Overview
Hey Everyone! Welcome to this week’s edition of the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast.
This is the third of a four-part series of Community Conversations on Race all releasing today that were hosted by Rev. Donna Covington, Vice President of Formation at Asbury Seminary. These recordings were originally released as part of a video series that released earlier this month, but we wanted to make them available in podcast form, too.
In this episode, Rev. Donna Covington leads part two of a conversation on Theology and Race with a Dr. Timothy C. Tennent, Dr. Bill Arnold, Dr. Ruth Anne Reese and Dr. Craig Keener on Theology and Race and how we can listen, learn and take appropriate action.
Let’s listen!
*The views expressed in this podcast don’t necessarily reflect the views of Asbury Seminary.
Community Conversation on Race, Theology and Race Part 2
Dr. Timothy C. Tennent has served as president since July 2009. Prior to his coming to Asbury Theological Seminary, Dr. Tennent was the Professor of World Missions and Indian Studies at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary where he served since 1998. Ordained in the United Methodist Church in 1984, he has pastored churches in Georgia, and in several of the largest churches in New England. Since 1989, he has taught annually as an adjunct professor at the New Theological College in Dehra Dun, India. He is a frequent conference speaker around the country and throughout the world, including numerous countries in Asia, Africa and Europe.
Dr. Bill Arnold is the Paul S. Amos Professor of Old Testament Interpretation. He joined Asbury Theological Seminary’s faculty in 1995. While at the Seminary, Dr. Arnold has served as Vice President of Academic Affairs/Provost, Director of Postgraduate Studies, Chair of the Area of Biblical Studies and Director of Hebrew Studies. Dr. Arnold is an elder in the United Methodist Church and pastored churches for six years before moving into Extension Ministry. He holds his ordination with the Kentucky Annual Conference of the UMC. His current Charge Conference is First United Methodist Church, Lexington, Kentucky.
Dr. Craig Keener is the F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Seminary. Dr. Keener has authored 28 books, six of which have won book awards in Christianity Today, of which altogether more than one million copies are in circulation. Craig is married to Médine Moussounga Keener, who holds a Ph.D. from University of Paris 7. She was a refugee for 18 months in her nation of Congo (their story together appears in the book Impossible Love, Chosen Books, 2016), and together Craig and Médine work for ethnic reconciliation in the U.S. and Africa. Craig was ordained in an African-American denomination in 1991 and for roughly a decade before moving to Wilmore was one of the associate ministers in an African-American megachurch in Philadelphia. In recent years he has taught in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and in connection with various denominations.
Dr. Ruth Anne Reese is Professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary. Dr. Reese is also the Chair of the New Testament Department at Asbury Seminary and serves on the board of the Institute for Biblical Research. Since 2006, she has served as the Chair for the Formation and Student Committee, which oversees the faculty’s role in the Christian Formation of students at Asbury Seminary. She received the Beeson Chair of Biblical Studies in 2013. She is involved as a layperson at Apostle’s Anglican Church in Lexington, Ky. She teaches, serves as Chalice Bearer, prayer team member, Lector and coordinates the church’s ongoing relationship with its diocese in Uganda.
Rev. Donna Covington is the Vice President of Formation at Asbury Seminary. She is a highly accomplished senior leader with experience in both corporate and higher education with a heart for ministry. Rev. Covington spent most of her life in the corporate world, serving in managerial positions at Texas Instruments and IBM from 1979-1991. From 1991-2007, she worked at Lexmark International, Inc., in a succession of positions from director to Vice President of Customer Service. After her son was killed in an altercation over a racial slur in 2010, Rev. Covington decided she wanted to spend the rest of her life helping in the spiritual and professional formation of future leaders. As a first-generation African-American college student, Rev. Covington prioritizes student success through student-focused initiatives. From 2010-2014, she worked at Kentucky State University, enhancing the university’s commitment to academic excellence, research and community service. Rev. Covington has been trained in Design Thinking at Stanford University, chaired Lexmark’s first Diversity Initiative, as well as the Black Achievers for Central Kentucky, and was recognized nationally by the President’s Award for Women of Color in Technology.
Heidi Wilcox, host of the Thrive Podcast
Writer, podcaster, and social media manager, Heidi Wilcox shares stories of truth, justice, healing and hope. She is best known as the host of Spotlight, (especially her blooper reel) highlighting news, events, culturally relevant topics and stories of the ways alumni, current students and faculty are attempting something big for God. If you can’t find her, she’s probably cheering on her Kentucky Wildcats, enjoying a cup of coffee, reading or spending time with her husband, Wes.
