A new exhibit is making use of the stained glass windows that surround the nave of Spokane’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist.
“Unto the Ends of the Earth: The Legacy of the Great Commission in the Inland Northwest” mines the story in those windows to understand how Christianity made its way from the Middle East to the Inland Northwest.
St. John’s, the seat of the Episcopal Church in Spokane, officially opened in 1929. In the years leading up to the centennial, the church is marking “bonus” milestones with exhibits like “Unto the Ends of the Earth.”
Darryl Gurecky, the co-chair of St. John’s Centennial Committee, helped create the exhibit, which features artwork, photography and historic church furnishings and celebrates 100 years since workers broke ground on the cathedral.
“We thought it was a good opportunity to look at the history that occurred before the cathedral was built,” Gurecky said.
Gurecky and his fellow committee members were careful not to glorify that history. One window shows Constantine the Great declaring Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
“At that point, it was kind of a first point of Christianity beginning to displace other cultures, displace other belief systems,” Gurecky said.
That displacement isn’t just a theme throughout the exhibit; it’s also present throughout Christian history, according to Gonzaga religious studies professor Kevin Brown.
He cited an early Christian theory known as “supersessionism,” or the idea that Christians had replaced Jews as God’s chosen people. The Catholic Church has since formally rejected this teaching. But hundreds of years ago, "it led European nations, who identified as Christian nations, to read themselves into the stories of the Old Testament where the ancient Israelites were recalled as settling particular lands and encountering people who are in those lands,” Brown said.
That in turn led to the Doctrine of Discovery, “the claim, essentially, that lands that were discovered by Christians, that were not inhabited by Christians, were able to be claimed by the Christian nations,” Brown said.
The Doctrine of Discovery was issued by the Catholic Church, but after Protestants split off during the European Reformation, they leaned on the justification, too.
That set the stage for many of the interactions between Christian European settlers and Native Americans in the New World. Across the U.S., settlers forcibly displaced tribes from their land and sent Indigenous children to Catholic and Protestant boarding schools, which Brown calls a form of cultural genocide.
“But it ultimately was a practice of the deeper reality of genocide as well, because it resulted in the abuse and neglect of many children and the desire to not let a particular people hand on their own way of life,” Brown said.
At the St. John’s exhibit, some posters tell the stories of Indigenous children who attended early versions of those schools.
Also on display are visual depictions of Christian history that missionaries sent home with Indigenous children. The Episcopal Church worked with the Nez Perce tribe to translate some of the writing on these Protestant and Catholic “ladders” for the first time.
As a self-described history nerd, Darryl Gurecky is excited that “Unto the Ends of the Earth” has uncovered buried stories. But he also recognizes the more somber opportunity that the exhibit gives his congregation.
“It's important to — not to condemn the past, necessarily, though there's a lot of bad stuff that happened in the past, but to own the reality of the past and build upon that or learn from that,” Gurecky said. “To hopefully move in a better direction as we move forward.”
For years, Gurecky said, he and other congregants worshiped at St. John’s without stopping to read the story written in its windows.
“But it is our story to own,” he said. “And a painful story to own.”
“Unto the Ends of the Earth” is open to visitors Thursdays through Sundays from 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Admission is free. A collection of Spokane Garry’s Bibles on loan from the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture will be displayed at the cathedral on October 10 and November 7.
The exhibit opened September 17 and will run through November 15.
