RALEIGH, N.C. — Two First Baptist churches sit across from each other on Capitol Square in Raleigh, N.C. One, on Wilmington Street, is attended mostly by African-American worshipers; the other, on Salisbury Street, is predominantly white.
The two churches have more in common than their faith and their spot on the city’s main square. On the first weekend in March, a theater production will celebrate their shared history, dating to their founding as one church 200 years ago. Organizers hope the play will also be an important step in what’s developing as the two churches’ shared future.
First Baptist Church on Wilmington Street
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First Baptist Church on Salisbury Street
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It’s not unusual to find racially separate First Baptist churches in Southern cities, where 11 a.m. Sunday morning is known as the most segregated hour of the week. In few places is the separation so physically stark — so near, and yet, apparently, so far.
But appearances can be deceiving, and Carolyn Dickens, a longtime member of the Salisbury Street church, said the play shows how the two churches bridge the divide that grew up after the Civil War. And the joint production should help foster that relationship.
“We want to go forward into our third century with an authentic relationship of working together,” Dickens said. “There’s a lot we can do as sister churches downtown, being a witness and reaching out to our community. That’s something we are in for the long haul, both churches.”
Producing the play, “Two Buildings/One Heart: 200 Years of the First Baptist Churches of Raleigh,” developed naturally as organizers at Salisbury Street approached the bicentennial. “We have our sister church, so it’s not just about us,” Dickens said. “That has been a wonderful thing to keep us having a broader view than just ourselves.”
Fellow member Anne Bullard serves on the board of Raleigh’s innovative Burning Coal Theatre Company. She knew the troupe’s education director, Ian Finley, is “gifted at telling local history stories.”
Staging a play also was a natural fit for Chris Chapman, the pastor at Salisbury Street. With a background in theater and music, he works to find ways to “express faith through art.” Sometimes, he incorporates dramas with real or imagined characters into his sermons.
“We’ve sort of had a disconnect between art and religion in this country, as if the arts are suspect in some way, and art and artists are in some way alien to spirituality,” Chapman said. “I’ve never really understood the Church’s disconnect, the reluctance to use the arts other than music to proclaim truth and gospel, and as an insight into human experience.”
Chapman also believes in the importance of confronting history. “I have a bias toward holding onto history, particularly vis-a-vis race,” he said. “Some people want to go forward without dealing with the past. You can’t change things, but you have to understand where we’ve been and how recently we were very divided.”
“Two Buildings: One Heart” will be instructive for younger members of the congregation, Chapman said. “Young people have trouble believing that people related that unequally until very recently.” A play can make that history come alive for them much more vividly than something they read in a book, he said.
Finley, the playwright, drew on a wealth of material from both churches. The play will be told through vignettes, using voices of historical characters. Raleigh, the fledgling state capital, needed churches, so the legislature offered the Capitol itself as a meeting place for any minister who could pull services together. What are now the two First Baptist churches started 200 years ago with a meeting of 23 people — 14 African American and nine white — there. The two churches are planning a “birthday party” in the Capitol on the anniversary, March 8.
The church progressed until after the Civil War. The congregation moved a few times, meeting at the sites of both contemporary churches. In 1868, during Reconstruction, the African-American members asked for a letter of dismissal to start their own church. The separation was granted “amiably,” records show.
The play will portray the separate histories and the shared stories, such as the two churches’ ministers working together during the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. That led to more joint endeavors.
“Two Buildings/One Heart” is a part of that sharing. Burning Coal actors will fill major roles, but people in both congregations are being invited to audition. Singers from both churches will provide a choir.
Two of the performances on March 2-4 will start at the Salisbury Street sanctuary, with the cast and audience moving to Wilmington Street at intermission. The other two will start at Wilmington Street and travel the other way. As audience members walk through Capitol Square — where their churches started — they will pass actors who might tell them more of the story.
Capitol Square, Carolyn Dickens noted, is also called Union Square.
Linda Brinson ([email protected]), based in Madison, N.C., is a correspondent for the Religious Herald.