Seeking a Raceless Gospel and a Desegregated Church

Recently I have been thinking about race and racial segregation. Last month I finished reading Starlette Thomas’s impressive book Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church. Then on June 2, I learned about the end of segregated schools in Kansas. 

Starlette Thomas, according to her website, “is an author, activist, visual artist and race abolitionist.” She has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Wesley Theological Seminary. Her book was published last year under the same title as her doctoral thesis.

Dr. Thomas is currently an associate editor at Good Faith Media (GFM) and the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative. That program is

a didactic, multifaceted ministry of communication that decenters the sociopolitical construct of race and its progeny for the sake of Jesus’ gospel and in hopes of practicing an inclusive hospitality for a raceless ‘kin-dom’ of God to come.

In the fifth and final chapter of her book, and just before one of the many times she cites Galatians 3:28, Starlette writes, “The raceless gospel, rooted in baptismal identity, is an embodied ecclesiology that aims to drown out all competing identities” (p. 90).

On the following page, she asserts her belief that “human beings were not created to be color-coded”; rather, “all bodies are created equal” and “our allegiance to a racial group directly conflicts with our baptismal identity.”

Because she embraced that decisive identity, Starlette has been on a spiritual journey “of decentering whiteness, decolonizing identity and deconstructing race.”*¹

The Madam C. J. Walker School was built about 1860 to house the Black students of the South Park area in what is now the city of Merriam in Johnson County, Kansas. A new building was constructed in 1888 after Johnson County organized School District No. 90. 

Black and White children went to the school until around 1900 when the school district began separating the students based on race, and the South Park Grade School was built for White students.

In 1947, the school district built a new South Park Grade School for White students using taxpayer funds. Black students had to continue attending the two-room, markedly inferior Walker schoolhouse even though their parents had to pay taxes for the construction of the new South Park School.

The following year, Alfonso Webb filed a lawsuit with the Kansas Supreme Court in the name of his sons who were second and first grade students at Walker School. That case was won in 1949 and Black children were allowed to attend the South Park School.*²

That decision in Kansas was a precursor of the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit. In May 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court settled that case by ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.*³

Why are there still so many segregated churches since segregated public schools have been ruled unconstitutional for seventy years now?

At the end of the first chapter of her book, Dr. Thomas cites the well-known words of MLK, Jr.: “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning” (p. 29, citing an address King delivered in 1957).

In that seminal talk, King stated, “Racial segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ. Segregation is a tragic evil which is utterly un-Christian.” Starlette’s advocacy of the raceless gospel is her endeavor to continue doing what King was urging Christians to do 67 years ago.

Fortunately, most church segregation now is not because of opposition to integration so much as it is because of the importance of the Black church for its members. (In this regard, consider ”The Downside of Integration for Black Christians, Jemar Tisby’s 2017 essay.)

King declared that the church “cannot rest until segregation and discrimination are banished from every area of American life. It has always been the responsibility of the Church to broaden horizons, challenge the status quo, and break the mores when necessary.”

Starlette Thomas is currently endeavoring to do that admirably—but in a way that doesn’t bypass “the beauty of particularity” seen in the Black church.*⁴

What can we who have benefited from White privilege do to promote the raceless Gospel and to combat the vestiges of racial segregation?

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*¹ These words are from Starlette’s column titled “The Raceless Gospel as a Proclamation of Somebodiness,” which was first posted (here) on Good Faith Media’s website in April. Also, please consider reading this June 5 “conversation with Starlette Thomas” about her book.  

*² On June 2, two of Alfonso Webb’s five daughters (and he also had five sons) were honored guests at Rainbow Mennonite Church, and I was able to chat briefly with one of them. The former Walker schoolhouse, enlarged and completely remodeled, is now the Philadelphia Missionary Baptist Church, and June and I much enjoyed attending their Sunday morning worship service yesterday.

*³ My blog post on May 10, 2013, was titled “Brown v. the Board of Education.” Here is a link to that post, if you would like to read it (again).

*⁴ The quoted words are from Felicia Murrell’s book, And: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World (2024). This link will take you to an article with the author being interviewed about that insightful book. 

The Purpose of Life is Love

This post is the third in my series on the 4-Ls. (Those of you who didn’t see the previous posts or want to review them can click here for the March 9 post and here for the one on March 30.)

The second of the 4-Ls is love, and the title of this article comes from the following words by Leo Tolstoy:

The purpose of life is loving, the penetration of everything with love. It is the slow and gradual change from evil to good, it is the creation of the real life, the life filled with love (A Calendar of Wisdom, p. 249). 

