Race in the American Church

Wilmington’s Lie

I am a native New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn. But neither of my parents were New Yorkers by birth. My father immigrated from Trinidad in the early sixties. He had been a lawyer in Trinidad but studied accounting at Brooklyn College when he came to the United States. My mother, already a citizen, migrated from Wilmington, NC to Harlem, NYC as a teenager in 1952. She was a part of the Great American Migration, the mass exodus of African Americans out of the southern States from 1900-1970. I sat with her back in 2014 to record her story for my posterity. My grandmother left Wilmington for Harlem in 1947, leaving her children six behind for a time, because she wanted to provide a better life for them. Mom said that my grandmother told her children that if she was going to save them, or they were going to have any opportunity, she would have to leave them for a little while. My mother wanted to be a nurse for as far back as she could remember. She knew that there was no way for her to pursue that dream in Wilmington, NC.

In January 2020 I was preparing for a ministry trip to Wilmington, and had just finished reading the book, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. The Tusla Massacre is the only time in U.S. history that the government bombed it’s own citizens. Well the coup of November 1898 in Wilmington, NC is the only armed, hostile coup of a duly elected city government in U.S. history. A current city landmark at the site where the white mob gathered acknowledges that the violence left untold numbers of African Americans dead, led to the overthrow of the city government and the installation of the coup leader as mayor. The reason for the coup? A flourishing and growing Black community in a city that was becoming a post-Civil War model for Black and White cooperation.

In the lead up to the coup Rev. Peyton Hoge, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, preached white supremacist messages to his congregation. Other white ministers joined in, all at the request of Democratic politicians. On the Sunday following the coup Rev. James W. Kramer, of Brooklyn Baptist Church in Wilmington, declared to his congregation, “God from the beginning of time intended that intelligent white men should lead the people and rule the country.” Rev. Hoge himself carried around a Winchester rifle during the overthrow. Today we say that politics has no place in the pulpit, but Rev. Kramer said in his post-coup sermon, “I believe that the whites were doing God’s services, as the results for good have been felt in businesses, in politics and in the church. We will give the negro justice and will treat him kindly, but never again will we be ruled by him.” In the Sunday after the coup Rev. Hoge opened his sermon saying, “Since we last met in these walls, we have taken a city.”

This history is personal for me because there is a direct connection between the lack of opportunity my mother understood to be the reality of her life in the 1940’s and 50’s. The coup set the city on a course from which it has not yet recovered. In 1898 Wilmington’s population was 56% Black. Today it is 18% Black. That thriving middle-class Black community that was decimated as a result of the coup has not re-emerged. Not only that, but the white church was more than complicit in the coup. The white ministers actively promoted and supported it. I’m going to talk more explicitly about beautiful community tomorrow, but let me say this for now. We cannot effectively promote a vision for the beautiful community that God is committed to cultivate for humanity without bringing to the surface the real-life dehumanizing and oppressive conditions that have contributed to the ongoing racial and political divides we experience in the church today.

The testimony of Scripture is that God is beautiful community. He is the perfection of unity in diversity and diversity in unity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One God in three distinct persons. What this means is that as his image, humanity was created to reflect his glory to the world as beautiful community; unity in diversity, diversity in unity. We see bumper stickers calling for peaceful coexistence. We hear the demands for equal justice under the law. These right desires demonstrate our discontentment with disharmony and inequality among humanity.

As Herman Bavinck writes,

“Only humanity in its entirety—as one complete organism, summed up under a single head, spread out over the whole earth, as prophet proclaiming the truth of God, as priest dedicating itself to God, as ruler controlling the earth and the whole of creation—only it is the fully finished image, the most telling and striking likeness of God.”

In Ephesians 1:10, the apostle Paul helps us understand that God’s plan of salvation is much more magnificent than individual people confessing and repenting of their sins and believing in Jesus Christ. That is surely magnificent, but the glorious gospel is God’s plan to unite everything in Jesus Christ, both things in heaven and things on earth. Every rupture in the cosmos will be repaired. This is where we are headed, the reign and rule of Jesus Christ over everything and everyone. The good news is the good news of the unity of the human race. And the church is called to demonstrate that eschatological reality to the world. When Paul portrays the new humanity in Jesus Christ as “one new man” in Ephesians 2:15, he is describing the church as the evidence to the world that the Lord’s promise to unite all things in Christ has been inaugurated. When Paul says to the church in Colossae in Colossians 3:11, “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all,” he is reinforcing for them that their new life in Christ brings them into intimate communion across lines of polarizing difference. It brings them into beautiful community. So, he says that they in their diverse communion are God’s elect who are holy and blameless (Col. 3:12). In this condition, they are to put on compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness. And above all these things they are to put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. The church is called to be a sign of the unity of human race that will one day be perfectly achieved. What the fall destroyed was union and unity with God and each other. Reunion is the story of Scripture. These words we find in Scripture - renewed, reconciled, united - are the reversal of the fractures, divides, breaks, partitions of life in this world and before God that was/is so desperately needed. We are truly stamped from the beginning for Beautiful Community—for unity and union, for wholeness and shalom.

This also means that we ought to be diligent in seeking to learn and understand the causes of our disunity and divides. Let me offer you this challenge. If you’re reaction to my sharing the story of 1898 is something like this, “That was over 120 years ago. Bringing it up and talking about it now does nothing to further our efforts toward unity.” As I mention above, I read Wilmington’s Lie right before a ministry trip to the city. While there I met and interacted with a racially and denominationally diverse coalition of pastors who are striving to bear witness in the city of our unity in Jesus Christ. For them and the city, the coup is not ancient history. It still even casts a shadow over the church today. They know that they must engage the lasting effects of this historical event if they are to experience the intimate communion the Scriptures describe for God’s people.

No less is true here in Tulsa. What does the Holy Spirit empowered work of repair look like? The place to begin is lament. We don’t begin the work of repair by trying to fix things. We begin by weeping with those who weep.

Designate a season of prayer, lament, discernment, and discussion for your session. Seek the Lord for a unified commitment to racial reconciliation among the leaders of your church. Pray for “soft hearts and thick skin” at the very beginning of this journey, a spirit of humility, and an openness to the possibility that we’ve been wrong on the issue. Ask the Lord to give his wisdom, insight, and conviction so that your leaders can celebrate evidence of grace, repent of particular sins and failures, and pursue the fruit of repentance in specific actions. Pray that the Lord would make your neighbors visible to you because there are often representative people groups in our neighborhoods that you have not really seen. This is also a good time to discuss each member’s personal story with regard to racial self-awareness, shaping experiences/ influences, and ways that your past affects your present thoughts on race for good or ill. This may take time, but be patient, prayerful, and expectant that the Lord will hear your prayers.