The Beloved Community Fellowship for Racial Justice will provide intensive training and learning from experts for a cohort of United Methodist leaders who are longing to work for racial justice. The 18-month leadership training program will culminate in the opportunity for Fellows to design and implement a racial justice initiative together with Great Plains funding. Please note: The program is on hold until staff transitions have been completed.
“Beloved community’ is a term that characterizes God’s dream for us,” Luther Smith writes in his book Hope is Here! Martin Luther King Jr. used this term for casting his vision of community based on love, respect, justice, reconciliation and non-violent protest. King was indebted to Josiah Royce, who coined the term ‘beloved community’ to emphasize the fundamental role of community in shaping moral persons.” During the Civil Rights Movement, King described the creation of beloved community as the end goal of nonviolence. Through bus boycotts, marches, sit-ins, imprisonment, voter registration drives, and careful organizing, hundreds of thousands of people came together to move the nation closer to realizing God’s dream.
While the vision of beloved community easily and naturally reflects the teachings of Jesus, it is a concept that transcends Christianity and includes people of all faiths, cultures, and convictions. Decades after the Civil Rights Movement, ordinary people across every difference can again be unified in radical love and action through a pursuit of beloved community, but this will require leadership.
The purpose of the Fellowship is to bring together a community of committed Christians who will lead the people of the Great Plains towards beloved community and racial justice today.
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