Home assignment is full of meeting and spending time with people. We make new acquaintances and renew old ones. Home assignment is also full of opportunities to get to know, on a more personal and deeper level, people whom we may not have seen, yet are a part of our global human family and/or our global Christian family. [Please see: Our Global Families: Christians Embracing Common Identity in a Changing World]
This Home Assignment was our time for Sankofa. Sankofa is a West African word meaning “looking backward to move forward.” We just ‘looked back’ on our 60+ years of life as we experienced the ECC’s interactive Sankofa Journey, one that helped us to recognize and to challenge our interpretation of our knowledge, and lack of knowledge, of the history concerning the hundreds of years of racial injustice to the present-day reality of racism and violent oppression toward people of color in the U.S. We spent three days with 26 new friends on this bus trip from Chicago to Birmingham, to Montgomery, to Selma, to Memphis, and back to Chicago, and were moved by the Holy Spirit to open our hearts in order to deepen and broaden our love toward, and for, others; to open our minds, our awareness and our understanding to recognize the truth; to open our eyes and be willing to truly see others; and to admit our biases and strongly held opinions so that they can be confronted, repented from, and removed.
Sankofa was not just a “looking back” at our past and present history in the U.S. but was also a confirmation of God’s call on our lives and ministry in Colombia to “move forward” on our journey of walking alongside the Covenant of Colombia in addressing the past and present realities of social injustice, racial prejudice and the inequality of personal and corporate rights. Whether we are in Colombia or in the U.S., our resolve has been deepened through hearing God’s heart for justice in the narratives of our new friends whom we met on the Sankofa Journey. We are determined and energized to press on and to move forward in responsibility to better address racial righteousness in the church, in the nations, and in our world.
(please visit https://covchurch.org/justice/racial-righteousness/sankofa/)
