In 2016, Nativity’s Racial Equity and Justice Ministry (then called Anti Racism Team) was born after the death of Philando Castile at the hands of a St. Anthony police officer. Four years later, George Floyd now, unfortunately, holds a distressingly similar place in the world headlines. We continue to dedicate ourselves in proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ to love one another, to stand up for justice and truth, to eliminate racism in all its forms and to change systems and structures that privilege some and marginalize others. We are writing because this crisis has created an urgency to make the Nativity community more aware of our existence and the good we are capable of bringing about with the help of the broader Nativity Lutheran community.
These words of Martin Luther King guide us: “Increasingly, by choice or accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments…[If] we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” (Clayborne Carson, ed, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 340)
We, the undersigned, as members of Nativity Racial Equity and Justice Ministry team, offer our time, our talents, and our possessions, to commit to the goal of racial equity and justice as Jesus calls us. May we, as hearers and doers of the Word made flesh, make God’s Word our world’s reality.