| Getting beyond color-blindness
But patience is crucial in the multicultural church business. So is a large measure of forgiveness. Michael Coles has learned both lessons, the hard way. Coles, in his late forties, is the first African American pastor at Seventh Baptist, a browning church on the corner of St. Paul and North Avenue. Seventh Baptist is not his first multicultural flock. After graduating from seminary, Coles and his best friend at the time, who is white, started a multicultural church in Columbia, Maryland. When his co-pastor was disqualified for misconduct, Coles found that some members of the congregation were not ready to accept him as the sole leader of the church. Though they were willing to hug him on Sundays, Coles says, "I had people come up to me and say, 'I just can't sit under a black preacher.'" It took Coles time to get over his bitterness, especially toward white Christians. But since 1996, he has taken pride in leading Seventh Baptist, a church that didn't allow black people to sit on its outside steps in the 1930s and 1940s. Warm and voluble, he offers an easygoing pat on the back and sometimes a grandfatherly "Be good" as he says goodbye to congregants. At the same time, he responds to questions with take-it-or-leave-it candor. Some white members of the congregation have found his coming unpalatable. He is not surprised. Coles chuckles at the rhetorical questions put by those advocating color-blindness, mimicking their air of innocence with a smooth drawl: "Why can't we all just get along together? Why can't we just be Church?" He responds, "I believe one of the most racist statements that anyone can say is that God does not see color, because if God does not see color, then he made an awful mistake." His laughter booms--"an awful mistake." For Coles, seeing and acknowledging differences is a first step toward tolerance. Coles's anti-color-blind approach is to discuss divisive subjects in the open and to challenge perceptions. He replaced the old Sunday School curriculum with texts targeted at urban and African American congregations. He brought up the O.J. Simpson trial in a sermon, before an audience that is usually about 60 percent black and 40 percent white. Betty Strand, seventy-nine, has been going to Seventh Baptist since 1940, when it was almost entirely white. Since then, whites have fled Baltimore, and the area around the church has grown darker. Strand, who is white, approved of hiring of a black pastor to attract more people from the surrounding neighborhood. She knows some people who left because of Coles's race and because of the church's changing worship style, with its new emphasis on gospel. Of those who remain, she says, "We think an awful lot of Pastor Mike. He's a down-to-earth Bible preaching minister, who doesn't mince words." Coles will need all his evangelistic skills to face the challenges of staying multicultural on North Avenue, a street many associate with abandoned homes, drug deals, and even homicides. He will have to hold on to a nucleus of white families, even as he convinces neighbors that Seventh Baptist has divorced its racist past, and that the local rumor, "Mike is pastoring a white church," is simply not true. He accepts the challenge with a certain enjoyment, and sees his unique position as an advantage. When white folk, interested in helping, ask, "What can I do?" he sees other black pastors responding, "We don't need you." Coles is happy to end the impasse and accept resources from outside his church and city. In return, he offers suburban congregations the opportunity to overcome their negative perceptions. He describes a recent visit by a white Baptist congregation: "We had a group come up, their expectation was that someone was going to get hurt, someone was going to possibly die, their things were going to get stolen … at the end of the week, they were so blessed to realize there are good people here. They went back home with a 180-degree [different] idea of what the city was all about." In Baltimore, integrating the most segregated hour in America remains a sought-after dream. "It's just not very clean or smooth, it's very messy," says New Song's Thurman Williams. "There's always something coming up that let's you know there's issues that haven't been dealt with." Patty Prasada-Rao agrees. "It's hard, it feels impossible, but I believe that it's important, it's what God wants. If you can't do it in the church, it's going to be hopeless to do it anywhere else," she says. I visit New Song's service on a hot July Sunday. Two blocks from a basketball court where men are warming up for a game, I find a small congregation of about thirty-five people. A third are white, a third are kids of both colors talking intently or teasing each other. A doctor from the Health Center, her daughter, and her husband are the lone Asian family. Sylvia Simmons has promised me an un-Presbyterian style of worship: "Lots of upbeat music, clapping and stomping." The low hubbub quiets for a moment of silence. On the front wall, behind the electronic keyboard that serves as an organ, there is a sentence spelled out in puffy, sparkling letters: "Nothing is too hard for God."
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'The most segregated hour in America' Getting beyond color-blindness |