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BISHOP'S OFFICE

A Reflection on Black History Month

Black History Month invites the Church not only to remember,
but to repent, to listen, and to see again.

At the center of Scripture stands a God who does not look away.

“I have observed the misery of my people …
I have heard their cry …
I know their suffering,
and I have come down to deliver them.”
(Exodus 3:7)

This is not a distant God. This is a God who enters pain, who stands with the wounded, who interrupts history with compassion.

Black spirituality was born from this holy interruption. From chains and cotton fields, from segregated streets and broken schools, a faith emerged that refused to surrender dignity. Songs became sermons. Tears became theology. The body became a testimony that said, “we are still here.”

The Civil Rights Movement was not first a political uprising; it was a spiritual awakening. The march was prayer in practice. The pulpit was for breath. The cruciform love was carried again in American history.

Leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and John Lewis did not ask merely for inclusion. They proclaimed a Gospel that refused to separate salvation from justice, or faith from flesh.

The people called Methodists in Ohio know this holy tension. Our Church learned early that faith could not remain neutral. From its beginnings, Ohio Methodists were shaped by the moral struggle of their time, standing repeatedly at the crossroads between accommodation and conscience.

For generations, the Ohio River became known as a “Jordan River” for those seeking freedom – not because water itself is holy, but because countless people trusted God more than fear as they crossed it. Along this river, churches and believers became part of a quiet but courageous network of resistance, shelter, and hope within the Underground Railroad.

In these hidden sanctuaries, faith learned how to whisper and how to wait. Churches became tunnels of mercy. Prayer became a map toward freedom, dignity, and racial justice.

Today, the river has not disappeared. It has simply changed its form. We stand before new waters: racial inequality that refuses to die, economic systems that sacrifice the poor, immigration policies that forget human faces, politics that trade truth for power, and a Church tempted to choose comfort over courage.

Exodus is not over. The cry still rises. And God is still speaking, “I have seen. I have heard. I have come down.” The question is not whether God sees suffering. The question is whether the Church still does. Diversity is not decoration. Inclusion is not charity. Justice is a practical divinity for all. They are the shape of obedience.

To honor Black History Month faithfully is to inherit its holy restlessness, to become a Church that refuses to cross rivers alone, that carries the wounded with us, that remembers the past not to glorify it, but to keep it from repeating.

The Jordan is still before us. The Spirit is still calling. And the future of the Gospel depends on whether we are willing, once again, to step into the water.