UNCSW59 -- Step it Up for Women's Equality

Hello, Everyone! I've fallen behind in blogging all the wonderful things and people I've seen and heard while here at the United Nations 59th Annual Conference on the Status of Women. Being here is a lot like being at the Episcopal Church's triennial General Convention: many long days filled with uplifting worship, great speakers and panelists, meaningful Q&As and conversation, and meeting interesting people from around the world who have something to say for themselves and their communities and who want to influence the conversations here at the U.N. and back home. And like General Convention, there are caucuses for the various groups who have traveled together and evening debriefs to check in on everyone's day and plans for the next days.

For someone who has been a feminist since my teen years in the mid-60's, this conference feels like a great, big women's rally where sisterhood is palpable. In fact, check out some news coverage on the march and rally that were held in conjunction with UNCSW on Sunday, March 8, International Women's Day here and images from the events here. And we get to experience it in the glorious halls of the United Nations. As a teen, I visited the U.N. each time I came to New York and New Jersey to visit relatives. I would take the visitors' tour in English or in French and imagine myself walking these halls as someone who belonged here. Now, five decades later, here I am! I belong here, and so do all the other women and men who have come to UNCSW59.

The conference is both a review and an update of the CSW held in Beijing in 1995 when the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was adopted. That Platform for Action is one of the major influencers for the Millennium Development Goals which expire this September. It is anticipated that a new set of Millennium Sustainable Goals will be promulgated in September.

This is the handbook for the over 

450 parallel events put on by 

"Civil Society," which refers to 

all the Non-Governmental 

Organizations supporting the

work of UN Women.

In terms of themes, the overarching themes are gender equality for women and women's empowerment. In specific, I have noticed a large emphasis on human trafficking and especially sex trafficking of women and girls and lifting up the voices, perspectives, and contributions of young women, including LGBTQI women. (Did you know that something upwards of 20 to 30 Million - yes, that's right, 20-30 Million - women, girls, and boys are sex trafficked? Sex trafficking operates in the Deep Web or Grey Web, the hidden part of the Internet that accounts for 90% of Web traffic where illegal, unsavory transactions are made and sex slaves are bought and sold. See here and here for more information about sex trafficking.)

The speakers from various countries have been both self-congratulatory as to the advancements in gender equality that they claim and also confessional in lamenting the lack of progress in their countries. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of U.N. Women, in a couple of opening remarks in different settings, noted that not a single U.N. member nation has achieved all of the items on Platform for Action to date. That does not mean that progress has not been made, but it is incremental and deadly slow.

Phumzile Mlamba-Ngcuka

I chose the word "deadly" purposefully, because lack of gender equality can, in fact, be deadly for women in developing countries. It is a fact that women are the farmers, child bearers and raisers, caretakers of the farm animals (if any), and food and water gatherers. Doing all of this work without benefit of vehicles, whether self-propelled or gas-propelled, amidst harsh drought conditions and armed conflict is deadly for the women. Their bodies soon wear out even if their spirits remain rooted in the hope of a better future for their children.

Lack of gender equality for these women means that they don't qualify for the small grants that might be available to help a local farmer and don't get consideration for the few slots in the educational system to gain something beyond a primary education. Lack of gender equality also means that girls are often married off in their early teens, because their families make the choice to feed and raise the boys while gaining a dowry for marrying off their young daughters. One of the cultural paradigm shifts that must happen, especially in countries with rigid and enforced patriarchal systems, is to move to a culture that values girl children as gifts from the Creator who have the potential, with education and nurture, to make a valuable contribution to their societies.

Thus, U.N. Women has created a new nations' initiative. "Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality" is a call for nations to commit to doing the things necessary to move towards gender equality by 2030. Presumably, signatory nations will be signing on not only for the prestige and optics of being a signatory, but also as being sincerely committed to changes in legislation, elections, governmental appointments, and tax and subsidy programs to give women the equality that we deserve by virtue of our humanity. As many of the speakers from the podiums have pointed out over the past few days, women's rights are human rights. Women just want to have the same human rights as men do.

I will be posting about what some of the speakers have addressed in a future blog in order to share with you memorable thoughts too good not to share. Stay tuned!

