PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
***Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Allen R. Hilton: The country is polarized. How can Christians help?
When a zoning board has to call in the police to keep order, when 40 percent of Americans don’t want their children to marry across party lines, when 30 percent of national security professionals predict a U.S. civil war, there’s something wrong with our society, says the Rev. Dr. Allen R. Hilton.
And maybe, he says, the church can help fix it.
Hilton is working with about 25 churches across the country to lead a series of conversations about difficult topics. As congregations develop this practice, he hopes they will be able to move beyond church walls to help heal divisions in their communities and the nation.
An ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, Hilton previously served three congregations in Connecticut, Washington and Minnesota and taught at Yale Divinity School and St. Mary’s College of California.
He is a graduate of George Fox College, Princeton Theological Seminary and Yale University. His book “A House United: How the Church Can Save the World”was published in April.
Hilton spoke with Faith & Leadership while teaching at the Summer Institute for Reconciliation of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What was your inspiration to found House United?
I come from evangelicalism and have spent time in progressive circles. It started to grieve me more and more how [the two groups] were talking about each other. I saw too often stereotypes and almost bigotry from the left toward evangelicals and from the right toward progressives.
I wouldn’t give up the things I learned in either place. So I thought I’d really like them to meet each other and actually get the benefits of their differences.
I started in my last church post to do that, to have courageous conversations across theological and political differences within the congregation. It became clear to me that I wanted to widen the number of people who might be reached by this. In 2016, I founded House United, which is a nonprofit that involves helping people figure out how to talk to one another. So I do events that bring people and churches together that usually wouldn’t meet.
Right now, I am the primary mover. It is getting to the point where my schedule is full enough that I’m going to need to find partners, but it’s a young ministry. I’ve got clusters of churches across the nation. I’m hoping to have a cluster of churches in each major metropolitan area within the next three years devoted to this mission as a part of what they do.
Q: How do you foster these conversations, and how do you get people together?
I roll out a question -- such as, “Is the United States a Christian nation?” -- having sent out a preparation guide that is a balanced treatment of different theological or political positions on the issue.
After we do some prep and table setting -- which includes [rules such as] we’re going to listen lovingly; we’re going to be able to repeat back what somebody has said in other words; we’re going to say after each person speaks, “Listen for what the Spirit is saying to the church”; we’re going to move it out of the bar-stool debate into the church-discernment realm -- they just talk.
I ask a first question. At first, people are very nice and reserved, because they don’t entirely trust that if they speak what they believe they won’t be stigmatized, especially if they feel like the minority position in the room.
But after a time, they start to trust the group, and after two or three of those conversations, we get beyond tolerance to a kind of mutual respect. Then after four or five, we get to people opening themselves to learn from one another.
They start to realize we can now do something better than either of us would have come up with, because we’re in the same room talking.
That’s a step forward, not only for church, but it’s a step forward for culture and government and all the places where we’re running into stymied positions because we’re set over against one another.
A lot of people come out for these [conversations], and my read on that is they want to be a part of the solution. They don’t feel good about having enemies in their own town, but they need leaders. They don’t know how to get out of the ruts and echo chambers without somebody giving them a hint about how to do that.
I usually go in and lead one and then am usually invited back to lead a couple more, during which I train leaders. Beyond that, once a month is a good rhythm.
The ideal here is they’re doing the hard issues once a month and they’re getting better at it, so that the church becomes a place where if there’s a conflict in the city or if there’s a conflict in the church, they say, “You know what, we’re going to have a courageous conversation about this next week; we’re going to take it up.”
It’s a Christian practice they’re building. The churches that have been doing it longer are getting better and better at it, so it’s like building any other muscles.
Q: When you say “courageous conversations,” is that a particular methodology or process?
I brand it as “courageous conversations,” but I’m fully aware that there are other people who are calling other things courageous conversations. It’s a methodology that I’ve created borrowing from Harvard’s work on difficult conversations, borrowing from Scripture, borrowing pretty indiscriminately from a whole lot of different places and then just trying to apply wisdom to the specifics of the conflict in the church.
Q: You draw people from the same congregation who disagree with each other. Do you also pull together people from separate congregations or organizations?
Communities of trust do this best -- people who know each other, even if it’s just from being in the same sanctuary.
But in an ideal world, the congregation becomes adept at this, and they become the host for conversations in their community. The dream here is that people start saying, “I don’t know what else they do in that church, but they seem to be really good at talking to one another about hard things. We can’t get anything done in the city government, so we’re going to go ask the church to come help us with how to do this.”
So we start it in the trust community, and then we let it spill over into other communities.
Q: Have you had this experience of it spilling over outside the church into other realms, or is that just your dream?
I work with a church in Westport, Connecticut, called Green’s Farms Church. They’ve been working with courageous conversations for a little bit.
In the town of Westport, they’ve had to call the police in at planning and zoning meetings. Well, people in the church immediately wrote me and said, “When can we help these people?” They’re working on it right now.
There is another forum in which I do courageous conversations that doesn’t say, “Listen for what the Spirit is saying to the church”; it says things like, “Let’s form a more perfect union.” It tells people that this isn’t a fight; it’s a discernment.
An example of that that’s not House United-generated is Amy Butler at Riverside Church. When Brené Brown and DeRay Mckesson start to talk together on Twitter and go back and forth and a bunch of people follow it, [Butler] says, “Why don’t we have this conversation in real life, have it in our church, have an audience there and let you guys just talk it out?”
I love what she’s doing. That’s the kind of function I look for House United to have, to bring together -- it’s the spirit of the House United vision of, “Let’s help our world do this. Let’s be the conveyor of conversations that work.”
Q: So tell me about your book, “A House United: How the Church Can Save the World.”
It comes from the notion we were just talking about. One of the stats I like to use to make American polarization vivid to people is that in 1960, American parents were asked in a broad survey whether they would be concerned if their son or daughter married someone from the opposite political party.
In 1960, 5 percent said they would be displeased if their son or daughter married across parties.
In 2010 -- and this was before the 2016 election cycle, this was before polarization had gotten even more extreme -- it was about 40 percent.
People say, “I can’t get together with my family at Thanksgiving anymore, because things blow up if we go anywhere but football and weather.” Friends can’t go to coffee.
The book is about looking at that reality in a Jeremiah kind of way. In Jeremiah 29, Jeremiah writes to the exiles in Babylon who are confused and displaced and trying to figure out what they’re going to do. They’re a little angry and frustrated, and they’re tempted to hunker down and just sit it out and try to endure. He says to plant gardens, build homes -- seek the welfare of your city, for in their welfare lies your welfare.
And so in that spirit, I look around and say, “Maybe the church ought to notice that the world around us needs to figure out how to at least coexist -- and probably how to thrive -- amid the current political division. Let’s help them.”
Foreign Policy magazine did a survey and asked what probability [people] would place on the United States entering an armed civil war. National security experts put the likelihood at 30 percent.
I don’t want to be alarmist with that stat, but it does indicate that maybe the world needs help. How might Christians help it out and be -- ironically, after 2,000 years of division and divisiveness -- what if we became the bring-together kind of people?
The book is designed to start within Christianity, because Jesus prayed that they [Christians] all may be one (John 17:20-21). When Jesus pictured Christian unity, he wanted it to happen, and he wanted it to impact the world.
Religion has been bad at this for a long time. What if we move the picture here and make ourselves a part of the solution to our culture?
Read the interview with Allen R. Hilton »
Episode 7: Daniel Black on why black history is white history
CAN THESE BONES: DANIEL BLACK
Daniel Black is a novelist, a scholar, a musician and a storyteller par excellence. He's a polymath who is as comfortable channeling the voices of his ancestors as he is directing the voices of a gospel choir. In this conversation with "Can These Bones" co-host Bill Lamar, the Clark Atlanta University professor talks about his writing process, the research that went into "The Coming," a novel about the movement of African people through the middle passage, and why he believes in the stalwart power and necessity of the black church. This episode is part of a series. Learn more about “Can These Bones” or learn how to subscribe.
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More from Daniel Black
Video: Daniel Black reading from “The Coming”
Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture: Daniel Black entry
The Ndugu Nzinga community, founded by Daniel Black
“The Coming”
“They Tell Me of a Home”
“The Sacred Place”
“Perfect Peace”
“Listen to the Lambs”
Transcript
Laura Everett: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church.
I’m Laura Everett.
Bill Lamar: And I’m Bill Lamar. This is the seventh episode of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and other fields. Through this podcast, we want to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in their own “valley of dry bones.”
Laura Everett: You spoke with the novelist Daniel Black for this episode, and he is a really fascinating human -- a writer and thinker, and a deeply spiritual man. And I know that he is personally one of your favorite novelists. Tell us a bit more about Daniel.
Bill Lamar: Oh my goodness. This man is a treasure.Laura Everett: How did you find his work?
Bill Lamar: It’s interesting -- I found his work through Howard University. Every year, they invite the incoming freshman class to read a book, and the book that the freshman class was asked to read some years ago was Daniel Black’s “The Coming.”
I was apprised of the choice of the novel, and because I’d like to think I’m still 18, I read the book along with the freshman class.
And it was -- I mean, superlatives and hyperbole -- you’re told when you write you shouldn’t use these things, and when you speak you shouldn’t use hyperbole or superlatives.
But this book was riveting in every, every way. It was riveting because, as Dan will share in the interview, I feel like, Laura, he was not so much the author as he was midwife of being able to tell the stories of people long dead but still very spiritually active in our world, people who suffered tremendous indignity but who had a humanity that was bright and that continues to shine to the present day.
What is interesting is that Daniel Black is a scholar. So you could have one life, a life well worth living, if you’re an excellent scholar. He’s got a Ph.D. in African-American studies from Temple University in Philadelphia, which is one of the premier places to study that field. You could stop there and live a wonderful life.
