Spotlight On: The Isaac Project
Christ Church Cathedral is preparing to repent for the sins of its history with a worship service of healing.
This painstaking, painful reckoning is a result of the Isaac Project, a reexamination of the church’s racial history initiated by then Dean and Rector, the Very Reverend Timothy Kimbrough in 2020.
Research over the past four years has determined the church took advantage of and benefited from slavery, and racist attitudes among church leaders persisted into the Civil Rights era.
Phase 2 of the five-phase Isaac Project culminates with a public worship service of repentance and penance. The community-wide service is tentatively planned for early December, with other churches invited.
“We’re not trying to make it all better,” project committee chairwoman Mary Beth Stamps says. “We’re just trying to say we know we did this, and we’re sorry. We didn’t follow Jesus’ steps. We didn’t love our neighbor as ourselves and engage and foster relationships over hundreds of years. And we want to.”
The committee’s meticulous research is ongoing. Findings thus far are perhaps not surprising, given that church founders were members of Nashville’s elite, and the original church site in the early 1830s at 6th and Church Streets was three blocks from a downtown slave market.
In the years of slavery, about 90% of lay leadership and priests owned slaves, the committee found. All seven men who served as Rector or Acting Rector in the parish before 1865 were slaveholders. One early member, George Augustine Washington, had nearly 275 slaves; many had five to 10.
Washington is memorialized in the central window of the resurrection triptych above the cathedral altar. His wife, Jane Smith Washington, is memorialized in the wheel window at the opposite end of the church.
At times, Blacks and Whites worshiped in the same space at the same time but were segregated in the space of the Nave.
But the church’s abundant historical documentation includes little acknowledgment that slavery even existed. A century after the Civil War, much of the vestry still opposed desegregation.
Now, the church undertakes the work of confessing its sins of slavery and racism: “The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.” (1928 BCP). This will take place publicly, to the community, including other churches.
“What we’re trying to do is demonstrate we know what we did, and we need to say we’re sorry, and we need to position ourselves as a partner in the community that Christ Church Cathedral has never been,” Stamps says.
“We were the elite church, the high-income church. And now we’re trying to be humble and say we got there because we had all this leadership that got their wealth by having slaves.”
At a time of great debate around the country about how the nation’s history of racism should be remembered and taught, research findings have been presented to church members in forums and articles on the church website. Committee members were braced for resistance that might interfere with their work, but that has not materialized.
“There are some people who have the impression that by looking at these issues, there is some sort of preexisting intention to denigrate the founders of the church, and denigrate or criticize people’s ancestors,” committee member Dan Schafer says. “I understand that reaction. I think it’s very much a minority position at this point.”
Christina Callaway, one of three Black members on the 11-person committee, describes the project as a labor of the divine. She says it has caused agitation and they faced objections, but conversations have been candid and mostly healthy.
“While there were some divisive comments, through dialogue there has been a level of openness and a level of empathy that was not there before,” she says. “I was not expecting such a democratic process. I saw hearts change through that discussion and through the openness of being willing to hear everyone’s side.”
The church’s well-organized archives have made research easier. Records include baptisms, confirmations, marriages, burials, vestry meetings and membership that in many cases go back to the 1830s.
Storage was not always ideal, however. Schafer and Joseph Watson have helped lead the research, which briefly took them into a cramped basement storage area in a recently demolished building adjacent to the church.
They embraced the challenge.
“Joseph and I are both trained as historians,” Schafer says. “Dealing with painstaking work with dusty old documents, that’s our lifeblood. That’s what we love to do. There needs to be a little bit of musk in the air.”
It helped that much of the material has been digitized. If not for that, Watson says with a chuckle, the committee’s research would not yet have advanced beyond the 1860s.
“We can pull up vestry minutes and search for terms and names, instead of trying to slog through a bunch of 19th century handwriting,” Watson says.
He and Schafer have written 10 articles on their findings, adopting the tone of textbooks or historical journals.
Isaac, the namesake of the project, was the first person identified as a “slave” in parish records to have received the sacrament of baptism. The committee decided, when possible, to identify by name slaves and church leaders who owned slaves.
“We didn’t pull any punches when it came to trying to be honest about the implications or ramifications of these moments in the church’s history,” Watson says. “But we’re not trying to shame anybody whose ancestors were here in the 19th century or during the Civil Rights era. We’re trying to tell a more accurate history than has been told.”
Another goal of the project: to nurture relations with diverse neighboring congregations.
“We want to make sure we’re touching the churches who have been most impacted by our failure,” Stamps says. “That’s not the white churches.”
Christ Church Cathedral remains a predominantly White church today.
“We’re not a very diverse group, not like we should be,” committee member Monica Flynn-Urness says. “So how are we going to be welcoming to the four corners of Nashville? We have to constantly work on the relationships.”
It starts at the top, Callaway says. Until there’s more diversity at the pulpit, she says, there won’t be more diversity in the congregation, and financial and political barriers pose a challenge.
But she says the Isaac Project reflects an awakening and a new ministry.
“I’m encouraged by the research,” Callaway says. “I’m encouraged to see it did not fizzle out, that there was more than just tokenism, there was more than just a resolution.”
“The fact we’re four years into this and we’re only in phase 2 out of 5 means there is a great degree of careful consideration in terms of what this means for the future and for us as a cathedral.”
“In 50 years someone is going to be telling our story. How do we want that to be told?”
Future phases of the project will focus on institutional reform and renewal. Christ Church Cathedral is not the first Episcopal church to confront its complicity in slavery: A church in Richmond, Virginia, began to come to terms with its racial history in the 1960s, Stamps says.
But there’s limited precedent, and no liturgy for the service of repentance and penance. So a subcommittee will write one – a labor of the divine that will become part of an evolving, complicated story.
By Steve Wine
See full album of photos from the Adult Forum here.
