February 21, 2023
The Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), an independent intersectional justice organization with ties to the United Methodist Church, will be holding a webinar to share the results of a three-year organizational racial audit that the organization has conducted to find the places where it has been complicit with white-supremacy and make recommendations for improvement. The webinar will begin the process of working with those recommendations to live into these anti-racist commitments.
The audit includes research and study of the organization’s history and connections to other organizations, recognizes past patterns and themes, and ultimately offers a set of recommendations. As the audit report states, ”MFSA seeks to understand more clearly the patterns of white dominance and seeks to begin transforming our organizational structure and culture to be anti-racist.”
While the audit is focused on MFSA, others in the United Methodist Connection are invited to participate in the learnings and possibly use it as a springboard for evaluating white dominance and historic racism in other church related organizations.
This webinar will be held on Monday, February 27, 2023, at 4:00 p.m. PST and 2:00 p.m. HST. It will be an introductory overview session of the report from the audit team, including the themes and recommendations of the report.
Following the February 27th release of the audit report, an implementation team will be formed to shepherd the process of implementing the recommendations adopted by the MFSA Board and Program Council.
MFSA invites others — individuals, churches, and other organizations — to participate in this work. That may mean studying the report and considering how such a study could help you and your organization be more anti-racist, or it could mean joining with MFSA in their intersectional justice focus.
Over the next several years MFSA will be working to implement the recommendations through a cycle of education, implementation, and self-evaluation that looks at organizational structure, governance, relationships, and programming.
Originally known as the Methodist Federation for Social Service, the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) was founded in 1907 by several Methodist Episcopal clergy to direct church attention to the enormous human suffering among the working class. Immediately the Federation became Methodism’s unofficial rallying point for the Social Gospel and achieved the adoption of the first denominational social creed in 1908.
