Congratulations to Pastors Kwame Pitts and Michael Vinson for their excellent interviews in the recently featured article “Lutheran Pastors Want to Honor Emanuel AME Shooting Victims, Fight Racism” in “The State,” one of South Carolina’s most honored newspapers.
“This is an opportunity for us to face some real facts about our part that we as a church played in this and to move to this place that our confessions call us to, this place of repentance, this place of forgiveness and being repentant in even our complacency in the events that took place.”
Pastor Michael Vinson
“Part of the issue is, when we walk in, the assumption is that we are not Lutheran enough to be accepted into a Lutheran church… Because for many people, Lutheran means Danish, Swedish, German, Norwegian. So, it means white.”
Pastor Kwame Pitts
“For us to [venerate the Emanuel Nine] means that, annually, we are revisiting their martyrdom, that the sacrifice that was made for the life of the church — for the church to learn and move forward — will always hold value. So even 200 years from now, celebrating those nine martyrs will be a point of value even if we have obtained whatever this post-racism world looks like, that it will hold value to show us where we were and what has moved us forward.”
Pastor Michael Vinson
“We still have to confront [racism in the church]. We still have to work on it. We can’t just bury this.”
Pastor Kwame Pitts