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Scott Roley began his career as a musician in the Christian recording industry. But experiences as a kid attending a Martin Luther King Jr. speech and meeting John F. Kennedy haunted him with a sense of racial inequality. Roley left his music career and began working with the poor in Tennessee. His book, God's Neighborhood: A Hopeful Journey in Racial Reconciliation & Community Renewal, was written with James Isaac Elliott, with a foreword by his friend Michael Card.

You started Franklin Community Ministries in Franklin, Tennessee, and you were helping a lot of people. But you started the ministry without talking to Denny Denson, an African American pastor in Franklin. What happened with Denny Denson and what did you learn about what it means to be involved in racial reconciliation and community renewal?

What happens with most of us is that we want minority friendships. People will say to me, how do I really get involved? And I say, it's real simple, it basically costs you your life. What it really means is, you're willing to give yourself away to a person who's very different.

The best thing I could have done was to go to First Missionary Baptist Church here in Franklin. But instead of going up to the door, knocking, introducing myself, and spending time with him relating, I would go past the church. We would do these wonderful things among the poor in his neighborhood, but I never once asked his advice or asked for his help. Repentance came through another brother who suggested that perhaps Denny was not so impressed with me and the ministry as I hoped, and said that he was actually saddened by my inability to love. It was very powerful.

That was Hewitt Sawyer, he's another African American brother. I got up from where we were, went over to Denny's church, and sort of went up the stairs that I'd frozen on time after time, without courage, and walked in. I was so emotionally overwhelmed by my desire and the calling the Lord put on our hearts, he rose from where he was down in the front of the church, got up, walked up this aisle, and we met halfway, and I just blurted out my repentance. I was just so sorry and he wrapped me up in his arms and really cared about me.

People may be stunned that such an obvious thing wasn't part of your journey. Why didn't you go to him from the get-go?

My intentions are always, it seems, to do it myself. I actually want to be in charge. We care about credit, we care about being in charge, it's the way we're bred. I think the idea of actually extending and working and, not only doing the ministry with him but turning the ministry over to him, was so foreign to me that until it was the likes of John Perkins and Dolphus Weary and other of these marvelous community developers who began to teach me. And then Denny himself, as a South-Side Chicagoan, ex-Black Panther, was the last guy I ever thought I'd be friends with and now we're as close as brothers.

So why did you guys decide to move there? I mean, for goodness sakes, your buddy, Denny Denson, pastors an inner-city African American church and he lives in the suburbs.

We just felt that if I didn't move in there was no way to build the bridges with the people because they were so suspicious of any white people. Even the do-gooders, even the people dropping off turkeys at Thanksgiving, they always wonder why they didn't stay. Like, why do you people come through? And the white people who are buying drugs in my neighborhood, they know why they don't stay. They just come down to use the facility and then they're out of there.

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July (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48