Trinity News Spring 2014: God on the Ground

spring 2014 vol. 61 | no. 1

TrinityNews THE MAGAZINE OF TRINITY WALL STREET

GOD

ON THE GROUND

Faith on the Streets

The Church Grows in Brooklyn

A Movement for Women’s Freedom

SPRING 2014

TrinityNews VOL. 61 | NO. 1

THE MAGAZINE OF TRINITY WALL STREET

DEPARTMENTS FEATURES

1

Letter from the Rector

2

For the Record

7

Letters

8

Visitor File

9

Archivist’s Mailbag

Faith on the Streets Sara Miles

10 12

The Church Grows in Brooklyn Jeremy Sierra

16 A Movement for Women’s Freedom Becca Stevens

15

Overheard

20 All Music is Church Pete Matthews

25

Psalmtube

22

Open Communion: An Open Question

28 Anglican Communion Stories

26

Wildcard Awards: Supporting Innovation

29

What Have You Learned?

30

Parish Perspectives

32

Pew and Partner Notes

33 Letter from Lower Manhattan

On the Cover God on the Ground is a reference to the way God is active on Earth—in our churches and in our music, on our streets, in the lives of outcast and downtrodden—pushing new life up through the cracks in the sidewalk.

All photos by Leah Reddy unless otherwise noted.

TRINITY WALL STREET 74 Trinity Place | New York, NY 10006 | Tel: 212.602.0800 Rector | The Rev. Dr. James Herbert Cooper Vicar | The Rev. Canon Anne Mallonee Executive Editor | Nathan Brockman Editor | Jim Melchiorre Art Director | Rea Ackerman Managing Editor | Jeremy Sierra Copy Editor | Lynn Goswick Copy Editor | Max Maddock Multimedia Producer | Leah Reddy

FOR FREE SUBSCRIPTIONS 74 Trinity Place | New York, NY 10006 | 24th floor | New York, NY 10006 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.

LETTER FROM THE RECTOR

God on the Ground Although firmly rooted in Lower Manhattan, Trinity Wall Street is a global

parish. We are connected to public schools in Manhattan, churches in Africa, music lovers across the country, and many other partners in ministry and mission, near and far.

The theme of this issue, God on the Ground, reminds us that all our ministries respond to the needs of people, expressed locally. Those ministries grow out of relationships and communities, and the very specific context of both. God is always working in the world, as noted centuries ago by the writer of Isaiah: “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?� So we are called first to perceive, and then to respond.

For more than three hundred years our ministry has begun with the congregation, which today is racially, economically, and geographically diverse, as well as multi-generational. Members come to worship from all five boroughs, and New Jersey. Some of them are native New Yorkers, and many are originally from other states, countries, and continents, including a significant number of Caribbean Americans. All are joined together by a shared faith in Christ and desire to serve.

Through our Mission and Service Engagement Trips, the congregation forms relationships with other churches, dioceses, and communities in Long Island City, New Orleans, Panama, and Burundi. Haiti is our newest partner, where groups will work with the Rt. Rev. Oge Beauvoir, the Suffragan Bishop of Haiti, on building construction and agricultural projects, and to support the two-hundred-fifty schools operated by the Episcopal Church in Haiti. By fostering all of these specific, mutual partnerships, Trinity can serve as a gateway to the larger Anglican Communion, connecting people across the world.

As Sara Miles points out in this issue, God is already out on the streets and in communities, working on the ground. Trinity has been blessed with the resources and the ability to convene people across the world, but the work is made possible only by local communities. We do not take God to others because God is already there. Rather, we do all we can to love, support, and sustain each other, and thus continue the work God has already begun.

Faithfully,

The Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper jcooper@trinitywallstreet.org

Jeremy Sierra

PAGE 2 Indaba Fosters Conversation PAGE 3 Generations Remember Martin Luther King Jr. Ashes All Day PAGE 4 60 Years a Priest PAGE 5 Rededication of the Hamilton Monument PAGE 6 Affirming the LGBTQ Community News from the Choir

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The Rev. Daniel Simons speaks with members of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Mohegan Lake in Charlotte’s Place.

Indaba Fosters Conversation at Trinity On Saturday, January 11, parishioners came to Trinity from All Souls in Harlem and St. Mary’s, Mohegan Lake, to participate in the Diocese of New York’s Indaba program.

Indaba comes from the Zulu word which means “gathering for purposeful discussion,” and is an initiative from the Rt. Rev. Andrew Dietsche, Bishop of the Diocese of New York, to foster conversation and relationships among congregations from across the diocese.

Each Indaba team is made up of four members. The Trinity team includes the Rev. Canon Anne Mallonee, Vicar, and parishioners Janet MacMillan, Kudzai Tunduwani, and Samantha Stevens.

Other parishioners from Trinity came to the gathering in Charlotte’s Place, Trinity’s neighborhood center, to share lunch and to speak about Trinity’s various ministries.

“We wanted our Indaba guests to get a good sense of our congregational ministries here,” said Mallonee.

The two groups quickly made connections.

Some people had never been to Trinity. Others had come to Lower Manhattan when Occupy Wall Street was encamped in Zuccotti Park.

The conversation was lively and touched on the genesis of Charlotte’s Place, Occupy, and Trinity’s many ministries.

This was the second time the teams had come

together. They visited St. Mary’s in October 2013.

“It was a great weekend,” said Janet MacMillan, “and this has the same energy of jumping in and having a conversation.”

“I was looking forward to coming to Trinity because it’s the other end of the spectrum,” said Michael Attanasio, a member of St. Mary’s, a relatively small congregation, for more than twenty years.

Attanasio’s description may be true in some sense, but St. Mary’s is also a vibrant church with many outreach ministries and members involved in the local community. Attanasio, for example, is one of many congregants who help a nearby home for people facing emotional or mental issues by driving residents to church every Sunday.

All Souls is also a small but active and nurturing parish, said the Rev. Frank Morales, Rector.

There are many points of connection between the parishes, as well as differences large and small. “[Indaba] is setting the stage for dealing with some of the hard issues,” Morales said. “It’s a basis for dialogue.”

The teams also went on a tour of Trinity and the 9/11 Memorial together, shared several more meals, and attended services at Trinity on Sunday. They will meet again at All Souls in April.

Jeremy Sierra

Generations Remember Martin Luther King Jr. The Rev. Mark Bozzuti-Jones with members of the Trinity youth group.

Trinity has been celebrating the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for more than thirty years. On January 19, several generations once again considered Dr. King’s legacy at a forum following the 11:15am Eucharist. Eleven members of the Trinity youth group read quotes they had chosen from Dr. King’s speeches and answered questions from parishioners.

“There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us,” recited Nicolette Jones. She then grappled with the question of how to mend damaged relationships.

Madison Eve chose the quote, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” She connected it with bullying and standing by your friends.

“There is a lot of injustice in the world. What are we doing as youngsters and grownups to create justice in our world?” Gabriel Bonadie asked the youth.

“If you’re not going to stand up for what you believe in then nothing is going to happen,” said Shamiso Tunduwani, who had chosen the quote, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“Martin Luther King Jr. wants us to unite as one: to carry his dream on is to not hold on to hate, but to have the courage to take the first step,” said Samantha Stevens.

“To carry on the dream is to be the best version of yourself,” added Eve. The Rev. Mark Bozzuti-Jones, Director of

Pastoral Care and Community, who preached at the Sunday service, also participated in the forum.

“What the young people are giving us today is the opportunity to take these quotes home and live with them,” he said.

The young people also thoughtfully grappled with the challenges of being black in the United States—how being educated is often associated with being white, for example, and how social media can spread stereotypes.

“Faith is calling us to step out when things are tough, when things are uncertain, when things are dark, when we don’t have all the answers,” said Bozzuti-Jones. “Faith in God reminds us we always have more choices to get it right, more chances to do good.”

Ashes All Day On Ash Wednesday, Trinity staff and clergy offered ashes to passersby on the sidewalk in front of Trinity and St. Paul’s Chapel throughout the day. The Rt. Rev. Andrew Dietsche, Bishop of the Diocese of New York, presided at the noonday Ash Wednesday liturgy and then offered ashes outside as well. More than seven thousand people received ashes. Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent, during which Trinity offered a variety of resources and services to help the community observe the season, including Lenten meditations written by congregants, a music series performed by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and a labyrinth walk in St. Paul’s Chapel.

The Rt. Rev. Andrew Dietsche, Bishop of the Diocese of New York, imposes ashes on Ash Wednesday.

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The Rev. John Moody and the Rev. Dr. William Norgren celebrate the Eucharist together.

60 Years a Priest

BY JEREMY SIERRA

“ Trust the love that you’re discerning in your life.”

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Sixty years ago, William Norgren and John Moody were ordained to the priesthood.

On a Sunday in January, they celebrated the anniversary of their ministries, and the Eucharist, together in Trinity Church. After six decades of service, they shared a little of what they’ve learned through the years.

The Rev. William Norgren: The Path Toward Unity When Norgren was ordained in 1953 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he thought he would enter parish ministry. Instead, after getting his Master of Divinity degree at General Seminary and doing graduate work at Oxford, he became the director of Faith and Order studies for the National Council of Churches, beginning a long career in ecumenism.

“The main highlight of my career has been the friendships I’ve formed across the lines of the different communions,” said Norgren. “These friendships demonstrated to me that despite all of the differences or diversity between the major communions worldwide there is this 95 percent agreement in the basic Christian faith.”

The National Council of Churches is an ecumenical organization that originally included 33 (now 37) Orthodox and Protestant denominations. Norgren worked there during the civil rights movement and observed the churches coming together in new ways.

“They saw the need to work together on civil rights issues and make a Christian witness that’s more united than they were accustomed to doing. And they did make a major contribution.”

In the 1960s, Norgren spent three years in Rome, where he was invited to participate in the Second Vatican Council as a guest observer, and he worked as the ecumenical officer in the Episcopal Church. He’s seen a change as denominations move from antagonism to friendship.

“Friendship changes attitudes,” he said, “so that you can see this as a phase on the way to greater unity.”

Although he’s seen change in attitudes, he knows that historical change is a long process.

“We cannot accept the status quo ecumenically.

We’ve made progress. But to make that the end

would be a grave error. I believe you’d be fighting against the Holy Spirit.”

When asked what his advice for young priests or Christians might be, he said, “Christ made it clear that love is the greatest thing, and of course human beings fail in love a great deal. So do priests and theologians. So I would think the elevation of Christian love is the main thing for all our lives.”

The Rev. John Moody: Art and Faith Moody was ordained in Columbus, Ohio, where he helped establish the Church of St. Edward the Confessor, which grew very quickly as the population increased in the area and even became a training ground for young priests.

After 15 years, Moody took a sabbatical and obtained his master’s degree in visual arts at NYU. The arts have been an important part of his ministry and life ever since.

“The arts push the edge of our perceptions,” he said. “They push issues in a way that help us to confront them and live within them. Faith does this too, and in each of our individual faith journeys we’re pushing the edges of our own perceptions, trying to struggle for truth and wholeness.”

Moody was invited to come to Trinity in 1968 to “open the doors more widely to Wall Street.” He started a Weekday Ministry (where Norgren also worked for a time), with the help of Larry King, the Director of Music. They held summer festivals, hosted the performance arts,

music, and drama, and eventually opened a coffee house called 74 Below, which was housed in the basement of Trinity’s office building at 74 Trinity Place.

Since then, his experience includes launching an arts ministry at Old St. Paul’s in Baltimore, serving as the rector of St. Paul’s-on-the-Hill in Ossining, New York, working as director of program at Manhattan Plaza, a large public housing complex for artists and the elderly in New York City, and developing an interfaith

chaplaincy at the Village Center for Care. He returned to Trinity as pastoral associate before retiring in 1991.

