King of Glory, fill this place
King of Glory, fill this place
King of Glory, fill this place
King of Healing, fill this place
King of my peace, fill this place
King of my joy, fill this place
You hold the power
King of Power, King of Glory
King of Glory, King of Glory
ELIZABETH NGUYEN: Thank you. Well, I just want to say, welcome again to this conversation and I wanna start with some words by the Reverend Mal Hoover, who's been doing racial justice and racial identity work in our movement for many years. "We can dare to face ourselves in our entirety, to understand our pain, to feel the tears, to listen to our frustration and confusion, and to discover new capacities and capabilities that will empower and transform us."
King Of Glory Fill This Place Just Wanna Be With You Mp3 Download
Download 🔥 https://byltly.com/2y3ByR 🔥
So I'm going to hope I can stay with you by video, but if my connection gets choppy I'll just switch to audio, just so folks know. And I want to begin by thanking the folks in the Faith Development Office and these amazing religious educator colleagues, panelists who are with us today. I'm just really excited for the conversation and the story sharing that will be happening.
I want to share some of the goals and framing that I'm bringing to this conversation. To me, this webinar is building upon conversations that have been happening in our movement for decades about how we bring racial identity exploration into our spiritual work, our faith formation, and also the role of religious educators as racial justice leaders. And this particular conversation comes out of what many of us were hearing in terms of the fear that folks sometimes have around naming race, and particularly white folks's fear of messing up, of stumbling, of not being that perfect white ally, and how to sit with the unknown and the messiness of this work.
So all of that is kind of in the water and for me, authentic, vulnerable storytelling is one of the main ways that we can move forward from the moment where we're at, and so that's what brings us to this place. So here are a few goals that I just want to share for our time. That we model vulnerability for ourselves and each other, that we affirm the complexity of racial justice work, that we celebrate risk, and that we share insights and wisdom.
And I just a name that a webinar is a very odd format for vulnerable, authentic conversations. We're either sitting in front of our computers or we're in the car on the phone, and those of us who are sharing personal stories are speaking kind of into the void. So I just invite us, as much as we can, to honor that we're walking alongside each other, that we're doing this work together, and thank again the panelists for being willing to share their vulnerable story.
And now, without further ado, we'll share some stories of naming race in religious education. And I've just asked some of my phenomenal colleagues to tell a little bit about what happened, any insights or lessons that they learned, best practices that they want to share, and then to reflect a little bit on how this has impacted their own identity because we know this work is about our own faith formation and spiritual path in addition to how we serve as religious educators, And now I'll introduce our first panelist, Lauren Wyeth, who is the Director of Children, Youth, and Family Ministries in Minneapolis, and she's going to share a story of leadership and answering the call. Lauren.
LAUREN WYETH: Thanks, Elizabeth. So I'm in a congregation that has about 900 members and about 480 children and youth enrolled in religious education. And I'm fortunate to be at a church with a strong ministerial team that's made anti-racism and deconstructing whiteness and working for racial justice, a thread that we touch on every time we gather.
And so it became clear, as the director of our religious education program, that we needed to do some more focused conversations around race and racial justice with our children and youth, and that it was going to require us to-- me, specifically and us, in general-- to do some work to really enhance our curriculum. I was also fortunate that our church put together a training for congregants and staff to go through that was a 24 hour training that helped embolden me to face this work.
And we got tons of hands with things about recycling and taking care of our friends, and taking care of animals, and all kinds of things that kids can do to change the world that really has nothing to do with race, racism, racial justice, and here it was Doctor Martin Luther King Jr Sunday. So again, a reminder to me that if we're going to talk about race, we've got to be the ones to start the conversation. Can't count on the kids to take the first step.
What I was trying to get at was sort of the striking difference in appearance, that kind of initial impact that we would have just right as soon as we arrived. But I did so by totally sticking my foot in my mouth. And then I froze because I didn't know how to fix that mistake, that misstep, without potentially making the black student who was in the classroom feel uncomfortable.
But for me, as a new DRE, it was a real shift because just having that conversation with them, realizing my discomfort, realizing how out of water I felt, and then stepping into a conversation with that student sort of reminded me how important is. It gave me a new level of fluency about-- fluency is not the right word, but a little more comfort-- in terms of broaching this topic. And it also just really kind of kicked me in the ass about doing more work for myself to feel more confident in those conversations and really digging into this. Why does this feel so uncomfortable? And what could I have done? And replaying and sitting with it.
So it was really helpful. And I had been talking with Elizabeth at the LREDA conference last fall about this experience because it really did become sort of a turning point for my relationship with the student that I ended up having a conversation with. We were much more fluid with each other and able to talk much more honestly with each other around issues of race and bias after I brought up my own misstep. So it was really helpful.
And all of that isn't shining the brightest light on us, and as people, we want to look good. We want to look like we know we're talking about and for me, this is not a place where I feel that way. And it still is very much a part of my job and a part of our responsibility as human citizens in this world to really be sitting into this. So after our practice last week, I stumbled across a talk that I would really recommend in particular. Her name is Alison-- I jotted it down for myself here-- Alison Bailey, Doctor Alison Bailey, and the resource is called, What's Wrong with White Talk? I think the link is here. Maybe I have to press another button to show it.
But Doctor Bailey, around a 30 minute mark of her talk, talks about vulnerability and talks about it being a transformative process to really allow ourselves to be vulnerable. And for me, this exercise, and reflecting on that initial story, but this exercise of digging into it again and sharing it with more people really is kind of an example of the power of that to shift and propel us forward into deeper growth. So that's the glory I wanted to hold up today.
Last year, a couple of the ministers and I sat down with people of color from my congregation and basically just asked them, what's working for you, what's not working for you in terms of your feeling of acceptance in our community? And one of the moms, who is African-American, said that the two things that were bugging her were that when she walks in, she's often treated like a visitor and welcomed as a visitor instead of a member of the Church. And she also said that her daughter often gets called the name of another child of color, and that was upsetting to her.
So I went right after it. I felt like I needed to address this issue of kids calling these two children the same name or interchanging their names and I didn't know how else to deal with it, so I actually just dealt with it directly and talk to them about-- especially in our culture here church, we're mostly white people and call children-- I just dealt with it right out.
So I've done that work. And then all the way up through youth group who just hosted a session on "I'm Not a Racist, Am I?", on hosting the move with ten other churches. So I'm trying to bring it in systemically in terms of the educational part, but then having to deal with these instances where it comes up organically and having to go after that myself, which takes a lot of courage. I preached on it in the summer. I use this as an example. Right after that service, I had-- there were two black men in the congregation, who somebody exchanged their identities for each other, and that was really quite awful for them, so they came to me to go to the white people who were talking to them, and I did it. I went up to them and I talked to them about that.
So I have the grief of not only working with it in terms of the children and youth, but I also have it with-- I've hired an African-American staff member and now I have to constantly try to advocate for her fair treatment and it's just been so very difficult for me. So that's my story.
And then I also just wanted to share one insight that I had as we introduced this curriculum. I hadn't experienced-- similar to what we have with OWL at our congregation which is that, all of a sudden, children and youth showed up regularly for their classes when we were doing our curricula focused on racial justice. It was like they got it, and their families got it, that this was really important and it was different than what was happening anywhere else in their lives. And so they made it to church on a regular basis.
ELIZABETH NGUYEN: Thank you so much, Lauren. When there is so much that is broken and hard in this world, it's stories like that that make me feel like our faith is moving us in more whole and just directions. So I think Jamil is with us by phone. Do you want to try, Jamil? Are you there? 2351a5e196