Rest, Racial Justice, and Spiritualities of Repair: The Role of Rest in Ecclesial Vocations to Racial Justice

This paper explores the vital role that practices of rest, including Sabbath-keeping, play in energizing and sustaining ecclesial communities as they pursue callings to racial justice and repair. Since 2018, a New England based university has partnered with local congregations as they have discerned and developed ministries that reflect their communities’ callings. These congregations come from various denominations and cultural contexts, and many are engaged in social justice initiatives that express their communal vocations to care and advocate for the marginalized in their neighborhoods. Of these congregations, four have discerned and actively pursued callings to racial justice and repair, engaging in processes of personal and ecclesial self-examination, including public confession and repentance for present and historic harms; restructuring ecclesial policies and liturgical practices; participating in trainings on racial equity, white supremacy, and decolonization; and pursuing anti-racism initiatives, such as making materials reparations, advocacy, and building partnerships with Black communities.

Yet even as congregations make strides in their racial justice efforts, congregational leaders have emphasized the need for rest, both as a way to sustain the hard labor of pursuing racial justice and as an essential dimension of seeking true repair. While they stress that racial justice and equity cannot be accomplished apart from anti-racist action - including redressing social and material inequities - congregations emphasize that practices of rest and Sabbath provide essential opportunities for “respite and renewal,” as well as help them practice a “spirituality of relinquishment” - for white congregations, a letting go of power and control - crucial to theological and spiritual repair. Communities also underscore that providing access to rest is a means of reparation: rather than a temporary pause to catch one’s breath, Sabbath and rest practices affirm human dignity and offer black persons the “time and space for self care” they have consistently been denied.

This paper looks to deepen and enrich research on rest and Christian spirituality, as well as spirituality and racial justice, by exploring the vital role of rest and Sabbath-keeping among ecclesial communities pursuing callings to racial justice and repair. While there is an abundance of research on Sabbath-keeping (e.g. Dawn, Keeping the Sabbath, 1989); Bass, Receiving the Day, 2000; Wirzba, Living the Sabbath, 2006); Buchanan, The Rest of God, 2007); Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath, 2007);  Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance, 2014), this research is rarely connected to questions of vocation or vocational sustainability and discernment in ecclesial communities. Likewise, literature on the church’s role in racial justice, despite underscoring the need for theological and “spiritual reparations” alongside acts of material and social repair (e.g. Smith Jr., Hope is Here, 2023; Turner, Creating a Culture of Repair, 2024), rarely explores how spiritual practices of rest might make a critical contribution to the work of anti-racism, equity, and reparation. Finally, although there is growing research on racial justice efforts in particular denominational contexts (e.g. Han and Arora, "Igniting Change," 2022; Norman, White Followership, 2021), there remains limited qualitative studies on the practices particular congregations engage as they pursue racial justice on the ground. This paper thus draws on interviews with pastoral and lay leaders, as well as annual reports and congregation-authored materials, to examine how spiritual practices of rest and Sabbath support specific congregations as they live into vocations to racial justice and repair.

The paper ultimately argues that spiritual practices of rest and Sabbath are integral to sustaining and embodying vocations to racial justice, as well as central means by which congregations enact a spirituality of repair. Our research shows that, for predominantly white congregations, engaging in practices of Sabbath and rest provide opportunities to process and integrate difficult learnings, including complicity in racial oppression. Embodied acts of rest also assist ecclesial communities in confronting cultural patterns of domination and extraction that reinforce racial inequities and limit black communities’ access to social, economic, and theological power. Additionally, regular rest action also enables white congregants to practice a kind of examination of consciousness: in stepping back from the work of education and advocacy, congregants begin to (re)examine their motivations and consider the dynamics of power at play in their racial justice efforts, so that, in the words of one pastor, “[they] don’t end up reinscribing the harm.”  

For our racially and ethnically diverse churches, rest practices serve as acts of resistance, avenues by which to undermine the centuries of white supremacy and racial terror - and their economic, social, and psychological implications - that coalesce to make physical, economic, and soul rest all but impossible. As one pastor puts it, “What does it mean for a brown person to rest when everything in the world has told them that they can't rest, that it's dangerous to rest?” For this leader, the physical act of ceasing has provided a way to counter the pressures of “black excellence” and patterns of “anti-rest” - including over-extension and self-criticism - adopted as a means of acceptance and survival in a racist society. Practices of Sabbath also offer black congregants opportunities to reaffirm their inherent dignity as God’s beloved and replenish the spiritual, psychological, and physical reservoirs required to confront and resist white supremacy and racial discrimination in an ongoing way. 

For all four communities in our project, the invitation to “step out of the round” and into rest, in the words of Howard Thurman, serves as an embodied reminder that the justice and shalom (wholeness and peace) envisioned by the Sabbath cannot be realized without making rest available to all. In temporarily pausing from the active labor of seeking racial justice, whether through individual acts of rest or corporate practices of Sabbath, congregations proclaim and pursue a world marked by equity and peace, a world in which rest is a universal right not a privilege. Spiritual practices of rest, in this sense, far from ancillary to congregations’ callings to racial justice, provide vital support as they seek not only to “repair the breach” that is racial oppression and inequity, but the repair of the world, “tikkun olam,” that is the hope and vision of the Sabbath shalom - now and in the world to come.