in Compton, [in Los Angeles County] where two-thirds of my fifth graders were doing reading and math at a second-grade level or below, and some were actually illiterate.

Could you say more about the two separate school systems? The more high-performing school systems tend to be in suburban communities, middle- and upper-middle-class communities. Those kids tend to graduate from high school at very high rates, higher than the national average, and they’re going off to college—often very good colleges—again, at disproportionately higher rates than the rest of the country, and certainly at higher rates than kids growing up in poverty.

One of the differentiators is the expectations we have. [It would be very] unlikely to have someone come and ask that really pointed question: “Is college really for everybody? We’re probably asking too much of all of our kids.”

But if you drive 20 miles into the urban areas near that suburban community, you find a very different story. There are very few college and career-placement discussions that happen, because, again, the expectation is, “Gosh, we don’t think many of these kids are going to make it into college.” That’s where you have those conversations of, “Well, college isn’t for everybody.”

We certainly know that every single person on the planet isn’t going to go on to be a physicist at MIT, and that’s fine. We think that we shouldn’t have two different school systems that de facto decide for kids and for families who gets the shot to go to Harvard and be that physicist. God just doesn’t discriminate by race or by family income and say, “These kids have the academic potential, I gave it to them, but I didn’t give it to these kids over here.”

Was there a moment when you said, “This is my call”? There was a moment, actually, when I was in high school. I was fortunate to go to an exam high school, which was still a public high school in Detroit, but it was very different in terms of what was expected from us. This was the summer before our senior year, and I was waiting to get back my second round of SAT scores, and I was sitting on our front porch with my best friend, really stressing out about that, and she literally looked at me and asked, “Nicky, what’s an SAT?” Someone going into her senior year of high school had no one in her life tell her, this is the path to college, you have to take these classes, you have to take this test. It was very jarring for me. That moment has stuck with me, honestly, to this day, and it continues to motivate me.

“ We should be prophetic purveyors of hope in looking at what’s possible.”

An interview with Nicole Baker Fulgham Founder of the Expectations Project

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signs of hope in educationFrom Indianapolis to Boston and from Richmond to New York City, churches are creating successful partnerships with public schools.

Many of these programs started small and grew to help hundreds of students. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, for example, started the Micah Initiative in 1998 as a mentoring program with Woodville Elementary School. The initiative now brings together more than 130 communities of faith, including Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu communities, with 23 public schools. Volunteers do a variety of things, from tutoring and mentoring students to reading in classrooms and one-time projects.

Northside New Era, a predominantly African-American church in Indianapolis, received a grant to provide tutoring to public school students. Congregation members asked schools to send them the children who were having the most trouble academically. “We spend about four days a week with them, feeding them, helping them with homework,” explained Hope Moore, Director of Children’s Ministry for the church, “but more importantly, letting them know that ‘You are valuable.’” Northside New Era is now also partnering with a predominantly white suburban church on the after-school tutoring project.

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church has partnered with 55 other churches to help serve public schools in Boston’s South End. The church offers a variety of programs, including a B-Ready after-school program for elementary and middle school students, a summer program called B-Safe, and programs for teenagers. Those programs serve 800 students and have resulted in higher test scores. “We really take seriously the idea of being a good neighbor,” explained the Rev. Liz Steinhauser in an interview earlier this year. “As an institution, this church is a neighbor to that institution, the school.”

Many of these churches are connected through All Our Children. Originally started as a partnership between Trinity Wall Street and the Diocese of New York, it has become a network for churches partnering with public schools. To connect with congregations and find resources, visit allourchildren.org or contact Ariella Louie at alouie@trinitywallstreet.org.

What does it take to get a church community involved? The first stage for us is awareness building. I think some faith communities are very aware of this problem, because they’re in communities where it exists. Some are less so. For all of our brothers and sisters, we have found it really helpful to talk about the scope of the problem and try to define it in very clear and compelling ways, whether it’s through stories or examples. Some of us love statistics. I do. But beyond that, it’s very easy to stop at this problem in depth and go down that path of, “here’s a million reasons why this is so bad.” We found that people really need to have hope, and so we spend a lot of time talking about examples of success for kids in this very demographic. We say, if it’s happening here, what do we need to do to scale this up to see it happen for many, many more kids around the country? As Christians, we should be prophetic purveyors of hope in looking at what’s possible, even though it may not be in existence right now.

