wfn.org | Denver church models racial dialogues

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

April 13, 1999 News media contact: Linda Bloom*(212) 870-3803*New York
10-21-31-71B{199}

NOTE:  This report may be used with UMNS story #198.

DENVER (UMNS) - Since the 1960s, Park Hill United Methodist Church has been
one of the most successfully racially integrated churches in the country.

In fact, its black and white members have shared enough similarities - many
are middle-class professionals - that integration was never an issue,
according to the Rev. Clarence Snellings, a professor emeritus at Iliff
School of Theology. But, he added, the congregation has been so busy
preserving the surrounding integrated community "that we overlooked some
conversations that we needed to have."

Such conversations are taking place now that Park Hill has become one of six
pilot churches involved in the Acts of Repentance for Reconciliation for
Racism project.

The project is an initiative of the United Methodist Commission on Christian
Unity and Interreligious Concerns, in consultation with the Commission on
Pan-Methodist Union. It calls upon the denomination to repent for the racism
of its past, which led to the creation of three historically black Methodist
denominations by those denied freedom of worship in the larger church, as
well as the formation of a "blacks-only" Central Jurisdiction in 1939 that
was not abolished until 1968.

The Acts of Repentance will be a focus during the 2000 General Conference,
the denomination's top legislative body, and study guides are expected to be
distributed that summer for use in every local church. The General
Conference will meet May 2-12 next year in Cleveland.

At Park Hill, the Rev. Gilbert Caldwell, an African-American pastor, serves
as co-pastor with his Anglo-American counterpart, the Rev. Virginia Chase.
"The inter-racial reality of our pastoral 'team' has enabled and allowed me
to provide some leadership on racial/cultural issues in church and community
that would have been more difficult if I had not been in a team
relationship," he told commission members during their April 8-11 meeting in
Denver.

As part of its pilot church project, Park Hill joined with First Unitarian
Church to host a lecture series named after Christine Johnson, a longtime
member who died in 1998. Johnson's daughter, Jacqueline Benton, coordinated
the series, which has included a discussion of the movie and novel, Beloved;
stories from her father, Byron Johnson, about his years in the Negro
baseball league; a look at the life of Malcolm X; and testimony from one of
the students who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.

Even in an integrated congregation, Benton noted, facing racial realities
"does involve getting out of your comfort zone. It does involve taking some
risks."

Jeanne Miller Schmidt, an Iliff professor, lauded the study guide being
developed for local churches and outlined some of the history of racial
separation in the Methodist church in America.

"What Methodists tried to do in the beginning, following the leadership of
John Wesley, was to establish a strong anti-slavery norm," she said. Until
the separate denominations were formed, she added, African-Americans
accounted for at least a fifth of total church membership.

In 1784, the Methodist Episcopal Church Conference declared that a person
could not be a Methodist and continue to own slaves. But by 1804, two "books
of discipline" existed, and the one below the Mason-Dixon line removed that
prohibition. From that point, Methodists backed further and further away
"from that anti-slavery norm," Schmidt added.

When the Central Jurisdiction was created in 1939 "as the price for reunion"
of the north and south churches, it reflected a separation already begun
during reconstruction after the Civil War during the 1860s and '70s.

United Methodists must make it clear "that for us, this (Acts of Repentance)
is only the beginning" of the repentance process, Schmidt said, and they
must take responsibility for making a different future.

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