What’s Next? Chaos or Community?
Rev. Dr. C. Anthony Hunt, Ph.D.
I am
a fifth generation Methodist. I sense
that one of the primary reasons that my family members before me remained in
Methodist churches - worshipped and served faithfully, and steadfastly
supported them - was because of hope. They had hope that despite racism, gender bias
and social stratification, the stated leaning toward inclusion that was a
theological precept and practice of the Methodism's founder John
Wesley lent itself to their Methodist churches being places where all people
could someday find a spiritual home in Christ.
In
fact, John Wesley opposed and worked to eradicate the most egregious,
dehumanizing social, spiritual American sin of his day – slavery, and its
concomitant racism, notwithstanding the social teachings on race of the church
of his ordination, the Anglican Church.
Wesley preached and practiced a form of social holiness that evidenced
that the world (all people) was his parish.
My
family remained Methodists holding on to a hope that despite structural
segregation and discrimination against Black, Brown and Native American people,
women of all races, divorced persons, and others - the church would eventually
live into a vision of real diversity and inclusion, and realize that what
inclusivity really looks like is spaces where ‘all people’ really does mean
‘all people’.
