Shawnee Presbyterian Church and Harvey Browne Presbyterian Church have worked to form what they call ‘The Beloved Community’
May 22, 2023
Dr. Veda Pendleton
For the past 15 years, members and friends of Shawnee Presbyterian Church and Harvey Browne Presbyterian Church in Louisville have been working together to bridge the racial divide by forming a collaborative they call “The Beloved Community.”
More than 70 people in Mid-Kentucky Presbytery recently benefited from that work in the form of an implicit bias workshop offered by Dr. Veda Pendleton, a ruling elder at the Harvey Browne church. Pendleton is a parent educator; diversity, equity and inclusion instructor; and the author of the book Prepped.
The Beloved Community members said that the multi-racial group “exists to examine their own beliefs about social justice issues within the body of Christ while seeking ways to effectively address the issues in the Louisville community. To that end, The Beloved Community has offered events that provide information and activities that allow participants to seek their own answers to social justice inequities individually and collectively.”
Implicit bias, which can be defined as the beliefs that sit in the back of our brains and inform our actions without our explicit knowledge, can be a difficult topic to discuss. During a workshop that lasted less than three hours, Pendleton worked to help participants express themselves freely, offering them a workbook with small group exercises and enough lined pages for them to record their reflections on experiences with implicit bias over the next 21 days.
The verse for the day is one Pendleton said she often wrestles with: Matthew 22:39, where Jesus’ second commandment is “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
“There are people in this room with power and influence,” Pendleton told the crowd gathered at Harvey Browne Presbyterian Church. “Use those as you walk through your daily lives to change things for others.”
She had two other suggestions: “Can we agree for today to be uninterested in being right?” Pendleton asked. “Can we be uninterested in thinking of ourselves as a good person? Just for couple of hours, can we suspend those?”
In the interest of transparency, Pendleton said she never thought until recently that a white person could cut her hair well because they wouldn’t understand that her hair has multiple textures. “I was wrong,” Pendleton said. “Someone recommended someone, she appeared at my house, she cut my hair — and it was wonderful.”
After a brief exercise designed to gauge the diversity of the people workshop participants interact with, Pendleton invited them to jot down the initials of six people they trust. She then read characteristics of people, asking participants to place a tally mark next to the initials when they aligned with the participant’s characteristics, including the same nationality or race, the same religion, similar upbringing and education level, and the same or proximate neighborhood. She then asked: “Outside of your family, who do you trust, and why?”
“I can’t tell you the impact the media has on our biases,” Pendleton said. The term “Black-on-Black crime” is “a racist statement all the way. The media choose what to report and how it’s reported,” Pendleton said. “They sensationalize crimes committed by Black people. We don’t hear about crimes committed by white people in the same way. We have to look at who is talking and who owns the news system. It’s all by design, and if we want a different product, we have to change the design of our systems.”
Pendleton prefers an approach to teaching that uses the same three-letter acronym as Critical Race Theory: Culturally Responsive Teaching.
“I use what you already know as a bridge to get to what I need to teach you,” Pendleton said. Imagine starting your time in school “knowing things weren’t designed for you and people who look like you. How do you combat that? With love. We begin to change systems and policies in place that keep Black, brown and poor people disadvantaged in every walk of life.”
“I go back to language often because language is powerful. God spoke things into being,” she said. “Our words have the capacity to change some of our systems.”
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service
Daily Readings
Today’s Focus: The Beloved Community-between two churches and a presbytery
Let us join in prayer for:
PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
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Let us pray
Your gift of living water gives us new life. We thank you that this new life can be shared wherever you call us, O Lord. Amen.
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