Altar Call/Charlotte

(Saturday Morning, November 22, 2025)

by

Grinding the Beans | Nov. 22, 2025

Good morning friends. We observe Christ the King Sunday tomorrow, Thanksgiving week is next, and then the first Sunday of Advent.

Our hearts and minds have been focused on the administration’s selection of Charlotte, North Carolina as a theater for its border patrol (masked men driving large vehicles and heavily armed, who normally function on the nation’s actual borders). If you consume a certain kind of media you might have seen this as a necessary or good thing. From my perspective it is not. It has brought great harm, anxiety, fear and disruption to families, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and churches in our region.

Having a long history with Charlotte, as a pastor and now as bishop of the Charlotte Episcopal Area of the United Methodist Church, this has been both a disturbance and a revelation. The disturbance is the toll it has taken on the ordinary lives of the profiled. The revelation is the resilience, strength and engagement of the faith community, which in Charlotte is in overwhelming numbers the mainline churches.

How and why did this take place?

A people formed by scripture simply see what is happening in North Carolina in a different way---we love our neighbors, we know God hears their cries for help, we have a strength and power that is higher than ours, we know that every person is of sacred worth, we follow a non-violent Lord who saved us on a cross, we love our neighbor as an expression of holiness. The harm that has come to Charlotte and North Carolina is not an interruption to discipleship. It is the altar call we did not see coming.

Of course, to see it more regionally, western North Carolina has experienced Hurricane Helene (with little federal response, with legislative bodies not meeting, with no state budget, and I could go on) the suspension of SNAP (some counties in WNC have 10-15% of citizens needing this for food, the largest number anglos, and single-parent families with children) and now para-military groups arrive in our state, breaking things and accosting people.

I don’t intend to be partisan here. I know people in both political parties who have been distressed this week. Given the demographics, people in both political parties have been harmed. I write from the lens of faith.

How do we see each other? How do we see God?

Does God love us? Does God love all people?

So we do not return this violence with violence. We love our neighbor, and we repeat the above cycle. People showed up, leaned into their faith, displayed resilience, because they love their city and, yes, because they love our nation. And because they love God, and, by extension, all of God’s children.

It’s what we learned, in the deep south, in Sunday School. It is, now, the altar call.

All of this, I imagine, is to be continued…

Bishop Ken Carter serves as resident episcopal leader of the Western North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is excerpted from his Substack blog, "Grinding the Beans," a reference to the bishop's love of fresh coffee.