On Sunday, February 26, Plymouth will host Edith (Edie) Rasell, the United Church of Christ Minister for Economic Justice, from national UCC headquarters in Cleveland. The Mission Board, with support of the Council, invited Edie to lead a workshop on a Christian response to immigration, kicking off a year-long series of educational opportunities about immigration here at Plymouth Church. The workshop, with small snacks and desserts, will begin at 5:30 pm in the Mayflower Room. Edith will also lead the Social Justice class that morning.

Serving the national UCC staff as Minister for Economic Justice in Justice and Witness Ministries, Rasell works with UCC congregations around the country as well as national and international organizations to bring greater economic justice to people in the U.S. and around the world, especially the poor and marginalized.

Rasell is a UCC layperson and holds a Ph.D. in economics. Before coming to the UCC she worked at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a highly regarded, progressive think tank in Washington, D.C., where her primary areas of research were labor economics, health care financing, and social insurance programs (Medicare and Social Security). Rasell was also the director of EPI’s Economic Analysis and Research Network, a nationwide association of state-based research groups that examine living standards and other issues of importance to working people.

Rasell has testified before congressional committees on a variety of workplace issues, health care, and Social Security, and has been cited by the news media in major daily newspapers, as well as radio and television network news and information programs. Her work has been published in the American Economic Review, the New England Journal of Medicine, and other journals and the popular press.

Plymouth is a member of the United Church of Christ, a 1.1 million-member mainline Protestant denomination based in Cleveland. The UCC and the fore-runner denominations that joined together to create it have a long-standing commitment to justice. The UCC’s predecessor institutions include the first mainline denomination to write an anti-slavery tract in America (in 1700), the first to ordain an African-American (in 1785), the first to ordain a woman (in 1853), the first to ordain an openly gay man (in 1972), and the first predominantly Euro-American, mainline denomination to elect a African-American as President (in 1976).