UMR Communications is offering the latest headlines in the RSS format.
News
Black clergy advocate inclusion Robin Russell, Apr 28, 2008
UNITED METHODIST NEWS SERVICE PHOTO BY MAILE BRADFIELD
Dr. Lawson, an architect of the civil rights movement, makes a point as Dr. Caldwell listens.
By Robin Russell Managing Editor
FORT WORTH, Texas—Black United Methodist clergy who are also longtime civil-rights advocates say there are parallels between the struggles of blacks in the 1960s and that of gays and lesbians who are working for full inclusion in the church today.
At an April 27 rally held outside the Fort Worth Convention Center where the denomination’s 2008 General Conference is meeting through May 2, retired United Methodist clergy the Rev. James Lawson and the Rev. Gil Caldwell spoke of the connection between racism and “heterosexism.”
The rally was organized by the national pro-gay advocacy organization Soulforce to take place on the 40th anniversary of the United Methodist Church’s dissolution of its Central Jurisdiction, a non-geographic unit that effectively segregated black clergy and congregations.
Dr. Caldwell, former chairperson of the Black Methodists for Church Renewal and former co-convener of United Methodists of Color for a Fully Inclusive Church, recalled how his father, a Methodist pastor, came home “with a sense of despair” from the 1939 General Conference that established the Central Jurisdiction. He remembers his father telling him, “We are exchanging slavery for segregation.”
“How do we get at the fact that we have not walked our talk?” Dr. Caldwell asked. “What was the operative theology that allowed these apparent contradictions?”
Even as the denomination worked toward eliminating the Central Jurisdiction, attitudes were slow to change, Dr. Caldwell said. In 1964, United Methodist bishops—black and white together--were turned away at the door of a United Methodist church in Mississippi, he said. That church then argued it was “not un-Christian” for them to remain an all-white congregation.
“We still think there is something Christian about excluding LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people,” he said. “There is a great need for us to link the ‘isms’: anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and now heterosexualism. They come from the same kind of place.”
Dr. Lawson, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and one of the architects of the civil rights movement, said that even though the church dissolved denominational structures of segregation in 1968, that action didn’t automatically change the attitudes of some United Methodists “who proclaimed the Bible promotes racial segregation. It did not stop them from marginalizing some people in the church.”
That attitude was present even among United Methodist leadership, said Dr. Lawson. “There were some bishops—and I could name them for you--who did not speak up boldly then for change and who are not standing up now against the poison of marginalizing some people within the church,” he said.
Black United Methodists who worked for change within the denomination, Dr. Lawson said, experienced a history of frustration. He recalled when delegates at the 1964 General Conference in Pittsburgh rejected “a blueprint for change” that had been developed by members of the Central Jurisdiction.
“I wept in that conference,” he said. “I grieved. The proposals that the Central Jurisdiction brought in were summarily dismissed and turned down by the General Conference.”
By the 1968 General Conference, however, black clergy had become better organized. In the opening worship service, many black Methodists walked out before Communion was served, he said. “That sent a shock wave across General Conference—sort of our warning shot that things had to change.”
Dr. Lawson said he himself stayed up late to write the proposal to establish the General Commission on Religion and Race. “We were met with a fair amount of animosity, though we were children of the United Methodist Church, and been raised in the church. They thought we were among the most disloyal people possible.”
And that kind of “spiritual poison” is what comes to mind now when he hears about discrimination against gays and lesbian United Methodists: “that there are some people who are not worthy of the grace of God.”
Dr. Caldwell called for black clergy and laypersons to stand alongside gay and lesbian Christians, saying, “None of us are free until all of us are free.
“I wonder if those of us who have been wounded by being placed outside the gate have an even greater mandate to be healers of our sick society?”
An example, he said, was the effort by conservative renewal organizations to provide cell phones to overseas delegates. “One has to always beware of ties to benevolence,” he said. “It’s a superficial empowerment that’s really control.”
Dr. Lawson agreed, saying the action demonstrated “a grotesque paternalism that says, ‘Whip the Africans into shape’—and we have that in the United Methodist Church still.
“The same forces will become the enemies of Africa. . . . They want but one thing: the preservation of white, male control and dominance in the United States.”
UNITED METHODIST NEWS SERVICE PHOTO BY MAILE BRADFIELD
Dr. Lawson, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and one of the architects of the civil rights movement, said that even though the church dissolved denominational structures of segregation in 1968, that action didn’t automatically change the attitudes of some United Methodists “who proclaimed the Bible promotes racial segregation. It did not stop them from marginalizing some people in the church.” 
