Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. preached me happy in a recent revival in Philadelphia. But as exegetically succulent as his sermon was, one comment that he made about President Obama was a little pungent. Rev. Wright said that “Barack Hussein Obama was selected and not elected” to the presidency. To a nearly packed sanctuary of African American worshipers Rev. Wright supported his own opinion with this rhetorical question: “Why do you think Wall Street was at the head of the line for financial bailout funds?” He then answered his own question: (my paraphrase): “Because the supposedly elected simply did what he was selected to do,” while the marginalized and disenfranchised still are, and will remain, so.
Driving home from that revival, despite all that I know about his gifts, skills and intellect, I asked myself if my number one 21st century hero, President Obama, was merely a pawn in the ongoing game of White American politics. And then I turned inward to ask myself this question: Do African American pastors in front of white congregations in reality serve more in minstrelsy than ministry?
Joyce you are one heck of a deep blogger. I still am working up a response to your song choice post - it has me totally twisted. Now this!! All the keeps going through my mind is a very simple - share with me your FAITH tradition, I'll share mine. Unless we can acknowledge - yep, I'm white - you're black. Yep, I'm a member of the flock, you're the shepherd. Let's dialogue in the Greek sense - two minds, two spirits, two incomplete beings coming together. We're here to learn and become more together than what we are separately. If we can't give it up and appreciate and participate in each others Sunday songs for crying out loud - what happens when we get to the really hard stuff like generations of social inequity and economic privation?
ReplyDeleteThat's the point. The distractions and trivia keep us from the really hard stuff, so we never get to it. Not really.
ReplyDelete"Do African American pastors in front of white congregations in reality serve more in minstrelsy than ministry?"
ReplyDeleteIt is my hope that they would serve Jesus and minister in his name as well as continually point out the eternal and Living God to their congregations. If they are doing that then the original question doesn't matter. If the appointment came from White Guilt and is set up initially like 'minstrelsy" who is to say that it can't transform into a real and authentic ministry. That being said in the assumption of "With God all things are possible."
That’s good as far as it goes, but unfortunately, the church is less geared toward worship anymore. In fact the church worships less and less and strategizes more. The church is a strategically-engineered entity that is no longer fueled by theology alone. You might say that the right ventricle of the heart of the church is Jesus, and the left ventricle is a coagulation of marketing, programming, and political posturing, not to mention environmental obsessions and socio-economic encroachment. In other words the Jesus life-blood of the church is quite contaminated.
ReplyDeleteFifteenth century popes notwithstanding, the church is more administratively burdened than ever, so confidence in a pastor's administrative skills is increasingly crucial. The fact that it took about a hundred years for America to get around to trusting a black quarterback, and longer to, well, “suffer” the leadership of a black President, should tell us something about the American culture’s confidence in black authority. Doesn’t that pretty much ratchet back the black minister’s odds more toward, well, performance (minstrelsy), as opposed to leadership (ministry), especially in a senior role in a predominantly white church?
You make an excellent historical point. I guess starting my second year the idealism hasn't faded nor has the memory of seminary. I try to bring worship wherever I go, that's my strategy. But I think you're right CRC. No doubt right.
ReplyDeleteC'mon, trust a black QB? I loved Randall Cunningham and Warren Moon before I was told I wasn't supposed to. ;-) I think the scales are tilted against black authority in traditional "white areas" (however you define those) due to privileged and the starting point of getting black peeps into leadership roles beyond tokenism is difficult. Once that happens, I think what goes from there is based on the individual and the congregation there within. In Toledo, I've seen cases of both excellent strong black leadership in white congregations, as well as minstrelsy that burned both pastor and congregation. I don't think I can make a call whether it was based on minstrelsy vs. ministry. I'll have to test you theory as it never really occurred to me. Thanks for the food for thought!