Synod's NEW Diversity and Justice Task Force

New Diversity and Justice Task Force!

This summer Bishop Strickland prayed into being the new Diversity and Justice Task Force of the Southeastern Synod. We are charged with lifting up issues around race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation and gender identity. In our working vision statement, we are:

Aspiring  through the Holy Spirit, imagining what the community of God looks like
Comprehending and challenging our privileges and biases to break down barriers that exclude anyone
Transforming our beliefs, value, policies, actions to be a more racially just church, inclusive of all people

Our task force of twelve is representative of all the diversity mentioned above. In addition, we are geographically diverse, also representing a wide variety of ages, congregations, and life experiences. We hope that our task force looks like what the ELCA can become. At the same time, we are not trying to reinvent the wheel. Much good work in the areas of diversity and justice is happening across our synod and the larger church. Our goal is to partner with and shine a spotlight on many existing efforts to work for a more inclusive and just church. We want our page on the synod website to be a clearing house for great ideas, conferences, and resources, so if you know of an excellent event happening across the church or if your cluster or congregation is doing something around diversity and justice that others should know about, please email the details to PastorDevinStrong@gmail.com.

In the coming weeks watch for the following:

• Details about the Martin Luther King Day worship service (in this newsletter)
• A revamped Diversity and Justice page on the synod website: https://www.elca-ses.org/diversity-and-justice
• Quotes and stories from ordinary African Americans across our synod on the synod Facebook page during Black History Month
• Quotes and stories from women in ministry across our synod on the synod Facebook page during March
• A synod-wide virtual movie-watching event and conversation in March
• Regular articles about diversity and justice in this ENews

As Bishop Strickland likes to say, let’s make the circle so wide that we can no longer see the boundaries excluding anyone!