He’s also a person who cares deeply about the church. He’s in church every Sunday. He’s a church musician. He lives within the complexities and difficulties and beauties of the church. So there’s another life worth living.
On top of that, he is a novelist who has written not just “The Coming” but other interesting books. Here’s a man who writes novels but who also pours libations, channels the ancestors from his sofa, and he does all of those things while having a robust Christian theological grounding but also an understanding that God’s work in the world is beyond dogma, that it is beyond theological category.
I mean, I get so excited talking with him and thinking about his work. And I think that what he shares with us in this moment through his creativity and his midwifery, if you will, offers us a wonderful opportunity to learn from lives still among us in some mysterious way.
Laura Everett: Bill, that sounds really good. Let’s listen to your interview.
Bill Lamar: I have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Daniel Black, the author of “They Tell Me of a Home,” “The Sacred Place,” “Perfect Peace,” “The Coming,” “Listen to the Lambs”; a professor -- so an all-around gifted young man.
Dr. Black, welcome to “Can These Bones.”
Daniel Black: I’m appreciative of being here. Thank you for having me.
Bill Lamar: Thank you very much. So the first thing that needs to be said, sir, is I am an unrepentant fanboy of your work.
We’ve had a chance to meet and to speak, but I want to begin by sharing that your book “The Coming” was the most compelling book that I have read. And I have shared that with a number of people. The reason that we are talking is that I shared it with my colleagues, and [we] want you to share about what that book means to you and how it came into being.
Daniel Black: “The Coming” is a story of the movement of African people through what we call the “maafa,” or the middle passage. It details day by day, hour by hour, the trauma, the tribulation, the successes, the death, the unbelievable stench, the unbelievable pain of that journey, that movement of African people across the Atlantic Ocean.
And I came to write that story because, quite frankly, I began to see and I began to believe that people knew about the middle passage in a very cursory sense. We’ve heard the word, you know, we’ve heard of this historical moment before, but I realized in “The Coming” historical narrative that we had never heard from the Africans themselves.
They’d never gotten a chance to tell the story themselves, from their own perspective, their own point of view -- what really happened, what they endured, what they were thinking about in the belly of this ship. How they treated each other, how they thought about God, the new ways they evolved, the new ways they changed.
And I thought this was incredibly important, because the truth of the matter, Bill, is that the middle passage is really the defining moment of what it means to be black in America -- of what it means to be black in the diaspora.
The middle passage is the place where the transition from being African, if you will, to being African-American occurs. And there are so many cultural realities, from dancing to us literally learning to beat our thighs instead of having a drum, us understanding the power of collective unity, us accessing this thing called a collective consciousness, a collective memory.
These things happen during this historical moment known as the middle passage, and without understanding that, if we’re not very careful, we will believe that our beginning is America itself, and it is not. Nor is our beginning the middle passage. That’s not our beginning, either.
That’s simply the bridge that brought a people from one ancient land to a new place. But it’s a very, very important bridge, and it’s a very defining moment.
And so I wrote this book with the hopes of really helping people to understand the price that was paid -- just the unbelievable price that was paid -- for the sanctity and the sacredness of black life in America.
And I wanted, then and now -- I want people never to forget that.
Bill Lamar: Dan, your passion is palpable. And one of the things that I want to share -- because you have shared this with me in other conversations -- not only can it be argued that the middle passage moment was defining for African-Americans; it can be argued that that is the defining moment of America, period. Can you say more about that?
Daniel Black: Yes. In fact, I think what’s really important about what you’re saying is that the middle passage is a microcosmic example of what America will look like structurally for the next 300 years.
In other words, that ship -- the designation of people, the designation of race, the designation of where people even physically exist on the ship -- is a symbolic representation of where people would exist in terms of class structures in America itself. Black folks in the bottom of the ship; white folks at the top of the ship, giving orders, running things, if you will.
Black people waiting and hoping and trying to figure out how white people think, how white supremacy has absolutely shaped their lives. And black people trying to take account of the ways in which they feel their own culpability, in terms of their own social situation.
And this is important -- because a lot of people read the middle passage as a moment in African history -- there are as many whites on the ships as blacks. They’re just in a different place. But that’s extremely important to understand, because to understand the birth of “whiteness,” if you will, in America, one absolutely can go to the middle passage for that, too.
Because the ideology of white supremacy reigns central, and grows up, on this thing or during this moment known as the middle passage. So it’s very important to understand that the slave ship, again, is absolutely [emblematic] of American society to come.
Bill Lamar: Great insight, as always. Now, one of the things about this work -- and we are going to discuss some of your other work -- but one of the things about “The Coming” is that it is genre-bending. It is difficult to discern whether it is a novel, whether it is historical fiction. What I want to ask you is, how do you qualify the genre of this work?
Daniel Black: It’s a little poetic. There’s nonfiction. There’s fiction. All of that. Because what I really wanted to show is that Africans didn’t even conceive of narrative in the same way Europeans conceived of narrative at the time. They didn’t conceive of storytelling necessarily as a straight fictional act.
They knew oratory, but oratory included various possibilities in terms of genre. And I wanted to make sure that the African voice spoke in its own structural literary mold. It was a difficult thing to do, but I pray I did that well.
Bill Lamar: Well, sir, from my perspective, mission accomplished. I do want to ask -- you keep time differently. There is not necessarily a central character; you are able to paint beautiful portraits of the villages from which these people emerge, their theological systems, their familial systems, their sociopolitical systems.
In the backdrop of such a tremendous work, I sense exhaustive research. Tell me how you were able to reconstruct the lives of these persons with such precision and such beauty.
Daniel Black: Yes. I did years and years, probably 10, 15 years of research. I started researching the middle passage in graduate school, because that historical moment fascinated me then, as it does now. So I read about just hundreds of ships. I read captors’ journals and logs. I read how the ship was made. I read other novels that touch upon and speak about it, like Charles Johnson’s “Middle Passage.”
I read for years and years and years and years and years, because again, I was really in search of the African voice. What they thought, what they felt, what this meant to them, how this disrupted their entire -- not just way of life -- their entire being. How they had to construct new ways of being if they were to survive.
One of the things I realized throughout all this research is that no one had ever really dealt with these African people as people, man, as human beings. And one of the ways I knew that is because I could rarely ever find names. People would refer to these ancestors as “cargo.” Or they would talk about them as part of just the “goods” that had been brought from Africa.
And I began to wonder, Didn’t these human beings have names? Didn’t they have hopes? Didn’t they have wishes? Didn’t they have regrets? Didn’t they have dreams? And I realized that it was going to take someone coming along to humanize these ancestors on this boat and to give them names and to reconstruct what their dreams might have been, to imagine the arguments they may have had in the hull of those ships at night. To begin to believe that they probably blamed themselves as much as they blamed anyone for their social condition.
They have every right to speak for themselves.
They have absolutely every right to be registered in history as those who came, not just to a land with the physical ability to do labor, but they brought a culture. They brought a spiritual tradition. They brought religion. They brought dance. They brought music. They brought poetry. And the truth of the matter is, those things they brought with them have really made America what it is.
Bill Lamar: Wow. No one questions Shakespeare’s ability or Hemingway’s ability to speak to the human condition. But if you were to lift up a Toni Morrison, or if you were to lift up a Ralph Ellison, persons might say that they speak to the black condition but not the human condition. Help me to articulate -- please articulate how this work is a universal work rooted in the specificity of the victories and struggles of a particular people.
Daniel Black: Absolutely. The first problem is what you said, and that is we don’t yet understand black as human. That’s the first problem. We think all white-related experiences are human, because whites get the privilege of deeming themselves, or crowning themselves, speakers for the universe.
And what I’m suggesting is any human is a spokesperson for the universe. And so this story, “The Coming,” the story of this tragedy, but also the story of this triumph and this survival of African people, is really the story of human beings who were misplaced and displaced and demeaned and rejected and yet survived, and today their descendants thrive in the land that was once the land of their bondage.
And that is as “universal” as any story could possibly be. What we have to do is be very careful not to believe that, “Oh, this story, then, must be for African people.” No, this story is for humanity. It’s for human beings -- as every story is.
Bill Lamar: You shared a somewhat humorous anecdote that really gets to the heart of what you’re saying -- that a white book group got hold of this book, and they invited you and they shared with you. And I dare not tell your story. Would you share that with us, please?
Daniel Black: Sure, sure, sure. It was an amazing, amazing experience. They invited me to a book club, and I went to this book club meeting, to a white book club meeting, and it was a fantastic group of amazing, amazing people. And they were telling me how much they appreciated the story, the beauty of the writing; the language was just lyrical; it was fantastic.
And one person raised her hand and said, “You know, I really, really appreciate this story, and I feel like I’m learning so much about you and your people and black people in this.”
And I said, “Ma’am, I want to pause you. Because this story is about your people.” And she froze.
I said, “This story is about your people. You are as much a participant on the middle passage as was I. The minute I got on the boat, you were already there. It’s your boat.”
Yeah. And so we had -- it was an aha! moment, you know. And I’m really pleased to say she said, “I have to admit I just did not understand this that way. I didn’t see this that way.”
And I said, “And that is part of the reason we have a difficult time doing racial healing in America.”
Because we categorize moments and we categorize experiences so that whiteness always comes out clean. It always comes out pristine. It always comes out some kind of way being seemingly committed to healing and to reconciliation, when not only is that not true, but whiteness really is the reason that we even have the other categories, you know.
I was telling a class I teach the other day that we have to stop saying phrases like “people of color.” That is one of the most racist phrases I’ve ever heard in my life, because “of color” simply means that the standard is white. Everybody else is not white. You’re of some color. But white is a color, too. White is a color. And so to say “people of color” just means everybody else gets put into one category, and whiteness gets its own.