After he retired, Moody focused mainly on his painting. He became involved at Trinity again after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, working with EMS and participating in the interfaith chaplaincy program for first responders during the recovery. Since then he has become an active member of Trinity, especially involved in the Congregational Arts program.

“I feel so blessed in my years and my ministry,” said Moody. “It’s all grace. So many good things have happened and so many dark times I’ve been brought through—it’s a blessing.”

Looking back on his career in the Episcopal Church, he noted that the church has grown in its acceptance of women and the LGBTQ community. He, like Norgren, acknowledged the church’s openness to other faiths.

“We’re reaching out to world religions in seeking common goals and objectives and hopes. It’s a wonderful thing,” he said.

Thinking back on his own relationship with David, his partner of 37 years, who died six years ago, Moody said, “It’s that love shared in life that God’s presence really strengthens and clarifies.”

When asked what his advice would be to young people of faith, he said, “Trust the love that you’re discerning in your life. That’s God’s presence within us; that’s eternal life that we discern and touch and hope for. Love is God’s presence and grace in our lives.”

Rededication of the Alexander Hamilton Monument

Jim Melchiorre

Trinity Wall Street hosted several events to mark the birthday of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, who is buried in Trinity’s churchyard. The Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society sponsors a program twice a year, in January for Hamilton’s birth, and in July to remember his death.

A commemoration on January 10 included a visit by Vance Amory, Premier of Nevis, the Caribbean island on which Hamilton was born.

Premier Amory began the day by raising the flag of his nation, St. Kitts and Nevis, over Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. He was later joined by Doug Hamilton, a great-grandson, in unveiling a refurbished monument at Hamilton’s grave.

The Rev. Mark Bozzuti-Jones, a priest at Trinity, blessed the monument. And since Hamilton is also acknowledged as the founder of the U.S. Coast Guard, Coast Guard Captain Gordon Loebl offered a keynote address inside Trinity Church.

Vance Amory, Premier of Nevis, and Doug Hamilton, a great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton, unveil the newly restored Hamilton Monument in the Trinity churchyard.

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Affirming the LGBTQ Community Trinity clergy and staff members recently joined in the NALT (Not All Like That) Christians Project, a website founded by John Shore and Truth Wins Out that allows participants to intentionally and specifically express their affirmation of the LGBTQ community through video. The Rev. Emily Wachner, Program Manager for Liturgy, Hospitality, and Pilgrimage, explained why she and others felt the need to participate in the project: In 2010, columnist and activist Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, began the It Gets Better Project, an attempt to reach out to at-risk LGBTQ youth in response to the high rate of suicides in that group. Dan felt he had to do something to give hope to young LGBTQ kids, who might otherwise believe they were destined to a lifetime of bullying and second-class citizenship. The effort exploded and millions of Americans, including President Obama, recorded It Gets Better videos.

Dan has long been one of my favorite columnists, and the It Gets Better Project only confirmed that. I admire Dan’s frankness and his willingness to discuss the connections between politics, religion, and sexuality (the three things we’re NOT supposed to discuss in “polite society,” right?). In his column and podcast, Dan frequently takes to task the most hateful “Christian” groups and Christian-identified politicians who condemn gay people and perpetuate the message that “true Christians” don’t accept homosexuality.

Most of us in progressive Christian churches feel that we have moved past that, and that our messages of “Welcome!” are sufficient to convey the fact that all people are truly welcome. What we tend to forget, however, is that for many LGBTQ people, religion has been tremendously harmful. For example, in response to a 2013 Pew survey of LGBT Americans, one man said that “when I was 18, I couldn’t handle it and attempted suicide. I became religious thinking God would make me straight. I gave that up at 26 when I finally realized it wasn’t God who had a problem with me but his followers.”

It is time that conscientious Christians—who believe in the eyes of God and our church that LGBTQ people can be married and ordained and blessed—make it explicitly clear: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, or straight, you are welcome here as you are.

You can watch the videos at trinitywallstreet.org.

News from the Choir The Choir of Trinity Wall Street was recognized across the country and abroad this winter.

The choir joined The English Concert, a world-renowned Londonbased Baroque orchestra, on a whirlwind tour of several American and European cities. Performing George Frideric Handel’s Theodora, the choir and orchestra appeared in Sonoma and Orange counties, California, in late January before traveling to Chapel Hill, N.C. The tour continued on to Birmingham and London, in the United Kingdom, and Paris, with one stop in New York on February 2 for a concert at Carnegie Hall.

Reviews of the concert were glowing, and Trinity’s choir was singled out. Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Yet some of the evening’s most powerful singing came not from any of the soloists, but from the superb Choir of Trinity Wall Street, directed by Julian Wachner. By turns reflective and explosive—and marked throughout by finely blended choral textures—the group’s contributions helped the performance reach its summit.” Geoff Brown of the The Times in London said, “This is a choir from heaven.”

Mark Dolejs

The Choir of Trinity Wall Street performs in the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, N.C.

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letters

2013 winter| no. 3 vol. 60

ews TrinityN THE MAG

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of A Year on Comm Prayer

Anti-War? I recently read the article “Which Christianity?

A Conversation About War.” To be frank, I found the suggestion or inference that mostly poor people or those without options choose to serve their country offensive, as well as the premise (except for Ms. Johnson) that it is “Christians” who are war-like.

I have been a faithful member of the Episcopal Church for many years and have served on several vestries. I have encountered a number of clergy over the years who seem to harbor an anti-military sentiment which can spill over into a belief among veterans in the congregation that their service is not appreciated. I say that as a veteran. I have discussed this with several rectors whose response is that many in the congregation are anti-war. My response is that I am anti-war but that does not excuse ignoring the service of men and women who have done their best to serve both their country and God. My father served in WWII, and I served twice in the U.S. Army (initially after high school in the early 70s and then again after graduating from law school in 1980). I later returned to school and obtained an MPS from Loyola University.

In a perfect world there would be no war.

But we do not live in a perfect world and, as St. Augustine recognized, there are times when Christians can faithfully engage in war. I will readily admit that except for possibly WWII, none of the wars the U.S. has engaged in have been “Just Wars.” However, the church (which should always foster peace) also has an obligation to recognize those who have served their country and who sacrificed to secure many freedoms.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacekeepers.” I think many people and the church too often fail to recognize that the men and women of the armed services have done much to preserve and protect the helpless. These men and women have carried out their duty faithfully, and they have preserved and helped thousands of innocent people.

In conclusion, I served my country twice, and I try every day to serve my family and my God. I would serve my country again if called.

I would do so not because I am poor or have no options, or because I am a warmonger. One can serve both, albeit with difficulty at times, and the church ought to focus on support of those who serve. The church should be mindful that anti-war/military comments or suggestions are often mistaken by those who have served and are serving as an attack on their faith, and that they are somehow less “Christian” than those who did not or refused to serve—nothing is further than the truth.

Sincerely W. K. Jamison T

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A Note from Prison I am from Boston, Ma., a suburb called Charlestown. I am currently Life H Sacramere in the incarcerated. December ental U niverse was a bad month for me all the way around, beginning with my Uncle Jack relapsing after stem-cell treatment for his cancer.

He didn’t make it and died two weeks ago. Before he died I approached the chapel here and asked a gentleman standing outside if I could talk to a priest. I was informed that the Catholic priest recently quit, the pastor retired. I was devastated.

I need to talk to a religious person.

I ended up going to a Bible study the Protestants have once a week after hearing my Uncle Jack passed away in his sleep. After the Bible study I saw some of the men rooting through some boxes filled with reading material.

I joined in. The first thing I picked up was a copy of Trinity News. It was an issue from Spring 2011, Vol 58/No 1. I enjoyed this magazine so much! I can’t remember reading anything that was on a positive note from front to back. It sounds to me that Trinity Church is full of compassion not only for our loving God, but also for God’s children.

I am a poor man but rich in spirit. All doors may be closed to me at this time, but the door to God’s heart has remained opened for me. I feel there was a reason why the first thing I picked out of that old box was a copy of Trinity News.

Thank you for all your time and effort. God bless you all and the work you do.

Bach at On and Com e pline

Sustain abi in Africa lity

Ted’s Church

Your brother in Christ [Name withheld]

Letters have been edited slightly for clarity and length and Trinity Staff members have responded directly to the writers.

Send your comments and criticism to news@trinitywallstreet.org or Trinity News, 74 Trinity Place, New York, NY 10006.

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Karl Conrad

Tell me a bit about St. Mary’s.

St. Mary’s is a very lively place. We’ve got a lot of people of all different ages. A central theme in our congregation is feeding the hungry.

We have the largest food pantry in northern Westchester. We are very blessed in that our whole community has bought into the food pantry.

So it is supported by civic groups, school groups, scouting groups, sports teams—a lot of people come and contribute both time and money and food to the pantry. Everybody knows we’re here.

We’re having conversations about whether we need to become active in public policy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with food stamps being cut.

Our systems are being overwhelmed. Charity cannot compensate for bad public policy.

When I started at St. Mary’s, a huge week was 50 to 60 families. That was big. We are now doing, every week, 120 families. We count four members per family. That’s an enormous amount of hungry people.

CLAIRE WOODLEY

The Rev. Claire Woodley is Rector of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Mohegan Lake, NY. She visited Trinity to participate in Indaba, a program of the Diocese of New York designed to foster conversation between congregations.

INTERVIEW BY JEREMY SIERRA

What other types of work do you do?

We think of ourselves as feeding people who are hungry for community.

The folks that we think of particularly in that group are people who suffer from a mental or emotional disability.

There are several group homes and one very large residence within walking distance of St. Mary’s, and a number of those folks belong to our parish. So we have a surprising combination in our family service, which is families of all different kinds of configurations and mentally and emotionally disabled adults who get to be around children in a safe setting. A number of families have adopted folks, so they come home for Sunday dinner or Thanksgiving or a party, and it’s a beautiful thing.

What kind of work have you done with children?

Save-A-Life came out of a growing awareness that we were unusual in Westchester in the number of teen deaths. We had 25 deaths in five years—overdoses, car accidents, alcohol poisoning, murder, suicide. We did two programs in succeeding years, and we trained teenagers as first responders: what do I do if my friend is partying too hard, in an abusive relationship, talking about suicide, being bullied? It was fabulously successful. In the years that we ran the program there were no deaths.

A significant amount of the children who are participating in higher-risk behaviors are the kids with various learning disabilities or what are labeled as learning disabilities. So we created a program called Let It Shine. The goal is to help children and parents reframe how the child is engaged with the systems and structures that they are in, from being labeled a “problem” to asking, what is their giftedness?

I created the family service with those children in mind. So I have a high number of kids who have ADD and ADHD. The service is crafted in such a way that there’s lots of movement. Kids are participating in a Gospel play, they can be in the procession, they’re getting up for Communion, they’re in the family band, they can dance in the aisles when the music is on.

Is it difficult to be politically active without causing division?

One of our families lost a nephew in [the school shooting in] Newtown, Connecticut [in 2012], so we had a conversation between people who were looking to do some kind of gun-control legislation and people who own guns. We had a couple of meetings where we just talked about our experiences with guns and our response to Newtown and our response in loving kindness to the family who had experienced loss.

Whenever we can, we try to bring people together to experience and talk about this stuff so that we’re not just talking through our hats in a vacuum. We’ve got all kinds of folks at St. Mary’s. They’re in God’s family too, and we have to figure out how to love one another.

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Church in the Wee Hours The life of New York City in 1900 was centered in Lower Manhattan. Wall Street was the economic powerhouse of the country, and local politics were concentrated in City Hall. Unsurprisingly, Lower Manhattan was also home to the newsrooms and print shops of the city’s many daily papers. The neighborhood had been electrified since 1882, and businesses like telegraph firms and the post office operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week, illuminated by the light bulb.

