In observance of the 2025 National Day of Racial Healing, the ELCA, in partnership with Augsburg Fortress Publishers, hosted a free online educational event on Jan. 21. The National Day of Racial Healing, an annual observance that follows Martin Luther King Jr. Day, was established by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation as part of its Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation program.

Featuring the voices of ELCA leaders of color, the ELCA day of education was designed to raise awareness of the need for racial healing and to encourage actions that will build common ground for a more just and inclusive church and society.

Judith Roberts, ELCA senior director for diversity, equity and inclusion, points to the Strategy Toward Authentic Diversity (STAD), adopted by the 2019 ELCA Churchwide Assembly as the basis for much of the church’s ongoing racial and ethnic diversity work, including the educational event.

“People of color in the ELCA continue to work in many different ways to live into the [STAD],” Roberts said. She pointed to “an ongoing movement of leaders investing in our denomination and using their platform” to promote the strategy’s goals and recommendations.

“We’re not yet the church we desire to become—we’re still less than 10% people of color,” Roberts said. “This movement, which is named in the [STAD] document, said that the path forward is we have to do work around racial healing.”

Event resources made available

The Jan. 21 event included opening and closing worship, a guided recentering and reflection activity led by Jenny Sung and concurrent morning and afternoon workshops (videos of which are now available here and linked to below) led by a variety of presenters:

Two sessions were designed for and open only to Black, Indigenous and people of color participants: “A Shady Situation: Finding Rest and Healing Through Community and Storytelling,” presented by !Khabeb and Kelly Sherman-Conroy, and “Antiblackness in Multicultural Spaces: Be Seen, Be Heard,” presented by Rhonda Hill.

A supplemental “Poems & Practices” activity, led by artist, educator and speaker Joe Davis, was made available after the event.

During opening worship, Ali Paris offered music and Jacqueline Lewis, senior minister and public theologian at Middle Church of the United Church of Christ in New York City, served as guest preacher. Lewis focused on how the idea of manifest destiny was built upon a “broken theology in which a talking snake undoes the order God put in place.” The church, she said, has historically used that understanding of the book of Genesis to develop theologies of oppression steeped in violence, patriarchy and white supremacy.

“As the church, we need to critique this broken theology,” Lewis said. “Nobody gets to an antiracist society through violence—we get there through love.” She challenged participants to “let God speak afresh.”

Musician Benhi !Khabeb offered a song for the event’s closing worship, and Felix Malpica, bishop of the La Crosse Area Synod, gave the sermon and offered a sending song.

In his message, Malpica related the gospel story of Jesus healing both Jairus’ dying daughter and the bleeding woman. Both Jairus and the bleeding woman, he said, “told their whole truth [about their pain, and] Jesus stopped and listened to all of it.

“Church, this is something that we need to be doing today. We need to stop and make space to listen to the whole truth—to the truth of the pain and anguish that many people are experiencing today and have been experiencing. … I promise you that when Jesus shows up, healing will come. Life will come.”

Next steps

When Roberts applied for a 2024 Mission Development Fund grant on behalf of the STAD advisory committee, one of the committee’s objectives was to hold an educational event. After receiving the grant, she thought of connecting the learning event with the Kellogg Foundation’s National Day of Racial Healing.

“The Kellogg Foundation was very interested in faith communities participating,” she said. The foundation reached out to Roberts to learn more about the church’s work related to racial healing. “I think there’s a lot we can lift up, and they really valued us having a voice in this space,” she said.

Roberts pointed to the ELCA’s baptismal covenant to strive for justice and peace in all the earth—faith practices that include its “Journey to Right Relationship” race relations conversation—as well as recent actions taken by the ELCA Church Council. At its November 2024 meeting, the council approved amendments to the ELCA constitution that were drafted in response to a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) Audit, expanding language that defines DEIA and lifting up historically underrepresented groups.

“In addition to funding the educational component, we also gave money back” through the grant, Roberts said. One portion of the $100,000 grant funded the day of learning, another supported ELCA churchwide organization staff’s work toward authentic diversity that was not funded in their respective budgets, and another provided grants to ELCA communities, ranging from $500 to $2,000, she said.

“We gave $48,000 back through mini-grants that could go to congregations, synods, leaders or nonprofit organizations. These mini-grants were opportunities for communities to start or support a recently launched initiative that tied back to the values of the strategy.”

Roberts applied for another Mission Development Fund grant for 2025 and is already beginning to plan next year’s National Day of Racial Healing event. She’s been encouraged by updates she has received about work across the church that the grants have funded. “We have amazing new ventures and ministries that have started reaching new people, supporting creativity, and building bridges and relationships,” she said.

John Potter
John Potter
John G. Potter is content editor of Living Lutheran. He lives in St. Paul, Minn.

Read more about:

Mission & ministry, Religious news & social issues   Diversity, ELCA Churchwide Assembly, Racism, resources