Trinity Congregation maintains essence through years of change

TEXT AND PHOTO
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN

Trinity Lutheran Congregation has been on the West Bank ever since 1868, the year it was formed and given the auspicious name: “The Norwegian-Danish Evangelical Lutheran Trinity Congregation of Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

Plucky and able immigrants guided the church through its inevitable switch to English and through the red tape accompanying the establishment of schools and hospitals. Among their pastors they counted an adventurer who came from Norway on a sailboat with his family; a linguist who spoke 20 languages; an orator who was considered one of the finest of the times; a returned missionary with one year to live who stayed 30. They bought land and built various buildings, each one larger than the last. When they lost their most illustrious church building to the freeway, in 1966, their life as a congregation did not come to an end. The loss was taken as yet another opportunity for self-definition. At that pivotal moment, two things happened: They decided to stay on the rapidly changing West Bank, and they opened themselves to ecumenical relationships.

On the day Trinity closed its doors, the congregation walked in procession to the Riverside Presbyterian Church (now the People’s Center, at 20th and Riverside) where the Presbyterians had invited the Lutherans to share their facility. A few years later, when that church had to vacate its building, Trinity began to worship with the Roman Catholic Our Lady of Perpetual Help, an affiliation that lasted for many years. Eventually, in 1989, Our Lady of Perpetual Help’s building was claimed by a U of M parking lot, and Trinity, whose ties with Augsburg have always been close, began to worship at Augsburg’s Hoversten Chapel.

Despite all the moving around, and two failed attempts to create a community space that Trinity could use for worship, Trinity’s programs have always remained in the forefront. When Trinity lost its building, it recommitted itself to the Word and the Sacraments, redefining what that meant: The church should not be a refuge or a place to flee, but rather a body “involved  in political theory and practice, economic theory and practice, public education, the arts, you name it,” wrote James S. Hamre in his history of Trinity Lutheran Congregation.

The West Bank Connection
For the past 40 years Trinity Lutheran Congregation has not owned a church building. On Pentecost it will celebrate 40 years of nomadic life. Because it is not so visible, people may not know it’s there.

But Trinity has discerned that it doesn’t need its own church building to serve the community and to “walk along with the people of the community,” as one of Trinity’s current pastors, Jane Buckley-Farlee, puts it. Trinity’s many ministries are based in the edifice it owns at the corner of 20th and Riverside, the same building that houses St. Martin’s Table (St. Martin’s Table provides the best vegetarian lunches you can find—probably in the whole world— alongside an outstanding peace and justice bookstore). Trinity Lutheran Congregation is deeply tied to this particular place on the earth, this colorful West Bank, the original Norwegian ghetto, the Twin Cities’ Haight-Ashbury of the ’60s, the “drinking culture” (which Trinity historically opposed, back in the old saloon days), a center of anti-war protest and the home of the Minnesota co-op movement, the campus of Augsburg College and the one-of-a-kind Fresh Air Radio.
The members of this “invisible” church fan out as individuals, involving themselves here, there and everywhere, uniquely dedicated to the neighborhood. Judy Tiede, a longtime member at Trinity says, “People know who the Trinity people are.”

For example, people know Eunice Eckerly, an energetic woman who smiles a lot and loves walking around and talking to people. Her work, her housing and her spiritual community have always been within walking distance, which permits her not to own a car. She’s often seen at Mapps or Hard Times, keeping in touch with the news on the street. She grew up in rural Nebraska, the daughter of a Missouri Synod pastor. As a young adult she moved to Brainerd and got a church secretary job in the same synod, a church where women cannot be pastors. She felt her secretarial work “freed up the pastor to do the REAL work of the church.” Now she’s doing the real work herself — in a congregation where women have been voting since 1897; women are ordained (Buckley Farlee follows two women pastors); and women since the days of the Tabitha Society have been deeply empowered in the church’s work of serving people.

Eunice’s ex-husband introduced her to liberation theology. “The marriage didn’t take but the theology did,” she laughs. After they were divorced, in the early ’70s, she got a job with the Urban Coalition, working on civil rights and anti-war issues, and came to live on the West Bank. Living in the new highrise, she became aware of its overpopulation, lack of elevators, cockroaches, no place for children to play, and simply the sheer volume of people. It all pointed to the need for a grocery store and she jumped right in to help start the now-defunct West Bank Co-op Grocery Store across the street.

While living in the high rise, Eunice attended the Trinity services that were held in the building and met Trinity’s pastor Richard Mork and his wife, who also lived there. The pastor was involved with the Coffeehouse Extempore, a discussion and music venue originally started for Augsburg students. Whoever wrote the history of the coffeehouse that fell into my hands said it was “a meeting-house of the many changing cultures that were in turmoil during those times.” When it was in financial trouble, a former president of Augsburg College and the president of Cedar-Riverside Association led the charge to keep it open. It was a place where “Minneapolis Police ... could explain itself to a community that was increasingly hostile.” The Extempore’s sole mission was to provide a safe and drug free zone where people of opposing sides could talk. It also became one of the premier venues in the country for music.

