First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
February 23, 2003

The Rev. Dan Aldridge, former minister of one of our most racially diverse UU congregations, All Souls in Washington, DC, and himself an African-American, got used to being asked the question Why aren't there more African Americans in our churches? Where are all the black UUs? In response, he would say, "I will answer your question, if you will answer one for me. Where are all the white people? Why aren't there more UUs, period?" These are both good questions, and this morning as we celebrate black history month with this wonderful, high-energy music from our chorus, and prepare to kick off our congregation's annual pledge drive, it seems to me that they might help to illuminate each other. I want to suggest that in order to understand why Sunday morning continues to be what has long been called 'the most segregated hour in America', we must recognize the role that the black church has played in the culture of this nation and in the lives of its African American citizens. And I would suggest further that we in the mainline liberal religious community have some things to learn from the black church experience that could be of value to us as we seek to offer our particular good news to the world around us.

Two historical generalizations about the development of the black church tradition in the United States may be of some usefulness in understanding that institution's unique role. First, the black churches did not usually come into being as distinctive responses over doctrinal differences in quite the way that many of the various white denominations emerged from one another. When African natives were first brought to the North American continent as indentured servants and eventually as slaves, they were transported from cultures shaped by the various indigenous religious traditions of their native regions, usually characterized by little sense of separation between sacred and secular aspects of life, and very informal institutional structures around spiritual concerns. It is worth noting that as many as ten to fifteen percent of them may have come from cultures already significantly influenced by Islam. They came here into a culture dominated almost exclusively by Christianity, and by the expectation that they would adopt mainstream western religious beliefs and practices, yet white churches seldom welcomed them into full participation. Even before the Revolutionary war, as early as 1775, African Baptist churches were being founded by free blacks in the colonies.

During the period of slavery in the southern states, white churches often provided galleries, or balconies, where servants were expected to sit while attending the same services as their masters, in which obedience and patience with one's role in this life were emphasized as godly virtues, with rewards promised in a life to come after death. However, the stories and images of the same Bible spoke a different message to the ears of the slaves than to their owners. Particularly the Old Testament texts describing the ancient Hebrews' exodus from bondage in Egypt and their journey to a promised land flowing with milk and honey captured the imagination of these people who found themselves in bondage in a hostile land. The idea of a pilgrimage of liberation ending in a promised city of justice spoke powerfully to them, and they adopted and incorporated these themes in their adaptation of the Christian gospel to their own spiritual realities and needs. In very practical terms, the motifs of journeys, rivers, angels, railroads, and promised lands could be used to encode actual information about plans to physically run from slavery, to the northern states or to Canada, where they would be free. But such risks were for the hardy and adventurous; not everyone had the physical or emotional stamina to attempt to escape, and the penalties for those who tried and failed were savage. But even for those who remained, the message of the Christian gospel was an assurance of a coming day of judgement, justice, and freedom; the promise of a time/place when dignity and wholeness would bear fruit in joy and peace for all people, not just the arbitrarily privileged. They used the ancient names of Israel - the city was Zion, the river was Jordan, the leader was Moses - but what they were talking about was a complex and enduring confidence in the eventual change of the world as they knew it into something more fundamentally fair and humane.

This confidence was only partly justified with the coming of war between the northern and southern states, and the Emancipation Proclamation. Freedom alone, in a culture of Jim Crow laws and racist segregation, was not Zion; the Jordan river remained to be crossed, and in many important ways for many African Americans today, it remains yet to be crossed. The spiritual structure of the black church in this country was not built out of theological doctrines original to its own community; it was an imposed theology to begin with, adopted and adapted to speak to a peoples' condition. Thus it makes perfect sense to me that many adherents of the black church today may not be impressed by the kind of European enlightenment theological literalism that drives some of us as UUs to reject traditional Christian dogma. It wasn't their dogma to begin with, but the enslaved ancestors made it work for them; why should their heirs in this century be any less creative and flexible? Bernice Johnson Reagon, of the African American vocal group Sweet Honey in the Rock, writes:

I don't know how my mother walked her trouble down;

I don't know how my father stood his ground;

I don't know how my people survived slavery;

But I do remember, that's why I believe.

