To our siblings in the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church orders of Elders, Deacons, and Local Licensed Pastors:

During the Service for the Ordering of Ministry, the bishop asked each of us: “Will you, in the exercise of your ministry, lead the people of God to faith in Jesus Christ, to participate in the life and work of the community, and to seek peace, justice, and freedom for all people?”

To which we replied, “I will, with the help of God.”

In the course of recent days, as our streets resound with names—Ahmaud, George, Breonna, Rayshard, Tony, Oluwatoyin, Elijah—added to the long and terrible litany of lynched saints, we recognize that we are long overdue to take stock of our own inactions, complacencies, and silences in a world far too filled with the murders of Black and brown people.

We offer this series of letters as an act of witness, protest, and a call to action for all who would continue to work with us, that we might discover freedom in the painful work of telling the truth about ourselves while seeking justice for all people.

We offer this letter alongside the Summons to Witness, Protest, and Promise, and while we seek to address ongoing systemic issues, we also begin by recognizing that this is not the beginning. There have been those working to dismantle, to protest, to empty out the systems of racist antiblackness supremacy from our institution for a long time before us, including many who are in leadership in our churches and conference office even now. This letter and those who sign with it want to express our continued support and accountable participation in the work others have already begun.

Knowing that this is not the beginning, we nevertheless begin with confession, repenting for what we have done and what left undone.

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“We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.”

We repent that our Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church continues to perpetuate our denomination’s identity as a predominantly white institution. We repent of the bare truth witnessed in our 2018 reports: with a total of 1,207 clergy members in the North Carolina Annual Conference, 88% are white, 6.38% are Black, 2.24% are Native American, 1.49% are Hispanic/Latino/a, 1.16% are Asian, and .58% are multi-racial.

We repent of an ordination process that continues to privilege white understandings of vocation, fruitfulness, and theological foundations, thereby discrediting the pain and the beauty of the racialized experience as a source of divine calling.

We repent of leadership structures in our local churches, districts, and the Annual Conference that inadequately centralize Black, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American leaders, and in the rare occasion that these persons have been asked to lead, they are often tokenized and unsupported.

We repent that we continue to center what success looks like in ministry around white clergy, and that even now we struggle to center Black, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American clergy in leading us in these very protest actions.

We repent of continuing to serve unquestioningly, in spaces and on land that has been taken from Black and brown and native people; in spaces that bear the unspoken weight of enslaved persecution and exploitation; in spaces that refuse to acknowledge the history of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and the expulsion of Black leaders from our preceding denominations.

We repent that with continued willful ignorance of the racialized histories of the local church and associated lands, comes willful ignorance of how these places continue to function within the racial geography of its surrounding community to perpetuate structures of harm, disadvantage, oppression, and inequality.

We repent of the all-too-many ways that we have been silently complacent in the ordering of our connection, our conference, and our local church institutions.

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What can we do?

There is always a temptation, within whiteness’s recentering especially, to move quickly to action, to so-called “solutions,” to doing something to assuage our wounded conscience.

The first action we must take is to pause in the silence of confession and lament.

The time for action will come after the silence of death and resurrection can happen. There will be more in letters to follow, with actions to be taken, but first we confess so that the Spirit might convict us.

As we seek to repent, may we begin each day for the next week with these words from our own United Methodist Book of Worship:

O holy and merciful God,
we confess that we have not always taken upon ourselves
the yoke of obedience,
nor been willing to seek and to do your perfect will.
We have not loved you
with all our heart and mind and soul and strength,
neither have we loved our neighbors as ourselves.
You have called to us in the need of our sisters and brothers,
and we have passed unheeding on our way.
In the pride of our hearts, and our unwillingness to repent,
we have turned away from the cross of Christ,
and have grieved your Holy Spirit. Amen.