Epiphany Parish of Seattle
| Epiphany Parish of Seattle | |
|---|---|
| Epiphany Seattle | |
| 47°37′05″N 122°17′10″W / 47.618099°N 122.286091°W Fatal error: The format of the coordinate could not be determined. Parsing failed. | |
| Location | Madrona, Seattle, Washington |
| Country | United States |
| Denomination | Episcopal Church in the United States of America |
| Website | {{URL|example.com|optional display text}} |
| History | |
| Status | Parish |
| Founded | 1907 |
| Administration | |
| Diocese | Olympia |
| Clergy | |
| Bishop(s) | Gregory Rickel |
| Rector | Doyt Conn, Jr. |
Epiphany Parish of Seattle (also known as Epiphany Seattle) is an Episcopal parish church in Seattle, Washington, United States, founded in 1907.[1] It is located on the border of Seattle's Central Area residential neighborhoods of Madrona and Denny-Blaine, a short distance inland from Lake Washington's western shoreline. It part of the Episcopal Church's Diocese of Olympia (Western Washington).
History
Epiphany achieved self-supporting status and became a parish church in 1910, and was key to Bishop Keator's effort that year to transform his diocese from missionary to full, independent status in the United States Protestant Episcopal Church, as The Episcopal Church was known at that time. At that moment in Seattle's history, a development boom was underway, because the city was the U.S. port used by gold-seekers en route to and returning from mining country in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon.
Seattle's 1900 census showed it had more than doubled its population over the previous decade, reaching a total of 80,671. The following decade saw continued population growth, with a significant percentage of new arrivals being immigrants from Canada, Britain, and urban centers in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States,[2] areas with cultural ties to Anglican Christian worship.
The congregation's first senior warden – its lay leader – was a newly arrived young physician, Dr. Chal. P. Bryant, a nephew of New York journalist and author William Cullen Bryant. He and his wife Elizabeth organized their new Seattle neighbors and friends, some of whom were not Episcopalians,[3] first running a children's Sunday school in the back of a Madrona neighborhood grocery store, and then, as a missionary congregation.
The parish's first structure, now its chapel, was designed by Seattle architect, Chicago-born Ellsworth Storey, a member of the congregation. It is a City of Seattle Landmark (footnote City of Seattle site). The cornerstone of the Tudor-revival style building was laid July 23, 1911. The land for the building, located adjacent to Seattle's 1903 park-boulevard system, designed by the Olmsted Brothers, was offered to the church at less than half its market value by the neighborhood's developers, Charles L. Denny, a son of original Seattle settlers, Arthur Armstrong and Mary Boren Denny, and his partner, Elbert Blaine, whose wife Minerva underwrote the congregation's rent payment in the neighborhood storefront until the church could be completed.[3]
Epiphany was organized at a time of social reform in Seattle, a port city with a heritage of waterfront saloons, transient hotels, and a large section of its downtown generally dedicated to vice. In 1910, women won the right to vote in Washington state, and progressive Seattle citizens quickly launched a campaign to recall the then-mayor, Hiram Gill, who, it was revealed, was a partial owner of what was to be the nation's largest house of prostitution.[2] Epiphany congregation member George W. Dilling was among the leaders of the recall movement and in a special election held in the spring of 1911, Gill was recalled and Dilling elected to replace him.[2]
In the following decade, including during World War I, Epiphany's congregation expanded and the church also served the Madrona-Denny Blaine neighborhoods as a community center and polling place.[3] With the return to peacetime, Epiphany continued to be a growing parish, adding a residence also designed by Ellsworth Storey – the rectory – for the parish clergyman and his family. It was restored and expanded in 1971, and now serves as the parish office.
Epiphany's Growth
In the 1920s, under the clergy leadership of the Rev. George Wieland as rector, Epiphany was an active participant in the expansion of the Episcopal Church in Western Washington. It organized and supported two missions on the eastern shore of Lake Washington – now both parishes: St. John's, Kirkland and Emmanuel, Mercer Island. In that era, a long-standing dispute about where the Episcopal Church's diocesan headquarters should be located was resolved. The Rev. Simeon Arthur Huston of San Antonio, Texas, was elected bishop and directed that the church's “see city” should be moved from Tacoma, which had territorial-era ties to church-sponsoring transcontinental railroad fortunes, to Seattle – by then the state's largest city.
Epiphany weathered the Great Depression of the 1930s with continuing congregational growth and financial stability that bypassed its nearby sponsoring parish, St. Mark's Church. An ambitious effort by St. Mark's to build the diocesan cathedral collapsed, not to be revived until after World War II.
