Slideshow image

 

Beloved in Christ,


Last weekend, I attended Faithland Summer Camp with the Church Council of Greater Seattle at University Congregational United Church of Christ, with members from Queen Anne UMC, Sand Point Community UMC, Redmond UMC, Woodland Park UMC, Woodland Park Presbyterian Church, University Unitarian Church, and St. John United Lutheran Church, all of whom are somewhere in the process of reimagining how they use and steward the land that has been entrusted to them in this season. Throughout the weekend, we heard about projects that will result in housing being developed, projects that will re-imagine how church buildings are used, and projects that will help to live out values of repairing past relationships harmed by the exclusion of some groups of people from parts of the geographical area. In addition, we reviewed many of the learnings that were included in the original Faithland Cohort training that Carol Jaeger, Jon Daniel, and I took four years ago when we were just beginning to dream what was possible for the land that we steward at our church.
 
There are many hours of training that I can’t fit here, but I want to give you a highlight because I think there is something to be gained from looking back and re-engaging with the processes that have brought us to our current work. The weekend began with purposeful understandings of how discernment about land cannot be done without also discernment about racism. Because of the history of the way that land has been allocated for use by some at the exclusion of others based on race, decisions about the future either maintain the status quo established by those past practices or they intentionally diverge from it. Failure to acknowledge that racism is part of decisions about land is a decision to continue to benefit from and uphold past racist practices. One of the ways that we break the cycle of racism that is embedded in land holding in Seattle is that we take time to listen and learn before we move to action. Many of you may remember that our team and Linda Strock, Doug Manis, Susan Little, and others helped to meet with many members of our congregation, neighbors, denominational representatives, local leaders, and city officials to hear their dreams for the changes that will come to our campus and learn what constraints there would be on those changes. Building on that foundation, the weekend continued with explicit practices for listening, learning, acting, reflecting, and celebrating, including sharing protocols for meetings, question banks for eliciting shared dreams, and visual representations of the world that embody values of hope, peace, love.
 
The full impact of the weekend won’t be known for some time. However, the new relationships and understandings that were built are already beginning to bear fruit as contact information is shared and stories converge and lessons learned in one place are applied in another.
 
May the Spirit move through these new relationships in her time and way,


Pastor Laura