Racial Healing and Reconciliation Meeting

Church Street UMC applied for and has been accepted to participate in a six-month Racial Healing and Reconciliation (RH&R) Ministry training program sponsored by the Western North Carolina Conference (WNCC) of the United Methodist Church! We are joining eight local churches from the WNCC. CSUMC Church Council has just approved our participation. The NC leaders who designed this program describe it as “an opportunity to bring teams to journey together through difficult, but extremely necessary, ministry efforts.”

These Zoom training sessions will occur once a month where representatives from the nine churches will participate. Each church team will be titled a “Racial Healing and Reconciliation Learning Cohort”. Eleven people at CSUMC have committed to participate in Church Street’s Learning Cohort for the WNCC ministry training: Rev. Catherine Nance, Celia Ferguson, Ivee Miles-Slater, Luke Ihnen, Stephanie Blue, Pat Bellingrath, Dr. Olga Welch, John Eldridge, Lance McCluskey, and Jean Galyon.

If you have a heart for learning more about the issues involved, and if you would be willing to commit to six months of study and discussion alongside the Learning Cohort, there’s a place for you in this ministry! You would be meeting monthly with the eleven members of the Learning Cohort who will share with you their monthly training, beginning with the scriptural foundation for the effort. The sessions will be on Zoom until further notice and will probably be held on 6 Sunday afternoons or evenings from October through April.

As a participant with the Cohort and other committed Church Streeters, you would be asked to support the ministry, to process and to share, and to pray. It would be part of your role to study and discuss; to develop applications for the ministry; and to be a part of implementation. Whether or not you join this new Ministry Team, you can support with your prayers this challenging undertaking where we are striving to be the hands and feet of the One who first modeled and taught us about spiritual healing and reconciliation. Anyone interested in committing to this study and training group can contact Rev. Catherine (cnance@churchstreetumc.org) or Celia Ferguson (celiaferg@gmail.com) or Jean Galyon (jpgtn@icloud.com).