wfn.org | Call to repent for racial wrongs proves controversial

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Aug. 29, 2001   News media contact: Tim Tanton7(615)742-54707Nashville,
Tenn.     10-31-71BP{368}

NOTE: A head-and-shoulders photograph of Byrd Bonner is available. 

A UMNS Report
By Douglas Cannon*

A call to repent for past racism may be the most controversial issue ever to
face the United Methodist Church.

Byrd L. Bonner of San Antonio delivered that message during his keynote
address Aug. 14 to the Lay Connectional Convention of the African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Church in Akron, Ohio.

"In the last six months, I have had other white United Methodists refuse to
attend meetings where repentance for racism was on the agenda," Bonner told
lay representatives of the predominantly black 1.3-million-member
denomination. "Others have sent angry letters to ones who have spoken out
against vestiges of racism that remain, if not predominate, in our
churches."

As a result of those reactions, "I have come to see that a call to genuine
repentance may place more stress on the pews of United Methodism than all
the other issues that denomination faces rolled together," Bonner said. "It
strikes at the very core of the human condition-how we treat one another in
the name of love."

Bonner, executive director of the United Methodist Church Foundation, has
actively promoted racial reconciliation within the Methodist family for many
years. He was an elected member of the denomination's Commission on
Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns from 1992 to 2000. That agency,
along with the Council of Bishops, sponsored a service of repentance and
reconciliation for racism at the 2000 General Conference in Cleveland.
During the service, Bonner, a lay delegate to the conference from Southwest
Texas, spoke of his experiences with racism.

Sponsors of the General Conference service urged individual annual
conferences to go through similar acts of repentance. These acts of
repentance don't wipe the slate of past wrongs clean, Bonner said in Akron. 

Methodists shouldn't try to pretend that past racial injustice within the
church didn't exist, he said. "I don't mean wallow in that painful history,"
he said, "but take it and know it and commit it to our hearts and learn from
it and rise above it and beyond it and, yes, sometimes, restore what has
been lost."

Bonner said that his four years on the Commission on Pan-Methodist
Cooperation and Union taught him "much more about racial justice than about
cooperation or union."

The commission is discussing the possibility of merging the United Methodist
Church with three historically black denominations: the African Methodist
Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and Christian
Methodist Episcopal Church. They broke away from the larger Methodist body
during the past 200 years because of racial discrimination.

"We have challenged ourselves to live in new ways, to put ourselves in the
place of others to try to understand their pain," Bonner said. "Of course,
we cannot fully, but isn't that the example of Jesus?

"One way that Jesus preached was by identifying with those who traveled
different paths from what he had. That is a challenge for any one of us who
has and does draw distinctions about people because of the color of skin."

As a white United Methodist, Bonner noted, he hasn't:
7	Felt excluded from worship because of skin color.
7	Been denied credit because of skin color.
7	Been stalked by store security because of skin color.
7	Been denied promotion on the job because of skin color.
7	Seen institutions important to his heritage demolished because they
didn't serve the majority group.
7	Experienced fear or despair from seeing church facilities named for
leaders of the Ku Klux Klan.

"But I know full well that not until I share -- not just hear but share -
that bitter cry can God within my spirit dwell to bring God's kingdom nigh,"
Bonner said.

The true road to authentic repentance and reconciliation requires an Easter
resurrection experience, he said. "We are given the hope of being able to
die to the sin of racism -- all of us -- and to rise again into new life of
love and reconciliation."
# # #
*Cannon is editor of United Methodist Witness, the newspaper of the
Southwest Texas Annual Conference. This story originally appeared in that
paper.

*************************************
United Methodist News Service
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