In 1939, Epiphany's popular rector, the Rev. Wieland, was called to become director of Home Missions for the Episcopal Church’s national office in New York City, but the Epiphany congregation was again fortunate in calling an energetic young cleric, Philadelphia-born Elmer B. Christie, who had been serving in the Southwest Washington lumber town of Hoquiam, and then at St. John's Church at state's capital, Olympia. On the eve of World War II, in 1940, the Rev. Dr. Christie inspired his parishioners to embark on a successful fund-raising campaign to construct a large brick parish hall adjacent to the church, with classrooms, office and assembly room. Whitehouse and Price of Spokane were the architects.
The Rev. Dr. Christie's efforts then led Epiphany to purchase adjoining property where a much larger main church, also designed by Whitehouse, was constructed in 1951, as a World War II war memorial. During the 1950s and 1960s, a distinctive ensemble of stained glass windows, created by the Charles J. Connick Studios of Boston, MA were commissioned and installed. The entire campus underwent a significant renovation in 2015 under the direction of LMN Architects and Lease-Crutcher-Lewis, Seattle firms whose principals are members of the congregation.
In 1958, after Seattle's voters declined to support funding for kindergartens, Dr. Christie organized an elementary school as part of his church, utilizing its Sunday school classrooms and other facilities on the campus. Epiphany School continued under the auspices of the congregation as a sectarian institution until 1969, when it was reorganized as an independent school, with its campus expanded into the neighboring blocks.
Also in 1958 Epiphany again entered missionary work, supporting a new congregation founded in Edmonds, WA, St. David of Wales, in the fast-growing suburbs north of Seattle. Dr. Christie saw this as a fitting way to mark Epiphany Church's 50th anniversary. Epiphany's associate clergyman, the Rev. John Huston, son of Bishop Simeon Arthur Huston was called as the first vicar of St. David's.
Epiphany Church and the Era of Racial Violence in Seattle
During the 1960s and 1970s Epiphany Church and its Madrona-Denny-Blaine neighborhoods found itself on the front lines of racial conflict in Seattle. In 1948, racial and anti-Semitic exclusionary codes in the deeds of most of the homes around Epiphany were ruled unconstitutional, but that had not prevented local banks and real estate agents from redlining Madrona, primarily to exclude African-Americans by refusing to make home loans in areas where residents were not all whites. “White flight” disinvestment followed and growing black militancy impacted the church.
In 1968, a Seattle branch of the Black Panther Party was organized by two Madrona brothers, Aaron and Elmer Dixon, in a small storefront office next to the Epiphany Parish thrift shop, Trinkets and Treasures several blocks from the church. When the young Panthers began military-style drills at Madrona Park, Epiphany's volunteers were frightened, and the shop relocated to a small business district on nearby Capitol Hill. In his 2012 memoir, Aaron Dixon[4] described his attitude at that time in the Madrona of his youth as “get Whitey,” acknowledging this clashed with his middle-class parents.
In the early 1960s, the Diocese of Olympia attempted to encourage its congregations to welcome African-Americans, closing Church of the Advent, its Central Area mission to Black Seattleites, located not far from Epiphany. Those communicants were urged to join nearby Episcopal congregations, some more welcoming than others. Several of its members transferred to Epiphany, and other people of color soon followed, beginning a new era of multiculturalism within the congregation.
In 1968, the Seattle-area struggle to end racial discrimination in housing claimed the life of Edwin Pratt, an African American who was executive director of the Seattle Urban League, where Episcopal Bishop, the Right Rev. Steven F. Bayne was a board member. Pratt and his family, working with a multiracial advocacy group, had moved to a white suburb north of Seattle. He was a communicant at Epiphany's Edmonds mission, St. David of Wales. On a dark night in January, 1969, Pratt answered a call at his residence's door and was fatally shot. His assailant has never been found.
The only residential fire-bombings in Seattle during this era occurred within blocks of Epiphany, at the Madrona homes of two high profile, politically-liberal, white men: the area's state senator, and one of its two state representatives, insurance executive, David Sprague, a member of Epiphany's congregation.[5] There were no injuries, but some structural damage to their homes. Both men decided to retire from representing their increasingly non-white district in the state legislature, clearing the way for the election of African-Americans. While the state senator immediately moved to the white suburbs, Sprague and his family remained in Madrona and continued to be inspiring members of the Epiphany congregation.[3] In its determination to foster a spirit of multiculturalism, Epiphany organized a “drop-in” center for the neighborhood's teens, predominantly African-Americans, staffed by the Central Area Motivation Program, a social service agency located about a mile from Epiphany.
