The Way - Part 1

The next few posts will be a sermon I preached late this summer.

On January 16, 1927 – less than 100 years ago – a church in Shrewsberry, Massachusetts, named Fairlawn Community Methodist Episcopal Church, laid a cornerstone.  In it, they stored items that were important to their church’s story.

Decades later, after the church had become Wellspring Community UMC, they were preparing to move to a new building. They dug up the cornerstone to move it to the new location, and they discovered what was inside the “time capsule” of the cornerstone.  Most of the contents was what you might expect: Conference Journals, some 1926 change, including a buffalo nickel, newspaper articles, bulletins, and list of the founding members.  Along with these expected items were multiple pamphlets and magazine published by the Ku Klux Klan.

The church decided to keep the information about their discovery to themselves.

In 2020, the Wellspring Community UMC members voted to close the church. In July of that year, their District Superintendent was gathering information from the church for the Conference Archives and found the contents of the cornerstone. She told Bishop Sudarshana Devadhar, who later said, “Fighting racism requires truth telling, confession, and repentance from us all.  We lift up this church’s history not to shame them, but as a lesson for all of us in the importance of facing the past and reconciling with it. We must start by understanding our past; that is the only way we can hope to create a present where there is true racial justice.”

A resolution was passed at the 2020 New England Annual Conference to close the church and to place the assets of the church in a fund at the United Methodist Foundation of New England called the In Our Time Fund.  The purpose of the fund is to support and sustain anti-racism work.  In addition, a project called “Cornerstone: Claiming our past, building a better future” was established and led by the former church’s district to focus on racial justice and repentance.

I tell you this story because today I want to focus on how God works with and through churches like Wellspring United Methodist Church, the New England Annual Conference, and our church to bring about transformation in the world.