By David Gushee
On Tuesday, McAfee School of Theology hosted a sizable contingent of African-American leaders on our Atlanta campus. Gerald Durley, senior pastor at Providence Missionary Baptist Church in southwest Atlanta, preached in chapel. The sermon began with his searing experience in 1960 of being refused entrance to a Baptist church in Nashville, his first taste of the South’s version of bare-knuckled “Christian” racism, at age 18. He contrasted that disillusioning, bruising rejection with the happy significance all these years later of being invited to speak at McAfee.
I felt glad about that happy contrast, but I was struck by how racial reconciliation circa 2012 is made more complex because each generation has its own distinctive experiences, memories and challenges. My 25-year-old students can hardly imagine a church culture in which a college kid would be refused entrance to a sanctuary because of his skin color. It is astonishing that it ever was that way among us.
Their particular challenges right now are very different. At McAfee, for example, we are now 48 percent black, 47 percent white and 5 percent “other” in our student population. I have asked around and no one I have met has ever encountered this exact racial makeup anywhere. We are participating in what I believe is a providential experiment in biracial engagement.
The racially divided Protestant South of so many centuries, in which we sang many of the same hymns and worshipped the same Jesus in segregated churches, is experimenting here with an unprecedented (re)union.
There is no script for this effort, and certainly some grinding of the gears as we all learn how to do this together. We know that a school founded by white donors, churches and scholars rather quickly needs to evolve a biracial/multiracial church network, faculty and staff, and we are making some progress there.
We know that we share the most important religious commitments, but that we exhibit cultural differences that regularly surprise us. We know that the tendency to retreat into more comfortable one-race subcommunities is a constant menace, and we work hard to prevent that.
Personally, I am trying to keep my eyes on the prize: an Atlanta-based Baptist seminary of educational and spiritual excellence with a fully biracial community life, graduating students who learn innovative ways to overcome the 400-year-old legacy of racial division in this region.
And once this seminary gets even a little practiced at overcoming the divisions between black and white in the South, it will grow impatient with “only” that project because it will know that America circa 2012 is not just biracial but multiracial and international. We will learn to get better at building Christian community among and with Latinos/as, Asian-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, Africans and others who are already beginning to bless us with their presence in our seminary.
The other racial-reconciliation event occurred Thursday and Friday in Macon. Baptist legend Bill Leonard headlined a similar biracial group of Christians from campus and community who met together for the eighth annual “Beloved Community” symposium. Once again grizzled veterans of years of racial division and somewhat fewer years of efforts to overcome them gathered for fellowship and worship.
Leonard’s opening lecture was rich and subtle. He traced the notable and documentable decline of Christianity in the United States, including in the small-town South. He said that this decline was making many Christians unhappy, but that this loss of power actually provides an opportunity for us to rediscover a more authentic voice, not of power but of moral witness.
His talk, coupled with the inspiration provided by the very presence of this particular group in Macon, led me to a fresh, rather mordant hope. When it was my turn to speak I said the decline of Christian hegemony in the U.S. may mean that we will find each other in new ways across racial lines because we need each other more than we ever have. In a secularizing culture, Christians cannot afford to be separated by race or anything else. When troops have taken a lot of casualties and are scattered all over the battlefield, they find each other and re-form new units. We need to find each other. We can’t do it apart anymore.
There is a spirit of white Christian reaction abroad in the land, pining for a lost world in which everyone went to church and white Christians were in charge. I suggest an alternative. If we must pine, how about pining for a multiracial Christian community bearing faithful witness to the way of Jesus Christ?