For much of the spiritual community of the black church, remembering is believing, and believing is remembering. Communities of the dominant culture are in no position to regard such survival mechanisms with contempt.

A second generalization that may help us, is to recognize the central and crucial role that the black church has played in sustaining and developing the resources of the black community as a whole. Scholars like Tony Pinn agree that once the Negro denominations had separated or been pushed out by their parent denominations, whether Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal or Pentecostal, they became one of the few, or perhaps the only, social institution controlled by its own black constituency. In the church, African American men and women could rise to positions of prestige and honor; not unlike white churches in many small communities, the minister was often the most educated and literate man of the town. Through the function of charity, the church could create a certain level of social safety net, in which its members helped one another financially and emotionally through particularly hard times. Through the function of teaching, the church could help to articulate the expectations of individual behavior in the community, and the likely consequences for violating those expectations. It offered a friendship circle and the foundation of a social life; it held up aspiration for younger members, and support and dignity for the aging. Through the church facilities and activities, its members could have collectively many things that they might never be able to attain privately; like a beautiful building, and opportunities for artistic expression, and even political clout. But the central reality at the heart of all these activities was that in this one place, even if nowhere else in a world of oppression both brutal and subtle, African Americans were in control of their own destiny, were treated as they chose to treat one another, and could express the realities of their lives without editing to suit the demands of the dominating white culture. I can only guess how much energy it must have taken, and takes even today, to sustain one's dignity and safety in the course of interacting with a racially hostile society, never knowing exactly when a chance word or gesture or even glance might trigger an avalanche of suspicion and arbitrary power. In a way, it even makes sense to me that the more a black person functions in the context of a white culture, as a student or a teacher, as an employee or a boss, as a consumer or a citizen, the more important would be the familiar comfort of the black congregation on Sunday morning, the greater the relief not to measure one's own words, or weigh the words of others for hidden significance. In the context of that comfort and the resources of that institution for my own community, how much significance would I be likely to attach to whether or not I entirely agreed with the theological details? They might well be the least of my problems, and a religious tradition whose primary message was an offer of freedom from that dogma, like Unitarian Universalism, might appear to me enormously irrelevant to my most pressing concerns.

These kinds of considerations have long made me uncomfortable with the notion that UUs ought to seek racial justice by trying to attract more black people to leave the churches of their heritage that have been the locus of much power, in order to join our congregations. Last year, when Tony Pinn spoke at our Humanist Center gathering, he offered me a tantalizing clue to another, perhaps deeper, consideration. In responding to a question somewhat like that constantly posed to Dan Aldridge, Tony said that the religious questions that black churches must answer and wrestle with are fundamentally different from the religious questions that white churches must answer and wrestle with, and as long as that is the case, Sunday morning is likely to continue to be a segregated hour. What are those different questions? I'm not sure how much of this Tony said, and how much is the product of my own pondering since, so don't hold him responsible for all of it, but here's what I think. I think that we must take seriously Bernice Johnson Reagon's observation that survival is part of what believing is about. The questions that the black church must struggle with are these: What kind of resources do we need in order to stay alive, stay sane, preserve our humanity and our dignity in the face of the oppression with which we must live? What sources of hope do we have for the eventual transformation of the world into a place of greater justice and liberty? How do we keep going? What must we do to honor the endurance of our forbears, and carry forward their dreams? How do we continue to name and resist our oppression? How do we mourn all that we lose because of it, and what makes us strong enough to bear that loss and not give up? What creativity and joy is within us no matter what? What would it look like to feel, and be, truly free? The stories and images that are the answers to these questions may come from a variety of personal experiences as well as ancient traditions, but they will necessarily be viewed through the lens of the African American community's shared reality.

