All About the Beloved Community Staff Team

Lia Rivamonte, Beloved Community Staff and Communications Team

As we begin the new church year, we are reminded that Unity is rich in numerous opportunities to be together as a congregation in all the ways that matter — joy, pain, grief, celebration, worship, social justice — and in learning about ourselves and one another. The arrival of Rev. Oscar brings our congregation an especially charged atmosphere of promise and renewal. The Beloved Community Staff Team (BCST) is already at work exploring opportunities for deeper connection for this new year.

What is the BCST?
The BCST was initiated in 2016 by senior co-ministers Rob and Janne Eller-Isaacs to coordinate and sustain efforts across the congregation that explore and deepen learning explicitly through the lens of antiracist multiculturalism. Aspiring to achieve the Beloved Community, prophetic practice — developing meaningful ways to integrate our values into our day-to-day lives to make qualitative changes in our souls—is a constant. The BCST serves to expand and strengthen our collective capacity for antiracist multicultural understanding, and ensures that this remains foundational across the congregation from how we operate to our programs and activities, embedding our antiracist multicultural Ends throughout congregational life. 

It was the BCST, for example, that:

• Implemented congregation-wide learning opportunities with Team Dynamics that sharpened our awareness and understanding of intersectionality and dominant culture.
• Created the Double Helix Model interlacing faith formation and spiritual practice with antiracist multiculturalism. 
• Worked closely with the Ministerial Search Team to engage the congregation in examining biases surrounding identity and expectations for a senior minister. 

Under Rev. KP’s steadfast, inspired leadership, the BCST is committed to 1) critical discernment — keeping in mind the larger historical implications of this work, 2) connection — sustaining our humanity and empathy towards one another, 3) tracking hypocrisy — aligning what we say with what we do and noticing when we have failed, and 4) hope — empowering our creativity to reimagine the future in building the Beloved Community. 

The Unity Ends Statements that ignite the BCST work are:

• Know each other in all our fullness.
• Create an ever-widening circle of belonging for all people.
• Create brave space for racial healing and dismantling the dominant culture.

“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” — bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

Who is in the BCST?
The Executive Team (ET), staff members, and lay leaders make up the BCST. The ET: Rev. KP Hong, Minister of Faith Formation; Laura Park, Executive Director; and now senior minister Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair. Staff members are Rev. Lara Cowtan, Minister of Congregational Care; and Drew Danielson, Coordinator of Youth and Campus Ministries. Lay member Angela Wilcox serves as project manager and scribe.

To better inform the congregation about this work, former BCST members Erika Sanders and Pauline Eichten created the Beloved Community Communications Team (BCCT). The team has been at work for over seven years and is charged with the task of sharing stories of the struggles, questions, and collaborations coming out of the multicultural work at Unity and in the wider world of our faith and city. The current team includes Shelley Butler, Becky Gonzalez-Campoy, Marjorie Otto, Suki Sun, Ray Wiedmeyer, and me, team leader and BCST liaison. Guided by the work of the BCST, the BCCT is responsible for collecting and writing Beloved Community News articles and blog posts that focus on the issues, ideas, and challenges of the antiracist multiculturalism work, and for positing questions and engaging in reflection that offers deeper understanding and multiple perspectives.

Complexity is our only safety and love is the only key to our maturity. —James Baldwin

Antiracist multiculturalism work is inherently complex. As much as we wish it were simple — “love is love,” “we are one,” and numerous other aphoristic phrases we employ that invite complacency, to build the Beloved Community is to embrace the many layers of identity and experience that each of us represents. To dig down into our own human existence and examine ways to “know one another in all our fullness” is often difficult and sometimes painful, revealing uncomfortable truths about ourselves and how we influence others to the good or ill, but ultimately redemptive. 

The BCCT would like to hear your story! What illuminates your commitment to creating an antiracist multicultural community? Share a story, image, and/or video in the All Our Fullness program, or just get in touch to let us know you are interested in working with us: [email protected].

In this new church year, may we be guided by our faith and connected in love as we aspire to build the Beloved Community.