Progress can be slow. What keeps you going in those times? Honestly, it’s the kids I taught in Compton. Kids who couldn’t read at the beginning of the year reading chapter books by the end of the school year. Kids literally saying they didn’t think they were smart until this year, because now they’ve just learned that they actually are smart and can achieve. No one can ever convince me that kids in low-income commu-nities cannot achieve. So when I think this is going to take 10 more years to get here or there, I think back to the kids I taught, and I know that they deserve that, because they’re amazing, and God made them in his image. I also think about my 88-year-old grandfather, who lived through segregation and absolutely thought that things would be different now, and I want him to have some hope that this problem can change.

Nicole Baker Fulgham is the founder and president

of The Expectations Project, a nonprofit organization

that develops and mobilizes faith-motivated advocates

who help close the academic achievement gap in

public schools. She is a panelist at the 2015 Trinity

Institute conference.

22 Trinity News

On September 17, 2011, shortly after I finished gradu-ate school, I joined the first big Occupy Wall Street march in Lower Manhattan. I don’t particularly like marching. I don’t like holding up poster-board signs or shout-ing slogans. Still, I felt about the march like I sometimes feel about prayer: I couldn’t tell you exactly why or what effect it would have, but it was some-thing I needed to do.

You have probably felt something like this at some point, too, the last time you watched the news or passed a man on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign and a paper cup: like the world is broken in some daunting and complicated way and something needs to be done. But what do we do in the face of an overwhelming prob-lem like economic inequality?

“It’s human to feel overwhelmed,” says Jayce Hafner, Domes-tic Policy Analyst for the Episcopal Public Policy Network. “It

means you’re really paying attention.”

Our knowledge of the enormous scale of the problem can lead us to action or it can cancel out all our good intentions and leave us feeling paralyzed and inept. A recent study by psychologist Paul Slovic of the Univer-sity of Oregon showed that when people were presented with statistics about the large number of starving people in the world, they were less likely to help a starving person than people who were merely asked to help a single individual without knowing the magnitude of the problem.

So what do we do in light of this?

Hafner was one of several people I spoke to about how to approach large and complex prob-lems. She, like others, offered this advice: start small and remember that we are part of something larger.

“Any great social movement is the product of many different people’s actions over many years that have laid

the foundations for ultimately enormous change,” Hafner says. “I remind myself that I’m working to lay a foundation.”

Her point reminded me of author and activist Parker Palmer’s notion of standing in the tragic gap, the gap between what is and what we know is possible.

“No one who has stood for high values—love, truth, justice—has died being able to declare victory, once and for all,” he said in an interview in The Sun. “If we embrace values like those, we need to find ways to stand in the gap for the long haul, and be prepared to die without having achieved our goals.”

Effectiveness must be secondary to faith-fulness, Palmer says.

A few months ago I marched again, this time with 400,000 other people, down Central Park West and through Times Square. The march was organized by Bill McKibben’s environ-

BY JEREMY SIERRA

When is a March Like a Prayer?What We Can Do in the Face of Economic Inequality

Suggestions from

Cassandra Agredo Director of Xavier Mission

1. Keep it simple Break the problem down into

manageable steps.

2. Team up Join with other parishes or

organizations that offer services.

3. Be an advocate Write, visit, or call your

representative.

If you’d like more advice: cagredo@xaviermission.org or 212.627.2100.

What you can do

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Trinity News 23

mental group, 350.org, and was meant to spur world leaders to action against climate change.

Not long after I started working at Trinity, I interviewed Bill McKibben. I asked him if he ever feels overwhelmed by the problem of climate change.

