Recognizing changing social issues and concerns since 1972, The General Conference 2012 called the General Board of Church and Society to engage in a process to revise them “with the goal of making them more succinct, theologically founded, and globally relevant.” The General Conference’s direction was to review and revise the whole document to live fully into our identity as a global church.

Reproductive justice is a movement led by Black U.S. American women, with significant landmarks in 1989 and 1994. There are four shared tenets of reproductive justice today, as stated by SisterSong, a Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, and often shared by the group United Methodists for Reproductive Justice:

• “The human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy”

• “The human right not to have children”

• “The human right to have children”

• “The right to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities”

After more than 75 years of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism in historic Palestine, after 57 years of a brutal occupation in the small amount of land left for Palestinians, after an inhuman blockade that has been slowly destroying the people of Gaza since 2007, having authoritative reports from the world’s leading human rights experts that Israel has created an apartheid regime in all the land it controls, and especially faced today with the terrifying events we have seen in the Holy Land since October, we need to act on our convictions and strengthen our commitment to peace in Palestine/Israel.

Around the world, we are seeing rising threats to basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, even in supposedly democratic societies. Christians have a responsibility to defend our freedom to speak the truth about injustice wherever we see it. We also must protect the right to act on our values and address systems of injustice with nonviolent methods such as boycotts and divestment. We know that speaking truth to power will incur repercussions, including misinformation, defamation, and intimidation. We must employ wisdom to discern when important concerns about racism are manipulated to silence opposition to injustice.