In cities, towns, and suburbs, parishes are discovering food insecurity is everywhere.
FROM BISHOP WAYNE SMITH
Most downtown parishes attuned to their locale know that there are hungry people all around them. Almost all our parishes, anywhere, are discovering that food insecurity is hardly limited to the cities. Suburban parishes and others are also awakening to an under-utilized resource right around them—land for gardening or even farming. The produce from this land can then help feed hungry people and alleviate food insecurity. Or it can be sold to raise money for outreach ministries. A grand economy for mission ensues as these resources and human needs intertwine.
This issue of Connections includes an in-depth story about food ministries around the Diocese of Southern Ohio. Big parishes and little ones; in cities, towns, and suburbs; through food pantries, meals, ecumenical and interfaith partnerships, and growing the food itself—Episcopalians are finding venues for engaging God’s mission. The church’s assets and divine calling in this instance mesh with a real, and sometimes urgent, need in the world around us.
We serve a Savior known for eating meals in the company of friends and strangers, often with the wrong sort of people, according to the dominant culture in that time. The gospels include seven accounts of Jesus’ miraculous feeding of a multitude, the only miracle told in all four gospels. On the night he was handed over to suffering and death, Jesus took bread, and he took a cup. Jesus blessed food and drink, and naming them his body and blood, he identified himself with them. These ordinary things of life then become gifts entrusted to us, Jesus’ disciples, for the life of the world.
The long passage about Jesus and bread in John 6 provides a worthy reflection on the life-giving food ministries which many of us share, and I commend it to you. I also commend the stories in this magazine to you. I urge food ministries for every parish, and every believer.
Sharing God’s Bounty Food ministries flourish across the diocese.
BY NANCY BRYANTrinity, Columbus is on a mission in the capital.
BY NANCY BRYAN BY NANCY BRYANHolly Fidler takes the reins at Bethany School.
BY NANCY BRYANThe diocese deepens its commitment to Creating Beloved Community BY
JIM NAUGHTONEditorial Staff editor
Jim Naughton writer Nancy Bryan designer Jacob Bilich canon for communications Julie Murray
About the Magazine
Connections Magazine is published by the Diocese of Southern Ohio, 412 Sycamore Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202-4179. This publication is funded by mission share payments to the diocesan operating budget and is available at no charge to all members of congregations in the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio.
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Connections Magazine 412 Sycamore Street Cincinnati, OH 45202-4179
BY JAMES ALLSOP
By Nancy Bryan
by Megan Jelinger
Photos
Lyric Morris-Latchaw, custodian of Church of the Advent, Cincinnati’s garden
Food begets community. Just ask the churches across the Diocese of Southern Ohio that grow it, harvest it, process it, sell it, prepare it, serve it and distribute it. Whether they feed the hungry or cultivate the soil, congregations that sponsor food ministries are finding plentiful opportunities to share God’s love— and God’s bounty—with neighbors and strangers alike.
Church of the Advent on the near east side of Cincinnati has long understood the power of food to create community. The church’s expansive food ministry is part of its Open Door program, which began almost fifty years ago and has evolved to meet the needs of its Walnut Hill neighborhood. Today it seeks to respond to physical needs, especially the food insecurity experienced by many of its neighbors, and to the emotional and spiritual needs of loneliness and isolation.
Each Wednesday morning, the parish offers a food pantry and café that provides fresh produce, meat, dairy, canned goods, and pantry staples, as well as hot coffee and warm conversation, while observing COVID-mitigating protocols when local health data dictates. Through these conversations, the Open Door team learned that many of the church’s neighbors could not make it to the church on Wednesday
morning, and so other initiatives were born. The Just Food Project began in 2021, and now includes a garden, an orchard and frequent community meals. A Free Fridge has also recently opened.
“The question seems to be, ‘What can we do uniquely?’” said Matt Latchaw, minister for community engagement at Church of the Advent, who joined the staff early in the pandemic. “Can we return to making space for people to sit and be with one another again? Could we, as a congregation, meet Christ in our neighbors? How can we begin to see where God is already at work rather than being a provider of goods?”
The Good News Garden, located a few blocks from the church, is at the heart of the project. The garden came under Advent’s care in 2021, and the church hired Lyric Morris-Latchaw, who is married to Latchaw, as its custodian. The garden hosts volunteer days on Tuesday evenings and Friday mornings and donates its harvest to the congregation’s own food pantry and to other neighborhood pantries and meal programs.
Its produce includes annual and perennial vegetables and fruits, and gardeners try to accommodate requests from clients of the food pantry. Tomatoes,
green tomatoes, collard greens, okra, and peppers have been popular this year. The garden also grows flowers that are distributed at the pantry and donated to a local pollinator habitat.