“As people of faith,” he said, “we’re not compelled to believe that we have to do it all 100 percent on our own. If we do every-thing we can, then perhaps forces larger than us will meet us halfway. That’s not faith as an excuse for not doing anything, it’s faith as an excuse for not completely despairing while you do everything you can do.”

Despair is perhaps the greatest tempta-tion in the face of problems like poverty.

Sometimes the knowledge of what we can’t do keeps us from doing anything at all. These moments of despair are normal, but to succumb com-pletely to this kind of apathy is to make God small.

“It’s one of those bizarre situations where you focus on the inequality and you never get to the problem,” says Mike Bowling, pastor of Englewood Christian Church in India-napolis. “It doesn’t matter so much what we think needs to be done. What is God doing?”

Englewood’s work grows out of the fact that its members are part of a community. As a community, how can they let their neighbors go hungry or homeless?

This helps them avoid the trap of confusing efficiency for faithfulness, losing sight of people inside the system.

Now Englewood provides child care for 170 children. They have more than sixty units of housing for low-income people. The church itself has only about two hun-dred members.

The Rev. Mark Stevenson, Domestic Poverty Missioner for the Episcopal Church, also recommends an asset-based approach. Ask yourself what resources, gifts, and talents you have, he says. “Start with your

congregation, then branch out to people in the neighborhood.”

He recommends tapping into existing networks, of which there are many, such as Jubilee Ministries and Episcopal Relief and Development. When he feels angry or overwhelmed, seeing the ministry others are doing gives him hope.

“The church is alive and well,” he says. When you are work-ing alongside the poor and the oppressed, you are meeting Jesus in a tangible, sacra-mental way. “God is going to be doing the hard work as you go.”

I also spoke with Cassandra Agredo, Director of Xavier Mission in New York City. Xavier is a nonprofit associated with the Church of St. Francis Xavier, a Catholic church in Manhattan, and it runs a soup kitchen, food pantry, and shel-ter. It also provides skills training and financial assistance.

Suggestions from

Jayce Hafner Domestic Policy Analyst for the Episcopal Public Policy Network

1. Advocate Stay informed about federal, state, and local legislation. Start a relationship with your representatives

to begin a dialogue and let them know what’s important to you.

2. Enter into relationship with those who are most in need This will inform and empower your advocacy work. It’s important to understand that you are mutually learning and being transformed by one another.

You can find out more about what the Episcopal Public Policy Network does and sign up for updates at advocacy.episcopalchurch.org.

What you can do

Suggestions from

Mike Bowling Pastor of Englewood Christian Church

Ask yourself these questions:

1. What is God doing? 2. How is God getting that done? 3. What should we do given our particular gifts? 4. What assets are available to us?

Englewood uses a system similar to that of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University. You can find out more about it at abcdinstitute.org.

What you can do

“You have to break it down into manage-able steps,” Agredo says. “The Xavier Mission is not going to solve hunger.” But it can help the people who come to the doors. It can educate their members and advocate for better policies.

She says she feels better when she meets with other people.

“I am not the only one who is working on this,” she says. “If we can coordinate our ef-forts what we’re doing isn’t so small.”

As Episcopalians, we remind ourselves of this every Sunday morning. We gather

in a world so big that we barely understand it, and we lift our voices to a God we cannot completely comprehend. Our prayers are a faithful surrender to our own smallness in the face of big problems. Our prayers are like helping one hungry person, like sending one letter advocating for better policies, like joining a march. I am small, but I can do this thing. I can step out, and the others at my side give me a hope that I am part of something larger than myself. I can stand in the tragic gap.

Jeremy Sierra is

Managing Editor for

Trinity Wall Street.

24 Trinity News

From the book of Genesis to Revelation, God is revealed as the defender of the poor. Jesus also proclaims that his mission is to bring good news to the poor. The Christian, like Jesus Christ, is called to be one who lives and preaches good news to the poor.

God’s economy is not separate, but rather includes the global economy. The task of the Church, therefore, is to articulate God’s vision for the world and its economy.

