The Beautiful Community Team

 

PRAYERS DURING BLACK HISTORY MONTH

The Beautiful Community Team encourages you to lift prayers related to racial reconciliation during African American History Month (2/1–28). Please consider these prayer prompts, adapted from Faithful Anti-Racism, that may be helpful as you pray. 

  1. Pray for a soft heart, a spirit of humility, and an openness to the possibility that we have been wrong on issues of racial reconciliation.

  2. Pray that the Lord would give us insight and wisdom to confess our racial sins, pursue repentance, and celebrate evidence of grace in our congregation.

  3. Pray that our neighbors would be visible to us as we seek to welcome all people to Liberti. 

  4. Pray for other local churches with different cultural contexts; that we would work together for the kingdom in our neighborhood and Philadelphia.

PRAYERS FOR YOURSELF

Lord, thank you for the unique way you have created me and the unique experience you have given me. I confess the actions I have done that are contrary to your will for racial justice. I confess the actions that the groups I am a part of have done that are contrary to your will for racial justice. I confess the actions of our nation that are contrary to your will for justice.

Help me to do my part to prevent similar actions from continuing into the future. Thank you for your unending grace, love, freedom, and forgiveness for individual and corporate sins we experience through Christ. Help me to learn for the sake of love. Help me to learn as an act of repentance. Help me to become more educated in mercy, compassion, and justice. Help me to see our traditions and denominations rightly with their strengths and weaknesses.  

PRAYERS FOR THE CHURCH & NATION

Forgive our nation and the Christian church when we have stood for greed, corruption, and exploitation rather than compassion, honesty, and justice. Give us wisdom, strength, and courage to promote your righteousness and justice in our society. Give us eyes to see what we can do and the willingness to do it. Please move, by your grace, and change the unjust systems that produce devastation in so many people’s lives. Please allow justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Bring righteousness, justice, and restoration to our country and Christian communities. Please give us the faith, courage, love, and determination required to bring racial justice to our society. Please show us the path we need to take and give us the strength we need to take it. Help us to shine your light to the world.

PRAYERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED THE TRAUMA OF RACISM

Gracious God, you chose to be with us as our Emmanuel. You are the God who empathizes. Within your humanity, you know suffering. You know what it means to be disbelieved even now. You see our wounds; you remove shame and bottle every tear. You give us the power to acknowledge the pain of our sin and how others have sinned against us. Jesus, be a balm to our weary souls. Jesus, be a reconciler to our broken world. As you make all things new, bring truth, justice, and resurrection to our trauma, Amen.

PRAYERS FOR ACTION

Lord, thank you for empowering the early Christians to live lives of justice and unity in their unjust and divided society. Please help us to follow their example. Help us to rely on your inexhaustible strength rather than our own strength. If there is oppression in our communities, please give the oppressed the courage to speak up and provide the oppressors with the humility to listen. Help our communities share power in ways that produce justice and loving, unified relationships with one another. Help put our love into action. Help us to have courageous conversations that are filled with grace and truth. Help us to live out the prayer that we would be unified and demonstrate your love to the world. Thank you for giving us new lives with you and one another through the cross.

Please help our individual actions and the actions of your church to promote righteousness and justice in our society. Help us to build strong partnerships that can advance your justice in our society. Help our economic systems be just and provide special protections and kindness for oppressed and vulnerable groups. Help our political leaders to govern with wisdom, righteousness, and justice. Help us to create healthy, integrated housing and schools where people of all races can thrive. Give us wisdom as we seek to use our limited time, resources, and influence to have the greatest impact.

ABOUT the team

The Beautiful Community Committee was formed as part of Liberti’s response to the ongoing outcry for justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. We are named after the book, The Beautiful Community, by Irwyn Ince. 

The book states as its foundational premise, “The ministry of reconciliation demonstrated in the local church by the gathering of people from diverse backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities is the natural outworking of a rich covenantal theological commitment.”

We agree with this statement, and seek to embody this in our local church by working through these topics together on an ongoing basis, and making recommendations to the session of elders at Liberti. Practically, we are seeking to implement the suggestions for local churches in the Presbyterian Church in America’s 2018 Report on Racial Reconciliation. One of these recommendations is to learn best practices from other churches. Another is to send representatives of our local church to be equipped for the work of racial reconciliation. To that end, we are partnered with the Institute for Cross Cultural Mission to embrace a biblical vision for diversity by identifying the ways in which people are shepherded toward healthy cross-cultural living and ministry. This includes discipleship through teaching, training, and mentoring, and researching matters pertaining to justice and reconciliation ministries.

Growing out of that partnership, our committee continues to meet on a quarterly basis to continue this good work led by ruling elder Julian Spiegler. Contact Julian to learn how to get connected with the Beautiful Community Team

RECOMMENDED READING

The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity, and the Church at Its Best by Irwyn L. Ince Jr. 

Free at Last?: The Gospel in the African American Experience by Carl F. Ellis Jr. 

Roadmap to Reconciliation: Moving Communities into Unity, Wholeness and Justice  by Brenda Salter McNeil 

Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice by Eric Mason 

Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley 

The African Memory of Mark: Reassessing Early Church Tradition by Thomas C. Oden