VALLEY FORGE, Pa. (ABP) — After resigning abruptly in 1992 from one of the largest and influential churches in the nation, First Baptist Church in Dallas, and going through a divorce within two years, Joel Gregory's ministry appeared to be over. Through it all, he says, one minister kept calling him.
The late E.K. Bailey, the pastor of Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Dallas, asked Gregory to preach at his International Expository Preaching Conference. Though Gregory didn't know it at the time, it was actually an endorsement of his ministry that led to the white southern preacher being invited into hundreds of African-American churches and conferences.
Joel Gregory
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Gregory describes the experience — the first step toward redeeming his ministry that today includes serving as professor of preaching at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary — in a new book by Judson Press co-authored with Georgetown College President William Crouch.
In What We Love About the Black Church, Gregory and Crouch say much of America's religious history is marked by white churches taking a patronizing attitude assuming they have the right answers and need to help black churches with money, programs and organization. Based on their own experiences worshipping as white ministers in African-American settings, however, they argue that black churches have much to offer that would greatly enrich white churches if they are willing to learn.
Gregory said in an e-mail interview the most important lesson he learned is that the black church really practices grace. "White Baptists talk grace but to some extent revert to law in assessment of their own lives and the lives of others," he said. "Blacks are willing to take you where they find you, believe in your, pick you up and believe that you can say a good word for Jesus. Every Sunday in every black church I have experienced, now in the hundreds, grace is an active reality."
Crouch, a preacher's kid who grew up watching his father, Henry Crouch — the longtime pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., and a founder of the Alliance of Baptists — cope with the ugliness of racism in the South, set a goal of leading Georgetown, a predominantly white college founded in 1787, to become a campus of diversity.
Under his leadership the percentage of students of color at the college has increased from 3 percent in 2005 to 10 percent by the fall of 2009, with a goal of 20 percent by 2015. The school has also launched the Bishop College Alive project, aimed at resurrecting the spirit of a historically black college in Texas that closed its doors in 1988. It marked the first time in American educational history that a predominantly white college has honored the alumni of a historically African-American college.
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Crouch said one difference he has noted in visiting white and black churches is hospitality. Visiting a large white Baptist church one Sunday morning, Crouch said he was cordially welcomed by an official greeter but left the service feeling like an outside observer instead of a truly welcomed participant in worship.
He contrasted that with a first-time visit to a large African-American church in Chicago, where he was greeted with a handshake he described as "the lean." That is where right hands grip in a traditional handshake but left hands wrap around the other's back and right shoulders lean in and touch. He later learned is a nearly universal salutation among African-American men.
Upon learning he was a minister the greeter insisted on escorting Crouch to the pastor's office. He was introduced to the pastor, the assistant pastor and the senior deacon and asked by the senior pastor to remain with him in his office while the choir director led the congregation in pre-worship praise and singing and later to sit with him on the pulpit platform. Before the service began, every deacon, even though they didn't know his name, greeted Crouch with "the lean." By the time the service started, he wrote, "I was already a part of the fellowship."
Gregory said black and white churches will move beyond arm's-length cordial relationships only when they start getting involved in one another's lives. "We need more than annual pulpit exchanges," he said. "We need stated bi-cultural programs where black folks and white folks get into one another's homes, have meals and go through a guided discussion book with grace and openness."
He said well-intentioned efforts by whites to interact with blacks in joint worship settings fail to produce meaningful relationships because blacks "are quick readers" of white people's real attitudes toward them.
"The late Rev. Dr. E.K. Bailey told me one time, 'Gregory, we have had to read what white folks are really thinking for 400 years in order to survive. We can tell in an instant if a white person fears us,'" he said.
"That is true," Gregory continued. "We need a pure heart to meet on level ground. We need honesty and conversation. We also need to be able to be serious about stereotypes and at the same time be able to laugh out loud together at the misconceptions that we have of one another. I have seen great healing in such respectful, shared humor at the irony of our misconceptions."
Gregory said he hopes the book will be of equal interest to clergy and laity in both black and white churches. "We need it to be," he said.
"Make no mistake," Gregory said. "Prejudice is evil and serious. We cannot laugh it away. I believe the more time Christian blacks and white can spend with one another in homes, missions and conversations the perceived distances will melt."
Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.