Show Notes
Transcript
Heidi Wilcox:
Hey everyone. Welcome to this week’s special edition of the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast. This episode is the third of a four part series of community conversations on race. All four parts are releasing today on our podcast, and were originally hosted by Reverend Donna Covington, Vice President of Formation at Asbury Seminary. These recordings are also available as a video series @thrive.asburyseminary.edu, but we wanted to make them available to you in podcast form as well.
Heidi Wilcox:
This conversation is the second of a two part discussion about theology and race. So in this episode, Reverend Donna Covington leads part two of the conversation on theology and race, with Dr. Timothy C. Tennent, Dr. Bill Arnold, Dr. Ruth Anne Reese and Dr. Craig Keener. So let’s listen and learn so we can take appropriate action.
Rev. Donna Covington:
Welcome, and we’re continuing our conversation on theology and race. I want to welcome you to part two, but if you haven’t seen part one, I would encourage you to go back and view that on whatever website, social media that you’re viewing part two. I’d like to, again, welcome our panel and our guests. We have with us today, Dr. Timothy C. Tennent, the President of Asbury Theological Seminary, Dr. Ruth Anne Reese, Dr. Bill Arnold and Dr. Craig Keener. All outstanding theological minds that are guiding us as we navigate our way through current events.
Rev. Donna Covington:
So I want to pick up where we left off with part two… part one. How does our view of God begin to inform how we view scripture, how we read scripture, and then how we act, or our actions? Let’s talk a little bit on how do those experiences both good and bad start to inform how we view God in our actions. Let’s talk a little bit about that.
Dr. Ruth Anne Reese:
So I think in part one, we set up a series of frameworks that we could use to approach scripture and we talked about the image of God, we talked about love of God and love of neighbor. We talked about justice, so I think all these different kinds of frameworks. Ultimately there’s a piece of understanding that God ultimately desires relationship with His creation, all of it. All the people He’s created, the world He’s created. He wants to be in right relationship with that and He’s made that relationship available to us through the work of Jesus Christ, and that is the truth of the gospel, right? So we affirm that Jesus lived and died and was buried and was resurrected and is ascended into the presence of God and that is the good news.
Dr. Ruth Anne Reese:
Now, having said that, for me, and here I just speak personally out of my experience for a moment, as I have come to read and know and learn from African-American scholars and theologians, my understanding of some of the things in the New Testament in the Bible have shifted a little bit. So, for example, I recently had been reading a book it’s called Strangers From Home, and it’s about the way in which when you are a minority in a particular culture, you often have to know two languages. You have to know the language and function and the way the world works as a majority person and then you have your language that you speak with your minority folks, and it’s only privileged people like Bill who get to get invited into that minority context, where someone will take you around and educate you about what it looks like to actually be a member of this minority group.
Dr. Ruth Anne Reese:
When we start to read in that way with a lens of like, “I wonder if there’s a majority minority thing going on in scripture”, and we start to realize, especially in the first century that the church was a minority group, a little tiny minority group in a large majority culture, and it’s functioning with its own language, its own meaning, its own way of affirming thing. So when we see the language of grace and salvation and good news, this is language that people in the majority culture used. It wasn’t new words that Christians made up, and indeed what they did though, was that language became imbued with meaning that was distinctive to the Christian Church. That’s one example of how like understanding majority minority relationships and how they function can also help us hermeneutically approach scripture in particular kinds of ways. So that’s just one example that I might talk about.
Dr. Timothy Tennent:
I had the experience with that that you’re kind of reminding me when I was in Edinburgh. I had a Bible study that I helped lead in. It was probably eight to 10 of us in the Bible study and nobody was from the same country. In fact, there were probably four different continents present at the Bible study, and part of the way it worked was basically asking questions of the text, kind of an inductive kind of almost study. Well, I was amazed at the questions that they ask of the text. So in some ways, if theology is our how we ask questions of the text, then of course, obviously the questions become determinative in terms of how we think about what are the kinds of things the Bible should or should not weigh in on. So I’ve found is endless insights to that point, because in the part one, all of you mentioned, all of us mentioned that we were ourselves, our journey was simply formed by relational experiences we had.
