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In September 1968, five months later, Glen Kehrein, a white senior from Moody Bible Institute, was on a student retreat at the Green Lake Assembly Grounds, an American Baptist camping and convention in central Wisconsin.

Sharing the huge convention grounds with Moody that year were Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and other leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC had been turned upside-down since the murder of King, and it was time to pause and take account of the organization's future.

Kehrein was familiar with a few of the SCLC's surviving leaders, but King had intrigued him the most. He had heard about King's reputation as a "Communist" and troublemaker, and Christian leaders had warned him about the dangerous theology contained in King's "social gospel." Kehrein didn't know what to believe. After King's murder, the streets of Chicago had turned into a war zone. The sounds, sights, and aromas of sniper fire, burning buildings, and armed National Guardsmen were fresh in his mind. Even the relationships between black and white students at Moody seemed to carry some underlying strain. "I saw the racial divide vividly in the dorm when King's shooting was announced," Kehrein recalls. "There was a completely different reaction between the blacks and whites. It was not that dissimilar from the conflicting reactions that came after the O. J. Simpson verdict. We definitely were not on the same page."

In Wisconsin, Kehrein wanted to put those disturbing memories out of his head. But he somehow knew they were matters he needed to confront. He was hopeful when his professor announced that Ralph Abernathy had agreed to share a few words with the Moody students, that perhaps King's closest colleague would be able to put some context to his confusion about race in America. "Dr. Abernathy completed his talk and entertained questions from my class. But with all that history in the room, and all that had transpired in the civil-rights movement over the last 10 years, the majority of questions we ended up asking him were about his personal salvation and his understanding of the conservative tenets of evangelical doctrine." Kehrein was stupefied. "Dr. Abernathy was gracious and attempted to accommodate all our questions, but we were clueless. I think our narrow focus said a lot about the evangelical mindset during that era."

Thirty years after the incident at Green Lake, Glen Kehrein is the executive director of Circle Urban Ministries on Chicago's West Side. Through years of ministry in the inner city and committed relationships across racial lines, Kehrein has worked out much of the angst he felt as a Moody student. "I now understand the black community's huge public catharsis of anger and frustration and hopelessness that followed King's assassination," he says. "While I knew the white community's response to King was not a good measure of the man, back then I wasn't astute enough to fully grasp what was going on among African Americans. And I think many white evangelicals have been on a similar journey since King's death."

"White evangelicals were, for the most part, absent during the civil-rights struggle," admits National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) president Don Argue. Since assuming the NAE helm three years ago, Argue, a white Assemblies of God minister, has worked hard to forge relationships between black and white Christians, spearheading joint meetings between his group and the National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA), and assigning blacks to key positions in his organization. But he realizes the road to strong relationships will be a long and delicate one. According to Argue, white evangelicals missed their golden opportunity the first time. "When African Americans had their Moses in the person of Martin Luther King, we were either indifferent or, in some cases, critical and hostile toward what was happening."

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January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44