This webinar includes the inspiring and instructive story of Memorial Episcopal Church in Baltimore which can help us to wrestled out loud with race, reconciliation, and history.
This fall, Memorial Episcopal was featured in a remarkable story in the Baltimore Sun entitled, “In slavery, her family was owned by his. Now they attend a Baltimore church seeking to atone for its past.”
The Rev. Natalie Conway’s tenure as the new deacon of Memorial Episcopal Church in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill was by all accounts going well last year when she received news that sparked a personal crisis and sent shock waves through the congregation.
One of Conway’s siblings, who was conducting genealogical research on their family, told her that some of their forebears had been slaves on a local plantation — and the people and the land were owned by none other than the extended family of Memorial’s founding pastor, 19th-century cleric Charles Ridgely Howard.If that weren’t disorienting enough, a current parishioner at Memorial — a man Conway had known for years and respected — was a descendant of the slaveholding clan.
Read the whole artlce here.
Watch the Webinar
You can find the video archived on YouTube, and the slides are shared via Google Drive.
Resources from the Webinar
- More on Memorial’s Story
- Baltimore Sun Article
- First Slave baptized in the United States was in the Episcopal Church
- Traces of the Trade
- “The Color of Compromise” – Jemar Tisby – The story of the Church in upholding segregation after the civil war
- ”The Lines Between Us” – Lawrence Lanahan – how the racial divide in housing, education and employment continues to persist.
About our Presenters
Natalie Conway is the Past President of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of Maryland. She is a vocational Deacon currently serving at Memorial Episcopal Church in Baltimore. Prior to Ordination, she had a significant career at the U.S. Department of State.
Grey Maggiano is the Rector of Memorial Episcopal Church in Baltimore, MD where he has served since 2016. Prior to that, he was an Associate Priest at Trinity Cathedral in Miami, FL. Not a winter passes that his family does not remind him that they could all be at the Beach.
About Memorial Episcopal Church
Founded in 1860, Memorial Church has a long history as a sanctuary for faithful believers and a center of community for the neighborhood. Memorial is an urban church in the city of Baltimore and a parish in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. It is a Jesus-Centered, Justice-Focused community, which seeks to be a model parish for the 21st century, a place where all people can find a place for themselves in the Kingdom of God. Over the past 30 years, the parish has become a place of diverse theological viewpoints, where members take an inquiring approach to their faith.