“Vintage Wright”

We were fortunate to have one of our writers, Beckie Supiano, in attendance yesterday to cover Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s speech/Q&A at the National Press Club. Beckie’s article is posted on the DisciplesWorld website today.

Dr. Delores Carpenter, who was also there, called it “vintage Wright.” Like him or not, you’ve got to respect him for just going there and being himself, which it sounds like he did.

I haven’t had a chance to talk with Beckie yet, but I’m interested in hearing what her impressions were. Not just of Wright, but of the kinds of questions journalists asked him. From some of the reports I’ve read, it almost seems like they’ve got their collective minds made up about Wright. But we’ll see what Beckie thinks.

The big debate in what I’ve read outside the religious press seems to be “What should Obama do?”  Salon.com compiled an article from its staff today along those lines. I usually respect Salon’s approach but most of their staff reports just struck me as off-point. The question of what Obama should do is not the right one, in my opinion. Wright is his own man. As is Obama. One’s a preacher, the other, a politician. 

The best suggestions I heard from Salon’s staff were that Obama, with all eyes on him now, needs to stop this train-wreck-in-the-making and remind people of what’s going on while we’re all uncritically following this non-crisis: war, poverty, food crisis, destruction of the earth…stuff like that. 

By the way, Beckie said only a couple of journalists stuck around for the REST of the day’s events which included a teach-in at Shiloh Baptist Church, and a worship service. The whole event, including the National Press Club breakfast, was part of a two-day symposium on the prophetic witness of the African American Church, sponsored by the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference.  Yeah, I know, they had deadlines to meet and stories to file. Too bad though - they might have learned that there’s more to this whole “prophetic witness” thing than they can contain inside a set of quotation marks.

Brings to mind a great line from another prophet, Bob Dylan: “I’ll know my song well, before I start singin’…”

As the rest of the song goes, “…it’s a hard rain’s gonna fall.” 

Herrmann wins SPJ award for environmental article

Just found out this morning that Angela Herrmann of Disciples Home Missions won an award from the Indiana chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for her DisciplesWorld article, “Eating away at the environment” (April 2007) (login required).  Congrats, Angie!

Miscellaneous props

Lots happening in the world of Disciples these days. First off, one of our writers, Lisa Barnett, is graduating in a few weeks from Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Lisa is a Disciples M.Div. student and recently won several awards given by the faculty and her peers. She will do well wherever she goes from here. Lisa was part of our General Assembly news staff in ‘07 and has covered the Stalcup Lectures at Brite for us this year, among other things.

Next up, young adult Disciples have been making the news lately. Beau Underwood was interviewed by the Associated Press for this article on young religious voters. [Thanks, Adam Frieberg, for allowing us to use this photo of Beau in a t-shirt that complements the headline!]

Pastors Stacy Spencer and Greg Diaz were also in the news last week. The Commercial Appeal in Memphis did an excellent article about building relationships between Hispanic and black churches.

Finally, DisciplesWorld won 7 awards at the Associated Church Press conference last week in Dallas, including a runner-up award in the Best Denominational Magazine category. I mention this not so much to brag, as to say “thanks” to all those who supported the magazine through a tough financial year in 2007. Without advertisers, subscribers, donors, and readers, we would not be able to do the work that we do. It is a privelege to represent Disciples and an honor to tell your stories.

UPDATE 4/29/08: Lisa Barnett’s awards were the Colby D. Hall Award, and the Student Pastoral Ministry Award. She graduates on May 10.   RW

Wright and King

Bob Cornwall, on his “Ponderings on a Faith Journey” blog http://pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com/, makes some interesting observations about the whole Jeremiah Wright controversy. While checking those out though, I started reading through some really interesting stuff he posted regarding the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, on April 4.

Bob includes a link to King’s “Mountaintop” speech and excerpts a piece by Michael Eric Dyson in the LA Times as reminders that King’s calls for justice became stronger and less palatable to many in the years since his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. By 1968, he was losing popularity for his willingness to take on the Vietnam War, among other reasons, and he may have been losing hope that the nation could really make racial progress.

