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Sag Harbor Clergy Bear Witness at Border

3/4/2020

 
From
​SAGHARBOREXPRESS.COM
By Hannah Selinger - March 4, 2020
Picture
Patty McCormick, at left, was joined by Minister Kimberly Quinn Johnson, the Reverend Karen Campbell and Rabbi Daniel Geffen as they reported what they saw "Bearing Witness" to the conditions at the U.S. - Mexico border at the Christ Episcopal Church on Thursday, February 27. Michael Heller photo.
On Thursday, February 27, at 6 p.m., members of the local clergy convened at Sag Harbor’s Christ Episcopal Church to discuss their recent experiences at the U.S.-Mexico border. The small panel consisted of Reverend Karen Ann Campbell, rector of the Christ Episcopal Church; Rabbi Daniel Geffen of Temple Adas Israel; and minister Kimberly Quinn Johnson of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork.

In addition to a question and answer session, moderated by Patty McCormack, the meeting featured a brief slideshow of images and videos captured by Reverend Campbell during her January travels to Brownsville, Texas. At the forum’s end, audience members were encouraged to ask questions. All three members of the clergy had visited the border in hopes of broadening their understanding of border relations and government intervention.

“I had no idea what I was going to find, and it was amazingly awful, and evil,” Reverend Campbell said. “[P]art of my impetus was, when I was a kid, I found out about the Holocaust … I went to everyone who had been of age in 1938 and said, ‘Well, what did you do?’”

The tale recounted by Reverend Campbell, Minister Quinn Johnson, and Rabbi Geffen was a gruesome one. Photos showed makeshift pup tents for 4,500 migrants seeking asylum to protect them from the elements, open-air kitchen without proper sanitation, showers constructed with pumps that diverted non-potable water from the polluted Rio Grande, and minimal healthcare assistance.

One woman who had recently given birth found out, through a mobile medical unit, that her newborn infant had contracted pneumonia. Border agents, seeing the x-rays, denied her entrance for medical treatment on two separate occasions before finally granting her asylum. Of the 10,000 migrants who appeared at the nation’s border in November, Reverend Campbell said, seeking asylum from clear and present danger in their home countries, only 11 were admitted to the United States.

For Minister Quinn Johnson, travels to the border have ignited a passion for fighting injustice. “I cannot prepare you for what it feels like to witness people shuffled in in chains,” she said. “I am 100 percent clear that the work of my life is to free our people.” Minister Quinn Johnson reached the border by way of Tucson, Arizona.

Rabbi Geffen viewed the trip as an opportunity to see, firsthand, what he understood to be grave American injustices. “It’s not acceptable to sit on the sidelines at the distance,” he said. “I needed to be able to see, with my own eyes, as much as I was capable on this trip.” In response to a question regarding the perceived impotence of activism, Rabbi Geffen said, “We have to constantly be fighting against that feeling of powerlessness.”

Although the clergy members made no mention of specific political figures, their mission was, on its face, necessarily political. “We’ve decided that we need to have an enemy, and if it isn’t going to be Russia, evidently, it’s going to be people of color,” Reverend Campbell said. “I left thinking that Underground Railroad or falsifying documents were the only way to get [asylum-seekers] into the country.”

Minister Quinn Johnson offered a slightly less subversive tactic to enacting change at the border. “We can abolish ICE,” she said, noting that the institution has only been around for two decades; ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was established in 2003, as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. “There is a way that we managed the border, that we managed immigration, before ICE,” she added.

All three members seemed to agree that what they had seen had changed them. Rabbi Geffen said that the experience had also been elemental in his understanding of the current system and its extreme pitfalls. “I possess now an experience and a knowledge base and at least a foothold in a larger conversation,” he said. “Being there in person was an important necessary step — at least for me.” He also explained that it is often easy for local community members to ignore the problems at the border, since those problems feel far away from the northeast. Those problems, he said, are merely anecdotal “when it’s not an actual person with an actual name and an actual story.”

Reverend Campbell was less diplomatic in her assessment of what she saw and experienced. “Following orders is not a defense,” she said. “Let them cross. Choose your side in history.”