As I began teaching Christian Studies in Japan, I soon realized that most of my students were not only quite disinterested in Christianity but that they were also not much interested in traditional Japanese religions either.

Many students, however, were interested in thinking about the meaning of life (the first of the 4-Ls) and of love.

Few of my students had ever heard of or knew little about  Kagawa Toyohiko, a Japanese Christian. But the life and work of Kagawa (1888~1960), who obviously lived a life of love for others, was appealing to many of them.*¹

And while many students were negative toward the racism they knew existed in the U.S., which they generally regarded as a Christian country, they were impressed by the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and by his book Strength to Love (1963; Japanese translation, 1965).*²

So, I focused increasingly on how Christianity had been, and is being, expressed in loving actions and less on the doctrinal expressions of the Christian religion.

Understanding the distinctively Christian meaning of love is of great importance. In English, “love” is used in many different ways. For example, a man may say he loves his wife at one time and then in a different conversation say he loves ice cream.

C.S. Lewis, the English writer and popular theologian, sought to clarify that diversity in his widely-read book Four Loves (1960). One of those four was called agape in the Greek New Testament, and that word articulates the particularly Christian form of love.

The word “love” is not used as much in Japanese as in English. Rather than the word for love (愛、ai), Japanese people are more prone to say like (好きsuki) or really like (大好き、daisuki). But to emphasize the distinctive meaning of agape as used in the New Testament, I used holy love（聖愛、seiai).

Here is how that is written in Japanese calligraphy on the hanging wall scroll I introduced in the March 9 blog post: 

 The basis of Christian love is God’s love for us, but I am writing here only about our love for others, or the lack thereof.*³

In the Gospels, Jesus stated clearly that following the commandment “Love the Lord your God…,” the second greatest commandment is “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30-31, NIV).

This is a commandment, though, that is definitely difficult to obey. How often do we really love our “neighbor” as much as we love ourselves? And remember that Jesus taught that a neighbor is any hurting/needy person who we have the opportunity to help (see Luke 10:25~37).

Some of the “Church Fathers” spoke plainly, and challengingly, about such neighbor-love. Consider these words of Basil of Caesarea (330~370):

The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry man; the coat hanging in your closet belongs to the man who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the man who has no shoes; the money which you put into the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help but fail to help.

I am not sharing these disturbing words to make us feel guilty, as perhaps we all are. But if the purpose of life is loving, as Tolstoy wrote, seeking to love God and to love our neighbors is, truly, the key to experiencing life to the fullest.

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*¹ Here is a link to the blog article I posted about Kagawa in July 2013.

*² The first of several blog posts about King was in January 2010. I also wrote about his explanation regarding Christian love in a September 2018 post, in which I also made reference to chapters #22 and #25 in my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (published in 2020).

*³ Earlier this week, I  posted a brief article about the hymn “The Love of God” on my alternative blogsite, and I encourage you to read it by clicking here.

The Radiant Center Challenged by Criticism of Centrists

As many of you know, I am an advocate of what I call “the radiant center.” The last part of the last chapter of my book The Limits of Liberalism (2010, 2020) is about seeking and advocating a radiant theological center between the extremes of fundamentalism and liberalism (see pp. 317~330).

Last month, though, a man I greatly respect published an online opinion piece criticizing centrists. Naturally, I had to think about whether that was also a criticism of my strong emphasis on seeking the radiant center. 

Mitch Randall has been CEO of Good Faith Media (GFM) since July 2020. GFM evolved from what once was the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission (CLC), which I highly evaluated and appreciated in the 1960s through the 1980s.*¹

Randall began his July 20 article by asserting, “The greatest enemy of freedom is not white Christian nationalists breaching the U.S. Capitol. It’s white moderate — now centrist — Christian males advocating for civility over justice.” He immediately moves to MLKing’s powerful writing 60 years ago.

On April 12, 1963, King’s “The Letter from the Birmingham Jail” was published. In that pointed letter, King wrote that “the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens’ ‘Councilor’ or the Ku Klux Klanner.”

No, that stumbling block is “the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

I fully agree with King’s emphasis on positive peace and the necessity of justice. But it seems quite clear to me that King was also a centrist in that he was firmly between the extremes of doing nothing and of acting violently. He did not engage in the extremism of Malcolm X or the Black Panthers.

There are some who say that it was the extremism of the violent Blacks that made it possible for King to be so effective, but it is hard to know whether that was so. What we do know is that King had the “strength to love” and used those words for the title of his influential book also published in 1963.