Third Day at UNCSW59 - March 9, 2015

I'm a little behind in posting to the blog about UNCSW59. Each day is packed, beginning with ecumenical worship at the U.N. Church Center, about 5 blocks from our hotel, and ending with a debrief from 6:00-8:00 PM in the Episcopal Church Center, sometimes just the Episcopal Church delegation and sometimes with the women from Anglican Women's Empowerment. During the day the delegation spreads out, attending hearings at the U.N. and parallel events in several other venues. There is a lot of walking and talking together. Everyone is friendly, and we easily greet women from other parts of the world with smiles, "Hi, How are you," and "Can I help take your picture for you?"

Bishop Chilton Knudsen preaching at the Opening Eucharist

The Episcopal Church's delegation with Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori after the opening Eucharist

Digna de la Cruz (Dominican Republic), Coromoto Jimenez (Venezuela), Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Vaike Madisson (Honduras), and Connie Sanchez (Honduras)

Helen Abyei (Colorado), Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Joan Fraser (Provincial Representative from Long Island), and Lelanda Lee (Colorado)

Christina Hing and Inez Saley from the Diocese of New York, part of the Anglican Women's Empowerment host group, organizing snacks and meals during some of our ecumenical gatherings in the Episcopal Church Center's mezzanine gathering space. These women are long-time attendees at UNCSW over the years.

Ginny Doctor and Lelanda Lee. It was great to greet Canon Ginny, from the Mohawk tribe, who is the coordinator of Indigenous Ministries for the Anglican Church in Canada.  

Stacy Walker-Frontjes, a fellow blogger and Tweeter on the Episcopal Church's delegation.

Shirley Greiman, National Vice President for Program of the Episcopal Church Women, and Barbara Schafter, member of the Episcopal Church delegation and President of the United Thank Offering. 

Joan Grimm Fraser making some comments during a conversation in the Mezzanine space.

Gawain de Leeuw (Diocese of New York) and our only male delegate with Stacy Walker-Frontjes. Gawain serves on the board of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and cares deeply about reproductive rights for women, which is a major issue in gender equality and empowerment of women and part of the Beijing Platform for Action. 

Glenda McQueen, Episcopal Church Partnership Officer for Latin America and the Caribbean. Glenda teams with Lynnaia Main, Global Relations Officer and the church's primary United Nations link, to shepherd all of us, and most especially the Spanish speaking delegates.

Helen Achol Abyei (Colorado) leads us in prayer, using her smart phone. 

Jayce Hafner is the church's Domestic Policy Analyst out of our Washington DC Office of Government Relations. Joyce will be teaching us how to bring the advocacy messages of UNCSW59 home to our dioceses and communities. 

Lelanda Lee and Bishop Stacy Sauls, the church's Chief Operating Officer, in a selfie. Bishop Sauls welcomed the delegation to the Church Center in a session directly after the Opening Eucharist.

Helen Abyei and Joan Fraser.

Lynnaia Main and Barbara Schafer in a casual moment in the kitchen of the Mezzanine gathering space. 

Lynnaia Main making remarks in our evening debrief. She is the guide,  mentor, and leader par excellence of the Episcopal Church's UNCSW59 delegation. And she writes the most beautifully inspiring and informative emails that get posted sometime around 1:45 AM each evening. When does she sleep? Thank you for all that you do, Lynnaia! 

Our only "veteran" of UNCSW, Nellie Adkins (Virginia), representing the Native American cohort on our delegation. This is not her first experience with the women of the world interacting with the United Nations.

Reem Fouad El Far of Jordan gave a presentation in the afternoon on the Diocese of Jerusalem, where she serves on their Vestry Committee focused especially on the women of the diocese. She explained the cultural aspects of women's participation in their region in both society and church. She pointed out that the Christians in the region have been Christians for generations and are not converts from Islam as some people in and outside the region surmise.

A view of the audience during a presentation in the Mezzanine.

And another view . . .

Second Day at UNCSW59 - March 8, 2015

This is a post devoted primarily to photos with commentary from our second day at the United Nations 59th annual Conference on the Status of Women. Day 2 is actually a pre-conference day, featuring a celebration known as "Consultation Day," hosted by the Ecumenical Women NGO at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem. The theater is on West 125th Street, and we traveled from our hotel, the Fitzpatrick Grand Central, located on East 44th Street a block from Grand Central Station, one of the two train stations in New York City. Some of us traveled by subway in a group, and a couple of us arrived by taxi, thus avoiding the stairs down and up from the subway stations.

Apollo Theater in Harlem at 8:00 AM! 