Bill Lamar: So, Dan, you had to, in order to give birth to this piece, to be the author, you had to assume a posture of listening. And I think often about the difference between a symphony, which is melodic, and a cacophony, which is disarming, aurally.
How did you assume a space to listen so that you could distinguish between the symphony that was being given you and the cacophony around you?
Daniel Black: Yes. I poured a libation every day, brother, before I would start writing. I would sit on my sofa and breathe for a while. Right? To still my own thoughts and to let the ancestors’ voices come to me. I would pour a libation.
It would come, and some days I would weep. I would just cry, man. I would just cry as they were telling me the story. It was just unbelievable. But what I also had to do was probably even more intense. After I wrote, I would have to go outside, literally, and either sit or lie on the earth in order to be grounded and to come back and to be functional in this space and in this historical moment. Some days I was so emotionally distraught that I was dysfunctional.
Bill Lamar: Interesting. You make us think again of the artist as conduit, and that is very, very interesting. One of the pieces of the work that was captivating was you weave a narrative about the Africans’ own self-critical mechanism. Can you speak to that? Because I see that as a narrative that you could drop in any locale among any people.
Daniel Black: Sure, and in some ways that was probably the most heart-wrenching and the most complicated and confusing part of this narrative. The way in which these Africans, when they got the chance to speak for themselves, held themselves responsible for their own enslavement.
They were not wasting time, they were not spending time saying, “These white folks are horrible people, and I can’t believe they did this.” There was some of that, too, of course, but their main thrust in trying to understand and to explain this historical moment was a critique of themselves.
They said, “Listen, we spoke more proverbs than we lived. We simply did not heed the words of our elders at times. When the drums sounded the warning, we weren’t paying attention. We had gotten so used to life as we knew it, we simply took our gods for granted. The elders had been trying to tell us that destruction was coming, and we were just, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Greed began to grow among us, and all of us began to taste greed. And in our commitment to having material things, we lost our spiritual sensibility.”
Bill Lamar: Were you writing about that time or our time? Wow.
Daniel Black: Oh my God, man, oh my God. In fact, the parallels are just eerie. It’s just eerie. It’s just eerie.
But I have to admit I love how these ancestors were saying, “No, no, no, no, it’s not about the white man. No, that’s not what we’re talking about. That’s not our story. The white man is not at the center of our story. Our story is about ways where we dropped the ball ourselves. We were too spiritual -- we were too spiritual not to have known this was coming.”
Bill Lamar: And read the stars, as you said, read the stars.
Daniel Black: How in the world didn’t we know this? Because we simply weren’t -- we were skipping rituals, because we just didn’t want to go. And you know what? We were human beings. We were human beings. We were flawed human beings like any human beings anywhere. We were excellent, yes, but we were not without error.
Bill Lamar: And would you say more? I feel like I want to make sure that people hear this in the textured way that you give it and it does not become another argument for taking personal responsibility. What you’re talking about is much more than that narrow “they can blame themselves.” Can you just give it more texture? I want to make sure that people understand that.
Daniel Black: Yes, because this does not exonerate Europeans at all from, of course, what they did. No, not at all. Not at all.
What it does say is these Africans are saying that they had enough spiritual wherewithal, they had the kinds of cultural mechanisms, whereby they could have protected themselves, had they just been honest with themselves and had they been true to their own cultural mechanisms.
And I think that’s the point. They’re saying, “We knew how to protect ourselves. We knew how to sense danger coming. We knew how to do that.”
These were not naive, “primitive” people living in a place, who had no notion of higher-level intellectual things. No. That’s not who we were. We were not that.
We knew how to sense things. We knew how to tell danger coming. We knew how to extract healing from the forest. We knew how to do this. So when these strangers came, we were simply off our game. That’s what they said: “We were off our game.”
Now, [the Europeans] were wrong, absolutely, for coming. They were wrong for the way they treated us. They were wrong for enslaving us. That is absolutely true. There’s nothing that can make that anything other than true. They were absolutely, positively wrong.
What it’s saying is, while that is also true, what is true on our part is that we had compromised too much of our own principle and too much of our own standard to make this even possible.
Bill Lamar: It just adds so much texture to the way that we think about our present, as well as our past. I want you to share a little bit about your own reality in the church. I mean, you are a man of faith, of deep faith and commitment in that reality. Can you talk with us about that?
Daniel Black: Sure. I’m absolutely a man of faith. I’m a man who believes in the complement between the visible and the invisible. I am a man who believes that when one really understands this notion of what it means to have purpose and to have consciousness, that one gains a quality of life that no material thing can match. I absolutely believe that.
I’m also one who believes in the stalwart power and necessity of the black church. You know, the black church has really been historically the only institution we own, the only place where we could go when we were kicked out of all other places. The civil rights movement would never have happened without the black church.
But I’m saying something else, too. I’m saying that the black church also as an institution -- not a particular church but the black church itself as an institution -- is absolutely critical, I think, to the survival of black people. But if we’re not careful, in this contemporary moment, I’m not sure most of us see this.
Most of us are too busy being tied into the whole argument of whether you believe that Jesus is Lord and Savior. Do you have to be baptized in the name of Jesus or in the name of the Holy Ghost? Do you have to go down under the water; can sprinkling be enough? We’re caught up in these details, which really don’t translate into spiritual insight anyway. Right? It’s really useless babbling.
But I’m saying the institution itself, for what it has taught culturally, the institution of the church really gave black people self-worth, gave black people dignity. It taught black children confidence.
How did they do that? Black kids, there was a day when black kids had to do things -- Easter speeches. There was a way they taught you to stand before people. They taught you to speak loudly, to hold your head up, to make sure you learn those lines. “Say them clearly, young man.”
Those kinds of things, they were teaching us. They were preparing us to stand in a world that did not believe in the excellence -- or even didn’t believe in the possibility -- of our humanity. But that wasn’t so much about God. That was about the culture. That was about us believing in ourselves. And the black church as an institution absolutely taught that. It taught economic solvency. It taught forms of leadership.
It even perpetuated good culinary skills. All of us know if you were in the black church the best cooking was going to happen on certain days of the year. You know? And I’m saying all of this to say: those cultural remnants I would beg us, beg us not to lose. But I don’t see them being stored or being kept anywhere other than the black church right now.
I’ve had my issues philosophically with the black church and some of the foolishness that we teach -- “That’s what God said” and all that, and “The Bible is the only word of God.” I don’t believe any of that.
What I do believe, though, is we need the institution itself. Now, let’s overhaul it. Certainly. But my God, let’s not get rid of it.
I go to church absolutely every week. But one of the things that I think has been a serious deficit for us as black people is we have a lot of black scholars who critique the church, but they don’t attend it.
And I think that’s a deficit of sight. I’m not sure how accurate one’s sight is if one is not in the middle of what you’re reporting about. We need our scholars’ insight in the church. I know what the church has done to scholars. I know what the church has done to intellectual inquiry. I’m enormously clear about that.
And still, I would say we need to fight the battle, because we need our thinkers in our spiritual places. But from what I see, most black scholars -- very solidly, I believe that most black scholars have abandoned the walls of the black church. But I think that’s to our detriment. Because the truth of the matter is I’m not sure what other institutions are being built that would take its place. And you cannot sustain a culture, you cannot sustain a people, you cannot sustain a nation without institutions.
Bill Lamar: Say more about institutions, because our listeners work in institutions, Christian institutions. What is your understanding, your theology, your philosophy of institutions? That would be very helpful.
Daniel Black: Sure. I think that an institution is an organization or is a body that people come together and create, whose purpose is not for any particular person but to perpetuate the collective ethos of a people. Institutions -- it can be church, it can be schools, can be social clubs, etc., -- but the point of the institution is to perpetuate the idea and the excellence of the people themselves. It should outlive any one person.
But for all practical purposes, when the people come together, they create an organism that could not exist with any one person alone, and that organism is the thing I’m calling an institution. And every culture has it. I’m clear about why institutions are critical, but I’m also clear that we won’t survive without them, because no one person can do the work of the transformation of a people. That takes an organ, or organism, that is bigger than any one person has the strength to do.
Bill Lamar: Dan, when I consider the titles of your work -- “They Tell Me of a Home,” which is a piece of that great James Cleveland song “Uncloudy Day”; “The Sacred Place”; “Perfect Peace,” which comes from Scripture; “Listen to the Lambs” -- all of this is drenched in religious language, gospel language. Tell me about your work and how it is so connected and drenched in that reality.
Daniel Black: The first thing I’ll say is that music has been the healing balm for black people throughout the diaspora. In many cases, the reason we survived is because we had a song. See, music does for the heart what reading does for the head. Music does for the heart what reading does for the head.
And we have needed heart surgery from the time we stepped off those slave ships, because our hearts have been so wounded. Our hearts have been dismissed; our hearts have been degraded; our hearts have been damned. And what music does is give the heart, if you will, back its life. And specifically, the music of the spirit, the music of the church, this thing we call gospel music, spirituals. You know, all our music has its root in the gospel, in the spiritual. Whether it’s blues, jazz, hip-hop -- the root is the spiritual, and the spiritual was really trying to tease through this question of, “What lesson is God trying to teach me?”
And so, you know, I’m a musician; I’m a gospel musician. I’m a choir director, and I see in so much gospel music where the black heart is crying out and trying to ask God the question of, “God, am I doing this right? Are you proud of me, God? God, do I look like you yet? Are you hearing my cry, oh God? Are you going to cover me? Are you going to take care of what I cannot handle?”
It’s all of these conversations between the visible and the invisible, because black people believe that there is as much real in the invisible as in visible places. And so our music perpetuates this notion. It perpetuates this narrative.