It would be facetious for the religious communities of the dominant culture to ask the same questions in the same way. It seems to me that white churches must take seriously the unintended consequences of the privilege that they cannot escape. We must struggle with questions like these: How do we best use the resources we have to nurture justice and compassion in the world? How can we understand the uses and corruptions of power as a spiritual issue? What, if anything, are we called upon to do about the unfairness of life, and of history? Are there aspects of our own human condition from which we are cut off by high levels of comfort and safety? To what are we accountable for the use we make of our individual and collective potential? What are our dreams for the world's future, and the human race? How shall we respond to the ambiguities of our own hearts' good intentions, while still believing and celebrating what is best in ourselves and others? What truly gives our lives meaning, when we know that power, achievement and wealth don't work? These kinds of questions, which are urgent for people living lives of relative privilege, could seem less than compelling to a community that must deal with tangible oppression on a constant basis.

Now, I do believe that there is wisdom to be had from entering into the religious questions of communities other than my own from time to time, as well as from sharing my own deepest questions with others. Even as communities, congregations, traditions, we are not in this struggle alone. And while we may appreciate what is spiritually and culturally unique to the context of the black church, we may also have some insight to gain from observing some of the ways in which these congregations address the spiritual needs of their members and their larger communities.

Our congregational consultant this year, Michael Durall, tells a story about asking a group of people to use pieces of wire to express the spiritual journeys of their lives, and one young woman, born a UU, who made a simple circle, and explained that although she had experimented with a number of other religious possibilities, none of the groups she had encountered in her search had had enough impact on her to "bend her wire." Mike Durall believes, and I agree, that as religious communities, we should be in the business of 'bending peoples' wires.' Who we are and what we are about should be significant enough that when someone is touched by this congregation, their wire is bent - good and bent. I believe that is what we want for ourselves, for the wires of our ordinary, everyday, anxious, generally pretty privileged lives to get bent enough that we know we are truly alive, and wrestling with something that matters, and transforming the world as we ourselves are being transformed.

The black churches have known this; since the days of slavery, they have known that if they weren't bending the wires of their members, if they weren't making a significant difference of hope and endurance in peoples' lives, those lives would be lost, to outer violence and inner despair. They had no choice - and I wonder; do we really have a choice, either? Well, I can tell you one choice that we have; it's a choice that you are each going to make when you get a letter in the mail this week, or have a chat with a member of the board who calls you, or maybe even fill out a card this morning. You're going to have a choice about what you are going to enable this Society to do for its members and for this community and for the world next year. That is the choice you will be making when you make your pledge; whether we will be able to educate ministers who honor and celebrate the humanist tradition, and whether we can reach out to young adults and everyone else who longs to hear about a faith of freedom and reason that wants to change the world, and whether we can make this building an expression of the beauty of the human spirit that we affirm here. You will decide this, when you fill out your pledge card, so let me tell you one more thing about the heritage of the black church.

Because it was one thing that was their own, and because they knew that no one else was going to do it for them, the members of those churches supported them. It was and it still is true that statistically, the congregations whose members have the least income, give the highest percentage of it to empower the work of their religious communities. Out of what little they had, many of them set aside ten percent for the church, for god's work, they called it. And then on top of that, they gave more when they were asked, for love offerings, to help one another in adversity, to do special missions to the community and the world. Out of what little they had, and have, they did this. I know a congregation on the north side of Minneapolis today, that serves people in one of this city's least affluent neighborhoods. They deal with drugs and gangs and homelessness and unemployment and family violence up close and personal every day; they take welfare to work so seriously that they run two childcare centers 24 hours a day, so that mothers can work second shifts and graveyard shifts, which is all the work that some of them can get, without leaving their children unsupervised. They have a shelter for women fleeing abusive relationships, and they have a program for men to learn to deal with their feelings without resorting to habits of violence. The members of this congregation are struggling people, but they help each other. And together, they are building a three million dollar shelter facility for those children, to give them the environment they should have to grow up strong and whole. These are not wealthy people, but they take their faith seriously. Are they doing it because they think that's what god calls them to do? Are they doing it because they love Jesus? Maybe so; maybe so. But if children are being kept safe and cared for; if women are being set free from the bondage of poverty, dependency, and powerlessness; if families are learning to break the cycles of violence and live together in respect and hope, what difference does that make?