Since I oppose the extremes of doing nothing and violent action, I guess I could be called a White centrist Christian. But according to Randall, such centrists “have done more to thwart the progress of faith and freedom than any fascist or anarchist.”

Moreover, Randall charges that such centrists “decry those demanding justice for the isolated, marginalized and oppressed” and they brand people like him as extreme because he advocates “for inclusion, affirmation, and equality for all of God’s children.” 

But I want to remind Randall that the center is quite wide, and the radiant center I advocate for ethics as well as for theology includes those things he so strongly calls for.

There are some who want the justice, the inclusion, the affirmation, and the equality that Randall desires but who are willing to use violent action to seek those good ends. However, I haven’t seen Randall advocate such violence, so I would place him, just as I did MLK, in the radiant center.

Seeking the radiant center doesn’t mean embracing “bothsideism.” When the opposing extremes are vacuous inactivity and violent action, the radiant center calls for “neithersideism.”*²

I have often emphasized the importance of both/and thinking. But there are also times that the emphasis needs to be on neither/nor. The radiant center often stresses the latter. So, in considering the radiant center with reference to ethics as well as theology, these words still are applicable:

The radiant center radiates the heat (passion and compassion) and light of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the gospel about Jesus. The radiant center is engaged, for light does not stay in the bulb nor heat in the radiator. Radiance entails engagement.*³

Yes, being in the radiant center means actively engaging in efforts to produce peace and justice for all, which usually means moving to the far left side of that center—and I appreciate Mitch Randall for criticizing those centrists who are on the far right and are not radiant.  

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*¹ When the CLC was significantly changed (and later renamed) as a part of the conservative takeover of the SBC, the Baptist Center for Ethics was formed in 1991 by former Southern Baptists who had established the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship the year before, and in 2017 Randall became the second director of that organization, which is now GFM.

*² I don’t remember ever seeing/hearing the word “neithersideism,” so I thought maybe I was coining a new word. But in searching the Internet, I soon found that journalist Matt Labash subtitled his 4/21/22 Substack article “The case for Neithersideism.”

*³ The Limits of Liberalism: A Historical, Theological, and Personal Appraisal of Christian Liberalism (2020), p. 329.

Blessed are the Good Troublemakers: A Tribute to John Lewis

It isn’t one of the Beatitudes, but I think Jesus could have said, Blessed are the good troublemakers. And I am sure Jesus would have many positive things to say about John Lewis, who died on July 17, 2020, and the way he espoused “good trouble.” 

The Making of Good Troublemaker Lewis

John Robert Lewis was born in February 1940 near Troy, Alabama, about 50 miles southwest of Montgomery. His parents were sharecroppers, but he had a happy, though very segregated, life as a boy.

He was 15 years old and in the 10^th grade in 1955 when he heard of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Later, as an adult he told high school students how when he was their age, “I got in trouble. I got in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

He challenged the students he was speaking to: “Go out there and be a headlight and not a taillight. Get out there and get in the way, get in good trouble, necessary trouble . . . .”

His first troublemaking was when he tried to integrate his local library. That was in 1956 when I was a freshman in college, but Lewis couldn’t even use the public library because he was Black. Then he tried to enroll in an all-White college, and his application was never answered.

Lewis wrote MLK, Jr., asking for help, and King sent him a round-trip bus ticket to come to Montgomery to meet with him. By that time Lewis was a student at American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville. In 1958 he made the nearly 300-mile trip back to Alabama to talk with King.

In Nashville, Lewis also met and was deeply influenced by Jim Lawson, known as “the non-violent activist who mentored John Lewis.”

Lewis said that Lawson taught him “the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence”—and that way was integral to his activities as a good troublemaker.*

The Legacy of Good Troublemaker Lewis

Lewis had a long and distinguished career in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 until his death last year.

Now the illustrious legacy of Lewis is being widely recognized. Last year eminent author Jon Meacham’s book His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope was published. Also in 2020, CNN Films produced Good Trouble, a splendid documentary about Lewis.

This month, an imposing statue of Lewis has been erected in a new Atlanta park. A Nashville road named for Lewis will be dedicated this week. The christening of a Navy ship named after Lewis is scheduled for July 17.

A crowning tribute will be the passing of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act later this year.

Blessed are the good troublemakers; their legacy will live on.

Learning from Good Troublemaker Lewis

Lewis stands in a long line of good troublemakers. Earlier this year, Andy Roland, a retired Anglican vicar in the UK, published a book titled Jesus the Troublemaker.