And so my books, you’re right, do have these titles which bespeak our connection to music and musicality. And I’m suggesting that music is really the thing that keeps blood flowing to our hearts every day.
Bill Lamar: Could you share with me as a teacher, as a musician, as an author, as a man of faith -- what practices ground you, give you energy, remind you of who you are and who God is?
Daniel Black: I visit the water often, whether it’s beaches, lakes, rivers, streams. I visit water often. I’m a fisherman, so I love to fish. But often when I’m at the water, I’m in conversation with God. I’m in conversation with the Spirit. You know, water as the life-giving substance has a way of bringing clarity. It has a way of helping me, at least, to think things -- to put them in their proper context, to not let the details overwhelm the big picture. So I’m often, often, often at the water.
The other thing that I do is I attend choir rehearsal regularly. Being in music, being in gospel music particularly, has a way of grounding, has a way of reminding me that “trouble don’t last always.” It has a way of helping me be clear that the things I’m in the middle of or the things I might be going through have a function and have a purpose and I’ll be better for it afterward.
This group of people, Ndugu Nzinga, we meet weekly. And that gathering of people, that connecting to other human souls in a spiritual place, with all of our imperfections -- when we gather, the way we love on each other, the way we touch each other, the way we hold each other’s hands, the way we sing together -- that human connection, that touch, does everything of restoring my divinity and my clarity that I have worth and value as a human being.
Bill Lamar: Finally, my brother, the name of this podcast is “Can These Bones.” What does that phrase bring to mind for you?
Daniel Black: What’s funny is when I first heard of this podcast, when I first received information and the invitation to be part of this podcast and I saw that title, I loved it.
Because, of course, I know that scripture, that story in the Bible about the bones, you know, the folks -- these bones, and the valley of dry bones. And the thing that’s amazing to me about the image -- “can these bones” -- it’s like there’s this interstitial space.
See, bones mean there was once beingness; there was once life here. But what bones also suggest is, and it can be again.
Bones, to me, kind of exist in this liminal space between that which was and that which can be, right? We can dress up the bones; we can put flesh back on the bones, metaphorically, if need be, and we can live again. Or we can let these bones deteriorate, and let all life leave from this space.
But when I heard the question, I felt like it was asking, Can we as -- not just black people -- can we as human beings in America, can we thrive again? Is there a new way of being that would honor all of us? Isn’t there a way that we can love that we have not done before? Isn’t there some means by which we can hold and touch each other that is more excellent and more beautiful and, even in its vulnerability, is more divine than what we did yesterday? Can’t these bones live again -- these bones, this fragmented place called America? Can’t we be more excellent than we’ve imagined before?
And absolutely we can. Absolutely we can, if we will do the work of telling the truth, of being honest with each other, being honest about the way we’ve wounded each other, but also being honest about the unbelievable power we have to create the world that I think God created us to create. God is not going to do it. God created us to do it, and either we’ll do it or we won’t have it.
And I think the question, “Can these bones?” is asking that question. Are we willing to pull together and to do a new thing, a brand new thing, a much more marvelous thing?
And hey, I’m ready for the work, brother. I hope I began or am perpetuating that work through this book “The Coming.”
Bill Lamar: You’re a gift to us, and we hope that those listening will be motivated to get “The Coming” and your other work and to participate in the new world that I believe God is creating through your work and the work of so many others. So thank you very much.
Daniel Black: Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Rev. Lamar, for having me. And thank you for doing this podcast. And thank you, sir, for believing that these bones can in fact live again. Because the truth of the matter is if we don’t believe that, we should shut down every institution, we should close every book, we should even give up our breath.
Bill Lamar: There you go again. Thank you, brother, thank you.
Daniel Black: Yes, sir. We’ll talk soon.
Laura Everett: That was my co-host Bill Lamar speaking with the writer Daniel Black.
That was such a rich and robust and wide-ranging interview. There are so many places we could dig in, but I want to start by asking you about this genre-bending work that Daniel Black does as a researcher, a historian, a novelist, and a poet and a musician.
For those of us who defy easy categories, talk to me about what it means for you to be in conversation with Daniel Black and the way he’s moving as an academic and an artist.
Bill Lamar: The first thing I have to say is that Daniel Black is a human being. He does not wear a cape. He does not go into telephone booths and change his garments. He is a human being.
He’s so present spiritually, so present intellectually and so present relationally that he is a polymath. He can do so many things well.
And one of the things I learned from him is if you sit still and if you don’t categorize yourself -- you don’t say, “I’m just a pastor; I’m just a Christian institutional leader” -- if you allow your imagination to grip you at the intersection of all of your giftedness, you’d be surprised at what you are capable of producing.
And so for Dan, the story of “The Coming” was gift given to him that he gives to us. It was a means of recovering the humanity of people who were listed simply as cargo or simply as the enslaved. And I think that this ancestral gift that Dan gives is not just trapped in the pages of “The Coming” and some of his other work and other manifestations of his creativity and artistry, but it is how Dan deals with human beings.
For him, every human being has a story worth being told, a story worth capturing and a story worth sharing. And his means of wrapping all of that up in one package of boundless energy teaches pastors and teaches Christian institutional leaders that we must be the spaces and places for people to share their stories.
Especially those whose stories might not be told or might be disrespected because of race, because of gender, because of socioeconomic status, or just because somebody is weird. Because people can be mean, and people marginalize others. Dan’s work shares with all of us, in our perspective as leaders, that the world is a poorer place when stories are not told and humanity is not given a chance to shine.
This work was so transformative for me, Laura, that it went from the book that all of the Howard University freshmen read to the book that Metropolitan AME Church is reading together in this new year. We are going to be discussing it and thinking ourselves about how we can be channels and midwives of the greatest dreams and fondest hopes of our ancestors. Their dreams and hopes were human hopes. Before and beyond categorizations that separate us was hope for human freedom, for human thriving, human dignity. And all of those things excite me to no end, especially given the status of the world in which we live.
Laura Everett: Bill, that act of naming, of unearthing the names of those who were simply listed as cargo, or as goods, is such a sacred act -- a scriptural act, really. We see so often in the stories of our faith that the act of naming grants dignity and agency.
And I’m really struck by Dan sitting with those ship manifests, the slave ship manifests, and imagining, inviting the names of those who were merely listed as numbers to come to him.
It is an act of pastoral imagination to notice those who go unnamed. It’s what we do on Sundays, right? I mean, that’s what we do in prayer. And what we do when we read the newspaper carefully is to notice who is going unnamed and invite ourselves to research and imagine and think into their experience. I found that a deeply profound gift, the way Daniel Black talked about his work.
Bill Lamar: One of the things that need to be said is that Dan Black gives permission through his artistry and his giftedness for us to not be afraid or ashamed to engage the world spiritually. I really believe that many of us in the church are afraid to engage the world spiritually or to speak in spiritual terms. I think that we speak in terms of the things that are tangible and can be counted.
But people come into our institutions, whether they name it or not -- whether they can name it or whether they’re comfortable naming it, they are seeking an encounter with God. They are seeking encounters with the divine -- even those, again, as I said, who would shudder at mentioning that kind of language.
So what excites me so much about Dan is that Dan is the one who was willing in this work to sit with the pain. Because he talks about often, in the interview, and in other venues where we have spoken, the pain of his having to do this work -- it crippling him, him not being able to work for days on end because of the clarity with which the ancestors communicated with him spiritually.
Here’s the thing: he’s not just making stuff up, but he spent 10 years researching primary documents, seeing things that some people had not seen or that very few people had seen. So this profound spirituality does not come being disconnected from tradition. It does not come sitting in our rooms making stuff up, but it is an encounter with human wisdom and a human reality beyond our categories of description, beyond physicality, beyond the tangible.
And I think that there is a tyranny of the tangible in the church that will weaken us, especially in this day when Christendom is disintegrating. We cannot expect the culture to push people to a church. The church’s proclamation and the power of the God to whom we bear witness must drive people to the church, and that requires a depth of spirituality. And Daniel Black is at the forefront of that kind of work.
Laura Everett: I am captivated by the artistry of this, too. He certainly -- I mean, he could have written a historical record of the lives of those who were enslaved and in the belly of those ships. But instead, he made the decision that the genre-bending -- that no single genre would do, and that he needed to allow the African voices to speak in their own mode.
That conversation actually reminded me a little of some of the conversations in the church about inclusive and expansive language, and about the sort of multisensory, multimodal ways that we come to understand our lives in Christ, that it does not do to just work in one way.
And Bill, I need this, too. I’ve said to colleagues recently, “If there isn’t artistry in this work, I’m done. I’m out. I cannot do it.” Seriously! If it’s just about learning “the 12 best things to get your board to do what you want them to do” or “the five easy steps for financial solvency” -- like, I’m done. I need the kind of artistry and the kind of multimodality that Daniel Black is practicing in his own life, and the attentive listening to the voices that not only have been suppressed but have gone unnamed. I need that.
And the place that convicted me in this so much was when Daniel said that this is not simply a black story; this is an American story. And that there were as many whites on the ships as blacks, but they were in a different place.
That conversation about universality that you two engaged in, this sort of parsing of what we think of as a black experience or a white experience, and that I as a white person somehow have no need to know the history of Africans coming to this country -- that that is an American experience, and part of what I need to understand about how my whiteness comes to be defined at that moment in the middle passage.
Bill Lamar: And what’s fascinating is, you know, the whiteness is defined in opposition to. And the sad thing, the theft and poverty of our world in regard to human exchange, comes in large part because of the tyranny of normativeness of whiteness that Dan and I almost -- if we were white, talking about white things, there would not need to be an argument about its universality, because its universality is assumed.