Dr. Timothy Tennent:
I think I was just yesterday, I spent an hour with Dr. Gray, down at our Orlando campus and he made a comment that the reconciliation involves people that were once together that need to be brought back together. He said, “But the problem is we’ve never worked together to begin with.” So he didn’t even like the word reconciliation and his point was that we have to first get to know each other first and then we can come together because there was never a point we were together. I think a lot of times, a lot of the experience, the majority community is that we don’t have any relationships. So it’s a real quite unique that relational dynamic is what gives us those perspectives that Ruth Anne mentioned and Bill and others and Dr. Keener in their comments.
Dr. Craig Keener:
I found the exegesis of the text, there are a lot of things I learned, but in terms of how I apply that exegesis of the kind of questions that I bring to the text, that’s very much shaped by the contexts that I know. Dr. Todd was on the board of the first congregation with which I worked as a minister. Dr. Todd was a Jewish psychologist and he talked about how crossing, once you’ve crossed one cultural barrier, you begin to think more cross-culturally. That’s really important for understanding scripture and it’s also important for understanding the world around us. It wasn’t until I became part of an African-American church and was living in the African-American community that I began to think about, you know what? I mean, I thought before crossing cultural barriers, dealing with racism, that’s all important, but what does the Bible have to say about it? But once I was in a setting where it was upfront, it was close at hand, that’s when I started thinking about, “Whoa, I mean, it’s all over the place here.”
Dr. Ruth Anne Reese:
I think maybe one of the things I want to add to what Craig is saying is that each one of us in this panel has talked about how we’ve had a personal relationship or a personal experience that has shaped us in a particular kind of way. Maybe some people who are listening to this presentation, maybe you don’t have that opportunity. Maybe you live in an all white place. Maybe you live in a place that you don’t have the means or the resources to have that kind of experience that we’re talking about. But one of the things I want to say is there are so many resources available. Resources on the internet, resources on books, and things from libraries, and just all kinds of resources that mean you can take that journey, whether you have that personal relationship right now or not. So I don’t want people to think, “What if I don’t have a personal relationship or a set of relationships with African-Americans? Does that mean that I can’t make that journey to deeper understanding of the situation that’s going on?” The answer is, we can all make that journey.
Rev. Donna Covington:
Dr. Reese, I think you make such a great point. So I think in our culture, this is my perspective. We’re expected as African-Americans to be able to traverse into a white community, but all of us live in places that have diverse communities. So I would want to pick up on the point you’re making, and of course we want to read, we want our resources, but to have the courage to walk into a place that’s not like you. Even if you don’t have a friend Dr. Arnold, who can help you go there, but to walk into an African-American church or to walk into a Latino church. Very much like Dr. Keener’s experience of having being able to, I doubt that you just woke up one day and say, “I’m going to go to this particular church”, but you had the courage and the fortitude to say I’m going someplace different that makes me uncomfortable. So we can… We all have those opportunities in the cities and the communities that we live in. So that’s great. Thank you.
Rev. Donna Covington:
I’m going to turn our conversation just a little bit, because these are questions that I’ve asked myself. When I look at current events, when I look at not just current events, but the many, many injust deaths that have happened before these three and these events, one of the questions I asked myself is what is the church’s authority? What is the church’s posture? How does the church act? As Christians what is it that the scripture informs us that our behavior is to be when we come into situations like this? So I want to throw that question open and just fully think through and talk about a little bit of what is the authority of scripture and the church’s authority to speak into these types of issues that we’re experiencing now?
Dr. Bill Arnold:
Well, I think I’ll speak into that a little bit, Donna, and it’s a complex answer for me because I’m grieving. I think a loss of the church to have any real influence in our culture, on these issues and for the church to have a wrong position on many of these things. So with the death of George Floyd, especially, but as you mentioned, Brianna Taylor and Ahmed Aubrey, there are so many things that this has brought forward for me about the church. We mentioned in the first part, the role of the image of God. I really want to come back to that because I think it being in the first chapter of the church itself has never fully grasped the significance and I’m not sure any of us have grasped the significance.