Last year I posted a blog article about Daneen Akers’s book Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints, which includes people of the past such as Francis of Assisi and Harriet Tubman. I suggested that she should include Lewis in her planned second volume.

It needs to be noted, though, that there are no “good troublemakers” for those who benefit from the status quo and wish to protect it. Those who inveigh against troublemakers are mostly people who like the way things are in the present and want to preserve their privileged position.

In the Afterword of Meacham’s book, Lewis wrote,

The teaching of individuals like James Lawson, Gandhi, and Dr. King lift us. They move us, and they tell us over and over again if another person can do just that, if another generation can get in the way or get in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble, I, too, can do something. I, too, can get in trouble for the greater good (p. 248).

Can we learn, and act upon, that from John Lewis?

And can't we affirm that, indeed, good troublemakers are blessed?

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* The above paragraphs have drawn heavily from a February 2020 article by Marian Wright Edelman, founder of Children’s Defense Fund. (My 11/25/14 blog post was about Ms. Edelman.)

In Fond Memory of Mrs. King

 Coretta Scott King died fifteen years ago today, on January 30, 2006. Thirty-five years ago, we at Seinan Gakuin University in Japan had the privilege of having Mrs. King on our campus and in our city. I am writing this in fond memory of Mrs. King. 

Coretta Scott King in 2003

Coretta Scott

In central Alabama on April 27, 1927, Obadiah (“Obie”) and Bernice Scott became parents of a baby girl whom they maned Coretta. Just two and a half years later the Great Depression began, and life was hard for many Americans and especially for a Black family in Alabama.

As a young girl, Coretta started tending the family garden, and by the age of ten she was working in the cotton fields. When she was 12, though, she enrolled as a seventh grader in Lincoln School in Marion,  ten miles from home. She graduated from high school in 1945, the top student in her class.

After graduating in 1951 from Antioch College in Ohio, Coretta continued her studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Kings in 1964

It was in Boston that Coretta met Martin Luther King, Jr., who was usually called M.L., and they married in June 1953. (Currently, Boston is moving forward with a major effort commemorating the Kings with a large 22-foot-high monument of intertwined bronze arms.) 

In the fall of 1954, Coretta and M.L. moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. A year later their first child, Yolanda, was born. Three more children were added to the King family, the last two being born in Atlanta in 1961 and 1963.

M.L.’s involvement in the civil rights movement led to the bombing of the King home in 1956, the year between the birth of Yolanda and MLK, III.

Widow Coretta Scott King

After years of anxiety about what might happen to M.L. and/or to her family, her worst fears were realized on that April 1968 evening in Memphis when MLK was fatally shot.

It was, of course, a time of great grief for her and her family, but also for the nation, except for the bigots and racists who had long railed against King and his clarion calls for equality for “colored people.”

After M.L.’s assassination, Mrs. King took on the leadership of the struggle for racial equality in the U.S. Among other things, in 1968 she founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, commonly known as The King Center,” which now hosts over one million visitors a year.

In 1985, Seinan Gakuin, the school system that included the university where I was a full-time faculty member, began to consider who to invite as a prominent speaker for the school’s 70^th anniversary to be held in May 1986.

As a member of the planning committee, I suggested we try to get Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa to be our speaker, and some preliminary contacts were made in that regard. But then someone came up with the idea of inviting Mrs. King. I thought that was a brilliant suggestion.

Mrs. King accepted our invitation. So, she came to Fukuoka City, spoke at Seinan Gakuin’s 70^th anniversary service, and also gave an address at a rented hall downtown. There were around 4,000 people who attended that gala event.

I was also one of a small group of Seinan people who hosted Mrs. King to a dinner one of the evenings she was in our city, and I was impressed by what a warm, genuine person she was.

Among the many university students I taught, many had negative views of Christianity partly because of the racism they knew was deeply rooted in the United States, even though it was, they thought, a Christian nation.

Mrs. King’s talks at Seinan Gakuin and in downtown Fukuoka City, widely covered by the press, were warmly received, and her unassuming Christian witness was highly beneficial to those of us serving as Christian missionaries in Japan.

So, today I am fondly remembering Coretta Scott King and thanking God for her lifelong commitment to peace and social justice.

Speaking Truth to Power: Remembering Two Elijahs

Not many people are named Elijah. This article is about two of the only three Elijahs I have heard of, but they were two men with a similar defining characteristic: they spoke truth to power.

