The Adult Forum will be delivered via a Zoom Meeting on Wednesday evenings at 7 pm. Information on how to connect to the Zoom meeting will be shared via a Bethel Connection email. If you are not receiving the Bethel Connection emails, please contact the church office office @ bethelstl.org to be added to the email list.
WEDNESDAY April 7 & 14, 2021, 7:00 – 8:00pm
“Best Practices for Healthy Conversations about Racial Justice”
Dr. Joe Bartzel, Bethel member and Visiting Research Fellow at Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics
Questions about racial justice have become prominent in American public discourse in recent years. Here in the St. Louis region, protests following the shooting of Michael Brown brought the region’s history of racial discrimination against African American residents to the forefront of public attention, and race became a fixture of both public and private conversations among many St. Louisans. Even so, having healthy conversations about the fraught topic of race can be difficult. How can we conduct those conversations productively across the many divisions that often impede mutual understanding—divisions in race itself, as well as in worldview, life experience, and the many other differences that often lead conversations about race to produce more heat than light? We will examine best practices for healthy and productive conversations about race, and the place that communities like Bethel might have in fostering those conversations in our local community.
WEDNESDAY, April 21 & 28, 2021, 7:00 -8:00 pm
“A New ‘Women’s Lectionary‘“
Dr. Wil Gafney, Professor of Hebrew Bible, Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas and former teacher of LCM/LuMin Campus Pastor Tina Reyes
After Dr. Mary Streufert’s presentation and a few other observations about the *use and misuse* of the traditional lectionary, Matt Bear researched Dr. Gafney’s work on the Women’s Lectionary. She is nearing completion of that work. As she lifts up the many named and unnamed Biblical women and their stories, especially in the Hebrew Bible, she is motivated by a deeper purpose: making the claim that we are misled and hurt by sacred books when we read texts out of context without familiarity with the stories, cultures, and world views that give rise to the particular text. She would like to see a focus on Biblical literacy for authentic interpretations. There are also other issues that such a lectionary revision addresses. We will base her two-session Zoom Forum presentation on the Virtual Rector’s Forum at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, CA with Fr. Mike Kinman, former Wash U Episcopal Chaplain at Rockwell House next door to LCM/LuMin. For advance viewing, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33niWbSzFjo