Practical steps for racial and cultural reconciliation

An important seminar on race and faith was recently hosted at New Life Fellowship, a multi-ethnic church in Queens, New York City. The seminar video, Next Steps in Racial and Cultural Reconciliation, is now available online.

The seminar was led by Pastor Pete Scazzero & Dr. Soong-Chan Rah, deepening an understanding of the complexity & depth of bridging racial & cultural barriers within our communities. The seminar also provide practical, do-able steps for each person to take to make reconciliation a reality.

About the seminar topic, Pete Scazzero wrote in “Bridging Barriers: Next Steps for New Life Fellowship Church” ::

I soon realized that our evangelical discipleship/spiritual formation model was too superficial to bring about the kind of in-depth transformation we would need to live in authentic community. … Asians, with their rich legacy of love for education, had great difficulty in embracing high-school dropouts who now attended our youth group … We also had to consistently remind immigrants that they were now part of the American church.

And Drew Hyun wrote in “Thoughts on our Reconciliation Seminar“:

1) The Conversation of Reconciliation Needs to Address Personal AND Corporate Injustices/Sins; 2) There’s an Illusion that Building a Diverse Church Family will be Easy (or Formulaic); 3) Understanding (or at Least Trying to Understand) The Black Experience is Fundamental to Making Progress in the Area of Reconciliation; 4) I Have to Take Personal Responsibility; 5) We Need to Talk

Thanks to Drew Hyun for the video link.

Reading about this topic, again, it makes me wonder just how much these racial and cultural barriers stay embedded because some people deny their existence and sincerely believe that we live in a post-racial American society.