Episcopal Church’s political advocacy team expands public witness with weekly prayers
[Episcopal News Service] To say this year has been a busy one for The Episcopal Church’s Washington, D.C.-based Office of Government Relations would be an understatement.
With President Donald Trump taking office for a second term in January and quickly upending many of the legal, political and diplomatic norms of the nation and its capital city, the Office of Government Relations, following resolutions adopted by General Convention, is using an acronym to help focus its responses to the new administration’s actions: LEAP, or litigation, education, advocacy and prayer.
The Episcopal Church’s Office of Government Relations is based in Washington, D.C., and regularly meets with members of Congress and their staffs to advocate for the church’s nonpartisan public policy positions, as adopted by General Convention. Photo: David Paulsen/Episcopal News Service
Litigation includes the lawsuit filed by The Episcopal Church and its interfaith partners seeking to protect houses of worship from Trump administration immigration enforcement actions. To educate Episcopalians on other issues that matter to the church, the Office of Government Relations holds updates at 1 p.m. Eastern every Thursday on Zoom and partners with Episcopal Migration Ministries on a separate weekly update at 1 p.m. Eastern Tuesdays focused on immigration. The office’s advocacy in support of the church’s nonpartisan public policy positions combines meetings with elected officials with its churchwide mobilization of Episcopalians through the Episcopal Public Policy Network’s weekly action alerts.
Even with such a broad range of engagement, the church can’t respond to every new development out of the White House and Congress. That’s where prayer comes in, said Rebecca Blachly, the church’s chief of public policy and witness.
In March, the Office of Government Relations began releasing weekly prayers, usually numbering about a half dozen, focused on various issues of the week that might otherwise have fallen through the cracks. “We still wanted some way to respond” to those issues, Blachly told Episcopal News Service, “and we heard from Episcopalians that they were eager for us to respond.”
The prayers are distributed by email every Friday and on social media. Anyone signed up for the Episcopal Public Policy Network’s action alerts also will receive the weekly prayer emails.
The May 2 prayers focused on police and policing, Indigenous communities, coalition building and Yemen, as well as a “prayer for discernment in digesting online content.”
“Most High God, your Son is the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” the latter prayer reads. “In his name, we raise to you our concerns about false, distorted, or fabricated information which is increasingly shared online and through official channels. Help us all to be wise consumers of information, and grant protection and healing to those who have been harmed by untrue posts. Amen.”
Blachly and the staff of the Office of Government Relations decide on the prayers’ topics after discussing the top issues of the week, based partly on the feedback that office receives from its weekly webinars and Episcopal Public Policy Network members. The prayers aren’t intended to be a comprehensive series, though each weekly selection has been intentional and “specific enough that it was responding to the contemporary moment,” Blachly said. The office’s intern, Emily DeMarco, has taken the lead in writing the prayers.
Often the purpose of the prayers is to “stand in solidarity with those who feel afraid or vulnerable or threatened” by Trump administration policies, particularly as it pursues an anti-immigrant and anti-transgender agenda, Blachly said.
The Office of Government Relations, for example, heard a lot of concern from its networks about the National Park Service’s removal of Pauli Murray’s biography from its website. Murray, the first Black woman ordained a priest in The Episcopal Church, is also remembered as a trailblazer in the LGBTQ+ community. The Murray Family Home in Durham, North Carolina, is now a National Historic Landmark.
Murray was celebrated in the first weekly prayers distributed by the Office of Government Relations, on March 14.
“Holy God, you call each of us by name in the fullness of who You created us to be,” the prayer reads. “We join in the lament of our nonbinary and transgender siblings whose identities are being removed from government documents. We remember Pauli Murray, whom we celebrate with a feast day, and whose biography was deleted from a government website. Amen.”
In inaugurating the weekly prayer series, the Office of Government Relations affirmed that the prayers “are not a replacement for action.” Rather, they “offer grounding and allow us space to discern what actions each of us may feel compelled to take.”
The office continues to send separate weekly action alerts on the most pressing issues for church advocacy. The April 29 alert urged Episcopalians to contact members of Congress in support of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, commonly known as food stamps. The church has long advocated for robust government spending on SNAP as part of the Gospel call to alleviate poverty and hunger.
Other recent action alerts have focused on federal investments in the environmental protection and advocating passage of the Religious Workforce Protection Act, which would ease legal residency restrictions on clergy from around the world who are serving congregations in the United States.
The weekly prayers, meanwhile, are aligned with Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe’s vision for his newly created Division of Public Policy, Partnership and Witness, which Blachly leads.
Prayer, she said, “is one way that we can offer public witness.”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.
