Local Churches Make Commitment to Faith-Based Reparations

All Saints Episcopal Church and Edgewood United Church are doing their part for faith-based reparations with each committing to donating $100,000 to the Justice League of Greater Lansing.

The Justice League of Greater Lansing (JLGL), founded by Willye Bryan in January 2021, is working to reduce the disparities caused by slavery and racial discrimination.

By working with local houses of worship and organizations, JLGL is seeking to create an endowment fund through contributions from faith-based and individual donors, build an advisory council made up of African Americans from different sectors in the community, and ensure the fund supports education scholarships, home ownership and business startups for minorities.

All Saints and Edgewood have recently taken the step to join JLGL in their mission.

The Rev. Kit Carlson of All Saints and her parish have been focusing on faith-based reparations since since the summer of 2021. The church has its own reparations task force already created, but has grown together with JLGL.

“Our reparations task force met first to develop a process by which we would examine reparations,” Carlson said. “They did that in our vestry, which is our governing board, and approved the process. The process included having small group conversations here at church about faith based reparations so that everyone would have the chance to be in a conversation group and talk about this idea.”

Edgewood also maintains a focus on racial justice in their parish.

“For the last seven years, we have been doing intensive work as a congregation around racial justice,” the Rev. Liz Miller said. “This has involved workshops with the congregation, books, movies, presentations, getting to know the Greater Lansing Area, and knowing the history of institutional and systemic racism in our community and how we, as a predominantly white congregation, benefited from some of those practices.”

Edgewood’s partnership with JLGL began about two or three years ago in order to expand on this knowledge and work.

“This relationship was sort of organic,” Miller said. “Because we were tuned into this work, we became aware of them [JLGL] as they started and were really blown away by the leadership and the vision they had for faith based reparations in the Greater Lansing area.”

With a history of discrimination and racism in the East Lansing area, both churches wanted to look into their personal history and see what they could do in order to work toward equity.

Until the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, realtors explicitly discriminated against Black people that looked to buy a home in East Lansing. Even after the act was implemented, people of color continued to be discouraged from living in the city.

“Many of our members who have levied and owned property in East Lansing have been able to build wealth in a way that African Americans, who were living in red-lined areas of East Lansing, were not able to,” Carlson said.

When looking at the red-lining map, Carlson found that houses in these areas sold for around $80,000, whereas their rectory will most likely sell for $200,000 or more.

“That’s a visible witness to this racial wealth gap caused by these housing policies,” Carlson said.

All Saints looked into its own history during this time and found that the parish had participated in these discriminatory actions.

Dr. David W.D. Dickson, the first African American professor at Michigan State University, was a member of All Saints at the time. The members of the parish discouraged him from trying to buy a home in the area due to fears his presence would cause people to not donate to the church.

Both parishes have created faith-based reparations plans in order to continue to give back to the communities they have historically harmed.

All Saints’ reparations plan focuses on short-term, medium-term and long-term plans in order to “humbly and faithfully commit ourselves, and this parish, to the following program of reparations and repair.”

Edgewood hopes to continue to support JLGL’s presentations and programs the church has been offering and to continue to become more knowledgeable about racial injustices, racism and faith-based reparations.

“Whatever the league needs, we have folks who are willing to help,” Miller said.

All Saints made the decision on June 4 to make a significant financial contribution to JLGL when they sell their parsonage. When the church sells its parsonage, it hopes to make $200,000, and half of that money will be donated to JLGL.

A week later, on June 11, Edgewood held a congregational meeting where all members of the parish voted unanimously to contribute $100,000 of their endowment funds to JLGL.

“To be unanimous in that vote is really a testament of the work that has led to that and to the strength of the call the congregation heard to faith-based reparations,” Miller said.

While this partnership is benefiting the JLGL, both reverends have also seen it benefit their own parishes.

“It has helped us learn about our implicit bias, the racism that we walk around with all the time, and we are working to become intentionally anti-racist, to understand not just what’s going on in the world around us, but what’s going on in our own hearts,” Carlson said.

Carlson also expressed the divide between the East Lansing and Lansing communities, and how she hopes this partnership will be a step in bridging that divide.

Since 2016, the Edgewood congregation has offered over 150 hours of exploration around racism and antiracism topics, and Miller has seen the positive effect this work has had on her congregation.

“I, as their pastor, have really seen a transformation in our shared understanding of the different facets of racism,” Miller said. “Whether it’s interpersonal and personal or cultural and systemic, we have a much more complex analysis and lens to look at how race shows up in our community and in our history and in our personal lives. It’s been transformative and has really strengthened our church’s identity and call.”

Moving forward, both churches hope to continue to support JLGL and their mission, as well as encourage others to do the same.

“Some of the members of our congregation are making personal contributions to the Justice League,” Miller said. “That call to look within and look at your own resources and how those came about, those funds will be added to the congregation $100,000, so that’s ongoing.”

Carlson shared a similar hope that others will look within themselves and get involved with JLGL.

“I hope that this might show others that it is possible to start to do something, to try and cross these great breaches that have risen between white people and people of color as a result of white, racist, supremacist practices,” Carlson said.

An anonymous family was recently inspired by the actions of All Saints and Edgewood and matched their donations by pledging $20,000 to JLGL.

Miller shared that the family stated that, “We both know, through our professional work and our personal lives, how much we have benefited from white privilege, including economically. While we can and should all work to undo racist institutions, achieving economic justice also must mean simply moving money from our white-majoirty families to African American families, businesses, and institutions. The Justice League of Greater Lansing is making it possible for us to do so in a straightforward and deeply effective fashion.”

Other individuals who wish to make a contribution towards JLGL, can do so through Edgewood online or directly to the Justice League of Greater Lansing website.

Clarification: This story has been updated on June 23, 2023, at 1:31 p.m., to clarify that All Saints Episcopal Church and Edgewood United Church have both committed to donating $100,000 to the Justice League of Greater Lansing.