Remembering Prophet Elijah (9^th Century BCE)

The Old Testament prophet Elijah has long been one of my favorite biblical characters. I remember studying hard to learn more about Elijah and then leading a Bible study about him 65 years ago—yes, in the summer of 1956 when I was a college student.

Elijah was a prophet during the reign of the wicked King Ahab, the seventh king of Israel, and his infamous wife Jezebel, who was, well, a jezebel (= “an impudent, shameless, or morally unrestrained woman”; Merriam-Webster).

According to 1 Kings 18:17 in the Old Testament, “When Ahab saw Elijah, Ahab said to him, ‘Is it you, you troubler of Israel?’ Elijah was a “troubler” because he spoke out in criticism of the evil king and his notorious wife.

Jonathan Sacks, the noted British Rabbi who died last November, published an article titled “Elijah and the prophetic truth of the ‘still, small voice’.” He stated, “Elijah was one of the greatest of the prophets, a man of justice unafraid to confront kings, condemn corruption and speak truth to power.”  

That’s what the Old Testament prophets did. It was only the false prophets who cozied up to kings.

A century before Elijah, the prophet Nathan stood before powerful King David, guilty of adultery and instigating murder, and declared, “Thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12:7, KJV).

That Old Testament story is the basis of journalist Maina Mwaura’s January 9^th piece titled, “At the Capitol, evangelicals’ ‘Thou art the man’ moment.”

Remembering Representative Elijah Cummings (1951~2019)

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born 92 years ago today, but as I have posted blog articles about him previously (first on Jan. 11, 2010), I am writing now about an outstanding African American man who was born three days after King’s 22^nd birthday.

Following his birth on January 18, 1951, Robert and Ruth Cummings named their new son Elijah, after the Old Testament prophet.

The Baltimore Magazine unsurprisingly told in a 2014 article how Cummings remembered “running home from church on Sundays to listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches” on the radio.

From age 45 on, Cummings served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 23 years until his death in October 2019. Monday would have been his 70^th birthday. 

On the day of his death, Phil Murphy, the governor of Maryland, tweeted, “A model of dignity and strength, Elijah Cummings' upbringing in a segregated Baltimore led him on a lifelong mission to promote justice, to always speak truth to power, and to ensure a fair shake for every American.”

In February 2020, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s hearing room in the Rayburn Office Building in Washington, D.C., was renamed the Elijah E. Cummings Room in honor of the late Baltimore congressman.

At that dedication ceremony, Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Cummings “used his gavel to speak truth to power for our nation.”

If last week’s tragic events had happened two years ago, Rep. Elijah would most likely have been a key politician speaking truth to power—and the misuse of power by the President.

Cummings would, no doubt, have joined with Rep. Jamie Raskin, who wrote the resolution calling on VP Pence to invoke the 25^th Amendment to remove DJT from office.

(Raskin, b. 1962, currently is the U.S. Representative from Maryland’s 8^th District, where both of my sons live; Cummings served that state’s 7^th District.)

In 2018, the year before he died, Cummings said, “I’m going to try and make people realize that in order to live the life they are living, they need to have democracy, and it’s being threatened.”

Little did he know then how much U.S. democracy was going to be threatened on January 6, 2021.

How important it was/is for people like him and the Old Testament prophet Elijah—and all of us in our own place of influence—to speak truth to power!

The Scandal of Grace: Learning from John Ruskin

John Ruskin, the highly influential British writer, art critic, and social thinker in the last half of the 19^th century, died 120 years ago today (on January 20, 1900) at the age of 81. His most important literary work highlighted what has been called “the scandal of grace.”

Bumping into Ruskin

When I read the Summer 2019 issue of Plough Quarterly, I was impressed with the article titled “Comrade Ruskin: How a Victorian visionary can save communism from Marx” by Eugene McCarraher, a professor at Villanova University.

(McCarraher’s 800-page book The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity was published last November, and he makes numerous references to Ruskin.)

And then late last year I was reading Gandhi’s An Autobiography: Or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (originally published in 1925~29). I was surprised when I read of his reading Ruskin’s Unto This Last, calling it a book that “was impossible to lay aside, once I had begun it.”

After he read Ruskin’s book, Gandhi decided to change his own life according to Ruskin’s teaching. Among other things, he established “a farm where everybody would get the same salary, without distinction of function, race, or nationality.”

Indeed, Ruskin's influence reached across the world. Tolstoy described him as “one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times" and quoted extensively from him.

Also, as the Plough article states, “Echoes of Ruskin’s thought reappeared in the 1960s and 1970s” in the work of economists such as E.F. Schumacher.

