Over the past year, a group of 15 individuals from St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in the Fort Hunt area have been working together on a film-based dialogue series on race and faith known as Sacred Ground.  This race dialogue series is one tool that supports the Episcopal Church’s long-term commitment to racial healing, reconciliation and justice under the banner of Becoming Beloved Community.  It is an attempt to be responsive to the profound challenges that currently exist in our society, focusing on the challenges that swirl around the issues of race and racism, as well as the difficult but respectful and transformative conversation about race. It invites participants to walk back through history to peel away the layers that brought us to today, and to do that in a personal way, reflecting on family histories and stories, as well as important narratives that shape the collective American story. It holds the vision of beloved community as a guiding star – where all people are honored and protected and nurtured and beloved children of God, where we weep at one another’s pain and seek one another’s flourishing.

After nearly a year of reading, viewing videos, discussing what we have learned and praying for guidance and direction, several ideas have emerged for follow-up. One of the things we learned during our readings and discussions is that people of color historically have been excluded in various ways from participation in certain activities that would allow them to build personal and intergenerational wealth. This includes the creators of Spirituals, who were generally unable to seek or obtain copyrights to their compositions. Thus, the group is developing a proposal to bring to the Vestry (our church administrative board) to commit to a process of providing a free-will offering to an appropriate charity at several points in the year to reflect the use such music in our worship services over the generations.

After consulting the Choir Director, the Senior Warden (head of the Vestry), our Priest-In-Charge and several other interested parishioners, we would propose to ask the Vestry to commit to making a free-will offering (amount to be determined, but say $500) twice a year to a local charity that supports people of color engaged in or studying to become active in the music or arts professions. Symbolically, we propose that St. Luke’s make these free-will offerings on the Sundays closest to Martin Luther King Jr. and Juneteenth national holidays.

To reflect the support of the parish as a whole, these free-will offerings would be a separate line item of the St. Luke’s budget. Additionally, a special offering would be taken up on those Sundays to augment the budgeted funds. The total amount budgeted and collected in January could be given as a free-will offering to one local charity and the amount budgeted and given in June to another local charity.   

We are currently in the process of vetting several local charities that might be appropriate recipients of these free-will offerings. At this point, we are concentrating on two, The Duke Ellington School for the Arts in Washington DC and the Coalition for African Americans in the Performing Arts in Prince Georges County.

·      Duke Ellington School https://www.ellingtonschool.org is a public high school in the DC school district dedicated to arts education. The school has approximately 585 students, who come from every Ward of the District. Roughly 70 percent of the students are African American.  The school has a 99 percent graduation rate, compared with the overall 53 percent graduation rate of DC high schools.

·      Coalition for African Americans in the Performing Arts (https://4caapa.org) seeks to create wider-based performing opportunities for African American classical musicians and performing artists and to introduce the classical music genre, along with other art forms, to African American audiences.