The celebratory spirit of Consultation Day began as we entered the lobby of the Apollo Theater. An all women mariachi band, Mariachi Flor de Toloache, greeted us with joyful music. 

Those who arrived early by taxi got into the theater as it opened close to 9:00 AM. The theater personnel stamped our hands, just like they do for concerts. The audience was overwhelmingly women with a handful of men scattered around the theater. There were a lot of enthusiastic greetings, hugs, and photo-taking.

First up on the program was the Women of the World ensemble, four women from different parts of the world - Italy, India, Japan, and USA/Haiti - who sing songs from various countries in the countries' native languages. Their short medley of songs roused us to our feet to clap and sway with their music.

The program began with a historical perspective. There have been four World Conferences on Women organized by the U.N.: 1975 in Mexico City; 1980 in Copenhagen; 1985 in Nairobi; and 1995 in Beijing. Since Beijing there have been five-year reviews, and 2015 brings us to Beijing+20. To commemorate the four conferences, four women came on stage individually to give a brief reading from the documents of those conferences.

I admire the confidence, poise, and grace of the young women who have found their core values, developed their voices, and claimed their places among the leaders and decision-makers of the world to speak out on issues that matter to them and their sisters and brothers. It gives us who have become elders in our communities great pride and hope that the work of advocating for human rights for all people has been shared forward with our younger generations. It is only through the vision and persistence of all of us hand-in-hand through the generations that equality, justice, and peace will prevail over discrimination, oppression, and violence among humankind and Creation.

The above photo shows the various chapters of the NGO Committee on the Status of Women that have been instrumental in producing Consultation Day this year. There are chapters in a number of geographical areas throughout the world such as the Arab States, Geneva, and New York. 

Keynote speaker Ruchira Gupta is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and activist from India, who founded the NGO Apne Aap. The Hindi phrase "Apne aap" is translated as "Self-empowerment." Gupta was named the Woman of Distinction by the NGO Committee on the Status of Women.

Gupta spoke on how she came to make the film "The Selling of Innocents" about the sex trafficking of low-caste Indian women to brothels in Bihar and India. I've been involved in heightening awareness of human trafficking for a while and began the Facebook Page "Episcopalians Against Human Trafficking" with several other activists, and Gupta's telling of the stories brought me to tears.

Gupta shared an insightful concept: avoid "skimming the top of the bottom." In other words, we must go deeper than just superficial attention to changing the wrongs of society and intentionally focus attention to change the root causes of evils such as sexual human trafficking. We must practice consistent and persistent activism against violence directed at women and girls. Gupta pointed out that one kind of crime is connected to other kinds of crime, and that violence against a woman of low-caste normalizes violence against all. Gupta said, "We can only walk the last mile if we walk with the last girl."

The Beijing+20 panel "Voices from the Regions" brought together women from eight regions of the world and a discussant (respondent) on a panel to bear witness to the progress or lack of progress and current issues and hopes regarding the 12 action foci of the Beijing Platform for Action. These women raised issues such as how class plays a major role in the gaps in benefits (such as access to housing, education, and jobs and freedom from violence) of women living in poverty compared to women with more affluence. They pointed out it is important to ally with women in other movements besides the particular segment of the human rights movement in which you participate. 

Several of the women spoke against religious extremism that is "distilled and exaggerated," which has become a fault line in all people's lives, having the potential to cause serious harmful consequences in many communities. The panelists cited violence against "women human rights defenders (WHRD)" as something that women must rally together to name and combat. They challenged the audience: "Can we defend women human rights defenders in our neighborhoods?" The panelists spoke forcefully against the political use of religion to achieve political purposes, which leads to dividing the people in communities from each other. They cited the need for accountability in connecting local movements with global movements. 

The women closed with some important reminders for all people who care about human rights:

• Keep the fire burning.
• With equality, there is no deadline.
• Who do you want to be equal to?

Pictured here is Dr. Gertrude Mongella, Former Under-Secretary-General of the Fourth U.N. World Conference on Women. Mongella spoke after another wonderful panel featuring Young Activists joined by Mary Robinson, President of Ireland (1990-1997) and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002). The young activists shared their dreams and hopes for what the world could be like and how the NGOs which they have joined and started are helping to create a more equitable future for all.

