O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thy every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
(Lyrics from “America, the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates)

From Lake Shore Baptist Church to Fellow Community Members of Waco:

We live in a free nation the world looks to as an example. A place that declares all are created equal. Yet we have flaws God needs to help us mend. To quote novelist and playwright James Baldwin, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason: I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Although we have much to be proud of, we cannot ignore the experiences of Black people, Indigenous people and other people of color during the last 500 years. Worldwide collective action since the murder of George Floyd has caused us to look at how certain groups of people are treated. Voices of Black people, Indigenous people and other people of color are finally being heard. And the truth is they have been systematically and intentionally denied full inclusion in mainstream society. People of every faith tradition everywhere must ask how we can help bring about what we believe is favored by God.

We, the Lake Shore Baptist Church congregation, stand with those seeking racial justice.

We ask that all Christians remember Christ declared his stance on this issue when asked, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus replied with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In Biblical times, the Samaritan was the outcast, the despised, the Other, the less-than-equal, the less-than-free—the one most opposite to the ruling class. Yet he was a “neighbor” to the victim of violence. A modern-day version might name the “neighbor” a Black person, an undocumented person, a poor person, a member of the LGBTQA+ community, a person with a mental disability or an incarcerated person. Floyd was, and still is, our neighbor. And we must love our neighbors as we love ourselves, no matter how similar or different we believe they are. If we do not love our neighbors, then we are less than God believes we can be, less than God hopes for us.

Christ’s commandments focus on only one issue: Love. Love of God, love of neighbor. Jesus repeated this on his last night of his freedom before being taken by the Temple police, tortured and eventually—with the cooperation of Rome’s policing power—killed slowly. His final commandment before his arrest was: “Love one another.” We at Lake Shore Baptist Church are grappling with how to put feet on this ideal. We are not a monolithic community. But we believe Black lives matter, and those of Indigenous people and other people of color matter too, and we want to be anti-racist through words and deeds.

At minimum, let us join to take these three steps:

1. PRAY for the comfort and strength of Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color. They have navigated the evils of racism for centuries while believing our nation can and will live up to its ideals. It should not have taken video footage of a violent death and marches to get companies and institutions finally to commit to making their spaces inclusive.

2.And, after having prayed, READ. It is easy to absorb only what we see as truth. Read the works of people like Ibram X. Kendi, Lorena Oropeza, Oren Lyons, and Martin Luther King Jr., especially King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

3.Lastly, ACT: help make our nation a place of freedom and liberty for all. Our actions might involve donations, voting in local and national elections, taking part in peaceful demonstrations, and/or writing to local, state, or federal officials about policy reforms.

Three steps: Pray. Read. Act.

America! America! God mend thy every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

Adopted in a Congregational Meeting on July 22, 2020