It was the souls of these night workers, whose shifts lasted into the wee hours, that worried the Rev. Montague Geer, Vicar of St. Paul’s Chapel.

Many souls worried Geer: women office workers who were, in his mind, open to lunch-time seduction by unscrupulous bosses, the newsboys who sold papers in the streets, and persecuted Armenians, to list a few. He was undoubtedly the parish’s grandmaster of quirky outreach ministries.

But back to the night workers: how were they to participate in Holy Eucharist on Sunday mornings? The Catholics, Geer knew, were holding late night Masses at a church on Duane Street. According to estimates he was given, there were 5,000 night workers within a one-mile radius of St. Paul’s—approximately 2,000 of those were Protestant—and the faithful among them were attending the Catholic Mass for want of a Protestant option.

In 1904 Geer proposed holding 2:30am services on Sunday mornings, just as those workers were heading home. Geer evidently planned this liturgical experiment without consulting the Rev. Dr. Morgan Dix, Rector of Trinity Parish. In 1904 Dix was an old man: he had started as an assistant minister at Trinity in 1858. When he caught wind of Geer’s plan, he must have objected, because the Trinity Archives contain Geer’s four-page response, clearly written in haste, defending his plan.

“I did not lay this matter before you because I could not ask you to commit yourself to an experimental—and because I found no difficulty in arranging for the first service. … If it is a failure, it can be charged simply to my consideration. If it is a success, then the whole question is to be laid before you.”

Geer goes on to explain his reasons for the service, concluding that he had “sufficient Providential indication of duty” to warrant a trial run. Dix allowed the experiment to go forward.

The first service for night workers was held on the first Sunday in Lent, February 21, 1904, at

2:30am. One hundred and two men and four women attended. Attendance hovered between 70 and 100 for the duration of the year.

Geer and his allies considered the services a success. In the parish yearbook they wrote: “It is believed that something like this is probably the Churchgoing record of nearly all these men who have begun again their old custom of frequenting the Courts of the Lord’s House on the Lord’s Day. There are several very young men, and others are likely to come later, whom these services, if they are continued, are likely to save from falling hopeless victims of the non-Church going habit.”

Trinity’s Archives contain a number of documents related to the services, including typewritten lists of all the night workers employed in nearby office buildings, and a letter from some anonymous employees asking Geer to intercede with management on their behalf and get them out of work 45 minutes early so they could attend the 2:30am service.

Evidently not everyone agreed with Geer. The services were discontinued in 1905. Notes from

Trinity’s subsequent rector, the Rt. Rev. William T. Manning, about one particularly problematic vestryman and comptroller, shed light on the reasons for ending the services.

“Mr. C. [Herman H. Cammann] demanded that that ‘Service for Night Workers’ should be given up in Dr. Dix’s time because he held that the men who attended the service might claim the right to vote [in]the parish elections. I had the service resumed against Mr. C.’s will.”

And so the services were revived in 1911, with the “hearty sympathy and encouragement” of the new rector. Manning also furnished St. Paul’s with an electrically lighted sign, installed on the Broadway fence, announcing the services. It was turned on from 10pm Saturday night until 3:30am on Sunday and furnished “object-teaching to countless thousands of passers-by, that the Church of Jesus Christ takes a loving interest in the spiritual welfare of her people at all times, under all circumstances.”

St. Paul’s 2:30am services for night workers were discontinued in 1918, the same year Geer retired.

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Faith on the Streets

Claire Blackstock

BY SARA MILES

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Ash Wednesday should be the least appealing of Christian holidays. It’s got no shiny decorations, no gifts, no delicious traditional foods; in fact, there’s no food at all for those who follow the Christian tradition of fasting. Nobody gets a nice greeting card for Ash Wednesday: you just have some dirt smeared on your face and are informed, bluntly, that you’re going to die.

Yet Ash Wednesday’s become one of the most oddly visible days in the Christian calendar, attracting new attention from believers, and even reaching all kinds of people who don’t consider themselves part of the church. There’s a growing movement around the country to take the services outside, offering ashes at bus stops, malls, city parks, and suburban train stations. For the last four years I’ve observed Ash Wednesday in the streets of San Francisco, which happens to be one of the nation’s most secular cities. And yet hundreds and hundreds of strangers will come up, call out, even follow me down the sidewalk, asking urgently to receive ashes.

We’re witnessing the ways Church—not the buildings or tax-exempt legal entities, but the complex, contradictory body of Christ—is already here.

My new book, City of God, tells the story of one such Ash Wednesday, from dawn to dusk.

But it also raises some questions about evangelism, about truth-telling, and what it means to be Church outside of church buildings, in the city of God. “Oh, my God, Sara,” my wife groaned the first time I told her where I was planning to be on Ash Wednesday. “Are you really going out in public in, like, full church drag?”

As difficult as it had sometimes been for our family when, in middle age, I converted to Christianity and started attending Sunday services, I knew this was a whole new step. Now I was proposing to do church outdoors, with wacked-out random bystanders, smack in the middle of our neighborhood. “Yeah,” I said.

“Well, you know, just a few of us, we’re just holding a little service. Sort of. Ashes. I mean— look, what can I say, I’ve gone over the edge.”

I tried to sound casual, but I could tell the line between respectable churchgoer and lunatic evangelist was rapidly eroding. And I hadn’t mentioned to Martha we were planning to kneel on the sidewalk, wearing black cassocks, and pray.

To plan our Ash Wednesday service in the streets, I corralled Bertie Pearson, a young priest from Austin who’d been a DJ, party promoter, and punk musician before getting ordained. Bertie has pink cheeks and swept-back, jet-black hair; in his formal clericals he looks like a choirboy dressed up as Johnny Cash.

I told Bertie I wanted to offer ashes right on the corner of 24th and Mission, by the subway and bus stops, on a busy concrete plaza that’s ground zero for street evangelists and the winos who ignore them. He was terrified. “I mean, I live less than half a block away from that plaza,” Bertie said, “and every day I walk past these fundamentalists screaming, ‘The blood of Jesus is real, you must repent, Jesus loves you.’ All of which I agree with, you know, but …”

“I know,” I said.

“I detest the way they give the message,” Bertie said fiercely. “It’s really challenging to think about being in the heart of my community, trying to reclaim the public language of sin and repentance from fundamentalists. So much of my life has been distinguishing myself from them.” He stopped and then continued in a gentler voice.

“They must sometimes feel as awkward as we do,” Bertie said.

“I wonder,” I said. “I feel pretty awkward.”

You might ask: why work so hard to hold a church service outside, especially one so potentially humiliating? Is this evangelism just a break in routine for bored liturgists, a flirtation with the exotic? Are we engaging in a kind of extreme religious sport? Following a trendy fad?

Making a statement to show how innovative and daring we can be?

Or worse, do we imagine we are, in a phrase that makes me deeply suspicious, “bringing Church to the people?”

What I hate about that expression is the way it assumes people on the streets––sex workers, punk rockers, young parents––don’t already have their own revelations and faith: they just need to get with the program and come to know God the right way, which is ours. Liberal and conservative Christians alike might be willing to translate a bit, to dress Jesus up with contemporary images or what we imagine to be culturally appropriate music, but basically we tend to think we know the answers: God, the real God, is already revealed inside my own church building, or inside my denomination, and if I’m generous enough, I can go offer the good news to unfortunates who are surely waiting for it on street corners.

But awkward Christians like me heading outdoors on Ash Wednesday, or for that matter zealots hollering “Repent!” through their amps, are hardly “bringing Church to the streets.” If any of us are honest, we’re just witnessing the ways Church—not the buildings or tax-exempt legal entities, but the complex, contradictory body of Christ—is already there.

“The people” are God’s people. They’re out in the streets and fast-food joints and marketplaces of the city, encountering Jesus, Mary, saints, demons, angels, themselves, and one other–– sometimes a lot more intensely than is comfortable.

They’re praying, sinning, repenting, blessing, being baptized into the muddy river of life.

They’re not waiting for the correct theology to be shoved into their hand via a damp pamphlet; they’re constantly developing their own, in profusion. And they’re definitely not waiting for missionaries of any stripe to come save them.

God is saving them––and, God willing, will save

me, too, from my own pretensions and bring us together to make a new thing.

Christian evangelism, for me, begins with a burning desire to hear, as well as to tell. To pay attention to what God is already doing, among all kinds of other people. As the Orthodox theologian Demetrios Constanteios points out, “It is the Spirit which moves where it wills, whose presence and operation is everywhere and all-encompassing. The Spirit of God may not be where one would like to see it and it may be where one refuses to see it. Thus it is impossible to define the boundaries of God's people.”

There is no boundary, really, except the very thin layers of skin touching skin, my thumb and a stranger’s forehead, made slippery with the ashes that signify our shared mortality. And those ashes, like all blessings, are not “imposed” by one person on another but dirty everyone up.

They unleash a power that flows back and forth, creating space for the good news to be revealed between us.

I go outdoors on Ash Wednesday to be evangelized. I need to get beyond the tastefully enclosed museum of religious life, to stand on the kind of holy ground that isn’t curated by church professionals, where a burning bush can blaze forth in defiance of safety regulations and outside of regular office hours. I need to walk arm in arm with others, listening for the strangeness and power of God’s voice on streets where the volume isn’t going to be decorously muted, where we might find ourselves upset or offended––or blessed.

Because the good news is that the blessing has been set loose: God has left the building.

Sara Miles is the founder and director of The Food Pantry and serves as Director of Ministry at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.

Her books include Jesus Freak: Feeding Healing Raising the Dead and Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion.

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A bar is not the opposite of church

David Boling

The Church Grows in BROOKLYN

BY JEREMY SIERRA

O

n a Sunday in February, I visited Bushwick Abbey, a new Episcopal community that meets in the back of a bar in Brooklyn. The walls were black, and pink and blue light splashed across the room. The band played blues and gospel, but the liturgy was Anglican, with prayers from the New Zealand Prayer Book and The Book of Common Prayer.

“A bar is not the opposite of church,” said the Rev. Kerlin Richter, an Episcopal priest with short blonde hair dyed blue, who founded the church. “Both are places where you come with loneliness and thirst.”

The Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, was also there on a surprise visit.

“I’m thrilled to see this,” she told me after the service. “I’m convinced the

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church needs to be doing things like this that fit the context.”

Although I am a lifelong Episcopalian with an abiding love for The Book of Common Prayer, for several years I’ve been attending another small church called St. Lydia’s that meets on Sunday evenings around a dinner table. It is one of several experimental communities popping up in Brooklyn (you might call them “emergent,” though the term is somewhat muddy).

With church attendance dwindling in many places, I wondered what these communities had in common and what role they could play in the future of the Episcopal Church.

After attending church in a bar, in a bell tower, and around a dinner table, what I found were communities responding to the needs of particular contexts, yet firmly rooted in mainline denominations.

Not So Churchy Not So Churchy meets once a month in Fort Green, Brooklyn. About 25 people gathered in the hall of a Presbyterian Church when I visited on a Monday evening. The musicians rotate, so each month the service is a little different.

“There are a few core pieces,” said founder Mieke Vandersall, a Presbyterian pastor. “The idea that worship is created by the community.

That we all have access to uncovering Scripture.

That we do it in a different way than we’ve been traditionally taught.”

Instead of coffee there was chocolate beforehand. I ate a piece (well, several pieces) and chatted with some of the members, before taking a seat on the metal chairs arranged in a half circle around a simple altar.

There were no service leaflets or hymnals.

Vandersall and a handful of musicians led us through the service, singing the music to us before we sang, a kind of call and response called “paperless music.” This technique was pioneered

by Trinity staff member Marilyn Haskel and others at the influential (and experimental) Episcopal church in San Francisco, St. Gregory of Nyssa.

