A message from the Lord’s tent in earshot of protests: ‘God is the God of peace’
NEW HAVEN — Pastor Stanley Woodley sat alone at a drum kit in the back corner of a parking lot tent at 11 a.m. Sunday, starting time for the outdoor, inperson service at the United House of Prayer for All People.
A few people set up the lunch table out in the sun, next to the church. Otherwise the flock filtered in slowly. The brass band was not yet present, raising some mild ire.
This was a big day. Only the second in-person services since the state loosened the coronavirus rules, it was also Pentacost Sunday, a special time for an evangelical, Pentacostal congregation.
And of course, it was the first Sunday after the nation once again tore up its insides over a racerelated killing, the white cop slaying George Floyd in Minneapolis. Just a few hundred yards down Dixwell Avenue, protesters would soon gather to make their voices heard, and heard and heard again as anger over countless injustices boiled over.
I asked Woodley whether he would address the roiling issues — as if I might have come across the only pastor in America who didn’t plan to make the horrific killing part of Sunday’s sermon.
“It depends on how it comes up,” he told me, minutes before taking the podium to start the service. “Only thing I can say, the Lord is blessing us.”
“It turned bad. It turned real bad,” he said. But he added, “It could be a lot worse,” and it could get worse before it gets better.
He did indeed address the unrest — after the brass band known as the Kings of Harmony showed up in force, and played now raucous gospel jazz, now doleful ballads to a singer’s intonations behind the animated trombonist Isaiah Williams.
But unlike in some black church traditions, where civil protest melds with spirituality in a unified discourse, the United House of Prayer lives apart from the marching — which, at that moment, was approaching I-95 and a tense standoff with police.
“I’m not going to get political. We may feel some kind of way but God said ‘I’ll take care of you.’ God says ‘I’ll have your back,’” Woodley preached from the podium.
“We have nothing to do with the world. We’re in the world but we’re not of it,” he declared.
And as for the protesters, “They may be trying to make a statement but we’re making a statement too. Our statement is, “God is good! Can I get a witness of somebody that can stand with me and say “God is good!’”
Chords of music appear as if magically and his voice, the congregation’s voice, melds from speaking to singing and back with no orchestration.
“God is good! Amen! Amen!”
A private view of injustice
None of this means the pastor and congregation turn away in the face of injustice. No, by turning to God, they’re very much part of the movement — just not part of the marching. It’s the same inward look that guides the spirituality of all faiths, but for these Pentacostals it’s more private than, say, some Baptist or African Methodist Episcopal Zion congregations that combine moral beliefs with public issues.
Isee Greenwood, known as Saint, danced in a white dress with flowing hair, not to entertain or even to express herself publicly, but rather in the Lord’s possession, sometimes speaking in tongues.
Gwendolyn Burkett led the half-dozen United Inspirational Singers in a handful of hymns on the asphalt where, a day earlier, the congregation strapped for cash from the pandemic had held a car wash fundraiser. Those voices, combined with the multi-generational Kings of Melody, might have drawn thousands of event-seeking music fans of all races to the New Haven Green, and raised far more money, if billed as a day of gospel.
Instead, with coronavirus still sweeping the Dixwell Avenue corridor, the crowd inside and outside the tent remained thin. People are still afraid to come out, I heard from one of the many church members who welcomed me and urged me to return next weekend.
By now the protest, out of earshot and out of mind in the spiritual and musical intensity, had reached the New Haven Police Department headquarters. Head usher Roxanne Bartlette tells how, a half-century ago, as a teenager, she snuck out to the Black Panthers’ march just a few blocks from where we spoke.
“My father chastised me,” Bartlette said. “I said, ‘I want to know what it’s about.’”
She talks about George Floyd. “We’ve been through a lot,” she says. Now she had no desire to march and shout slogans.
“We try to separate ourselves from the political,” she said. “We understand it but we will not get out there and protest.”
But rather than see it as two different worlds — the spiritual and the political — she prefers to view the activities as two different stages. I didn’t ask whether she meant theatrical stages that we strut across, or stages of life.
“The God in heaven sees it all,” she said.
‘Without God there is no peace’
Up the Dixwell Avenue corridor, stretching to Hamden, most churches remained closed for inperson services Sunday, even as the state starts to open up. The new rules for religious services — up to 25 percent of a building’s capacity or 100 people, whichever is less — took effect Monday, not Sunday. Besides, many pastors believed it was just too soon.
“I don’t feel comfortable given the age of my congregation,” said The Rev. Steven Cousin Jr. at the Bethel AME Church. “We don’t feel it’s safe just because they say it’s safe.
He added, “There will be come pastors that will throw caution to the wind just because of the need for revenue.”
Cousin talked about his online sermon message connected with the protests — related to Pentacost Sunday, which celebrates the Holy Spirit descending on the apostles.
“If we’re able to work together and have the ability to understand each other, that’s where power comes,” he said, invoking the tearing down of walls. “It empowers you to understand each other, not just your particular race but all races.”
Thankfully, COVID-19 has not taken anyone at
Bethel AME, nor, Woodley said, at United House of Prayer.
Woodley told the congregation that weeknight prayers can resume inside but the music stays in the parking lot for now.
“Are people still getting sick? Yes, so we have to still be careful,” he told the gathering, speaking of the shutdown in biblical terms — “They shut down America .... They shut down New York... They shut down Hollywood...T hey shut down the NBA...”
“In the midst of a pandemic, the Lord is taking care of us,” Woodley said — but that doesn’t mean we can act with hubris. The Lord gives common sense, not a shield from all harm. He compared flouting risks to jumping into a lake full of alligators. “If you can’t walk on water, you can cancel Christmas.”
The same holds for the underlying conditions that have led to the protests, though he didn’t see the racial inequity of the coronavirus crisis as a factor in the uprisings.
“Poverty hits harder for us too. It’s just something we have to deal with,” he said. And as for injustice, “This has been there for hundreds of years but you’re in a day and a time when this new generation is not going to put up with what the old ones did.”
It’s a narrative for all people, he said, not just black people. “If you want peace, you have to have God in your life. Without God, there is no peace.”
And it’s a narrative that embraces both shouting in the streets and devotion in the hearts of the faithful.
“God is the God of peace,” Woodley intoned, “not the God of confusion.”