A Word from Laura: Praying to Dismantle Racism
“To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.”
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
As Western prepares to celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, in light of a PC(USA) emphasis on dismantling structural racism, I call us, my friends, to prayer.
In his work, Dr. King prayed to the “creative force in the universe, already working to pull down gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way…” He knew that the evil, injustice and sin at work in racism were too big for humankind alone.
We’ve had faithful conversations about racism in different areas of our church life. This past week, we received a letter back from the White House in response to our session’s support for reparations at the federal level.
This week I invite you to join in the spiritual work of calling on God to be at work through Western to dismantle structural racism – as it gets into us as individuals, as a church, as a society. To be clear, structural racism refers to the ways discrimination gets baked into social structures and systems – education, health care, finance, politics, neighborhood zoning, labor markets – even the church. This means it gets in each of us, too!
As part of that we need to acknowledge the impact of white supremacy. For us at Western, white supremacy is not white nationalism or the KKK, but the ways our history, tradition, ways of being church and seeing the world often align with a system that benefits those who line up with and can abide by the norms of whiteness.
Understanding that God is at work upsetting white supremacy doesn’t mean we believe having lighter skin is bad or darker skin is good. But that as Christians, we are being transformed. And we who have been taught that we are white, but without any clear sense of racial identity, we have some work to do.
Knowing that this is spiritual work, I invite each of you, however you identify racially, to join me in prayer for ourselves, our church and our world. Our prayers of the people this Sunday will be just that – made up of your prayers. This link will send you to a form with seven short questions, inviting you to call on God’s love and justice at work. (You may answer as many or as few as you feel called to respond to.) Please respond no later than Sunday morning at 7 am, so that your answers may be part of our prayer in worship. All who respond will have your names listed at the end; if you wish to remain anonymous, please indicate in the last line.
As we know, the work of dismantling racism won’t be finished in our lifetime. Given the size of the work, the prayer questions won’t get at everything. My hope is that they will help us stay connected to that “creative force, already working to pull down gigantic mountains of evil” in the words of Dr. King – so that we might be part of God’s making a way where it seems there is no way.