We need a spiritual reconstruction in our institution. We do not need small adjustments here and there; we need active dismantling and reconstruction in order to live in a more just order.

We move toward not just repentance and rejection, but active resistance. What follows names some of the places where we collectively can resist, working inside the Spirit’s desire for wholeness and joining to bring about a more just, equitable, and anti-racist structure in which we might all flourish.

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We will resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.

We will resist the long-held powers of silence and ignorance by committing to the hard work of self- and mutual education regarding the formation and impact of racial identity, especially in our local churches and The United Methodist Church.

We will resist the presumptions of what success in ministry looks like, recognizing how the narrative of church growth, monetary stability, and professions of faith has been built around visions of whiteness.

We will resist these presumptions of success by valuing and supporting the work of minority clergy, celebrating their leadership and vision for the church.

We will resist taking part in an ordination process that perpetuates this racial divide by demanding regular reports on the racial and gender representations throughout the ordination process during Annual Conference clergy session.

We will resist the temptation to remain quiet and passive while our Black, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American brothers and sisters are being silenced, held up in the ordination process, and exploited when it is convenient for the conference.

We will resist the oppression still visible in our worship spaces by engaging our trustees to reconfigure and transform our sacred spaces with a clarity of witness to the pain that haunts our past.

We will resist by working from this moment on, to follow behind the voices of Black, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American clergy in our conference, emptying and decentering our privileges for the sake of building a more just and equitable institution that more fully reflects the beloved community we seek to proclaim.

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What can we do?

We will resist and actively dismantle antiblackness supremacy within our institution, orders, and organizations by:

1. Asking through collective individual communication to the executive leadership of the Board of Ordained Ministry and the Office of Ministerial Relations to include racial demographics in their reports to the orders, showing the current state of racial representation throughout the ordination process.

2. Asking the executive leadership of the Board of Ordained Ministry and the Office of Ministerial Relations to work with District Committees on Ordained Ministry to audit the status of racial representation in candidates coming to the district level, and to more actively work toward a culture of call at the local church and district levels that supports ordinands of color.

3. Convening our trustees and local church leadership to make a thorough historical review of our physical space, reported to the entire congregation and narrating any participation in the division of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and any ways that our sacred spaces perpetuated segregation and antiblack oppression.

4. Expressing to our bishop and district superintendents our desire to see Black, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American clergy prioritized in appointment decisions, in a way that supports, centers, and celebrates their leadership

5. Requesting that our Connectional Table and conference Leadership Team take steps to expand the Office of Conflict Transformation Ministries to include auditing and mediation capabilities regarding anti-racist transformation in local churches.

We recognize that these words of repentance, rejection, and resistance are only a beginning, that there will be more items added to our lists to repent of and more action to take as the Spirit continues to chasten us.

We recognize that this will be a long, difficult journey ahead if the Spirit is going to draw out of us the poisons of antiblackness supremacy.

We recognize that while there is considerable corporate work to do, there is also much we must do personally, in learning to listen to one another with a posture of belief, openness, and charity in order to undo the defenses whiteness builds in and around us.

We also recognize that in intense moments such as now, where public attention is stronger, it is easier to performatively join in, to speak out in assumed solidarity; but, then when the public attention inevitably fades and the hard work remains, many of our voices go silent.

Therefore, we are signing on to this letter of petition not merely with our names, but with the expectation of holding one another accountable to this work.

In claiming accountability, we are issuing a clear warning to each of us: do not add your name to this document if you do not intend to be held accountable, particularly to Black, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American leaders in this Annual Conference.

In the days ahead, we intend to continue this work, and we will be held accountable to its completion. We are Wesleyan people, accustomed to conversations on accountability and sanctification. It’s long past time we put those tools to better use.

We will practice that accountability internally, through regular gatherings and check-ins to see how we have responded with repentance, rejection, and resistance.

We will practice that accountability externally, reporting on our work and the actions taken to resist, and using our power to engage those in leadership positions to be held accountable for action, too.

We yearn to see a world where Christ’s peace reigns; where no person fears for their safety—especially from the state—in their own home; where our communities can ring out with the sounds of laughter and not the sounds of tear gas and the cry, “I can’t breathe.”

We yearn to be set free from all that binds us, for the sake of the one who did not see power as something to be grasped, but freely emptied himself even to the point of being lynched, that we might all have life and life abundantly.

We yearn to be set free from the collective shame that racism cultivates, and we intend this letter not to be a tool of shame. We are sharing these words as a recognition of solidarity in the very real, very painful excising work of the Spirit’s sanctifying grace that cuts away at our stony hearts for the sake of wholeness.

We write this in hopes that the Holy Spirit will lead us into holy friendships with one another, and in those friendships, we pray that God will burst open our racial imagination.

We pray that God might make a new way forward for us all where the sin of whiteness is confessed, resisted, repented of so that greater opportunities for relationships of intimacy and human flourishing are possible for all people in our Annual Conference

May God, who has given you the will to do these things, give you grace to perform them, that the work begun in you may be brought to perfection. Amen.