O let the Son of God enfold you with his Spirit and his love. Let him fill your heart and satisfy your soul. … Jesus, O Jesus, come and fill your lambs …
The “Spirit Song” echoed through St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church as Eugenia Wilson, 93, strode purposefully to the microphone. Resonant and matter-of-fact, Wilson told the story of how segregation defined what St. Elizabeth’s would be. In 1912, she said, “it was suggested that Negroes needed an Episcopal church for missions.”
That chapel became St. Augustine Episcopal Church. The church was composed of the burgeoning Black middle class of the early 20th century — teachers, lawyers, doctors and managers for the brand new motor car manufacturing companies located nearby.
St. Augustine represented the lofty aspirations of the Black faithful — until it didn’t. Forced to merge with the declining white church, Christ Church, to help with the upkeep, it struggled through years of location changes, name changes and even a fire before white flight took hold. In 1988, it finally settled in its current Elizabeth, New Jersey, location with a new name — St. Elizabeth’s — and a predominantly Black congregation.
What Wilson was too polite to mention, but her priest, the Rev. Canon Andy Moore, made sure the congregation heard, was that the church’s merger split up the old St. Augustine congregation. Many Black parishioners simply refused to worship at the merged church, including Wilson’s husband, Floyd. A vestry member and chairperson of the men’s club of his beloved place of worship, Floyd never became a member of the merged church, although he eventually joined his wife once the parish became St. Elizabeth’s.
“The debilitating effect was generational because even today, some descendants who went off to join other local churches speak about the pain (the merger) brought upon their families. It was nothing short of Black trauma,” Moore said.
O give him all your tears and sadness; give him all your years of pain,and you’ll enter into life in Jesus’ name. Jesus, O Jesus, come and fill your lambs …
On this Saturday in March, Wilson’s personal story recounted just one of the many ways in which racism has played a part in disrupting the lives of Black worshippers in the Episcopal Church. That collective history was the biggest reason the Reparations Commission of the Diocese of New Jersey has for the past three years sponsored a Stations of Reparations service, so that the true story of the diocese’s 10 historically Black churches can be told.
At a moment in the liturgical year when the Stations of the Cross mark the brutality of Jesus’ last day and the approach of Easter, the diocesan practice recognizes a legacy of systemic racism, rooted in New Jersey’s history of state-sanctioned enslavement, while also holding the possibility of a path toward repair.
