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Sometimes there is hardly time to listen before God says, "It's time to act!" Just a few weeks after I began pastoring Messiah Presbyterian Church in Lubbock, Texas, I received a letter from nearby Iles Elementary School inviting community leaders to discuss how they and their constituencies could be more involved with the school.

The principal opened by announcing the goal of the session: to try to figure out how to protect the school population from encroaching drugs and gang leaders. Then the teachers spoke, one by one. A sixth-grade teacher told how one of his students was running drugs. The child was making $1,000 a week. He had just bought his mother a car and paid cash, and he told his teacher that in a year or two he would be able to buy her a house.

"No," his teacher told him, "I am afraid you won't live that long." The boy looked at his teacher as if he knew it were true—all the more reason to accumulate as much as possible now.

The story that haunted my memory most, though, was told by a mild-mannered white teacher who taught second grade. He had a boy in his class who was a lookout for a drug dealer. The child was from a poor family, but now he was wearing expensive athletic shoes. The kids in his classroom were suddenly impressed. The teacher was concerned.

"What can I do with this kid?" he said, half to himself and half to the rest of us. "He's only seven years old. He doesn't even completely understand what he's doing. He thinks he's making a good choice when he's really making a bad one."

That afternoon I went home and could not get out of my mind this story: a second-grader with the shoes every kid dreams of, running into a life of gangs and drugs and crime with no awareness of any other way to live. At the time, I was the white pastor of this black Presbyterian church in Lubbock. If you know anything at all about Texas, you know that it is big, while black churches are often small. Still, our God is never small. So, naturally, my tiny church saw God do big things there.

Messiah Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) of Lubbock has 21 adult members, eight children, and a constituency of 43 in an essentially segregated city of 200,000 people. Blacks make up less than 9 percent (about 17,000 people) of the population of Lubbock. The city lies in a region so rugged it could not be settled until the development of windmills, barbed wire, and the six-shooter.

West Texas is characteristically a place that is hard on women, the weak, and minorities. I had been living on the white side of town for five years when I began to serve Messiah (my husband was the pastor of the largest Presbyterian church in the city). It is no exaggeration to say that Messiah Church and I were from two different worlds, and even in the best of circumstances, merging these worlds can be complicated for both blacks and whites.

In January 1994, members of Messiah asked me to help provide worship leadership. Their black pastor had left, they needed support during Lent, and I became their part-time pastor a few months later, serving a congregation of 17 adults. I could remember times in my ministry when I was not sure a class was worth teaching if it had fewer than 24 people in it. But now I was the only white woman pastoring an African-American congregation in the PCUSA.

Immediately I came to grips with two issues. First, I had to face the fact that my life and experience had been very different from my congregation's. This was more than a matter of race. It was also a matter of education, socioeconomic class, regional upbringing, and even experiences of faith. Second, how would I be at Messiah—and who would I be?

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October 2 2000, Vol. 44, No. 11