Mongella helped summarize a packed day at the Apollo Theater, rocking with world music and universal messages of hope and renewal for humanity:

• Have confidence. Instill confidence.
• Build teams. You can't go it alone.
• Remember your constituents. Walk alongside them. Invite them to walk with you.
• Gather evidence. Do the research.
• Develop trust as you work with institutions and governments in order to build capacity.
• Maintain multi-level, multi-faceted relationships.

First Day at UNCSW59 - March 7, 2015

This is a post devoted to photos from my arrival in New York City for the United Nations 59th annual Conference on the Status of Women (UNCSW59) through yesterday, the first day of events with the NGO "Ecumenical Women." I'm a delegate from the Episcopal Church's Diocese of Colorado, and I also serve on the church's Executive Council (its board of directors) as chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Advocacy and Networking for Mission. 

As someone who has focused intently on social justice and public policy issues for the church during my soon-to-end six-year term, being here at UNCSW59 has been "right up my alley," with presentations, panel discussions, and workshops on human rights for women and girls. My intention with this post is to give the wider church a sense of the flavor of being here at UNCSW59.

I'm with Helen Achol Abyei, also from the Diocese of Colorado. We met up in Denver for an interview that will be published in the diocesan newspaper, The Colorado Episcopalian. Helen is in her native dress from Sudan.

We arrived at LaGuardia Airport the day after a plane slid off the runway. Air traffic delays kept us on the ground an extra hour before our plane was released to fly. There was still a lot of snow and ice on the ground in New York, and we waited almost an hour in a very long queue for a taxi to take us to our mid-town hotel near the Church Center and the Untied Nations. Luckily, although it was very cold, the wind was not blowing.

Helen, Julia Ayala Harris from the Diocese of Oklahoma, and I walked over to Grand Central Station on our arrival night to find dinner on a budget in the food court on the lower level.

The orientation for the NGO Ecumenical Women, of which the Episcopal Church delegation is a member, took place a 9-block walk away at the Salvation Army's site, which included a ground floor chapel and upstairs meeting rooms. Here we are piling into the building for a hosted continental breakfast and a 9:00 AM worship start in the chapel. 

Some of our delegates before morning worship started: Glenda McQueen, Partnership Officer for Latin America and the Caribbean (R), Vaike Marika Madisson Lopez de Molina from the Diocese of Honduras (L), and Consuelo Sanchez Navarro, also from the Diocese of Honduras (R).

Joan Grimm Fraser from the Diocese of Long Island, who represents the church as our Provincial Representative in the Anglican Communion's delegation, and I tried a selfie after meeting each other for the first time. It turned out that Joan knows some of the same people I know from the Diocese of Colorado.

Another selfie:  I connected with Fern Lee Hagedorn from the ELCA Young Adult Cohort, and we chatted about being raised as Chinese American daughters and becoming lay Christian leaders.

Lynnaia Main, a member of our delegation, is the Global Relations Officer with primary responsibility for the church's United Nations relationship. She is the coordinator for our delegation. 

Lopa Banerjee, Chief of the Civil Society Section in UN Women, from India, moderated a panel discussion titled "Beijing Then and Now." She reiterated the three focal points that Executive Director Mlambo-Ngcuka cited as necessary to make progress on the Beijing Platform for Action: 1) Unrelenting political commitment; 2) Investment in gender equality; and 3) Strengthened civil society. During the panel discussion, the point was made that gender equality is a shared focus for human rights for all people, not just for women.

Prior to going to the United Nations Church Center for the afternoon's panel discussions and workshops, several of us stopped at the United Nations to register and obtain our official delegate's badge. One enters through a security building after showing identification and our official registration form. This is the lobby of the United Nations after we went through the separate security screening building.

Three of the church's delegation were just joining the line to get their U.N. badges:  Grace Aheron from the Diocese of Virginia (L), Hollee Martinez, Diocese of Texas (C), and Jayce Hafner, the church's Domestic Policy Analyst (R).

The orientation day closed with a worship service filled with intercessory prayer for the global family in the first floor chapel of the UN Church Center. 

UNCSW59 - Day 1

Lelanda Lee at the U.N.

UNCSW59 is the abbreviation for the 59th annual United Nations Conference on the Status of Women (UNCSW) being held in New York City from March 9 to 20. This year, for the first time, the Episcopal Church is participating as an official 20-person delegation, led by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. The church received official status as a non-governmental agency member of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in May 2014.

