Justice Talks
John Hill (top left), interim top executive of the General Board of Church and Society, moderates a "Justice Talks" webinar, "From the Pulpit to the Public Square," featuring the Rev. Stephanie Arnold (top right) and the Rev. Kendall L. McBroom. (UM Insight Screenshot from Zoom)
Pastors who want to inspire their congregations to social justice action will be more effective when they follow John Wesley's model to establish relationships with church members and learn their needs, say experienced preachers.
The Rev. Stephanie Arnold and the Rev. Kendall L. McBroom agreed that a familiar adage captures the context of social justice preaching: people won't care what you know until they know you care.
Revs. Arnold and McBroom were the panelists for the General Board of Church and Society's third "Justice Talks" webinar, "From the Pulpit to the Public Square" on Nov. 7. A recording of the webinar is available to view on Church and Society's YouTube channel.
Senior pastor of First United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Ala., and a Church and Society board member, Rev. Arnold said the world urgently needs United Methodist pastors to follow the example of Methodism's founder, John Wesley, who got to know the needs of the poor and wasn't afraid to speak out against the injustices of his day.
"To say we're living in challenging times is an understatement," said Rev. Arnold. "We face war, efforts to roll back voting rights and LGBTQIA rights, chaos in government, the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, and so much more."
Rev. Arnold said First-Birmingham underwent a transformation in 2009 when, as a dying downtown church, it adopted a mission statement to be "an open place for all." That vision led staff and members into discussions about who was missing from the congregation and who might be included.
"That was an honest conversation about meeting their current downtown context," said the senior pastor. "Otherwise, the church would have become a historic landmark without a church presence."
Rev. Arnold said she joined First-Birmingham as an associate pastor shortly after the new mission statement was adopted.
"When I interviewed for the position, the then-senior pastor told me: 'you'll have CEOs and unhoused folks; black and white; straight and gay people.'" she said. "When the church created its mission statement it was responding to evidence of people's lives in downtown without a safe place to belong, without a faith community."
Welcoming all to the church has revitalized the congregation, which now numbers 619 members with an average Sunday worship attendance of about 300, said the senior pastor.
Among the issues on which First-Birmingham has advocated has been state legislation affecting LGBTQIA rights and potential effects on transgender church members and non-binary teens in the church's youth group. The church advocated for greater awareness of domestic violence after a mother was murdered in front of her eight children. When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staged a series of raids in Birmingham, a church member who is an attorney helped draft a policy designating First UMC as a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.
"We tried to look at issues impacting community and take a step toward them," said Rev. Arnold. "Even small decisions begin to move the needle and help us shape our faith and political discourse."
As Church and Society's director of civil and human rights, Rev. McBroom said both the United States and the world "are seeing both an attack and a rollback on liberties and rights that so many of us have grounded our understanding and hope for America and the world."
"The common thread I see is dehumanization," said Rev. McBroom. "People are seeing 'the other' as 'less than' and therefore not worthy to participate in society's benefits. We're seeing it in voting rights, immigration, criminal justice, the death penalty which an individual can't come back from. These issues are attacks on the dignity and image of God in another individual."
"We're at a crossroads for the (social justice) work we do," Rev. McBroom continued. "If we are the church that believes in a redeeming God, then if we hold to that belief we see that the United States isn't really a Christian nation, even though it views itself as a Christian nation."
Rev. Arnold and Rev. McBroom both said that they also use the historic theological method known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral as a social justice ministry tool. The Quadrilateral interprets and applies scripture through the lenses of church tradition, experience and reason.
"The Wesleyan Quadrilateral gives people tools to engage with issues they might not engage otherwise," said Rev. Arnold.
"I switch it up by leading with experience of those I'm in community with," said Rev. McBroom, who was ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. "We have to see people and listen to their stories; it humanizes us and them."
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Rev. McBroom emphasized that social justice preaching and Christian education require pastors to "understand the context of scripture and tradition" and then instruct church members.
"We must know what context a verse birthed from," he said. "It may not be what a layperson might want to understand, but clergy need to break it down and make it real on the ground to know why and how we're where we are."
John Hill, Church and Society's interim executive who moderated the Nov. 7 webinar, said the panel's presentation drew many questions from the online audience. Among them was a question about how to use the Wesley Quadrilateral to educate church members about social justice.
"Our United Methodist tradition has gotten watered down," said Rev. Arnold. "We're rooted in public discourse because Wesley didn't back down (from the issues of his day such as slavery). Politics now is divisive and ugly, but politics is people living in community together having conversation on shared values. Today we're so polarized we don't even know how to come together around issues on which we agree."
Rev. McBroom concurred with Rev. Arnold.
"There's a notion that 'politics' is a dirty word, but it's how we negotiate space and resources," he said. "As United Methodist Christians we are rooted in an ethic of grace and love. When we root our action, advocacy and organizing in love and grace that will shift our engagement with policies on local, state, national and global levels. We can move from scripture to action because we have scripture as examples; the people we read about (in scripture) actually did something political."
Pastors seeking to inspire their churches to greater social justice action must take care to balance challenging a congregation with shared leadership and action, agreed Revs. McBroom and Arnold.
"It will ebb and flow like water," said Rev. McBroom. "It can be hard for us as Christian pastors to take a step back and say 'I don't always have to be in front,' but if people see us, they'll want to learn more about us and become active participants in the ministry of Jesus Christ."
A veteran award-winning religion journalist who has reported on The United Methodist Church at all levels for more than 35 years, Cynthia B. Astle serves as editor of United Methodist Insight, an online news-and-views journal she founded in 2011.