[Oe List ...] Beyond 'Reconciling' conversations: How Black Lives Matter is changing the church

[W. J.]

Friends, you may wish to read the latest article from The New Yorker. And then, if you're interested in more, scroll down to read my personal commentary.I invite your responses.Marshall Jones
How Black Lives Matter Is Changing the Church


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How Black Lives Matter Is Changing the ...
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“You have this phrase and this movement that is forcing people, essentially, to take sides.” --Jennar Tisby

And now for a few personal words from this writer ...
When large numbers of raging counter-protesters with Confederate flags mounted on their pickups confronted BLM marchers in Maggie Valley, N.C. last month, they got my attention as a part-time resident.
Since then more police shootings of black men have continued to raise the cultural temperature above the boiling point, creating a head of steam that may explode at any moment with unprecedented racial divisiveness and further violent confrontations.

In our current moment Dr. Martin Luther King's practice of nonviolent demonstrations may look in our rear view mirror like sweetness and light personified.
I write as a long term survivor of the Civil Rights Movement. Though I was gassed by the cops during Durham's 1960 sit-ins at segregated Woolworth lunch counters, and experienced 1964's Mississippi Freedom Summer without getting shot at, and photographed MLK speaking at the Methodist Student Movement in 1964 for New World Outlook without incident, and staffed the NCC-sponsored Student Interracial Ministry while working for the Methodist Board of Missions at 475 Riverside Drive, NYC, from 1964 until 1967, I was not fully immersed in a radical corporate response to racial injustice until the assassinations of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 propelled me from the quiet environs of Hinton Rural Life Center in Clay County, NC to the burned-out inner city of Chicago's West Side when I joined the staff of The Ecumenical Institute.
I could not perceive it at the time, but having a bunch of white honkies living with their kids in a 97% black Chicago ghetto was an in-your-face intrusion into the community. With our unquestioned assumptions of White Privilege, we were sitting ducks. We may have been naive, but fortunately we survived the fires and contributed to the transformation of that devastated neighborhood into the 5th City Model of how to care for every human being in a local community. 
See Fifth City: A Decisional City (1983), that Oprah narrated and I was privileged to film.
Even with the perspective of my unusual life history, I continue to struggle with how much I enjoy and take for granted my White Male Privilege, which, together with my economic privilege, has kept me feeling relatively safe and secure into my old age.
As I mark eighty thousand miles on my birthday next month, I'm left wondering whether I personally--and we as a group--have done enough to date as cultural, historical, and epidemiological waves collide and flood over us, washing us up onto an unknown shore.
And whether I, and we, need to be doing something different at this unprecedented moment. 
In the poetry of D.H. Lawrence: Ha, I was a blaze leaping up!
    I was a tiger bursting into sunlight.
    I was greedy, I was mad for the unknown.
    I, new-risen, resurrected, starved from the tomb
    starved from a life of devouring always myself
    now here was I, new-awakened, with my hand stretching out
    and touching the unknown, the real unknown, the unknown unknown.Perhaps having quiet, comfortable, and inviting conversations with select, non-confrontational representatives of other racial communities is not enough.
If we learn how to step out of our cultural frame of reference and listen more deeply and daringly to what others may be bold enough to say--and only if they can trust us--perhaps even that much is not enough.
As I turn the corner to begin what will probably be my final decade, I am not arrogant enough to propose a sweeping Answer that we should rush to embrace. Rather, I take refuge in the humility of acknowledging that, in the words of JFK in 1961, "the torch is passed to a new generation."
The unanswered question in my mind is whether our "new generation" has been adequately prepared in depth to meet the challenges of the rest of the 21st century. And whether "the old folks" including myself need to do WAY more to challenge them to carry the torch of individual freedom, radical inclusion, and profound humanness. And to invent with them the tools to do the job.
Historical footnote: In 2016 David P. Cline published From Reconciliation to Revolution: the Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement. His choice of title offers insights into how our history has swept us forward from our culturally biased responses of previous decades to confront their limitations and dare to invent responses that are new and different in the Now.
Links in the message (5)

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MLK’s address to the Methodist Student ...
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Public Domain Poetry - New Heaven And E...
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A tale of two rallies: Americans on all...
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The World of Human Development Fifth Ci...
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>From Reconciliation to Revolution | Dav...
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