A Place of Refuge & Recovery

Holy Trinity Lutheran Church at 2730 E 31st Street has called the Lake Street corridor home for 116 years. Its past and future are deep rooted in open worship, social justice, and affordable housing. Ingrid Rasmussen has been the lead pastor at the church for a mere seven of those years - but more than enough to care deeply about the people and community she serves.

Just a block away from the 3rd police precinct, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church quickly became a site of refuge and recovery during the civil uprising in late May 2020. From a makeshift medic station to a food and clothing drive site, Ingrid knows she couldn't have done any of it alone and is grateful for all the help along the way, “We couldn't have fed tens of thousands these past months without the support of the wider community. Thank you. We can’t imagine our future without the wider community either. We are grateful for the opportunity to be rooted in this place for the next 116 years.”

Below is the entirety of our interview with Ingrid Rasmussen. 

 You mobilized very quickly after the protests started. What motivated you to do this?

I got a call late one evening that the medic site that had been housed at Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light (adjacent to Gandhi Mahal) needed to find a new home because of encroaching fires. The caller asked if Holy Trinity would open our doors and tend to wounded demonstrators. To be honest, it was a big ask. Our building had been closed--I mean, really closed--for two months because of the pandemic. But faithfulness and love require different things from us in different moments, and that night this faith community knew that we needed to show up. Because some of our congregants were already protesting in the area, we went from doors locked to doors propped open in about twenty minutes. In the months since, we've followed the call to love our neighbors through food and basic necessity distribution multiple times a week. We've found ourselves at the center of a big, beautiful community formed around mutual aid. 

Was Holy Trinity damaged during the protests?

Unlike most of our near neighbors, we did not suffer any significant damage during the uprising. Our outdoor pizza oven was tagged with the letters "BLM." We decided to keep the graffiti. Those spray-painted letters serve as a call to action to ensure that Black Lives Matter in this church, this neighborhood, this city, and beyond.

What lessons have you learned from this experience about yourself & others?

When George Floyd was murdered and we were called upon to respond, I was eight months pregnant. The truth is that I couldn't have made it through those days and nights without the support of the community. I hope that I always remember that new life for me is always bound up with new life for my neighbors. 

What do you hope for the future of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church?

One of our church leaders reminded me that several months ago, I told the Church Council -- a.k.a. leadership body -- that in five years I hoped our church walls were even more permeable, metaphorically speaking. I didn't anticipate that it would happen quite this way or quite this quickly! But now that our doors are propped open, so to speak, there is no turning back, and we are grateful for that.

What do you hope for the future of Lake Street?

 For me, hope is a verb, which means it’s less about sentiment and more about action. Hope requires all of us to work together. That said, I hope that more affordable housing is built here. I hope that culture, in all its richness, is fostered here. I hope that the status quo will no longer work here. I hope that white supremacy has lost its grip here. I hope that policing as we’ve known it will no longer have a home here. And I hope that BIPOC dreams—too long deferred—will have space to flourish here.

Read more about Ingrid in the Longfellow Nokomis Messenger:
“Pregnant and parenting during COVID-19: There are no manuals for this”.