There was a Scripture reading accompanied by piano. Vandersall gave a short sermon, followed by group sharing and discussion and a time to pray. We repeated a short melody again and again as we took Communion, a moving and peaceful moment.

Several of the attendees were worship leaders at other churches, and there were a number of LGBTQ people.

“Some of them are seeking this kind of spiritual place and have been really hurt by the church,” said Vandersall.

Vandersall is the director of Presbyterian Welcome, a group that works with LGBTQ people in the church. As an openly lesbian person, she herself had trouble finding her place in the Presbyterian Church after her ordination.

Not So Churchy came to her as an idea that she just couldn’t shake, a need to create a welcoming community that combined faith and creativity (Vandersall is a musician).

“It’s Presbyterian church in theology, but not expression,” said Vandersall.

Parables Parables meets in the bell tower at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Brooklyn. When I visited on a cold Sunday afternoon, about seven or eight people in their 20s and early 30s huddled around space heaters on folding metal chairs, a table with bread and wine and grape juice sitting between them.

“I want to make sure people have the same type of religious community I was able to experience,” said Ben McKalehan, founder and a Lutheran pastor. “A place of love.”

McKalehan spent much of his childhood in towns where the churches ran the sports teams and Boy Scout troops and the youth group, but the friends he made at Reed College were

skeptical of the church. He wanted to create a church that would speak to them.

In the bell tower we sang a few lines composed by one of the members. McKalehan has written some lovely prayers to begin and end the service.

We were each given a moment to speak of the “moments of desolation and consolation” from the week, when we felt far or close to God. McKalehan gave a short sermon while passing around an iPad with photos of artwork to get us thinking, followed by some time for discussion.

Afterward, we were given about 15 minutes to draw, write, knit, or even make balloon animals, whatever creative outlet worked best for us. I drew some shapes and wrote a bit of bad prose.

The service ended after we passed around the bread and wine and sang again.

McKalehan has long been interested in art and theater and how that intersects with his faith. He tried public art and group art projects, with varying degrees of success. Over time the focus of Parables has shifted toward storytelling and a Eucharistic meal.

Parables is an experiment, though a thoroughly Lutheran one.

“Because we have less institutional structure we have the freedom to take risks,” said McKalehan. “Ultimately we are one congregation within the denomination. The most local expression of the body of Christ.”

Episcopal Experiments Can communities like these exist within the Episcopal Church, tied as it seems to be to The Book of Common Prayer? I asked the Rev. Daniel Simons, a priest and liturgist at Trinity Wall Street.

“In a word, yes,” said Simons. We have misunderstood the idea of “common prayer” to mean we all use the same words, when in fact people use different prayers all over the Anglican Communion, he said. The Episcopal Church is joined through relationship, a fellowship of churches and dioceses and bishops, as well as our participation in word and sacrament in our worship. Within that, there’s a lot of flexibility.

Bushwick Abbey is an example of this. “It comes out of loving the Episcopal Church but not being sure it made sense to the people I loved in my daily life,” said Richter.

Although some may be tired of shallow stories about churches that meet in bars to attract young people, Richter was simply looking for a place to meet and knew the owner of the bar, Tari Sunkin, who was looking to connect with the community. Vince Anderson, who leads the music, was a friend who was already performing gospel music as Vince Anderson and His Love Choir every week at a bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Bushwick Abbey is an expression of Richter’s vision and love of the church and the people in it.

“We want to be really authentic and ask what it means to be a church here at this time and to these people,” Richter said.

After attending church in a bar, in a bell tower, and around a dinner table, what I found were communities responding to the needs of a particular context, yet firmly rooted in mainline denominations.

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Patrick Paglen

Is This New? All these communities have landed consistently on worship that includes singing, sharing stories, and a Eucharistic meal.

“The church has always been changing,” said Bowie Snodgrass, who cofounded a small community years ago called Transmission. “The church is 2,000 years of evolution and revolution.”

There are other churches experimenting with community and liturgy around the country, many of them in dialogue with the more evangelical, conservative branch of Christianity.

Bushwick Abbey and the other communities I visited, on the other hand, are ultimately rooted in traditional mainline denominations. The theology in each is firmly Lutheran, Anglican, or Presbyterian. The emphases are somewhat different, perhaps, focused a bit more on the idea that God’s love extends to everyone rather than on the question of how to live righteously, worship correctly, or get to heaven. They are all explicitly, openly, and deeply progressive and welcoming.

So is this just a matter of a change in style, eschewing a building and some of the trappings of mainline Protestant worship?

“Liturgy is theology,” McKalehan said when I asked him this. Experimenting with liturgy will lead to new theologies and deeper understanding.

In that case, it’s worth noting that all these communities have landed consistently on worship that includes singing, sharing stories, and a Eucharistic meal, revealing perhaps the deepest and oldest kind of communal worship.

St. Lydia’s St. Lydia’s, the church that I have attended for the past four years, fits firmly into this mold.

I found St. Lydia’s shortly after I moved to New York to attend graduate school. When I arrived I was immediately put to work cutting vegetables and setting the table. Emily Scott, the Lutheran pastor who founded the church, led a liturgy based on early church practices, most of it sung using the paperless music technique with the help of a congregant song leader. We passed the bread around in the circle with the words, “This is my body.”

Afterward we all sat down to eat and talk, 14

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followed by a sermon, sharing, and more prayers and singing. Then we all did the dishes together.

I wasn’t looking for an emergent church or anything like it, but I felt immediately noticed and welcomed at St. Lydia’s. It quickly became the bright center of my week during the early, lonely days in a new city.

“The desire to start St. Lydia’s came when I observed a hunger in New York for spiritual connection and connection with one another,” said Scott.

The community started meeting about five years ago in Daniel Simons’ apartment. Now it is affiliated with the Lutheran Church, with ties to the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, and it is growing quickly.

St. Lydia’s, like Parables, Not So Churchy, and Bushwick Abbey, began as the vision of individuals responding to the needs of a particular community.

“I think St. Lydia’s has a role to play as a source of inspiration,” said Joel Avery, a seminarian at Yale who is also an intern at St. Lydia’s. These communities are models of what the church can be, not answers to the problem of dwindling attendance and changing cultural attitudes toward the church.

“I believe that the experiments occurring at the edge of the pool are sending ripples back into the middle of the pool,” said Scott. “The church is being changed from the outside in, but also being transformed slowly from the inside out. There’s a good dose of death and resurrection at work.”

Perhaps creating a taxonomy of the church is an increasingly pointless exercise. What matters is that people find a place where they encounter God and connect to one another.

St. Lydia’s is where I met my fiancée. I continue to go every Sunday, and as I sing and pray and share a meal in the company of my community, I feel the presence and the peace of God. Jeremy Sierra is Managing Editor for Trinity Wall Street.

He can be contacted at jsierra@trinitywallstreet.org.

For more of Jeremy’s thoughts on the term “emergent church,” visit trinitywallstreet.org.

overheard | FROM ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL’S THE PROPHETS

ur eyes are witness to the callousness and cruelty of man, but our heart tries to obliterate the memories, to calm the nerves, and to silence our conscience. . . . Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet’s words.

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I

don't

think

that

any

child’s

dream

was

to

be

a * Ensnared as a young teenager, Shelia Simpkins McClain spent more than a decade struggling to escape the commercial sex industry.

Freedom came for Simpkins McClain at Magdalene, a residential community in Nashville founded by Episcopal priest Becca Stevens. Simpkins McClain spoke at Trinity Wall Street during a panel discussion on human trafficking in January 2014.

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prostitute*

A MOVEMENT FOR

Women’s Freedom

BY BECCA STEVENS

How can the church serve victims of sexual violence, trafficking, and prostitution?

Peggy Napier

G

ive me that old time religion is the refrain from the Gospel tune of the late 19th century. It’s a sweet mantra to hum while we, as communities of faith, explore how to respond to the universal issues of sexual violence, trafficking, and prostitution. The old wounds humanity carries from these issues demand that we respond with love, the oldest and deepest truth of religion.

Our culture is just beginning to see the scope of the problem—the connection between child sexual trauma and addiction, and the pathway to prison this traumatic history lays out.

This connection is clear at Magdalene and Thistle Farms. Magdalene is a two-year

residential community for women who have survived lives of prostitution, trafficking, addiction, and life on the street, and Thistle Farms is a social enterprise run by the women that creates natural body-care products. Most of the women are, on average, first raped between the ages of seven and 11 and hit the streets in their teenage years. We are beginning to hear changes in the national conversation as people now recognize the fact that before women are criminalized, they have been victimized for years.

Yet in my conversations in hundreds of churches over the past 15 years, it feels like many still turn a blind eye to the connection between child abuse, runaways, and trafficking. Faith

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By the time

I was 14,

I was on

the streets.

Met a guy,

sold me

a dream.

I thought

he was my

boyfriend.

I would

communities are still reluctant to speak out boldly against people being bought and sold as commodities and downloaded in two dimensions, giving no thought to the story of the people being used. There is still a sense that we can buy and sell images and use people without there being a cost to that person.

So we need some good old-fashioned religion to infuse our communities, and we need to use the most powerful force for social change in the world—LOVE. We need to become a living and breathing movement capable of embracing the backside of anger, the shadow side of our world, the underside of bridges, the short side of justice, and the inside of prisons.

It’s a movement for women’s freedom, grounded in the belief that love heals. This love is rooted in radical hospitality offered without judgment and cast wide enough to reach the hell of both the street and all kinds of entrenched prisons.

There was a moment about a year ago when I felt the shift, as Thistle Farms became more than a sanctuary and social enterprise. It became part of a movement, as dioceses and churches from across the country began to invite us to come and share the vision and speak about how we can all get involved to help women leave unworkable systems and violence to find their way home to sanctuary.

It’s beginning, but it will take many more communities that want to offer free long-term housing, begin radical social enterprises, and support work going on in communities such as Magdalene House in Nashville, Trinity Episcopal Church’s effort called Eden House in New Orleans, and the community supported by Christ Church Cathedral called Magdalene St. Louis. All of these are made possible with the time and talents of Episcopal churches.

To realize this movement requires that we become idealists. We have to dream of a world where

children are safe and rape victims expect justice.

Idealism doesn’t mean we are Pollyanna-ish about the world. I have heard the war stories from Kigali, Houston, Lawala, Guayaquil, Omaha, Kampala, and every other city where I have traveled and where people bear the common pain on their individual backs of sexual trauma. In each of these places, Magdalene House has been invited to partner with local groups and create an emerging network of sister organizations committed to helping each other with best practices and expanding to support our individual social enterprises.

We have just been invited to come back to Lexington, Kentucky, where a group from a local church has launched a new residential program called The Well. There are now 20 to 30 new emerging communities that share the work.

They are a witness to the truth that women in loving and compassionate communities can recover and find restitution and freedom.

Love is both lavish and economical. It’s beyond seeing what our values are in the marketplace, to looking at how we can change the marketplace through increased economic and political leverage for others. In October, Thistle Farms, for example, held its first national conference and launched a new shared-trade initiative. People from more than 30 states showed up, and all in attendance committed to using our economic and political resources to help our collective work thrive.

As the movement to address the issues of trafficking, addiction, and prostitution grows, let us confirm that this work is sustainable. As more churches invest in long-term housing and social enterprise, we can save our communities millions of dollars by reducing recidivism, by helping women reclaim their families, by lowering court-restitution costs, and by ensuring gainful employment while decreasing disability payments to the women. Social enterprises can

sell my

body,

he would

take the

money.* Peggy Napier

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Members of Thistle Farms, Tracey, Kim, Arleatha, and Tasha.

