Join us as our ABCNJ Executive Minister, Rev. Miriam Méndez, lifts prayers for the victims, families, and communities impacted by this past weekend’s racially-motivated violent extremist act at the Tops Grocery store in Buffalo, NY. We are also praying for our colleagues in the Niagara Area Baptist Association as they continue the work of healing in their communities.
Read MoreThursday, 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.
Read MoreABCUSA 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.
Read MoreNews 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.”
Read MoreThis 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreLetter from our Executive Minister Miriam Méndez on antiracism: “Your ABCNJ staff and I continue to be honored to serve in an energetic, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, Christ-centered Region characterized by covenant, friendship, mutual respect, and collaboration in mission. As such, we believe it is important for everyone to understand that all human beings are created equal in God's sight.”
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