Dr. Bill Arnold:
Ruth Anne in a moment ago was talking about relationship, God wanting to have a relationship with humanity and I think of all the things that the image means, and of course, lots has been written on that. It means that God wanted a relatable creature, a creature that’s unlike the other creatures that God himself could relate to and have relationship with. That’s really the foundation for the call of Abram in Genesis 12, which gives Israel its mission in the world to be a blessing for all nations. Those nations need to be blessed and can be blessed and can bless themselves in the name of Abram because they are made in the image of God. So that’s the foundation of the mission of the church. That’s the foundation of all of us as Christians. So to see what happened in Minneapolis is to see the loss of a person made in the image of God, and to see it as a sort of a crux where as Tim said earlier, you have all these horrible things coming together, personal sin and systemic sin, all coming together in that one moment.
Dr. Bill Arnold:
So for me, it’s the church not being the church and I think what pains me most about that is that the church tends to in the US, the church tends to mirror simply the values of the culture. I know Dr. Tennent has said before, I’ve heard him say, I love the way he’s emphasized the vast inclusivity of the church universal. Around the world there’s no institution and I’m stealing your thunder, Dr. Tennent. There’s no institution anywhere in the world that is more inclusive, both in terms of gender and in terms of race, than the church, and I know that’s the truth. You can look at our student body and see that it’s true.
Dr. Bill Arnold:
But when you look at the US church, as it’s been famously said, the 11 o’clock hour on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week. The US church does not reflect that inclusivity and I think what’s happened is the church in the US has simply reflected back upon the world, the values, the sinful convictions that have led to this mess we’re in. So the church is not being the church, and I don’t really have answers here, Donna, this is just me responding to your question by admitting the pain that I feel about the church not being anything but a mirror upon the culture, rather than a window into what life could be like. This is again, calling for another great revival. I think it’s the only hope in some ways that our culture has.
Dr. Bill Arnold:
One more thing, I don’t want to dominate, but I say one other thing about our tradition. The Wesleyan tradition in its origins was as I think all of you know, strongly abolitionist. Our tradition was against slavery and the racism behind slavery. But in the early 19th century, in the 1820s, we can’t be that much more specific than that, our traditions began to change. In many ways, the institutional church that represented who we were as Westminster and Methodist began to reflect the culture so that you had a lots of Methodists who were supportive of slavery, for example, rather than being again, a window into another reality, simply mirroring what the culture was doing. I fear so much has happened since that 150 or 60 years that this is just another illustration, which the church is not really being the church at this moment.
Dr. Timothy Tennent:
Yeah. Let me pick up on that Bill. That’s a great segue because I also wanted to say about our tradition since we’re on that subject. I think that one of the advantages that Wesley inhibition has in terms of understanding repentance is for us, repentance is not simply tied to justification, therefore something you look back on as a one-time event that you repented and now you’re a Christian, but repentance is ongoing because of sanctification. Therefore, in some ways we have theological space in our tradition for ongoing repentance in the life of the church, which obviously we need. I love Sandy Rector’s definitely the church where she says the church is the outpost of the new creation in Adam’s world. I love that vision that we are to be the sign of the new creation. So I think Bill, your point is so true that right now, especially compared to the civil rights movement in the 60s, the church’s voice as many ways has been muted for a lot of reasons.
Dr. Timothy Tennent:
I mean, it’s not simply it’s our faithlessness in many ways, certainly, but it’s also because of just the sheer post-Christendom reality we’re now in as a culture. Therefore we have to embody something that will be a striking alternative to the culture, not simply mirror the culture, which of course the image of God is supposed to be the idea of the image, right? Reflecting. We should reflect a new creation, and I feel like in some ways that’s the very, one of the biggest challenges that we face as a church. You might say, put it bluntly, we have to get our own house in order, we have to get our own house in order. We just follow the gospel of fresh and to be a stunning alternative because at the church, if we ourselves were to model racial reconciliation, hope, peace and race and celebrating the other, et cetera, and radical embrace, then of course that the world would notice that this can’t be solved in Washington, DC. It can’t be solved.
Dr. Timothy Tennent:
It’s not like another civil rights act will solve this. The whole point is, the civil rights act of 64 and 68 were important. We may need more laws. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have more laws, but the point is, it’s never enough. At the end of the day, it goes into the hearts of people and the gospel has to intersect that and that’s something that only the church can model and help proclaim to the world through our deeds and our lives.
Dr. Craig Keener:
I think we have this sacred secular divide within the minds of a lot of Christians too, in our culture. So that, “Yeah, I’m a Christian. I go to church on Sunday but then the rest of the week, how does that impact my work life? How does that impact how I treat people? How does impact how whatever my particular vocation is impacts working for justice and so on.” So many of us are part of the systems that perpetuate injustice or part of the systems that could be working for justice and so we need to take those things into account how we can make changes in the larger culture. At the same time, I want to echo what my colleagues have said and that is, it has to start with us as God’s children. We have to model what that should look like and what we see in the New Testament again and again and in particularly highlighted for us in the book of Acts is that the Spirit is what drives this that way.
