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On the first Wednesday in May, as the centennial of the Tulsa massacre ap­proached, Robert R. A. Turner stood outside Tulsa City Hall with his megaphone, as he does every week.

“Tulsa, you will reap what you sow, and that which you have done unto the least of these my children, Jesus said, you have done also unto me,” said Turner, 38, the pastor of Historic Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church. “We come here to say, for your own benefit, you ought to do reparations not tomorrow, not even next week, not next month, not next year, but we demand reparations now!”

After a two-year prison sentence, Amber Bjornsson moved into a recovery home. She took a minimum wage job at a restaurant within walking distance of her transitional housing. But she still faced the substantial court fines she’d accumulated prior to her prison term.

“Everything in front of me was burnt by kerosene, and I had to get across it,” Bjornsson said. “I had $7,000 of fines to pay off, and I worked at a pizza place. How am I supposed to pay those off? I needed help.”

Help came in the form of a coach from Jobs and Hope West Virginia.

Vashti Murphy McKenzie, the first woman to be elected as a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, will retire from active ministry at the AME general conference in July. She currently leads the AME’s tenth district, which encompasses the entire state of Texas.

The AME denomination retires all bishops at the general conference closest to their 75th birthday. (The general conference takes place every four years.) McKenzie was scheduled to retire in 2020, but the general conference was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Russell Moore, the embattled South­ern Baptist ethicist and “never Trumper,” is resigning as president of his denom­ination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Moore will be joining the staff of Christianity Today as a public theologian.

In his new role, Moore will help launch a public theology project and serve as its leader, said Tim Dal­rymple, president and CEO of Chris­tianity Today. The project will host events and gatherings about public theology and publish content, including Moore’s writing and his Signposts podcast.

Lenny Duncan, a queer, Black pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is joining Pacific Lutheran The­ological Sem­i­nary as a public theologian to help de­velop a two-year certification program.

In a statement to the Century, Dun­can said he was humbled by the opportunity to help prepare people “for a world beyond the institutional church.”