David Moyer is the Conference Minister of the Wisconsin Conference, UCC. He sent this message to clergy of his conference as news stories misrepresenting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright appeared around the country.
March 18, 2008
To: Clergy in the Wisconsin Conference
Dear Colleagues:
Grace and peace to you all in the spirit of the one who comes to bring peace and to inaugurate the reign of justice among the whole human community.
I am working on my usual Holy Week meditation/letter to you, but I am pausing for a few moments to write you out of the pain I feel for a ministerial colleague in the UCC and the concern I have for the portrayal of one of our UCC congregations and our whole church in the media. This morning as I did my morning work out on the machines at the health club, at least 5 of the 8 TV sets (the others were sports channels) had brief video clips of Pastor Jeremiah Wright sermons, and then breathless commentary by pundits who decry the tone and content of Pastor Wright’s preaching. These attacks on Jeremiah Wright and Trinity UCC have been precipitated, because Presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama and his family are members of the congregation.
Jeremiah Wright needs no defense from me. Anyone who has built a congregation from 87 members to some 8000 and whose congregation has modeled ministries to one of the poorest areas of Chicago has provided a body of work that speaks for itself. A recent press release from Trinity UCC, issued by the new Senior Pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, identifies Trinity’s generosity and accomplishments, and then says that on Sunday mornings alone, over 36 years, Pastor Wright has spoken for 207,792 minutes. The video clips represent perhaps 15-20 seconds of that time. Those clips represent .0000012 of his total preaching at Trinity, and yet many are quick to judge him, his church, and, indeed, our denomination, on this statistically ridiculous sample.
Would I have chosen the exact words he chose in the clips that are on the airways? No. Most of you know me and you know a conservative and buttoned down person who is cautious about his words and holds opinions close to the vest. Many believe that is a significant fault of mine, and they may be right. But, unlike Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., I have not preached to the same congregation for 36 years and loved a church into remarkable growth in ministry and seen generations come and grow and return to the God who gave them life. I have not ministered in the midst of terrible poverty and been confronted in my study week after week with texts that provide a stark and dramatic contrast to the scene of boarded up buildings and a broken education system just outside my window. I have not faced the challenge of finding a “word from the Lord” to my people, who, no matter their success, daily face the boundaries of racism in our society.
I am struck with the Psalm for Easter Sunday, Psalm 118. It begins and ends with these words: “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures for ever!” If you go onto the Trinity UCC website, you will hear Pastor Wright’s voice shout these words with great power and warmth. This could have been a “clip” of his preaching just as well as those that media outlets have chosen. But, even this soaring text of thanksgiving goes on to say: “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in man. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in princes.”
Or, the Acts text for Easter: “And Peter …said, ‘Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him…. And he commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that he is the one ordained by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that every one who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”
Put yourself in the study at Trinity and look out on a city of African American people stretching for miles in nearly every direction, and juxtapose those texts for Easter Sunday and find your voice in the context of poverty and racism and lack of education and health care. Any word of hope in such a situation will be a ‘hard’ word. It won’t be an easy word to hear. But an easy word isn’t likely to be a saving word, and that is something that Pastor Wright knew. An authentic word of hope will be hard to hear. Good news cuts through life and it can wound, but Easter tells us that God in Christ heals those wounds and “makes us strong at the broken places.”
I’ve gone on a long time, but these aren’t really even the words I want to share with you. You can (and some of you will) engage and argue with the above words. You will take a different position, and that is good and in keeping with the freedom of conscience that prevails in our Protestant tradition. What I want to share with you (with apologies to Paul Harvey) is “the rest of the story.”
I am reminded of this part of the story, because this past Sunday, Palm Sunday, I was in Milwaukee to share in the 2nd anniversary service of Grace United Church of Christ on north Sherman Avenue. It was a wonderful celebration, and it reminded me of Grace’s story and the significant role in it of Pastor Jeremiah Wright and Trinity. As you know, the congregation of Mt. Tabor United Church of Christ voted to end its ministry, but with the guidance of the Southeast Association, it determined that it would give its building to the Conference with the Easter hope that a new ministry could arise on this location.
About a year after we received the Mt. Tabor building, I made an appointment and drove down to 95th Street on the south side of Chicago and visited with Dr. Wright. I told him that the UCC had 21 churches in Milwaukee in 1957 and that at that time there were five. We needed and wanted to start a new African American congregation, but we had no idea how to do it. I told him that we had engaged in a capital campaign and had money to start a church, and that I knew that the financial requests to Trinity must be endless. I said we were not asking for money but guidance and help in identifying leadership for this new church.