Christ Church Earns $100,000 Grant for Community Cafe

2/7/2020

 
From sagharborexpress.com
​Christ Church Earns $100,000 Grant for Community Cafe
By Kathryn G. Menu - February 7, 2020
Picture
The Reverend Karen Campbell of the Christ Episcopal Church in Sag Harbor.
​Michael Heller photo.
For Christ Episcopal Church Rev. Karen Ann Campbell, it felt like a little bit of divine intervention when she received word last Friday that the church’s proposed “Community Café” was awarded $100,000 from the Texas-based nonprofit, Moody Foundation.

The grant funding, coupled with the close to $100,000 raised independently for the nonprofit café, will enable construction of the café after the project earns approval from regulatory boards in the Village of Sag Harbor, said Rev. Campbell on Tuesday.

“It is just a huge gift,” she said. “It means we can go ahead with the commercial kitchen and we are so appreciative of that.”

In many ways, Rev. Campbell said, the grant funding does indeed feel like “a gift from God.” The Moody Foundation, which has operated for over 75 years, largely funds only projects and programs that benefit communities in Texas, with over 4,000 grants awarded totaling $1.7 billion. Recent grants include a $100 million gift to Southern Methodist University for the Moody School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, $130 million for a new basketball arena at the University of Texas at Austin and $1.5 million to provide computers to underserved youth in Galveston.

How the foundation became aware of Rev. Campbell’s hopes for the Community Café —envisioned as a place where the food insecure and those seeking companionship can come have a weekly, restaurant-style meal, free-of-charge, with no questions asked — was through a board member at the foundation, who rented a home nearby. While Ms. Campbell declined to name the trustee, she said he attended church a handful of times this summer and called Rev. Campbell to find out if the church had any pressing needs. She told the gentleman about the Community Café, and he suggested she apply for a grant.

“It is my understanding this is only the second time they have given money outside of Texas,” said Rev. Campbell. “We are just thrilled we will be able to feed people in the village who are food insecure or otherwise in need. We really feel like this is a gift from God.”

With the funding, Rev. Campbell said she hopes construction will begin as soon as next fall, although the church is still waiting on the Town of East Hampton to close on its $520,000 purchase of 0.3-acres of land adjacent to the church that it is buying through its Community Preservation Fund. The land will be used as a passive park once it is formally acquired. The proceeds of the purchase will be placed in an endowment that will help support the Community Café over time.


Should spiritual leaders conceal political leanings?

1/23/2020

 
From Newsday
By Jim Merritt

​Asking the Clergy: 
Should spiritual leaders conceal political leanings?


The Rev. Karen A. Campbell was one of three religious leaders asked to respond to that question.

Read her response below.  

> Or click here to see the full Newsday article by Jim Merritt

Response by the Rev. Karen Ann Campbell,
​Rector, Christ Episcopal Church, Sag Harbor:


The church, as followers of Jesus, began as a countercultural movement following the lead of our Jewish forebears. Unfortunately, over the millenniums, the church became the tepid endorser of everything the government did.

In U.S. history, a few brave Gospel bearers spoke out against the tyranny of England during the American Revolution and against slavery during the Civil War; courageous spiritual leaders stood against Nazi Germany’s Holocaust and spoke out for equal rights for people of color, and LBGTQ people.

​Throughout the history of humans and God, there have arisen times when people of faith have taken action. God sent German pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who died in a Nazi concentration camp) and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak the Gospel truth to power.

I recently returned from the U.S. border in Brownsville, Texas, with Matamoros, Mexico, where I witnessed what I believe to be cruel and evil policies designed to keep “poor" and "huddled masses” out. Many of these people from South and Central America have walked two months to get here, knowing that the United States used to take in asylum seekers who said their lives were in danger.

“Verses Suggested by the Current Crisis,” an 1845 poem by abolitionist James Russell Lowell that was incorporated into a well-known hymn about social responsibility, begins “Once to every man and nation comes a time to decide …”

As an Episcopal priest, I took a vow to proclaim the Gospel. I have decided to let people know where I stand. We clergy must speak.

           CJM
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