Members of the Outreach Team met with members of the Social Justice Team by Zoom with the goal to determine how Nativity might respond during this time of deep racial upheaval in our country.
Several years ago, I attended a two-day program offered by the Racial Equity Institute. In it, they used this powerful analogy. If you were walking by a lake and saw several fish struggling on the bank, you might walk over, put those particular fish back into clean water, and to those fish, that was good. If you were to notice that the lake had many fish dying or ill, you may wonder what you could do to fix the lake and make changes around that particular lake. However, if you read in the paper, that several different lakes in your area were all suffering in similar ways, then it may occur to you that you had a groundwater problem – a base volume of water feeding many areas all with a common issue. Racial Equity Institute argues that racism is our groundwater problem.
From a practical standpoint, the analogy also impacts how Nativity might respond to the issues of racial equity in our community and in our country. Should we use our resources to treat the fish – individuals that need help? The lakes – the justice system, education, healthcare, housing, etc? Or the groundwater – the underlying racism and white advantage that permeates it all? The call, we believe, is all of these. As Stephanie has often preached, it is rarely an “either/or” situation but more often a case of “both/and”.
We hope to be able to use our resources to continue in direct outreach as we have done for many years (taking care of the fish), but now we would like to be more purposeful in thinking about ways that we can reach out and support changes to the systems (lakes) and even more importantly, the groundwater.
We look forward to input from the Sacred Conversations group and ask you to please pray for the us as we feel our way forward in this important work.
Becky Showalter