Upcoming Classes and Events
Save the dates
Check back on this website for more information about the upcoming 2025 Social Justice events:
- January 29 , 6:30-8p – Dine and Discovery Speaker
- February 13 – Lunch & Learn on Racial Justice
- March 12 – April 9 – A book study, The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee will be offered 6:30-8p
- May – Dine and Discovery TBD
- June – Celebrate PRIDE month
- July – August – Sneakers with Soul
- September – Tower Grove Pride Event
From Feb. 23-March 30, please join the Alpha Class as they study the book, Evicted Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.
Description: Along with the book’s compelling stories of people experiencing eviction, we will learn what eviction looks like in St. Louis. We will study this complex issue through reading, statistics, discussion and a simulation game. Finally, we will reflect on how the Bible calls us to respond.
All are welcome!
Book: Please secure your copy of this book from your local library or preferred book resource.
Join us for a 4-week Social Justice Lenten group which will be discussing the book “The Sum of Us” by Heather McGhee.
Description: Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy–and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common root problem: racism. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out? McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm–the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others.
Along the way, she meets white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams, and their shot at better jobs to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is the story of how public goods in this country–from parks and pools to functioning schools–have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.
But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: gains that come when people come together across race, to accomplish what we simply can’t do on our own. During this time of Lent, this book discussion is intended to help us begin to shift our thinking to how we as a collective body with Christ might make a positive difference by coming together and move away from a belief system rooted in scarcity to positively impacting the lives of all of us by discovering how we can all prosper by living a life out of abundance.
All are welcome!
Book: Please secure your copy of this book from your local library or preferred book resource.
