From Commemoration to Conversion: Black History and the Work of Renewal

Black History Month arrives each year at a difficult intersection.

On the one hand, it calls us to remember. On the other, it often finds us exhausted—morally tired, spiritually fractured, politically polarized, and unsure how to speak truth without inflaming wounds. Many in the Church feel trapped between silence and slogans, between fear of saying the wrong thing and fatigue from saying nothing at all.

But the Church was never meant to be paralyzed by the world’s noise. Nor was she called to mirror its outrage. She was called to be a hospital for the wounded, not a courtroom for the accused—and certainly not an echo chamber for the age’s competing ideologies.

Black History Month, rightly received, is not a cultural obligation. It is a spiritual summons.

Remembering as a Theological Act
In the Christian vision, remembering is never neutral. Scripture remembers so that truth may heal and prevail. The Church remembers not to curate nostalgia or inculturate victimhood, but to participate in redemption. Memory, when ordered toward God, becomes medicine.

Black history is not merely a record of injustice endured or achievements attained. It is a witness carried in bodies, prayers, songs, tears, endurance, faith, and unfinished lament. It is history marked by suffering—but also by spiritual depth, perseverance, hope against hope, and a stubborn refusal to surrender dignity even when denied by law, church, or culture.
To remember this history faithfully is not to weaponize it, sentimentalize it, or reduce it to political talking points. It is to stand before it with reverence—and to allow it to interrogate our theology, our ecclesiology, and our posture toward suffering.

A Church Tempted by Distortions
We must be honest: the Church today is weary. Polarization has hollowed out our moral imagination. Justice is often treated as a slogan rather than a vocation. Silence is baptized as “wisdom,” while outrage is baptized as “faithfulness.”

Both are distortions.

The Gospel does not permit performative justice that requires no repentance, no endurance, no love of enemy. But neither does it permit a neutrality that refuses to name wounds for fear of discomfort. Christ never healed by denial. He healed by truth spoken in love, wounds touched with mercy, and lives restored through communion.

When justice is severed from the Eucharistic life of the Church, it becomes brittle, ideological, and exhausting. When mercy is severed from truth, it becomes evasive and sentimental. The Church is called to neither extreme.

Justice at the Table, Not the Tribunal
Orthodox theology insists that justice is not first a legal category—it is a relational reality. True justice seeks restoration, not retribution; healing, not humiliation. At the Eucharistic table, there are no abstractions. We do not encounter “issues” there. We encounter Christ—and, in Him, one another. We are confronted with the reality that every human being is an icon, bearing the image of God, however obscured by sin, history, or violence.

Black history confronts the Church with an uncomfortable truth: there have been times when the Body of Christ failed to recognize Christ in the wounded body of its neighbor. Repentance here is not performative guilt. It is conversion of vision—learning again how to see.

From Commemoration to Conversion
Black History Month should move the Church beyond commemoration toward conversion.
This requires:

• Ecclesial humility: acknowledging where the Church has been complicit, silent, or distorted.
• Cultural sobriety: refusing both ideological capture and escapist spirituality.
• Pastoral courage: creating space for lament without rushing to resolution.
• Leadership responsibility: forming communities that can hold grief, tell truth, and practice reconciliation over time.

Justice, in the Christian sense, is slow work. It cannot be microwaved. It requires formation, patience, prayer, and shared life. It asks leaders not for statements alone, but for shepherding. Not for perfect language, but for faithful presence.

A Different Way Forward
The Renewal Center speaks often of renewal—not as reinvention, but as right re-ordering. Black History Month invites this same work.
It invites the Church to:

• Recover lament as prayer, not protest alone.
• Resist false binaries that demand allegiance without discernment.
• Practice justice that flows from communion, not coercion.
• Lead with spiritual depth rather than cultural anxiety.

This is not withdrawal from the world. It is deeper engagement—on Christ’s terms.

Let's us pray together:
To the weary: may you find rest that does not numb your conscience.
To the wounded: may your pain be honored, not rushed.
To leaders: may courage be joined with humility.
To the Church: may we learn again how to see Christ in one another.
May our remembering become healing.
May our truth-telling be soaked in mercy.
May our pursuit of justice be shaped at the Table, under the Cross, and toward the hope of resurrection.
For renewal is not forgetting the past.
It is allowing God to redeem it—together.

I am renewal.