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Holy Trinity’s Annual Meeting will take place at 10:30am on Sunday, January 31 in the church parking lot. Using the same FM radio converter that we used for outdoor worship on Christmas Eve, the meeting will be conducted over car radios at FM 101.5 while everyone remains safely in their vehicles.  Questions and comments may be entertained by a short beep of the car horn at which point a Council member will come by to receive the information through a car window and relay it back to the Council President who will communicate the matter over the radio and invite a response in the same way.

A copy of this year’s annual report can be downloaded by clicking Annual Report 2020.  After reviewing the report, questions and comments are invited via the church email address (email@engagedbygrace.org) or telephone (614-486-9433) to help facilitate dialog during these days of remote meetings. A Council member will directly respond to your question or comment sometime before the Annual Meeting and then report that question and response within the meeting agenda so that everyone has the benefit of the exchange.

Because the Constitution of the congregation requires a quorum of 50 persons to conduct official business, we would ask that you register your participation on the form available at this link on the church website:

Thank you for your attention to these important matters. We pray you and your family continue to be safe and well in these trying times.

Yours in Christ,
Mike Christman, Council President
Steve Wachtman, Pastor
Sara Wunsch, Vicar

The Racial Justice Ministry Team invites your participation in our Faith Enrichment Series for Black History Month.  We are uniquely blessed to be able to share and engage with the stories of two people with extensive experience in the ongoing Civil Rights struggle over many decades.

Did you know that Pastor Dave Markowich actually marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? Join us for two informative video interviews to learn more about his experiences as an active participant in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s and his ongoing commitment to racial justice.  Each session will include an opportunity to engage in discussion – what connects us to Dave’s story, how does it extend our own learning, and how does it challenge us to act?

We have also invited Vicar Sara’s friend Beryl Anderson-West to share her experiences working with Rosa Parks as her Director of International Communications. Beryl was also the first Black TV reporter for the U.S. Supreme Court press corps, and she has produced and anchored her own TV shows.  Her direct connection to one of the heroes of the Civil Rights movement allows us to engage with history in real time.  Like the interviews with Pastor Dave, there will be an opportunity to engage in discussion about what that history might mean for us today.

The sessions are not limited to adults.  School-age children, especially young adults, may find this activity particularly relevant since they will likely have assignments related to Black History Month.

We will meet on Zoom (link will be provided in the Engaged by Grace Weekly). The schedule is as follows (starting each evening at 7:30):

• Thursday February 4^th & 11^th: Pastor Dave
• Thursday February 18^th & 25^th: Beryl Anderson-West.

See you there!

Regular print editions of Word in Season devotional books have arrived.  If you would like to receive a booklet, please contact the church office at laura.hudson@engagedbygrace.org or 614-486-9433 so that one can be mailed to you or a pickup time can be arranged.  Regular and large-print editions of Portals of Prayer are also available.  If you prefer to view the electronic edition of the daily devotions, please click https://go.augsburgfortress.org/temporary-word-in-season-emails

Adult Enrichment with Dr. Walter F. Taylor Jr.

7:30pm, Thursdays, January 7, 14, 21, 28

The pandemic of 2020-2021 has created challenges in every area of human life, including the church. In light of that reality, our class will explore together these and other questions:

What is the church?

What is a congregation?

What have we learned this past year about ourselves as believers and a church?

A major resource will be the New Testament Book of Acts. From it we will look at how the early church handled its own challenges and how it spread the message of Jesus in the first decades of the church’s life.  Discussion handout resources are available by clicking the corresponding link:  January 7,   January 14,   January 21,   January 28

Join us for this presentation via Zoom at this link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5931525374?pwd=VkRPMUJoTE9KKzRPaFVCOHA1U2Fadz09

As stewards, we continually fall short of God’s expectations for us.  In spite of our good intentions and best efforts, we sin daily.  We fail to use our time, talents, and treasures as wisely and faithfully as we should.  Through faith, we recognize our sins and are sorry for them.  As believers, we place our trust in Jesus for forgiveness for our sins, and we are determined, with the help of God, to be more faithful in how we live our lives as stewards.  For more information about stewardship, please contact Max Buban.

For a printer-friendly version of this week’s news, please click Engaged Weekly 01172021

Leading up to Black History Month, and hopefully long after February, members of the Racial Justice Ministry Team are sharing their personal experiences with race.  For the next two RJMT articles, Sue Eubanks is sharing reflections on the impact of systemic racism through the lens of the Columbus City Schools.

“You can’t go there!  You could be killed!”

Those are the words I vividly remember a group of neighbors saying to my mother in the summer of 1977.  She had just accepted a job teaching English at Linden-McKinley High School.  I was entering my junior year at Walnut Ridge High School on the Far East Side.  They were scary words to hear about my Mom.  All the more scary because one of the neighbors was the President of the Board of Education of the Columbus Public Schools and a close family friend.  I think it was the first time I came to grips with ugly, naked racism in an otherwise ordinary middle-class childhood.

