Who doesn’t love a good news story! Currently, there is a lot to celebrate starting with leadership roles in some institutions being filled by Indigenous leaders.
The United Church of Canada has a “wonderful” news story. In July of this year the Church elected Rev. Dr. Carmen Lansdowne, Kwisa’lakw, 47, as its 44th Moderator for the next three years.
Dr. Lansdowne is “the first Indigeous woman to spiritually lead Canada’s largest Protestant denomination.” As a Heiltsuk woman she has spoken about how the restructuring of the United Church was not fully done in consultation with the Indigenous Church and has left some shortfalls to the Church’s committments. She suggests that this is worth a new conversation.
In her words…
My feeling is that some of the divisions that we’re seeing across Canada — across political divides, across racialized communities, the increase in racism, the increase in classism, the ways people are showing up for protests — are symptoms of some wider, systemic social justice issues around how we’re all impacted by global, political-economic structures.
And the church has a really strong history on social justice, and that’s obviously the work that I feel called to do as a theologian and as somebody in outreach ministry. I think that if the church endorsed raising our voices to reclaim some moral authority around economic systems of injustice in this country, that would go a long way to heal some of the political divides. So that’s something I’m interested in listening to see if the church feels ready to have those kinds of conversations, too.