Beloved Community Committee

Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of the ‘fight with fire’ method which you suggest is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community. Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy, but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that. Yes, love—which means understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill, even for one’s enemies—is the solution to the race problem.

—Martin Luther King, Jr., 1957

You might have heard the term "beloved community" in our church and in Unitarian Universalist settings many times before, but did you know that the phrase was made famous during the civil rights movement? The term was created by Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce, and then used by black theologians such as Howard Thurman, Benjamin Mays, and Martin Luther King, Jr. As the above quote illustrates, they envisioned a cooperative world of mutual respect and love as the ultimate goal of the black freedom struggle. Unitarian Universalists have used it since to refer both to racial justice and to our dream of creating loving spiritual collectives in our congregations and the wider world.

The Beloved Community Committee uses the term to refer to our hopes for building a multiracial, multicultural world, both inside and outside the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville.

Beloved Community Committee Charge

August 2011

The Beloved Community Committee is charged with:

  1. Helping the congregation build and embrace a just and multi-cultural world. This ongoing spiritual work includes the following:
    • educating ourselves about the history of oppression and freedom from oppression;
    • encouraging examination of individual and congregational processes to facilitate ongoing self-assessment;
    • taking action within the congregation and the larger community to become a fully realized anti-racist, anti-oppression, multicultural community.
  2. Sponsoring classes, sermons, retreats and ongoing activities to engage our community in discovery around historical issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender and social justice - in our world, our country, our town, our denomination and within our church. We engage the whole congregation in active exploration of what it takes to build the fully realized beloved community we dream about.

One Board member shall serve on the Beloved Community Committee.

Members

  • Kyle Armstrong
  • Anastasia Curwood (Chair and Board Liaison)
  • Mary Early-Zald
  • Emily Green-Cain
  • Anna Belle Leiserson (Social Justice Liaison)
  • Jason Shelton (Staff Liaison)

Current Announcements


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