Messiah receives Lilly Endowment Inc. grant
Nearly $1 million will be used for racial justice
Messiah University is the recipient of a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. totaling more than $975,000 to help establish a new program, “Thriving Together: Congregations for Racial Justice.”
The program is funded through Lilly Endowment’s Thriving Congregations Initiative, and the goal is to strengthen Christian congregations and contribute to the local communities and the world. The Lilly Endowment is funding nearly $93 million in grants as part of the initiative.
“In the midst of our partisan, polarized and racially divided society, we need churches committed to coming together to understand how we can thrive together across racial divides,” said Program Director Drew Hart, assistant professor of theology.
Through the project, Messiah will invest in a cohort of leaders from 12 congregations seeking to understand how the legacy of race has shaped our region in ways that vandalize the witness of the Church. This will help program leaders determine ways congregations can come together in larger regional efforts to achieve a just society—one characterized by the biblical understanding of shalom.
“We believe that if we would just slow down and discern God’s delivering presence at work in our neighborhoods, congregations could provide the kind of Jesus-shaped justice, healing and truth-telling that our society yearns for, and which could become the answer to our sacred prayer that ‘your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven’,” said Hart. “The Thriving Together program funded by the Lilly grant is audacious enough to seek after God’s dream for us all.”