Fortunately, my Mom and Dad ignored the neighborly advice.  My Dad was suffering from the cancer that would eventually take him, and my Mom was intent on going back to work to support my brother and me in the near-certainty that my Dad would die young.  As she later recalled, “I needed a job.  The job was at Linden-McKinley.  I figured God had a reason to send me there”.  She stayed for 20 years, about half of which was spent as Chair of the English Department.  She directed plays; developed the initial “I Know I Can” site in the Columbus Public (now Columbus City) Schools which provides college scholarships/support to CCS students; taught every senior at Linden; and impacted hundreds of lives.  At the time I graduated, Walnut Ridge was viewed as one of the best academic schools in the city.  But some of the best teachers I ever encountered were at Linden-McKinley in the heart of the urban core.

I grew up thinking that the South had racial problems, but we Northerners were somehow better.  It couldn’t happen here, because we didn’t have separate schools and restaurants and drinking fountains.  Boy, was I wrong.  Although my high school was slowly becoming more diverse, I clearly didn’t understand how pervasive our problems of race and racism were, and still are, in my beloved hometown.  Until I started consulting with non-profits in the social services sector in the early 2000s, where I saw the impact of segregationist and racist policies on the people my clients served.

Almost 30 years from the day those neighbors told my Mom she might be killed if she took a job at Linden-McKinley, a 2015 study from researchers at the University of Toronto found that among America’s large metropolitan areas, Columbus had the second-highest level of economic segregation in the nation. Only Austin, Texas, ranked higher.  Let that sink in!  Columbus!  Not Atlanta, not Boston, not New York.  Our Midwestern-nice Columbus!  How in the world could this have happened?

I have recently tried to understand why, and although there are a myriad of causes and reasons, the Columbus City Schools offer a perfect example of the consequences of systemic racism – meaning the institutional policies that over the years have had the cumulative effect of segregating us from our neighbors of color and creating two very different realities for people living just a few miles apart.  I’ll mention some of them today…the ones that led up to Columbus Public Schools being under a federal court order to desegregate from 1979-1985.  In the next article, I’ll talk about the policies that came after desegregation started, and the impact that the systemic decisions have had on us all across Central Ohio.  This isn’t meant to be a definitive history…just my own attempt to understand how people who probably didn’t consider themselves racists propagated policies that fit the very definition of systemic racism.

Much of the story is the same as any other large northern city.  As the Great Migration began after World War I, Blacks began arriving in Columbus in large numbers, driven by Jim Crow laws in the South and the expansion of manufacturing jobs in the North.  Developers, Realtors, lenders and politicians all combined in various ways to determine where Blacks and Whites would most likely live, resulting in the same de-facto segregation that happened in many northern cities.  Blacks were confined to the central city.  Whites were further away from the urban core.  Wealthy whites were increasingly in deed-restricted suburbs such as Upper Arlington and Bexley.

Where Columbus started to differ from other northern cities was its use of massive land acquisition efforts after World War II, which expanded the Columbus city limits far beyond the central city and inner ring.  Most large northern cities have small land masses and lots of separate suburbs.  In Columbus, the city limits extended outward, mainly all the way to what would become the I-270 ring.  And although the 1940s and 50s brought an increased interest in desegregation and integration of many activities, the federal and local lending/development policies favored new housing in the new areas of the city, and those areas were increasingly only available to Whites.  The Columbus Public Schools were charged with serving ALL these areas, and they did so with policies that exacerbated segregation.

In short, the Board of Education systemically diverted resources away from central city (Black) schools and into suburban (White) schools to help foster middle class economic growth within the city limits.  Walnut Ridge, Whetstone, Northland and others were in White areas, and got new buildings and better resources.  South, Linden, East and others were in Black areas and left with old, dilapidated buildings and fewer resources.  Student boundary lines were drawn to ensure that Whites went to school with Whites and Blacks went to school with Blacks.  These policies allowed suburbs within the city limits to attract white middle-class families.  Columbus Public Schools essentially knowingly created two separate school districts, which were very much unequal.  They ignored the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling of 1954.  They ignored it until the mid-70s, when they were finally sued.  My neighbor, the aforementioned School Board president, was the named defendant.  After Federal Judge Robert Duncan ordered desegregation, the Board of Education fought it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and the decision was upheld.  The Board decided to affect desegregation via forced busing, which started the fall after I graduated from Walnut Ridge in 1979.  And then Columbus got even more segregated.  More on that, and how it continues to impact us today, next time.

Sources:  Although most of my reflections are based on years of reading, community conversations and personal experience, much of the data comes from two primary sources:

• Segregated City: The Geography of Economic Segregation in America’s Metros, Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander, University of Toronto, 2015
• Getting Around Brown: Desegregation, Development and the Columbus Public Schools, Gregory S. Jacobs, Ohio State University Press, 1998

Thank you to everyone that donated blood at Holy Trinity last week.  The Red Cross collected 35 usable pints that will help save the lives of 105 people.  The next blood drive at Holy Trinity is scheduled for Thursday, March 25 from 9am-3pm.  Hope to see you there!

We are new creatures in Christ, the Apostle Paul declares (2 Corinthians 5:17)!  As such, we no longer view ourselves or others the way we once did.  We have a new role; we are ambassadors for Christ, “as though God were making His appeal trough us” (2 Corinthians 5:20).  And those to whom God appeals are the lost for whom Christ has died.  What a sober responsibility we have!  As stewards of the Gospel that we spread not just with our mouths, but with our actions as well, let us implore God to enable us to be His light in this dark world.  For more information about stewardship, please contact Max Buban.