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THE JOURNEY / 2015 WINTER
The group of around 20 people gathers regularly to have a safe place to discuss issues of race and issues of social justice. They seek understanding among one another and hope to change the way that the Christian community in the High Country sees racial relations. The discussions have centered around how the church can respond without trying to convert one another to a particular political party. Eventually, the group settled on hosting a training for clergy called Mobilizing the Gospel: Transforming Leaders and Communities, for clergymen and women and church leaders in the area in November. The Rev. Alexia Salvatierra, author of “Faith-Rooted Organizing: Mobilizing the Church in Service to the World,” spoke at the November conference about multiple topics, including about how to talk to parishioners about race and how to engage with issues of systemic injustices. In the spring, the group will host a larger conference for the public that will discuss how faith, the community, and justice intersect. “My personal commitment to this is recognizing that it’s impossible for me to not feel what other persons of color, even though they’re in different cities, feel in the aftermath of such racial unrest and racial violence,” Wrencher said. Along with discussing race, the group also discusses social issues, such as poverty. Wrencher said that he thinks poverty in the High Country is more invisible than it is in cities because the area is rural. The group hopes to lead Christians in responding to these issues.
Wrencher described the goal of the group through the words of John Wesley. Wesley had three rules: Christians should stay in love with God, do good, and do no harm. Wrencher said that he believes Christians do a good job of loving God and doing good. Where we often fail is in doing no harm. “It’s a commitment to resist injustice and to discover the ways in which we might be silent about injustice or be unaware of it even if we’re not explicitly engaging in it,” Wrencher said. “The old saints when I grew up called it sins of omission and commission. Sins of omission you don’t really know that you’re doing, but they’re nevertheless just as important. To do no harm is to stay in love with God. The three are connected.” One of the most important steps white Christians can take to be sensitive toward racial issues is to speak with gentleness, Wrencher said. He hopes that people will be willing to listen and learn. “The biggest thing white Christians can do is just to simply learn how to have better language, and I don’t mean that in being politically correct,” he said. “I’m talking about shifting our language to be more caring and loving and compassionate and careful. Political correctness lacks the internal motivation, the kind of integrity I’m talking about. It’s more about posture and about attitude than about doing something. Having the wrong perspective drastically can corrupt and create a diseased social imagination.” Pastoring an All-White Church Wrencher is thankful that racial divisiveness hasn’t
Members of Blackburn’s Chapel United Methodist Church
