The diocese deepens its commitment to Becoming Beloved Community
When she began work on a new curriculum to deepen diocesan leaders’ understanding of the work of dismantling racism, Miriam McKenney knew there were many methods and curricula already in circulation across the Episcopal Church. She thought getting back to basics might be helpful.
“The approach I like to take is that honoring difference is really important, and the best way to do that is through the things we share in common, like Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer,” McKenney said.
Her curriculum had its inaugural outing in Thursday night Zoom sessions in October as part of the diocese’s Becoming Beloved Community initiative. McKenney, director of development and mission engagement for Forward Movement and a consultant to the Beloved Community initiative, said she appreciates the diocesan leadership team’s willingness to move beyond “the kind of training where people are just checking a box,” and give participants in antiracism trainings and other Beloved Community offerings, “an experience where they can understand some of the nuances people can only understand when they get to know each other.”
The new curriculum exemplifies the diocese’s evolving understanding and deepening commitment to its Becoming Beloved Community initiative.
“We have adopted Becoming Beloved Community as our paradigm,” said the Rev. Jason Oden, canon for formation and new Episcopal communities, whose department now oversees the work. “Anything the formation team creates has to be part of the work of beloved community,” he said. “It encompasses everything we believe is about discipleship in the Episcopal Church.”
The work of Becoming Beloved Community, while always important, has taken on new urgency since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, Oden said. “The church became more conscious of this work, and is adopting it as some of the primary work of the church,” he said. “We are starting to understand the ways it informs what discipleship is all about.”
Becoming Beloved Community, which is deeply influenced by the work of Catherine Meeks, Ph.D., founding executive director of the Absalom Jones Episcopal Center for Racial Healing, is built around what is sometimes referred to as the Fourfold Path: Telling the Truth, Proclaiming the Dream, Repairing the Breach, and Practicing the Way of Love. The Episcopal Church offers numerous resources to promote Becoming Beloved Community work, and in Southern Ohio, the diocesan initiative draws upon these churchwide resources as well as the gifts of local leaders.
McKenney and Oden co-facilitated the group that piloted the diocese’s new curriculum. After a brief introduction, the small group gathered on Zoom broke into pairs to talk about the role of race and racial privilege in their backgrounds and to discuss occasions when their “social location” within American racial and class hierarchies either helped or hindered them.
Later, drawing on the Book of Revelation, Oden told the group that the work of Becoming Beloved Community was similar to the process of receiving a revelation. “It’s about the scales being pulled from your eyes,” he said. Then, when one sees clearly that one is entangled in corrupt and racist systems, “you have to make a choice,” he said. “Am I going to be complicit? Or am I going to pull out of this?”
The evening ended with a study of Matthew 15: 21-28, the story of the Canaanite woman, who reminded Jesus that even dogs eat the scraps that fall from their masters’ table. In doing so, some scholars believe, she changed his mind and broadened his understanding of his mission.
People who are not fully human and fully divine do not typically change their views on race on the strength of a single encounter, but rather as a result of deepening relationships. For that reason, Oden said, the diocese will no longer offer one-session Becoming Beloved Community training programs and presentations, opting instead for more long-term formats that require building relationships over time.
“We want to permeate our work into the leadership … throughout the working of the diocese, the commissions and the committees, so we can dismantle racism and build the diocese God dreams for us person-by-person, group-by-group,” McKenney said. “My dream personally is to keep people talking to keep sharing our stores and just continue to build these relationships, because when we know each other we can’t help but care about each other.”
Amy Howton, the consultant who led the diocese’s Becoming Beloved Community initiative for its first three years, remains actively involved in its work. She said the time was right to focus on the initiative’s future.
“We have been at this work for a long time,” she said. “I think the call to become Beloved Community offered us a chance to articulate a vision and put forward an infrastructure that would support our growth toward that vision.”
Becoming Beloved Community is an initiation for some, and “an opportunity to go deeper for those who are ready to go deeper,” she said. “And to not be alone in it.”
“My sense is that as the work goes forward there are going to be several different ways for folks to find their way in,” she said. “There is no more time to be in fear. As a church we have a responsibility to actually practice the way of love. And hopefully the formation and the offerings we make available are going to reflect that.”
Howton will soon offer a program based on “The InnerGround Railroad,” a book she wrote with Quanita Roberson. “We are exploring ways in which trauma in the form of white supremacy and imperialism and patriarchy has shown up and continues to show up and cut us off from the divine,” she said.
The program includes body-focused practices to help heal trauma. “As Episcopalians we want to stay in our heads,” she said. “I want to move from our heads to our hearts, into our bodies so that we can be human together.”
Knowledge of and participation in Beloved Community trainings and sessions varies across the diocese, McKenney said. There are parishes that are already trying to follow the Fourfold Path, but are “keeping it to themselves,” she said. There are other primarily or exclusively white parishes that participate in Becoming Beloved Community programming, but do not form relationships with people of color in their communities, and there are exclusively white churches that do not find the programing relevant to their contexts.
“People think they don’t have people of color in their communities,” McKenney said. “But if a person of color is your sexton, you have people of color in your community.”
Read this story in the Winter 2022 edition of Connections Magazine.