Learning from Ruskin

Ruskin considered Unto This Last (1862) his most important work. The title of that brief book, which can be read here on Wikisource, comes from Matthew 20:14, toward the end of Jesus’ parable about the laborers in the vineyard.

Jesus’ parable is called “the scandal of grace” by Warner D’Souza, a Catholic priest in India who in 2017 posted (here) an article on Rembrandt’s 1637 painting titled “Labourers in the Vineyard.”  

One contemporary scholar endeavoring to help people learn more about and from Ruskin is Jim Spates, an emeritus professor at a small liberal arts college in New York. He maintains a blog titled Why Ruskin? which is “dedicated to making known Ruskin’s continuing importance to the troubled world in which we live.”

Spates’s 169^th posting, “Unto this Last: The Power of a Parable” was made this month on January 7. It is partly a retelling in contemporary language of Jesus’ parable recorded in Matthew 20. (Unfortunately, Spates used penny as the paraphrase for denarius, which in Jesus’ day was the wage for a day’s work by an ordinary laborer.)

Implementing Ruskin’s Teachings?

While recommended more perhaps by Gandhi (and Jesus!) than by Ruskin, there are some contemporary economists and politicians who are proposing a “universal basic income.” (Here is the link to an explanatory article about that from June 2019).

This sort of economic structure was proposed by MLK, Jr., who is being celebrated by a federal holiday today. In his 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here? King wrote,

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

While the idea of a universal basic, or guaranteed, income may seem offensive to some, it is not only in keeping with the writing of John Ruskin and the example of Gandhi but also consistent with Jesus’ parable about “the scandal of grace.”

In closing, let me share these words from Ruskin’s Unto This Last:

There is no Wealth but Life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

A Remarkable Man, a Remarkable Church: Howard Thurman and Fellowship Church

Howard Thurman was a remarkable man and 75 years ago he founded a remarkable church. This article is about him, the church he founded, and a remarkable co-pastor of that church today.  

The Remarkable Howard Thurman

Howard Washington Thurman was born in Florida 120 years ago this month, on November 18, 1899 (although some sources say he was born in 1900) and died in 1981. Ordained as a Baptist minister in 1925, he has been characterized as “a spiritual genius who mentored MLK, Jr., and carried Gandhi’s teaching to America.”

Thurman was a part of a Student Christian Movement-sponsored four-person “Pilgrimage of Friendship” to South Asia in 1935-36. That experience, including personal conversations with Gandhi, influenced Thurman greatly—and later reverberated throughout the civil rights movement in the U.S.

In 1953, Thurman became the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University (BU), the first African American to hold such a position at a majority-white university. At that time, MLK, Jr., was a graduate student at BU.

According to BU’s alumni magazine (see here), “King not only attended sermons [at Marsh Chapel] but also turned to Thurman as his mentor and spiritual advisor. Among the lessons that inspired him most were Thurman’s accounts of a visit to Mohandas Gandhi in India years earlier.”

So much more needs to be said about Thurman, but for additional information I highly recommend the superlative February 2019 PBS documentary “Backs to the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.”

So much more needs to be said about Thurman, but for additional information I highly recommend the superlative February 2019 PBS documentary “Backs to the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.”

The Remarkable “Fellowship Church”

In the fall of 1943, Alfred G. Fisk, a Presbyterian clergyman, had the vision of starting a church that would welcome people of all races and creeds. Thurman, who had served as Dean of the Howard University Chapel since 1932, was asked to recommend a young black minister who might be interested in helping start such a church.

Thurman decided to volunteer himself and requested a year’s leave of absence from Howard beginning July 1, 1944. Thus, Thurman was the main one responsible for starting a new church in San Francisco with a remarkable name: The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. For short, it is often just called Fellowship Church.

On October 8 of that year, Fellowship Church held its first public meeting—and last month it celebrated its 75^th Jubilee Anniversary.

Fellowship Church was unmistakably based on the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Along with that basic affirmation, though, the second of the three-paragraph “commitment” agreed to by Fellowship Church members says,

I desire to share in the spiritual growth and ethical awareness of men and women of varied national, cultural, racial, and credal heritage united in a religious fellowship.

In 1959, Thurman wrote a book titled Footprints of a Dream: The Story of The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (reissued 2009). I finished reading it last week, and it was a fascinating read.

The Remarkable Current Co-pastor of Fellowship Church

Since 1994, Dr. Dorsey O. Blake has been co-pastor of Fellowship Church. (Currently, the other co-pastor is a white woman.) This past June, I had the opportunity of hearing/meeting Dr. Blake, for he was the speaker at the local Juneteenth banquet.   