Becca Stevens is an Episcopal priest and founder of Magdalene, residential communities of women who have survived prostitution, trafficking, and addiction.

In 2001 she founded Thistle Farms, which currently employs nearly 50 residents and graduates and houses a natural body-care line, a paper and sewing studio, and the Thistle Stop Café. She is a prolific writer and has been featured in The New York Times and on ABC World News, NPR, PBS, CNN, and Huffington Post. Her newest book, The Way of Tea & Justice: Rescuing the World’s Favorite Beverage from its Violent History, will be released in 2014.

Peggy Napier

also support the work through the sale of products and services, as Thistle Farms does.

We can help protect the next generation, and we can live deeper into the truths we long to believe. This work can infuse our parish life with new spirit and revive the vitality of our common worship. Like the old-time religion, we can allow the Spirit to move us to free the captives, preach good news to the poor, and give sight to all of us who are still blind.

It also takes a great deal of humility to try to face universal issues by loving individual women in small groups. I have witnessed women who relapse back to the streets and die from the violence and drugs that thrive there and on newspaper back pages. We can do more to meet the economic, physical, psychological, educational, and spiritual needs of those women who have survived, by working humbly as a community.

Good news sometimes is the oldest news we know. We don’t have to overcomplicate it. We just have to take out the trash when the trash can is full and keep doing the daily work.

Last summer the Episcopal Church Women in Pensacola, Florida, invited us to come and help them start thinking about how to plant the seeds of a movement there. One of the graduates of Thistle Farms that went with me was Dorris Walker. When Dorris was a child, she witnessed the murder of her father, and she was abused as a very young teen. As a young woman she ended up walking a 10-block radius on the streets of Nashville for 26 years. In all that she had witnessed and endured, no one had ever shown her the beach. It was on the trip to Florida that her feet first touched the sugar sands and she saw the sunrise from the coast. When she stepped into the ocean and felt the tide for the first time in her life, she threw her arms up and asked, “Has this been doing this my whole life?” As long as the moon has been spinning around the earth, the tide has been coming in. Like love it is old and true. Sometimes it just takes a community to help us get to the shore to feel its power and remember the source.

Love heals, inspires, and changes us for its own sake.

Tracey and Gwen making healing oils for Thistle Farms.

ABOUT MAGDALENE

• Magdalene is a residential community that offers two years of housing, food, medical and dental services, therapy, education, and job training.

• Thistle Farms is the social enterprise that is run by the women of Magdalene. The women create natural bath and body products by hand.

Proceeds directly benefit the women.

• Magdalene’s six homes function by relying on residents to create a supportive community and share household tasks.

• Women come to Magdalene from prison, the streets, and across the country.

• The women of Magdalene/Thistle Farms range in age from 20 to 50.

Many have been sexually abused between the ages of seven and 11, began using alcohol or drugs by 13, have been arrested a hundred times, on average, or have spent about 12 years working as a prostitute.

• 72% percent of the women who join Magdalene are clean and sober two and a half years after beginning the program.

For more information about Magdalene and how you can help, visit thistlefarms.org.

ALL MUSIC IS CHURCH

P

ushing past the chestnut carts, day-trippers, and Salvation Army bell-ringers that clog Fifth Avenue the week before Christmas, I climb the steps of St. Thomas Church, the imposing gothic pile on the corner of 53rd Street that abuts the Museum of Modern Art. Inside, the St. Thomas Boys Choir is standing on the altar in seasonal red vestments, singing Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols as part of their annual holiday concert. Led by their director John Scott—formerly the organist and director of music at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London—and accompanied by harpist Anna Reinersman, the boys’ treble voices soar in the high stone nave, clear and resonant all the way to my seat in the organ loft. For an hour or so, I am transported far from the clamor outside.

A few days later, I’m downtown at St. Paul’s Chapel at Trinity Wall Street for the Sunday night service known as Compline, sung by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street under its director, Julian Wachner. With the nave lit only by candles, the choir sings a haunting mix of plainchant and improvised music, putting a modern spin on the ancient monastic service. Compline is just one of several musical events presented by Trinity Wall Street each week: there are lunchtime concerts devoted to Bach’s cantatas on Mondays, plus organ music every Wednesday, and chamber and contemporary music on Thursdays, along with regular performances of operas and other large-scale works featuring Trinity’s in-house orchestra, NOVUS NY. Almost all are free.

It is irrefutable that sacred music lies at the center of the Western classical music tradition.

From Gregorian chant to Bach, Britten, and beyond, more music has been written for the church than for any other institution. But in a city with a surfeit of world-class performing arts institutions, music lovers tend to overlook the day-to-day musical offerings at places like St. Thomas or Trinity, perhaps put off by their religious underpinnings.

Sacred music has had an outsized influence on one surprising corner of the New York musical world: the post-classical scene found at places like Le Poisson Rouge or heard on the label New Amsterdam Records. Much of this is because

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Why Choral Music In New York Matters

BY PETE MATTHEWS

churches offer a flexible schedule and a steady source of income for fledgling freelance musicians, as they have for centuries. But after speaking with several prominent composers, all in their early 30s, it’s clear that while singing in church may be a day job, it’s also an inspiration for their own music.

Composer and violinist Caleb Burhans spent nearly 20 years in church choirs, including seven years as a countertenor at Trinity. “Choral music is central to who I am,” Caleb says. “It informs everything I do. There’s something about the visceral experience of singing close harmonies with others that I really like.”

Caleb, who considers himself agnostic, admits to being ambivalent when it comes to the religious nature of this music. A case in point is his debut album, Evensong (Cantaloupe Music), with its ambient and post-rock settings of traditional Anglican verses.

I guess you could say I’m on a personal quest to reconcile with Christianity through my music.

Subconsciously, I’ll tweak a harmony to be subversive or will tip my hat to the past by quoting a motif or cadence from some 16th-century hymn or motet.

Another composer strongly influenced by sacred music is Nico Muhly, whose earliest performing experience was as a boy soprano at Grace Episcopal Church in Providence, Rhode Island. In his 2005 Guardian essay “Choral Sex,” Nico said that after his voice changed, he carried his affinities for the Anglican choral tradition—its localized repetitions, small gestures, and overall restraint—over to his own music.

“It’s become a cantus firmus through everything I do,” he said in an interview with the Metropolitan Opera last year, “not just musically,

but also as a sort of philosophy of how to make music and think of yourself as a composer.”

In addition to writing large-scale works like his opera Two Boys, staged earlier this season by the Met, Nico has composed a great deal of choral music, much of it for John Scott and the St. Thomas Choir. “With sacred music,” he says, “your obligation is to the bigger narrative of the fundamental story of the church. But because everybody knows the story, the composer’s job is one of shading and re-telling.”

Even for non-composers, the daily rigor of singing in a church choir can be beneficial.

Soprano Mellissa Hughes, one of new music’s most sought-after and dynamic singers, says that her day job as a member of the Trinity Choir has been invaluable in honing sight-reading chops and other technical skills.

“I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t sung in choirs,” she says. “There are these little tricks you learn that come from knowing your instrument and working in a group setting.”

Bora Yoon is an experimental composer and performer who creates surreal soundscapes by blending electronics and found objects with her own voice. Bora says that while her membership in the Voices of Ascension choir has turned some heads among her avant-garde peers, it’s had a profound influence on how she thinks about performance, and music in general: As a singer and composer, I get influenced just by having to sing through all of this varied repertoire week after week that I wouldn’t normally be exposed to. I have access to this great wealth of knowledge about how timbre works, how spatialization of sound works, what makes one period sound different from another.

“My administrators think I’m insane, but I don’t have any regulation on attendance,” says Trinity’s Wachner. “First of all, it allows the singers to pay their rent, but more importantly it keeps them artistically satisfied, so that when they come back to Trinity from singing in these other groups, they come back with these experiences that increase what we do.”

One of these groups is the GRAMMY Awardwinning a cappella octet Roomful of Teeth, half of

whom come from the Trinity Choir (a fifth member sings with St. Thomas). The group incorporates folkbased vocal practices from all over the world, including yodeling, Korean P’ansori, and Tuvan throat singing.

“It seemed like a given to me,” says their director Brad Wells, “that composers would enjoy writing for the voice in dramatically different gears from bel canto, to throat singing, to all of these different kinds of techniques.”

One of Roomful of Teeth’s members, Caroline Shaw, used many of these techniques in her “Partita for 8 Voices,” which won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for music. Caroline, who sang in the choir of Christ Church New Haven before moving to New York in 2008, says she didn’t initially set out to write something so substantial: “I’m not sure what the impetus for it was, other than wanting a certain kind of clarity.”

As a result, “Partita” has a bold, unadorned sound that is both vividly fresh and strangely familiar—it catches you off-guard. “When we first performed “Passacaglia” (the first movement) in 2009,” Wells recalls, “there was a real power to it.

People were leaning forward in their chairs; they couldn’t help but cheer right in the middle of it.”

On a snowy Saturday in December, I trekked to Brooklyn College’s Walt Whitman Hall for a holiday concert by the GRAMMY Awardwinning Brooklyn Youth Chorus (B.Y.C.), made up of kids aged 11 to 18. After sing-alongs of “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” the B.Y.C. performed Shaw’s “Its Motion Keeps,” a mesmerizing homage to “A Ceremony of Carols,” with overlapping, antiphonal sounds marked by dissonance and decay. “Its Motion Keeps” was commissioned by the B.Y.C. last year as part of their New Voices Commissioning Project, which has yielded more than two dozen works to date.

“The existing body of music for treblevoice youth chorus is somewhat limited,” says B.Y.C. Founder and Director Dianne Berkun-Menaker.

Commissioning music has made it possible to find and express our own unique voice. The range of composers that B.Y.C. has worked with, from John Adams to Shaw, has provided the chorus with musical challenges on every level—from vocal technique to complex harmonies and polyrhythms.

The following week, I went to hear the Sunday night meditation at the Church of the Ascension, a quiet, reflective service with a cappella music sung by Bora from the organ loft. The music all sounded like it came from the same period, though I couldn’t tell which. When I saw her afterwards, Bora said the first selection was by the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179), but the others were by David Lang and Meredith Monk, both living New York composers.

“We’re revisiting the same side of the record, just several grooves in,” she told me.

Hildegard’s music is nearly 1,000 years old, and it still carries the resonance it does because it has a universal nature that will never outdate itself.

Classic and romantic periods are very declarative and presentational, whereas medieval and postmodern music both have an inward quality that has a glow to it, that’s very clear and transportive.

It’s all cyclical.

Wachner hears a similar thread. “The choral tradition is based primarily on a modal system,” he says.

It’s 16th century white note minstrel notation that’s based on a fixed set of constrained pitches. Which is also where contemporary music comes from.

And so, I think today’s minimalism and mystic minimalism has been a return to medievalism.

There’s a real affinity between those two worlds.

Beyond the technical similarities between Renaissance and contemporary music, I wondered if the daily practice of singing sacred choral music

also affected these young musicians in a metaphysical way. Almost everyone I spoke with could recall at least one instance where they were caught off guard by the emotional resonance of singing in church, be it hearing the reverberation of their voice or the spiritual content of the text.

Tempting as it is to define such experiences as “Road to Damascus” moments, Wachner says that’s missing the point.

“All music is church,” he says. “All music is spirituality, whether it’s specific or whether it’s a reference.”

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I made my way back to St. Thomas for Evensong, the daily choral service that has been sung in some form since the Middle Ages. Although elements of the service change depending on the day, the Magnificat— Mary’s song of praise when she realizes she is the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies—has been sung at every Evensong for more than 1,500 years. Countless composers have set this text— on this day the music was by Francis Jackson, the former organist and director of music at York Minster Cathedral, still active at the age of 96.

