Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 5c)

Note: Probably, you should go back and read at least parts 5a and 5b before reading this one.

Now, we arrive at the problem.

Everything probably -- okay, not "probably," let's say "might have" -- would have been okay if I had just kept the kids out of sight, but, after youth group, I would open up the gym to the kids and let them play basketball. Or whatever. But, you know, basketball. Because it was always basketball. Sometimes mixed with skating. Don't ask. The gym was directly across from the chapel, which was where the adults met on Wednesday nights (the sanctuary, where Sunday service was held, was in the other building). So, basically, I flaunted my youth group in front of the adults. Not that that was the intent, because the intent was to let the kids have some time having fun.

Let me make one thing clear: At this point, the problem wasn't just the black kids; it was almost all of the kids. 90% of my group were kids from low-income or lower middle class families. They weren't the demographic the church leadership wanted. And it was just the kids, meaning that they didn't bring tithing parents along with them. However, it was the black kids that stood out. And, to make things more complicated, they couldn't tell me they didn't like what I was doing because how would that sound? So the message I was receiving was, repeatedly, "Great job! Keep it up!" And I did, because, well, I was young and naive and trusted them.

All of this took place over a few years, and there were other things going on that affected the eventual outcome, but it's way too much to try to cover, so I'll give you the basics:

1. While I was in high school, we (the church) had begun a Spanish mission church. They met on Sunday mornings in the chapel while the main church happened in the sanctuary. The pastor of the Spanish mission was part of the church staff, and his daughter (one of them) was in youth group with me. What I failed to see as a teenager was that having the Spanish mission kept Hispanics segregated from the main church. There was never any overlap or joint activities between the two groups.

2. During the time I was acting as the youth director (because they wouldn't call me "pastor," but that's another story entirely), the church opted to start -- I don't remember what they called it, but it wasn't "African American" -- another mission a few blocks away, one for blacks. They hired a black pastor with the intent of paying him until the church could stand on its own. This, of course, pulled the black kids I had in my group out of it, and they set up a separate night for the mission to use the gym. I think it was Thursdays, the point being that it was a night when the church was not normally in use by any white people. Effectively, they eliminated any "black element" from Wednesday nights. And, actually, from Sundays, because there had been the occasional black visitors on Sunday mornings as the black population around the church grew. They couldn't legitimately just turn them away, so they gave them somewhere else to go and patted their own backs while doing it.

3. Because the "core" church membership was in such a decline, they began to have talks about what to do about that and how to grow the church. Of course, what they wanted was to return it to the state it had been in in the late 60s/early 70s: 1500 white, middle class members including lots of families with children. They had started trying various tactics meant to spur that kind of growth in the mid to late 80s, including hiring a pastor who was supposed to be an appealing preacher, but, despite their efforts -- because they didn't make any substantive changes -- the membership had continued to dwindle. By the early 90s, they were beginning to worry about sustaining the money as the older, rich members died off and ceased to tithe. It's always about the money.

Which brings us close to the end.

As the leadership saw it [I should point out that I was not considered leadership because I was not, technically, on staff. To be on staff and go to staff meetings, you had to be salaried, and they wouldn't do that with me (again, long unrelated story). However, my mother was on staff (church cook and all), so I got to know everything that went on during these meetings. The other leadership was the deacons: old, rich, white dudes one and all.], at the end of it all, the church had two options:
1. Merge with the church that originally planted my church more than 75 years prior. That this even came up as an option should tell you something, but it did come up as an option, and that church pushed for it, because it, can you guess, wanted our money.
2. Open the church to neighborhood surrounding it, which would include absorbing the black mission that we had planted, at this point, somewhere around two years before. That this was spoken of in those terms should also tell you something. "Open the church to the surrounding neighborhood."

"Open the church to the surrounding neighborhood." This all makes me sick and mad just to think about it. I mean, that this ever even had to be a consideration is... wrong. And the debate, as it came down to it, especially among the deacons, was that they would have to share leadership with "those people." And "those people" couldn't be trusted. And won't we lose all of our members if we let "those people" into our church.

And I wanted to scream, "What members?" At this point, it was normal to have less than 200 in the congregation on Sunday mornings, and 30 of those were my teenagers!

