“I am tired of waiting for the ELCA as a collective body to take meaningful actions on race. Our congregations need to do more. We need to do more. The sin of white supremacy must be called out and dismantled at every opportunity.”

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The ELCA passed its resolution “Freed in Christ: Race, Ethnicity, and Culture when I was a child. Since then, the church has continued to struggle with deeply ingrained racism on an institutional level and within the individual congregations whose members continue to foster stereotypes and support policies that actively hurt people of color. We can see this most clearly in the actions of the self-proclaimed white supremacist who committed murder at Emanuel AME church on June 17, 2015. The shooter was a baptized Christian and a member of a Lutheran Church in Columbia, Virginia. As fellow Lutherans, we are guilty in fostering a culture that allowed seeds of white supremacy to take root in this man, and we have an obligation to our brothers and sisters in Christ in the AME church to atone for our collective sins.

I am now in my 30s, and I am tired of waiting for the ELCA as a collective body to take meaningful actions on race. Our congregations need to do more. We need to do more. The sin of white supremacy must be called out and dismantled at every opportunity.