Liberation theology offers the best method of identifying the problems caused by poverty and keeping the church’s focus on offering good news to the oppressed. In its early days, liberation theology gained many supporters (and detractors) by professing that God has a “preferential option for the poor.” Liberation theology calls the Church to pay compassionate and prophetic attention to all those who experience oppression and to commit to the liberation of those who are marginalized and oppressed because of class, race, creed, gender, economics, and religious belief. Liberation preaching demands that we listen to the poor and oppressed, understand their cries for justice, stand with them, and advocate on their behalf.

Knowing the truth about how the issues of poverty and the oppression of the poor are referenced in the Scriptures is of utmost importance for the preaching enterprise. It will keep preaching biblical, relevant, and aligned with true worship of the God of life.

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is illustrative of the contrast between God’s economy and many of our present-day economic policies. Dogs licked the sores of the poor man Lazarus, while there is no indication that the rich man even noticed the suffering at his doorstep. At the time of their deaths, Lazarus is comforted, but the rich man is punished for his time of comfort on earth and his lack of attention to the poor. When the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his five brothers, the answer comes back: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced if someone from the dead goes to them” (Luke 16:31).

Effective preaching gives the Church and society new opportunities to hear the message of Moses and the prophets, in hopes they listen as the rich man and his friends did not.

Preaching good news to the poor involves naming the oppression and poverty in our world and showing that God seeks to bring liberation and justice. God is the God of Life and, therefore, against death-dealing poverty. Because poverty is a life-threatening condition that wreaks havoc on the most vulnerable in our society, and because it impacts the well-being, human flourishing, and quality of life of those affected, our response as Christians needs to be a consistent confrontation of the ills of poverty. It must be rooted in the biblical mandate of the God who created us to live in dignity because we are created in the very image and likeness of God.

Those who preach in God’s name, therefore, have a moral obligation to address issues of poverty and its effects. Such preaching must go hand-in-hand with work toward a dismantling of the structures of poverty. Everything that works against a good life for women, immigrants, and minorities must be addressed. The Church must challenge itself and its members to authentic actions of justice and love for the poor, while dismantling any vestiges of the belief that poverty is a virtue or that poverty is the fault of the majority who are poor.

In attending to material poverty and the economic structures that perpetuate poverty, the church and society have new opportunities to hear and respond to those who need help and liberation. The turn and return both to the reality of their suffering and to the Law and prophets are foundational to effective preaching. The pulpit and its preaching become a voice of and for those who are oppressed.

God’s EconomyLiberation Theology and Preaching Good News to the PoorBY MARK BOZZUTI-JONES

Throughout its history, the

Church has wrestled with

poverty and how best to

respond to the plight of

the poor. In this adaptation

from his recently completed

doctorial thesis, the Rev. Dr.

Mark Bozzuti-Jones

considers this question

in light of liberation

theology.

Trinity News 25

God’s economy, as revealed in Scriptures, calls us to respond differently to the human economy we experience day to day. It calls us to a stewardship of all that we have in a way that is not exploitative and to question why there is a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Selfishness is replaced by a care for all and the cries of the poor are attended to in ways that lead to liberation from suffering. Where our economy lives by the law of scarcity, God calls us to a place of abundance and love, where we care for each other. The alternative to our present economic structure is an embrace of God’s economy that leads to a posture of sharing, caring, and a preferential option for the poor—and that message must be preached.

We have a God-given task to confront the issues of poverty, raise awareness of respect for women, welcome the stranger, and assist all who need help; when we call for an end to oppressions and care of the weak we best imitate the preaching that Jesus did.

The Rev. Dr. Mark Bozzuti-Jones is Director of Pastoral Care and Community for Trinity Wall Street.

He received his Doctor of Ministry in Preaching from the Aquinas Institute of Theology in 2014.

God’s EconomyLiberation Theology and Preaching Good News to the PoorBY MARK BOZZUTI-JONES

Eye of the Needle By Mark Bozzuti-Jones

Every human being struggles with life, questions, challenges, and God

Can a faithful church be wealthy? Can a wealthy church be faithful?