And that is part of the difficulty of the church and the broader body politic’s language, because what is assumed as universal is not. All voices are necessary to point us to the universality.
And one more thing that I really think is important: what Dan does is what each leader in institutions and churches must do, and that is return agency to the people, the way that [Ronald] Heifetz, on leadership, talks about giving work back to the people.
[Daniel Black] is clear that these Africans were agents before the middle passage. He spends time talking about how they were scientists, how they were astronomers, how they were philosophers and theologians and agriculturalists, and how they did wonderful things, and how their looking away from themselves made them vulnerable. Their looking away made them vulnerable to the horrors that came.
So he does not hide from their vulnerabilities. He restores to them their full humanity, and they remain fully human even in the most dehumanizing situations.
One of the threads that you pull from that into his experience in the black church, or my own -- he talked about giving Easter speeches. We talked about that, laughed about that -- that what the black church has offered to black people in this space is, “OK, no matter what you see, what you hear, you are human. You are capable of learning beautiful things and writing beautiful things. You’re capable of speaking beautifully and changing the world. The world is yours. You are not being acted upon. You are an actor in this space, and you can continue to act and to take agency.”
I think a weakness in our institutional and church lives is that we rob people of agency. Give people the space for them to speak and for the glory of God to shine through them.
One of the church elders and doctors is reported to have said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. And I think that as we offer persons spaces to be fully alive, our churches will thrive, our institutions will thrive -- not without complexity, not without difficulty -- but you will have a place aglow with human beings are fully alive. And God indeed is present in that kind of space.
Laura Everett: Amen. Amen and amen. Listeners, you have heard the benediction from the Rev. Dr. Bill Lamar. Your reading assignment is “The Coming,” by Daniel Black. Thank you so much for this conversation.
Bill Lamar: An absolute thrill. Thank you for listening to “Can These Bones.” There’s more about Dr. Daniel Black, including video of him reading his work, on our website, www.canthesebones.com.
Who are we talking with next time?
Laura Everett: It’s a really interesting conversation with my friend Marty St. George, who is an executive vice president for commercial and planning at JetBlue.
Bill Lamar: I can’t wait.
Laura Everett: Sounds good.
“Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions, and Daniel Black’s interview was recorded at Clark Atlanta University. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment Inc.
Listeners, we want to hear from you. We invite you to share your thoughts about this podcast and the stories we’re discussing on social media. I’m on Twitter @RevEverett, and you can find my colleague Bill @WilliamHLamarIV. You can also find us through our website, www.canthesebones.com.
I’m Laura Everett, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
The United Church of Christ's minister for racial justice helps people get started and stay on the journey of dismantling racism and deconstructing whiteness.
Velda Love: People want to be part of the conversation about race and equity
Photo courtesy of Velda Love
The United Church of Christ’s minister for racial justice helps people get started and stay on the journey of dismantling racism and deconstructing whiteness.For the Rev. Dr. Velda Love, serving as the UCC’s minister for racial justice grows out of being “passionately in love with serving God.”
Love provides resources and training, including the new restorative justice curriculum, Sacred Conversations to End Racism, for the 5,000 congregations in the denomination. She also is the co-host of the podcast “Podcast for a Just World: Sacred Conversations to End Racism.”
“My work is to deconstruct [the] institutional ideology so that it is less colonial in its approach and more open,” she said.
“So that people feel like, ‘I can make space; my voice will be heard; my body will be respected; my dignity will be recognized. I will be seen in this institution, and I don’t have to apologize for being here.’”
Before joining the national UCC staff in 2017, Love served for 16 years as the director of intercultural justice and learning at North Park University in Chicago. She spent nine years at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago as an adjunct professor and conference speaker.
Love has a master’s degree from North Park Theological Seminary and a doctor of ministry degree from Chicago Theological Seminary.
She spoke with Faith & Leadership while teaching at the Summer Institute for Reconciliation of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School.
Q: What are the biggest challenges in working for racial justice in an institutional setting?
I spent 16 years in higher education, and the challenge is that it moves really slowly as an institution.
And I am a nontraditionalist, so I work against a lot of the ideology of an institution, because of the lack of inclusivity of people of color or traditions around cultural context and cultural education.
And the way in which we talk about justice in an institution is really an injustice. Because [the institution] hasn’t quite figured out how to navigate broader spaces -- to not only have the student body be diverse but to be inclusive of decision makers who are sitting at the table, and to be willing to hear how those decision makers can create a more open space of an institution.
And that brings a level of discomfort for those who are donors and/or traditionalists or thought makers; they’ve always done it this way.
And so my work is to deconstruct that institutional ideology so that it is less colonial in its approach and more open. So that people feel like, “I can make space; my voice will be heard; my body will be respected; my dignity will be recognized. I will be seen in this institution, and I don’t have to apologize for being here.”
Q: How did you come to do this work?
I was born during the civil rights movement. I was aware of King’s presence as part of the leadership for the civil rights movement. I was raised in the black church during a time of civil unrest and oppression and marginalization and all of the “isms” that go along with being born with black skin.
I had this great awakening, if you want to call it that, when I joined Trinity United Church of Christ in the ’80s and my pastor was the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
And that was an African-centered spirituality, pedagogy, Bible understanding -- a theology that included women, womanist and black liberation theology -- which was for me very liberating.
Because I’m a person of African descent, and why should my education be limited to a white, Western, colonial understanding of history and church and methodology?
I came to it because it was important to make sure that liberation was always a part of, not only just the message that should be shared in the nation, but -- the church was holding that hostage. The Western sense of the white church dominates space.
And so I came to the work so that I could be part of the liberation. The African is the original human, in the creation, so how do we honor that as part of the world’s civilization? How do we honor those who were part of that Mediterranean, that African context, that Afro-Asiatic experience?
Jesus died for liberating people, not marginalizing, and so [my task is] making sure that people understand that there is no dominant culture, making sure that people understand that there is no dominant race of people.
And so I come to it out of this centeredness of being a descendent of those who were enslaved but were free, born free And so that’s how I came to it, and wanting to make sure that students and people I worked with in institutions that I was part of knew that that was my mission. That’s what God had called me to.
Q: You didn’t grow up in the UCC?
I was baptized Baptist, and I grew up in the UCC as a young adult; I was part of that church for about 20 years.
But you have to understand, Trinity United Church of Christ, even though it is a United Church of Christ church, was the largest black church in the denomination. And so I wasn’t as interested in the denomination as I was the church that I was attending.
Now I’m part of the denomination. Which is ironic, because I’m in a space now where the church is 5,000 churches, and 80, 85 percent of those churches are white. And, wow, that blew my mind, but here we are.
Q: How do you implement the ideas you’ve expressed? What does that mean day to day?
My day to day means that I’m paying attention to what the nation is doing to people of color. My day to day is reading, listening to what’s happening around xenophobia and racism around the globe.
My day to day really allows me to write and to think about how to create opportunities for churches to be engaged in the deep work of deconstructing whiteness. Because white skin, white privilege, whiteness is a construction.
And so my day to day is making sure that I am staying true to the anti-racism that the United Church of Christ is committed to as part of our bylaws and our resolutions. Making sure that the churches have resources that assist them in understanding who they are, not just as a denomination, but as a faith community.
Q: Do you ever find yourself in tension with your institution -- in a position of calling it to account?
No, because I’m really clear about what I’m there to do. I was hired to do this work. The search committee was looking for this new, innovative, creative bridging of both intellectual and heart with the church.
How does that happen if you don’t have someone in that space? How do you talk about indigenous peoples? And how do you talk about the immigrant, and how do you bring awareness and consciousness to the churches if you’re not fully present?
I have support from my colleagues, and I have a team leader and an executive minister who’s doing the work, and she models the work on the national stage while I do it within the space of creating those resources at the national level as well.
I approach it from a cultural-centered understanding or an African-centered understanding, but I’m also aware that that needs education, and it needs awareness and critical thinking.
And so I just released a curriculum, “Sacred Conversations to End Racism,” and we presented it to the national staff last week.
Another colleague and I, the Rev. Tracy Wispelwey, developed a podcast during the Lenten season, “Podcast for a Just World: Sacred Conversations to End Racism.” We were intentional about doing anti-racism work, and it was received well.
People want to be engaged in the conversation. They want to be part of activism. They just sometimes don’t know where and when to start, or how to, and so our job is to assist them with their journey.
Q: If congregations or individuals within your denomination come to you with those questions -- “How do we get started? What do we do?” -- what other resources do you give them?
I believe in doing this work because “race is not real, but racism is.” That comes from the Rev. Traci Blackmon.
It is to point them in the direction of being immersed in someone else’s culture. It is having them read text, Scripture, the Bible, out of the cultural context. It is them doing the work of understanding what it means to be white.
It is them doing the hard work of sitting, struggling, wrestling with not only what that means but what it means to give up that whiteness. Because God did not create race or racism. And so what does that really mean? I have to sit with that.
And if it’s a painful place, then the work that we do is to say, “Yes, feel that. Because you’re living in 600 years, 400 to 600 years of people living in pain, living on the margins, living and feeling the brunt of not being seen as human, and being invisible, being incarcerated, being murdered for being black or being indigenous or being an immigrant.
“And so read, listen, learn from and then do the work of educating people within your congregation, your conference, so that you can be part of this work of dismantling racism and not a colonizer.”
I think it’s easier to stay in a colonial mindset than it is to be part of disrupting and dismantling.
But there are also some great colleagues who are part of the sanctuary movement, who are providing shelter for those who are being deported.
There’s a great understanding of what it means to be on the front lines and to be marching in D.C. or to be part of the Poor People’s Campaign or to be connecting with organizations and faith-rooted organizations that are doing civil disobedience work.
So we’ve got all of that within our denomination, and we’ve got people committed to it.