“The garden has provided a connection to memories and family histories for clients, volunteers from the congregation and those from the neighborhood,” Latchaw said. “Recalling foods served by parents and grandparents and re-creating those remembered family recipes has been a source of delight for many who have come to us in this space.”
In addition to the garden, the parish has worked with Cincinnati’s Common Orchard Project to plant a cherry tree and two varieties each of apple, pear, and peach trees on church grounds. The young trees will produce only a small yield next year, but the harvest will increase as the trees grow.
The earliest Christian communities gathered around a meal, and the power of table fellowship is not lost on the leaders of Church of the Advent. In 2021, they initiated the Holy Family Service at 5 p. m. on Saturday evenings, conceiving it—in the words of the parish’s website—as “a new Episcopal community of faith and practice exploring creative ways to gather around food, hospitality, the arts, and the life of the neighborhood.”
The Rev. Jason Oden, who served as Advent’s priest-in-charge until he became the diocese’s canon for formation and new Episcopal communities, believes the service “emphasizes the relationship between liturgy and mission.”
“Outreach is a result of a vibrant congregation,” he said.
Parish leaders have designed the service, which concludes with a meal, in the hopes of reaching people who may have become disconnected from the faith of their childhood or who are seeking new ways to express their faith.
Latchaw sees all of Advent’s ministries as part of a larger whole. “We want to work with our neighbors and with other groups to advocate for our neighborhood and its needs,” he said. “Can we provide a space for health care or work with the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation toward ending the local food desert?
There has been no grocery store here for five years.”
Seventy-five miles northeast of Walnut Hills, All Saints, Washington Court House also grows crops to complement its traditional food ministry. The Come Grow with Us program began in 2011 when parishioner Bob Rea donated the use of 22 acres on which crops— corn that first year—could be raised and sold to subsidize the congregation’s outreach ministries.
“I stole the idea and modified it,” Rea said, explaining that he was inspired by Warren Buffett’s son Howard, a commercial farmer, who donates to local food banks through family farms in Illinois and Nebraska.
Over the years, other parishioners and neighbors have joined the effort, offering land for planting, and donating seeds, fertilizer and labor for planting, cultivating, and harvesting the crop. The program has continued, using land on several farms—most owned by members of the All Saints congregation—to grow soybeans or corn.
The program’s success lies in “being connected and knowing who to call,” Rea said. “When folks have hundreds of acres of farmland, asking that 20 acres be set aside is a deeply appreciated but small commitment of their land.”
Local businesses, particularly Cargill, a multi-national corporation that operates grain elevators in nearby Bloomingburg, also have chipped in. “Agribusinesses often have marketing budgets, money that they may have a hard time placing in small communities,” Rea said. “Cargill has been a willing partner for us along the way.”
“We want to work with our neighbors and with other groups to advocate for our neighborhood and its needs.”
This year, the program had 31 acres under cultivation and raised $14,500 for All Saints’s outreach programs. In its 11 years of operation, Come Grow with Us has raised between $10,000 and $20,000 each year, and all of the money has been donated to area ministries through All Saints and its parish leadership team. The St. Vincent DePaul Society of St. Colman of Cloyne Catholic Church is a regular beneficiary, as are the local food bank, Second Chance Center of Hope, and an area pregnancy center.
Rea said an invitation he issued through the diocese to other rural parishes to develop similar programs to fund their outreach ministries remains open.
The parish has also collaborated with Cargill to start the Harvest Express Program, which allows farmers to donate a portion of their grain to help fund community programs. That initiative was the feature of a video presentation at diocesan convention in 2013 and may be found on the diocesan YouTube channel.
“We’re a small parish and don’t have the manpower to accomplish all these ministries on our own,” said the Rev. Warren Huestis, the priest at All Saints, a Lutheran-Episcopal congregation formed in 2018. “Funding programs in the larger community allows us to participate even if we’re not always ‘hands on.’”
Along the Ohio River, on the diocese’s southern border, the Rev. Joshua Nelson also knows what it
is like to minister in communities where poverty is common. He serves Grace Church in Pomeroy and St. Peter’s Church in Gallipolis, two small, 180-yearold parishes with outreach ministries that are essential to their communities.
St. Peter’s has hosted a meals program, called Loaves and Fishes, for more than 30 years. The ministry, which is supported by a grant from Episcopal Community Ministries, provides a hot noon meal one Sunday a month, said Nelson, who grew up in nearby Circleville and began his ministry with the two churches in February 2021.
