“What I was thinking was, “Urk said slowly, “what if we asked our members what they believed.”
“You mean about racism,” said Bryan. “First of all, most of us White dudes don’t want to talk about it because we know we are guilty but don’t know what to do about it.”
Roy and his Black colleague, Zeke, looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “As long as we are being honest about this, you know that if we are faithful to the Gospel and genuinely try to ‘love our neighbor,’ we’d have to act.” said Zeke.
“But what can we do we do that has any chance of making a difference,” said Jennifer. “I don’t control the justice system or the school board, let alone the banks and the real estate business. If I start thinking about it, Zeke, I just want to cry.”
“Do you really think God approves of our churches being quiet,” offered Bryan?
“Of course not, just as God wouldn’t approve of lots of things we do in the church. But God is not down here trying to make our budget or keep our bills paid,” said Eric. “I’m sorry,” he continued, “but real is real. It’s not going to do a whole lot of good if our churches collapse or if I lose my job and can’t support my family. Why challenge them if we don’t really know what we can do to change things.”
“I wonder what would happen if we didn’t start out focusing on race but instead focused on what people say they believe,” said Urk.
Everyone paused. Then Frank broke the ice. “OK, I’ll ask the obvious. What in the hell are you talking about?”
“I know this has to be refined,” says Urk, “but here is what I’ve been thinking. What if the eight churches here began by sending out a survey to our membership? We could begin with asking them just to name the six to ten beliefs that they think are most important about the Christian faith.”
“OK, then what,” asked Jennifer.
First, we’d each take those beliefs and build a summary that we would send back to our congregation. Each of us would send our summaries to each other as well. From the beginning, all eight churches would know that their summary was being sent to the other eight. I’m imagining that, under those circumstances, each congregation would sort of compete to see who would look better.”
“Urk, you are more devious than I ever imagined you to be,” said Fred.
Urk smiled and continued. “After those exchanges, we would send another questionnaire asking our members to say how they, given the beliefs they have identified, would, being faithful to those beliefs, live out those beliefs addressing the racial tension in our city.
Again, we would remind them that we will build a summary of their responses and share them with our other churches. The White churches would know that the Black churches would see our summaries and the Black churches would know that the White churches would see their summaries. Again, there is the pressure of competition in seeing how we look as we live out the Gospel that we ourselves have identified as critical to our faith.”
“So, we suck them in and then ask how they would like to live out the faith they have identified. I like it,” said Zeke. “I think you might be surprised about how our churches respond as well as yours.”
“Heh, we could even have some multi-church banquets and let them both see and discuss what they are seeing in the different church graphs. That way they can learn from each other,” said Eric.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” said Brian, “if, since we are making use of the internet, we invite some extra churches in other countries, or at least in far often sections of this country to share the same process and we discuss them as well.”
“Not only that,” said Eric, “but with some program like Zoom, we could have some multi-church worship experiences at the same time.”
“You know,” said Felicia, “we could really get into this shared worship thing.” “What are you thinking about?” asked Urk.
