It's been about a year and a half since I posted here. I'm now working on a different church history project, but just as interesting in it's own way, and even more challenging because of it's ramifications for our present and future life on earth.
Saturday, I attended about my fourth joint meeting of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama’s Commission on Race Relations and parish historians, at St. Mark’s in Birmingham. I have been attending as an assistant parish historian from Canterbury Chapel in Tuscaloosa. I finally decided to “blog” a little bit about it partly because we need to spread information about our work, and this is one – but only one – way to do that. And, also because this area of Alabama church history is fascinating to me for several reasons. More about that later.
Our group is preparing for the Diocesan Convention in Florence in mid–February. Bishop Parsley has given us a few minutes in the midst of a tightly packed schedule of events that weekend to tell delegates and attendees about “the commission.” Along with our fifteen minutes of fame on Friday at noon, we will have an exhibition in the same conference space. It will consist of three large (36x48") panels making a timeline of the history of the Diocese of Alabama from 1828 through 2010. We also plan to have handouts for those interested in researching their parish’s history and someone there to answer questions about the group and the work. So if you are going to the Diocesan Convention, please look for us.
Who are we and what are we doing?
In 2008, at the 177th Diocesan Convention of the Episcopal Church in Alabama, the convention passed two closely related resolutions in response to the resolutions adopted by the national church at the General Convention in 2006 concerning race relations and reconciliation (the primary resolution was A123, but there were four in all).
One resolution (#3) urges parishes to include a prayer for peace in weekly prayers of the people, and affirms our Baptismal Covenant that calls each of us to ‘strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.’”
The other resolution (#5) calls us, as the Church, to be “ ‘the repairer of the breach’ consistent with Isaiah 58:12,” calls for a Day of Repentance to be declared” within the diocese, and “that the Commission on Race Relations be directed to develop resources for both parish and diocesan use, to document the role of The Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Alabama in condoning and supporting slavery, segregation, discrimination and the efforts undertaken by the Church to repair and rectify the same and pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit toward the responses that will lead us to peace, harmony and reconciliation.”
So, they did and we are.
Individual members of the group have been working on various projects, some working on documenting their parish’s history, taking oral histories of older parishioners who have long institutional memories, others are researching the early history of their town and/or county, gathering information about the larger land owners, who inevitably were also the larger slave owners, to see what these slave owners had their slaves build and what their money supported. More on the projects in a future posting.
Click here and search for 'slavery' to see listed all Episcopal Church resolutions on slavery.
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