It is not enough for us to say “All Are Welcome.” It is not enough for us to believe we are all beloved children of one Heavenly Parent. It is not enough to profess that we are all one body in Jesus Christ. Our Black neighbors, family members, and friends are hurting. This is not a sudden revelation but a truth we have known for a long time. As we do when we face our own sin, we confess that we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We confess the sin of silence and inaction which cause us to freeze. We confess the sin of self-preservation which refuses to forfeit power. We proclaim a gospel of repentance and reconciliation: We are not defined by our past sin, but we are responsible to work to amend it.

This is of utmost importance to our Parkview community because so many of us have known the pain of discrimination, violence, alienation, and incarceration on the basis of race and racism. We recognize anti-black racism as a unique evil which runs deep in our country’s history, and we are seeking to understand how it has affected us in our lives today. We recognize racism goes beyond individual actions and affects policies and systems, threatening the well-being of our Black neighbors.

We are recommitting to the work of racial reconciliation, racial justice, and anti-racism as an expression of our faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, who was beaten and killed by an unjust government. We invite our membership to join in the following ways:

1. Commit to study of the scriptures to deepen our understanding of God’s command to just treatment of all people and creation.
2. Participate in community organized actions and demonstrations demanding justice for our Black neighbors.
3. Develop relationships with and pray for our Black neighbors.
4. Speak with our families and friends about racism and challenge racism in our own communities.

Black Lives Matter.

In unity with the Presbyterian Church, USA, we affirm the following statement of faith as professed in the Belhar Confession.

We believe
• that God has revealed himself as the one who wishes to bring about justice
and true peace among people;
• that God, in a world full of injustice and enmity, is in a special way the
God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged
• that God calls the church to follow him in this; for God brings justice to
the oppressed and gives bread to the hungry;
• that God frees the prisoner and restores sight to the blind;
• that God supports the downtrodden, protects the stranger, helps orphans
and widows and blocks the path of the ungodly;
• that for God pure and undefiled religion is to visit the orphans and the
widows in their suffering;
• that God wishes to teach the church to do what is good and to seek the
right;
• that the church must therefore stand by people in any form of suffering
and need, which implies, among other things, that the church must witness
against and strive against any form of injustice, so that justice may roll
down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream;
• that the church as the possession of God must stand where the Lord stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged; that in following Christ the church must witness against all the powerful and privileged who selfishly seek their own interests and thus control and harm others.