During the pandemic, the ministry switched from a plated meal to carryout boxes, which kept people fed but resulted in what Nelson called a loss of “the community that was so important to its ministerial identity.” In recent months, they have resumed indoor dining, and are seeing a return of members of the community, “not necessarily in need of food, but looking for fellowship and community,” Nelson said. The congregation recently purchased a grill, and that provides what Nelson describes as “olfactory advertising.”
St. Peter’s and the churches with which it collaborates in Loaves and Fishes also make items such as used clothing and shoes, toiletries, diapers and feminine hygiene products available to their guests on the Sundays they serve meals. The program “is not a feeding ministry per se, but another way to build a different kind of community,” Nelson said.
The church’s location in downtown Gallipolis makes its front yard an ideal spot for the town’s Tiny Pantry box. Nelson said the church tries to pay special attention to the unhoused people in Gallipolis, making sure easy-to-eat items like fruit cups and canned Vienna sausages are available.
“At least every day somebody comes by and gets something from there,” he said. “It’s another kind of extended community.”
BY MEGAN JELINGER
Trinity, Columbus is on a mission in the capital. By Nancy Bryan
In January, Trinity Episcopal Church in Columbus hosted a state-sponsored event celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The featured speakers included the Rev. Joel L. King, an Ohio-based Baptist minister who was Dr. King’s cousin. The Rev. Jed Dearing, Trinity’s newly arrived associate rector, was scheduled to preach the following Sunday, and he asked the Rev. King what challenge he would place before him.
“Ask why they are making me, in my 80s, fight the same fight around voting rights and education. Is that the world they want to go back to?” King said. Dearing took his advice, preaching on the importance of the church’s ongoing work of justice.
Trinity, which sits across the street from Capitol Square, faces a distinctive challenge. “We seek to be open, to be a place of prayer for everyone, and yet to maintain a relationship with government, given our proximity to the statehouse,” Dearing said.
One way Trinity turns its “resource of location” toward the cause of justice is by offering hospitality to activists seeking to influence the state and local governments. After George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, the church became a safe space for protesters, offering water and restroom facilities. More recently, on the Sunday following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, parishioner Harriet Donaldson was moved by a prayer about gun violence offered during the liturgy.
“Here we are across from statehouse, why aren’t we doing something to get conversation about this issue?” she said recently. “Everyone in the legislature should hear this prayer. I want to march over to the statehouse and say ‘this is ridiculous, pass some laws to stop the violence.’”
In August, when the city planned to bulldoze a nearby encampment of unhoused people that had sprung up on city-owned land, Trinity and 15 other organizations organized an event to draw attention to the needs of those living in the encampment. By the end of the following week, the city had found housing for everyone.
“There is an energy around standing up for neighbors, advocating – attending something a little more on the fringes,” Dearing said. “We don’t always see the breadth of resources beyond church and the ways collaborative action can make a difference.”
Rev. Jed Dearing and parishioners Patricia Ewing and Ken Leslie represented Trinity’s hot meal program at an event the parish helped organize on behalf of an encampment of unhoused people.
Trinity also makes its space available to programs that serve those in need. The parish’s In the Garden ministry provides a homemade hot lunch for the hungry each Sunday afternoon. The program, which is supported by a grant from Episcopal Community Ministries, also draws new volunteers to the parish.
“In the Garden brings in suburban churches, making them aware of the struggles of downtown,” Donaldson said. “Families don’t live downtown, so it has to be activism or cultural events that brings folks in.”
Pre-COVID, Trinity was open during colder months from morning through mid-afternoon as a respite location and warming station. With the availability of vaccines, that work has resumed with more limited hours, both to maintain safety protocols and because neighboring organizations have taken on similar programs.
Keeping the church’s doors open is not necessarily easy, said long-time parishioner Debbie Wiedwald, “yet we are committed to being welcoming to all.”
Trinity recently held an adult education series asking “Who is Our Neighbor?” One session featured members of the Homeless Outreach Team from the Capital Crossroads Special Improvement District. “Trinity continues to grow, evolve, get better,” Wiedwald said. “We are getting to know the needs of the downtown community, offering both homeless ministry and early music performances, to meet the needs of everyone connected to downtown.”
This summer, the parish hosted the diocese’s first Pride Eucharist and served as a step off point for the Pride march, offering hospitality as members of the LGBTQ+ community took the lead both in liturgical planning and behind the scenes. “Both here in the diocese and as part of my seminary experience at [Church Divinity School of the Pacific], the question we are learning to ask is what the queer community teaches us about who God is and the building of community and family,” Dearing said.
Recently, the parish partnered with Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church and University Center on the Ohio State University campus to host the documentary filmmakers of “Are We There Yet.” The new film explores the Doctrine of Discovery and its impact
on the church through the lenses of white supremacy, religiously motivated violence and the efforts of the Standing Rock Sioux to protect their land against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Participants demonstrated what Dearing called a “hunger for deepening theological language on these issues” during a 40-minute question-and-answer period.