As the voices of the men and boys soared over the rumbling bass line of the organ, one verse resonated beyond the others: He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent away empty.

As I walked out onto Fifth Avenue, I thought about how classical music left so much of the past behind and wandered the desert of serialism for the better part of the 20th century, leaving many hungry for the familiar joys of tonality.

In the early years of this century, contemporary musicians are reminding us that no matter what church we belong to, music can bring us all closer to the divine.

This article was originally printed in Brooklyn Rail and has been reprinted with permission. Pete Matthews is the founder and editor-in-chief of Feast of Music, a website about live music in New York City and occasionally other places.

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n e p O Communion Imagine experiencing Episcopal Eucharist for the first time. The point arrives when the congregation stands and starts going forward for Communion.

Do you go? Are you invited?

An

n e p QueO stio n?

Which is worse—that you’re excluded from this part of the service, or that you’re welcome to join but you don’t quite know what’s going on? Which creates in you a greater yearning to go deeper—an opportunity to participate in something wonderful but rather strange, with the hope of understanding it someday, or the chance to observe a ritual that is clearly meaningful to others and to look forward to learning more about it, so you may eventually participate meaningfully yourself?

Pastoral concern for people having these kinds of experiences and the questions they produce have led many Episcopal parishes into a space where practice and canon do not always match up. The church’s official position of welcoming only baptized Christians to the table seems inhospitable to some, while the de facto custom in many places of inviting all present seems to others to make a confusing muddle of baptismal theology. And of course, to paraphrase the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, some people do see it both ways.

It is neither a secret nor a shame that practice in many churches has moved ahead of both canons and a fully reasoned theological position. And I believe it is a good thing that nobody claims to have the final answer. The current reality has led to a great deal of important discussion and writing in the classic spiritual model of action and reflection. Two of the Episcopal Church’s most valuable resources for reflection and formation—the Anglican Theological Review and LeaderResources—have published collections of essays providing a diverse set of thoughtful insights (see page 24).

To further support these conversations in parishes, Trinity Wall Street* has recorded interviews with two leading theological voices, the Rev. Dr. James Farwell and the Rev. Donald Schell, who approach the topic with respectful and well-thought-out differences. Those interviews, which run approximately a half-hour each, may be viewed on our website and used for individual or group reflection. Also available on trinitywallstreet.org are shorter video excerpts from both Farwell and Schell that we hope will lead you to seek out more.

The Rev. Linda L. Grentz says it beautifully in her introduction to the LeaderResources volume: “This is not a time for dispute or arrogant proclamations; it is a time for deep, thoughtful dialogue.” May the conversation continue.

Interviews and introduction by Robert Owens Scott, Director, Faith Formation & Education for Trinity Wall Street.

* For the record, Trinity’s worship bulletins say: “In the Holy Communion we experience the Real Presence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and all adults and children who desire to receive Him are encouraged to come forward.”

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THE REV. DR. JAMES FARWELL The Rev. Dr. James Farwell is Associate Professor of Theology and Liturgy at Virginia Theological Seminary.

He is the author of several books and served in parish ministry for almost 20 years.

You have done some interesting work exploring this issue.

I wrote a piece back in 2005 that was intended to get the conversation started. Since then I often get identified as the guy who’s opposed to open Communion. That wasn’t quite what the article was about, but what I was seeing was a number of parishes and clergy were going to the practice of what now is being called open Communion, or open table, without actually having a significant and robust theological conversation about what would be involved. I’m particularly concerned with the fact that there is a linkage between baptism and Eucharist that is embedded in the texture and the language of the rites themselves in the Prayer Book… that assume that those who are taking the Eucharist are part of an already intentional, committed community.

First of all, it’s very clear, you’re not recommending refusing someone who is unbaptized and waiting at the altar rail.

No. No. And none of us do that.

Now, one argument is that restricting Communion to the baptized is inhospitable.

Does that hold any water?

I’m sure that there are individual cases in which people are drawn to the experience. … If they felt they couldn’t come forward, that might be experienced as an act of exclusion in some way.

I hesitate, though, to build the entire argument for open Communion on that sort of anecdotal reality, because for every story of someone who experiences that as inhospitable, there will be another story of someone for whom it’s not offensive at all. They may not even understand all that the table signifies, and they wouldn’t really expect to be part of that.

Well, what about the view that Jesus came into a religious structure that had firm boundaries and kept breaking them with everybody?

Of course, we must go to Scripture to begin as the foundation of our faith, but it’s a tricky argument to work from Scripture to the question of open Communion. First of all, the Gospel records are not newspaper accounts of what Jesus did. Then you look at the content of the Scriptures themselves, and yes, you have these recounting of meals where Jesus ate with people that were considered not worthy. But then you look a little closer at the stories, and you realize that, at least in many, if not all cases, you’re dealing with a case in which Jesus is eating with Jews who by other Jews were considered to be unworthy of the covenant or to have behaved in a certain way in which they fell outside the pale of God’s covenant.

So going straight from Scripture to what we do about a sacramental ritual that is based on and warranted by the Last Supper of Jesus, but not a direct mimicry of that supper, doesn’t actually work quite as easily as some of the proponents of open Communion argue. There are some other intervening steps that have to be made there about the way in which baptism and Eucharist have come to operate as rituals in a more developed religious tradition.

So in terms of our practice today, what do you see as the implications for evangelism?

Well, a lot of people are concerned that not being welcome at the table in some way works against hearing the Gospel as good news. That’s a legitimate and concerning question. Episcopalians have never been very good at finding ways to articulate the fact that they are people of faith.

For my money, we could tinker till the cows come home with what we announce or don’t announce before we go to Communion, and I’m not sure at the end of the day we’ve really done very much in making progress in the kind of evangelism that a public church probably needs to move toward as a witness to the world in our current setting.

I also don’t want to be unfair to you and box you in to talking purely academically.

You’ve had experience with this pastorally.

My own pastoral ministry was certainly never one to engage in practices that were exclusive.

But we have, in fact, this wonderful catechumenal process of adult formation that we are able to invite people into as unbaptized adults who have this spiritual longing and want to go deeper and are drawn to what they see and what they hear proclaimed in the church. My approach in the parishes that I served was always to develop an adult catechumenate to respond to those adults, and I found not only was that sufficiently effective to make a place for the unbaptized in the parish, but that, in fact, it was a tremendously rich experience for those persons. In several cases, the richness of that experience had, in part, to do with waiting to get to the Eucharistic table on the day of their baptism.

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THE REV. DONALD SCHELL The Rev. Donald Schell is founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa, a church in San Francisco with a history of experimenting with liturgical practices. He is an author of several books and president of All Saints Company, which provides liturgical resources to churches.

We hear that term “open Communion. “ Do you use that phrase, and what do you mean by it?

No. Closed means rejecting people. Saying closed Communion implies that the people that insist on baptism before Communion are imagining a closed community, which they’re not.

And in fairness, I’ve not heard anyone argue in the church that someone who has approached the rail should be turned away.

When I went to General Seminary, what we were taught was you must never turn anyone away who comes to the rail.

I know that St. Gregory of Nyssa has a particular history with this. Could you talk a little bit about your experience with that practice?

In about 1981 or 1982, our practice was that we surrounded the table to share Communion and that it was passed from hand to hand among the laypeople present. And we began seeing our congregation deliberately sharing Communion with the visitor that they brought to church who was not baptized, and we’d talk about it afterwards. We had the accidental, circumstantial, or Spirit-inspired discernment that was happening in practice.

We reached a point where we began saying, “Okay, we know what the rubrics of the Prayer Books say, but this is a place to declare what we’re about.” So far as we know, we were the first congregation in the Episcopal Church to be making an invitation to all present to receive.

How do people understand? They sense it, they feel it. They recognize that something wonderful is happening and that they want to share in it. Is that bad theology? No. Is it complete theology? Well, no. How does a baby understand, how does a very sick and not fully conscious person understand? Understanding isn’t the whole thing.

We’ve shifted from an age of reason—you shouldn’t receive the sacrament unless you fully understand—to a stance that focuses on people’s experience and assumes that our interpretation will be appropriate to who we are and that there’s continuing learning that’s possible.

If I go to a Buddhist temple, they’ll probably be doing things that I don’t understand. If I wanted to take part, I would go to someone and ask for more instruction. Some people will argue that receiving Communion can act in the same way.

I understand that and I’ve heard it, and I’ve also had the experience of building a congregation from the ground up and encountering a lot of people who had no church background and came and were entranced, captivated, moved.

John Wesley said that the Eucharist is a converting sacrament. It does something to people to be welcomed, to share, to receive.

We welcomed people to Communion and found them saying, tell me about baptism. I want to be baptized. We welcomed people who were estranged from church, and the simple fact that we welcomed told them this is a different game from the game that they left. We have had people describe what amounts to a startling moment of conversion in receiving Communion.

It’s bigger than our understanding.

John the Baptist says get ready, and Jesus says it’s too late. The kingdom is here now, and God embraces you.

I want to help people know that they are truly welcome in the kingdom of God, and I will drop therefore all of the things that separate me from other people. The Gospel is not about being initiated to live inside the church walls. The Gospel is about finding ourselves in the presence of God and then saying I want to live in deep communion with all the people God loves.

So in terms of the practice in the Episcopal Church, do you agree that the Prayer Book assumes baptism comes first?

Yeah. It’s clear that it does, and the Prayer Book is a wonderful, historical artifact. Every Prayer Book is. I would say every generation in the church’s history, in fact, has in its way redefined the sacraments, both in teaching and in practice.

Was the Spirit done with us? I don’t think so.

So yes, what the Prayer Book imagines and what lots of congregations in the United States have been discovering don’t match.

What are the questions that you would hope that the church would be looking at?

I don’t think we are ready, personally, to try to change the Prayer Book or the canons. I think we actually need to be willing to dwell in the space that Jesus was willing to dwell in, of operating outside strict conformity to the law and asking the questions of how the Spirit is working.

I’m glad for people raising the questions. I think it’s terrifically important and a wonderful opportunity for us to talk about who we are when we gather in God’s name. If we can continue to talk to one another, I think we’re going to make some profound discoveries.

Online Resources Water, Bread and Wine: Should we offer communion to people before they are baptized?

Published by LeaderResources, LLC, LeaderResources.org/wbw.

“The Open Table,” Anglican Theological Review, anglicantheologicalreview.org/read/ conversations/1/.

Visit trinitywallstreet.org/opencommunion to watch the full interviews.

psalmtube

12 Years a Slave and Standing Against Evil

BY LYNN GOSWICK

Since its release in October, the movie 12 Years a Slave has reaped accolades, including an Oscar for best picture, for the story of Solomon Northup, a free-born black man kidnapped from Washington, D.C., and sold into slavery in the 1840s.

Based on Northup’s autobiography of the same name, the film follows Northup and other captives on their paddleboat journey to the Deep South, where they are displayed like sculptures and evaluated for their muscle tone, nimbleness, and work potential by the local plantation owners.

We see Northup, now renamed “Platt” by the slave trader, sold to the relatively “benevolent” owner of one plantation, then resold to escape retribution for showing up an overseer by proving there was a more efficient way to transport lumber. We watch Northup in his new home, as he tries to protect himself and, at times, a fellow slave, Patsey, from the manic follies and punishments doled out by the planter, Epps, and his jealous wife. Twelve years after his kidnapping, he is vouched for and rescued by a white merchant friend from New York.

Not surprisingly, this rendering has rekindled conversation about the institution that so marred our country.

While we need this conversation, what makes this film most powerful is not its telling of the enslavement of one man, but what it says about our capacity for evil and emptiness, and our equal capacity for empathy and resilience.

12 Years mirrors how often we have gotten it wrong in this country, but also how often we continue to get it wrong as human beings.

