The Rev. Susan Daughtry preaches Jan. 11 at Grace Episcopal Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is rector. Photo: Grace Episcopal Church, via YouTube
[Episcopal News Service] When a U.S. citizen, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, was killed last week by federal immigration officials in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the congregation at Grace Episcopal Church responded by finding solace in their faith. They gathered for worship and prayer. The Rev. Susan Daughtry, Grace’s rector, invited members that evening, Jan. 7, for an impromptu Compline on Zoom, and they grieved together.
Grace Episcopal Church is located about three miles from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official shot and killed Good in her car. Their brief altercation and its deadly conclusion were captured on video, generating intense reactions on all sides, from the White House to American communities far from the violent scene on a residential Minneapolis street.
Since then, Episcopalians and Episcopal clergy across the United States have joined anti-ICE protests and attended prayer vigils for Good. Some read her name in their Sunday services during the Prayers of the People. Many are looking to Jesus’ life and teachings for guidance on how best to respond, as Christians, to what some fear is an increasingly authoritarian and unchecked federal government.
“It’s been a painful week in Minnesota, and this is a critical moment in the history of our nation,” Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya said in a Facebook post inviting Episcopalians to join an online prayer vigil at 7 p.m. Central Jan. 13 on Zoom. Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe also will participate.
The Episcopal Church also is promoting its Protesting Faithfully tool kit, offering “spiritual grounding and practical resources for faithful presence at protests and public demonstrations.”
In Minnesota, known as a left-leaning state with a Democratic governor, Grace Episcopal’s members are mostly progressive and active in community outreach ministries, Daughtry told Episcopal News Service this week by phone. She, like other clergy in more progressive Episcopal congregations, felt empowered and compelled to address the implications of Good’s killing directly in her Sunday sermon on Jan. 11.
“We see groups of masked men jumping out of unmarked vehicles and detaining everyday Somali and Latine and Hmong people with no warrant and no cause,” Daughtry said in her sermon. “We see federal officers reacting with violence when people exercise their right to observe them. … We saw them kill a woman in broad daylight.”
Since then, President Donald Trump and other high-ranking members of his administration have justified the killing while blaming the victim, Daughtry added. Those federal officials have accused Good of “domestic terrorism,” without evidence, and have suggested that opposing Trump administration policies is itself a crime or is fueling crime. Since the killing of Good, the Department of Homeland Security has ordered more officers to Minneapolis, in numbers that now outnumber the city’s own police force.
“This is where we live right now, a city and a state being use as a televised spectacle of cruelty by its own government, made-for-TV fascism,” Daughtry said in her sermon.
Other Episcopal clergy have been vocal in lamenting Good’s death, in sermons and at vigils, while calling on immigration authorities to deescalate their enforcement actions in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities.
“We want dignity for our neighbors and peace for our neighborhoods,” New York Bishop Matthew Heyd said at a prayer vigil. “The cruelty, the violence by ICE makes us all unsafe. … What happened in Minneapolis could happen in any of our neighborhoods.”
New Hampshire Bishop Rob Hirschfeld spoke in at a vigil for Good held in Concord and said, “the times of statements and the times of our eloquent words have reached a kind of limit, sadly.”
He and others have invoked the example of martyrs, such as Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels, who died in 1965 shielding a young, Black civil rights activist from a deputy sheriff’s shotgun blast in Alabama.
“I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness,” Hirschfeld said. “And I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order, to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”
Hirschfeld, in a phone interview with ENS, clarified that he was not expecting clergy or other Episcopalians to seek out dangerous situations, but rather he was acknowledging that it is an increasingly dangerous time to be an American engaged in nonviolent protest — and dangerous to be a follower of Jesus.
“If we’re going to put on the clothes of compassion and humility and patience and all the things that [Saint] Paul tells us to put on,” Hirschfeld said, “that’s not always welcomed with open arms in our country.”
In Trenton, New Jersey, the Rev. Bruce Montgomery, associate priest at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, preached Jan. 11 about how Good’s killing is an “awful picture of where we are” as a country. Yet the story of Jesus’ baptism in the day’s Gospel reading reminds Christians that Jesus is always with us “lifting people up” even “in the midst of the tragedy.”
Montgomery encouraged the congregation to consider “how can we follow God’s life of justice for all people?”
The Rev. Jed Dearing, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Columbus, Ohio, invited his congregation to “breathe a prayer of remembrance” for Good and to center themselves spiritually, “as we’re presented with the rise of fascism in our country” and “as federal forces are unleashed in our cities able to kidnap migrant neighbors, to harm, to kill with impunity.”
In Stamford, Connecticut, the Rev. Joseph Rose said in his sermon at St. Francis Episcopal Church that he struggled with how best to preach about the recent events. “I know there are a lot of opinions on immigration, on the mass deportations that are happening right now,” he said. “These issues, they’re very complex.”
By contrast, “dignity, human dignity is not complex,” he said. “Dignity is not a blue issue or red issue.”
Others have posted laments, tributes and calls to action on social media.
The Rev. Allison Burns-LaGreca, rector of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, shared her thoughts in a lengthy post on Facebook. “Renee’s life calls us to more than sorrow,” she said. “It calls us to protect one another more fiercely, to dismantle the violence that took her, and to build a world where kindness is not a survival strategy but a shared way of living. We carry her with us as a sacred responsibility.”
The Very Rev. Kate Moorehead Carroll, dean of St. John’s Cathedral in Jacksonville, Florida, was in Minneapolis on a personal trip when Good was killed. She described the city now as a place “in great turmoil.”
“They’re being occupied” by federal immigration officers, she told ENS. “It feels very similar to the West Bank when I visited years ago.”
When she returned to her home congregation, she shared some of her experiences in Minneapolis while underscoring Florida Episcopalians’ efforts to press for humane and reasonable reforms of federal immigration policies, as an alternative to the Trump administration’s escalating crackdown on legal and illegal immigration.
To ENS, she echoed Hirschfeld’s comments about Christians’ faith-based call to “go into places of the cross” and oppose injustice despite the potential dangers.
“Christianity is marked by martyrdom,” she said. “Oftentimes, we go to the places of pain and struggle. We don’t run away from them.”
Daughtry, the Minneapolis rector, said some members of her congregation are involved in hyperlocal networks that have formed to support their immigrant neighbors. When she preaches, however, she sees her role as more broadly helping the congregation “embody joyful love” by praying together and, sometimes, lamenting together.
“When we come together for worship, part of what we take away is the courage to practice the way of Jesus,” Daughtry told ENS. “These are the days when courage is needed.”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.