But perhaps [for] those who are not there yet, that’s why I’m there -- to help them get started and to help them stay on the journey. It’s not just, “I’ve done a march; I’ve read a book; I’ve talked to my neighbor who’s different.”
But that difference means that that’s another beautiful human creation of God, and [that means] not othering them or exoticizing them or treating them as if they are deficient because they’re different -- because they are equally human.
And so that journey is lifelong, and I want to be able to create those kinds of resources where people are constantly watching movies and documentaries and reading and learning another language.
Q: Can you explain what you mean by a colonizer?
A colonizer is someone who thinks that people need to fit into their culture and their systems and their structures to belong. The nation was colonized by Europeans. And so when you conquer the land, you create and control the narrative. You create and control the laws. You write into policy how people live and earn their economic status.
When you colonize, you create education that teaches a perspective about a people group and you leave out others, or you mythologize your own history in order to create this superiority.
A colonizer takes land, gentrifies, names people, decides to build walls, keeps people out of the church because they’re uncomfortable. That’s a colonizer.
Q: Thank you. Where do you see the most important direction of your work? The last few years have brought these issues to the fore.
The issues aren’t new, but it’s the approach that I am trying to create -- I’m building on other people’s approaches, this liberation that we call theology and ideology and so forth.
And so I see it being a space and a place that grows into changing the narrative of our history, changing the way that we educate our children, so that people are getting cultural education, as opposed to a colonized or Western education.
I see my work being part of changing this narrative, this landscape, this idea that there is not a dominant [culture], so that people can then speak into it, live their lives freely.
How do we change our economic system?
I see this being an opportunity for people to understand where money came from and who controls it so we can talk about equity. Our prison industrial system is being propped up by those who own stock in making sure that those buildings go up and that prisoners stay prisoners. It’s another form of enslavement. And so I want people to be aware of that and hold people responsible.
I see this being a national effort to change how we educate, how we preach, how we teach, maybe developing an institution where thought leaders come together and they do what Starbucks did -- they close down. Not just for a day, but close down for maybe a day a month. Or every week there’s a day where they commit to this process of looking at what it means to have an equitable society.
Q: Is there anything that you would add that I did not ask you about?
I don’t do this because it’s just work, because I’ve been hired by the United Church of Christ. I do this because I am passionately in love with serving God.
I’m deeply committed to doing this work because I know that people are being hurt by the way that this country demonizes and ostracizes and murders. And how do you separate a child from its mother just because they cross the border? Whose border?
I do this work because people need to feel as if they can live and breathe and move without being threatened and detained.
I am passionate about this work, and I love that people want to be engaged in this and ask the questions and commit to saying, “I’m willing to give this up to do this.”
Read more from Velda Love »
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke DivinityReconciliation doesn't begin with us but with God and God's longing to reconcile all of us to himself. And Jesus is the model for how reconciliation happens, a scholar says in this interview.
Claudia May: Reconciliation requires us to observe, practice and take seriously how Jesus lived on earth
Reconciliation begins not with us but with God, and for Christians at least, the model of how reconciliation happens is Jesus, says Claudia May, an associate professor of reconciliation studies at Bethel University.
“From a biblical standpoint, we’re reconciled to God through Christ,” she said. “And Jesus embodies how reconciliation should be lived. So for me, when I’m looking how to receive, abide in and live out reconciliation, Jesus is my go-to. It is through Christ that we are reconciled to God and one another.”
Which doesn’t mean, of course, that reconciliation happens easily. It can be difficult, bringing with it certain tensions and costs.
“A lot of peace and joy comes with faith, but reconciliation reminds us that it’s going to be uncomfortable for ourselves and for many people,” May said. “Jesus was challenged by most everyone. His disciples challenged him, close followers challenged him, Pharisees and Sadducees -- it was pretty constant.”
May is an associate professor of reconciliation studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, with expertise in African-American, black British, and Caribbean literature and popular culture; biblical studies; and Christian hip hop. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of “Jesus Is Enough: Love, Hope and Comfort in the Storms of Life.”
She spoke with Faith & Leadership recently while at Duke Divinity School to teach a seminar on the theology of reconciliation for the Summer Institute for Reconciliation. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: To start, what does reconciliation mean theologically?
First, reconciliation isn’t our idea; it’s God’s initiative, God’s longing to reconcile all of us to himself.
From a biblical standpoint, we’re reconciled to God through Christ. And Jesus embodies how reconciliation should be lived.
So for me, when I’m learning how to receive, abide in and live out reconciliation, Jesus is my go-to. It is through Christ that we are reconciled to God and one another.
Q: So, as the description for your summer institute seminar says, “Jesus is the way to reconciliation.”
Like I said, God gave us the gift of his only Son so that we could learn through him what it means to be loved, healed, forgiven -- what it means to be a new creation.
Jesus himself teaches us a couple of things around reconciliation.
One is that he didn’t situate himself in one particular location. He moved in different regions, encountered different peoples, was comfortable being around those who were despised, the hurting. His ability to be present to other people reflects a God who is willing to meet people where they are and confront the injustices he encountered.
Jesus has such a wide, embodied vocabulary of how he relates to individuals, which nurtures a sense of humility for those who follow him and take him seriously.
Because you can’t assume that you will know what to do in any given moment, you become more and more sensitive to your need for God. Jesus himself said he could do nothing without God.
And that tempers an ego-driven way of leadership, or a sense of self-reliance. Jesus was very communal; he was very much about the “we.” And the “we” was very inclusive rather than exclusive.
So the way to reconciliation requires us to observe, practice and take seriously how Jesus lived on earth and related to those whom he encountered, especially the hurting, the marginalized, and the despised. It was Jesus’ custom to go to a lonely place. It’s easy to lose sight of this essential practice of Jesus, because it is often sandwiched between activities of healing, teaching and table fellowship and conversations.
As word spreads about Jesus, he doesn’t covet the approval and the affirmation of others; it’s enough for him to go away to a lonely place, a place that’s deserted and unpopulated. There aren’t distractions; it’s just him and God.
A lot of what I do in reconciliation is to help people observe how Jesus lived out reconciliation, not just in terms of mindset, but also in terms of following how Jesus lived out reconciliation.
Q: What is the relationship between spiritual disciplines or practices and reconciliation?
Allowing God to teach us how to deepen our engagement with spiritual disciplines is absolutely essential. There was only one spiritual discipline that the disciples asked Jesus how to do, and that was how to pray.
The disciples are a motley crew; a lot of times they don’t get it. But you have to give them credit for noticing how prayer was so enriching to Jesus’ life and how he related to others.
It’s also important that we make the distinction between spiritual disciplines and being disciplined by spiritual practices. It is key that the disciples have to ask Jesus about prayer rather than having him force it on them.
Reconciliation is going to affect every aspect of your life, not just how you relate to other people, people of different races and ethnicities and cultures classes, gender, and sexual identities, but also how you relate to God. (Claudia May)
As a leader, he didn’t insist that they pray. He encouraged them to pray, but he didn’t force them to do so.
So we have to see spiritual disciplines as a form of freedom that allows us to be very transparent, very present to the God that’s present to us. There are many forms of communication with God that Jesus himself lives out.
Howard Thurman talks about the humility of God, which at first I found strange. It challenged some of my beliefs of God.
I wondered, does that diminish God in a very human way, this sense of humility?
But as I pondered that and I thought of Jesus, I thought, you know what? I can get my head around that, because God is willing to wait for us to call upon him.
Q: So how does all this contribute to reconciliation? And reconciliation with whom, between whom, among whom?
Reconciliation acknowledges that there are divisions. Reconciliation isn’t divorced from the pain of the world and the fractures of our world. Even our relationship with God is full of tensions, divisions.
Many times, an unwillingness to receive God’s love is part of the experience of sin. So that’s part of the initiative of God, to create reconciliation as a way to bring us to himself again.
Q: So before there’s reconciliation between and among people, there is prior work to do -- reconciliation with God?
Yes. You have to remember that this was God’s idea. It wasn’t our idea.
Our relationship with God through Christ informs how we relate to others. This process is not linear and it is not without its disruptions. It is a messy process and a humbling one. We will make mistakes — many of them. We must not adopt the mindset that we have to establish a good relationship with God before we live out reconciliation. The ministry of reconciliation requires us to learn and live out how to reconcile with others even as we learn how to reconcile with God. This happens simultaneously.
And yet what we also see is that even though this was Jesus’ mission, he couldn’t force people to accept this call of reconciliation. He couldn’t even force his own brother James to buy into him, you know?
But that’s the beautiful, humane aspect of reconciliation. How can we learn from Jesus to be present and true to the call but be comfortable with the fact that not everybody is going to buy into this?
Reconciliation is going to affect every aspect of your life, not just how you relate to other people, people of different races and ethnicities and cultures, classes, gender, and identities but also how you relate to God.
When Jesus encounters individuals, he does a couple of things. He never discredits or disbelieves a person's story; he never interrupts people when they speak. He never says that what somebody has said is trivial and unimportant. He never does that.
Martha can come to Jesus and complain that her sister isn’t helping her. At no time does Jesus say, “Why are you coming to me with this concern?”
You’ll have people who are deeply hurting know that they can come to Jesus and that they can be healed, but they come as they are. There is no time in Scripture where Jesus says, “No, I will not go to your home.
The English Standard Version has a wonderful terminology, that Jesus “reclined,” when he’s sitting at the table with tax collectors and sinners, the despised. And we never get a sense that the people when they leave cease being those things -- tax collectors, sinners.
But Jesus is willing to recline with them and not have a criterion of who or what they need to be or how they need to present themselves in order to be in his presence. That says a lot about the freedom that comes with this reconciled relationship.
