Podcast Episode 144

How can a faith community organize itself to combat the sin of racism? Michael Adam Beck and Stephanie Moore Hand share with us a practical framework for doing justice together that reimagines discipleship, leadership, and evangelism as tools for change.

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Announcer: Leading Ideas Talks is brought to you by the Lewis Center for Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. Subscribe free to our weekly e-newsletter, Leading Ideas, at churchleadership.com/leadingideas.

Leading Ideas Talks is also brought to you by the free video-based study Moving Faith Communities to Fruitful Conversations about Race. This dialogue about race in America may be used to help your church bring people together to talk about moving forward bravely and boldly in the name of Christ. The study is divided into four 15-minute videos which may be used in one or more sessions. Watch now at churchleadership.com/videos.

How can a faith community organize itself to combat the sin of racism? Michael Adam Beck and Stephanie Moore Hand share with us a practical framework for doing justice together that reimagines discipleship, leadership, and evangelism as tools for change.

Ann Michel: Welcome to Leading Ideas Talks. My name is Ann Michel and I’m a senior consultant with the Lewis Center for Church Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary. I also serve as one of the editors of our Leading Ideas e-newsletter, and I’m honored to be serving as the host for this episode of Leading Ideas Talks. My guests today are Michael Adam Beck, who directs Fresh Expressions Initiatives for Discipleship Ministries, and Stephanie Moore Hand, who serves as a vitality strategist in the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church. They are co-authors of a new book Doing Justice Together, which describes a process for how churches can organize themselves, or perhaps it would be better to say, to orient themselves, to combat the sin of racism. So, welcome to you, Michael and Stephanie. Welcome to Leading Ideas Talks.

Stephanie Moore Hand: Thank you.

Michael Adam Beck: Yeah, grateful to be with you. Thanks for having us.

Ann Michel: So, I think particularly since the George Floyd murder, there’s been renewed interest at least among certain churches in addressing racism. But I think in many of these churches, racial justice is seen as just one of a menu of different social issues and the approach is often just to delegate the issue of racial justice to a racial justice team or a committee or something like that. Your book is suggesting a much more comprehensive and holistic approach to activating a church against racism. But before we get into the specifics of that model, I wanted to ask each of you about the experiences that led to you write this book and led to the articulation of the particular model that you described. So let me start first with Stephanie.

Stephanie Moore Hand: Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today as I am an alum of Wesley Theological Seminary’s doctoral program, I’m going to say it started, the seeds were planted, deeper, deep roots there, in that type of work. But it started way back in my incident as a student athlete in Morehead City, North Carolina, where for the first time in my life I experienced injustice on a basketball court. A group of adults, not a child, but a group of adults, in a rural county began calling me out by name, calling me “monkey,” calling me the “N-word” in a basketball game. Not only did they do that, at the conclusion of the game they followed my team and myself and my coaches out to the bus and began rocking the bus back and forth, throwing rocks at the bus, calling and wanting me to get dragged off the bus. But we were able to get out safely. As a 17-year-old youth I experienced that. I’ve never talked about that since then until writing this book. Because the trauma of that was suppressed in my subconscious. But in writing this book, with all the incidents and things in America that have happened leading up to it, and as an ordained minister in the United Methodist church, I began to ask, “What do I do? How can I be a part of the solutions?” Of course, theological seminary teaches us that racism is sin. Anything that’s ungentle to the gospel of Jesus Christ falls in the bucket of sin. We don’t care how you cut it and what area it is in. Sin is sin.

So, there was a seed that planted in my spirit when the Florida Conference invited me to come to be a consultant in the hard work they were doing in the Florida Conference. Through that journey, not only did I see what can happen when leaders acknowledge the sin and are willing to heal from the sin, but that’s also how I met my friend Michael Adam Beck in that journey of going down and even in our annual conference in the work that we’re doing with Fresh Expressions. At the altar, at the conclusion of our cohort, I was in a prayer line, which was not his prayer line. But this is when I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit intersecting people’s lives. The person who was directing the lines, pushed me over into his line and we had a Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit encounter at the altar as he prayed over me. It was from that encounter that he circled back to me and said, “Hey, let’s consider writing a book together.”

Ann Michel: Michael, is that also the origin of this for you? Or have you had prior experience in working with congregations on the issue of racism?

Michael Adam Beck: My journey includes my own ongoing sanctification as a white male: awareness and repentance for my participation in the racist culture and systems and thoughts that are part of our society. But where it really became prominent for me, I grew up in a not-normal situation. I was born addicted. I was in and out of juvenile detention and experienced poverty as a kid of the 1980s crack epidemic. But the deepest place where I’ve seen racism in my life is in the church. And so, I was sent to Wildwood, Florida to pastor a congregation. If you’ve read anything from Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, she mentions Wildwood. So, this is a sundown town with a long legacy of racism and segregation. The congregation, which is a Methodist Episcopal South origin congregation, very much had its roots in that soil and was not neutral in creating a very dangerous and deadly situation.

So, coming into that and visiting with these very chronologically mature saints of the church and hearing them, at the same as they’re telling me their faith journey with Jesus, dropping the “N-word.” We started doing some Fresh Expressions in the MLK in that community, and really trying to heal that racial divide–doing some marches and some racial justice-oriented things. We had a Black church plant, God’s Glory Ministries, come and live with us. We decided not to have a financial arrangement, but really to kind of partner as kingdom partners and just live together and do ministry together. We started Fresh Expressions together. I had people in that con