On Sunday, we started off the day attending the church service at the First AME Zion Church that is our home base for the week. This is the oldest Black church in Oregon, and I believe the oldest in the PNW if I remember correctly. I found myself deeply touched by the sermon and the community who welcomed us in as guests. I could feel the power and significance of this place in terms of belonging and mutual support, especially for elders, in the Portland Black community. I was surprised to see how small the congregation was (less than ten overall not including our group) and I was saddened to think of the loss of community over the years in a historic church like this that is such a crucial part of the Black community here as gentrification and various factors pushed Black Portlanders out of this area. I enjoyed our conversation with one of the congregation members after the church service. He had been away for a number of years but came back to this church to seek solace and support in the community after the passing of his daughter.
Being in religious spaces has usually been an uncomfortable experience for me as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I find myself feeling deeply uneasy and guarded in predominantly white religious contexts. Somehow I knew going into Sunday that this would not be my experience here, and I was correct in this assumption. I anticipated I would be treated with kindness in this church, and that I would be invited into this space as a guest without expectations or judgement, which I found to be true. I think the students and I each were all able to resonate with the sermon in different ways. The message was to be “real” with God, yourself, and those around you. It gave me a lot to think about with how I interact with others and how to do so in an authentic way, and also how I can be more honest with myself too. As a choir kid since age four, I enjoyed getting to participate in the church service by singing along, even though I didn’t know the songs beforehand. I noticed in the comments and reflection afterwards that the students enjoyed the music as much as I did too. The service also discussed performativity, and doing things for the sake of tradition, or appearances and social recognition. This opened up a lot of good reflection for me about intentionality in how I show up in the world and not losing touch with the “why” behind things. This conversation was presented through the lens of lent, why or why not someone would fast, and challenging tradition for tradition’s sake without a purpose and driving factor behind it. I was able to resonate with the messages of the sermon even without a religious background or affiliation. I also think it was interesting attending a service led by a woman, and I heard good reflections from the students about how they experienced this positionality.
We spent the afternoon walking around North Portland and seeing different locations relevant to Portland’s Black community and history. As we started off down the street near the church, we found ourselves (especially me, to be frank) excited by the different places we saw in the business district near the church – trendy coffee shops where we stopped to get (expensive) lattes, “hip” restaurants, patisseries (one of them is a favorite of mine, with pricey but delicious croissants), cutesy donut shops, yoga studios, and breweries. As our conversations progressed, and we visited the different stops on our route, it hit us more viscerally what had been right in front of us – very clear, palpable examples of gentrification. Some of us had been to the area before but hadn’t thought critically about this before, and many of us had different conflicted thoughts about this. We saw newly built apartments that I’m pretty certain I could not afford, even as a white person with generational wealth, a graduate degree and a “good job”, let alone the Black community that were homeowners here in past years. We saw the pieces of empty land that were cleared for Legacy Hospital to be built, displacing 300+ families, with the promise of affordable housing which never came. We had good conversations about how and where we choose to spend our money, who owns the businesses we frequent, and the impact we can have by being mindful as consumers and residents of a community. It was a rewarding day and I am grateful for the experiences and conversations we had.
-Holly Peterson