Go sell all you have and give the money to the poor

Notice Jesus did not say this to every human being or to every rich person

Go sell all you have and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven

Like Jacob we struggle with God

It is the be or not to be question

It is the question of the eye of the needle

We define ourselves as the ones who love God, neighbor

We don’t love money, we don’t worship money and we agree with God

You can’t love God and money

You can’t serve God and money

All things come of Thee, O Lord

And of Thine own have we given Thee

It takes a lot of courage to proclaim:

We will use our wealth

We will use our Real Estate

We will use all we have to serve and love God

Our greatest treasure, our greatest joy

Is to keep struggling to love and serve the Lord in all things and in all persons

We will feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked and do works of mercy

We will be good news to the poor.

This is our history, challenge, our story and call.

Amen.

Fresco of Lazarus and the Rich Man at the Monastery of Saint Ivan Rila in Bulgaria.

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26 Trinity News

If you’re visiting Christ Church by the Sea in Colón, Panama, consider yourself lucky to have the Rt. Rev. Julio Murray, Bishop of Panama, as your guide. The bishop is a former pastor at Christ Church and never misses a chance to offer a history lesson.

“The work of the church began as a chap-laincy,” Bishop Murray said, explaining that early ministries were directed only to people temporarily living in Panama.

The Panama Railroad ChurchChrist Church by the Sea is the second-oldest non-Roman Catholic church in Latin America, after St. John’s Cathedral in Belize. In this neighborhood, of course, a church consecrated in 1865 is not really very old; certain Roman Catholic churches built by Spain are approaching a half millennium. And just as the dream of wealth brought those conquistadors to Panama, another “gold rush,” in California in the late 1840s, was the genesis of Christ Church by the Sea. Fortune seekers saw the narrow strip of Panama as the quickest way to travel to California. A New York shipping magnate, William Henry Aspinwall, raised a million dollars to build a railroad across the 50-mile-wide isthmus.

The new arrivals from the United States and Britain decided they needed to build a place of worship, originally calling it the Panama Railroad Church. The population of construction workers swelled with the building of the railroad and then exploded with the birth of the most famous thoroughfare across the isthmus, the Panama Canal. Those canal builders included thousands of West Indians.

“Many of my ancestors from Jamaica, Barbados, or Trinidad came to Panama to be part of the construction,” Bishop Murray said. “They came, and they brought with them their religion.”

They were Anglican, and eventually the West Indians joined with other English speakers, U.S. citizens stationed in the Canal Zone, to worship at Christ Church by the Sea.

Regina Jacobs, a parishioner at Trinity Wall Street, recalls attending Christ Church as a little girl.

“My family always sat in one whole pew together,” Jacobs said. “I remember clearly the sun beaming in and looking through the stained-glass windows.”

A Renewed Commitment to ColónFor much of the church’s history, little or no attention was paid to the Spanish-speaking majority in Colón. Bishop Julio Murray has changed that, constantly reminding his listeners of the importance of a bilingual church.

“The richness of the Anglican Church in Panama is our diversity,” Murray noted. “You can step into a congregation and you can either hear English or Spanish.” Or both.

When I attended the 9:30am service on the second Sunday of September 2014, the bishop preached, alternating between Spanish and English. The atmosphere that morning was quite different from my previous visit in May 2012, midway through a four-and-a-half year renovation, when the sanctuary was a gutted shell, a scene Regina Jacobs remembers with distress. “That was an emotional experience, just seeing that it had fallen into such disrepair.”

However, architects Etzel Peña and Sergio Jose Lopez promised restored beauty, and they’ve delivered. Christ Church by the Sea, or as it’s called in Spanish, Iglesia de Cristo a Orillas del Mar, was rededicated on August 24.

“There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re excited about it,” said Patricia Reid, the senior warden.

The congregation offers Bible study and provides classes teaching local children how to cook. Bake sales around Christmas and on Panama’s Independence Day in November draw hundreds of people to the church.

The recent renovation is a symbol of the

stories

A Church for PanamaBY JIM MELCHIORRE

church’s commitment to Colón, where people struggle with high unemployment rates, hundreds of condemned buildings, and crumbling infrastructure leading to frequent street flooding. Talk to folks in Colón and you’ll hear a common lament—that the national government has ignored them.

