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Evangelicals have brought racial reconciliation into sharper focus since police killing of George Floyd

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – In the years following the police killing of African American George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, groups of US evangelicals have been quietly working on racial reconciliation in the church and US society at large, according to the Roys Report (RR).

Among those working on healing entrenched racial divisions are members of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, RR reports. While critics have long accused the SBC of having been founded to protect Christian slave owners and of continuing to perpetuate racism in one form or another down the decades, leaders in the denomination were set to attend a racial reconciliation forum at the annual SBC meeting on Monday, June 12.

Fred Luter, a former SBC president and the first African American to head the denomination, told RR that he expected around 300 people to attend Monday’s reconciliation organized by the Unify Project. “We need to have honest conversations with people who don’t look like us to find out why we have these differences,” Luter said. “We need to talk about it, we need to discuss it, and we should be able to discuss it in a Christian-like manner and hopefully come up with simple steps of what we can do to bring about unity among the races in the SBC.”

Separately, the ten denominations that comprise the Churches Uniting in Christ group recently met to work on “a shared mission to combat racism,” part of an agenda that includes commitments to promoting unity, celebrating the Eucharist together, and continuing theological dialogue, RR reports.

“Our hope is to set some goals for the next three years that will focus on how we can continue to work on racial equity together and how we can continue to dialogue with each other,” Rev. Jean Hawxhurst, a United Methodist ecumenist and vice president of CUIC told RR.

Meanwhile, on June 10-11, over 130 churches participated in the inaugural National Unity Weekend, a racial reconciliation event launched by the National Museum of African American History and Culture year, RR reports. Many clergy preached that weekend from the verse in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you, are all one in Christ Jesus.”