Contemporary racial history of an African American pastor in a local congregation through shared anamnesis : overhearing and evaluating a pastor’s experience of racism.

This project aimed to assist Black and white Greater Houston pastors desiring personal, congregational, and community transformation to embody the Great Commandment by seeing, hearing, and confronting racism more clearly. The five-week seminar (held once per week for 120 minutes), “A LUVE Talk on Racial History,” focused on exploring a local Greater Houston African American pastor’s racial history by listening, understanding, validating, and evaluating (LUVE Talk) the pastor’s experience with racism. The project measured the impact of theological and biblically based remembering of racial history through the perspective of an African American pastor in relation to identifying and confronting racism. The Great Commandment served as a key biblical passage studied. The seminar also explored the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on contemporary pastoral remembrance of racial history. Participants examined personal, church, and community racial histories. The final seminar explored a biblical model for embracing unity, considering the African American pastor and participants’ contextualized and shared racial histories. Opportunities for participants to explore their racial history included developing a racial autobiography, church racial history, and community racial history (these opportunities were for the participants’ usage and not a part of data collection for the project). For data collection purposes, participants completed an online pre- and post-racial history survey (with reflection and discussion questions). After each seminar session, participants also completed a weekly online reflection journal assessment. Through a mixed-method research approach, comparing participants’ survey responses with the control group, the results indicate an increase in racial history awareness, leading to pastors identifying and confronting racism more clearly.