A MULTI-CHURCH COLLABORATION THAT SEEKS RACIAL HEALING FOR OUR CITY
One Day, One Step is a multi-church collaboration that seeks racial healing for our city through corporate, intercessory prayer. The event includes a Service of Repentance and Healing that leads participants through a process of Lament, Repent and Forgive. With these prayers, we have hope that One Day, Richmond will be racially reconciled and healed. This day is One Step to seeing God's will be done in Richmond as it is in Heaven.
New this year...
We invite participants to join us in a post-event 40 day Justice Fast
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When you register to attend the event, you will have the option to sign up for the fast. We will send you a daily email for 40 days with a scripture and short devotion
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Together, we will continue to pray and fast for justice and healing in our city
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Funds collected during the fast will benefit an area of need in our community
To learn more, check out this video from East End Church's Lenten Justice Fast
ABOUT US
One Day, One Step began in 2022 as the “Day of Repentance,” an event intended to foster racial healing through lament, confession, repentance, and forgiveness. The service was held at a church on Monument Avenue near the site where the Robert E. Lee statue stood for 131 years. Following the death of George Floyd and subsequent unrest, the Robert E. Lee statue became a public gathering space for bringing awareness to racial injustice and inequity. This statue sat on land donated by a church and dedicated in a service led by a Presbyterian pastor in 1890. In an effort to seek peace and healing, a steering committee arranged the 2022 Day of Repentance during the anniversary month of the statue’s removal.
Based on the responses to this event, the steering committee decided to pursue an annual service of repentance. In 2023 the name was changed to “One Day, One Step” (ODOS). This acronym is fitting for this annual gathering since the first Christians were known as the “odos” (ὁδός), the Greek word for “way” (cf. Acts 9:2). We are convinced that all those who follow the way of Jesus are called to participate in liturgical rhythms of lament, confession, repentance, and forgiveness. The event is especially designed for those who are committed to actively promoting racial healing in Richmond, Virginia.
Our Theology
The One Day, One Step Steering Committee is composed of pastors and lay leaders from churches all across the Richmond metro region, from a variety of denominations. While we have different theological perspectives on a number of secondary issues, we are unified in our faith as articulated in the Apostle's Creed, and together we rely on God's redeeming grace to heal the divisions in our city.
Why Lament?
Lament is the spiritual discipline of acknowledging and sitting with suffering that has been experienced personally or communally. Scripture connects lament to personal trauma in the biblical story of Job. After losing everything, Job laments by crying out to God, tearing his robe, and shaving his head (cf. Job 1). Before trying to rationalize what happened or even trying to fix anything, he takes a moment to feel and to grieve. Christian scripture also connects lament to communal suffering in the book of Lamentations, which is Jeremiah’s meditation on the destruction of Judah and the suffering of her people after the Babylonian invasion. In addition, almost a third of the Psalms are Laments, expressing the suffering of God’s people through generations. Lament is a personal discipline as well as an institutional discipline. Institutionally, it can involve creating space to acknowledge the stories of those who have experienced harm from this sins of racism and racial oppression. Lament resists the cultural temptation to either ignore painful realities as an emotional defense mechanism, or to deny them as a form of self-exoneration. Lament begins with actively acknowledging the reality of historical trauma and contemporary pain long enough for us to feel it, and long enough for it to move from abstraction to embodiment. Perhaps most importantly, lament affirms that truth-telling is a prerequisite for healing.
Why Repent?
We understand biblical repentance to mean “turning from sin and towards a Godly lifestyle.” The verb for repent in the Old Testament is the Hebrew word “shuv,” which involves this type of turning from sin and evil – often corporately (cf. Ezekiel 18:30). The Greek word most often used for repentance in the bible is metanoia. This word connotes not just a change in action, but also a change in mind, heart, attitudes and prejudices. When Paul uses this word, he implies that God cares not only about our external actions, but also our hearts. Moreover, metanoia implies that when we have an authentic change in our heart away from our sinful nature and toward the ways of God, this change should affect our behavior.
