The Westminster Seminars offer a dynamic schedule of topics to help us live more fully as thoughtful Christians in today’s world. Everyone is always welcome. Come when you can – no preparation or homework. The Zoom option makes it easy to catch a seminar if you aren’t at church. Find the link on the church website under Featured Events or in the Friday church email.

For most seminars, you can watch or listen later on the Westminster website under News & Media: https://www.westminster-church.org/news-&-media/westminster-seminars.

Join Zoom Meeting
The Zoom meeting opens at 9:30.
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The Puritan Vision for New England

Sunday, April 28
John E. Wilson, Professor Emeritus of Church History, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary

John Winthrop's famous sermon of 1630 aboard the "Arabella" expresses not only Puritan hopes and expectations for New England but also ideals that were to become characteristic of American Christianity.

Democratic Faith: The Witness of the Civil Rights Movement

Sundays, May 5, 12, 19, 26
Derek Woodard-Lehman, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary

Julian Bond, an early SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) activist and later president of the NAACP, once joked that the average American understands the story of the Civil Rights Movement like this: “Rosa sat down. Martin stood up. The white kids came down and saved the day.”

This textbook narrative reduces decades of legal, political, and ecclesial activity to a pair of heroes and a handful of events. It erases the larger and longer story of the movement. A story that reaches back to the anti-lynching campaigns of Ida B. Wells (1890s) and the Double-V Campaign of Pittsburgh’s own James G. Thompson (1940s). It ranges beyond Martin Luther King to lesser known, yet arguably more important, leaders like Ella Baker and Septima Clark, James Lawson and Diane Nash, Bayard Rustin and Bob Moses.

It embraces thousands of ordinary citizens and Christians who did the hard work of grassroots organizing that made possible King’s mass mobilizing. This four-week series revisits the history of the longer Civil Rights Movement, reflects on its larger witness, and reveals a mode of Christian faith that is inherently political and intrinsically democratic.

May 5 – History Beyond Hagiography: Remembering the Movement
May 12 – Background & Beginnings: Montgomery, Little Rock, Nashville
May 19 – Confrontation & Culmination: Birmingham, Washington, Mississippi
May 26 – Living Legacy: Keeping Faith in Politics

Derek Woodard-Lehman is Lecturer in Theology and Ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. His research and teaching ask how the theological question “How shall we live as Christians?” informs and transforms the political question “How shall we live with other citizens?” in increasingly pluralistic and polarized communities. He is especially interested in how Christian commitments mobilize political resistance to injustice in cases like the American Civil Rights Movement (1950s-1970s), the German Church Struggle (1930s), and the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement (1970s-1990s).