Dr. Blake was born in 1946, and before he was a year old his father became pastor of First Baptist Church here in Liberty, a predominantly African American church from its beginning until the present. His first six years in school were at the segregated Garrison School in Liberty, established for Black students in 1877.

Fellowship Church in San Francisco, literally seeking to be a place of fellowship for all peoples, continues to thrive under the leadership of a remarkable man whose early life was spent as a Baptist PK (preacher’s kid) in the small town of Liberty, Missouri.

Lying Down with the Lions

Although perhaps he is now not widely known or remembered, this article is posted as a tribute to Ron Dellums, a man whom I long admired—and who died a year ago today, on July 30, 2018.  

Ron Dellums (1997 portrait by Andre White)

Who Was Ron Dellums?

Ronald Vernie Dellums was born in West Oakland, Calif., in 1935. Following a stint in the Marine Corps from 1954~56, Ron earned the B.A. degree from San Francisco State University in 1960 and his Master of Social Work degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962.

After working for a few years as a social worker and a community organizer, in 1967 Dellums won his first political election and became a member of the Berkeley [Calif.] City Council. Three years later he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served for the next 27 years without interruption.

Dellums decided to retire from the House in 1998, although he would undoubtedly have won re-election for another term had he wished to remain in Congress. Later he did run for another political office and consequently succeeded Jerry Brown as Mayor of Oakland (Calif.), serving in that office from 2007~11.

At the age of 82, Dellums died of complications from prostate cancer.

Why Praise Ron Dellums?

You might wonder why I was such an admirer of Congressman Dellums and why I am writing about him now. In the early 1970s, I became aware of, and appreciative of, Dellums because of his thoroughgoing opposition to the war in Vietnam/Indochina.

(I probably first heard of Dellums from reading The Post-American, which began publication in 1971 largely as an anti-Vietnam War tabloid and which later became Sojourners magazine.)

All along I liked Dellums’s consistent opposition to increased military spending and support for more spending on anti-poverty programs. And then later I—and Nelson Mandela!—applauded his pivotal part in helping to end apartheid in South Africa.

Overall, I was an admirer of Dellums because of his commitment to the implementation of principles he learned from Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1967 he heard King give a speech in Berkeley. In that talk, King argued that “peace is more than merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.”

Dellums accepted the truth of what King said. He realized (as recorded in the book cited below), “By working for peace you must work for justice; by working for justice you work to bring about peace” (p. 49). His whole political career was rooted in that realization.

When he announced his retirement from Congress in 1997, he said that he knew he had “maintained faith.” He stated, “I had been comprehensive in my moral concerns; I had sought to live and work from a perspective of peace; I had sought to link the quest for peace with the quest for justice” (p. 198).

When he left his congressional seat, Dellums was succeeded by Barbara Lee, whom he mentored and whom I have also admired over the last 20 years. (Lee, b. 1946, still is serving in the House.)

Why Read Ron Dellums?

Dellums’s political memoir was published in 2000 under the title Lying Down with the Lions. It is an engrossing book that I greatly enjoyed reading.

Written with the assistance of H. Lee Halterman, a white man who was his chief aide for 28 years, Dellums’s book details the inspiration behind, the struggles in, and the accomplishments of his political career up to his departure from the House.

The title apparently comes from Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom (see Isaiah 11:6-7). It was inspiring to me and many others to have a U.S. Congressman with that kind of vision. May his tribe increase!

TTT #25 Love is More an Attitude and Action than a Feeling

This article is almost entirely from just one part of the 25^th chapter of my as-yet-unpublished book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (TTT). After you finish reading this article, I encourage you to click here and read the other three parts of that chapter.

King’s Explanation

In the 22^nd chapter of TTT, I referred to Martin Luther King Jr.’s book of sermons, Strength to Love (1963). In the chapter titled “Loving Your Enemies,” King explains that “love is not to be confused with some sentimental outpouring.” What’s more, this love is “something much deeper than emotional bosh.”

After writing about the difference between the Greek term agape and two other Greek words translated love, King then seeks to make a clear distinction between the meaning of the English word like from the meaning of love as a translation of agape.

King notes that Jesus did not say, “Like your enemies”—which is a good thing, King emphasizes, since it is “almost impossible to like some people.” No, in commanding his followers to love, Jesus was speaking about agape, which is “creative, redemptive goodwill” for all people. Thus, it is entirely possible to love people we do not like.

