One of my predecessors as pastor at Myers Park Baptist Church was the great Carlyle Marney, who confessed, “The real crisis for me was in Charlotte” where he was caught in a web of socio-economic forces that included “money, banking, interest rates, loan policies” and “a heavy emphasis on property and profit … commercialism and family.” He thought the country club culture of the Myers Park community created the illusion of progress and race always was a part of the social fabric.
In church, Marney complained, “I ran into psychic incest, perversion and political manipulations.” Maybe I should have known what I was getting in to.
It was a dream come true to be called as the pastor of MPBC, a historically liberal tall-steeple church with a proud legacy of opposing the Vietnam War, promoting women’s equality, supporting racial integration, working for ecological conservation and advocating for same-sex marriage and LGBTQ inclusivity. MPBC was “evicted” from the Southern Baptist Convention in 2001 and considered a pinnacle of liberal Baptist life in the South.
Benjamin Boswell
I was eager for the opportunity to serve an influential progressive church with a progressive legacy, a “free pulpit” and educational series that brought in renowned biblical scholars and theologians from around the world.
Unfortunately, my tenure at MPBC would coincide with a resurgence of white supremacy, the election of Donald Trump, the birth of #MeToo, some of the worst mass shootings in American history, a stifling global pandemic, the horrific murder of George Floyd, the largest protest movement of all time (BLM), an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, a growing environmental crisis, an explosion of white Christian nationalism, a new war in Europe, and a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Compounding national crises, the city of Charlotte experienced its own moral reckoning in 2016. The Chetty Study of social mobility revealed Charlotte was the worst city in America for economic progress. A debate about transgender people using the bathroom of their choice evolved into a fight between the City Council and state leaders. The police killing of Keith Lamont Scott (and uprising that followed) catapulted the city onto the national news and pushed my clergy colleagues and I out into the streets.
What did ministry look like in this extraordinary context? At first it was exceptional and brimming with possibility. We implemented an ambitious strategic plan with 47 tactics in conjunction with the largest and most successful capital campaign in the church’s history, securing $4.25 million in gifts to the endowment; funds which now offset the facilities budget by more than $137,000 per year. Additionally, I worked with an associate minister to lead four years of the “Awakening Series,” a cutting-edge educational program on race, immigration, the body and the environment, which involved launching the church’s first podcast.
“We started the process of updating and revamping our outdated governance model by rightsizing and remodeling the board of deacons.”
In 2018, we celebrated MPBC’s 75th anniversary by embarking on a marketing campaign that garnered two ADDY (American Advertising) awards as well as many new members for the church. Building on our strategic plan, we engaged staff and lay leaders to eliminate barriers to worship, making our services more accessible by decreasing formality and integrating nontraditional styles of music like jazz, indigenous and rock. We also began racially diversifying our staff and congregation by hiring the first Black minister in the church’s history followed by several others. Finally, in 2019, we started the process of updating and revamping our outdated governance model by rightsizing and remodeling the board of deacons.
During a critical inflection point for our nation in summer 2020, when the horrific murder of George Floyd galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement, we responded together by expanding the “Confronting Whiteness” program that eventually was completed by more than 1,000 participants in 15 states and three countries. Many members of MPBC participated in the course, and some even described it as the most profound experience of racial awakening of their lives. In addition, we hosted three successful Confronting Whiteness conferences with more than 250 attendees focused on important themes like “The Case for Reparations.”
But that’s only half the story. The other half is the hostility and opposition that began when we made changes to the board of deacons. When I arrived, the board of deacons included 36 members plus “Life Deacons” who could activate as voting members each year. “Life Deacons” have a lifetime appointment like a Supreme Court justice; a status achieved after a person serves five three-year terms or as the chair.
It is not a coincidence “Life Deacons” were established in the late 1960s when the church first voted to be “open to all and closed to none” on race. This new office was a subtle way for a church founded in an all-white neighborhood with racist restrictive covenants to create a façade of racial progress while maintaining a white power structure.
