The brutal murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 was a trigger and a wake-up call to the world and much closer to home within our church community. Visit the George Floyd page here
As a church family, we are seeking to respond to the longstanding issue of racial injustice and to press into God’s call to us to be a community where people of every race, nation and culture can thrive, reflecting the vision described in Revelation 7:9.
This journey of reflection has included many conversations over the last year with black members of our church family and others from culturally diverse backgrounds where they have described their often painful experiences both inside and outside the church.
As part of our ongoing and committed to journey to become the racially inclusive church that God is calling us to be, we are inviting anyone who calls Trent their home to continue on a path of reflection and towards greater understanding and change. During October, we have had a series of Sunday talks on race and in November we will be providing resources for small groups to engage with together.
John Wright gave the first in this series of talks on 10 October (watch and listen here), and then we were led in prayer by one of our church family Wale Akanni (watch and listen here). We invite you to listen to John’s talk and to engage with Wale’s prayer over us as a community. John continued the series on 17 October (watch and listen here) and then on 31 October, Josh Kay from Hope Vineyard Oxford shared the final talk in the series with us (watch and listen here).
Over the coming weeks, we encourage you to set time aside to reflect personally and engage with some resources that we want to make available and point you towards. In engaging with these resources, for some, they will bring challenge and discomfort and for others you may connect with your own experience of prejudice or racial injustice. But we believe this is a journey worth taking as a church family and that God is inviting us into.
So here is a selection of resources that we invite you to engage with and reflect upon. Also, you may want to connect with a selection of resources that we made available last summer Visit the page here