Stranger in a Strange Land: The Story of a Black Pastor in a White Church by Derrick Weston

Being a pastor in a mainline denomination is lonely. It’s a unique calling with personal and professional expectations that are often difficult to describe to those outside of the church. You are scholar, teacher, building manager, chaplain, financial planner, civic leader, head of staff, and spiritual guide. As a friend of mine said recently, you are called to lead a community of which you do not get to be a part. This feeling of loneliness and isolation is amplified considerably when you are the minority leader of a predominantly white congregation. Not only are you leading a community of which you cannot be a part, you are leading a community where you would most likely not be a part outside of your sense of call. To be the black leader of a white church then is to be a foreigner called to lead a strange people into relationship with God. No wonder so many of us feel like Jonah!

My first full time call was to a church in Springfield, Ohio. Their story was the story of many a mainline congregation. They had been thriving in the fifties and sixties, their size and relevance carried over into the eighties and they expanded their building. Then the demographics of the surrounding area began to change. What was once a neighborhood church had become a destination church to which people commuted on Sunday mornings. What they left behind was a community more diverse in terms of both race and income. At the same time, the kids of the church had gotten older and moved away from Springfield. A church with a sanctuary that held hundreds was now worshipping around forty on a Sunday morning with the average age of those in attendance being around 60. My hiring was a not so subtle, last ditch effort to connect with the neighborhood and “save” the church. Here’s why that didn’t work: while hiring a black pastor changed the preaching style of the church (somewhat… I’m not the “blackest” of black preachers), it did nothing to change the style of worship and more importantly, it did nothing to change the community. One parishioner consistently invited their African American co-workers to worship on Sundays. The response was always the same: the visitor would tell me that I gave a great sermon and then we would never see her again. Later, the parishioner would say something to me like “well, they loved you, but they didn’t really feel comfortable here”. Shocking! Putting a black face in the pulpit didn’t change the nature of the community.

Speaking of black face, one of the other issues that arose in this community was an unwillingness to wrestle with their own history of racism. One Saturday morning, while distributing flyers for an event, I knocked on the door of a man who literally lived across the street from the church building. “Hi, I’m Derrick,” I said. “I’m the pastor of the Presbyterian Church”. The African American gentleman, possibly in his fifties twisted his face, looked at me, looked over my shoulder to the church building then back at me. “You? You’re the pastor of that church,” he asked. “Man… things sure have changed!” Well, they hadn’t and it took a little bit of digging to really unpack what was being said to me that morning. It came into focus some time later. I was working on picture history of the church and asked people to bring in photographs of their time at the church. Most of the remaining members had been long time members of the church. Boxes poured in filled with photos. One of the ruling elders of the church left a box by my desk and gleefully exclaimed how excited she was for me to see how vibrant the church once was. “You’re going to love the pictures of the church cabaret nights we used to have!”. Church cabaret wasn’t really my thing, but I appreciated her enthusiasm. When I went back to my office and saw the box I began perusing through the pictures and there they were, the pictures of the church cabaret night… complete with church members in blackface. I gasped and tossed the pictures back in the box. I sat there for a minute. Was this an intentional insult to me, to give me these pictures and emphasize those particular events? I don’t think it was. I think she, like much of the congregation, was oblivious to the church’s racial history as well as their perception in the community. The church had historically been known as a “white church” with no interest in changing that. The previous pastor had started a second worship service in the evening that brought in some “less desirable” elements, meaning kids, lower income folks, and black people. To ask the older members of the church, this was the thing that lead to the church’s decline. They argued that the pastor’s focus on “those people” took her away from caring for the real members of the church. “Those people” were a drain on the resources and couldn’t financially contribute. Subtly, it was also mentioned that “they” didn’t fit in.

As my time went on with that church, I found that I was quickly becoming one of “those people”. I became the stand in for everything they didn’t like: black, young, liberal… had I only been gay I could have absorbed all of their ire. I found myself working on the things that I found to be important all the while alienating myself from the congregation I had been called to serve. One of our members was doing significant work at the local government level on helping citizens returning from incarceration. With a slew of releases imminent, this felt like a great place, in my mind, for the church to put some of its energy. The church couldn’t have agreed less. “You want to invite criminals into our church,” I was asked on more than one occasion. I always gave the wrong answer there. I became the scapegoat for the church’s woes and while that is not uncommon for pastors of small churches, it was amplified by the fact that I also looked like the people they blamed for the erosion of the country at large. One of the older members of the church, a staunch Republican, took to referring to President Obama as my “race buddy”. Anything the president did that he didn’t like, which was everything that the president did, he’d come to me on Sunday morning, paper in hand and asked, “Did you see what your race buddy did this week?” I was also criticized for getting involved with youth organizations. “Those kids will tear up our church,” I was told. The building was already suffering from decades of deferred maintenance, but to have the building “torn apart” by those kids… the ones who set up their basketball hoops in our oversized parking lot… the black ones…was totally unacceptable. And to the church, I was one of those kids. Frankly, I got to the point where I would have much rather been associated with those kids than with the folks inside the church walls.

And that, I think is the challenge of being black clergy in the predominantly white mainline church. It is our job to bridge the gap between the church and the neighborhood that is often literally outside of its doors and, when push comes to shove, I believe it is our role to stand with the marginalized in our community even if that means going against the will of the congregation. As black clergy in the white institution we have a unique ability to speak prophetically to the white church as both insider and outsider. We have the joy and burden of saying to the church “I am one of you, but I am also one of them”. We are able to extend the invitation for people to come to the church, but more often, we are the ones extending the invitation for the church to come to the people.

After a season of discernment in which the church decided that it was going to make no effort to be a force for good in the community, I had to leave. A year after I announced that I was leaving, the church closed its doors. The last that I heard, the building was being taken over by a non-denominational church that wanted to turn the church into more of a community center. Praise be to God! The work of the Kingdom continues! But here too is a lesson for the mainline church: a church that hides from the increasingly diverse world around it is signing its own death warrant. The church has to be willing to follow the move of the Spirit into the neighborhoods where it has been scared to go or else it ceases to be the church of Jesus Christ.

I would love to say that I can tell this story without animosity. I would love to say that the things I experienced in this church rolled off of me like water off of a duck’s back. I wish I could say that what I went through didn’t lead me to some dark places in my life that still haunt me. I would be a much better man if I could say that I am not still angry at times. I guess that leads me to one final thing: at the end of the day, even a “calling” is on some level, just a job. Ultimately, we need to take care of ourselves, our families, and our connection with God. We deplete ourselves in ways we can’t even feel at the time they are happening and we need to prioritize self-care. As people of color, the church that hires will rarely be the church that cares for us and so we have to create professional connections and systems of support that will love us when we experience antagonism in our ministry. It’s taken a long time and painful lessons for me to learn that lesson. I may never be able to give myself to a church the way that I did for the first one. I doubt I’ll ever be as naïve or idealistic. More importantly, I’ll never be foolish enough to go into ministry without a strong community of support surrounding me with which I know I can be vulnerable and transparent. In a ministry that has often made me feel like a stranger in a strange land, it has been important for me to have places that I call home.

Rev. Derrick Weston is an ordained Presbyterian (USA) minister and currently serves as the neighborhood organizer for Arlington Presbyterian Church in Arlington, VA. He is a blogger, podcaster, an avid gardener with a keen interest in the intersection of food justice and racial justice. Rev. Weston and his wife live in Lutherville, Maryland and have four children between them. His other writing can be found at www.derricklweston.com.