50th Anniversary Study Guide on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
Upon the 50th anniversary of King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail in 2013, Christian Churches Together leaders representing several member communions collaborated to create a study guide as a tool for U.S. Christians, to re-invigorate, or in many cases initiate, a conversation about the present reality of racism in church and society. The hope is that these conversations may move God’s people to take action in their own context to address the sin of racism and its ramifications.
The impetus for this study guide came from the 2012 CCT convocation in Memphis, where Participants together drafted a document titled One in Christ for the Sake of All (see below). This call to action—in addition to leading to the creation of the above resource—urges U.S. churches to:
1. Examine their participation in the structures and personal choices that ignore the reality of poverty and perpetuate the effects of racism.
2. Embrace one or more of the initiatives from the CCT Statement on Poverty as a church wide priority which seek the elimination of poverty in this nation.
3. Partner with another church who is representative of being an “unlikely partner” in our anti-poverty work, so that our common witness may be to the God who reconciles us in Christ.
4. Proclaim publicly, in their own ways and in alliances of joint action, that the new forms of racist and unChristian behavior toward the immigrant, the impoverished and the non-Christian are abhorrent to God and a denial of the grace which God in Christ Jesus offers to everyone.
5. Seek ways to collaborate in their anti-racism and cross-cultural ministries and to share their resources and experiences in this work with each other and, as appropriate, with multi-religious partners.
6. Be mutually accountable to each other by regular reporting of their actions on these recommendations through a forum identified by Christian Churches Together.