Guests from DenverŐs St. Francis Center help with the beginnings of the Peace Garden

This month, bishops and deputations from each jurisdiction in the Episcopal Church will gather in Denver, Colo. for 10 intensive days of decisionmaking (check <www.thewitness.org> for pre- and post-convention commentary). It has long been a Witness tradition to offer our friends and supporters some hospitality and encouragement during this triennial legislative marathon. But in recent years we have felt drawn to also making sure our General Convention Witness event provides people with a chance to experience something of the "real" metropolis outside the polished confines of the could-be-anywhere convention centers where these large gatherings typically take place. To this end, July 9th we'll be hosting a benefit reception at the St. Francis Center, a day shelter that serves the city's ever-increasing homeless population at the edge of Denver's high-rise downtown.

Our festive event will be catered by the Women's Bean Project, a non-profit business aimed at equipping disadvantaged women with needed job and life skills. Peter Selby, an English bishop-activist for the Jubilee 2000 debt-relief campaign [see TW 6/00], will be our keynote speaker. And, mindful of this year's Jubilee 2000 appeal for restoration of right economic relationships, we'll be presenting four "Spirit of Justice" awards to people whose commitments we admire: farmworker organizer Baldemar Velasquez [TW 11/99]; New Hampshire's bishop, Douglas Theuner, who continually pushes for socially responsible church investing [TW 5/94]; war-tax resisters and bioregional activists Wally and Juanita Nelson [TW 12/96]; and Betty LaDuke, who uses her art to promote global women's economic sustainability [TW 6/00].

With this issue of The Witness we attempt to scratch beneath Denver's surface in other ways, too -- in search of justice and hope in a city and region which projects an image of prosperous and fun-loving frontier spirit, but where discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgendered people has been publicly advocated in statewide debates, where Superfund sites abound, and where unbridled development has forced independent-spirited poor people literally underground. We also add an interview with children's advocate Jonathan Kozol in sad memory of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton.

This is the second time over the past year that we have probed into the spirit and politics of a particular place [see also TW 6/99]. Our conviction in taking up such subjects has been that in today's globalized culture, it is very easy to lose the "grounding" in the specifics of real lives in a real place that we need if, as Kozol observes, we are to "find the courage to confront directly the local inequalities which are reflections of national inequalities."

There is something uncomfortably disembodied about the church gathering in a city to celebrate the Jubilee year and then spending long hours in windowless seclusion from that community's everyday realities. To their credit, our church leaders have tried to be mindful of Denver's justice struggles as they organized this synod. A dramatic illustration is last January's Executive Council decision to cancel arrangements to headquarter General Convention at Denver's 1,000-room Adam's Mark hotel upon discovering the chain's alleged pattern of racial discrimination (in March the hotel's management agreed to pay $8 million in damages to a variety of plaintiffs, though without admitting any wrongdoing).

And we commend the special efforts of the Episcopal Environmental Network in brokering the purchase of the electrical energy to be used by the convention from producers who generate it using the renewable resource of the wind.

But we also believe that spending time taking a "toxic tour" of the Denver region (p. 14), for example, or working the earth alongside homeless gardeners bent on restoring life to more than an empty city lot (p. 18), would be well worth missing a General Convention session or two. Even essential, perhaps, if the church's Jubilee commitment extends to making its presence in this place -- and in so many others where social and economic inequities flourish -- a blessing to more than itself.

Julie A. Wortman is publisher and co-editor of The Witness, <julie@thewitness.org>.