What is the 1Cor13project?
1Cor13 project is a collaborative resource to center the health, healing, and wholeness of Black people in particular. It intends to counteract the debilitating effects of the American church’s complicity in 400 years of failure to love black people.
It is a healing space for Black people to locate sources, practices, and opportunities to heal the wounds of racial trauma.
It offers materials, processes, and products that equip non-Black Allies and Freedom Fighters to actively practice repentance that leads to faithful participation in the flourishing of Black people.
Ways of rectifying the Dismemberment of Black people and bringing their songs, expressions, God-talk, history, and breath into rightful membership in the Church in America.
Glossary
This glossary is to clarify the ways these words operate for the purposes of this project.
Ally:
Allies are non-black people who have become aware of racial injustice and are in the process of reading and engaging to gain greater understanding. Allies are preparing to physically engage in the work for racial equity.
Cross pollination:
The process of sharing and cultivating new information about Black people that prioritizes the health, healing, and wholeness of Black people alongside non-Black people.
Dis-memberment:
The result of the American church’s unloving posture toward Black people that demands racial segregation in church, worship and religious life. (Note: The dis-memberment of black people does not dismember them from the Church universal but only from the body of the American church.)
Excavating:
Excavating is the process whereby people, churches, and institutions examine their historical relationship with Black people to discover their participation in 400 years of unloving. Excavation is essential in the process of rehearsing for repentance.
Freedom Fighter:
Freedom Fighters are non-Black people who are informed, trained and doing the internal and external work to center the health, healing and wholeness of Black people and dismantle racially unjust systems.
Not Now/Not Yet/Not Ever:
Non-Black people who for a variety of reasons are unwilling or not ready to do the work of centering the health, healing, and wholeness of Black people.
Rehearsing:
The process of constantly repeating and revisiting the details of a church’s, an institution’s, or an individual's unloving practices until it produces evidence of Godly sorrow that leads to repentance.
Re-membering:
Engaging Black people in a new way based on the revelation of dismemberment and the new information that comes from reminding. The need for Black people, Black thought, and Black ways invites the body of Christ to come back into membership.
Re-minding:
Planting new information into the soil after excavating the soil and rehearsing. The intent is to contribute to a new mind or a new way of thinking and acting toward Black people based on new information.
Repentance:
The process whereby we are confronted with our unloving ways and move from acknowledgment to sorrow (Isaiah’s “Woe is me”) to seek out new information in order to replace unloving practices that communicate “we have no need of you” with loving practices that confirm “we are indeed one body,” according to 1 Corinthians 12.