The Southern planters’ quest for wealth and dominance led them to disregard the humanity of the people they used to harvest the lucrative cotton, sugar, and tobacco crops.

Was it the strangeness of different color skin, the “otherness” of the Africans, that led planters to treat these human beings as soft machines for work, sex, or amusement? Or was it strictly the sin of greed that made palatable the lie that these people, in the words of planter Epps, “ain’t my hired help. They’re my property.”

Today, plantations are tourist attractions that remind us of our past, and citizens of all races may enter into formal and informal contracts for employment, but there is a familiar disregard for those living on the lower end of the socio-

Twelve Years a Slave is a narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New York who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841, and rescued from a cotton plantation in Louisiana in 1853.

economic ladder, for those who aren’t part of the ruling class. Practices that led to our recent economic crisis, including irresponsible lending to those who couldn’t afford their mortgages (a practice historically conservative bankers would never have considered), have brought to light a similar disregard for our neighbors.

This disregard has caused incredible hardships for many Americans, and the effects will echo for some time, just as slavery’s legacy continues to be a source of distrust, friction, and even hostility in our country today.

While 12 Years mirrors how we have gotten it wrong, what’s incredible about this story— Northup himself, and humans generally—is Northup’s refusal to give in to the horror of his situation.

On the paddleboat ride South, a fellow slave advises Northup to keep his head down and tell no one who he is, but Northup replies, “I don’t want to survive. I want to live.”

The absolute evil of slavery, and the United States’ participation in that institution aside, it is tragic when a man who has everything—a rich family life, employment that he chooses for himself, friends, and standing in his community—is forced into enslavement with no way of getting word to his family, no hope of righting the wrong.

Most, like the slave woman whose children were taken from her arms and sold to two different planters, would despair and, as she did, mourn aloud for her loss.

What fueled Northup’s determination to do more

than survive? Could it have been his emotionally wealthy existence before he was taken?

When we catch him looking into the distance, with the sun bearing down and the cicadas rioting in the background, his expression is an exquisite combination of wonder, bewilderment, and calm. Is he remembering the nights he tucked his giggling children into bed? Or is he satisfied with the knowledge that his family is safe in New York, surrounded by townspeople who respect them?

Mentions of God in 12 Years are limited to moments in which the planters use Bible passages to encourage slaves to work well for the masters. Did Northup know of a more just God? Over the 12 years, circumstances wear Northup down. His hair grays. His back stoops. But it’s only at the burial of a field worker, when the others sing for the Jordan River to “roll, Jordan, roll,” that Northup seems to give in, if only for a little while.

After years of keeping himself a little aloof, much contained, and a steady presence to the others, he joins in the singing and the mourning.

In many movies, there is a decisive action—a defining battle, a moment of truth—that resolves the conflict. 12 Years a Slave doesn’t shine based on the moment Northup is rescued. Like our real lives, the shining comes in the everyday victories, the persistence in the face of struggle and hopelessness, and the refusal to back down to evil. May we find strength to fuel those victories.

Lynn Goswick is Project Manager and Associate Editor for Trinity Wall Street. She can be contacted at lgoswick@trinitywallstreet.org.

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WILDCARD AWARDS

Anthony González

Supporting Innovation

S

ince it provided land and funds for fledgling New York parishes in the 18th century, Trinity Wall Street has supported startups and innovative programs in New York and around the world. In keeping with this tradition, Trinity recently gave Wildcard Awards to four innovative organizations.

These are one-time, $25,000 awards intended to support beyond-the-bell-curve programs that inspire transformation.

The awards fall outside Trinity’s standard funding objectives but are part of the parish’s efforts to be a resource for innovators in the wider church.

“The recipients represent a broad spectrum of social activism, but each in its own way seeks to improve the human condition,” said the Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, Rector of Trinity Wall Street. “We are delighted to help these worthy organizations grow, so that they may have a transformational effect on their communities.”

Trinity began accepting nominations in April 2013 and chose the following four from the 52 ministries nominated.

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Healing Communities Network Healing Communities Network (HCN), based in New York City, will use the award to help expand its network of post-incarceration support groups in the five boroughs.

Healing Communities Network was founded by the Rev. Stephen Chinlund in 1979 as the Network Program. For many years, Network Program worked inside prisons to prepare incarcerated persons for parole and re-entry.

Network Program was successful in reducing the recidivism rate: a 2009 study found that only 9 percent of Network Program participants returned to prison, versus New York State’s average recidivism rate of 36%.

Today, the organization works to raise the self-

Tracey, a resident of Magdalene.

esteem and self-awareness of those in prison in advance of parole, then supports their transition back into their families, communities, and employment through regular support group meetings.

The Four Part Meeting is the foundational practice of HCN: participants move from SelfAffirmation, to sharing Stresses and Concerns, to Making a Plan for positive action in the future, to a silent Reflection. The organization aims to help participants learn and practice a conscious philosophy for living.

Healing Communities Network currently sponsors six support groups in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens, many in partnership with local churches. The Wildcard Award will support HCN’s expansion into Brooklyn.

“This is a life-giving award,” said Executive Director Jacqueline McLeod. “It will enable us to work with churches who are ‘sleeping giants’ when it comes to re-entry and incarceration. We look forward to reporting back on the value and the outcomes of this award.”

A Movable Feast It can be difficult to attract young adults to church, especially college students. A Movable Feast, a new ministry of the Diocese of North Carolina, is bringing the Communion service to them.

A Movable Feast will create a mobile campus ministry by outfitting a bus with kitchen facilities and chapel space. The bus will take campus ministry to four diverse university campuses in North Carolina: the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina Central University in Durham, and John C. Smith University in Charlotte.

Young adults, ages 18–35, will be invited to take part in the roaming feast and Communion service, which will offer food and hospitality as

Carolyn Snell

Creative Arts Workshop Creative Arts Workshop (CAW) focuses its program on a very specific geographic area of New York City: northern Manhattan.

The neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood are home to more than 30 percent of Manhattan’s population, and children there have historically been underserved.

Creative Arts Workshop provides young people in northern Manhattan between the ages of four and 24 with training in visual, performing, and technology arts. Through after-school programs, Saturday classes, and full-time summer employment, Creative Arts Workshop assists children, youth, and young adults in learning job and developmental skills. A more fundamental objective of the program is to encourage students to see relationships among themselves, art, and their community.

Since 2005, CAW has operated a Restorative Justice Initiative that seeks to empower youth exiting the judicial system, as well as those from homeless families, to find opportunities for artistic expression by creating murals and other public art.

The award will support a plan to develop new business partnerships to provide large-scale public art.

In acknowledging the Trinity Wildcard Award, Brian Rickin, Executive Director & CEO of Creative Arts Workshop, noted, “It will help CAW ensure that these arts employment opportunities are made available to many more teens and young adults, who sadly today often lack for either a creative education or meaningful work experience.”

Pablo Picasso famously said, “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Creative Arts Workshop helps New York City, and specifically the neighborhoods in northern Manhattan, get a little closer to solving that problem.

well as a sacred space for prayer.

Young adults will also be the ministers, acting as pastors for the mobile ministry and helping to develop the community.

A Movable Feast also endeavors to develop sustainable outreach to each campus with the help of active local parishes.

It is not the first community to focus on a meal, but it is one of the few truly mobile ministries to do so.

The Rev. Nils Chittenden, Director of A Movable Feast, said, “We are so grateful to Trinity Wall Street for their willingness to fund innovation and make our plans a reality. We hope that this mobile ministry will highlight that ‘church’ is less about bricks and mortar and more about a way of life.”

The award from Trinity will cover startup costs, including purchasing a vehicle and food supplies.

Magdalene St. Louis Magdalene St. Louis is a startup, but it’s not exactly starting from scratch. Modeled on the successful Magdalene Community–Thistle Farms in Nashville, Tennessee, it will use many of the same methods to not only help women, but also help to change a culture that buys and sells women as commodities.

Magdalene St. Louis will provide a haven for women recovering from the effects of abuse, prostitution, trafficking, addiction, and life on the streets.

The organization will provide a home and community life for two years at no cost to the women, including educational and vocational opportunities, and will help them acquire the skills and tools they need to rebuild their lives.

The award will cover startup costs such as securing a residential house for the community.

“In the midst of acquiring our first residential home and planning its rehab, this generous award could not have come at a better time,” said Magdalene St. Louis Executive Director Tricia Roland-Hamilton. “Our circle of support now includes Trinity Wall Street.”

The Very Rev. Mike Kinman, Dean of Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral and Chair of Magdalene St. Louis’s board, also visited Trinity in January to participate in a panel that highlighted the important issue of sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

See page 16 for an article about sex trafficking

by Becca Stevens, founder of Magdalene House.

If you have questions about Trinity’s grants and awards, please contact Trinity’s Grants Program at 212.602.0710 or grants@trinitywallstreet.org.

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stories Backpacking Across the Anglican Communion

JM: You write that the view of many Anglicans in Africa toward the issue of homosexuality is based in culture. You also write about the times when you publicly challenged that view.

JZ: It is important at various times to say, “Actually, no, I think that’s wrong. I think that the position that you’re taking on this issue is incorrect.” My response is to articulate the truth about how I feel—and in my conversations with Anglicans around the world, I was always truthful about both what I believed and how I felt—and [allow them] to do the same thing in return.

Courtesy of Jesse Zink

Jesse Zink with Bishop Abraham Nhial on a pastoral visit to the contested Abyei region of Sudan/South Sudan, six weeks after the area was overrun by armed militias and tens of thousands were displaced.

The Rev. Jesse Zink, an Episcopal priest who grew up in the United States, traveled to far-flung and often remote dioceses and parishes of the Anglican Communion on five of the world’s seven continents. Zink documents his journey in a book called Backpacking through the Anglican Communion: A Search for Unity. Zink discussed his book with Trinity News editor Jim Melchiorre.

JM: What motivated you to make this journey?

JZ: One of my core motivations is this idea of incarnation. It’s the first act, really, of Jesus Christ’s ministry. Jesus showed up. And I had this real sense when I traveled that that was the first thing that I wanted to do as well, that the first thing was to be with people, to listen to them, to learn from them, and to see where our journey was going together.

JM: You explain that you began this journey in search of unity in the Anglican Communion. Did you have an idea of what unity would look like?

JZ: I knew what it wouldn’t look like. I knew that there was a difference between unity and unanimity. If you look at the history of the church, there’s never been a time when everybody’s been able to get together and write down what we agree on. I mean, that was just as true of the Council of Nicaea as it is of anything in the Anglican Communion today. But I did have this sense that unity was something that was really significant.

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JM: When traveling in Africa, were you surprised how often the issue of homosexuality came up, especially the ordination of partnered LGBTQ priests as bishops?

JZ: Issues like homosexuality are impossible to avoid. What I was repeatedly surprised at was a real openness to at least talk about this issue in a holy way. I cannot tell you the number of times somebody would bring up these issues with me, not in a spirit of wanting to condemn me or to judge me, but simply to say, “Listen, we hear this about your church in the U.S. Can you explain this to us because we have a hard time understanding it.” When we move past the headlines, and come to be in relationship with other Anglicans around the world, the kind and the quality of the conversation that we have is much different.

JM: During your travels to Ecuador, a man tells you that he doesn’t speak much when he meets Americans because Americans are so busy talking, all he can do is listen.

JZ: I think one of the greatest challenges in the Anglican Communion is having people speak for themselves. When people speak for themselves, especially people who may not speak English as a first language, who may not have access to Internet, it really challenges the listening skills of someone like you or me. So in order for more people to speak for themselves, a lot of us are going to have to become better listeners.

JM: Your book is more than just a reporter’s documentation of a series of trips, there’s also the sense of a personal journey of growth.