Believe it or not, this all resulted in what can only be called a final showdown. Which I'll tell you all about next week.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 5a)

I was 15 when I started working at my church. It started out with small tasks, I suppose you'd say. I'd help in the kitchen, which was an easy job to get because, well, my mom was the cook, so, if they were shorthanded and needed someone to do the dishes or something, I'd get drafted. I mowed lawns for the building superintendent. Sometimes, I got the oh-so-fun job of cleaning the bathrooms. Things like that.

But I was good with kids so, somewhere in there, I transitioned to working in the various children's programs, and I spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school (when I was 16) working in the gym assisting the recreation director with all of the summer programs, including the ones for teenagers, which meant I was in charge of my friends. It wasn't a big deal. I mean, I never had to go get someone higher up to enforce the rules because people wouldn't listen to me. Not even when I was in charge of adults during the evening programs. And, as time went on, I was left in charge more and more often.

During my junior year of high school, the recreation director left to go somewhere else. The church didn't hire a new one; they just put me in charge of the recreation programs. Nominally, I was under the auspices of the youth director, but, really, it was just me. Basically, he just had to sign off on whatever it was I wanted to do, but he never said no. [This was a good deal for the church, by the way. We were in a decline, at the time, and they replaced a salaried staff member with an hourly worker. A minimum wage hourly worker, at that. I'm sure they pocketed at least $25,000 off of the deal.]

During my senior year of high school, I started teaching Sunday school. Not to little kids, to my own age group. Sometimes, I also taught on Wednesday nights, too, to the whole youth group. And, sometimes, I taught the college group on Sunday nights. These teaching gigs were not because they didn't have anyone else to do it. They were because the youth director acknowledged that I was the most qualified. To put this in context, any time there was a disagreement about anything in the Bible between my youth director (who also taught Latin, so a smart guy) and myself, when we got into it and did the research, he always had to come tell me that I was right. [This is not me bragging. This is me giving you the necessary contextual background to understand what's coming up.] The only thing he didn't fully concede to me was our disagreement on Revelation to which he said, "I'm not saying that you're right, but I am saying that I was wrong."

All of that to say that I was fairly integral to the running of things "downstairs" (where the youth stuff was located) well before I graduated from high school. But, then, I graduated from high school, and, then, I went away to college. During the summer after my graduation before I left, the youth pastor quit. It was very sudden, but he got a (much) better offer from another church in the city and, basically, just walked out the door. Sure, he gave, like, the standard two weeks notice, but that doesn't mean much in church work. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed at him for bailing, and we didn't exactly part on the best of terms.

Now, let's jump ahead a couple of years.

Where I went to college, although in another state, was only about an hour away from home. My mom didn't much like having me out of the house, but freshmen were required to live on campus, so that's what I did. As soon as I became a sophomore, though, she started urging me to move back home and commute to school. The thing that decided me to do that was that opportunity to become the acting youth director at my church, the church I had mostly not been to for the past couple of years (other than the summer between my freshman and sophomore years). Hmm... maybe "acting" is not quite the word I want. Technically, there was a youth director, but they had rolled a whole bunch of stuff up into one position, so he was about six different things: youth, recreation, college/career, education, and... well, I can't remember what else. At any rate, he wasn't much interested in teaching the youth, so he offered me a spot under him in which I would be over the youth (and, mostly, the recreation) program. I was still not on staff, though, and still being paid by the hour. [Yes, it's like the crummy deals that authors take from traditional publishers when they are first starting out because 1. they don't know any better and 2. they are just happy to be being published.]

Just to make this point clear, when I left to go away to college not quite two years prior to that first Wednesday night I walked down into the youth room to teach, we had been running 40-50 teens on a Wednesday night. But I and the youth pastor had both left at the same time, and he had been replaced with a guy who felt like the teenagers were a burden and didn't really want to have anything to do with them. I knew there had been deterioration, but, still, I wasn't expecting the sight I was greeted with: two kids. Two. Both of them middle schoolers. I didn't even know who they were.
Well, then.

[So, yeah, I know that this doesn't seem to fit into this series, but, trust me, it does. Just come back next week.]