Call to Action – Defend the Orphanage! Contact the ELCA: Stop sending police to harass the First Trinity Community Center
On February 8, Chicago Police broke into the First Trinity Lutheran Church community center (commonly known as the Orphanage) and detained and cuffed two volunteers hoping to arrest, illegally evict, lock out and board up the building at the behest of a real estate corporation determined to sell the church. At the time of the intrusion, folks were busy preparing and organizing for the community meals, clothing drives, youth programming, and various other mutual aid services provided out of the space. After dozens of comrades and concerned neighbors converged to defend the space, the predators and parasites retreated in defeat. This is at least the fourth time in the past year that real estate agent Brandon Banks, of Coldwell Bankers and Spacematch Inc, brought cops on false pretenses to break windows and bust down doors, only to eventually leave after realizing that incorrectly leveraging the law to harass, punish, and halt community-led mutual aid was not going to work. The Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) who had hired Coldwell Bankers to sell the place sent a email on Feb. 5 to CPD directing them to arrest any “trespassers”, some of whom had been a part of First Trinity for over a decade.
Contact the ELCA and let them know: the community is not for sale! Fire Coldwell Bankers! Stop police harassment! Folks are pulling an immense weight providing free food, clothing, space to warm up, arts and activities for kids, providing sanitation supplies, and sending books to prisoners. The church has no business harassing that!
Let Them Know! -> Tom Anderson tanderson@mcselca.org 773.248.0021 hit 0 ask for Tom Anderson or Bishop Curry
First Trinity Lutheran Church has been an important part of the neighborhood for 130 years and continues to host projects at its community center such as Midwest Books to Prisoners and El Comedor Comunitario, providing essential services like free food, clothes, educational materials, and a safe environment. While many churches across Chicago are now utilizing their buildings for mutual aid projects addressing ongoing housing and humanitarian crises, the Metropolitan ELCA is shamefully failing to fulfill their Christian obligations to stand with those in imminent need. This past year, a new First Trinity administration was installed by the ELCA to force what they concocted as a “Holy Closure” of the church despite the community’s continuing needs, hopes, and potentials: shutting down programs such as the “God’s Closet” free store and the Trinity House LGBTQ safe housing, they forced a highly contentious and likely illegal vote after scrubbing the vote roster to exclude the people directly running services at the church, including even the resident church pianist of 17 years who would have cast the deciding vote. Now that the ELCA owns the building, they are refusing our good-faith efforts to discuss the future of the space, instead sending police to bully and arrest us for “trespassing”, forgoing civil eviction proceedings in hopes of selling out a social center to gentrifying developers for more than a million dollars.
The greedy banks and corrupt church institutions want these buildings completely emptied and devoid of community, to sell to some prospective investor who would demolish the buildings and erase history. This process repeats itself across our stratified city driven by ruthless capitalist forces, who violently evict people and de-root community, raze down and gentrify the land, and in a final mockery, install some cruel cold sterile building, to host alienating commerce and soulless condos, for the singular purpose to generate profit. The Church trying to cash out on community coupled with the failure of imagination to meet the needs of the moment is blasphemy against the spirit. ELCA would like for this to happen quietly and out of the public eye, a silent death as they pocket the check. While the purportedly “progressive” Church talks about prison reform and human rights, they contract cartoonish bankers and predatory police to aggressively attack the community doing the exact work the Church claims it supports. Alternatively, we are already bringing into fruition a thriving social center, a world in which many worlds fit, where the intersection of abolitionist struggles against the prisons meet with the struggles of immigrants facing fascistic xenophobia and neoliberal indifference and brutal austerity. We refuse to be thrown away into society’s prisons and carceral shelters: we will defend each other, and we will not allow profiteering real estate corporations and soulless church institutions sell out the community.
We’re asking people to call on the ELCA to demand they stop the police harassment, to drop the contract with Coldwell Bankers, to interrupt the legacy of using Christianity to abuse power. Leviticus 25:35 says it plainly: “If one of your brethren becomes poor, and falls into poverty among you, then you shall help him, like a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with you.” And in Hebrews 13:3:“Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.” Hebrews 13:3.
For more information, contact orphanagecollective@proton.me
Further Reading:
- Chicago Aldermen Push For Accountability Amid Complaints Of Mistreatment At Migrant Shelters (https://borderlessmag.org/2024/02/01/chicago-migrant-shelters-favorite-healthcare-staffing/)
- Investigation: Migrants Describe Inhumane Conditions At Chicago’s Largest Shelter (https://borderlessmag.org/2023/12/14/investigation-chicago-migrant-shelter-pilsen-dangerous/ )
- Breaking Borders: Report on Anarchist Organizing in Solidarity with Migrants in Chicago https://itsgoingdown.org/breaking-borders-report-on-anarchist-organizing-in-solidarity-with-migrants-in-chicago/
¡Defender el orfanato! Demanda de la ELCA: ¡Alto a la policía que amenaza al Primer Centro Comunitario Trinity!