Father Moses Berry is the paster of an Old Calendar OCA parish in Missouri. I first became aware of Fr Moses and his museum via an Illumined Heart podcast last year. His story is an interesting one and I recommend listening to the podcast and reading the article of which I have attached an excerpt below.
[As I was clicking through his church's website just now I came across something remarkable. Fr Moses's parish hosted an American Heritage Music Festival last year and the year before. Until now, the only festivals I have known Orthodox parishes to host have been those for the purpose of celebrating some Eastern ethnic heritage: Serbian, Greek, Russian, etc. The ones that I have attended I have enjoyed--and i LOVE the food--but I have difficulty with the notion that it is among the Church's purposes to preserve/celebrate, etc ethnic pride or nationalism. But as long as we're celebrating heritages...why not celebrate American heritage? We are Americans after all, are we not? I didn't become Greek when I became Orthodox.]
ASH GROVE, Mo. — When he moved back home here 12 years ago, the Rev. Moses Berry wanted to settle down to small-town life with his wife and two children. He did not intend to become a one-man racial reconciliation committee.
But some residents of this nearly all-white, rural town of 1,400 people 15 miles west of Springfield say that he has done just that.
By founding a black history museum here, cleaning up his family’s cemetery and telling his family’s sometimes controversial story, beginning with its roots in slavery, Father Moses, as everyone calls him — an African-American, Orthodox Christian priest in a flowing black cassock — has tried to remind people of a part of the region’s often-forgotten past, and to open up hearts and minds along the way.
Read the rest here.
Ozarks Afro-American Heritage Museum website
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