Newsline: Church of the Brethren leader comments on CCT experience

[CoBNews <CoBNews@brethren.org>]

Newsline: Church of the Brethren News Service, News Director Cheryl 
Brumbaugh-Cayford, 800-323-8039 ext. 260, cobnews@brethren.org

Church of the Brethren leader comments on CCT experience

(Feb. 24, 2012) Elgin, IL -- Church of the Brethren moderator-elect Bob Krouse 
was one of the 85-some national church leaders who gathered at the Christian 
Churches Together in the USA (CCT) annual meeting in Memphis, Tenn., in 
mid-February. 

Also among participants representing the organization's five "faith families" 
(African-American, Catholic, Historic Protestant, Evangelical/Pentecostal, and 
Orthodox) were Church of the Brethren general secretary Stan Noffsinger and 
Brethren Press publisher Wendy McFadden.

The group visited the National Civil Rights Museum, site of Martin Luther King 
Jr.'s martyrdom; the Slave Haven Museum, an Underground Railroad safe house; 
and the historic Mason Temple where King delivered his last speech before he 
was assassinated. They also heard from speakers such as Bernard LaFayette, 
co-founder of SNCC and a Freedom Rider during the Civil Rights movement, and 
Virgil Wood, an organizer for the March on Washington.

"It was really a wonderful meeting," Krouse said, interviewed by telephone 
after the close of the meeting. He highlighted the impact of back-to-back 
visits to the National Civil Rights Museum and Slave Haven Museum, in a few 
hours being vividly reminded of the long history of racism in the US, and the 
struggle against it. 

Visiting the place where King was killed "was so powerful," he said. "There it 
was, the balcony where he was shot. . . . And to be reminded of the church's 
failure to deal with those issues, slavery, busing. It was humiliating, really, 
to see the failure of the church."

One of the learnings Krouse takes away from the gathering is the 
appropriateness of what he characterized as a Christian sense of "heart-ache 
and profound moral failure" in the face of racism. The CCT meeting as a whole 
was characterized by a mixture of joy, as well, he said--"joy that we could be 
there as the church."

What does this mean for the Church of the Brethren? "It's been hard for us to 
get handles," Krouse answered. "A lot of the issues we've addressed as 
political rhetoric," he said, adding that Brethren have not addressed racism in 
a practical way as some other denominations have been trying to do. One 
concrete suggestion coming out of the CCT meeting is to focus church planting 
on multi-ethnic plants in urban areas. Another is to actively acknowledge how 
racism hurts people in the dominant culture as well as those who are being 
discriminated against.

"The more isolated we are--theologically, culturally, ethnically--it does 
really limit our lives. The most beautiful quilts are the richly colored."

The Church of the Brethren is a Christian denomination committed to continuing 
the work of Jesus peacefully and simply, and to living out its faith in 
community. The denomination is based in the Anabaptist and Pietist faith 
traditions and is one of the three Historic Peace Churches. It celebrated its 
300th anniversary in 2008. It counts some 123,000 members across the United 
States and Puerto Rico, and has missions and sister churches in Nigeria, 
Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and India. 

># # #

>For more information contact:

>Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford
>Director of News Services
>Church of the Brethren
>1451 Dundee Ave., Elgin, IL 60120
>800-323-8039 ext. 260
>cobnews@brethren.org