The Convention Planning Committee wants to hear from you! Take a few moments to share your thoughts with us about your experience of this year’s Annual Convention as well as your preferences for next year. Survey is open to all attendees, including non-voting participants at Convention.
Annual Convention will be streamed from ECCT’s YouTube page, beginning with Opening Worship at 3 PM on Friday and then again at 9:15 AM on Saturday.
Follow along on our Facebook page for real-time updates during the weekend.
Written by Canon Sarah Louise Woodford
If you are at Camp Washington on November 2 for A Day of Growing Hope & Forging Peace, you will hear a distinctive sound, even from the parking lot—a ringing that has a steady, metallic harmony as hammer comes into contact with metal. This is more than just a hammer hitting metal, though. It is the sound of guns becoming garden tools. It is the sound of violence and tragic ends becoming objects of nurture, creativity, and new life. It is the sound of folks becoming blacksmiths.
November 2, 2024, will be a workday at Camp Washington’s fully-equipped forge and at the center of it all will be the Rt. Rev. Jim Curry and his crew. Bishop Curry retired as ECCT’s Bishop Suffragan in 2014 and in 2017, co-founded Swords to Plowshares Northeast, a non-profit that takes its name from Isaiah 2:4 and reduces gun violence by transforming pieces of guns into objects, especially garden tools. These garden tools are then given back to local community and parish gardens, the once tool for violence now a tool that nurtures the growing of vegetables and flowers.
It will also be a day when Swords to Plowshares Northeast takes on new apprentices. Blacksmithing is a traditional trade that is learned by doing, by being beside someone who has beaten and formed metal many times before you. “I want to train the next generation of blacksmiths,” Bishop Curry said in a phone interview earlier this month, “November 2 will be a day of learning traditional blacksmithing techniques.” Bishop Curry hopes that during the workday, the group will create mattocks from gun barrels—a mattock, especially one created by Bishop Curry and his crew, is a two-sided garden tool with a handle, one side to be used as a hoe, the other side to be used as a fork for soil cultivation.
On our call, Bishop Jim shared the catalyst for both forming his non-profit and shaping his love for blacksmithing: the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT, which took the lives of 20 students and six educators. He, along with then Connecticut Bishop Diocesan Ian T. Douglas and Bishop Suffragan Laura Ahrens traveled to the scene of the shooting to be with the shaken and mourning community. It is an experience he will never forget. “I had to do something,” he told me.
That something came through the craft of blacksmithing and the witness of the Reverend Jeremy Lucas and the Mennonite blacksmith ministry based in Colorado, RAWtools. Bishop Curry went west and worked at the RAWtools forge, learning how to turn guns into garden tools. He also brought members of the RAWtools ministry to Connecticut to train members of his team.
At the forge of RAWtools, “I fell in love with process,” he told me. “I was learning a traditional skill; I was training for something. Blacksmithing is a full-body process and it allowed me to physically step into my desire to change things. And it was fun! Through shaping metal, areas of great tragedy can reclaim something, and that reclaiming is really joyful.”
And many throughout ECCT have already benefited from Bishop Curry’s apprenticeship to blacksmithing as well as his apprenticeship to peace. Connecticut community and parish gardens nurture their crops through his garden tools, many (including me) have a necklace or bracelet from which hangs a piece of a bullet casing transformed into a heart—and even the crook of our current Bishop Diocesan’s crozier was formed by Bishop Curry’s passion, mission, and artistry at the forge.
Like all apprentices that came before, you too, can learn from Bishop Curry’s expert craftmanship on November 2 at Camp Washington’s forge. You too, can fall in love with the process and become part of the bigger story that brings peace and hope into a world that so often gets stuck in loops of violence. You too, can strike metal and hear that metallic, melodious sound as you “turn swords into plowshares,” just like Isaiah has called us to do.
You can sign up for A Day of Growing Hope & Forging Hope here.
ECCT has compiled a few resources to support you during election times. We also invite you to check out these events being hosted virtually.
Join Canon D Littlepage (Canon for Mission Advocacy, Racial Justice & Reconciliation) and Canon Rebekah Hatch (Canon for Lay & Ordained Vocations) on October 8 from 6 PM -7:30 PM and October 10, 12 PM – 1:30 PM over Zoom for the chance to join parish leaders from across ECCT to hear from one another. We’ll share the challenges and excitement of our work in this particular season.
Together, with God’s help and love, we can choose hope, connection, and community.