Interfaith prayer breakfast aims to sow love where there is hatred, as racial conflicts repeat in H.B.
Huntington Beach religious leaders and congregants of different faiths will gather virtually on Thursday to reflect on human dignity during troubled times in a prayer breakfast themed, “United in Prayer: A Time of Renewal.”
Hosted by the Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council, the event will be feature live and prerecorded prayers from six denominations and will culminate in a keynote address by Gail J. Stearns, dean of Chapman University’s Wallace All Faiths Chapel and associate professor of religious studies.
Stearns will speak on the importance of becoming “maladjusted,” of pushing past comfort zones and learned norms to forge interpersonal connections across nations, religions and backgrounds.
It’s a lesson some say is especially needed in Huntington Beach, where residents recently grappled with racial tension after neighbors awoke to find KKK propaganda littered on lawns and where plans for an April 11 “White Lives Matter” rally at the city’s pier proliferated on social media.
“A number of hate crimes and events have risen dramatically in recent years, so an Interfaith Council is needed now more than ever,” said Rabbi Stephen Einstein, one of the council’s founding members, who will speak Thursday.
“The idea here is to find the common ground that unites us,” he continued. “Our basic outlook is for our fellow human beings, our fellow creatures, and doing what we can to make this a better world.”
The Interfaith Council sprung from the work of the Huntington Beach Human Relations Task Force — a group formed in the aftermath of a series of local hate crimes, most notably, the 1994 shooting death of Vernon Floury.
A 44-year-old Huntington Beach resident, Floury was taking a walk along Beach Boulevard on Sept. 15, 1994, when he was confronted by two white men who engaged him in an altercation before one of them shot him on the street and left him for dead.
The trial of the suspects later revealed the shooter and his accomplice — ages 19 and 17 — were local youths who identified as skinheads and were possibly linked to the attempted murder, one month earlier, of two Latino men.
Shocked by the incident and testimonies, city officials took immediate action to stem what appeared to be a rising tide of hate crimes.
On May 6, 1996 — three days after the shooter was sentenced to serve 19 years to life in prison for the killing — the Huntington Beach City Council unanimously adopted “A Declaration of Policy About Human Dignity,” a document in which city leaders vowed to fight hate crimes with full force.
“The City Council warns those who advocate or perpetrate hate not to test the community’s resolve to oppose them,” it pronounced, promising to investigate, apprehend, prosecute and convict offenders.
The Human Relations Task Force was formed and to this day collaborates with the nonprofit O.C. Human Relations Commission to host events aimed at elevating viewpoints through honest and informed dialogue.
Thursday’s prayer breakfast has been scheduled to coincide with the National Day of Prayer, in which people of all faiths are encouraged to pray for the nation. But this year’s date happens to fall on the 25th anniversary of the city’s own declaration in support of human dignity.
GHBIC member Pat Goodman described the annual event as a generally uplifting experience in which participants are reminded there are more things that unite us than divide us.
“I think it’s needed — it’s always needed,” Goodman said of the message. “These issues have always been with us, and I’m hopeful we’ll address them better as human beings and not try to exclude anyone.”
The event is free and will be livestreamed Thursday at 9 a.m. at ghbic.org.
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