Dearing credits longtime rector, the Rev. Richard Burnett, who retired in 2021, with shaping the parish for the work of advocacy through liturgical formation. The church’s custom of walking the Stations of the Cross around the Statehouse on Good Friday was a call to recognize “that Jesus on the cross is our persecuted neighbor,” he said. The tradition continued in Holy Week 2022 with the Rev. Stephen Applegate, who arrived in August 2021 as Trinity’s interim priest-in-charge.
The formative power of Trinity’s justice and advocacy work was recently brought home to Dearing during a brief exchange with a student at the nearby Ohio State University. The student had grown up in the parish but stopped attending services until their involvement in campus activism brought them back.
“My involvement in advocacy comes from something I learned at church,” the student said. “I needed to come back and connect with what that was.”
On July 20, the Rev. Canon Scott Gunn, then-president of the Standing Committee and executive director of Forward Movement, had a cardiac arrest at Singapore Changi Airport while on his way to a vacation in Vietnam. When he collapsed, he sustained a traumatic brain injury, “as a bonus,” he says. While Gunn’s immediate prognosis was not good, the speed and fullness of his recovery surprised his doctors. After 12 days in the hospital, he spent an additional 39 days in Singapore, participating in various kinds of rehabilitative therapies and waiting for the swelling of his brain to subside. When, on September 8, he shared the news that he had been cleared to travel home, it set off a celebration on Episcopal Twitter, where Gunn is a popular figure. Jim Naughton of Connections Magazine spoke with Gunn in early November about his experience. The transcript of their conversation has been edited for clarity.
You had a significant brain injury, and that can complicate memory and perception. When did you first begin to understand what was happening to you?
What I’ve now learned is that it’s very common for people who have injuries like mine to lose chunks of their memory. So for the most part, the first thing I remember is getting discharged from the hospital on August 1, in Singapore. And I do remember Sherilyn [Gunn’s spouse, the Rev. Sherilyn Pearce] explaining to me—she probably explained it to me five times before my remembering it—why I was in the hospital, that my heart had stopped, that I had hurt my head, and it took me a while to just grasp the magnitude of that.
And then Sherilyn told me something else, and at first I thought I misheard her, that I wasn’t hearing it right. So she showed me in writing that when I had the cardiac arrest, they did CPR on me for 59 minutes, and it took six shocks to get my heart going again. And that’s a miracle.
And so part of what I was trying to figure out all at once is, what does this mean for my health, and also, how in the world did I live through this? So it has been a combination of the facts of the situation—You know, what happened? What’s the prognosis? What does the recovery journey look like? Just the facts, ma’am, to paraphrase Dragnet. And then also there’s the meaning of it. Why did this happen—if there’s a known reason?
And I cannot tell you how many medical people I’ve now spoken with who have all used the word miracle, and that introduces a whole other layer of meaning.
I am assuming that being who you are, you have drawn pretty heavily on your faith and your theological understandings as you tried to make meaning of this.
You’re right. The meaning I make of this comes largely out of my theological and spiritual beliefs. Although, it’s interesting, I have had some conversations with unchurched, nonreligious friends, and even if they’re unlikely to involve God in the equation, I think there’s a sense of, ‘Okay, Scott, you dodged a bullet. You didn’t die. So use your Act Two well.’
For me, I think there are a million questions, but one of the ones that comes to mind is ‘Why me?’ And if it’s true that this is a miracle—a real, honest-togosh miracle—what does this mean?
I think it must mean that God has some work or some calling in mind for me. And I was already serving in the church, so it wasn’t like I was goofing off, you know, about God’s presence in my life. But I do think it has given me some urgency to reflect on all sorts of things with greater urgency and clarity.
Was there a point when you just said, ‘Oh, I’m going to survive?’ when you knew the immediate threat was passed?
Probably the first time I went to a follow-up appointment after I was discharged from the hospital, I went to visit a cardiologist who took care of me in Sin-
“And if it’s true that this is a miracle … what does this mean?”
gapore, and he told me I have a defibrillator implanted now. And he told me that I didn’t need to worry about what happened, that if that ever happened again, my defibrillator would fix it 100% guaranteed, rock solid, I didn’t need to worry about that, and that I’d be good to go, that I had a couple issues to sort out. But he was very reassuring about my long-term prospects.
Sometimes after a brain injury people have a hard time trusting their perceptions. Did you experience that? How are you working through it?