We met for more than an hour, and as I got up to leave, Pastor Wright handed me a card. On the card was the name of the Rev. Wanda J. Washington, at that time a senior Associate on the Trinity pastoral staff. He indicated to me that he thought Pastor Washington would be interested and would be a good new church start pastor.
Not long after this meeting, I met with Pastor Washington and then she and her husband, Wayne, came up to Milwaukee to see the church building and to meet with some members and Association and Conference leadership. She discerned that God was leading her to this new challenge, and we began to make plans for a new church.
Once Pastor Washington indicated her willingness to come to Milwaukee, we received a letter from the Mission Board of Trinity, indicating that they would support Pastor’s Washington’s entire salary and benefits for the first year. In the second year they also have given the Conference and Grace another significant gift. As Pastor Washington prayed to discern her call to Milwaukee, there was a group of Trinity women who met with her and prayed for and with her regularly, calling on the Holy Spirit’s guidance in this life-changing decision.
When plans were moving forward to have an opening service for Grace in 2006, a carload or more of Trinity people came from the south side of Chicago to the north side of Milwaukee nearly every weekend to clean and paint and sort through files and materials and equipment and to prepare the building for the first Grace service. When Palm Sunday 2006 came, Trinity sent more than 300 people to Milwaukee to insure that the first service would be packed and spirit filled. They sent more than 20 deacons to serve. They sent a team of trained ushers and security people. They provided 15 women who prepared a feast to follow the service. They sent one of their women’s choirs, and for the first months of Grace’s life they sent musical leadership to lend their extraordinary gifts to Grace’s worship. Some individual members of Trinity tithed to Grace for the first year to offer additional financial support.
Ann and I went in the fall of 2006 to say ‘Thank you” to Trinity, and we couldn’t have been welcomed more warmly. I was given time to speak at a quarterly meeting of the congregation and we received more appreciation and hugs than we could have imagined.
Last Sunday there was a coach from Trinity that brought a group to the 2nd anniversary service. There were trained deacons from Trinity that came to again serve the spiritual needs of the congregation and to support the pastor. I counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 people from Trinity at the celebration.
All this support, financial, spiritual, physical, material, came out of one visit to Jeremiah Wright’s office. A new congregation. A critical new ministry to a large north side African American population came from one visit. I might suggest that my hour with Jeremiah Wright was probably even less than .0000012 of the time he spent in meetings over the past 36 years. I wish some clips of grace and generosity he and Trinity showed to us in Wisconsin would make some video clips somewhere.
As you know, Dr. Wright was the preacher for our Annual Meeting last June. He was invited, because Grace led our worship and we wanted to show our appreciation for Trinity’s exceptional gifts. Prior to the service, Pastor Wright and I were eating dinner together in one of the dining rooms. His phone buzzed, and he looked at it and discovered a text message telling him that someone in the Trinity congregation had died. He asked my pardon and then for the next 20 minutes made phone calls to his assistant and to members of the pastoral staff. “Who’s on call tonight? Remember, we need to respond to the family in one hour! Who is available to do the service? Let me know when someone has followed through.” Here he was, 200 miles from his church, speaking to us, and he was still fully pastorally engaged to see that the church did what it is committed to doing, that is, surround a grieving family and bring a word of hope and a presence of love.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s preaching, in its totality; in its African-American context; in its willingness to struggle with the hardest of biblical texts; in its recognition of the essential role of confession in forgiveness and judgment in grace; in the middle of vibrant and challenge African American life in a world city; in all of these his preaching helped to build a church. But to me that preaching would not have brought the kind of fruit in the Lord’s vineyard that it did without the absolute clarity of mission that brought a new congregation in another state to life and the deep compassion and clarity of the pastoral vocation that pauses in a busy speaking schedule to see to the ‘going home’ ministry to a family who has lost a loved one.
To me, “the rest of the story” is essential to the telling of a fair and just story of ministry. The reflections I shared in opening this letter are up for debate and diversity of opinion. The “rest of the story” is not. It is lived experience, and I will never forget it and will be, as our whole Conference will be, forever grateful.
I wish you all a faith filled journey through these days of Holy Week and then the full measure of joy on Easter Day.
Your colleague,
David Moyer
