Tag: Charleston

The Weekend Wanderer: 29 July 2023

Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.

Mother Emanuel AME Church memorial.jpg“Groundbreaking ceremony for Emanuel Nine Memorial set for Saturday morning at Mother Emanuel AME Church” – Ian Kayanja at WACH57: “The groundbreaking ceremony for the Emanuel Nine Memorial will take place Saturday morning. Running from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., there will be a groundbreaking ceremony for the Emanuel Nine Memorial and a dedication of the Mother Emanuel AME Church’s wholly restored pipe organ. At the ceremony, there will be remarks from Eric S.C. Manning, pastor of the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church and co-chair of the Mother Emanuel Memorial Foundation, John Darby, co-chair of the Mother Emanuel Memorial Foundation, and Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg. The Emanuel Nine Memorial will be located on the grounds of the Mother Emanuel AME Church. It is being built to honor the nine victims and five survivors of the June 17, 2015, racially-based mass shooting. It was one of the largest racially motivated mass murders in recent American history. It will feature a courtyard with two fellowship benches facing each other with high backs that arc up and around like sheltering wings. At the center of the courtyard, the curves of the benches will encircle a marble fountain where the names of the Emanuel Nine are carved around the fountain’s edge. Water will emanate from a cross-shaped source, filling the basin and gently spilling over the names of the nine lives lost. The opening between the benches toward the back of the courtyard will reveal a cross above a simple altar, providing visitors with a quiet place.”

Covenant School Gun Reform“Families form nonprofits to address gun, school safety after Nashville school shooting” – Kimberlee Kruesie in APNews: “Pausing at the microphone, 6-year-old Noah took a breath and softly stated, ‘I don’t want any guns today or any day in my school.’ His mom, Sarah Shoop Neumann, wiped away tears as she held the young boy. It had been more than four months since a shooter indiscriminately opened fire while Noah was at a private elementary school in Nashville, killing three of his schoolmates and three adults. And Neumann wanted action. Joining a group of families from The Covenant School, Neumann and others on Thursday announced that they had created two nonprofits to not only promote school safety and mental health resources, but also form an action fund to push legislative policy changes that would place certain limits on firearms inside the politically ruby red state of Tennessee.”

Moore Evangelical crisis“The American Evangelical Church Is in Crisis. There’s Only One Way Out.” – Russell Moore in The Atlantic: “The No. 1 question that younger evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible. These young people are committed to their Christian faith, but they feel despair and cynicism about the Church’s future. Almost none of them even call themselves ‘evangelical’ anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m crazy,’ one pastor said to me just days ago. ‘Does no one see that the Church is in crisis?’ Indeed it is. I am a conservative evangelical—previously the head of the public-policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. For years I dealt with evangelical backlash, including from some of my closest allies and friends, over my opposition to Donald Trump and my views on issues such as racial justice and Church sexual abuse. I hardly thought of myself as a ‘dissident.’ Instead, I believed I was just what I’d always been: a loyal Southern Baptist evangelical trying to apply what I’d learned from children’s Sunday school onward about basic Christian morality and justice.”

My Christ - Wiman“My Christ” – Christian Wiman in Image: “Of course there can be no such thing. My Christ. Two thousand twenty years of permutations, interpretations, hardcore seminars, and wholesale slaughters. My Christ? Of course there can only be such a thing. He is a universal language that only an individual heart can translate. My Christ. I begin this essay prompted by two things, a passage in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in which he talks of the necessity of drinking one’s particular shame to the dregs if one would ever be released from it. My shame is Christianity, sometimes. My shame is myself, sometimes. In any event I too often too-timidly sip of both, savoring my spite. The second thing? As I read the Lewis passage, a hawk flew into my vision and landed on a tree limb I can see from my study. How we want the world to speak to us! But some utterance is too intrinsic to be speech. Some luck is love incompletely seen.”

Disciple Making in the Family“Disciple Making in the Family” – You can listen to an audio interview with Dallas Willard on this topic at Conversatio: “A group of ministers in North Carolina, the Pastor’s Disciple-making Network, who put out the Serious Disciple Podcast interviewed Dallas four times on the telephone. Because these are interviews with people in ministry, trying to think through and implement discipleship in their churches, some of their questions are as excellent as are Dallas’s answers.” 

