Reconciliation United Methodist Church

Reconciliation United Methodist Church began worshiping together on the first Sunday in January 1998. It all began when two pastors, one African-American and one Anglo, were appointed to start a new congregation. A first of its kind, Reconciliation was a church plant called to be an intentionally multicultural and multi-racial church in Durham, NC.

This vision has since grown to touch hundreds and hundreds of people, enjoining numerous families across lines of race, culture and class. Like our vision of heaven, our congregation is a rainbow of races, lifestyles, and cultures, including husbands, wives, children, single men, single women, infants, toddlers, children, youth, young adults, adults, and senior adults.

In 2003, Reconciliation went through a discernment process to seek God’s will and guidance regarding the rapidly growing Latino population in our community and state. Specifically, we engaged in a study provided by the General Board of Global Missions called “Pentecost Journey.” Near the conclusion to our study and season of discernment, our congregation began to discover our mission statement was beginning to mean more than we had first imagined. We were being called to go deeper in our commitment to God and neighbor and to take more seriously our mission to “intentionally include people of all races and all cultural backgrounds.” The end result was the beginning of bilingual worship that began in January of 2004 in our main Sunday morning worship service.

Today, Reconciliation is a multicultural, multiracial, and bilingual ministry. We are a congregation that includes over 10 different nationalities, including Anglo, African American, Latino, African, Asian, South American, and many others.

Our membership includes people of varying means and vocations: health care professionals, construction workers, attorneys, day laborers, childcare workers, school administrators, educators, students, lay and clergy.

We put our mission in our church name, “reconciliation,” to remind us of God’s call in 2 Corinthians 5:18 where the apostle Paul writes: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;” and it is this same passage that inspired our mission statement which is reaffirmed each week in worship:

We are a Christian community that seeks to intentionally include all races and all cultural backgrounds. Our mission is to embody God’s ministry of reconciliation through our practice of worship, devotion, compassion, and justice. We believe that receiving and sharing God’s all encompassing love is our greatest challenge and our only hope.

Please see our Opportunities Page to discover how you can help us build a Multicultural Center to house our ministries!