In the Department of Things I’ve Learned this Year, I only knew the vaguest things about brain injuries, and now I know more. And you are exactly right. I
couldn’t always trust my own perception and analysis of things, and most of the time I was aware enough to know that. So I would come up with an idea, and I would say to Sherilyn, my loving spouse who flew over right away and was with me in Singapore during my recovery and healing, ‘I have such and such an idea. Is this crazy, or does this sound rational?
And sometimes she said, ‘I think that’s not quite rational.’ And sometimes she said, ‘No, no, that’s rational.’ So I had her there to be to help me, to be a compass.
But that was very difficult and it was a huge relief to visit the neurosurgeon last week and have her say, I’m good to go, I don’t need to come back. It’s pretty
likely I won’t have any more symptoms from my brain injury. And she didn’t say it was a miracle, but she just said I’m very fortunate because people with the kind of injuries I had—usually it takes longer to recover, but it seems like I’ve healed up really well.
It sounds as though you and Sherilyn had a real experience of community at St. Hilda’s Church in Singapore during your recovery.
Yes. It’s an amazing church. I just think that as a church and as individuals there, they spend more time praying than I think a lot of us do in the Episcopal Church. As I reflect on my time at St. Hilda’s I’m struck by the way they pray for very specific things. Not just “we pray for our bishops,” but “we pray for our bishop who has an important meeting this afternoon” or whatever it is. And I think there’s something really powerful about that.
Has your sense of urgency changed as your recovery has progressed?
I think early on, back in August and early September, I was still trying to understand my physical condition and trying to figure out if I needed to wrap up my affairs because I had days or weeks. On the plus side, I realized I wasn’t afraid of death. Death didn’t scare me, but I of course don’t want to die. I thought, okay, if the worst-case scenario here is I end up dead, I’m not afraid of that. I have faith. Okay.
As my healing has continued, and as I’ve spoken with more doctors and gotten good reports, every indication says this is something I’ll be telling stories about 25 years from now, which has changed my perspective because it’s not so much, “What am I going to do in the next hour?” but “How do I need to shape and direct my life?”
I think there’s still some urgency because I don’t want to squander the gift I’ve been given, but more a sense that I’m navigating a ship and not a kayak, as it were.
You have preached and written about your experience. What has felt urgent to communicate?
I think what’s felt urgent is to communicate that God’s love for us—generally for creation, but also individually and specifically for you and for me—is vast, is bigger than we can comprehend, that God loves you deeply and God loves me deeply. I hope my
life reflects gratitude for that love. It’s so very simple. But so often, I think in church, we talk all around the essential stuff, but we don’t get to the most important things.
Are there things about it that are impossible to communicate, that you just sort of despair to put across the people?
I don’t know that it’s impossible to communicate, but really, I have this desire to convey the sense that every single day and every single moment in that day is a gift from God. I don’t think I palpably understood that the way that I do now.
When I was a parish priest, one of the things that I—enjoyed isn’t quite the right word—but I found it very powerful to spend time with people who were confronting death. Either their own impending death if they were ill, or grieving a loved one who had just died. Because around the time of death, all the distraction of life goes away. And as I’ve said before, I never once met somebody near the end of their life who said, ‘Gosh, I wish I had worked harder on my job.’ Or, ‘I wish I had prioritized getting a new car every three years instead of every four.’ The regrets were always, ‘I wish I’d spent more time with friends, with family.’
And I think almost dying is like confronting death in that way. And it just kind of reorders things. It makes me realize there are all kinds of things I don’t need to worry about. It doesn’t mean I won’t worry about small things sometimes. But it’s helping my perspective.
I always like to end interviews by asking people if there’s something they wanted to tell me that I didn’t give them the opportunity to say.
I would hope that people who know someone who’s going through a life triumph or trauma might have a conversation like this one at the right time. I can have this conversation now because it’s more than three months after the event, and I’ve had some time to process what’s happened. I couldn’t have had it in early August. And I think if anyone reading this knows someone who has faced a trauma in their life or some kind of great triumph in their life, they probably have some compelling meaning that they’ve made of it. Ask them about it.
When Bethany School began looking for its new head of school last summer, the search committee was seeking a candidate who was warm and empathetic, transparent in their dealings, committed to fostering a close-knit community, and enthusiastic about Bethany’s identity as the only Episcopal school in Ohio.
By spring, they had made their choice.
“Holly Fidler is this candidate,” Karen Ryan, president of the school’s board of trustees, wrote in a letter to the Bethany community announcing Fidler’s hiring. “Bethany is well-poised to accomplish great things in the years ahead under Holly’s leadership.”
Fidler is an Episcopal school alumna who has previously served as head of the lower school at the Wellington School in Columbus and principal of the lower school at St. Paul Academy and Summit School in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has also taught in the public schools of both Columbus and Cleveland, where she started her career in 1999 after earning a master’s in education from the Ohio State University.