Dr. Craig Keener:
I mean, Acts 1:8 and then Acts 2:17, all flesh and then Acts 8:29. The Spirit says to Phillip, “Go join yourself to this chariot”, and then we have the first Gentile Christian who happens to be black from Africa. Then in Acts 10:19, is that’s the Spirit says to Peter, “Go down, I’ve sent these Gentiles to you.” In Acts 15:28, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit knew us not to impose circumcision on these Gentiles.” So the Spirit was continually pushing God’s people across these barriers. We need God’s spirit today. As Bill said, we need revival.
Dr. Craig Keener:
So Luke says in Luke chapter 11, verse 13, that if we ask for the Holy Spirit is not going to give us a stone, He’s going to give us the Holy Spirit. So let’s be concerted in prayer, concerted in prayer about the issues of racism and injustice and concerted in prayer that God will empower us by His Spirit to speak into these issues and to renew the church, to live like the church, to love one another, as Ruth Anne said, to love one another as ourselves.
Rev. Donna Covington:
One of the questions that I think that bags is, if we even bring it further down to Asbury and not that we’re running to action, but we start to say, I start to even ask myself, Dr. Keener, what is the Holy Spirit’s saying to us as we take this reflective pause around the events that are happening in our nation? What is the invitation from the Holy Spirit for us as a seminary at this time?
Dr. Craig Keener:
We need to hear the voices that have been marginalized. The first seminary I taught in was almost completely African-American. The second seminary I taught in was half African-American. We have a smaller proportion. We have a much greater international proportion for many different cultures it has varied. But a smaller African-American proportion, partly due to geographic demographics and so on, but we need to hear those voices and from those who can speak from their own experience, we need to invite our whole community to hear those voices.
Dr. Timothy Tennent:
Just speaking personally as President, I think one of the challenges that we really have worked hard to recruit students across the spectrum, but we have, because we have different geographic locations, students self-select to come. Obviously if you’re in Orlando Campus has majority Hispanic. Our campus in Memphis is majority African-American, et cetera. So I think as still mitigates against the relational capacities, which is part of the purpose of all things is to bring you all together into a community. So that’s a challenge that we face and I do think that it’s interesting that all this happened, right, as we as celebrated Pentecost.
Dr. Timothy Tennent:
I mean, I think it’s very, to me, it was very powerful the fact that this trauma happened, literally people burning things in the streets happened at the time when God Himself sent fire and wind to blow us away and to the winter presents God’s breath. As Ezekiel say the breadth is what brought these dead bones to life. The far that let us in the wilderness, can this far a Pentecost lead us to a new place as a community? Can we have new conversations, new listening, new laments and one of things that I think Dr. Craig said yesterday, Craig, I thought was very helpful. He said he’s been Asbury for 25, 30 years, whatever it is. But I do want to say that I believe Asbury is growing in its capacity to listen and that’s a commandment to us.
Dr. Timothy Tennent:
I think that we’re trying to listen. I think before we try to make big plans, we want to listen, try to be thoughtful and I think where we need to be a community, a [inaudible 00:24:34] way, a community of repentance, that we might ask God to shape us and form us and do something inside of us and then maybe God can help us across in larger venues.
Dr. Ruth Anne Reese:
The other thing that I want to add is that whatever conversations that we’re having, whatever listening that we’re doing, whatever lamenting we’re doing cannot just be for a day. It can’t be like let’s have a prayer time in the chapel and get this done with. It’s been a hundred, 200 year, 400 year thing that’s been going on in our culture in North America. To have the hubris to think that we could deal with it in a short time, like that would be really to ignore the African-American community and to ignore the generations of pain that have been their experience. So there’s a way in which we have to enter as an institution, into a posture of humility before the people that we wish to serve. Once again, we right in so doing, we get the privilege of looking like Jesus, because Jesus himself is the one who says I came to serve.
Dr. Ruth Anne Reese:
So, as we, this is a conversation that’s bubbled up here and there in the 20 years that I’ve been at Asbury and I think this is an opportunity for that conversation to become more intentional, more focused and continue to have the opportunity to shape us into an institution that reflects the person of Jesus himself in terms of how we posture ourself towards the African-American community.