“Since the year 2000, the economy in Panama has been growing,” economics professor Rubiel Cajar said. “At the moment, the impact is only working in one province, in the capital. Not so in the other provinces.”

A Church for EveryoneColón has its share of luxury housing, surrounded by barbed-wire fences and staffed with security guards, less than a quarter mile from squatter communities such as Playitas, where 300 people live in homes largely built with scrap metal.

A Sunday morning walk through almost any neighborhood in Colón brings the sounds of Pentecostal worship in Spanish. Historically, these are not the folks likely to attend an Episcopal church, but Bishop Murray wants them to know they, and their struggles, are not forgotten.

“This is no longer a foreigner church, this is a church that is made up of people who are born here,” Bishop Murray said. “The challenge is to become that church that looks like the country and to hear about the challenges that the country is facing.”

When I first entered the renovated sanctuary of Christ Church by the Sea, Bishop Murray asked me to look down, pointing out how certain sections of the marble floor shine more brightly. The brighter marble is older, dating back to the construction of the sanctuary in the 1860s.

And maybe that’s a metaphor for this church—a shining legacy of 150 years that continues to brighten the future for the people of Colón.

Jim

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Trinity News 27

WHAT HAVE YOU

learned?

THE REV. DEACON LAUREN HOLDER IS

SENIOR PROGRAM OFFICER FOR COMMUNITY

ENGAGEMENT. SHE JOINED TRINITY IN

JULY 2014, AND SHE WILL BE ORDAINED TO

THE PRIESTHOOD IN JANUARY 2015.

THE ROLE OF THE DEACON is to serve. If you are a geek like me and enjoy studying Greek, the term deacon is derived from diakonos, which can mean servant or waitstaff. As a deacon, I actually get to set the table. But a deacon’s service is not limited to the table. The deacon’s vocation is to serve all people, and the poor especially.

AS A TRANSITIONAL DEACON, I only get to claim the title “deacon” for the six months before I am ordained a priest on January 17th. However, the call of the deacon will always abide in the fabric of my vocation and will forever be what I was first ordained to.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT REQUIRES listening, flexibility, time, and a mixture of intentionality and whim.

WHILE IN WEST AFRICA I ate a lot of delicious food that I didn’t think was delicious until I had lived there at least three months. I also danced a lot in worship.

I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO MY ORDINATION TO THE PRIESTHOOD because I've been waiting and preparing for both the moment of ordina-tion and the vocation of the priesthood for years and years. Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” For me, to be ordained a priest is to be fully alive.

RUNNING HELPS me clear my head and listen to God.

WHAT SURPRISES ME ABOUT TRINITY is how much I can be present during worship. The vergers and the acolytes and the sound team and the musicians—all the many, many parts that make Trinity’s worship possible—also make it possible for me to just be, without worrying about every detail. It is such a joy to worship during worship rather than thinking or planning during worship. I love it.

WHEN I PREACH I pray throughout my entire sermon. And sometimes I get very excited—those are my favorite sermons—when the Gospel feels like it could shoot straight out of my heart and mouth.

OUR COMMUNITY CAN SERVE OUR NEIGHBORS by figuring out what we can do well together and focusing on that, rather than trying to do it all.

BECAUSE MY HUSBAND DOES TELEVISION NEWS I am a more grounded person—Jay is always my reality check. It also makes for an interesting schedule at home, as I stay up very late to see him after work and try to sleep in late to make up for it. We are morning people living in a night owl’s world.

THE CONGREGATION OF TRINITY has shown me compassion and love—and quickly too. The people are the absolute best part of Trinity, alongside the people’s worship!

LIVING IN NEW YORK CITY is an adventure every day.

I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO meeting our first child when s/he arrives this summer and learning how to be parents, all with the love and support of our Trinity community!

28 Trinity News

perspectivesP A R I S H

Parishioner Kevin Grant gives a child a dental check-up in the Lower Ninth Ward during Trinity’s Mission and Service Trip to New Orleans.

