…and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God – Micah 6:8

Stewardship to God must also contain a responsibility to God’s creation. The peoples, the land, all that God has made, we as a community are responsible custodians of God’s mission with equity, faith, and healing. We acknowledge that we gather on the traditional lands of the Puyallup Tribe; land the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla peoples once traveled to from the Columbia Plateau, hunting and trading with their neighbors to the north and west. Our faith home resides upon this land, but it came to be “ours” through deception, harassment, and ultimately, bloodshed. While we see the Sumner United Methodist Church and its place in our community as a positive, it would not have been possible without the pain of so many others. As a faith community, it is our obligation to God and to one another to own our part in this, and to honor those whose voices have gone cold in our collective history. To truly be a people of the Word, we must live the truth of that Word, and be stewards of the land that was home to those who have come before. Saying these words is not enough. We must do our part to uplift those who have been injured, those who have been lost, those who have been forgotten, and use our gifts to render aid to those that have been cast aside, regardless of whether we had a direct hand in that suffering or not. The Indigenous peoples who came before us were shepherds of this place since time immemorial, and are still here today. They are our neighbors, our community, our family.