wfn.org | Close Up: Church confronts pain, reality of racism

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

July 31, 2002 News media contact: Linda Green7(615)742-54707Nashville, Tenn.
10-30-31-71BP{333}

NOTE: "Close Up" is a regular UMNS feature that takes an in-depth look at
issues of the day. Photographs and a sidebar, UMNS story #334, are available
with this report.

A UMNS Report
By Yvonne J. Medley*

Like a scene from the pages of the civil rights movement, more than 300
United Methodists, white and black, marched in the nation's capital as an
act of repentance for a stormy past. 

Members of the predominantly white Foundry United Methodist Church and the
predominantly African-American Asbury United Methodist Church joined
together to declare that love had no boundaries, no color, no gender during
the Lenten season last spring.

"It was a very beautiful thing," says the Rev. J. Philip Wogaman, recently
retired pastor of Foundry in Washington.
   
The two churches, physically separated by only 10 blocks, had been kept
apart by a history of racial discord. In 1836, African Americans left
Foundry because of racism and founded Asbury.   They were tired of being
relegated to Foundry's balcony and barred from fully participating in
leadership. Some whites left with them and joined the Asbury church; one of
them, Ephram Nash, gave the church a house for women's mission work,
providing the foundation for today's Sibley Memorial Hospital. 

Today, the two churches share pulpits and joint ministries. Asbury's Rev.
Eugene Matthews explains that the Lenten march and reconciliation services
served as a public covenant to heal hearts, open minds and open doors. "It
was really a way to envision what could have happened and should have
happened if (the departure) had not taken place because of racism," he says.

The two congregations symbolize the United Methodist Church's struggle and
historic divisions over issues of race. Today, the church is actively
repenting for past and current racism, and it is seeking reconciliation with
African-American Methodists, who have often been marginalized in the
denomination or driven out altogether. The church has made strides in
inclusiveness, but much work remains in the battle to eradicate racism in
the denomination and society at large.

First step
 
The Asbury-Foundry event was sparked by the Act of Repentance and
Reconciliation service at the 2000 General Conference, the denomination's
top legislative assembly, in Cleveland. That service has inspired similar
acts in congregations and regional church gatherings throughout the
denomination.

Reconciliation and repentance cannot occur without facing tough issues, says
the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., a retired African-American pastor and civil
rights activist with 47 years of service in the United Methodist Church.

"I consider all of that stuff nonsense," he says of the services. "There can
be no reconciliation without facing the issues and going through the pain of
addressing the issues."

Much can be learned about reconciliation from groups such as Alcoholics
Anonymous, where the ninth step of the 12-step program is to make amends,
Lawson says. Eight steps are needed to move through pain, growth and even a
worldly death before an addict can get to that point, he says. "We say in
the Christian tradition that the cost was Jesus' death. So I would like to
suggest that with these sins of racism, sexism, homophobia and all, there
has to be death in us for the reconciliation in us to bloom."

Reconciliation can be achieved, but it is costly, he says.

And it can be messy. General Conference's act of repentance was a major step
for the denomination, but it left wounded feelings among African-American
United Methodists. Many of them complained that while the church had
apologized to the African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal
Zion and Christian Methodist Episcopal members, it had overlooked the racial
indignities experienced by blacks still in the United Methodist Church.
  
"They did all that apologizing to the AME and the AMEZ, but they didn't
reconcile with the folks who didn't go anywhere," says Paula Watson, a staff
member at United Methodist-related Philander Smith College, a historically
black school in Little Rock, Ark. 
 
Lagging behind?
  
The Rev. Rodney Smothers laments that society is ahead of the church in
dealing with racism. "The church, in general, unfortunately lags behind
society when it comes to taking an active stand against racism," he says.
Smothers, is an African American and pastor of Covenant Point, a new church
initiative in Maryland.  

Matthews agrees. "The military addressed it first. Sports, with Jackie
Robinson and others, addressed it," he says. "And even during those eras, we
still had the Central Jurisdiction going on," he says. Between 1939 and
1968, the former Methodist Church segregated all of its African-American
churches into the Central Jurisdiction. That division was eliminated with
the creation of the United Methodist Church, and today all of the U.S.
jurisdictions are based on geography.
 