In 2016, there were 30 Life Deacons and 12 who activated for the year, with 48 total voting members on the deacon board. As you can imagine, our meetings were daunting, traditionalist, regressive and structured for gridlock. In 2019, when we attempted to reduce the board of deacons and limit the number of Life Deacons, they reacted vociferously. After various attempts to sabotage our efforts, followed by multiple congregational meetings and hours of listening sessions, the new governance model barely passed. A pyrrhic victory was won, but the war was just beginning.
“We stopped meeting, and the cabal went back underground.”
Afterward, a group of Life Deacons began meeting in secret to subvert my ministry and force my departure. They ultimately were successful, but it would take five years, cost many causalities and jeopardize the soul of the church. When I learned of this cabal, I agreed to meet with them to bring their concerns to light and see if we could come to a mutual understanding for the sake of the congregation. However, after two years of meeting with a trained facilitator, the only thing the cabal of Life Deacons could agree on was that our congregation had “finished its work on race and did not want to hear about racism from the pulpit anymore.”
I agreed to disagree. We stopped meeting, and the cabal went back underground.
In his book The Mind of the South, Charlotte writer W.J. Cash defined Southerners as “self-satisfied, complacent people who will not be diverted from their smugness, their unwillingness to look critically at what they are, with the result that throughout their history anyone who has attempted to point out to them the extent to which they are being used and manipulated for the benefit of those in power has been unable to get anywhere.” MPBC was founded two years after the publication of Cash’s magnum opus, and his elucidations aptly describe the struggle of my experience as pastor there for nine years.
One encounter stays with me: A liberal white woman and former minister, who was part of the cabal, invited me out for a drink and said: “I’m not taking your whiteness course. I worked as the only white woman in an all-Black organization. I don’t have a racist bone in my body. How dare you come here and tell us we have work to do on race when we were on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement before you were born!”
Minutes later she casually referred to one of the Black female ministers on our staff as “an angry Black woman,” completely oblivious to the harm she was causing. She needed the course as much as anyone, and her pompous attitude revealed the cynical, self-righteous blindness at the heart of white liberalism.
In a speech in 1963, Malcolm X said, “The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the ‘smiling’ fox.”
After 20 years of being a white liberal “fox” and serving progressive congregations filled with white liberal “foxes,” I have learned the hard lesson Malcolm X tried to convey 60 years ago: “Liberalism is not liberation.”
“I no longer believe liberalism will lead us to liberation.”
This is what Resmaa Menakem said to me at a bar in Cape Town, South Africa, and it hit me between the eyes and crystallized everything. I came to MPBC believing liberal theology and liberal churches were the epitome of faithfulness and the only white dominant Christian communities who had any chance of living out the gospel or moving the world toward the kingdom. But I no longer believe liberalism will lead us to liberation.
It is too simplistic to imagine the problem at MPBC is that the membership is more regressive than their reputation. While that is true in some sense, hardline conservatives have very little power at MPBC, and it was liberals who showed me to the door.
The reasons for the conflict I experienced with white liberals only fully occurred to me in the aftermath of my departure. At some point in my spiritual and theological journey, I had come to possess a very different set of ideas, psychologies, goals and tactics than the white liberals I served as pastor.
Roderick Bush defines a white liberal as “a person who is torn between their egalitarian principles and their desire for stability and social order. People who care about racism but without having to significantly alter the racial and economic status quo that benefits them.” Or as Martin Luther King put it: “People who often stand in the way of progress because they are committed only in a lukewarm manner. Every time you try to move to solve the problem, they say you’re moving too fast. They are more devoted to order than to justice and stand in the way of every move forward.”
Serving with and among white liberals changed me. While I grew more radical over the years, most of the congregation remained deeply engrained in what Angie Beeman calls “liberal white supremacy.” Beeman defines liberal white supremacy as a “set of beliefs and practices rooted in an aversion to discomfort and confrontation, that progressive European Americans engage in to assert their moral superiority over other European Americans and people of color they see as less intelligent or sophisticated in their understanding of racism and injustice. … It is the ideological core that sustains systemic racism.”