For the Episcopal Church delegation the conference began on March 7th with the Ecumenical Women orientation day filled with vibrant worship led by the United Nations chaplain, the Rev. Dionne Boissière, greetings from UN Women’s Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, panel discussions, and workshops. 

UNCSW is the principal global intergovernmental organization working on gender equality and empowerment for women. The commission focuses on issues such as including girls in education for all children, eliminating violence against women and girls, improving maternal and childbirth health, and empowering women to achieve political and social leadership roles.

This year’s UNCSW is particularly significant, because it is also the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action established in 1995 in Beijing at the Fourth World Conference on Women. Implementing the Beijing Platform for Women is this year’s UNCSW theme. However, as can be seen in a message from Director Mlambo-Ngcuka to “step it up” for gender equality, the world has fallen far short of its lofty goals established two decades ago, and women together with men are called to action to make gender equity a reality.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

In September 1995, more than 3,000 people plus representatives from 189 governments, meeting in Beijing, participated in forums and intense discussions about human rights and equality for women and girls worldwide. The Beijing Declaration and Platform arose out of those conversations, covering 12 critical areas:

1.     Women and Poverty

2.     Education and Training of Women

3.     Women and Health

4.     Violence against Women

5.     Women and Armed Conflict

6.     Women and the Economy

7.     Women in Power and Decision Making

8.     Institutional Mechanisms for the Advancement of Women

9.     Human Rights of Women

10. Women and the Media

11. Women and Environment

12. The Girl Child

Look familiar? Those 12 critical areas align with the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were identified by the United Nations in 2000, listed below. The Chinese say, “women hold up half the sky,” and achieving the MDGs relies upon empowering women and girls so that they can contribute fully to improving life in their communities. From our Christian perspective, we are called to respect the dignity of every human being, and it is good stewardship to utilize fully all the resources God has given us.

            Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015)

1      To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

2      To achieve universal primary education

3      To promote gender equality and empower women

4      To reduce child mortality

5      To improve maternal health

6      To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases

7      To ensure environmental sustainability

8      To develop a global partnership for development

UNCSW59 offers the opportunity for women from many participating countries to put a human face on the critical issues facing women and girls and to commit together to raise those issues when they return to their home countries and communities.

I plan to blog and post photos daily from our activities in this blog and to Tweet from @LelandaLee.

Social Media Encouragement

Why Anti-Racism?

This is a paper that I wrote back in September 2014 to address why it's important to do Anti-Racism Training (or teaching) and to use the term "Anti-Racism" to describe such teaching. I'm posting it now in light of a current conversation that is happening on Facebook about Anti-Racism Training.

I’m someone who has been doing Anti-Racism training for the Episcopal Church since 2006. I’ve also led Train the Trainer workshops. Along the way, I’ve developed an 8-hour basic Anti-Racism Training and 8-hour Train the Trainer workshop, which I’ve been invited to tailor and conduct in many dioceses over the years.

One of the questions that is frequently asked before and during the trainings is why we still use the term “Anti-Racism” when there are so many other terms that are “friendlier” and “more inviting” to participants. Examples include “Diversity,” “Multicultural,” “Intercultural,” “Dismantling Racism,” and “Racial Justice.”

So, why the term “Anti-Racism”?

The answer is, because racism is a sin, as the House of Bishops taught in their March, 1994, Pastoral Letter. That Pastoral Letter was a teaching that included analysis, confession, covenant, and invitation to the church to join the bishops in those actions. If you haven’t read the Pastoral Letter recently, please read it, because it is an important teaching.

A historical lesson in why naming the actual sin is important lies in the anti-rape movement, which took shape in the 1960s and early 1970s as a dynamic of the women’s movement. When feminists began to name rape as a crime of violence rather than allowing it to continue to be described as a crime of sexual passion, and when feminists began to insist on using the word “rape” rather than using alternative or euphemistic language that describes rape as “sexual assault” or the generic “violence against women,” society’s response to rape began to change. Obviously, we still have a long way to go, when you consider that rape on college campuses is not handled well by college administrators and that there are hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits nationwide. However, naming rape as rape has freed many rape victims from the unfair shaming and scapegoating of earlier times.

“Anti-“ as a modifier to “Racism” means “to interrupt.” When we use the term “Anti-Racism,” we are saying “to interrupt Racism.” We are saying, “to interrupt the Sin of Racism,” because as the church, we are in the business of interrupting all manner of sin so that people can be restored to unity with God and each other in Christ. That’s the mission of the church. The Catechism in our Book of Common Prayer says so.

