Racial Audit Implementation Team Update - June 2025
Reflection on Repentance
June 2025 | Ian Carlos Urriola
Note: In June 2023, the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) Board of Directors established the Racial Audit Implementation Team to carry forward the recommendations from the comprehensive Racial Audit. This work represents our deep commitment to becoming an anti-racist organization. Rev. Anna Swygert is a member of that team, and this reflection is part of our collective journey to name, confront, and transform the white dominant culture within MFSA. It emerges from ongoing conversations centered on six key themes/patterns of white supremacy identified within our organization. These are the entrenched patterns we are actively working to disrupt as we move toward the liberation and equity we seek.
We are sharing these reflections and insights publicly with our movement because accountability, transparency, and shared learning are essential to dismantling white supremacy. We know that transformation does not happen in isolation. By sharing our process, struggles, and growth, we hope to invite our broader community into this work with us—offering tools, solidarity, and space for mutual reflection as we continue building a more just and faithful movement.
Much of this reflection builds off the work of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (Beacon Press, 2022). For a more in-depth understanding of a holistic approach to repentance at the individual, interpersonal, and institutional level, go to your local library and check out Rabbi Ruttenberg’s text or order it for yourself at your local independent bookstore. Rabbi Ruttenberg also offers her scholarship on a weekly basis through her Substack, Life is a Sacred Text at lifeisasacredtext.com
“The time has now come!” he said to the people. “Creator’s good road is right in front of you. It is time to return to the right ways of thinking and doing! Put your trust in this good story I am bringing you.” (War Cub Tells the Good Story 1:15, First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament)
These are the first words spoken by Jesus in Mark’s Gospel. Other English translations of this proclamation render it, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” Before Jesus says anything else, he calls for the people to repent.
The MFSA Anti-Racist Audit Implementation Team has spent considerable time exploring what repentance, as an organization and institution, can and ought to look like as we seek to guide MFSA toward living into and meaningfully addressing the findings of the MFSA Anti-Racist Audit.
In many Christian spaces, repentance is misunderstood. The most vocal proponents of Christian Nationalism wield repentance like a cudgel, striving to beat their followers into conformity and submission and cast out or destroy anyone who fails to conform. In liberal or progressive Christian spaces, the reaction to this toxic expression and understanding of repentance might be (understandably so!) shying away from talking about repentance altogether. Or perhaps it’s wielded in the same way—taking the form of purity tests that must be passed to truly be a part of “the cause”.
Of course, in both kinds of spaces, repentance often gets conflated with forgiveness as a way to sweep abusive and predatory behavior under the rug for the sake of preserving the power of powerful people.
All of these approaches to repentance miss the mark. Repentance is central to the message of Jesus, but it’s not a tool to be used to enforce conformity or purity. Likewise, repentance offers nothing meaningful when understood as a simple list of checkboxes that must be checked off in order to attain forgiveness and redemption.
In the Hebrew Bible, the word that is most often translated into English as “repentance” is teshuvah, which has a connotation of returning or turning around or away. Turning around or away from idols or idolatry and returning to God. In the New Testament, the word most often translated into English as “repentance” is metanoia, which also has a connotation of total transformation or reorientation. Re-ordering your life from the death-dealing powers and principalities of the world.
As we read through the MFSA Anti-Racist Audit, the Implementation Team is uncovering and learning that whiteness and white supremacy is an idol that has, for too long, captured the worship and admiration of too many people and organizations. MFSA is not exempt from this.
Whiteness, as it turns out, has very little to do with the amount of melanin a person has or doesn’t have in their skin. Whiteness is a foundation of sand upon which so much of our social order is built. Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, in her work I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2019), identifies four “pillars of whiteness” that work together to prop up our sin-sick social order:
Ego-ethnocentrism: the idea that my group is the only group that matters and that everything else must acquiesce to the needs of my group.
Selective sight: the systematic and intentional refusal to identify and name errors and harmful behavior of my group or its leaders.
Trust in authority: the individuals in whom my group has entrusted leadership act in ways that are necessarily best for my group.
Conformity: action or behavior that strays from my group’s established norms cannot be tolerated.
The idol of whiteness requires all four of these pillars to function with any power or effect in our social order, lest the sand upon which it’s built shifts and causes the whole structure to come toppling down. Repenting, or turning away, from whiteness requires critically examining how we, individually and in our own interpersonal relationships as well as organizationally and institutionally passively and actively allow these pillars to keep standing.
The question for MFSA remains: What does meaningful repentance from whiteness look like as an organization? What does it look like for an institution to repent?
The Anti-Racist Audit Implementation Team is working with the text of the audit to come up with and implement concrete actions and policy changes to get MFSA closer to that goal (and if you have suggestions of what that could look like, we’d love to hear them—you can email us at mfsa@mfsaweb.org). But, regardless of what specific changes emerge from our study and learning, we have a faint sense of what MFSA can look for to know that the transformation and complete re-orientation away from whiteness is complete.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, in her book On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (Beacon Press, 2022) reminds us that medieval rabbi, philosopher, and physician Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) offered his disciples a framework for repentance that puts the onus on restoring, as much as is possible, life and dignity to those who are harmed rather than centering the redemptive narrative of the one who does the harming. Maimonides, she recalls, understood repentance to be fulfilled when the perpetrator finds themselves in a situation with the power and ability to create the same harm as they did in the past, but, this time, chooses not to.
MFSA is implicated in racist and white supremacist abuse experienced by countless individuals and communities. Through both action and inaction, MFSA has allowed the pillars of whiteness to prop up a death-dealing idol. At times, MFSA has directed its devotion to and has been consumed by that idol.
May Jesus’ proclamation, which echoes across the ages, fall on our ears and fuel meaningful change in all of our lives.
“The time has now come!” he said to the people. “Creator’s good road is right in front of you. It is time to return to the right ways of thinking and doing! Put your trust in this good story I am bringing you.”
Ian Carlos Urriola (he/him/his) is the Associate Pastor at Burnt Hills United Methodist Church in the Upper New York Annual Conference. A lifelong United Methodist, he has held leadership roles at every level of the denomination’s polity and structure. Additionally, Ian has a Master of Divinity from Wesley Theological Seminary and a Bachelor of Arts in Music from American University, both in Washington, DC. He lives in the NY Capital Region with his partner, Jo, and their ever-growing collection of plant friends.