That's not a trivial commitment; ten percent of your income, when your income isn't that large to start out with. When people of limited means support their church at that level, it's the difference between meat and vegetarian meals sometimes; it's the difference between a new winter coat, and wearing the old one for yet another year; it's the difference between having an ice cream cone, and just plain being hot. And it isn't because there are going to be lots of ice cream cones and winter coats in heaven; it's not primarily about heaven, it's about a church that is essential to people's hopes for community, solidarity, and progress, right here and now. For the black church, it was and is about having the opportunity to see yourself and your friends in roles of leadership, to create an institution that reflects your own values rather than someone else's, and to experience what the world might be like if you had some say about running it. That's what Zion was; that was the promise of the promised land. The slaves knew; they knew that the legal and social system that held them in bondage could not stand forever; they knew that it was inherently unstable, and they sang the songs about crossing the river and over in Zion and going to see the king because those stories and those songs would help to bring it down. They sang those songs, and they sing them still - they gave their tithes, and they give them still - to bend the wires of their own lives, and the wires of history. They sang and they gave, as a testimony to a tangible place of freedom from slavery, but long after that, those songs remain as expressions of longing for an ideal community of justice and liberation.

What, then, of us?

Do we want lives consumed entirely in self-indulgence? Well, do we?

Or do we want something that matters so much to us that it is worth some kind of sacrifice?

Do we want a world torn apart by war?

Or do we want an earth made fair, with all her people one?

Do we want a nation divided between the elite and the powerless? Is that what we want?

Or do we want a land of diversity, opportunity, and justice?

Do we want our children to inherit a ruined planet and a bankrupt culture?

Or do we want to bequeath them light, and see them carry it beyond our troubled days?

Do we want a society dedicated entirely to profit?

Or do we want a culture of civic responsibility and generosity?

Do we want a police state? People say we do...

Or do we want the promises of democracy and liberty kept?

Do we want a violent city of homelessness, hopelessness, and fear?

Or do we want a vital center of urban excitement, and gracious neighbors?

Do we want a religion that is crabby and stingy and afraid?

Or do we want a faith that changes the world?

Do we want to be a congregation of privilege and self-congratulation? Is that what we're about?

Or do we want to be a community of transforming service and love?

Do we want an institution that just gets by, from year to underfunded year?

Or do we want a Society that bends our wires and makes a difference in our lives? Really?

Well, if that's what we want, my friends, there is only one way to get it, and that is for each of us to choose to make it so, by how we live and by what we give.

We, too, have a vision for the promised land of liberation and justice; we, too, have a hope for the golden city of compassion and freedom and peace, the city that lies forever across that deep river of human aspiration and labor and love, the city whose name is Zion. It is our city, the city of humanity, here in this world, in this life; it is our city if we will make it ours by our energy and commitment and generosity; it is ours if we will give ourselves to its work, and pay the cost. We can do it; others have done it before us, others are doing it today; out of the little they have, they are building Zion, the city of human kinship and dignity. Surely, surely, with all the resources at our command, we can make this Society a partner in that great work, can't we? Surely we can make this religious institution into the vibrant and transforming community that we envision - can we do that? All right, then; you know what to do. Go fill out that pledge card, and tell us that you are going to be part of that work; that you want us to make a difference; that we are in the business of bending wires together. Now let's listen to the choir one time, and then let's stand up and sing - hymn 141.