Within a Wedding: Risk, Church and Justice
Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellerman and Lydia Wylie-Kellerman
Sunday, September 20th, 10:30am
In 2011, Lydia Wylie-Kellerman married her same sex partner Erinn. Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellerman officiated at the wedding of his daughter as a United Methodist pastor. Charges were brought against him by the conference and his ordination was threatened. The issue now actively sets up a pending split in the church. Lydia and Bill share this story of love, risk, and the possibilities of what church can be. The story offers a nudge for each of us to be courageous and powerful in the midst of these times seeping with white supremacy, political disenfranchisement, and a pandemic spreading death into all our lives.
Bill Wylie-Kellermann is a non-violent community activist and United Methodist pastor recently retired from St. Peter’s Episcopal Church Detroit. He has authored six books, among them most recently Principalities in Particular (Fortress, 2017), Where the Waters Go Around: Beloved Detroit (Cascade, 2017), and Dying Well: The Resurrected Life of Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann (2018). He is co-founder of Word and World: A Peoples’ School and adjunct faculty at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit. He’s been engaged in direct action for justice and peace for 5 decades, most recently with the Michigan Poor People's Campaign. In Jesus, he bets his life on gospel non-violence, good news to the poor, Word made flesh, and freedom from the power of death.
Lydia Wylie-Kellermann is a mother, writer, and activist from southwest Detroit. She is the editor of Geez magazine, an ad-free, quarterly, print magazine at the intersection of art, activism, and spirit. She is also the editor of the forthcoming book The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids for a Just World (Broadleaf, 2021).
Join us Via Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/97275141173
Meeting ID: 972 7514 1173
Or Dial in:312-626-6799
CUUB Book Club
As a follow up to our book club discussion on the book "White Fragility", we would like to continue to have conversations on how we can be allies for racial justice. Join us on Zoom after service on Sunday, October 4th at noon if you are interested.
The Zoom link is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86116516453?pwd=dVZYbEpONFpEdjBieXNtVVFyNzllZz09 Password for the meeting is 865594
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress. Although white racial insulation is somewhat mediated by social class (with poor and working class urban whites being generally less racially insulated than suburban or rural whites), the larger social environment insulates and protects whites as a group through institutions, cultural representations, media, school textbooks, movies, advertising, and dominant discourses. Racial stress results from an interruption to what is racially familiar. In turn, whites are often at a loss for how to respond in constructive ways., as we have not had to build the cognitive or affective skills or develop the stamina that that would allow for constructive engagement across racial divides. leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium. This book explicates the dynamics of White Fragility and how we might build our capacity in the on-going work towards racial justice.
SJ Team to Sponsor ERACCE Workshop
Our Social Justice Team is hard at work making CUUB the place to be for effective action on important issues.
Past activities included a 2017 partnering with other organizations to hold the Love Rally at the mill pond to stand against hate and white supremacy & recently we participated in the Brighton Allies for Racial Justice vigil. Now CUUB SJ is hosting an online workshop for individuals and organizations across Livingston County.
This will be via Zoom on Wednesday, October 28th & Thursday, October 29th from 3-6 pm.
The goals are twofold: for individuals to deepen their understanding of systemic racism, and to strengthen connections between organizations in Livingston County through a shared experience.
The workshop will be facilitated by the Kalamazoo based group, ERACCE (Eliminating Racism and Creating/Celebrating Equity) which was founded in 2000 to help individuals and institutions understand the root causes of U.S. racism and develop strategies for dismantling systemic racism, specifically within our own organizations where we have the most impact.
So please mark your calendar TODAY and more information will be made available soon. If you have any questions on this or other SJ activities please please email Alicia Zemper at aliciazemper@gmail.com. Registration details to follow.
CUUB Healing Session
On September 27th at 1 pm CUUB will hold a healing session to give space for the congregation to process their feelings and needs around the process and decision to reduce the SE position and go into search for a full time minister. The point of the sessions will be for each person who wants to attend to be heard and to be able to make requests of the community so as we move forward we can recommit to our values and covenant once again to how we want to be in community with one another. In order to make sure we have the proper set up, we are asking that register if you plan to attend. The zoom link will be given out after registration.
Here is the link to register: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0scuGupjoqGtTKK3F045Je_i4eKbpCGzEH
