During Annual Conference in June the East Ohio Conference Anti-Racism Task Force announced an all-conference read of Our Hearts Were Strangely Lukewarm: The American Methodist Church and the Struggle with White Supremacy by John Elford, a United Methodist pastor with a background in history.
“In order for the church to be all God calls us to be, we must reckon with our history of causing harm and suffering, with the full history of our racist past,” Elford writes in his book. “There is freedom and liberation in knowing what really happened in our history.”
The Anti-Racism Task Force presented three pillars to guide the Conference in our work of anti-racism. Retelling, the first pillar, focuses on the storytelling of our history: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Join us in starting this journey into our collective past and into the histories that we each carry. Over the next several months you are invited to read on your own or in community together. The General Commission on Religion and Race has also produced a book study that is available at no cost here.