BLOG 9/25/16. RACIAL UNDERSTANDING: HOSPITALITY AND FRIENDSHIP

BLOG 9/25/16. RACIAL UNDERSTANDING: HOSPITALITY AND FRIENDSHIP

Some months back, my dear African-American friend John Perkins (that remarkable Christian community development, and civil rights leader)—with whom I have had many wonderful and helpful conversations on racial issues—called and asked me how I became so racially progressive, growing up as I did in a very segregated South. That set me thinking. In some ways I am the product of my times. I was ordained as Presbyterian pastor the summer after the Brown-vs-the Board of Education decision, and was denominational campus worker at North Carolina State University, which was all white at that time. But it was some more qiet and subtle influences, that I think back on now, which got me more inside the world of my African-American acquaintances and has made many wonderful friendships so beautiful.

By the early 1960s I had been called to a small working-class congregation in the very racist textile-tobacco town of Durham, North Carolina. Those were the years of lunch-counter demonstrations, civil rights marches, and the expressions of racial animosity on too many fronts. My wife and I lived, there, on the denomination’s minimum salary, and we had four lively children. We were ‘church-mouse poor.’ But my wife desperately needed some assistance in household chores, and so we ‘bit the bullet’ and asked around, and were led to Odessa Flake. If there was ever an elegant, modest, and gentle Christian woman, it was Odessa. She came, and we discussed her availability to work for us a half-day a week. It was when we began to discuss what we would need to pay her that my lights began to go on. She told us what our neighbors were paying her—and it was only half the national minimum wage. Betty and I were astounded (and offended). Our neighbors were ostensibly solid Christian citizens. But Odessa was somewhat helpless since she needed the employment and so suffered the injustice. So we employed her at the legal minimum wage (which didn’t endear us to our neighbors). She was like a member of our family for all of our remaining years in Durham.

But then, when Odessa came on Saturday mornings, we also invited her to have lunch with us at our table. This was simply not done in our segregated society, and initially Odessa was reluctant, but we insisted. In the quiet conversations that took place over the following years, we learned of her life, of the difficulties, of the things she could only pray about, and about small pieces of her segregated life which I would never have known apart from the conversations and her participation in the hospitality of our home. She also adopted us as her friends.

Subsequently, when a couple of black university students (who were out of the projects of Newark, New Jersey, and whom I had met at a Bible conference in upstate New York) came South for education and joined our church (to the dismay of our racist members), they also were occasional guests for Sunday dinner—which was a new experience for them—and one of them would ultimately spend weekends with us. It was in those contexts of hospitality, love and friendship—that to answer John Perkins’ question—that I began to tune-in to the corroding effects of racism, and to use my small influence to engender racial understanding, especially among the local African-American university students. I sought to be a reconciler. I was set free, and so our African-American friends were set free to understand each other and to work together. It was the context of hospitality and friendship, love, and honest conversation.

Later John Perkins and his family stayed in our home in Atlanta, and he has told me it was the first time he was ever invited to stay in a white home. Then, later, Betty and I would enjoy the hospitality and friendship of his (and wife Vera’s) home in Jackson, Mississippi.

My point in this blog is simply that reconciling the racial tensions will not ultimately come from theory or legislation, but by (especially Christian folk) engaging in hospitality, friendship, mutuality, and conversation. It is part of our counter-cultural calling as God’s New Humanity. It will not always make us popular among those who espouse racism, … but it is our calling. I commend it heartily. Pass the word along.

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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