Certainly, the divisions of our world are ruled by our own understanding, the histories that shape us. And Jesus shows us how God meets people in those divisions. He walks alongside the marginalized, the poor, and the despised. How does God love people in the midst of their own brokenness? How does God teach us how to forgive through Jesus?
When I think about reconciliation, first I always think about relationship. The God of the universe wants to be in a relationship with his people, all people. Whether all people will choose that is another thing.
Q: What are the tensions that come with trying to practice Jesus’ way of reconciliation?
Well, you may not always be claimed by the people you want to be claimed by or that you’ve rooted a lot of your identity in.
Jesus wasn’t welcome in his own hometown. After he spoke particular truths, they wanted to throw him over a cliff.
There is an awful amount of resistance to this message. It’s easy to talk doctrine and denominational allegiance, but when you really get the nitty-gritty of Jesus, he makes all of us uncomfortable.Many of us can have certain views that we will express sort of undercover, because doing so publically risks condemnation. When you align yourself with particular groups that are despised and are not seen as worthy to be loved, you will receive a lot of anger and hate.
Jesus says, “How they treated you -- just remember, they did the same to me.”
And that’s a part of it.
A lot of peace and joy comes with faith, but reconciliation reminds us that it’s going to be uncomfortable for ourselves and for many people. Jesus was challenged by most everyone. His disciples challenged him, close followers challenged him, Pharisees and Sadducees -- it was pretty constant.
How did Jesus live out the ministry of reconciliation while confronting such adversity?
It always comes back to this central relationship that Jesus prioritized with his Father. He needed his Father, to do what he did. And that kind of reliance and dependence is what we need.
We must learn to follow Jesus' example in the midst of community. This is a collective endeavor. And as we walk alongside, and learn from, and serve the hurting, and as we confront injustice, and pursue loving others in a divided world, God through Jesus also invites us to engage with the Holy Spirit as our teacher.
Q: As you talk about Jesus being the way to reconciliation, how does that play out in multifaith settings?
We have to look at the kinds of peoples Jesus related to; many of these individuals did not believe in him. I love the story of the good Samaritan, because you have this incredibly jarring figure that reminds us that history shadows us. We don’t even have to know his name. He is a Samaritan and, as such, a Jew would consider him an enemy.
He represents for many Jews all that is wrong in their relationship. A history of pain gets triggered by the Samaritan.
It’s a beautifully convicting story for all of us. For me, I come away with how Jesus often uses the unlikeliest of people to teach his disciples and followers about the ways of God that really aren’t our ways.
Reconciliation teaches us that it is never loving to skip over someone’s pain and go to the other side where apathy resides. I embrace the artist and activist, Jesse Williams’ assertion that “the burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander.” Similarly, Jesus teaches us through the Good Samaritan story that we must not expect the man who was robbed to comfort the Levite or the Priest, nor can we assume that the Good Samaritan is a Christian. We must be willing to learn from those whom we despise or dismiss as irrelevant. We must follow the example of the Good Samaritan and be vessels of God’s loving kindness to the brutalized.
Jesus’ message is not that before you encounter a person they must change, and then you follow suit. Oftentimes, it’s you must change, and you do so unconditionally, without expecting that somebody will change in step with you at that same time.
Q: How did your own story, growing up in the U.K., shape your interest in reconciliation?
I lived in the East End of London from the age of 7 until my early 20s. The world lived on my street. We had Irish, English, Scottish, Indian, Pakistani, people from different Caribbean islands, Africans, all on one street.
That was an incredibly rich environment to be in. It shaped me powerfully. In our humanity, there’s a diversity in the oneness that I was reminded of -- just God’s amazing creativity in the range of peoples that he created. That was a gift.
But at the same time, I don’t want to romanticize the community I grew up in. There were also racial tensions.
But what it did from a reconciliation point of view was a couple of things. One was that I received the gift of diversity. As I learned more about Jesus, it illuminated to me how he related to different kinds of people, how he was able to move in different regions.
But I was also aware of the tensions and the ways in which we can seclude ourselves in our particular cultural regions and identities.
Q: What’s the state of reconciliation today, given events and divisions here and in the U.K. and around the world? Are you encouraged? Discouraged?
Certainly -- just as Jesus encountered -- systems are in place that really do serve a few as opposed to all. And when I look at that, I think, well, Jesus was aware of the power decisions that were made by the Roman Empire.
Still, he did not allow the religious and political power brokers to prevent him from doing the work of reconciliation on the ground.
So obviously, yes, there are incredible divisions that are fanned by ego, by money, by those who build oppressive systems and by those who treat people and things as idols.
But there are many things that I don’t see that God sees -- the day-to-day ways in which people are also learning to love their neighbor. Day to day, people’s hearts are being transformed. They learn to address issues of injustice and not separate themselves from it.
This is how Jesus lived.
I can only see in the perimeters of where I’m moving, and it is often heartbreaking to me, in all honesty.
For me, a deal breaker was the massacre of the beloved Charleston Nine.
They were massacred on a Wednesday night, a time that many Christians in this country understand equals Bible study. But numerous churches did not acknowledge the massacre, the passing of some of their family members. I have students, predominantly white students, who said that their pastors did not mention this tragedy during their Sunday morning service.
When I heard that, I knew something was very wrong. Many Christians still believe that race and ideologies of any kind ought to separate us. We should never allow our ideological and political preferences to undermine our potential to be ambassadors of God's love, peace, and justice.
If we have that level of unconcern for members of the body of Christ, we have a very big problem. Do we actually have the right to speak to how other people are living if we can’t mourn with one another, love one another, and see each other's humanity as members of God's family.
That deepened my passion and my desire for reconciliation. I needed to talk to the family.
As family, we must live out the ministry of reconciliation by being hearers and doers of Jesus' teachings and practices. We must seek God's counsel through prayer and ask him how we ought to respond to the inequities we encounter. We must be honest with God about our resistances to Jesus' teachings, and share with him the biases, fears, and concerns we harbor in our hearts.
We cannot love God or others without God. We need each other and we need community to learn how to love. We need Jesus to teach us how to love. And so we must learn from the one who created love -- God. Through God's guidance, wisdom, and strength, Jesus teaches us that we can confront and break down the walls of division that separate us from one another and God.
Read more from Claudia May »
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leaders chart a strategy to combat violence and promote peace
Chicago high school students from The Faith Community of St. Sabina's B.R.A.V.E. program (Bold Resistance Against Violence Everywhere) along with other high school from the neighborhood around St. Sabina attend anti-gun violence rally and march on the South Side. Photo by Anne Ryan
Youth on Chicago’s South Side are taking anti-violence work into their own hands. Rallies and protests are just part of a campaign that also includes advocacy and policy change.On a Thursday afternoon in May, a dozen high school students trickle into the basement of St. Sabina Catholic Church’s community center on Chicago’s South Side. Hip-hop music reverberates through the room as the teenagers carefully decorate large wooden signs with green, yellow and red paint.
But what may look like an after-school art class is actually part of an anti-violence campaign -- the weekly meeting of Bold Resistance Against Violence Everywhere, or B.R.A.V.E.
Ke'Shon Newman paints the words " Demand Justice" on a sign in the basement of the St. Sabina youth center in preparation for a student rally the next day. In the background, Randell Watts wears one of the group's B.R.A.V.E. shirts. The rally is the closing event of the school year, throughout which the students learn about advocacy and policy. Photo by John Zich
The students are getting ready for a peace parade and rally the next day -- they’ll carry the wooden signs, which feature names of local victims of gun violence. The students helped conceive and plan the I Care parade and rally, and they convinced local schools to participate.The rally is a high-profile public event -- it will be covered on the local television news -- but it’s just one activity of the B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leaders, who work throughout the school year to promote peace and combat violence in many ways.
They have honed their public speaking skills, registered people to vote, learned about gun licensing legislation, and pressed their state and local leaders for additional funding for community programs.
The goal is to address the root causes of violence and thus -- they hope -- to prevent it. And they are partnering with other teens, including activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, to take the message nationwide.
Is your organization helping youth understand the political, social or economic system in which they operate? What kind of education could you provide?
“We teach them about policy and how the system works,” said Lamar Johnson, 28, the youth coordinator for violence prevention at St. Sabina, who oversees B.R.A.V.E.
“If you’re angry and educated, you can literally change the culture and the system the way you want to. I want you to be angry but know how to use that anger,” he said.
Lamar Johnson and Maxwell Emcays discuss plans as they supervise students getting ready for the student rally the next day. Photo by John Zich
The program seeks to empower young people to use their voices to stop gun violence of all sorts, from the daily gunshots haunting many Chicago communities to the school shootings taking place across the country.And it is organized and driven by the youth -- many of them traumatized by gun violence themselves.
Can you provide a link between the people who should be leading and the people who actually are?
Johnson is proud of the students, but he admits to being frustrated that this public advocacy has become the responsibility of high school students.
“You shouldn’t have to ask teenagers to [lead the] talk about peace and civility and social justice -- that’s why we have government officials and adults and leaders,” he said.
Building leadership skills
The weekly B.R.A.V.E. meetings serve dual roles -- they are part safe space, where students can speak openly about how gun violence has affected them personally, and part training camp for young people who have found themselves suddenly able to influence a national policy conversation.
In March, B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leaders had a series of highly publicized meetings with student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Florida school where 17 students and staff members were slain earlier this year. With so much attention focused on them, the students feel the pressure to capitalize on this moment.
“We don’t [want to] be another group or organization that does this but then fades away over time,” said B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leader Ke’Shon Newman, 16.