Dr. Craig Keener:
Just building on all of this in agreeing with all of this, it’s not just having African-American and Asian-American and White-American and other together, although that’s going to help people to hear one another. But we need to deliberately make sure that the voices are heard by giving space and requesting those voices be heard. People can see that the people who are their friends, the people they love, the people they care about, actually this is their real experience, and if we love these are our brothers and sisters, then we have to care about these experiences.
Rev. Donna Covington:
Well, the reason I asked the question about what invitation is the Holy Spirit giving us? For me as an African-American, this feels different for the first time in a long time. I’m praying that we’re open and that we’re listening to the Holy Spirit and to each other that says, “What are you doing something different among us at this moment in this time where our nation has come to this point?” So if you had one last word to say to people that are struggling, there are a lot of people struggling with what to say. Do I say, “Yes, I’m afraid of offending someone. Do I just stay silent as a question?” So as we look at the body of Christ, as they struggle with where do I stand in times like this? What would you say to them from, again, a theological perspective based on scripture, around the body of Christ? What would be your word to pastors and to people that are viewing the video?
Dr. Craig Keener:
From a position of servanthood, from a position of being brothers and sisters in the body of Christ, let’s listen to what our brothers and sisters who are most effected by these crises are saying. Then if we don’t know what else to say, let’s Amen and add our support to what they’re saying.
Dr. Bill Arnold:
That’s right, and I think I would add too. It’s hard to say to improve on what Ruth Anne said earlier about being a servant so that you look more like Jesus, when you do this. I was thinking earlier about servanthood and Isaiah throughout the Old Testament, the nation Israel serving the other nations and how that feeds into New Testament. It’s certainly true in terms of being raising sensibilities and listening and as Craig said, Amen if we don’t have the voice, we can certainly Amen those who do and say that it’s time for the church to be the church and to look out for those who are in pain and suffering and it is our mandate as a church to do so. So I think that was maybe the closing comment I would do, Donna.
Dr. Ruth Anne Reese:
I think, especially for anyone who’s watching, who is a user of social media, the question I would be asking myself is whose voice am I amplifying? What message does that voice have? If it’s a voice that is sowing division, if it’s a voice that is mocking, if it’s a voice that is… you get the picture, that’s not of God. If you’re a Christian and you’re using social media, you should be amplifying the things of God and those things look like the things we’ve been talking about, they look like love. They look like justice, they look like service. They look like care for the vulnerable. They look like the image of God in every human being. If those are things that you’re amplifying on social media, whether it’s in your own words or by reposting or retweeting, then those are the things that speak of the truth of who God is. So that would be my question is what is it that you’re amplifying if you’re a user of social media?
Dr. Timothy Tennent:
I was going to say that in our own tradition, we know that God is calling us to be made perfect in love and the Jews, the Rabbis had the saying that God is the repair of the world and he repairs the world through love. I believe that there’s nothing, there’s no more greater power in the world than the power of love, demonstrating embodying love to these communities and those are hurting. Whether it just be through a simple hug or in this case a social distance, a thumbs up. But that we understand and the African-Americans I’ve talked to in our circles have all said to me that they’ve actually appreciated those who’ve called or written emails and express their concern and that they felt it was meaningful to them, that they knew they were part of a solidarity of a community that is disproportionately suffered. Even though they weren’t in Minneapolis, so they weren’t in our case Louisville that they nevertheless understand they’re part of a people that has been disproportionately disenfranchised in our culture. So we want to acknowledge that and pray that to the power of love and the gospel, we can come to a better day.
Rev. Donna Covington:
Amen. Thank you, and on that note, we’re going to have to end our discussion today.
Rev. Donna Covington:
Friends, thank you for joining us for community conversations. As we take this journey through current events, it is my prayer, it is our prayer that we journey together as a community called that brings glory and honor to God. I hope these conversations has helped you as they have helped me process through these and think about the way we’re going to behave. I hope you’ve enjoyed these as much as I have. God bless you and keep you.
Heidi Wilcox:
Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s community conversation on race, talking about theology and race part two, hosted by Reverend Donna Covington. The next episode in the series continues the conversation and talks about church leadership. So make sure you give that a listen as well, and if you haven’t already, go ahead and subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcast player and follow us in all the places on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @asburyseminary. So have a great day you all and go do something that helps you thrive.
