How do you tell the story of St. John’s? What is it that the community means to you? What is it all about? If someone asked you the history of the church, what would you tell them?
How we tell our stories and record our history says a lot about who we are. Do we focus on the St. John’s past as the established church in Portsmouth, the beneficiary of royal gifts, the church of colonial governors, and the place where George Washington once visited? Or do we look to the lesser-known stories, the slaves and people of color who were relegated to sitting in the balcony for more than a century, the slaves owned and sold by our first ministers? Every time we tell our story we make choices about what to include and what not to include, who and what is important and who is not.
At our Diocesan Convention in November, the Episcopal Church in New Hampshire passed a resolution to encourage all congregations to commit themselves to programs of truth-telling about their history and the ways that race, power, and privilege factor into them. The resolution invites communities into “learning about the history of race, slavery, segregation, and their legacies of ongoing discrimination and racial inequities in their church and local communities,” and “prayerfully considering how best to respond to that history in order to build a more inclusive and just community today.”
To respond to that invitation, This year’s Lent program will focus on how we do the work of truth-telling, and how we tell the story of St. John’s in a way that honors those who have historically been marginalized:
