Song: A Change Gonna Come | PBS documentary Dawnlands |

Friends,

I'm not confident of the arrival of the Kingdom of God. And yet I believe that it is at hand. Seeing the results of a decades long project helps me keep up the hope that change will happen.

-Liz

It takes time. Lots of time.

I am an impatient person.

All the more so in this time when so many people are being hurt. I want immigration, disability services, housing, SNAP, abortion rights, voting rights, and on and on and on, I want them right now.

Of course people deserve these improvements right now. But much of change simply does not happen quickly. Much of what we need is to keep on working on what we have long been working on.

I shared last week about hearing native women sharing their experiences at government funded and church-lead residential schools. The intent of those schools was literally to "kill the indian to save the child."

The bravery of these women to sit in front of an audience of people they did not know and to share their experiences is extraordinary. To relive their experience, but also to trust that we would believe what they said, that we would care to act in support of them, that we would hear the story as the horror that it was, that trust took decades to develop.

I asked the diocesan leaders afterward how they got to this experience. What did it take to create the exhibit, to meet the women, what did it take to build the trust?

One leader laughed and said, yes, we applied for the grant that funded this in 2018--eight years ago. Another said oh, but the idea for the grant grew out of work they started in 2011, fifteen years ago. Then another said that really the previous bishop had met, and listened to, a native man twenty five or six years ago.

What took all that time? What was required for this work. First, to listen to people. To believe them. To be introduced to another, and then another. Eventually they got ready to make visits to each of the registered tribes in their area. "Those were hard." They did not go to tell the tribes, nor to make amends for something they did not understand. They went to simply listen. Through those visits they made more connections.

At the same time, the people they met kept saying to the diocesan leaders "you need to do your own work, too. You can't expect us to do all the teaching." So they took courses, and attended workshops, and read books. Eventually that lead to the realization that they needed to pay someone for their expertise and hired someone to lead this work. They expanded the relationships they were building into each congregation. They noticed that more and more, members of their congregations who were members of tribes were willing to claim that identity. And more and more of the people they met were willing to say "I was harmed by the church and will never return to it."

They accepted both of those messages as simply truth that needs to be heard.

This presentation is traveling to communities that had Residential Indian Schools. It is not the last step, simply one of the steps, heading toward reconciliation, toward apology, toward accountability.

It has taken years. It is worthwhile. It is one of the many tiny steps to creating God's reign on earth.

What is your church doing, or thinking about doing these days? How are you being here in your particular place? Just reply to this email to let me know what's happening. ​
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A documentary about the native schools in the United States and Canada.

Sam Cooke, It's been a long time coming, but Change is Going to Come. (3:10).

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