"We should be at the forefront, the cutting edge," says Asbury's Matthews.
  
The church must shake itself and society up, Smothers says. "The church was
never called to be a safe society. It was called to be just the opposite -
to be an agitator of society. And consequently, if you're going to have a
prophetic voice, you're going to upset the status quo."
  
James Taylor, an executive with the United Methodist Commission on Religion
and Race, also believes that a shakeup in the status quo is needed. "We are
still a 93 percent white church in terms of our membership," he says, citing
2000 statistics from the denomination's General Council on Finance and
Administration. 

In 1990, the percentage of ethnic and racial membership in the denomination
was 5.67.  Ten years later, the percentage is 6.83 percent. "You could
almost do nothing and accomplish that," he says. 

In total figures, the U.S. church has about 392,824 African-American
members, compared with 7.2 million whites and about 137,393 Asian Americans,
Hispanics, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, according to finance
council data.
 
Taylor, who is white, says that one of his roles at the commission involves
"talking to white people about white privilege and white racism." The
commission conducts sensitivity trainings nationwide, and Taylor refers to
them as "ministry in a post-majority age." He says that no particular racial
or ethnic group will claim majority status by the year 2010. "The numbers
are shifting, but who's got the power? That is the question," Taylor says.

Although numbers are important, they are not everything, says the Rev.
Yolanda Pupo-Ortiz, another commission executive. "So if you tell me that we
have 10 whites, five blacks and three Hispanics, I want to know who's making
the decisions. How do you welcome the new insights that people are bringing?
Are people feeling that they really belong at the table and that they're
making contributions?" 
 
"If we're all saying that we're all equal in the eyes of God, then everybody
is going to have to give up something to equalize the issues of power and
control. ... We're all saying that we want to do it, but no one stands up to
do the action to get it done," says Anne Marshall, an executive with the
denomination's Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns. 

Marshall is the first Native American to serve as an associate general
secretary for a United Methodist agency. The denomination's first Native
American general secretary (top staff executive), the Rev. Thom White Wolf
Fassett, led the Board of Church and Society from 1989 to 2001, but no
American Indian has been elected bishop.
 
Gains have been made in the church, and Taylor acknowledges the plethora of
racial reconciliation services. However, he says: "While we may feel better
about being nicer to people, we're not doing as well at addressing some of
the systemic issues."  
  
The denomination's national plans focusing on African Americans, Hispanics,
Native Americans and Asian Americans are evidence that the church is working
on the problems, he says. However, he also notes: "If the national
population has doubled in the last census period in terms of racial-ethnic
people and we've only gained a little over 1 percent in our membership, it
almost makes you cynical about all of the special programs and efforts that
we're about." 
 
Hard work

More work is needed in building racial-ethnic involvement at all levels of
the church, say advocates for inclusiveness.

"If you look at the numbers in terms of racial-ethnic involvement, it's the
highest and most pervasive at the general church level," Taylor says, "but
you can just graph the line down as you move toward the local church." 

Indiana Area Bishop Woodie White has been helping the church deal with
issues of race and equality for decades. He was the first general secretary
of the churchwide Commission on Religion and Race, and he was a founder of
Black Methodists for Church Renewal. He stresses that in the fight to
eradicate racism, the United Methodist Church has "to be vigilant to see
that the gains we've made are sustained." 

For example, the cross-racial appointment of pastors represents an area of
progress in the church, but that has not been widely accepted throughout the
denomination. "If there is a (white) church that has a need and if there's a
person of color who seems to have the gifts for that particular situation,
then we should not automatically rule that person out" because of color,
White says.  

"Pastors, regardless of color, must be willing to go, and bishops must be
willing to appoint them," he says.  
 
White suggests looking at racism by using three categories: attitude,
behavior and institutional presence. "I think we have addressed
institutional racism, and we have made significant gains. We have removed
the segregation and the discriminatory structures that place persons in
structures by race," he says. However, attitudes are another matter, he
says. "And the observation is that the closer you get to the local church,
the more evident are racist attitudes."   

Besides pastoral appointments, salary levels represent another equity issue
that the church must address, African-American leaders say.

