Doing Racial Reconciliation: "Crossing Eight Mile in a Yellow Shirt and Shorts"

So there I was on stage in my yellow shirt, shorts and sandals.  It’s hot, but I’m not sweating from the heat.  I’m conscious of the fact that everyone around me is dressed to the nines in suits and skirts, mostly black, with splashes of red, purple and gold.  It is my African-American friend’s Installation Service and, being a visiting pastor, I’m invited not only to sit on stage but also to say a few words when the Bishop is done.  The small crew from my church is standing against the back wall or in the empty last pew.  Not only were we late coming from our own service, but we’re also all in Vineyard-standard wear.  This is my doing.  They had asked me what to wear and I had insisted it was a party; I should have trusted their intuition.  Just then the pastor stands and welcomes me up before the church to say a few words.  How I got there and what happened next is the essence of my story.

 

Like most Vineyard churches, we have a purpose statement.  This statement often is simplified to what might affectionately be called the “purpose slogan.”  Ours is to be a community cultivating authentic disciples of Jesus.  Again, like many, we’ve even identified three values that round this out – connection with God, relationship with others, mission for others.  I’m convinced these purpose statements and values are good and useful, so long as they are true.  In other words, are we really going to value and purpose to do what we say?

 

We’ve always known that central to the value on relationships was reconciliation – isn’t that, after all, near and dear to the heart of the gospel?  God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.  But if you’re in metro Detroit and thinking about reconciling relationships then sooner or later you’ve got to address one thing: racial reconciliation.  So, the question is, would we live what we said we believed?

 

Simply put, metro Detroit is plagued by racism.  It is one of our metropolitan sins.  The City of Detroit is over 90% African-American and the majority of the suburbs are similarly white.  (Interesting tidbit: I’ve heard the Detroit suburb in which I grew up was the whitest city in America over 100,000 through the decade of the 90’s).  As a black friend of mine put it last year in the wake of Katrina (and I paraphrase), “Brother Jim, you know what’s going on down in New Orleans?  If there were a crisis, the same thing would happen here today!”  Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words about segregation on Sunday morning are a prophetic word about metro Detroit’s churches.  What would we do?

 

We started talking about racial reconciliation from early on in our church plant.  Then a new guy to our church, not even yet a Christian, asked me a simple question, “Jim, do you have a black friend that you’d hug the same way you hug me?” Has God ever spoken prophetically to you through the unchurched? He was on to something and I knew it.  God was speaking to me and I needed to act.  We needed to cross Eight Mile (the Detroit-suburbs border made famous by rapper Eminem).

 

My wife and I started praying for God to bring into our lives an African-American pastor from the City of Detroit with whom we could begin a relationship.  After a few near misses, God introduced me to Pastor Scottie L. Jones of the Lamb of God Outreach Servants Church of God in Christ (LOGOS COGIC – having been in the Army, I love acronyms), a new church plant in the heart of Detroit.  From our first meeting at his favorite Dunkin’ Donutsâ, I knew that we valued the same things, dreamed the same things, and were ready to sacrificially labor to do them.  We both wanted to cross Eight Mile, but were nervous about being received on the other side.  In our case, God had made the bridge.

 

We started meeting regularly and have continued now for over 15 months, slowly including others from the church in on the conversation.  I wanted to heed Ken Wilson’s advice to “think in terms of months, even years” when approaching racial reconciliation.  It has been an adventure.

 

The “Yellow Shirt and Shorts incident” came early on.  One day, Pastor Jones invited me to his installation at his new church.  A small caravan of cars went to the event immediately following our Sunday gathering.  Most of the way from our church building to theirs is highway, but eventually, in the middle of Detroit, you come up onto a surface street.  I’ll never forget that time.  With my friends following me I felt like I was seeing it through their eyes.  It seemed we had crossed over into to a two-thirds world country, as surely as if we had gone from San Diego to Tijuana.  Then we got there.  Now, I had heard it was a celebration, which led me to think it was like a party.  Ha ha.  I’ll never forget walking into the sanctuary – everyone there was dressed to the hilt, all in black, with no air conditioning so all the women were working their fans as fast as they could.  We were all dressed in t-shirts, shorts, summer dresses.  Sheepishly, we found an empty back pew.  One of their ushers approached me and insisted that I come and sit up on the stage!  So as soon as the bishop was done speaking (yes, the bishop), they invited me to come up and say a few words in closing – me in my yellow shirt, shorts and sandals! They even graced my words with a few amen’s!  Praise God!  That’s what reconciliation is all about.  (Let me just say, I’ve been learning a lot about preaching recently!)

 

Since that time, LOGOS and the Royal Oak Vineyard Church have done lots together.  We’ve had three Joint Worship Gatherings (with another planned for the fall), where we combine worship teams, the visiting pastor preaches, we eat each others food, and we try not to worry about who gets what from the offering.  Pastor Jones shared at my ordination.  He’s also helped with our facility search process.  We have a joint racial reconciliation discussion small group.  Several members of our church periodically attend their Sunday gathering and others go out and minister with them in their neighborhoods.  This August we’ll be inaugurating Detroit: Mission Possible, a neighborhood missions partnership between three Detroit-area Vineyards and LOGOS.  Then, after the success of our joint Azusa Street centennial celebration, we’re laying plans for a one-year anniversary of the event where we ask the question, “Where are we at now?”  (For those who may not know, racial reconciliation was a big feature of Azusa, just as it had been at Pentecost.)  We’re hoping to have as many as fifteen Vineyard and COGIC churches from around the city and suburbs.  We’re doing this not just to have a larger stage for ourselves, but rather to encourage churches throughout the cities and suburbs to encourage churches to take the risk of reconciliation and pursue God as He leads them across their own “8 Mile” divides. 

 

This brings me to my final point.  Our hope is to see these kinds of relationships springing up all over the Great Lakes and throughout the country.  Racism isn’t just a Detroit problem.  If you live in America then racial reconciliation is an aspect of what it means to faithfully embody the gospel of our reconciling Lord.  Where is your Eight Mile?  As my friend once asked me, “Do you have a friend of another race or ethnicity that you would embrace as you would (hopefully) embrace me?”  If so, Well done!  I pray that that relationship, through prayer and perseverance, will bear fruits of reconciliation.  If not, then I encourage you to pray.  When the Lord answers your prayers and brings you into relationship across the divide in your community, then seek to be humble, listen and learn, share from your treasures, and be authentic.  Oh, and enjoy the adventure!

 

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