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.
