Five Generations
Five generations of American slaves in one family. (Shutterstock Photo Courtesy of The Conversation)
Special to United Methodist Insight
To: Centrist, Progressive, Traditional United Methodist Laity and Clergy in the USA and the World: Petitions that address The Black Church and its future (deadline, Sept. 15, 2019).
The Rev. James M. Lawson, a United Methodist clergyman who was a close colleague of Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Movement, wrote these words in "A Call To A National Conference Of Negro Methodists" in Cincinnati, Ohio, Feb. 6 - 9, 1968: “Negro Methodists must develop a life of power and a unity without Annual Conferences. We must have a stance from which to speak as a people of God to the Methodist Church apart from the official structures in which we will continue to function...lift up the distinctive mission that the Black Church can and must carry into the ‘new’ Church...in the cities where we live.”
I contend that if The United Methodist Church at the 1972 General Conference had not made homosexuality the UMC’s “Original Sin”, rather than “Racism: America’s Original Sin”, we would not be discussing today, division over the “practice of homosexuality.” Nor would the USA have elected the President it did in 2016.
I suggest petitions that address the following:
1. Joey Butler wrote: “50 years on, Central Jurisdiction Shadow Looms,” that was posted on United Methodist News Service, April 18, 2018. It mentions that a majority of Negro Methodist Conferences voted against the 1939 decision that created the Central Jurisdiction. Also it mentions the $20 million Temporary General Aid Fund to address the inequality of salaries and pensions of Central Jurisdiction pastors that was approved by the new UMC. The UMC could have complemented that action by creating a “reparations mentality,” financial and otherwise, that empowered Black Churches to be involved in Justice Ministries “...in the cities where we live.” Daily we hear/read about the economic, educational, and healthcare gaps between Blacks and Whites. How is that factored in when apportionments are determined and the mission/ministry of the UMC is articulated?
2. I participated in a “livestream” event here in Asbury Park, NJ, where with other cities we interacted with the New York Times' 1619 Project. (The title comes from the year that African slaves arrive in what is now Virginia). At last there is growing recognition that the existence of slavery not only compromised capitalism, it compromised Christianity, democracy, and culture, in ways that today affect all of us. The UMC still has the opportunity to model for the world how it addresses, acknowledges, and actualizes, a response to its historic and contemporary white privilege, supremacy, patronizing, and “cosmetic” racial integration. A UMC that boasts of its Bishops of Color, women and men, yet since 1972 has been “fiddling with homosexuality while the world burns” on matters of race, has “miles to go, before we sleep.” (Robert Frost).
3. James Baldwin asked this question regarding race: “Who wants to be integrated into a burning house?” (paraphrase). Where does the Black United Methodist Church “fit” when Centrists, Progressives, and Traditionalists battle over “the practice of homosexuality” while the occupant of the USA White House has unleashed throughout the world the racial/racist bigotry that has been there all along?
I expressed the hope that as a special session of General Conference met in Black History Month/February 2019, 400 years after the arrival of Black Slaves in what is now the USA, some recognition would take place. But the UMC is more interested in “weaponizing the Bible” to punish same-gender loving persons. A bold and brave new commitment by the UMC to make Racial Justice and Empowerment its priority, would enable it to abandon its current obsession and fascination.
Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” May the petitions from all over the world to the 2020 General Conference, affirm those words.
Gilbert Caldwell
The Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell. Photo by Mike DuBose, United Methodist Communications.
The Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell of Asbury Park, New Jersey (USA), is a retired member of the Mountain Sky Conference. Describing himself as a "foot solider in the civil rights movement," he is a co-founder of Black Methodists for Church Renewal and United Methodists of Color for an Inclusive Church.