BOISE, Idaho — Inside the Cathedral of the Rockies, there are a lot of faces. Over the last year though, one face has vanished, confederate army leader Robert E. Lee.
“After we removed Robert E. Lee we put in a clear window, that allowed some light in, which was proverbial perhaps, we said who should go up in the window,” said Pastor Duane Anders with the United Methodist Church in Boise.
After community conversations, Pastor Anders says the United Methodist Church and Cathedral of the Rockies decided to remove the image of Lee, explaining that “Lee is not someone who upheld Christian values, in his leadership as a general in the confederate army defending slavery.” The task became: whose image should replace Lee?
“50 or so names came in, great names. Some we had not thought of and we started to research the various list of names and we did that and one kind of rose to the top because it had a connection to the cathedral, to Boise, and Methodism. That’s Bishop Leontine Kelly,” Anders said.
As Anders said, the community had a lot of ideas for a new face to overlook the sanctuary. So, why Bishop Kelly?
“Bishop Leontine Kelly was elected Bishop at jurisdictional meeting here in Boise in 1984 in the Methodist Church. She was the first African American woman elected Bishop in any denomination that we are aware of. If you go to her Wikipedia page, it will say the first in the world, the first black woman to be a Bishop in the world. She was elected here, consecrated here, and began her ministries as a Bishop here in this building,” Anders said.
In the context of replacing Lee, Pastor Anders says the accomplishments of Bishop Kelly also put her apart from other names.
“Bishop Kelly was a phenomenal leader. She not only was the first African American woman but was ahead of her time as an advocate for LGBT inclusion. She was an advocate for women in ministry, and she was only the second woman Bishop in our denomination, so she was a front runner in many ways. She served in Northern California and Nevada as a Bishop for four years,” Anders said.
Anders said the reactions within the church have varied.
“As you can imagine, we are not always of one mind. We had to wrestle through this, we had to disagree for a while, we had to fight through it, we had to pray through it. Some folks were feeling like, are we caught in cancel culture? Are we eliminating history? When they listen to the conversations around the national issue of systemic racism as we watch Breonna Taylor and George Floyd be shot and killed, it became obvious we needed to move forward. But wanted the history to stay here. The previous window will be gifted to the Idaho Black History Museum, so it stays in Idaho and it continues to teach about what it means to be a person of color here in Idaho,” Anders said.
Church leaders say they know simply removing and replacing an image does not finalize the conversation. They vowed to repent, and that continues beyond this action.
“We all live within systemic racism and so we are working to say as followers of Christ, how do we step out of that? How do we become anti-racist? How to we become proponents of all people,” Anders said “The word repentance is a key word in Christen life, the first sermon Jesus preaches: repent and believe. Repent means change the way you think, and so, even as followers of Christ we have to occasionally change the way we think about things we were comfortable that we recognize things that maybe weren’t fully representative of God.”
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