Video by Patrick Scriven
May 16, 2016 | Portland, Oregon
“We do need to be seen; we do need to see each other. If we can’t acknowledge the presence of another person and we just see the extreme left or the extreme right, I don’t know how we are going to find a way to get this to be the church that God calls us to be.”
Rev. DJ del Rosario shares an encounter with another delegate as he wrestles with how to honor diversity and see the movement of the Spirit.
As a denomination, we are having an extremely difficult time seeing the ‘shades’ of our faith, seeing the divine image in every human being. People of color, people who are LGBTQI, people who are Native American and indigenous, people who are ‘different’ from the primarily white, American, first world, male, hetero-normative, gender-conforming majority in the church are indeed invisible, silenced, excluded, vilified, shamed and hated by the majority, right in front of our eyes at General Conference, all in the name of God. Our outdated, unwieldy and oppressive denominational structure is not capable of bringing about the necessary and real substantive change the UMC so desparately needs.