Mission and Vision

10^th Annual Redeeming the Prophetic Vision Martin Luther King Jr. Interfaith Service

Redeeming the Prophetic Vision
January 17, 2016
Urban Grace Church
902 Market Street, Tacoma, WA

MISSION STATEMENT

The Conversation’s mission is to recapture, reinvigorate, and redeem the prophetic vision of Reverend, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We want to present his vision with its sharp searing insight within the context of everyday life in contrast to what we see as an ongoing effort to render it as benign, anemic, antiseptic, allusive, and static. We want to bring it back to the streets, to the people, where it started, where it belongs.

To this end we have planned Redeeming the Prophetic Vision; a service which has become an annual event for Tacoma highlighting Martin Luther King Jr.’s radical, progressive, prophetic oratory and complementing the other traditional events around the city celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Deeply rooted in his spiritual beliefs and grounded in the traditions of the Jewish prophet and that of the black church, Martin Luther King’s prophetic vision is a vision that calls the society to a commitment to peace, to equal justice and to equal opportunity for all, both within and beyond the nation’s boundaries. This is a call for the nation’s resources to be deployed in the interest of its entire people, particularly in the areas of education, employment, housing, and healthcare. This vision confronts the powerful on behalf of the powerless and puts the spotlight on the disenchanted, the disadvantaged, and the disinherited. The prophetic vision is the one that challenges the status quo and calls the nation to be what it can and should be.

In his life and work the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister worked side by side with many people crossing boundaries of race, class, religion, gender, and sexuality. Throughout his life he challenged those controlling the nation’s resources, marched with the disenfranchised, and confronted the purveyors of inequity. We believe that Dr. King’s life and work should be re-presented before us as part of the effort to promote peace and to call attention to ongoing inequities, to energize those who work to fulfill his prophetic vision of social justice, and to mobilize a new generation of prophetic visionaries for engaged practical action grounded in the power of the people, the inclusive we.

Consequently Redeeming the Prophetic Vision’s goal is to:
1. Bring together a broad cross-section of the Tacoma, Pierce County community to
2. Participate in a creative restatement of Dr. King’s life and work with a focus on the prophetic declaration of a call for peace and social justice which was central to King’s life, and
3. Draw our community’s attention to evidence of injustice in our own midst and to the need for corrective action.

We plan to have an interfaith service where all are invited to participate with “respectful presence.” A respectful presence for us is a presence that honors particular faith traditions as well as those who choose no organized religion in a spirit of cooperation with others whose practices may be different from our own, but who share a common vision of justice for all.

The focal point of this service will be oratory addressing some element of King’s prophetic vision. This address will be complemented with the arts; music, drama, dance and with other forms of creative presentations all focusing on highlighting the question of peace, justice and opportunity for all; the prophetic vision of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.