Body Politics
Amid political tensions, when is a pastor to speak out and when to refrain?
By Gordon Macdonald | posted 10/01/2004
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In 1966 my young family and I moved into a southern Illinois town where I became pastor of one of those ubiquitous First Baptist Churches you see everywhere. It was a time of serious racial tension in America, and that tension was palpable in our new neighborhood.
There was only one African-American church in our community, and its pastor and I cultivated a friendship.
One hot summer evening in our community, a number of African-American young people reacted angrily to some racial slurs made by whites on Main Street. Store windows were broken, cars were "keyed," and police authority was defied. Within hours the town polarized along racial lines.
I called my friend and proposed conversation. Would he, I asked, consider gathering a group of those who'd been involved in the meleé and bring them to our home? He would, he said, and he did. Perhaps if I'd been wiser, I'd have gone to his home. But the word I'd heard was that a white guy would not be warmly welcomed on his street at the moment.
A day later two dozen young men and women came to our home for a long discussion in which I tried to listen, ask questions, and respond with an idea or two. The meeting set up a rapprochement with the police and the beginning of dialogue, which helped the community face its problems. I assumed everyone (especially my congregation) would be thrilled.
A week later, at a church leadership meeting, one of our deacons arrived carrying a tape recorder. He had taped a message, he said, because he was so angry that he could not trust himself to speak spontaneously. This certainly caught my attention.
"How you respond," he said, "will determine whether or not I stay on this board and in this church."
We listened.
I learned not to talk of my visits to the Clinton White House, not even to hint that something good might be happening. It seemed as if people did not want to believe that was possible.
The pastor (that was me), the taped voice said, had betrayed the responsibilities of ministry by engaging in "social gospel" activity. It was the deacon's opinion that I had no business conferring with the African-American leadership in our community, and that if I did not renounce what I had done, write a letter of apology to the town newspaper, and promise that I would never again do such things, he would resign the board and, perhaps, leave the church.
As I listened I began to visualize the loss of my pastoral mandate. It was a scary moment. I am not by nature an activist, nor do I have the makings of a prophet, but I was convinced that I had acted in obedience to the scriptural mandate: to be a seeker of reconciliation.
When the tape ended, the chairman—a remarkable man—looked the deacon straight in the eye and, calling him by name, said, "We're very sorry to lose you from this board." And then he turned to the rest of us and said, "Let's turn to tonight's agenda." The now ex-deacon packed up his recorder and left the room.
Should I rock the vote?
I grew up in traditional fundamentalism. "This world is not my home, I'm just a-passing through" could easily have been our defining hymn. The faith community of my boyhood was relatively disinterested in any public issues except those that had something to do with family or matters of private morality. Everything else was "of the world." Result? I was quite naïve about how to sort out the kind of public issues with which a pastor should identify.
Figuring all of that out began during my seminary days. On weekends I pastored a tiny, rural church in northwestern Kansas. As I was preaching my first sermons Lyndon Johnson was running against Barry Goldwater for the Presidency. I determined to break from my Republican roots and associate with the Democrats. I pasted a Johnson sticker on the back of my Volkswagen. I did this in a Kansas county that would eventually vote overwhelmingly for Goldwater! Was I brave or stupid?
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