Neighbor churches, split on race lines, work to heal divide
MACON, Ga.—There are two First Baptist Churches in Macon—one black and one white. They sit almost back-to-back, separated by a small park, in a hilltop historic district overlooking downtown.
“We’re literally around the corner from each other,” said the Rev. Scott Dickison, pastor of the white church.
About 170 years ago, they were one congregation, albeit a church of masters and slaves. Then the fight over abolition and slavery started tearing badly at religious groups and moving the country toward Civil War. The Macon church, like many others at the time, decided it was time to separate by race.
Ever since—through Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, desegregation and beyond—the division endured, becoming so deeply rooted it hardly drew notice. Jarred Moore, whose family has belonged to the black church for three generations, said he didn’t know the details of the history until recently.
“I thought, ‘First Baptist, First Baptist?’ There are two First Baptists right down the street from each other and I always wondered about it, ” said Moore, a public school teacher.
Then, two years ago, Dickison and the pastor of the black church, the Rev. James Goolsby, met over lunch and an idea took shape: They’d try to find a way the congregations, neighbors for so long, could become friends. They’d try to bridge the stubborn divide of race.
They are taking up this work against
a painful and tumultuous backdrop: the massacre last year at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina; the much-publicized deaths of blacks at the hands of law enforcement; the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the sniper killing of white Dallas police officers. These events, and the tensions they have raised, have become part of the tentative new discussions among congregants at the two First Baptists. Next month, the pastors will take their most ambitious step yet, leading joint discussions with church members on racism in the history of the U.S., and also in the history of their congregations.
“This is not a conversation of blame, but of acceptance and moving forward,” said Goolsby, sitting in the quiet sanctuary of his church on a Monday morning. “What will govern how quickly we move is when there’s a certain level of understanding of the past.”
Religious groups try to set a moral standard that rises above the issues and ideologies dividing society. But faith leaders often fall short of that ideal, reflecting or even exacerbating the rifts. Like many other American institutions, houses of worship have largely been separated by race, to the point that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called Sunday mornings “one of the most segregated hours.” Recently, more churches have tried to diversify and to look critically at their past actions and teachings, with denominations from the Southern Baptist Convention to the Episcopal Church making a priority of fighting racial bias.
When Goolsby last year told the black church of the plan to work with the white congregation, people applauded. White congregants were enthusiastic as well. Yet, it was excitement mixed with some apprehension, since the effort would inevitably require “some challenging conversations,” Dickison said.
“It’s hard to talk honestly about race,” said Doug Thompson, a member of the white church and also a Mercer University professor who specializes in religion and race. “It’s always hard to help people move forward.”
The two churches’ first activity together was modest but symbolically significant. For years, each church held its Easter egg hunt in the same tree-shaded park behind their churches, but at different times. Last year, they met there together. Photos from the joint gathering show children huddled together for a group picture, grasping pink, blue and yellow baskets, black faces and white faces squinting into the sun.
As the churches held other combined activities—a book drive, a Thanksgiving potluck—some participants were so moved they had tears in their eyes. There were members of both churches who said they had been waiting for decades for such a reunion.
“I thought it would be a great opportunity and a blessing,” said Bea Warbington-Ross, a retired human resources specialist and member of Goolsby’s congregation. “There’s no reason for Sunday to be the most segregated day.”
Congregants were surprised to learn their sanctuaries had nearly identical designs, with vaulted ceilings that resembled the inverted hull of a ship. Warbington-Ross lives in the historic district five blocks from the white church, which some of her neighbors attend. She’d never been inside.
While the visits back and forth and the joint activities are clearly establishing connections, the churches are not working toward a merger.
“We don’t want to be one congregation again. We want to be a family,” said Jessica Northenor, a public school teacher and member of the white church who is helping shape the new relationship.
The congregations sealed their commitment to each other at a joint Pentecost service at the black church. Before a choir drawn from both congregations, leaders pledged to work together under the auspices of the New Baptist Covenant, an organization formed by President Jimmy Carter to unite Baptists.
“If you hold onto the pain of the past, you don’t allow God to minister and bless you in the days to come,” Goolsby said in his sermon that day. “We can show in our relationship what it means to be a child of God.”
But the pastors acknowledge the long journey ahead. They are tackling what some call the original sin of the country’s founding. The influence of racial inequity on U.S. history and modern-day life is, of course, a contentious and sensitive issue.
In Macon, where plaques and monuments commemorating Confederate soldiers’ valor adorn street corners and parks, white congregants will be asked to re-examine their own church history, which until recently had been officially recorded in mostly benign terms. It reflected a perspective of white “good paternalism” toward the black congregation, Thompson said, with almost no recognition of racism.
The review is so sensitive that Goolsby had suggested early on that the two churches wait to address the past until they built more mutual trust and goodwill. Dickison, acknowledging that some congregants will be embarrassed and some distressed or resistant, considers the conversation vital.
“A white person from the South—to not come to terms with our own history and experience with race is to deprive ourselves of a full understanding of the Gospel. We need to go through this kind of conversion experience of confession, of repentance and of reconciliation. We need to have that when it comes to race, not just in the country but within the church,” Dickison said.