She brings a strong strategic outlook, and what Sharon Shumard, the school’s director of community engagement, called “a genuine sense of compassion” to the job.
Fidler said her coursework in educational studies at Emory University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in French, aided the realization that teaching “was always who I was.” The word “commitment” comes up frequently when she describes what drew her to Bethany, a coeducational, K-8 school with 165 students on a 23-acre campus in Glendale.
“Bethany School lives out its values and identity as an institution committed to justice and diversity,” she said. “Our physical plant’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification was a huge commitment exemplifying that the school ‘walks the walk.’ This opportunity to work in a faith-based setting that leads with its spiritual identity was exciting to me.”
In her first months in the new job, Fidler has been inviting community
members, including Episcopalians in the Cincinnati area, to discover a thriving school that those who know it consider a well-kept secret.
“When I visit area high schools, I talk about what you’re going to get when you inherit a student from Bethany School: curious, kind, justice-minded, resilient, empathetic, good members of the community,” she said. “These, far beyond grades, are predictors of how a person will live and contribute to society.”
Founded 125 years ago by the sisters of the Community of the Transfiguration, the school was conceived as a countryside respite for girls living in central Cincinnati. It remained a girls’ school until 1963, and a boarding school until 1977, when it began its current incarnation. Founded during the late 19th-century backlash against the Industrial Revolution, the school provided an “open-air space” that could develop the whole child, and this emphasis on developing students’ minds, bodies and spirits is still apparent today.
Students participated recently in a Blessing of Animals for St. Francis Day with clergy from Christ Church, Glendale, and the school also creates other ways to interact with its neighbors. “The school … draws the community in, engaging through athletic competitions and events,” Fidler said. “We are a small school, but one with a big impact on our community.”
The school lives out its values not only by educating children, but by doing so in an environmentally friendly way. In constructing the two buildings in which all of its academic activities now take place, the school installed 108 geothermal wells and a new stormwater drainage system. The buildings, both completed since 2018, exceed the LEED standards established by the U.S. Green Building Council and are rated as the second most energy-efficient school buildings in the country.
LEED certification is only one step in a green school initiative. Recently, all faculty members were certified as green educators, and the insights gained in that process are “shifting the way we live in the school,” Fidler said. Several student organizations also focus on sustainability, exploring the campus for opportunities to follow better environmental practices inside the classroom and out.
While highlighting environmental concerns, the school also partners with Magnified Giving, a local non-profit for which students design projects to assist organizations in the greater Cincinnati area.
About three-quarters of the school’s students are children of color, and only 10 percent are Episcopalians. The school provides them with opportunities to explore what spirituality means to them, not only through curriculum and prayer, but also in everyday experiences with their peers and community. Students attend chapel services once a week and also attend religion classes twice a week, where they learn about world religions, ethics, Bible stories, and religious traditions.
In conversations with Fidler and her staff, the phrase “come and see” echoed repeatedly. “I hope Bethany School will be a place for all, committed to helping children grow in faith, to know what it means to be part of a community and a contributor to that community, oriented toward justice and acting on their passions and compassion toward others,” Fidler said. “We have a reputation for being a great school. Our definition of that is laid out in tenets of faithfulness, upstanding citizenry, and academic strength through the resilience and perseverance it takes to learn, grow and thrive.”
When she began work on a new curriculum to deepen diocesan leaders’ understanding of the work of dismantling racism, Miriam McKenney knew there were many methods and curricula already in circulation across the Episcopal Church. She thought getting back to basics might be helpful.
“The approach I like to take is that honoring difference is really important, and the best way to do that is through the things we share in common, like Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer,” McKenney said. Her curriculum had its inaugural outing in Thursday night Zoom sessions in October as part of the diocese’s Becoming Beloved Community initiative.
McKenney, director of development and mission engagement for Forward Movement and a consultant to the Beloved Community initiative, said she appreciates the diocesan leadership team’s willingness to move beyond “the kind of training where people are just checking a box,” and give participants in antiracism trainings and other Beloved Community offer-
ings, “an experience where they can understand some of the nuances people can only understand when they get to know each other.”
The new curriculum exemplifies the diocese’s evolving understanding and deepening commitment to its Becoming Beloved Community initiative.
“We have adopted Becoming Beloved Community as our paradigm,” said the Rev. Jason Oden, canon for formation and new Episcopal communities, whose department now oversees the work. “Anything the formation team creates has to be part of the work of beloved community,” he said. “It encompasses everything we believe is about discipleship in the Episcopal Church.”