JZ: This book is, in part, about my vocation as someone who can speak to Christians from a variety of different cultural backgrounds. The book comes out of this deep sense of joy that I have at the relationships that I’ve formed with sisters and brothers in Christ around the world.

But it also comes from this deep sense of frustration, in that I sense in a very real way that the discourse in the Anglican Communion does not reflect the reality of the church as it is actually lived.

JM: What do think about the future of the Anglican Communion?

JZ: I think the Anglican Communion needs to have a future, because God has joined us in relationship for a reason. Our global relationships are broken. And I think that the reason the Anglican Communion needs to continue to exist is that it has this potential to provide this counterexample of reconciled diversity, of unity, of healthy and productive relationship, to be the truly countercultural example to the world that God is always calling God’s church to be.

Jim Melchiorre is Editor of Trinity News. He can be contacted at jmelchiorre@trinitywallstreet.org.

learned?

WHAT HAVE YOU

MATTHEW LYON JOINED TRINITY IN 2012. LAST AUTUMN HE VENTURED TO LONDON TO SERVE WITH THE MOOT COMMUNITY, LOCATED IN THE HISTORIC GUILD CHURCH OF ST. MARY ALDERMARY. ACTIVE LARGELY WITH HOST CAFÉ, LYON HELPS SUPPORT A PLACE WHERE SITTING TO PRAY AND SITTING TO SIP A COFFEE CAN HAPPEN IN THE SAME MOMENT, AT THE SAME MOMENT. YOU CAN FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER: @MATTHEW_LYON_

A MOOT IS an ancient Saxon council (like a

vestry) which was vested with power to decide legal matters for a town or village (ergo, a “moot point”). Moot, the “new monastic” community I intern with here, takes the same posture as the first century ecclesia written about in the Epistles. For Socrates, an ecclesia was an assembly of wealthy men vested with power to decide legal matters. St. Paul subverted this when he gave ecclesial identity to the orphan, widow, slave, and others at the margins who followed the way of Jesus.

COMMUNAL LIFE CAN SHOW US each where

our ego hides, and the ways in which the egos of others have mishandled and wounded us.

Communal life also shows us a path to healing and vulnerability.

myself in ways I really need to see, but which I don’t always enjoy. Hospitality is immediate, dangerous, face-to-face with reality. Most days, I finish work exhausted because of the huge task it is to rein in my fear and/or pride and be available to both customer and coworker, who are my neighbors. This means seeing and attending to those parts of me that are not so hospitable but come so naturally I don’t even realize they are there. Yet, when I am listening, it is like walking the banks of the Thames, full of shards and pieces of stories, outward signs of an invisible grace.

LITURGY IS IMPORTANT TO ME BECAUSE it is

an outward sign of an inward grace—though not a grace arriving from “above” but from beside.

Liturgy’s great benefit, in my reckoning, is that it calibrates us in Faith, Hope, and Love for our neighbor’s sake. Not the idea of “neighbor” but the embodied strangers in the pew beside me, or the strangeness in those I know and care about, and even those people I don’t care about.

Caroline Puntis

INTERNING AT THE CAFÉ HAS SHOWN ME

I THINK EXPERIMENTING WITH LITURGY

expresses that we are listening to our culture, context, and tradition. Tradition, from the Latin verb do, dare, “to give,” names some of the gifts of culture. I see experimentation as opening up space in our traditions for changes in context and culture (which, like us, are always in flux) to receive Faith, Hope, and Love.

MY FAVORITE FORM OF MINISTRY IS anything in which sisters and brothers gather to be loved and to love. In a world (and a nation) with so

many categories of distinction, separation, and opposition, it does my soul well to be amidst a diverse crowd so given to fellowship and hospitality.

I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO RETURNING TO NEW YORK BECAUSE I sense a vocation as

priest, and Trinity is the parish I have been led to.

Ordination is something I have been discerning since my young years as a pastor’s kid. In terms of New York sacraments, I would also like a Gray’s Papaya hot dog or a proper slice.

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PA R I S H

perspectives

TOP: Janet Yieh, Assistant Organist, sings with the Choir of Trinity Wall Street during the liturgy of Ash Wednesday.

LEFT: The Rev. John Moody with his artwork, inspired by a trip across the United States. Moody’s art was on display in the parlor of 74 Trinity Place.

RIGHT: David Jette, Head Verger, with members of the congregation at a meeting to celebrate those who serve as ushers. From left to right: Rowena Irons, Patrice-Lou Thomas, Carla Richards, Kowk Sum and Kam Chee Fun, and Ivey Coard-Gheler.

BOTTOM LEFT: Visitors walk the labyrinth in St. Paul’s Chapel.

The labyrinth was laid out in St. Paul’s every Sunday in Lent for reflection and prayer.

BOTTOM RIGHT: A youth group from Florida participates in the 10am Sunday Eucharist at St. Paul’s Chapel.

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The Rev. Dr. James Cooper in costume for the Mardi Gras celebration at St. Paul’s Chapel.

TOP RIGHT: Members of the congregation, Lorna Bruce, Barbara Inniss, Carla Richards, Oliva George, and Evelyn Moss, along with a visitor at Mardi Gras.

Jim Melchiorre

LEFT: Congregants Maria Menna Perper and Suresh George dance at the Mardi Gras celebration.

Administrative coordinator for St. Margaret’s House, Ruby Toh, with Kwang-Hai Au at the Lunar New Year celebration. St. Margaret’s House provides housing for elderly and disabled persons.

Onleilove Alston, M.Div, MSW, a community organizer, speaker, and writer, addresses the Trinity community at the Task Force Against Racism’s Black History Month speaking series in February.

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News from Trinity’s partners and friends, near and far.

Bible Challenge One hundred and twenty congregants participated in a Bible Challenge, which began on Ash Wednesday 2013 and finished just before Lent 2014. The Rev. Daniel Simons, Priest and Director of Liturgy, Hospitality, and Pilgrimage, challenged congregants to read the entire Bible in a year. Although not all participants made it through the Bible, some called it life changing, and everyone celebrated the completion of the year with a party.

Charlotte’s Place Jenn Chinn, Program Manager for Charlotte’s Place, and Bryan Parsons, Program Associate and Brown Bag Coordinator, visited Knollwood Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in late February. Knollwood is considering starting a community center in Winston-Salem modeled on Charlotte’s Place. This was the culmination of a relationship begun when Ken Meyers, Minister for Faith Formation and Education at Knollwood, visited Charlotte’s Place in 2012. A group of Knollwood parishioners also visited in 2013.

Downtown Initiative PENCIL, a nonprofit that fosters partnerships between businesses and New York public schools, launched its Downtown Initiative in March. The initiative is funded with a grant from Trinity Wall Street and will focus on creating partnerships between local businesses and the 60 public schools located in Lower Manhattan.

James and Tay Cooper Honored At a meeting of the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes (CEEP) in Atlanta, Georgia, Virginia Theological Seminary honored the ministry of the Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, Rector of Trinity Wall Street, and his wife, Tay. Jason Pizer Jason Pizer, President of Trinity Real Estate, was elected Chair of the Board of Directors of the Hudson Square Connection, a business improvement district. Hudson Square Connection aims to transform the area bounded by West Houston Street, Canal Street, 6th Avenue, and Greenwich Street in Lower Manhattan into a creative hub. Trinity’s real-estate holdings are located in the area.

Laptops for Haiti Trinity’s IT department, in collaboration with Trinity’s Faith In Action department, donated 20 laptops to the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti for the use of the Rt. Rev. Ogé Beauvoir in his ministry.

The Episcopal Diocese of Haiti currently operates more than two hundred schools and is expanding its ministries, and the laptops will be put to good use.

Mark Bozzuti-Jones The Rev. Mark Bozzuti-Jones, Priest for Pastoral Care and Community, was invited by the Diocese of Long Island to speak at and facilitate a clergy workday in February.

New Congregational Council Members On Sunday, March 1, the congregation of Trinity Wall Street held its annual meeting and elected new members to the Congregational Council.

Craig Curley, Maribel Ruiz, Luciana Sikula, Scott Townell, and Susan Ward were elected to serve two-year terms on the council. In addition, two congregants were appointed by the Vicar, the Rev. Canon Anne Mallonee: Sam Ghiggeri and Patrice-Lou Thomas. These seven will join eight current members of council: Mark Alvino, Sandy Blaine, Beverly Bryant, Michael Cornelison, James Gomez, Heather Lorch, Donato Mallano, and Tapua Tunduwani. The Congregational Council is responsible for the mission and outreach of the congregation of Trinity Wall Street. The congregation also elected three delegates to the Diocesan Convention: Emory Edwards, Toni Foy, and Roz Hall.

On March 18, the council elected Tapua Tunduwani to serve as president and Scott Townell to serve as vice president.

Roomful of Teeth Four current and former members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street won a GRAMMY as part of their work with Roomful of Teeth, an experimental vocal octet. Dashon Burton, Eric Dudley, Virginia Warnken, and Martha Cluver accepted the group’s GRAMMY for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for the album Roomful of Teeth, just minutes after performing during the pre-telecast awards show at the Nokia Theatre. Two other members of the choir, baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert and tenor Steven Caldicott Wilson, were nominated for the same award with the quartet New York Polyphony.

Spread the Word Do 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.

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I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.

(Psalm 122:1) Worship in the Anglican tradition varies globally, depending on the local culture. I love how at home I have felt in the Anglican churches I have been blessed to visit. Our shared roots in The Book of Common Prayer provide the framework for our worship and connect generations of Anglicans whose spiritual lives have been shaped by the Prayer Book for centuries. I delight both in what we share in common and in our liturgical differences.

Not so long ago, great concern arose among some that The Book of Common Prayer’s influence would diminish or be rendered obsolete with the introduction of desktop publishing capabilities in church offices. Happily, while many still prefer “to hold the book,” the shape of Anglican liturgy still has its grip on us despite our all-inclusive bulletins.

Earlier this year, I had the honor of preaching at St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town.

The liturgy was extraordinary: Anglican to its core, a gorgeous space, beautiful music, and elegant liturgy. I was among family. This is what was so remarkable—the hymns, the prayers, the Scripture readings were in three languages, equally divided among English, Africaans, and IsiXhosa, the mother tongue of the late Nelson Mandela. Even the verses of the hymns rotated among the three languages. As a result, I felt a deep connection to my South African brothers and sisters as we worshipped our God together.

My husband Tony and I visited the Anglican Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf with a group from the Compass Rose Society a few years ago. We were immersed for a few days in the world of the Orthodox Church, which has a strong presence in that part of the world with its beautiful architecture, icons, and chanting. I felt very much the visitor. When we gathered for worship in St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, Nicosia, however, I felt as though I were back home even though I had never been there before.

The dean of St Paul’s, Nicosia, celebrated the Eucharist with our group. Following the Fraction, when the consecrated bread is broken, I was startled by the Invitation he extended to us. It was welcoming, pastoral, and compelling. I asked for a copy following the service and have used it regularly in weekday liturgies at Trinity, where we have a tremendous number of visitors who respond well to this Celtic invitation: Come to this table, You who have much faith and you who would like to have more; You who have been to this sacrament often and you who have not been for a long time; You who have tried to follow Jesus, and you who have failed.

Come, it is Christ himself who invites us to meet him here.

Our identity as Anglicans is connected to our liturgical tradition, in all the rich ways it is expressed globally. I have come to see the differences less as differences and more as new facets of ourselves to be embraced.

Blessings,

The Rev. Canon Anne Mallonee Vicar, Trinity Wall Street amallonee@trinitywallstreet.org Leo Sorel

TrinityNews Trinity Wall Street 74 Trinity Place New York, NY 10006-2088

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