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. 

"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

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WHEN GLORY COMES

“They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.”  (Isaiah 35:1-10)

If advent is about anything, it is about the promise of the glory of Lord becoming evident and real in each and every one of our lives.  Isaiah’s words make this perfectly clear when he declares at the beginning of the 35^th chapter that “They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.” 

If you know like I know, the glory of the Lord is not like any other type of glory that can be found in the world.  In our popularity driven culture, we tend to glorify too many things and too many people that really mean too little to us.  We glorify sports and entertainment figures; we glorify politicians and people with power in our lives; some people we even glorify preachers.  And if the truth is really told, some of us are seeking glory for ourselves.  But this is not the same type of glory that Isaiah promises that the people will see. 

With picturesque and vivid imagery, Isaiah told the people of Judah of a time when the glory of the Lord would be revealed to them. 

And so it was to be that some 700 years later, the people of God would experience this glory when angels proclaimed in the Book of Luke, the birth of Jesus, and declared this same glory when they sang, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth toward all people.”

THERE'S HOPE!

Luke 1:39-45

 

In this day and age, there seems to be a paucity of hope among us, and thus we are led to wonder, what is there that we can really be hopefully about.  An inventory of our world, and the days of our lives, would indicate that we teeter (and teeter) on the brink of hopelessness and despair. 

The news abounds with such signs.  The Affordable Health-care Act (what is known as Obama-care) has consistently been threatened with failure and demise over the past several weeks.  Sequestration, fiscal cliffs, foreclosure, shut-downs, bankruptcy, have become are part of our everyday reality. 

Crime continues to infect our neighborhoods – in Baltimore city, again there will have been over 200 people murdered in 2013.  Global conflict and wars persist, natural disasters kill thousands around the world, preventable diseases like AIDS and malaria continue to afflict too many of our sisters and brothers – especially in the two-thirds world.  The days of our lives often appear to be hopeless – don’t they?

And yet, the death of Nelson Mandela (three days ago) should remind us that regardless of how hopeless things might appear, regardless of how dire our circumstances may feel, regardless of the despair and disappointment that we face, there’s always some reason to hope, and  we should never give up hope. 

History shows that South African Apartheid brought on some of the most despicable forms of human atrocity and suffering in modern history.  We should not forget, that through decades, the majority population in South Africa and in other southern African countries like Rhodesian (Zimbabwe), were subjected to deplorable living conditions, under oppressive political and military power structures.  And it was people like Nelson Mandela – even in the midst of 27 years of imprisonment – who never gave up hope that the day would come that Apartheid would come to an end, and that all people – blacks and whites - would have rights to live as they were created by God.

And we know that the apparent paucity of hope that I began with is not new or exclusive to the present age.  Luke tells us that as the angel Gabriel came to Mary to announce that she was about to give birth to God’s son, the world – and especially Israel - faced similar apparent hopelessness. 

God’s people in that day found themselves under Roman occupation.  Their land had been overtaken by political and economic structures that served to oppress them and subject them to human suffering not unlike Apartheid in South Africa, or slavery in America, or imperialism in India, or the Holocaust in Germany, or ethnic cleansing in Europe.