Episode 5: Racial Justice in Largely White Contexts with Rev. Winter Hamilton

About This Episode

Host Kenneth Pruitt interviews Rev. Winter Hamilton of Manchester United Methodist Church in St. Louis. Hamilton is an Ordained Deacon. Together they talk about the possibilities of engaging with racial justice and equity even when living in a predominantly white area.

“It’s really easy to think about us versus them. I get in a lot of conversations with members of my church where they say, 'but those kids in the city ... ' and I say, 'I’m sorry. Didn’t you mean our kids?' And they get a little confused and say, 'No, no, no. Those kids ...' and I say, 'You mean our kids. Right? Because I live in the city, and I’m also a member of your church. And my kids live in the city. So those are our kids.' Seeing as our identity in Christ is supposed to come before our identity in the state or the city. I’m very comfortable saying that those are our children. That’s a big piece of this. Helping people understand that those are our kids.”

“The focus of pastoral and prophetic happening at the same time is really one of the lines I have to walk the best. I can’t just get up in the pulpit at 9:30 in the morning and say, 'Black lives matter.' I will be asking people to jump so far that they will break a leg, and they will no longer walk. They will no longer walk with me or with each other on that journey. That’s not everybody that I’m talking about but there’s enough that it matters. So there has to be another way that we can speak about lives, about Blackness, about Whiteness, about mercy, justice, about what it means to know ourselves as Christians. And that’s the heart of it.”

In This Episode

1:25 Surprised by Ministry Calling
5:40 Using Your Poor Kid to Teach my Rich Kid a Lesson
7:00 Urban Forum’s Influence
8:15 One for the Crow Plant-Space
11:45 Shifting the Mindset From Acts of Mercy to Doing Real Justice
13:30 Balancing the Pastoral and Prophetic
17:00 Being a Mother
23:00 Work Moving Forward