Honoring Black History in Houses of Worship
While we see Black History, race and gender are being censored throughout the country, in celebration of Black History Month, the Bahá'í House of Worship in Chicago will host a music and art program Saturday, performing music composed by Black composers as well as an art show highlighting the work of Black Bahá'í’s.
Meanwhile in NYC, on Feb 24th, the Center for Community Engagement & Social Justice and Pride in the Pews will host the State of The Black Church Symposium. This event will bring together Black faith-leaders and academics to bridge the gap between the LGBTQ+ community and the Black church, through the message "Progress & Change.” To learn more about the upcoming event, you can read the press release here.
Last week in the news and media update we celebrated NYC’s very own Mother AME Zion Church in Harlem and Varick Memorial AME Zion Church in Brooklyn, for being recipients of the Preserving Black Churches grant and this week we’d like to uplift an organization that is connecting Black Churches with sustainable resources. Green the Church, led by Rev. Dr. Ambrose Carroll Sr., is an organization created to be a catalyst for the intersection of the Black Church and the Environmental and Sustainability Movement. Most recently, Green the Church connected Allen Temple Baptist Church in East Oakland with Tesla to provide solar panels and a new roof, an investment that will help the church save $285,000 on their electric bills over the next 10 years! During a sermon at Allen Church, Rev. Carroll said “the African American church will always be a place of power” – not only referring to the Black church’s legacy in the movement for racial justice, but also it becoming a source of clean energy and solar power for the Black community in a fight for environmental justice.
Faith-Based Affordable Housing
Last week, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held for the opening of the new four-story, affordable housing complex for seniors, in Frederick County, Virginia. The property is on the site of the now-razed St. Paul’s on-the-Hill Episcopal Church. The congregation leased the property to the developers, Wesley Housing, for 99 years for $10,000 per year.
This example from the St. Paul’s congregation to use the church property for affordable housing is a great example of how congregations can have successful collective, complex decision-making about their property to continue to aid in their mission and support their community.
Trinity Episcopoal Church in Lewiston, Maine is reinventing their church into a community center. Senior warden at the church, Klara Tammany remarks, “our worst nightmare would be that we can't afford it anymore as a small congregation, and it is either converted to a high-end restaurant or torn down and made into condos.” With that in mind, the church is adapting by becoming a community center that will be accessible to the city, and used for film, dance, and theater.
Just as congregations can make decisions about how their property is redeveloped, neighbors also have a say in how they prefer a property be used. In the midwest, residents who live near the Basilica of St. Mary campus, are pushing back against the church’s expansion in which they plan to develop their vacant land into a Montessori school and a senior apartment complex. According to the report on Hometown Life, Livonia residents are less concerned about the school and are more bothered by the idea of apartments near single family homes.
