Inter-Church Ministries of Erie County (ICM), a network of Christian churches working together united in faith, is deeply saddened and disturbed by the horrific murders in Buffalo, NY. Our prayers join millions of others in the anguish of facing the horrors and deep trauma of such evil actions and intent. We speak with one accord as Christians who pray each day, “deliver us from evil.”
That unity of voice has been under duress throughout American history because both white Protestants and Catholics have failed to respond in solidarity with our black churches in the midst of a constantly recharged white supremacy, a white supremacy for which we must take full responsibility, since it originated in American churches, our churches, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Recent studies by Robert P. Jones have confirmed that “white Christians overall are more likely than white religiously unaffiliated Americans to register higher scores on the Racism Index” (https://www.splcenter.org/states/pennsylvania) This is a scholar from one of our most renowned United Methodist seminaries, Candler School of Theology at Emory University. So read that statement again: “white Christians overall are more likely than white religiously unaffiliated Americans to register higher scores on the Racism Index.” If you go to the Southern Poverty Law Center listing of hate groups in Pennsylvania, there you will see an inventory of new manifestations of the Ku Klux Klan in our state, you will see their implicit theology, rooted in the same Scriptures we read in church each Sunday.
ICM will continue to place resistance to this evil at the center of Christian practice. We will continue to bring to the public conversation the white problem of white racism and white privilege. Followers of Christ transgress the bare minimum of our faith when we evade and ignore the consistent traumas and tragedies that have befallen our fellow Christians from their forced arrival on our shores through 19th century Reconstruction to this day. Since our inception over 45 years ago, and intensely for the past six years, ICM has consistently gathered people of good will to analyze, understand and denounce racist social structures. ICM calls upon all Christians and people of good will to renew their commitment to the Prince of Peace by embracing quad A level discipleship. In your life and witness as persons of faith Acknowledge, Admit, Ascertain, and hold yourself, your loved ones, and your institutions Accountable to the simple demands of the Gospel.
Acknowledge: Acknowledgement of others’ joy, hopes and pains is a natural spiritual response in our social lives. When we pray, deliver us from evil, we acknowledge the powers that prevail upon us and which we must resist. We must acknowledge white racism as a spiritual evil, a sickness that runs throughout American history and culture. And we must acknowledge that it also runs through us, that we are not totally immune to this sickness. But we also acknowledge that we have access to the remedy, not only in our practices of prayer, worship and contemplation, but in our active solidarity with each-other. We also acknowledge that there is necessary preventative medicine available in communities of care and institutions of vigilance. Institutions which never let down their guard through constant conversation, education, and awareness. Is that not what the church is, the preventative medicine which soothes the sin sick soul and acts as the very soul of society?
Admit (confess) Once acknowledged, we must confess our individual shortcomings and evil thoughts. We must confess that our comforts too often get in the way of our courage. This is at the heart of all Christian traditions. We confess the evils we have done, and the things we have failed to do. And what have we failed to do? We have failed to come alongside black communities at the times of their trauma, pain, grief and cries for justice. This is our faith omission of 500 years! ICM, and hosts of other Christian bodies, have sought to give voice to peace and justice. But for too long, we have been a small prophetic minority. In our admission and confessions, we allow a new opening to broaden the scope of the prophetic essence of our shared faith. All our confessions are absurd without an experience of forgiveness, another essential gift of Christ’s truth. In fact, our voices are saturated with the wellspring of forgiveness which propels us and moves us to act in just-mercy. That ongoing and fluid movement of repentance, forgiveness and action invites us to deepen our knowledge of the tragic facts of history.
Ascertain (seek out knowledge) In the parlance of the work-a-day world, “we ain’t gonna learn what we don’t wanna know.” Forgiveness opens up the lenses of our historical perceptions, and awakens us to the historical trauma from the violence and social structures initiated and given support by the silence of white Christians. We ascertain the truth of the current political climate, namely that the black preacher and theologian adored by the Christian mainstream, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was a forerunner to so- called critical race theory in his later testimonies and essays about the Vietnam war. Before him, the faith-filled writing of W.E.B. Dubois convened erudite sociological analysis with poetic and prophetic Christian realism. The current scare tactics of those denouncing critical race theory are very tired and formulaic strategies, smokescreens to spook thinking Christians into returning to the comforts of their provincial certainties (i.e., like the evils of communism). By connecting prophetic black theorists explicitly with socialism and
communism, reactionaries turn the depth of these theorists’ analyses into something easily dismissed. But mature Christians realize that this same tactic was used against Jews in the 1950’s, liberation theologians in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Instead, our critical faith theory can ascertain the alternative tradition of resistance derived explicitly from our Christian faith. Our churches, our public and private educational institutions at every level, must give voice to 18th and 19th century abolitionist movements, like those of devout Christian John Brown, and the determined underground abolitionist work of Quakers, Methodists and Jesuits. Today, people of faith can re-examine the deep history of resistance to the evils of racism by an engagement with studies in critical faith history. ICM has been engaging in this public educational dialogue and we want to encourage all people of faith and good will to join us.
Accountability All Christian congregations provide a plethora of practices to maintain and develop accountability: Bible studies, small groups, prayer groups, the rite of reconciliation, and corporate worship. But recent events have made it clear that Christians can no longer sit idly by and watch while evil bleeds out from the inter-net, and other media. We need ongoing collaborative engagement with all faith communities in Erie County and beyond. We need to learn together, worship together, pray together and speak out when some among us lose our voices. We need preventative medicine for the sicknesses that fester on the internet and television, the access youth prone to depression, alienation, mental health diseases have to these images, diatribes and heresies; these are the evil one’s curricula along with easy access to firearms, including automatic weapons! Our children need alternative social engagements which are not insular and consumptive, but social and life-giving. We need to hold our governmental officials, civic leaders, faith leaders, school boards and mental health institutions to standards of care that represent the best hopes for our communities. This means we must bring our faith into the public forum. Holding each other and institutions accountable is messy business, but good and true business. It is messy because we have to confront routine moral mediocrity with expectations of moral excellence. And, we have to do so with the love and mercy of Christ in our hearts. Isn’t that exactly the baptismal life to which we are called?
ICM has been here in Erie County nearly fifty years, filling that middle space of dialogue and understanding. We are committed to helping Christian churches, our brothers and sisters of other faiths, and all people of good will face the present realities and future with accuracy and insight. We invite you to join us in this difficult and redemptive process. Join us in the simplicity of Acknowledgement of the problem, Admission of our complicity, Ascertaining the tragic truths of history still with us today, and holding all to be Accountable to the simple but difficult commandment of Christ to love your neighbor as yourself. ICM, working together united in faith, is both conservative and liberal. We are hard at work conserving the love of Christ in our communities but in order to do so, we must give it away, being liberal with the risks we take to move into the beloved community envisioned by our American Christian tradition.
— Aaron Kerr, PhD, Chair, Inter-Church Ministries Advocacy, Education, and Justice TEAM
