Friday, October 24, 2014

What have We Wrought? – The Legacy of the Washington Conference


Rev. Dr. C. Anthony Hunt
 
This article was published in the "United Methodist Connection" in September 2014.
Growing up in the Methodist Church, it often puzzled me as to why and how there came to be so many Methodist Churches located in such close proximity to one another.   St. Paul Methodist Church – the church in which I was baptized as an infant – was a small church, all of whose members were black.  Although I was regularly taken to church by my parents and grandparents, the problem of race in the church really didn’t dawn on me until 1969 when I was seven years old. 

That was the year that St. Paul received its first white minister.  That was also the year that there began to be discussions and outward overtures from the white Methodist church around the corner (Oxon Hill) about shared ministries and possible merger.  Up to that point, the two churches seemed to exist in two separate worlds.  Although they were less than a mile apart, in the same denomination, and supposedly worshipping and serving the same God, the churches were in fact essentially invisible to each other.

It was at the point when serious talks of merger and shared ministry began that the realities of racial division in the church came to the surface for the members of both St. Paul and Oxon Hill churches.  Up until 1968, St. Paul, one of the oldest Methodist churches in Maryland, had been a part of the Washington Conference and the Central Jurisdiction - all-black sub-structures that had been created within the larger denomination, with the uniting of Methodist factions in 1939, while Oxon Hill had been an established and well-regarded member of the Baltimore Conference and the broader Methodist Church. 

Thursday, May 1, 2014












"What Church Leaders Can Learn from Other Enterprises" published in Leading Ideas, an e-publication of the Lewis Leadership Center at Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC - http://www.churchleadership.com/leadingideas/leaddocs/2014/140108_article2.html