Mixed flock: When donkeys and elephants share the pews
The Sunday after the presidential election, Pastor Rock Dillaman kept his ears tuned to the conversations among members at the church he leads.
He knew from his own observations and general trends that in a racially diverse congregation, there would be plenty of Donald Trump supporters and Hillary Clinton backers, and he could only wonder at the fallout after the most bitter campaign in recent memory.
“What I found that first Sunday was people loving one another, laughing with one another,” said Mr. Dillaman, pastor of Allegheny Center Alliance Church, a North Side congregation with large numbers of white and black worshippers. Many religious congregations may be almost entirely red or blue in their politics, depending on their racial, theological, geographic and economic makeup.
But some houses of worship have flocks made up of a fairly even mix of donkeys and elephants. Preachers there find themselves “struggling to say something that’s both unifying and prophetic,” wrote Craig Barnes, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, in a recent edition of the journal Christian Century.
“It’s easy to gloss over the divisive issues of a congregation with a declaration about spiritual unity, and it’s easy to make a congregation afraid of the ‘them’ who are to blame for our problems,” he wrote. “But it’s very difficult to preach to a divided ‘us.’ ” Yet at times pastors can’t keep silent, he said, calling on