Thomas Pynchon“The Far Invisible: Thomas Pynchon as America’s Theologian” – Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review: “In 1988, the great Lutheran scholar Robert Jenson published a book called America’s Theologian, conferring that honor on the formidable eighteenth-century Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards. Jenson did not mean that Edwards is the greatest American theologian, though he probably is, but rather ‘that Edwards’s theology meets precisely the problems and opportunities of specifically American Christianity and of the nation molded thereby, and that it does so with the profundity and inventive élan that belong only to the very greatest thinkers.’ Quite clearly, a very different America has emerged in the decades since Jenson’s book was published, and the best theologian of our America is by profession neither a theologian nor a pastor. The great theologian of our America, I propose, is the novelist Thomas Pynchon.  This may seem a peculiar claim, and not just because Pynchon is a writer of fiction. No evidence indicates that Pynchon is a Christian, or indeed a religious believer of any kind (though he may have been taken to church as a child).”

Music: Jon Batiste, “Drink Water” ft. Jon Bellion, Fireboy DML

Emanuel, Charleston, Forgiveness and the Future

Matt EricksonLeave a comment

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Last night I had the chance to view Emanuel, a documentary directed by Brian Ivie (The Dropbox), about the shooting on June 17, 2015, at Emanuel A. M. E. Church in Charleston, SC, in which 9 people died. I attended with one of my sons, and we participated in a talk-back after the movie to reflect and process what we had seen.

For me, the movie highlighted three things that are part of my own journey and also things I hope to continue working on:

  1. The power of forgiveness – The documentary focuses largely on the power of forgiveness in the lives of those who lost loved ones through this trauma. On the one hand, there is the power of forgiveness to release the one who inflicted wrong into the hands of God but also the power of forgiveness to release ourselves from bitterness. This is no simplistic journey, but overall I felt the film did a good job of showing how there is spiritual strength that gives us the ability to forgive, but also how everyone processes forgiveness differently and according to different timelines. As followers of Jesus who live in light of God’s forgiveness through the Cross, we know the power of forgiveness. As Célestin Musekura says: “Because of this divine act, the Christian model of forgiveness stresses the granting of unconditional forgiveness to those who cause injury, pain and suffering in this life.”
  2. The need for racial healing – At various points during the film, attention is given to the racialized history of Charleston and the United States. Charleston served as a hub for the slave trade in colonial America and South Carolina was the first state to secede from the union in what led to the Civil War.By interspersing these hard realities, we are reminded of the need for racial understanding and healing in the midst of the contemporary moment in our nation. From Ferguson to Baltimore, from Oakland to Milwaukee, we cannot ignore that slavery, “America’s original sin,” has left a legacy of racial inequality, pain, and violence that cannot be ignored. We need to take steps forward both in facing into the realities that are here, as well as cultivating both personal and institutional healing of racism.
  3. The importance of stopping racial violence before it starts – While the documentary did not directly address ways to stop racial violence before it starts, it hinted at the reality that a wayward, lonely young man found a narrative of white supremacy that filled the gap of meaning and belonging in his life. This grabbed my attention as I considered afterwards how we might work intentionally on stopping racial violence before it starts. Where are those at the fringes of society who find belonging in sickened narratives of prejudice, injustice, and violence? How do we find them and interrupt their stories with grace, love, and shalom from God? While not easy to address, it is vital that we work as a society, as the church, and as Christians to overcome both the fruits and the roots of racial violence.

For the past six years, I have worked across racial lines with other pastors on developing ways to make a difference in our city through The Milwaukee Declaration and other organizations. Emanuel reminded me that in stepping forward with this work there is great challenge and greater hope, great darkness and greater light.

Just this morning I came across an excerpt from journalist Jennifer Berry Hawes‘ recently released account of the atrocity in Charleston in her book Grace Will Lead Us Home.  There, Hawes relates how after the atrocity, Reverend Kylon Middleton, an African American pastor and husband of one of those killed, was invited to a historically white congregation to preach.

Middleton had grown up in this city, a divided one, and knew well the significance of a black pastor in a white pulpit. He approached with a ready step. When he got there, he beamed. “I never imagined in a million years coming to Second Presbyterian Church!” Sunday, he noted, remained the most segregated day of the week.

But why? They all served the same Christian God, the same one who’d brought them all together here tonight.

“Faith becomes the equalizer!”

In many ways, this was the most important change in race relations to come from the shooting. Friendships and familiarity had been born, especially within the Holy City’s largely segregated churches.

May God give us grace to step forward with such grace before more violence happens and before wounds overflow into riots, that we might meet at the foot of the Cross where healing, humility, understanding, and forgiveness can be found.

 

 

Emanuel is in theaters for a limited time. If you want to see it, there are still showings for Wednesday, June 19.