Honoring that part of the Baptismal Covenant in which we promise “to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being,” St. Michael’s Church commits every effort possible to repair the sin of slavery and its legacies in our church. Our reparations commitments extend beyond allocation of financial resources for new programs and include continued discernment about our church community’s spiritual purpose and identity. 

Founded in 1807 by wealthy families, some of whom owned slaves, St. Michael’s Church grew over its first century from a small rural parish into an influential institutional urban church. St. Michael’s prosperity emerged in a society whose economic structure depended on slavery and, after the Civil War, on racist inhumanity and exploitation.

In its second century, St. Michael’s explicitly preserved slavery’s legacies – the cruelties of segregation and disenfranchisement – in the maintenance of a segregated mission-chapel, St. Jude’s Chapel, and in subsequent patterns of spiritual exclusion. Though St. Michael’s Church has made progress recently in confronting social injustices and in offering inclusive welcome, it has only just begun a deep discernment of its own complicity in slavery’s legacies and in racism.

Begun in 2019, the work of the Reparations Committee unfolds from deep discernment processes.