Oliva George reads at the 11:15am Eucharist.

Jolie Curley on Halloween.

The Rev. Deacon Lauren Holder blesses a pet in Battery Park in honor of St. Francis.

Parishioners place crosses in the ground of the churchyard to remember loved ones on All Saints’ Sunday.

The Rev. Dr. James Cooper baptizes a young parishioner on All Saints’ Sunday.

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Spread the WordDo you have news to share with the rest of the Trinity community? Email your news, milestones, and updates to news@trinitywallstreet.org or call 212.602.9686.

Ariella LouieOn November 3, Ariella Louie, Program Coordinator for All Our Children, attended an announcement by Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York, about his administration’s plans to expand community schools in New York City. Ninety-four Renewal Schools—schools that have been identified as struggling—will be supported by the community school approach.Louie is on the mayor’s community schools advisory board, which is helping design a strategy for implementing the community school model in New York City.

Evan DavisEvan Davis, vestry member and Chancellor of the Parish, was honored at the Episcopal Charities 2014 Tribute Dinner on November 19. Eight hundred people attended the annual dinner, held in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and raised more than $900,000.

Dickson Chilongani The Rev. Canon Benjamin Musoke-Lubega attended the consecration of the new bishop of the Diocese of Central Tanganyika, Tanzania, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Dickson Chilongani. Bishop Chilongani visited Trinity in 2011 as part of a delegation of Provincial Secretaries from across Africa.

Joe BreedJoe Breed is retiring after 23 years as Executive Director of St. Margaret’s House. St. Margaret’s House is Trinity’s home for the elderly and disabled, and is named in honor of the Sisters of St. Margaret who had agreed to join Trinity in their ministry to the elderly.

Julian WachnerJulian Wachner, Trinity’s Director of Music and the Arts, recently conducted the San Francisco Opera in its production of Handel’s Partenope and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in a concert of Bach, Handel, and Teleman. He was also profiled by The Washington Post.

Mark Bozzuti-JonesThe Rev. Dr. Mark Bozzuti-Jones completed his Doctorate of Ministry at the Aquinas Institute of Theology. His thesis was titled “Good News to the Poor: Effective Preaching Through the Lens of Liberation Theology.”

New York Marathon Alyssa Panzarino, Program Assistant for Anglican Partnerships, ran in the New York City Marathon—her first—November 2. She ran with Team for Kids, a charity that raises money for physical fitness and running programs in schools. Steven Hrycelak, a member of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, also ran the marathon with Kelvin Chan, a former choir member.

Sister Gloria Shirley Sister Gloria is celebrating 50 years as a sister and her 80th birthday in December. She has been serving the Trinity community as a mem-ber of the Sisters of St. Margaret for more than 10 years.

Trinity PreschoolLinda Smith, Director of the Trinity Preschool, and head teachers Elzbieta H. Szarwark and Justine Willey, presented at the 2014 National Association of Episcopal Schools’ 50th Annual Biennal Conference. Their presentation focused on their approach to using art in the classroom.

Westina Matthews ShatteenTrinity vestry member Westina Matthews Shatteen was invited to contribute to Forward Movement’s annual book of daily meditations, Meeting God Day by Day. Matthews has contributed to several Forward Movement publications in the past.

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The Most Rev. Justin Welby The Archbishop of Canterbury

Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel and Dimed; This Land Is Their Land

Robert Reich former Secretary of Labor (Skype Q&A)

Cornel West The Rich and the Rest of Us

Make Economic Inequality your Lenten Adult Education Theme

Free Lent curricula at TI2015.org/lent

TRINITY INSTITUTE FEATURED:

The Trinity Institute 2015 conference presents speakers who provide hopeful, practical tools to make a positive economic impact.

Free curricula from the conference will be available in February to use during Lent. Hear innovative ideas from the Most Rev. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cornel West, Barbara Ehrenreich, Robert Reich, the Rt. Rev. Julio Murray, and many others. Curricula include full-length video classes and reflection materials perfect for adult education classes.