Arson Fire at Epiphany Church
During the decade of the 1970s, for the first time in Seattle's history, its population was in decline. There was a sharp drop in employment at the Boeing Company, located in the region, and white families with school-aged children moved away when the city's public school district voluntarily imposed mandatory busing to address racial imbalance in its classrooms. The 1980 census showed that only increases in college-aged individuals living within the city limits prevented the drop in Seattle's population below 500,000 from being even worse.
Despite many strategies, racial segregation in Seattle schools continued, with Madrona's public elementary school's student body having become almost entirely black in the 1970s, with the headquarters for the Black Panther Party located a block away.
Epiphany neighbor and captain of Seattle's Black Panther chapter, Aaron Dixon, welcomed the declining white population in the neighborhood at that time as politically empowering to the black community.[4] Dixon's 2012 memoir recounted national news magazines Time Magazine and Newsweek in 1969 ranked Seattle as number one for racially-motivated fire bombings among U.S. cities.[4]
In spring of 1975, under cover of darkness, arsonists broke into Epiphany's main sanctuary and set it on fire. A passenger on a passing city bus spotted individuals fleeing, and the fire department was quickly called. No suspects were ever identified.
Arson intimidation did not daunt the Epiphany congregation in its determination to remain in what had become a majority non-white neighborhood. Its young rector, the Rev. John “Jack” Gorsuch, Colorado-born, Yale University-educated, had been called to the church upon the retirement of the Rev. Christie in 1968, and continued to lead his congregation forward into multiculturalism. Epiphany's insurance largely funded repairs that were quickly made and services soon resumed in the restored church.[3]
Epiphany Leads in the Ordination of Female Clergy
The growing movement within the Episcopal Church to allow women to be ordained to the priesthood came to a national vote at its General Convention in the summer of 1976 in Los Angeles, CA [link]. The Diocese of Olympia was divided, with its then-bishop, the Right Rev. Robert Hume Cochrane voting against the proposal to allow, but not require bishops to ordain women. The previous year, Epiphany's rector, Father Gorsuch had invited Dr. Laura Fraser, who held a theology doctorate as well as degrees in sociology and philosophy, to join Epiphany's clergy staff. With the national vote, the congregation prepared for her ordination, although it was by no means certain Bishop Cochrane would agree. Although a protest service was conducted at a conservative Episcopal congregation elsewhere in Seattle, Dr. Fraser's high-profile ordination at Epiphany, a subject of extensive news media attention, was conducted at the church, Bishop Cochrane presiding, on February 3, 1977. This was the first female ordination in the Episcopal Church in western Washington and one of the first in the Episcopal Church nationally.[3]
New Directions – Social Outreach and Campus Renewal
Father Gorsuch's decision to retire in 1986 was followed by the calling of the Rev. Philip Compton, who due to ill health, soon resigned, and the subsequent arrival of the Rev. Don Goodhart to serve as rector in 1988. He was assisted by two female clergy, both mothers of young children, the Rev. Dorian McGlannan and the Rev. Whitney J. DeVine, who “job shared” – a new concept for the congregation. In subsequent years, clergywomen have been integral to the life of Epiphany Parish. Social outreach programs also were developed serving the poor and homeless in Seattle and missions to Central America.
Recognizing the need for structural and physical upgrades, the congregation conducted a significant capital campaign in 1997, financing the installation of a new Noak pipe organ, seismic retrofit, construction of columbarium and garden renovations. When an earthquake struck the region in 2001, there was great thankfulness for the seismic improvements that prevented serious damage.
Epiphany Today
The current rector, the Rev. Doyt Conn, Jr., was called to Epiphany in 2008, and under his leadership there has been significant parish revitalization and expansion. Currently four Sunday services are offered. A preschool was opened and after-school daycare provided, as well a concert series and pilgrimages to sites considered holy in the Christian world.
References
- ↑ Article on History Link
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Berner, Richard (1990). Seattle 1900-1920, From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence to Restoration. Seattle: Charles Press. ISBN 0-9629889-0-1. Search this book on
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Stenson, Barbara (2007). A Bridge Over Time: Seattle’s Church of the Epiphany, Seattle - Centennial History. Seattle: Epiphany Parish of Seattle. ISBN 978-0-9794193-0-0. Search this book on
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Dixon, Aaron (2012). My People are Rising. Haymarket. ISBN 978-1-60846-178-3. Search this book on
- ↑ Richman, Carol. "Madrona Memories, Part 2 — Civil Rights and Civil Unrest". HistoryLink.org. Retrieved 23 September 2019.
External links
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