Some may wonder why we are repenting of sin that has happened in the past. There are many times when the Bible refers to God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations” (e.g. Exodus 20:5). In numerous places, we see community leaders in Scripture confessing not just personal sin but ancestral sin: “We and our fathers have sinned” (Daniel 9:8, Psalm 106:7). Similarly, Nehemiah grieves and repents to God for actions of his fellow Israelites, even though he did not personally commit the sins himself (Neh. 1:6-7).
All these examples demonstrate that the sinful consequences of some can be passed on from generation to generation and shared across time and communities. We are not just free floating individuals who have no connection to the past, but we are deeply shaped and defined by both the glory and the rebellion of those who have gone before us. While we may have not committed historic sins of racism and racial oppression, we often share in the communal repercussions of the sin of others. God invites us in grace to take responsibility for and turn away from the ways that individuals, communities and systems have harmed other human beings in the past, and to work to repair the ongoing effects of those historic harms.
Why Forgive?
When Jesus is asked how many times we are to forgive someone, he replies, "I do not say to you seven times (is enough), but seventy times seven." (cf. Matthew 18:22). Scholars do not believe Jesus is saying to forgive someone literally 490 times, but rather that we should continue to forgive someone until the forgiveness is complete. As God's forgiveness of us is unlimited for our personal sins, we should extend the same unlimited forgiveness to others. When we are offering forgiveness for egregious offenses, such as racial trauma, we acknowledge that we are limited in our human nature to offer complete forgiveness. It is only when we turn our hearts to God and rely on the Holy Spirit to fill us with God's infinite grace that we can begin to release forgiveness that will lead to true and complete healing...as individuals, as a corporate body, and as a city.
What does One Day, One Step have to do with healing?
We believe that God heals and redeems. As 2 Chronicles 7:14 says, "If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and forgive their sin and heal their land."
One Day, One Step is a unique opportunity for the Christian community of Richmond to put into action what Scripture says. During the service we explain and embody biblically rooted lament, confession, repentance, and forgiveness. Whereas confession is an act of faith that the Gospel is more powerful than our personal and collective historical sin and shame, repentance affirms that our racism does not have to have the last word in Richmond’s story. We believe that through the power of the Holy Spirit, repentance must involve changes in how we live and love one another. To this end, One Day, One Step partners with Richmond organizations to host a Repair Fair as part of our annual gathering to provide opportunities for residents to learn about how to support and engage racial justice work locally and tangibly “seek the welfare of the city” (cf. Jeremiah 29:27). Ultimately, we are convinced that One Day, One Step and its partners can play a critical role in how God continues to bring structural repair to Richmond and interpersonal healing to its residents.
LOOKING BACK
We started in 2022 as a small gathering with bold prayers...
The first gathering, held in 2022 at a church on Monument Ave, one year after the removal of the Robert E. Lee Statue.
At the 2022 Day of Repentance, attendees wrote the names of people they wanted to forgive; those papers were shredded, and the clippings were placed beneath the plants in the restored "Marcus-David Peters" Circle.
The first gathering, held in 2022 at a church on Monument Ave, one year after the removal of the Robert E. Lee Statue.
The Day of Repentance was also featured in E Pluribus Unum's report on "The Legacy of Confederate Memorials and the Promise of Public Spaces." One Day One Step is an Unum Alliance member. For more information on E Pluribus Unum, visit their website.
...and God has grown us every year
Newsreel recap from our 2024 One Day, One Step
SPONSORS
Interested in being a sponsor? Email renewingrva@gmail.com
Arrabon
Cornelius Corp
East End Fellowship
First Presbyterian Church
Mt. Gilead Full Gospel International Ministries
RCLI
Renewing RVA
Richmond's First Baptist Church
Richmond Hill
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Third Church