Since his death, as Dyson points out in his recent Time Magazine piece called ”The Burdens of Martyrdom,” (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1726040,00.html) remembrances of King tend to portray him more like he was in the early 1960s, in the “I Have a Dream” days.  Bob compiles examples of some of King’s rhetoric toward the end of his life, which sounds not all that far off from Jeremiah Wright’s.  All of this is not to disparage King, but to point out how much our collective memory has forgotten. 

Improved race relations are a great thing, but we have a long way to go and we don’t have to “whitewash” history to achieve them.

Speaking of race relations, the United Church of Christ is calling for a new national dialogue on race. (http://www.disciplesworld.com/newsArticle.html?wsnID=13237 )

Wherefore art thou, Disciples of Christ? Per my last post, now WOULD be an appropriate time for the leaders of the UCC’s partner denomination to step up. Perhaps they will.

Editor’s note: an apology for including the links in this post. WordPress switched its blog interface and it’s not allowing me to link the usual way.

Weighing in on the Jeremiah Wright controversy

…is actually what I’m not going to do (at least not until the end of this post). But I do want to draw attention to what other Disciples are saying and writing about it.

Dr. Ed Wheeler at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis wrote an essay which circulated via email among some Disciples and others. It was also sent to CTS’ faculty. Wheeler sent this piece or something similar to Brite Divinity School’s trustees also, expressing his support for their decision to move ahead with plans to recognize Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright for his ministry. Although Texas Christian University asked Brite to move its State of the Black Church Summit events off-campus because of security concerns, and Wright later canceled for safety reasons, Brite honored him last Saturday evening.

Wheeler makes a great point about technology and how a few repeated sound-bites from Wright’s sermons were chosen to represent (or misrepresent) his ministry and preaching; what might this mean for the church, and for preaching in general?

Another Disciple who expressed an opinion in a public forum was Rev. Robin Hoover of First Christian Church in Tucson, Ariz. Hoover, a TCU and Brite alum, weighed in with a piece in TCU’s Daily Skiff and a similar one that ran in the Arizona Republic.  Hoover “falls on his sword” for Wright and reminds readers about the prophetic tradition in Scripture, which included prophets who criticized Israel when God’s justice was at stake. Also, the Daily Skiff deserves much recognition for publishing a number of opinion pieces, news articles and letters to the editor as events unfolded last week.

Disciples blogger and Gen-X pastor Dennis Sanders posted his “Notes from a Black pastor” early in the controversy, giving a negative assessment of Wright’s message, and then came back with another posting, “The Way We Were…and Are,” noting that while there may have been a time and place for rhetoric like Wright’s, that time has passed. The nation still has work to do, but has also made progress and we need to take that into account.

What I’ve been wondering is, should the denomination be weighing in on this in some official way? Wright’s not a Disciple, although he’s ordained and has standing in the United Church of Christ, with whom we Disciples have a relationship. And what continued to feed the controversy last week was partly the plans of a Disciples seminary to honor him.

My conclusion is that any ‘official’ statement from the General Minister and President or even the head of the National Convocation would be a little ‘off’, for Disciples. We’re not a denomination where anybody speaks for anybody else.

However, a lot of folks ARE speaking, and talking, and writing about this. But from what I can gather, we are speaking mostly to and with those who already know and agree with us. Publishing Ed Wheeler’s opinion piece on our website (with his permission) is, in part, an attempt to get some thoughtful dialogue going in broader circles, before all this fades away.

I’m not in favor of letting the Disciples totally off the hook though. For a denomination with the intentional anti-racism commitments we have made to just let this slip by unremarked would be a shame. What would be great is if this, coupled with Barack Obama’s speech on race, could be the starting point for some new conversation on race and racism in the church. They say this ‘new conversation’ is happening on college campuses and in other places already, because of the Wright incident and the Obama speech. Why not in the church? Or is it?