Ke'Shon Newman speaks to the crowd at the rally. Two years ago Newman's brother was shot nine times and killed in crossfire. Photo by Anne Ryan
For the B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leaders, who come from various schools in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood and surrounding communities, gun violence is sadly familiar.Randell Watts, 17, was 9 when his cousin was fatally shot on the doorstep of Watts’ home. A few years later, Watts’ father was struck by stray bullets at a birthday party. Although his father survived, Watts struggled with anger and depression afterward, and he didn’t like to talk about what had happened.
How could you help individuals deal with trauma while also addressing systemic issues in your community?
Watts started attending B.R.A.V.E. meetings earlier this year, on the day of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. He credits the program with helping channel his stress and anger into something productive.
“It brings out my best leadership skills,” he said. “Every time I come to B.R.A.V.E., I feel like I should have been here for a long time.”
Through B.R.A.V.E., Watts said he has built up the courage to talk in front of crowds and TV cameras about what happened to his father and cousin.
“As I’ve told my story, people have started to understand where I’m coming from,” he said.
Randell Watts DJs before the rally starts. Photo by Anne Ryan
A program for students, by studentsB.R.A.V.E. began as the brainchild of the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a priest with a reputation as a radical and militant advocate for his community.
In his three decades ministering at St. Sabina, Pfleger, the church's senior pastor, has been credited with bringing new social services and businesses into the neighborhood. He has also drawn attention to segregation in Chicago with provocative acts of protest, such as the pouring of stage blood on the street and, most recently, a march that shut down the Dan Ryan Expressway.
The Rev. Michael Pfleger, an activist and priest at St. Sabina. Photo by Anne Ryan
Pfleger, too, has known Chicago’s violence firsthand. In 1998, his own foster son, Jarvis Franklin, died after being caught in the crossfire between two warring gangs.Yet Pfleger did not see anyone successfully addressing what he considered to be the root causes of violence: poverty, racism, lax gun control and the tit-for-tat culture that perpetuates Chicago’s shootings.
“Let’s try to put in place some programs to try to preventwhat’s happening, not just react to it,” Pfleger recalls thinking. “We needed to institutionalize it, and make sure we have an actual program that does this all the time,” he said.
In 2012, Pfleger hired Lamar Johnson to coordinate youth programs for St. Sabina. Johnson was himself an alumnus of St. Sabina Academy elementary school, and he had experience overseeing student activities as youth pastor at New Eclipse Church, a Baptist congregation on the South Side.
At St. Sabina, his first assignment was to create a violence prevention youth council, Johnson said.
He began to develop the program working with Pam Bosley, St. Sabina’s violence prevention manager. Bosley had become an outspoken anti-gun violence activist after her 18-year-old son, Terrell, was killed while carrying musical instruments into another South Side church in 2006.
In 2012, Bosley’s younger son, Trevon, was in the eighth grade. He and a few friends would make up the inaugural B.R.A.V.E. class, helping to define the program as they went.
“I was asking them what kind of youth council they want to be,” Johnson said. “What do they want to talk about?”
Have you asked the youth in your congregation what they want to talk about? If so, how did you act on that information?
Johnson and Pam Bosley organized B.R.A.V.E. like a student council, wherein students set the program’s priorities and are ultimately responsible for deciding how to allocate their time and resources. Funding for the program comes from grants and private donations.
Over the next several years, the early B.R.A.V.E. members gradually recruited more students, most of whom had already been working to end violence as part of in-house “peace teams” at their respective schools.
Johnson has a loose curriculum for the high school program, with lessons on conflict resolution, community organizing and leadership, among other topics.
Today, the program has divided into three age groups. In addition to the high school B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leaders, which now numbers around 30 students, there is Junior B.R.A.V.E. for middle school students and Baby B.R.A.V.E. for children ages 6 to 8.
Together, the programs aim to ensure that students can build nonviolence skills at every age, with a steady pipeline for participants to move through.
Abigail Visco Rusert, the director of the Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary, said that B.R.A.V.E. represents an innovative model for a church-affiliated youth group.
“We have set up young people in congregations to be objects into which we pour spiritual knowledge, instead of treating young people as agents who have the capacity to form and inform even our own spiritual journeys,” she said.
“I think that the challenge to this stereotypical model is a model that lifts up the capacity of young people to follow God into the world.”
Do you recognize youth as agents with capacity? What about younger colleagues?
Indeed, Rusert argues, there is a solid biblical basis for encouraging young people to exercise their agency.
“God is always choosing a young person, an outcast, a woman, an Ethiopian eunuch -- the unexpected person -- to change the world,” she said.
Angry, educated and fighting for change
The students also gain experience advocating for policy change firsthand. With the Illinois midterm and gubernatorial elections approaching, Johnson said that the B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leaders have written letters to candidates, stressing the need to funnel more resources into Chicago’s South and West sides.
Students who are 18 have gotten certified as voter registrars, permitting them to register others to vote at B.R.A.V.E. rallies and events. Several B.R.A.V.E. members also visited City Hall, where they met with the deputy mayor of Chicago, who heard their case for allocating more funding to after-school and violence prevention programs.
Chicago high school students march to bring attention to issues of violence on the South Side. Photo by Anne Ryan
As his students have taken on more media appearances and public engagements, from news interviews to public forums, Johnson has begun incorporating speaking skills into the program’s curriculum.In one recent B.R.A.V.E. meeting, he ran drills meant to teach students to think on their feet, cull the “ums” and “likes” from their language and speak with confidence.
Johnson also leads discussions about the causes of violence that they see in their neighborhoods.
In the room where B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leaders meet, there is a drawing of a tree, titled “Tree of Violence.” Listed on its branches are the surface-level factors related to Chicago’s gun violence problem. Among them: fear, low income, stereotypes, code of silence.
But farther down, on the tree’s roots, are listed the deeper issues that Johnson wants students to see are really to blame: lack of school funds, no black-owned businesses, drugs, corruption of power.
The illustration sums up the B.R.A.V.E. approach. While Johnson knows that his students are frustrated with the violence they see, he believes that they need to understand its true causes before they can fight for change.
“The whole vision,” he said, “is teaching young people and giving them the opportunity to get engaged in community advocacy, civic leadership -- overall [equipping them to ask], “How can I be a peacemaker for my peers?”
Since helping B.R.A.V.E. get off the ground, Trevon Bosley, now a college sophomore, has established himself as a prominent anti-gun violence advocate. Earlier this year, he was asked to speak before hundreds of thousands at the national March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., and in 2016 was invited to pose a question to President Barack Obama at a public town hall.
Lessons from B.R.A.V.E. have contributed to his success, he said.
“We learned how to speak to elected officials, as well as what they control,” he said. “People tend not to expect young people to have such knowledge.”
‘We have to keep it going’
Randell Watts volunteered to DJ for the I Care rally, blasting upbeat hip-hop as hundreds of students gathered in Renaissance Park, a block away from St. Sabina.
Students dance to the music at the rally starting point. Photo by Anne Ryan
Shortly after 10 a.m., the speeches began. B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leaders selected students and alumni from each of four participating schools to address their peers.The content of the speeches varied widely. Anthony Lovelace, a former B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leader, reminded the young people that they would soon be tax-paying citizens. “That means the state works for y’all,” he said.
In his speech, Watts denounced the shooters who terrorize his community, as well as the lack of city funding for Chicago schools and “gun laws that don’t make sense.”
Youth display photographs of victims of violence at the rally for peace. Photo by Anne Ryan
Speakers at the rally included local Muslims as well; while B.R.A.V.E. operates through St. Sabina, a Catholic faith community, Johnson is a Baptist pastor, and B.R.A.V.E. members come from a variety of religious traditions.“In all of the holy books -- in the New Testament, in the Torah, in the Quran -- there are people who stand together with common beliefs of love and respect,” Pfleger said. “If the people of faith can’t come together, don’t ever expect the people on the street to come together.”
Who are the expected and unexpected partners on your journey?
Running the B.R.A.V.E. program through St. Sabina, Johnson said, has been instrumental to its growth and success. The group has built on what Pfleger and St. Sabina already have done for the neighborhood.
Johnson’s advice to someone looking to start a program like B.R.A.V.E.: “It’s got to be part of an organization that already cares about people.”
In June, the B.R.A.V.E. students participated in another rally against violence, attended by the Parkland students, former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, hip-hop star Chance the Rapper and singer Jennifer Hudson.
And this summer, several B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leaders (including Trevon Bosley and Anthony Lovelace) will cross the nation in a bus with the Parkland students on the Road to Change tour. At some 50 stops across 20 states, they will educate young people about gun law reform and register them to vote.
In many ways, the tour will bring the mission of the B.R.A.V.E. Youth Leaders to the national level -- a prospect that’s exciting to Johnson.
“That’s the whole goal, to get as many young people as possible involved,” he said. “We have to keep it going.”
Questions to consider
- Is your organization helping youth understand the political, social or economic system in which they operate? What kind of education could you provide?
- Can you provide a link between the people who should be leading and the people who actually are?
- How could you help individuals deal with trauma while also addressing systemic issues in your community?
- Have you asked the youth in your congregation what they want to talk about? If so, how did you act on that information?
- Do you recognize youth as agents with capacity? What about younger colleagues?
- Who are the expected and unexpected partners on your journey?
Bob Sitze offers Starting Simple to help readers live joyfully and justly. Because Sitze believes conversations change us as individuals and that most important social changes take place through conversation, he invites us into heart-to-heart conversations about simple living. Sitze helps readers and others in their congregations to learn what the Scriptures have to say about living a godly life in these times; find ways to repent of unsustainable lifestyle choices; gather courage to change the ways we think and live; and speak and listen to the struggles of others, with honesty and respect.
This practical book includes side trips filled with thoughtful quotes, short stories, and activities. Readers may use it to spark conversations, invite sharing, make decisions, ask for forgiveness, or encourage other who are ready to change. Congregations will find it a good guide for small group discussions, family negotiations, or educational programming.
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