A Woman’s Disagreement

Many years ago when I was explaining this in a sermon to a small congregation in Japan, one woman started shaking her head in disagreement. In discussing the matter with her later, she was adamant that loving is a feeling and basically the same thing as liking others.

But she was wrong—and it is very important to realize that agape is not a feeling or an emotion. It is an attitude and is expressed in action. Thus, that kind of love is something that can be commanded.

Although my parents reported that I was a rather “picky” eater as a child, for most of my adult life my dislikes have been few. But there is one food above all others that I have never liked: raw cucumbers.

My mother could have forced me to eat cucumbers; parents regularly devise ways to get children to eat more or a variety of food.

But what if she had demanded that I like cucumbers? That would have been an impossible demand. Somehow she might have been able to get me to eat cucumbers, but there is presumably nothing she could have done to make me like them.

Agape love, however, is something that can be commanded.

Jesus’ Command

If loving is an emotion, such as liking is an emotion, then Jesus’ command that his followers love others, even enemies, would have been impossible to carry out—and therefore meaningless.

One cannot command someone else to have certain emotions, feelings, or likes. But attitudes are different. We can change our attitudes by our willpower, and we can act on the basis of attitudes in ways that run contrary to our feelings.

If love is an attitude—if its nature is to value a person in such ways as actively to seek his or her deepest welfare and fulfillment—then, if we choose, we can will to love others, even our enemies.

Certainly, that is not easy to do; it is more natural to act upon our feelings—such as hatred, which is an emotion. 

The love Jesus commanded, though, is not a feeling. It is an attitude that can be chosen. But since it is easier to act upon our feelings than upon our attitudes, King wrote helpfully about the necessity of having the strength to love.

Just as physical strength increases by exercising, the strength to love increases by practicing it.

Honoring the Memory of W.E.B. Du Bois

Last month one of my blog articles (see here) was about a brilliant French woman who died 75 years ago. This article is about a brilliant African-American man who died 20 years later, in August 1963. This remarkable man was born when Andrew Johnson was President and died the year Lyndon Johnson became President.

A Brief Bio

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born 150 years ago in February 1868, was the great-grandson of James Du Bois, a white plantation owner in the Bahamas. But W.E.B. pronounced his name “doo boyz” rather than with the French pronunciation.

When he was only 20, Du Bois graduated from Fisk University. He went on to study at Harvard, at the University of Berlin, and then in 1895 became the first African-American to be awarded the Ph.D. degree by Harvard.

In 1903 Du Bois published his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of 14 essays—and now, 115 years later it is still in print and relevant. 

One central point made on the book’s very first page seems, unfortunately, still to be true: “the problem of the Twentieth Century [and now the Twenty-first Century] is the problem of the color line.”

In that book, and consistently through the following years, Du Bois adamantly opposed the idea of biological white superiority. Partly for that reason, in 1909 he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and long served as editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis.

Du Bois taught at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910, and then at the age of 66 he went back to that school and was chair of the department of sociology from 1934 to 1944.

During most of the 1950s, Du Bois was unable to travel outside the U.S. because of his alleged ties with Communist nations.

In 1961 Du Bois moved to Ghana—and later became a citizen of that country, where he died in 1963 at the age of 95.

A Critical Controversy

Although they were the two most important African-American leaders after Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, there was an ongoing controversy between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who was twelve years his senior.

Du Bois’s criticism of Washington was eloquently voiced in the third essay in The Souls of Black Folk—and it lasted until Washington’s death in 1915. In what Du Bois called the “Atlanta Compromise,” Washington seemed to accept the view that blacks were inferior to whites.

Du Bois, however, strenuously objected to that idea and called for full equality of blacks and whites. He wanted complete rejection of all Jim Crow laws and ways of thinking. He favored confrontation rather than compromise in seeking to erase the problematic color line.

A Lasting Legacy

Through the years I never heard as much, or learned as much, about Du Bois as about other noted black leaders such as Douglass or Washington. Maybe that was partly because Du Bois leaned toward socialism, was prosecuted as a Red sympathizer in the 1950s, and did join the Communist Party in 1961.

Nevertheless, I have been deeply impressed by my recent reading of and about Du Bois, and I close with words Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke (and which can be read here) on the 100th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth.

King declared that Du Bois was “one of the most remarkable men of our time,” a scholar who “recognized that the keystone in the arch of oppression [of blacks] was the myth of inferiority” and who “dedicated his brilliant talents to demolish” that myth.

Du Bois’s legacy lives on—and his voice still needs to be heard today.