THE Episcopal Church in the United States is to invest $2 million a year in its racial-healing work, and plans to set up a new organisation, the Episcopal Coalition for Racial Equality and Justice.
A new report proposes the creation of the coalition, and also calls for the examination of liturgical texts for racism; an investigation into the Church’s operation of indigenous boarding schools; an audit of assets to identify those tied to racial injustices; and guidance on language to describe people of colour in the Church.
Resolutions to ratify the coalition and move the other measures forward will come to the Church’s General Convention in July.
The report was released by the working group on Truth Telling, Reckoning and Healing, commissioned last year by the Presiding Bishop, the Most Revd Michael Curry, and the President of the House of Deputies, the Revd Gay Clark Jennings.
Bishop Curry said then that it was “an opportunity to engage in a Church-wide process of truth and reconciliation that, to my knowledge, has not been done before on that level”.
The working group was created in recognition of the Church’s uneven progress on racial equality, and the renewed impetus given by public outrage over the murder of George Floyd, as well as revelations about the part played by the Church in the cruelty meted out in indigenous boarding schools in the US (News, 11 February).
The report puts forward 92 recommendations, most of which will be taken forward by the new coalition if it gains approval this summer. Suggestions range from “research and share the full history of historically Black churches within your diocese” to “commission artists, poets, liturgists, and musicians of color to create new hymnody, prayers, and liturgies”.
The proposed coalition would be a voluntary association of dioceses, parishes, organisations, and individuals. It would be be governed by a board appointed by the Presiding Bishop, and made up of a majority of people of colour, funded from a tithe of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society’s financial holdings, which would bring in about $2 million a year.
A new organisation is needed to take forward the work, the report says, because “the current corporate structure of the Episcopal Church, like other corporate structures in the United States, has been influenced and shaped by white supremacy. In order to work toward radical change in our Church and world, we need new structures to birth new possibilities.”
However, “every level of the Church [should] engage in the work of truth-telling, reckoning and healing,” the report says.
Several recommendations require separate resolutions from the Convention. One seeks to to establish the phrase “people of color” as the Church’s preferred term for communities in the Church which “do not exclusively identify as white”. More specific names should be used “when referring to a smaller group of people that share a historical, cultural, or ethnic identity”.
The Revd John Kitagawa, one of the conveners of the group, said: “The coalition is a vehicle to affirm and co-ordinate so much good work already happening throughout the Church. It will help the Church to begin much-needed structural and cultural changes in our quest to build the beloved community.”