“White liberals are fundamentally committed to maintaining the status quo.”
According to Beeman, white liberals prefer nonconfrontational approaches, gradualism, process, decorum, civility, decency, politeness, while white radicals prefer truth, confrontation, disruption and accountability. White liberals seek consensus, understanding, reconciliation, unity and reform, while white radicals seek progress, change, equity and transformation. White liberals are fundamentally committed to maintaining the status quo, while white radicals are fundamentally committed to justice and liberation even if it costs an individual or an institution.
“Radical” simply means moving beyond the superficial and getting to the root of things, and we can see this conflict between liberals and radicals playing out all over American society today at family dinner tables, nonprofit board meetings, denominational summits, organizing gatherings, church Bible studies, as well as on the national stage between establishment Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Nanci Pelosi and Democratic Socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani.
This conflict is not going away any time soon and it boils down to radically divergent views about power.
Liberals imagine power can be persuaded to change through rational conversation, civil dialogue and moral appeals to conscience. Radicals see power through the lens of Black intellectuals of history like Frederick Douglass who said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
Looking back, I realize my time at Myers Park Baptist was a crucible — one that refined my understanding of ministry, community, justice, power and the true meaning of liberation. Like Marney, I had my own crisis. I arrived believing liberalism was the natural precursor to justice and progressive theology would inevitably help the church evolve into a liberating praxis. But over time, the gap between those ideals and the lived reality inside the congregation became impossible to ignore or overcome.
“Liberalism can articulate justice, admire justice, even vote for justice, but often does so without ever truly risking anything for justice.”
Liberalism can articulate justice, admire justice, even vote for justice, but often does so without ever truly risking anything for justice. Liberation requires something more. It requires sacrifice, disruption, the loss of privilege, a divestment of power, willingness to confront the systems that formed us and the humility to be transformed in the process. My departure was painful, but it clarified something essential: My calling is not to comfort the rich and powerful but to accompany the oppressed; not to maintain buildings or bureaucratic institutions, but to preach the liberating gospel that is so often trapped inside them.
Nine years at Myers Park Baptist taught me one lesson above all: Liberalism is incapable of saving us from the fascist forces that are destroying us. The gospel is not a call to comfort; it is a call to courage. It is not an invitation to preserve the status quo but a command to overturn the tables of exploitation, domination and hypocrisy — no matter whose hands built them or whose security depends on them. One might imagine the fascism we face today would radicalize us all to the point there would be no liberals left, but sadly we are not that lucky.
Today, on the one-year anniversary of my departure from MPBC, I can see now it was not the failure of a pastor or a congregation. It was the inevitable clash between two fundamentally different understandings of discipleship: One that seeks to make peace with power and one that seeks to transform it. I left with grief, yes — but I eventually found clarity, conviction, hope and a new community to serve.
Myers Park Baptist helped make me into the pastor I am today, not because it embraced my ministry, but because it resisted it. The pressure revealed the truth. The conflict revealed my calling. The struggle revealed the path forward. I will make more mistakes as a pastor in the future, but I won’t put my faith in white liberalism again.
Liberation never has come from the polite or moderate center. Every movement for justice has been carried by radicals, prophets, dissidents, dreamers and holy troublemakers who were accused of going “too far” and “too fast” by those who claimed to agree with their goals.
I no longer believe the church’s calling is to be liberal. I believe it is to be liberating, and that distinction makes all the difference.
Liberalism is not liberation — but the story is not over for me, for MPBC or the Mainline church in America. The Spirit has a way of unsettling us over and over again until we finally choose transformation. I pray the Spirit will constantly unsettle me, the church and our nation. I continue to have faith that the same liberating Spirit who radicalized me and called me forward will continue calling all our churches forever forward as well.
Benjamin Boswell is the former pastor of Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C. He currently leads a church start in Charlotte called Collective Liberation Church. He’s also creator of Confronting Whiteness, an anti-racist spiritual formation course that has grown into a community of people striving to be anti-racist in their spheres of power and influence.
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