“The Justice Journey was a very personal experience for me,” says Tyler Grissom, Hub Director for Axis, the 18 to 20-something ministry of Willow Creek Community Church. The Journey has this kind of radical effect on its participants. Their world view on issues of race is forever changed.

Since 2004, Willow Creek has partnered with these local churches to help raise the value of desegregating our houses of faith and understanding the way racism still cripples. Christ followers of different races immerse themselves in education-by-experience in a bus trip, visiting historical landmarks that tell the history of slavery, racism, and the Civil Rights movement. Led by Alvin Bibbs, director of multicultural church relations for the Willow Creek Association, the trip is in its seventh year.

Grissom and his wife experienced a part of US history that many would just as soon forget. “I’m a brand new husband, and my wife Julie and I took the trip together. What we learned will affect how we raise our family, where we will choose to buy a house, the kind of neighborhood we want to live in. We want our kids to be exposed to all kinds of people,” he says.

History Comes to Life

This year’s team visited key landmarks, including:

·     Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where in 1965, armed officers attacked peaceful civil rights demonstrators who were attempting to march to the state capital. To commemorate this tragic event, the team locked arms—white and black together—and walked across the bridge as one.

·     The Slavery and Civil War Museum, where participants experienced the degradation of what it actually might have felt like to be a slave.

·     Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and Center, including King’s boyhood home and burial place. Here, the team worshiped, prayed, and remembered his life.

·     16^th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, AL, where four little girls were killed one Sunday after the church was bombed. Dr. John Perkins, a faculty leader on the trip, preached at the church.

·     Memphis, TN, the city where MLK Jr. was assassinated. Participants stood in the very spot where he was killed, and toured the Martin Luther King Jr. Museum.

The Only Voice

“As a ministry leader,” Grissom says, “this trip gave me a new lens to see what the church could be and should be, in terms of reconciliation. From a biblical standpoint, we are not to be separatist. God has called us to really bridge the racial gap, to be bridge builders and to stand up for social justice and equality in our world.  We are the only voice. Who else will take a stand?”

To learn more about the Justice Journey, go to www.justicejourney.org.  If you have a passion for social justice issues, learn how you can get involved in Willow Creek’s Compassion & Justice ministry.