The work of Becoming Beloved Community, while always important, has taken on new urgency since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, Oden said. “The church became more conscious of this work, and is adopting it as some of the primary work of the church,” he said. “We are starting to understand the ways it informs what discipleship is all about.”
Becoming Beloved Community, which is deeply influenced by the work of Catherine Meeks, Ph.D., founding executive director of the Absalom Jones Episcopal Center for Racial Healing, is built around what is sometimes referred to as the Fourfold Path: Telling the Truth, Proclaiming the Dream, Repairing the Breach, and Practicing the Way of Love. The Episcopal Church offers numerous resources to promote Becoming Beloved Community work, and in Southern Ohio, the diocesan initiative draws upon these churchwide resources as well as the gifts of local leaders.
BY HOWARD HELVEYitsPHOTO Miriam McKenney
McKenney and Oden co-facilitated the group that piloted the diocese’s new curriculum. After a brief introduction, the small group gathered on Zoom broke into pairs to talk about the role of race and racial privilege in their backgrounds and to discuss occasions when their “social location” within American racial and class hierarchies either helped or hindered them.
Later, drawing on the Book of Revelation, Oden told the group that the work of Becoming Beloved Community was similar to the process of receiving a revelation. “It’s about the scales being pulled from your eyes,” he said. Then, when one sees clearly that one is entangled in corrupt and racist systems, “you have to make a choice,” he said. “Am I going to be complicit? Or am I going to pull out of this?”
The evening ended with a study of Matthew 15: 21-28, the story of the Canaanite woman, who reminded Jesus that even dogs eat the scraps that fall from their masters’ table. In doing so, some scholars believe, she changed his mind and broadened his understanding of his mission.
People who are not fully human and fully divine do not typically change their views on race on the strength of a single encounter, but rather as a result of deepening relationships. For that reason, Oden said, the diocese will no longer offer one-session Becoming Beloved Community training programs and presentations, opting instead for more long-term formats that require building relationships over time.
“We want to permeate our work into the leadership … throughout the working of the diocese, the commissions and the committees, so we can dismantle racism and build the diocese God dreams for us person-by-person, group-by-group,” McKenney said. “My dream personally is to keep people talking to keep
sharing our stores and just continue to build these relationships, because when we know each other we can’t help but care about each other.”
Amy Howton, the consultant who led the diocese’s Becoming Beloved Community initiative for its first three years, remains actively involved in its work. She said the time was right to focus on the initiative’s future.
“We have been at this work for a long time,” she said. “I think the call to become Beloved Community offered us a chance to articulate a vision and put forward an infrastructure that would support our growth toward that vision.”
Becoming Beloved Community is an initiation for some, and “an opportunity to go deeper for those who are ready to go deeper,” she said. “And to not be alone in it.”
“My sense is that as the work goes forward there are going to be several different ways for folks to find their way in,” she said. “There is no more time to be in fear. As a church we have a responsibility to actually practice the way of love. And hopefully the formation and the offerings we make available are going to reflect that.”
Howton will soon offer a program based on “The InnerGround Railroad,” a book she wrote with Quanita Roberson. “We are exploring ways in which trauma in the form of white supremacy and imperialism and patriarchy has shown up and continues to show up and cut us off from the divine,” she said.
The program includes body-focused practices to help heal trauma. “As Episcopalians we want to stay in our heads,” she said. “I want to move from our heads to our hearts, into our bodies so that we can be human together.”
Knowledge of and participation in Beloved Community trainings and sessions varies across the diocese, McKenney said. There are parishes that are already trying to follow the Fourfold Path, but are “keeping it to themselves,” she said. There are other primarily or exclusively white parishes that participate in Becoming Beloved Community programming, but do not form relationships with people of color in their communities, and there are exclusively white churches that do not find the programing relevant to their contexts.
“People think they don’t have people of color in their communities,” McKenney said. “But if a person of color is your sexton, you have people of color in your community.”
BY KRISTA DEVAULYou may not know the Rev. Jerry Cappel’s name, but if your parish has been using the diocesan vestry devotionals or the creation-focused prayers for Advent, you know his work and ministry.
Cappel is the director of The Center for Deep Green Faith, whose offerings blend study (biblical and otherwise) with contemplative practice to deepen people’s faith and commitment to living responsibly on the earth. The organization is currently working with the diocese’s Creation Care and Environmental Justice Commission and with other dioceses across the church.
“Deep Green Faith is about formation: how can churches be educators of a green faith?” Cappel said.
In Southern Ohio, the center has helped lead a year of seasonal worship and provided teaching resources, building on the commission’s work. Resources for Epiphany and Lent are soon to follow, and, after these worship resources, prayers and class materials are piloted in the diocese, a full set of materials for the liturgical year are planned for summer 2023.
