Self Care for Clergy: Prevent Burnout

 In a time when children were not honored or even considered, Jesus tells the people that it is they who hold the realm of God in their hands. Jesus teaches that it is from the children we must learn how to enter the realm of the Holy One. The message seems clear.
 
Last month we considered the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny and their legacy among us even to this day. As we continue the journey in 2020 of taking a hard look at this nation’s founding and the impact on the indigenous people that were encountered, we must acknowledge how the government – largely through the churches – sought to control the children.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries the federal government established boarding schools – largely funding denominations to run them – for the primary purpose of assimilation into European-American culture and the annihilation of Native American culture. Read more

Breath to the People: Sacred Air and Toxic Pollution

by Traci Blackmon, Assoc. General Minister of Justice and Local Church Ministries,UCC 

In 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice released our first environmental justice report on toxic waste. That report sounded an alarm regarding the poisoning of our land and people, and challenged us to address the juxtaposition of toxic waste sites in neighborhoods populated by poor, non-white residents.

With this report, the term: environmental racism became a part of the national narrative on environmental concerns. I wish I could say sounding that alarm was enough to change the heart of America, but it was not. I wish I could say when the church spoke out about the dangers of poisoning the land, our industries and legislators changed course. But they did not. Yet we must still sound the alarm. 

This Ash Wednesday Justice & Local Church Ministries sounded the alarm once again. This time, we add to our toxic waste report, still cited academically, a new report on toxic air pollution. This report includes an interactive map identifying some of the most hazardous chemical sites and the impact of their toxic emissions on the health of our children and environment. Link to report

Disarming Racism - a Webinar United in Christ's love, a just world for all. That's the vision of the United Church of Christ. But to create that just world for all, one must dismantle racism. UCC Racial Justice Ministries, which offers resources and tools to assist that work, is sponsoring a 2020 All Church Read to address the issue of racism and whiteness, using the books of Jennifer Harvey. "Jennifer's books are a testament to what the Christian Church needs to be reading and studying in order to create a racially just world," said UCC Minister for Racial Justice, the Rev. Velda Love, in an invitation to a March 26 webinar that will begin this book discussion. The Rev. Jennifer Harvey is a theologian and author of three books on racial reconciliation. Read more and register here