Sacred Ground

By Lallie Lloyd In an August webinar for facilitators, the Rev. Nora Boerner, the Rev. Canon Meg Wagner, and the Rev. David Ware joined a conversation about Sacred Ground as a place where people are meeting across different kinds of difference and learning skills for brave conversations in their wider communities.  Boerner and Wagner both…

By Barbara Van Cleve By most people’s standards I had a very good education, but it took only one session of Sacred Ground for me to recognize that my excellent high school and college teachers had misrepresented American racial history. Over the following nine weeks, through our readings and videos, I registered growing annoyance—even anger—at…

By the Rev. Margot Critchfield It was Michael Brown’s death in August 2014, and the subsequent Ferguson uprising, that changed my life. Like many other progressive and privileged White women, I’d been outraged and horrified by the murders of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, but not enough to change. The circumstances around Michael Brown’s death…

By Noelle Ptomey and Lesley Dean Known by some as a flyover state, Nebraska is worth a look to see how to imbed Sacred Ground in a conservative-leaning culture.  Located in the middle of the country, we are a small, predominantly rural diocese made up of 51 congregations spread out over 77,000 square miles, with…

By Mark Edwards and Avril Barker The website for St. John’s Episcopal Church, Norwood Parish, Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Maryland, proclaims, “Everything we do at St. John’s is done through the lens of building community—helping people to connect to people. Whether we worship, learn, grow, or serve, everything is meant to help us grow into deeper community…

By the Rev. Tricia de Beer Emmanuel Katongole, a Ugandan Catholic priest and theologian reflecting on the Rwandan genocide, said, “The resurrection of the church begins with lament.” There is an amazing transformation of the heart that can happen when we allow ourselves to feel the pain of what is lost.   What I have observed…

By Andrea Lauerman Sometimes a transformation of the heart can be so complete that it is shocking even to the one being transformed. Caroline Russell, a parishioner at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brunswick, Maine, experienced just such a transformation in the final years of her life, and the effects are now rippling far beyond…

By Amanda Szakats As a facilitator of the Episcopal Church’s Sacred Ground program, my fellow group members and I delved into America’s history of race and racism. Like many white people, I had not studied or thought too deeply about the lasting impact of white supremacy on today’s racial disparities, particularly in the arena of…