✊🏾 Answer Me, White Church! Answer Me! — A Black History Month call to truth-telling, repentance, and faithful repair: not performative religion, but justice, loving-kindness, and humility.

Worship Service – February 1, 2026 | Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany (Black History Month)

Bulletin – 02-01-2026

Scripture: Micah 6:1–8 (NRSV)

This Sunday at Holy Covenant United Church of Christ, worship met us online only due to inclement weather—yet the Spirit was anything but distant. In this livestream gathering, we entered the Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany carrying the sacred weight and living witness of Black History Month, listening for God’s voice not as comfort alone, but as holy summons. (Service date and context: February 1, 2026.)

Our worship opened with prayer that honored Black faith as communal lament and resilient hope—prayer that has sustained people through the impossible, becoming freedom songs and “coded maps to liberation.” From the first moments, we were invited to bring our whole selves—body, mind, and spirit—into a truth that does not flinch.

In the Call to the Heart, we named a cloud of witnesses—Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ruby Bridges, Pauli Murray, Fannie Lou Hamer, Sidney Poitier, Langston Hughes, John Lewis—each a living testimony that faithfulness is not passive. Their stories became our prayer: may we embody them, continue their work, and be courageous enough to finish what they started.

During our Black Christian History Moment, we honored James H. Cone, widely recognized as the father of Black Liberation Theology. In the Modern Lesson—adapted from Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree—we heard the sobering insistence that the church cannot claim reconciliation without truth, nor grace without aligning itself with the oppressed. Repentance, we were reminded, is not sentiment; it is turning.

Our scripture from Micah 6:1–8 brought the people to court—God pleading a case, demanding an answer, refusing religious theater. The prophet’s clarity landed like thunder and mercy at once: what does the Holy One require but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

In his sermon, “Answer Me, White Church! Answer Me!” Pastor Chris offered a courageous and necessary word for this season: that faith must disturb injustice, not bless it; that silence is not neutrality; and that the church’s credibility depends on truth-telling, repair, and the costly work of justice. The invitation was not to shame, but to transformation—moving from comfort to accountability, from performative gestures to lived solidarity.

Communion carried the same holy urgency. The table was proclaimed as a place where barriers are broken down, where the excluded are welcomed, and where we are strengthened for the work of justice, equity, and peace—nourished not for escape, but for faithful action in the world.

📖🙏 Order of Worship Highlights:

• Prelude: “Let Us Break Bread Together” (arr. D. Wyrtzen)
• Introit: “Salaam” (M. Samir)
• Call to the Heart: Black History Month litany of witnesses
• Hymn: “Come, All You People” (UYAI MOSE – Zimbabwe)
• Black Christian History Moment: James H. Cone
• Song: “I Love the Lord” (R. Smallwood)
• Modern Lesson: Adapted words from Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree
• Scripture: Micah 6:1–8
• Sermon: “Answer Me, White Church! Answer Me!” — Rev. Christopher Czarnecki
• Offertory Anthem: “Wade in the Water” (arr. D. Moore)
• Communion Music: “Let Us Break Bread Together”
• Hymn: “We Will Walk With God” (SIZOHAMBA NAYE – Eswatini)
• Postlude: “Let Us Break Bread Together” (arr. J. Carter)

“God is not impressed by offerings that avoid the heart of the matter—justice, loving-kindness, and humble faithfulness.”