Race, Gender, and Church Memories

Reading Small Glimpses sparked some recent church memories of my own. I was raised Southern Baptist but have not considered myself to be one for at least nine or ten years now. I haven't been one for longer than that, but just didn't realize it at the time. I record that here as a reference point for what follows. My family and I have been attending a United Methodist church for the last year or so. We attend there for a number of reasons. It's literally around the corner from our house which makes it truly a community church. Our children also attend the same public schools as their church friends. The staff is great. Gender isn't an issue in who does what. The fellowship is great. They are a church that invests in the community and beyond with their labor and their money. It's not perfect, but who would want to attend the perfect church?!

Anyway, the memory I wanted to bring up occurred last year in the fall. It was announced from the pulpit by our pastor that the message would be brought that day by a visiting higher-up (I forget his title) from the district. She introduced him and he took the podium. He was an African-American man and gave a great message. I was almost brought to tears as I realized that this was the first time in my life that I had been in church when a denominational administrator had been introduced and they were a person of color. I looked at my children and felt so grateful for this chance for them to see our female pastor introduce an African-American guest speaker as an accepted, normal practice in the church. The church of my childhood, youth, and adulthood has been the most racially segregated part of my life up until around 8 years ago. It was also the one place where roles were limited by one being a female of the species. Neither of these situations should exist in the church. I'm grateful to have lived out of that environment long enough to develop a sense of how ridiculous, how un-Christlike, these traditions have been.