If you’re reading this newsletter about justice for people in UCC churches, you probably won’t be surprised to know that I spend a lot of time in meetings. Meetings to get to know new people, meetings to plan worship services, meetings to prepare for more meetings, meetings during which we invite people into our justice work or demand that elected officials make choices that will best serve their neighbors near and far.  

I imagine you spend a lot of time in meetings, too, whether as part of your justice work, your church life, or both! But if you’re like me, you probably also spend some time wondering if all those meetings are really worth it. You might be like me in wondering whether all of those meetings get in the way of enacting our commitment to justice. 

This 8-minute video of a recent speech from Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, titled “It’s Time for a Meeting!” is causing me to rethink what “meetings” really are. The video is well-worth the watch, but to summarize, Dr. Barber chronicles a list of meetings that led to fundamental change: everything from the liberation of the people of Isarel from Egypt and the dry bones in a valley rising up to Abolitionists in the 1850s and fair wage organizers in the 1920s and people sitting at a Greensboro lunch counter. Dr. Barber reminds us that these meetings changed the heart of the nation. He reminds us that fundamental change takes everybody. “No one person can do it alone,” he says. “It takes a meeting.”  

 

Because there is work to be done, it’s time to have a meeting. Because there are people who don’t earn enough to live, it’s time to have a meeting. Because we’re hurtling over the cliff of irreversible climate change, it’s time to have a meeting. Because people need health care and good housing and good jobs with fair wages and voting rights and quality education and immigration reform and indigenous rights – it’s time to have a meeting.  

 

The meeting that Dr. Barber invites us to is the Moral March on Washington on June 18, 2022. I hope you’ll consider joining poor and low-wealth people, as well as faith and moral leaders, from around the country. Learn more and register here. I especially want to invite Massachusetts residents to join this open house on April 9 to learn more about the campaign locally. Please be in touch with me if you’re interested but unable to attend. 

 

I also hope you’ll join me in considering how the meetings that fill up our schedules might help us live out God’s call to justice. How might our meetings model equitable, democratic decision-making? How might our meetings build community? How might our meetings enact anti-racism? How might our meetings invite new people into our movements for justice?