When black pastors complete their tenures as district superintendents -
supervisors of a group of pastors in an area for six years - "there's still
a challenge to place them in churches that give salaries that are
commensurate with the salaries they had on the districts," notes the Rev.
Zan Holmes, who recently retired from the 5,000-member St. Luke "Community"
United Methodist Church in Dallas, a predominantly African-American
congregation.

Moving target

Today, racism is more subtle than overt. "I call it a moving target," Taylor
says. "When you think you've got it cornered, it will jump around somewhere
else." 

Bishop Forrest Stith of Upper Marlboro, Md., says racial subtleties exist
throughout the church and the country. For example, it is rare for a
racial-ethnic person to serve as chairperson of a conference finance
committee, he says. An African American, he was elected bishop and served as
president of the General Council on Finance and Administration, but that
"was not, and is still not, the norm," he says. 
 
Bishops are not exempt from racism in the church, says Bishop Melvin Talbert
of Nashville, Tenn. "What happens to you as a bishop is you show up at
gatherings and you're treated just as white folk treat black folk, but the
moment that people discover who you are, it's 'Oh, this is the bishop,' and
everybody's glad to see you."

For a reality check, Talbert says that sometimes he arrives early for a
gathering, unannounced or without his "bishop" attire. "Then you can really
see to what degree things have changed."

Even so, Talbert has seen much improvement since his call into ministry
during the Central Jurisdiction days. Talbert - like Lawson and White -
worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights
movement. He later became one of the United Methodist Church's first
African-American bishops and the first African-American secretary of the
Council of Bishops.

"Racial issues have been a longtime struggle primarily because the United
Methodist Church is one of the most racially diverse denominations around,"
Holmes says. "We're still making progress." 

During the 2000 U.S. jurisdictional conferences, seven of the 13 people
elected as new bishops were African Americans, including three women. Today,
the church has 14 African Americans among its 50 or so active bishops.
   
But the numbers fall when it comes to bishops representing other ethnic and
racial groups. The council has one Asian-American bishop, two members of
Hispanic descent and no Native Americans or Pacific Islanders. 
 
If Wesley embraced Native Americans, "then why is there not a Native
American bishop?" Marshall asks. The church has come far from the days when
it asked Indians to "leave your culture and your rituals at the door and
come on in," but it still has a ways to go, she says.
 
However, before the Native American issue can be dealt with, the church must
better address its black-and-white issues, she says. "You know, we just did
that huge act of repentance for racism, and someone asked me what is a
native person doing working on an issue that really should be a black person
or a white person's issue. For me, until we deal with the black-and-white
issue, the church is not going to pay attention to me as a Native American.
 
"They're not going to pay any attention to the Hispanics or the Asians or
the Pacific Islanders," she continues. "It would be great if the church had
shoulders big enough to be able to deal with all the issues at the same
time." 
 
Mobilizing laypeople

Such a task might have to fall on the shoulders of the laity, Stith says.
"The issues are so subtle that they have to be dug up, but there's hardly
anyone who can get enough strength to do so."

Many African Americans and people of other ethnic groups have become
complacent since the turbulent '60s and '70s, Stith says. "A good position,
a semi-good salary, a safe pension can sap one's strength to fight." When a
"lone ranger" comes along, "everybody will look at him like he's crazy," he
says. The attitude is, 'You're going to mess up my good thing,' he says. 

The laypeople must be catalysts for promoting conversation in the church
around these issues, Smothers says.

The local church also must move beyond its walls for ministry, says Dick
Freeman, a director of congregational development in the North Alabama
Conference. "The idea that we're the church and our doors are open on Sunday
morning and you all need to come - that's not going to work anywhere."
Freeman, who is white, says he's aware of the need for cultural, lingual and
racial inclusion. 

When educating people about inclusion, the United Methodist Church should be
careful not to overlook its young, White says. "We have assumed that young
people don't need to be addressed in this area, and consequently we may
have, inadvertently, failed to prepare our young people to live in a more
racially inclusive society," he says. Automatically thinking that young
people don't have racist attitudes because they're young is a "faulty
assumption," he says.     

Trying to get to know people on a personal level is key to a better racial
understanding, Smothers says. "If you don't know a person of a different
culture at a personal level, then you have very little point of reference to
get beyond the stereotypes." 

# # #

*Medley is a writer based in Waldorf, Md.

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