“Many people want to work toward increasing the number of recycling bins available. For me, it’s more important to change the way we pray first,” Cappel said.
“An outdoor kid,” by his own description, Cappel began college as a wildlife biology major, switching to religion partway through. “I always felt bifurcated, with one foot in the created world and one foot in the church,” he said. That ability to walk both paths has formed his priesthood.
In his role as environmental coordinator for Province IV, which comprises dioceses in the southeastern United States, Cappel synthesizes the work being done at the Center for Religion and Environment at the University of the South (Sewanee) and its School of Theology with the efforts of local congregations and individuals.
“Faith empowers rather than hinders,” Cappel said. “This is not just activism: it is as much about faith as environment. We must see the disease within faith as well as environment – one helps heal the other, balancing attention on needs of creation and needs of faith. This is mutual, reciprocal work.”
Cappel and Catherine Duffy, cochair of the diocesan commission, lead a monthly meeting of network members from Provinces IV and V which is open to anyone. Links to a newsletter and more information about the work of the environmental network for Province V are available on the website: provincev.org/creation
Jerry Cappel and Stephanie Johnson, A Life of Grace for the Whole World: A Study Course on the House of Bishop’s Pastoral Teaching on the Environment
Robert Gottfried and Fred Krueger, Living in an Icon: A Program for Growing Closer to Creation and to God
Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ On Care for Our Common Home Websites
The Episcopal Church Creation Care Ministry
The Center for Deep Green Faith
The Diocese of Western Massachusetts Creation Care Network
Province V Creation Care Network
Province IV Environmental Network
The Church of England Environment Programme
Creation Justice Ministries of the National Council of Churches
Reviving Creation with Margaret Bullitt Jonas
I’m going to remember 2022 as a year during which
I spent a lot of time on the phone. As vice president of the Standing Committee, part of my job was talking with people from across our diocese, listening to concerns, considering options for moving forward, and explaining how things work—and sometimes, why they don’t work. Now, as president, I am still on the phone.
This all sounds fairly ordinary, but I’ve learned that it isn’t. We have a lot of very smart people in this diocese, and our collective ability with written language sometimes makes us too formal and keeps us from getting to know each other. And sometimes, people who excel at other means of communication feel left out. So instead of trading memos or emails when there’s been a challenge to overcome or a disagreement to navigate, I’ve tried to take a deep breath, get a cup of coffee, pick up the phone, and say, let’s talk.
This strategy was especially effective when the Standing Committee had to pull together during the sudden illness of the Rev. Scott Gunn, who served as our president for much of this year. We relied on each other and on dedicated diocesan staff members, prayed regularly for his recovery and celebrated when he returned to our meetings.
During this year of conversations, I’ve learned that many of the issues that seem to divide us—differences in geography, race, and financial means, to name a few—have been exacerbated by bureaucratic insensitivity and a sense of mystery about how the diocese works. Together with Bishop Wayne Smith, the Standing Committee has been working to overcome these divides by dismantling the culture of addiction and the resulting lack of trust that has kept them in place. The survey conducted by Holy Cow Consulting in 2021 was critical in helping us to get the pulse of the diocese and understand how to respond to the concerns we were
fielding. The survey interpretation by my Standing Committee colleague Barry Feist was equally invaluable in this regard. Thanks to this data, members of the committee are more informed listeners and leaders.
So far, so good. The search for the Tenth Bishop of Southern Ohio is well underway, and the Bishop Nominating Committee will release its profile of the diocese and open nominations early in the new year. The Standing Committee will soon appoint the Transition Committee, which will plan both the ordination of our next bishop and a grateful farewell to Bishop Smith, among its other responsibilities. We are on track to elect a new bishop on September 30 and, God and God’s people consenting, to host the ordination in February 2024.
But big institutional systems like ours don’t change quickly. It will be tempting for us to revert to our old ways when things get stressful. The Standing Committee is committed to doing its part to change our old patterns by communicating clearly and demystifying how the diocese works. We want to talk with you, hear your concerns, and resolve issues whenever we can so that we are the strongest diocese possible when we begin our ministry with a new bishop. Across central and southern Ohio, God is calling our congregations into a new future, and we need to move forward together, praying continually.
So when in doubt, pick up the phone. I’ll talk to you soon.
Dr. James Allsop is president of the diocese’s Standing Committee. He can be reached at 513-476-5076. Email him and the other members of the Standing Committee— Lissa Barker, the Rev. David Kendall-Sperry, the Rev. Jed Dearing, the Rev. Scott Gunn, and Barry Feist—at standingcommittee@diosohio.org