Over the decades, Eunice has seen a lot of changes but her values haven’t changed too much. A trip to Nicaragua inspired her belief in nonviolence and reinforced her desire to advocate for those who have less power. As a person committed to nonviolence she feels the hardest thing is to practice nonviolence when confronting any person or organization that wants power or control. She says she can’t support their agenda and feels compelled to work for the empowerment of everyone. That’s what she keeps trying to do on a daily basis through her many levels of engagement.

“Let’s gather around the table”
Now that Trinity has become Americanized—the Norwegians all speak English and have intermarried with Germans and what-have-you, and the pastors have no Norwegian blood (Pastor Buckley-Farlee descends from English/Irish/German ancestors and Trinity’s seminary student pastor, Alem Hagos, comes from Ethiopia and speaks six languages, including Norwegian)— Trinity is welcoming a new wave of immigrants, almost entirely from Eritrea and Ethiopia. While the early immigrant congregation solved its language issues with separate English and Norwegian services (an approximately 100-year-old sign that Jane dug up in their office reads: “English upstairs * Norwegian downstairs”), now people of the different cultures and languages worship together. They sing hymns and say litanies in Tigrinya, Amharic and English simultaneously. That’s in the main 11 a.m. service. In addition, there is a strictly English service at 9 a.m. and a 12:30 service in Amharic.

Political changes are also notable as well. The early Norwegians came from a place where the church and the state were more or less one entity. “Their ideal was what they’d inherited from the Middle Ages: a unified, cohesive society with one religion in which church and state worked together to produce and sustain a Christian civilization,” wrote Hamre. A search on Norwegian immigrants revealed that 19th century, pre-Ibsen Norway was a classist society; for example, a lower class person was expected to tip his hat to a person of the upper class if he met him on the street. Trinity Congregation threw most of that out pretty easily, it seems. The idea of America, the land of equal opportunity, appealed to them.
Political changes for Trinity’s African members are great, as well. The historic conflict, and the recent return of the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia is something they can be free of here. While they might not have been able to worship together as Christians over there, here they can do so without problems. They don’t bear each other animosity. A longtime member from Ethiopia, Meheretab, says, “former Eritreans and Ethiopians can greet each other after church, put it aside.” He says, “We can leave behind our countries, our tribes and our politics and come together and be one as the body of Christ.”

All Christians—who of course encompass the broad range of possible human differences — continue to believe that whatever changes occur, there is always something that remains the essence, something that binds believers together.
Maybe the binding essence is just the word Jesus, not even Jesus the person, since everyone has different ideas of who Jesus was or is and what the significance of their idea is. Buckley-Farlee, who moves around in the neighborhood kind of like Eunice does, tells of a conversation she had in a coffeehouse one day with friends, one Native American and one Ethiopian, about their faith. She felt that theologically they had only one thing in common—they all believed in Jesus.

In some mysterious way Jesus is the heart of all Christian kindness, Christian service. One of Trinity’s major ministries, and one that Buckley-Farlee has spoken about on numerous occasions, with great enthusiasm, for the past several years, is the Wednesday night suppers. The suppers are gatherings for single moms in the vicinity and their children. They were started, before Buckely-Farlee came to Trinity, to offer a meeting place for people who were “turned off” by the institutional church. Tiede, a nurse for Hennepin county and a member at Trinity, says “turned off” is not a strong enough word. How about “alienated,” she suggests.

The only overtly religious thing about the gathering is a before-meal prayer chosen by the group. Buckley-Farlee, though, says that when she says the words “Let’s gather around the table” she feels God’s presence as much as when she says “Let’s gather around the table” on Sunday mornings before Communion. She feels the suppers “expand the idea of Communion,” as though there is something sacramental about bringing people together just to be together, to care for one another, to visit or not visit, to feel safe and at ease. The only “Bible study” is the painted mural on the back of the building, the wall where the door to the offices is. Like Medieval stained glass windows, the mural represents biblical stories and their truths.

The suppers have taken on their own life. Sometimes men attend. Sometimes kids come without their moms. Some of the guests are Muslim. Sometimes volunteer teens from the congregation give the moms a break by taking the children to play in the rehabbed gym at Bethany Lutheran on Franklin Avenue.
There’s been a huge focus on youth at Trinity in the past couple of years, says Tiede. There are so many children of immigrant families whose parents are struggling to maintain their identity but still wanting their kids to fit in. Trinity offers a homework help program that helps kids through the transition period their families are in. The kids need a place. Poverty and gangs are some of the problems they have.  Hagos, who has been at Trinity since last November, is especially focused on the concerns of young people. The office building is always hopping. For children, it’s like a McGruff House, a place to come if you can’t find the keys to your house or you get scared for any reason.

A public church
Trinity Congregation’s two essential, unchanging values over its long history have been a commitment to service and a commitment to involvement in the affairs of the world around them. From the Tabitha Society that gave money to struggling families outside its immediate congregation, and visited the sick and disabled, to the present-day Wednesday suppers, Trinity has tried to help people around them. From the first members who sat on the library board and the school board, to present-day members who attend CRBA (Cedar Riverside Business Association) and NRP (Neighborhood Revitalization Program), there’s a constant interest in what they call the “church in the market place.” Like the programs at the Trinity office building, there’s no attempt to preach. Buckley-Farlee says, “We don’t go to CRBA or NRP and thump our Bibles. We try to be present, fair and honest.”