Our synod includes the District of Columbia and the Maryland and the Virginia suburbs, from upper Montgomery County south to the Quantico Marine Barracks, and from the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay out to the foothills of the Blue Ridge.
Organizing synod efforts between the ELCA Caribbean Synod in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria
I’m afraid that in the Christian churches in our country these past few years, we have constructed for ourselves a powerful alternative history that isn’t true. “We were never racist,” we say to ourselves. “We were never homophobic.” “We never ignored the leadership gifts of women and girls.” “We never acted as though our ethnic backgrounds were the same as our religion.” “We never celebrated our gifts and ignored everybody else’s.” “We never just looked away from behavior we knew was wrong.” We say things like this to ourselves and we ignore the truth about who we were and are. And we act as though we believe that if we have the right attitudes and the right opinions now, everything is really OK. But people don’t trust us and our witness in the world is crippled sometimes because we won’t acknowledge the pain we have caused.