God’s “kingdom priorities” October 21, 2007
Posted by Zack in Missouri , trackback
This morning, I was flipping channels with one hand, and ironing my shirt for church with the other (when I don’t know how people will be dressed in a new church, I try to play it safe). I landed on a movie in which Nicholas Cage stumbles on to an island where the residents have created a fantastic alternate reality, and he struggles to understand it. When we got to St. Louis’ New City church, I felt a little bit like the same thing was happening to me.
About half the church was black and half was white. Folks were a range of conservative-looking (suits and all) to slightly off-beat. A lot of people were immigrants from Africa.
The music was already thumping as people were still arriving. It was awesome. It was not African-American gospel, African traditional, African pop, white “praise music,” modern Christian indy rock, R&B or punk—it was all of that together. No, they didn’t switch off from one style to the next, but seemed to mix it all up into their own style. I’m not an ethno-musicologist, but that’s what it sounded like to me anyways. The band looked like three white men and one Asian man. The singers were a couple of black men, a couple of black women and I think one white woman. Songs were in English, French and African languages I couldn’t identify.
There were about 600 or 700 people in the sanctuary, a converted school gym, with the basketball hoops still on the walls. The church complex is an old school building. Classrooms are now used for Sunday school, day care and other functions. There are dorms that house interns as well as families in transition.
Immediately, a lot of people were down in front dancing. And then they were dancing up and down and all around the isles. Also—they kept the kids in the sanctuary for this part of it. And there were just a zillion of them—all mind bogglingly cute, up on their chairs dancing. When the music stopped and they got into announcements, you could barely hear the speaker over the kids in the room as they wound down. It was great.
Martin Luther King Jr’s statement that the “most segregated hour in America is 11AM on Sunday” still holds a lot of truth. And while some predominantly white mega churches have surprised researchers with their “high” percentages of people of color (As “high” as 20%!), they are still predominantly white churches.
At New City, on the other hand, we really had the feeling that we were seeing cultures meeting each other on equal terms. I can’t say I’ve ever had that feeling anywhere before, except in a few local union chapters when I was working in the labor movement.
During the break between the music and the sermon, we asked the people around us what they were doing differently here. One thing they mentioned was a long series of “racial reconciliation” classes that church goers went through, especially during the early years. There’s got to be a whole lot more to the story than that, but it’d take a lot more than one visit to get a real grasp.
From their website:
New City Fellowship came into existence in July of 1992 after several years of prayer by a number of St. Louis Christians connected with the Presbyterian Church in America (P.C.A.). These believers were convinced there was a great need for their denomination to make an active commitment to reconciliation between the Anglo and African-American communities in St. Louis, as well as a basic God-given responsibility to care for the poor.
After a year of preparation and much prayer, Barry Henning, Associate Pastor at New City Fellowship in Chattanooga, Tennessee - a racially mixed congregation worship ministering to Chattanooga s inner city communities, was brought to St. Louis to begin the work of planting a P.C.A. church committed to exalting Jesus Christ and the power of the gospel to work toward racial reconciliation in the church and address the needs of the people of the city of St. Louis. New City’s need and commitment, since its beginning, have been to act as a catalyst for the larger body of Christ (first in the P.C.A. and then in the greater church at large) to fulfill this call through intentional, Spirit-led acts of justice, compassion and righteousness.
In other words, they went about this very deliberately, with the support of many local churches, and with some expertise from a senior pastor who had already figured some things out in another city. I want to write in the future about the role that prayer plays in these Christian communities when they approach big, difficult tasks. It’s really interesting, but I have to learn more first.
Note also that these are not the liberal mainline Presbyterians that the secular left knows and loves. PCA is a split-off group of mostly Deep South congregations that walked out of the larger Presbyterian body when it made a left turn in the early 1970’s. Some say they left partly because of the denomination’s support for the Civil Rights Movement. But now here they are!
The senior pastor is traveling, and so the sermon was delivered by a visiting pastor from Togo. He preached on a part of Acts of the Apostles that documents a situation in which one ethnicity inside the Early Church was being neglected, and how a solution was arrived at by the community. He was hitting on some deep theological questions—and I just don’t understand enough about the Bible yet to know if I understood his main points correctly.
The sermon was delivered in both English and French—apparently they do it that way every week.
Like Nicholas Cage in the movie this morning, there was a lot that didn’t make sense to me about the scene at church. I was mainly curious about “my people,” the suburban white folks there. Why were they willing to sit through a sermon made twice as long by its delivery in two languages? When people started dancing in the isles around them, why didn’t they get that awkward “what am I doing here!” look and, instead, joined in? Why didn’t it feel either like a “white church” or a “black church?” Why didn’t people clump up with others of their ethnicity like in almost every other mixed setting?
