Holding Up Your Corner: Talking about Race in Your Community
Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community, equips pastors to respond with confidence when crises occur, lower their own inhibitions about addressing this topic, and reclaim their authority as prophetic witnesses and leaders in order to transform their communities
Pastors and other church leaders see, to varying degrees, racially rooted injustice in their communities. Most of them understand an imperative, as part of their calling from God, to lead their congregations to address and reverse this injustice. For instance, preachers want to be preaching prophetically on this topic. But the problems seem irreversible, intractable, overwhelming, and pastors often feel their individual efforts will be futile. Additionally, they realize that there is a lot of risk involved, including the possibility that their actions may offend and even push some members away from the church. They do not know what to do or how to begin. And so, even during times of crisis, pastors and other church leaders typically do less than they know they could and should.
This book provides practical, foundational guidance, showing pastors how to live into their calling to address injustice, and how to lead others to do the same. Holding Up Your Corner prompts readers to observe, identify and name the complex causes of violence and hatred in the reader’s particular community, including racial prejudice, entrenched poverty and exploitation, segregation, the loss of local education and employment, the ravages of addiction, and so on.
The book walks the church leader through a self-directed process of determining what role to play in the leader’s particular location. Readers will learn to use testimony and other narrative devices, proclamation, guided group conversations, and other tactics in order to achieve the following:
Open eyes to the realities in the reader’s community—where God’s reign/kingdom is not yet overcoming selfishness, injustice, inequality, or the forces of evil.
Own the calling and responsibility we have as Christians, and learn how to advocate hope for God’s kingdom in the reader’s community.
Organize interventions and activate mission teams to address the specific injustices in the reader’s community.
What Does ‘Holding Up Your Corner’ Mean?
The phrase ‘holding up your corner’ is derived from a biblical story (Mark 2: 1 – 5) about four people who take action in order to help another person—literally delivering that person to Christ. For us, ‘holding up your corner’ has meaning in two aspects of our lives today:
First, it refers to our physical and social locations, the places where we live and work, and the communities of which we’re a part. These are the places where our assumptions, attitudes, and beliefs have influence on the people around us. When we feel empowered to speak out about the injustice or inequity in our community, we are holding up our corner.
Second, the phrase refers to our actions, the ways we step up to meet a particular problem of injustice or inequity, and proactively do something about it. When we put ourselves—literally—next to persons who are suffering, and enter into their situation in order to bring hope and healing to the person and the situation, we are holding up our corner, just like the four people who held up the corner of the hurting man’s mat.
Lead your congregation to see and solve problems of race and justice in your community.
Foundational material provides context and basic starting point for clergy to share with their congregants, so that the language of justice and reconciliation makes sense.
Examples from a wide variety of churches/leaders makes this not an African-American resource, but a resource for all; readers will see themselves and their congregations here.
Sermon help for pastors who are at a loss on how to preach about these topics; worship guidance for planning services around these themes; other actions & practical/tactical steps for mission/outreach teams, small groups, and others.
Video component brings leaders from across the UMC into local churches, and allows these leaders to share from their own life experiences. This provides an important model for participants to follow, and plows the soil for honest, open conversation in the group.
Centers on relationship. People intuitively know that the best way to bring change to deeply complex problems is through meaningful relationships, developing ideas and tactics together over time. This resources facilitates that action, starting with relationships.
Outcomes are self-directed, localized. The pastor and members of the congregation & community determine together what happens next, as an outcome of their Guided Conversation. The resource strongly suggests an objective (Build a Servant Relationship with a Local School), and provides guidance for groups that choose to pursue that objective. But the result of the Conversation is particular and contextual, so that the response has a greater chance of being effective and sustainable.
Practical material provides ways for the pastor and congregant to act, to do something effective; an alternative to grandstanding or hiding.
Pastors and mission/outreach leaders can put together an immediate response to crisis situations when they arise.
Pastors and mission/outreach leaders can establish a long-term approach for their congregation, becoming people who embody hope for a hurting world.
The Guided Conversation Gives pastors, other leaders, and congregants something practical to do a way to make actual change in themselves, in their churches, in their communities. People are tired of hand-wringing, feeling powerless to do what they suspect is right. The Guided Conversations give leaders and others an effective way to respond, to live out God s call. This is an alternative to grandstanding or hiding.
Pastors, church leaders, community leaders, and regular people are prepared to respond to crisis situations when they occur. They will know what to do when the time arises, instead of making it up as they go along.
Pastors and leaders can establish a long-term approach for their congregation, becoming people who embody hope for a hurting world. Churches who adopt this process can change their congregation s DNA.
Product Details
- Title : Holding Up Your Corner: Talking about Race in Your Community
- Author: Johnson, F. Willis
- Publisher: Abingdon Press
- Publication Date: 2017
- ISBN: 9781501837609