In my last column, I discussed visible repairs — practices that mend fabric with brightly colored threads, as well as the art of kintsugi, which repairs cracked pottery with veins of gold — and suggested we need visible reminders of our nation’s history of slavery to keep us wise for our future. Then I asked: What do visible reminders of past harms look like in our churches and church institutions? I’ve been struggling with the question. 

Please understand that I’m not talking about reminders of our martyr history. I am talking about remembering institutional sins from recent generations.

The metaphor of beautiful repairs began to unravel as I thought about institutional harms. We have sometimes taken opportunities for confession, growth and attempts at reconciliation. But these harms cannot be repaired as easily as gluing a broken pot back together: Native children die at church-sponsored residential schools, far from home. Institutions turn a blind eye to the sexual violence of a charismatic theologian and lose much of a generation of women theologians. A church relief organization helps Nazi collaborators emigrate, and they escape accountability. 

The painful consequences remain after the reports are filed, policies updated, funds opened and rituals performed. And so our churches and institutions need sites of memory and pilgrimage where we can go, sit with those pieces, take our children, search our hearts and consider our own sometimes overlapping roles as survivors, enablers or perpetrators — and commit to be part of a better future.

The institutional sites of memory that I know about are easy to visit but difficult to touch: websites and reports. Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary has a webpage in response to victims of a theologian’s abuse. Mennonite Central Committee commissioned and posted a report on its historical entanglements with German National Socialism. Independent sites post survivor stories. Local rituals and acts of reparation and repatriation are opportunities for memorializing past harms and may be deeply meaningful. 

News stories provide a second layer of impact and leave a historical record, but I have not encountered anything in the physical landscapes of the church institutions I have visited. Only, sometimes, absences — as when a university quietly removes “anthropological artifacts” that had been in display cases for decades, recognizing that they may in fact be sacred relics.

The only time I can recall passing a story to my daughters about institutional harm and response came from a noticed absence, not a presence, in the soundscape of our church. At a service at a local church, we sang a song we used to sing at our own church. On the way home, my daughter commented that she hadn’t heard it for a long time. I explained that the song isn’t in the new hymnal, Voices Together, and that our home church stopped singing the composer’s songs after learning that he harmed women. She understood and expressed surprise that the other congregation continued to sing his songs. “Maybe they don’t know,” I said. 

We both loved the song, yet neither of us wants to sing it anymore. We feel safer knowing his work won’t be celebrated in the sanctuary where we worship. We feel safest because our home church has adopted Safe Church policies, taking concrete steps to protect vulnerable people.

After painful and imperfect institutional processing of harms, it’s understandable to want to move on, to consider the work finished. But the past is best kept before us. I would like to hear more news of our churches and institutions installing tangible reminders and places of pilgrimage like the National Healing Garden proposed by survivors of clergy sexual abuse. 

I understand that Hesston College’s “Community Healing Circle” represented such an effort. Built in 2022, it became a site for student protest against the college’s inadequate response to reports of sexual violence. A plaque at the healing circle states, “We name and acknowledge the acts of violence that have broken the bonds of trust in our community.” Not knowing the wishes of campus survivors or student activists who had some representation in the process, I hesitate to critique the memorial’s claim to name without actually naming the harms committed. It is, at the very least, a start.

In streets across Europe, more than 100,000 small bronze Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” are embedded to memorialize local residents murdered in the Holocaust. We have to remember where we’ve stumbled so we can envision a better path ahead. We need to celebrate those who worked to be heard and to make things right, with memorials built in a way that supports the resilience of survivors of harm as they wish to be remembered.