I saw a documentary last week about Little Rock’s Central High School, the first public school to be desegregated. In the present day, classes there still have an invisible line down the middle that divides the “black” from the “white” side of rooms—40 years after desegregation.
No question: racial reconciliation is about the most difficult kind of social change to make in America. I’ll offer a theory about one thing these church folks might have in their favor as they attempt it: They’re not doing it for each other’s sake, but for the sake of their God.
When I was in college, there was a big political movement almost every year among the students: resistance to tuition hikes, the Gulf War, protests against harassment of students of color by campus police, etc…. Every year, like clock work, each movement exploded into a giant race conflict among the student activists—despite a ton of effort put into deliberate racial reconciliation (workshops, classes, etc…).
Sometimes it felt as though the harder everyone tried, the worse the outcome was. At the time, I concluded that the process was doomed from the beginning by the idea that reconciliation was something that white people should do out of the goodness of their hearts for the victims of their own racism. There seemed to be no way to shake the paternalism out of that equation. The whites couldn’t shake the feeling that they were doing something they didn’t have to do—i.e. we were doing others a favor.
These white Christians, on the other hand, are approaching the problem with a whole different attitude. They’re doing it for God. And so the two groups may have an easier time coming together as true equals—with no one doing anyone else a favor—as children of the same God making the world right because its what he wants.
Just a theory.
PS: A really interesting read is NewCity.org’s Core Values section. The church takes these ideas very seriously—there’s an eight week class on them just to become a member of the church.
Some selections:
When Jesus Christ came to earth he announced the good news (Gospel) of the kingdom (Matthew 4:23). He came as the King of kings and the Ruler of the Universe to save a people for himself, through his own sacrifice, and restore us under his loving rule and reign as a people who would live lives defined by godly justice, mercy and humility (Micah 6:8). The focus of Christ's ministry in this world is described in Isaiah 42:1-4"Here is my Servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations. He will not shout or cry out , or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness he will bring forth justice; he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth. In his law the islands will put their hope."
As his people, we are freed from a lifestyle of self-focused sin and freed to "seek first his kingdom" (Matthew 6:33). Like Jesus, we are anointed by the Spirit (Matthew 3:11), gifted to make his love known (Ephesians 4:7-13), and will be led by the Spirit to sovereignly appointed opportunities for good works (Eph 2:10).
God's kingdom priorities are not hidden to us, nor are they ours to define. God has spoken in his Word and declared to us what he wants our service to look like: "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter - when you see the naked to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? The your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I." Isaiah 58:6-9
Comments»
Interesting thread — I am in an interracial marriage and when my wife and I were looking for a church I talked to a black associate pastor of a mostly white church. I asked him about trying to find an interracial church and he told me to be careful not to stumble upon a church that makes multiculturalism and tolerance more important than the Gospel. In no way am I implying that the church you visited does this, but there seem to be more than a few churches that take worldly concerns and evelvate them about the Message. Anyway, love your blog.
May I extend a formal invitation to Little Rock (home of Central High)? If y’all are ever down this way, I will gladly find you a home to stay in and you can visit our church. We’re still young, and learning, but we are intentional about being reconciled to one another as we are reconciled to Christ (www.mosaicchurch.net). I didn’t get to visit New City while I was up in St. Louis, but I will have to plan a visit next time I’m in town.
Zack,
Thanks for taking me up on my offer and visiting our church. I’m really sorry that I wasn’t there this week (my wife and kids were all sick). I would have loved to have met you. I really appreciate everything you said about New City. I just moved to St. Louis this summer to begin my studies at Covenant Theological Seminary, and in the short time that we’ve been attending New City it has become a model for much of what I hope my future church to look like.
In the interest of full disclosure, the services aren’t always completely bilingual - just usually portions. But the music is always amazing and the kids are always rambunctious.
I’m sure you’re meeting plenty of qualified people in your travels, but if you ever have trouble understanding the Bible feel free to shoot any questions my way and I’ll throw my two cents in - danleman at gmail dot com.
And while some predominantly white mega churches have surprised researchers with their “high” percentages of people of color (As “high” as 20%!), they are still predominantly white churches.
Isn’t 20% pretty high, considering that 75% of the country marked “White” on the census?
Not a megachurch attendee myself, just wondering why this figure seems kind of disparaged.
Thanks for the reflection on your recent visit to New City Fellowship in St. Louis. As an elder and long-time attender, I can attest to the motivation for what you saw as “doing it for God.” Let me know if you want to delve further into the life and motives of New City Fellowship.