What’s so wrong with those other, friendlier terms?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with terms such as “Diversity,” “Multicultural,” “Intercultural,” “Dismantling Racism,” and “Racial Justice.” They just don’t mean what “Anti-Racism” means. They don’t point us to interrupting the Sin of Racism.

Diversity training generally encompasses teaching people to recognize and acknowledge that different people are, well, different. But Diversity training generally doesn’t get into teaching how prejudice and power together create racism and how racism and White Privilege together create systems of institutionalized and structural racism that are extremely difficult to dismantle. Anti-Racism Training does.

Multicultural training generally takes Diversity training deeper, by encouraging participants to learn about cultures different than their own. Intercultural training takes Multicultural training still deeper, by having participants interact with people from cultures different than their own so that they have first-hand experience of those people from other cultures. Again, both Multicultural training and Intercultural training generally don’t teach about how racism results from not only prejudice, but also from the presence of power differentials, and how institutional and structural racism cause disproportionate disadvantages to People of Color in everything from public education to employment to voting rights to mass incarceration.

Dismantling Racism generally focuses more on institutional and structural racism than it does on the racism of individuals. It is very important to teach about institutional and structural racism, because they so disproportionately disadvantage large groups of People of Color in highly life disrupting ways. But it is also important to focus on the responsibility of the individual to analyze his or her own sin of racism, to admit and confess that sin, and to covenant to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being, which includes becoming an Anti-Racist.

Racial Justice is a wonderful term, because it is aspirational and most appropriately should be used to title committees and commissions that do the work of Anti-Racism. But, the work, such as is done in trainings, is not merely aspirational. The work is also pragmatic, comprised of analysis, confession, and covenant.

If we were to choose a different, yet familiar title, for Anti-Racism training, how about “Safeguarding God’s People from Racism”? That title says that there is some action that must be taken to safeguard God’s People, in this case, from racism. However, that title also implies that the participants in the training are somehow the “good guys” who don’t have to acknowledge their own sin of racism. So, maybe we won’t go with this familiar title, after all. Because the work of anti-racism is the work of everyone in the church.

Why do Anti-Racism training?

What we, the church, do is proclamation. We proclaim the Good News of God in Jesus Christ. The Good News is that our reward is in the Lord, that by grace and by the blood of Jesus Christ dying on the hard wood of the cross, we are saved for eternity.

Now, pause for a moment, and reflect.

We proclaim the Good News of God in Jesus Christ, and that Good News includes the story of Jesus’ very painful and very human death upon the cross, which was necessary to redeem humankind from our sins.

When we do Anti-Racism training, it is proclamation. We are proclaiming that when we acknowledge and confess our sin of racism and turn away from continuing to behave in racist ways, we restore ourselves to unity with God and each other in Jesus Christ.

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”[John 14:6 NRSV] Jesus said, “Follow me.”[Mark 1:17 NRSV] Jesus never said, “It will be easy.” Analysis, confession, and covenant, if done faithfully with intention and honesty, are hard work. Actively participating in Anti-Racism training is hard work. Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”[John 13:34-35 NRSV]

Anti-Racism training is not designed to be confrontational with the trainer or other participants. What is confronted is the sin of racism in yourself and in society. Just as we expect civil dialog in church whether it’s at worship, congregational functions, or committee meetings, we also expect civil dialog in Anti-Racism training. But, remember, Anti-Racism training is hard work, and it is work that is worth doing. It is also work that requires refreshing in the same way that we refresh ourselves, our confession, and our covenant with God through worship on a regular, repeated basis.

We want people to take Anti-Racism training. We want people to value Anti-Racism training as something that will provide a component of Christian formation for them that they are not getting in other formation education. We want people to come to Anti-Racism training cheerfully and not grudgingly because there is some church canon or decree from their bishop that they have to check this box or miss out on some needed certification. We want people to come to Anti-Racism training because learning how to overcome the sin of racism will enable us to love one another as Jesus loves each one of us.

In March 2006, the House of Bishops issued another pastoral letter titled “The Sin of Racism: A Call to Covenant,” which recommitted the bishops, and invited the church, to covenant with the bishops on eleven actions personally, corporately, and globally. After you’ve read or re-read the first Pastoral Letter, be sure to read this one, too.