Anti-Racism

Some exciting events coming up, as well as new content from the Center for Asian American Christianity

Thursday, April 21, 2022 | 7:00 – 8:30 pm EDT

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, communities from diverse groups have faced various social, emotional, and economic challenges. People of Asian descent, especially elderly immigrants, are afraid to use public transit for fear of attacks and have isolated themselves from socializing with friends and church members.

ABCUSA Anti-Racism Task Force article for July 2021. We celebrate our time together at the Biennial Mission Summit. We prayed together, brainstormed ideas, and shared our stories. We embraced the sacredness of the human story, and we honored the human experience as a denomination and as a people. We are grateful for your interest, curiosity, and willingness to explore with us in the work of anti-racism, especially in the context of our faith. Together we created brave sacred spaces where we answered the call to prayer, self-understanding and listening, and learning, unlearning, and relearning. We answered the call to reflection and introspection—to look inward and inward and to examine our individual and collective thoughts and feelings. As the ABCUSA, we dared to open ourselves to better understand who we have been, who we are, and who we desire to become. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.” We continue the journey.

News from the ABCUSA Anti-Racism Taskforce, including pre-biennial events. “One aspect of the work of the ABCUSA Anti-racism Task Force has been to identify resources. What we have discovered is that ABCUSA has a variety of resources created within the denomination. The American Baptist Policy Statement on Racial Justice (1985) is one of these resource treasures.”

This is hard work. It requires being honest with myself and listening—truly listening—to my beloved friends who are speaking a truth that can be hard to hear. It takes letting go of the fear that I hold onto: fear that my ego will be hurt, that I will lose…something, fear that I’m not doing the work I claim to be doing.

The Anti-Racism Task Force met for the first time on November 10, 2020. This meeting yielded an unprecedented commitment and dedication to the work of Anti-Racism. Through prayer, discernment, and honest reflection we have begun to identify and surface the historical and present experiences and stories of peoples affected by racism. We are dawning a new age in which we realize that providing symposiums and multifaceted resources are essential, and yet the great benefit to these initiatives is the revelation that anti-racism work is work that must be on-going.

“[The one] who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as [the one] who helps to perpetrate it. [The one] who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” – Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Stride Toward Freedom

Rev. Dr. Marie Onwubuariri, is regional executive minister, American Baptist Churches of Wisconsin and is leading a workshop at this year’s ABCNJ Annual Session. Find out more information and register at www.abcnj.net/annual-session-2020

Join us as we continue our Sacred Safe Spaces' webinars by looking at how marginalization, race, and bias have collided in profound ways with domestic violence.

Here is a resource that our congregations are using! Are you looking for additional resources for discussions around race with children or with family members?