Grace Ji-Sun Kim and I led a workshop on Disrupting Racism: Building the Intercultural Community at the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Big Tent Conference. Her books can serve as helpful resources for congregations and communities in their efforts to become the communities God intends. Here’s a brief review I wrote of her most recent book, Intercultural Ministry: Hope in a Changing World, on Amazon.
Thanks to Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Jann Aldredge-Clanton for this timely and important book. They have assembled and curated the work of a number of scholars and pastors to provide a vision of intercultural ministry as well as ideas, tools, and practices for creating and sustaining that ministry. In a world that tells us we should live separation, Intercultural Ministry provides an alternative–that we can live together. Kim, Aldredge-Clanton and their authors provides hope. And community is built on hope.
See you along the Trail.
#REDdress #MMIW #MMNAWG #gonebutnotforgotten
“Brokenness, disunity, and hatred are evident all over the planet. The world needs the witness Belhar calls the church to live out in the world. The church’s primary responsibility is to love God so fully that God’s saving presence shines through her like light in the midst of darkness. The church then becomes a beacon of hope, a lighthouse on the shore of a storm-tossed sea. By confessing, internalizing, and living out the principles of Belhar in her own experience, the church positions herself to become what Henri Nouwen calls, ‘a wounded healer.'”
“… Belhar claims the one God, revealed in Jesus Christ and present through the Holy Spirit, will be present and active when human lives are demeaned, threatened by violence, hemmed in, and held down by law, tradition, and institutional racism.”
“The calling upon our lives is to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8). Yet how can we do this when evil besets us, injustices overtake us, and the lives of black and brown folk are under attack? As we wander in the wilderness with Jesus during this Lent, there is a litany of names we could call right now as we wrestle with the militarization of the police–the names of boys and girls, and men and women who have been killed by police officers; and the names of unarmed people whose crime was being black. Additionally, the violence in our nation and the unattended spiritual and mental care of folks has precipitated last summer’s killing of police officers and members of the LGBTQ community at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida. … Belhar offers us insight on how to facilitate reconciliation and stand in solidarity with the oppressed.”
“The church is not gilded sanctuaries, stained glass windows, padded pews, cushy carpets, table, and font. The church is people from every nation, culture, and ethnicity who (1) call on and believe in God through Christ; (2) are consequently filled with God’s Spirit and led by God’s word to light candles in the shadows of life; (3) live among and act in unity with people who’ve been abandoned, pushed to the margins of society, and disenfranchised; and (4) advocate for justice on the steps of the courthouse or the statehouse, serving the present age in ways that reconcile disparate peoples and groups.”
“If we do nothing, singing along with the strains of subjugation, we are complicit with the sins of an unchristian ideology and doctrine. Worse yet, we compose new refrains that reinforce the symphony of domination by pretending that all is well.” With what voice is Christ’s church called to sing?
“We’re called to witness against the powerful and privileged by living as Christ wanted us to live–by sitting with those whom no one wants to sit with, by opening ourselves up to the hurt and pain that are caused by those who control and harm others. We must do this to make the church reflect the diversity of the world around us. We must work to dismantle that ability to control and harm others.”
Along the Graybeard Trail 