c. 1996 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS-It has been 30 years since that memorably dreadful day when Doris Viverito watched in shamed silence as the white deacons evicted a black woman who’d come to worship at Central Baptist Church.

She was in her 20s then and Central Baptist, all-white and Southern Baptist, stood at the peak of material security, self-confidence and racial solidarity.

The memory lies close to the surface, too ironic to bury away given the extraordinary changes of the last year.

For after Sunday services these days, worshipers still chat on the same church steps. But the faces are very different.

The white people are the remnants of Central, a declining church brought to the threshold of death by ethnic and racial changes in its neighborhood. The black worshipers are former members of a vibrant young Southern Baptist congregation until recently wandering in search of a home.

A year ago they gulped and embraced, merging their leadership, their music and styles of worship in an experiment in racial harmony that appears to be unique in the 15.6-million-member Southern Baptist Convention.

Now Central has a new name, First United Baptist Church. And two co-pastors, black and white.

Viverito claps and sings with the same exuberance as some of the black members of the church. And Minnie Witherspoon, despite an early wariness, at the age of 69 finds her new home as congenial as the old all-black congregation she once belonged to.

To top it off, their new congregation attends Bible study organized by H.B. Wheeler, a nearly life-long white congregant who remembers those days of enforced spiritual segregation.

Celebrating its one-year anniversary recently, First United is a congregation formed by the chance meeting of need and opportunity, groping tentatively toward a deep racial reconciliation.

“Is it working?” asks Viverito. “I think it is. I know it’s working in my heart.”

The roots of the story go back to the mid-’60s, as white families began to leave Central’s neighborhood, gradually opening the way for black and Hispanic families.

By the early 1990s, worship services that once attracted 200 or 250 dwindled to 30-all older white members who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave. Central was about to wink out.

At the same time, the Rev. Marshall Truehill, an energetic young black minister with a seminary doctorate, was leading a ministry called Faith in Action from one borrowed church to another.

Central was one of those churches. And in the early 1990s Central and Faith in Action began thinking about linking up. In a critical strategic move, the communities decided simply to live and worship together before confronting the formal issues of merger.

“There wasn’t hostility at first,” said Wheeler, the Sunday school supervisor and a member of Central for nearly 50 years. “But we didn’t know them, and they didn’t know us. It was a learning process. We had to change some preconceived ideas about them, and they had to change some ideas and hold that white people are pretty good, too.”

For a year and a half, the two congregations got to know each other and each other’s styles of worship. Truehill alternated preaching duty with the Rev. Walter Brown, a white faculty member at nearby New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary serving as temporary pastor. Both congregations began to adjust.

Services shortened up to a little more than an hour, instead of the luxuriant two-hour services black members had known, said Truehill.

“And I’ve never been a classic black preacher, not a whooper,” he said. “That’s been easier on the white members.”

At the same time, black members kept much of their joyous gospel music, to the delight of many Central members. “It’s much better,” said Viverito. “It has more feeling. You can move and clap your hands.”

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

For weeks they met, and weeks turned to months. Witherspoon, who feared she would lose too much joining a white congregation, began to feel more at ease.

“They’re more caring than I thought they’d be,” she said.

“I think what we have now is a sweet, gentle relationship between the peoples in our church,” said Wheeler. “There’s a real freedom, a lack of hesitancy about just embracing one another. It’s wonderful. I feel as close to Marshall as I have to any pastor in my life.”

After a year and a half of coexistence “the groups were so congenial, so blended with one another, that the logistics of the merger came a whole lot easier,” said Truehill.

Today First United is jointly led by Truehill and the Rev. Rod Kirby, a white former oilfield salesman Brown suggested as a permanent replacement before going off to a year’s sabbatical at Regents College in Vancouver.

The church’s decline has halted, even begun to reverse slowly. A typical service now includes 80 or 90 members, sometimes up to 120, Kirby said. A little more than half are black.

The evolution of the interracial congregation anticipated an historic moment in Southern Baptist history that occurred when the denomination celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1995. Delegates to its annual convention passed a resolution apologizing for the denomination’s past defense of slavery and recognizing that racism still exists within the church and its members.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

For all the good feeling at First United, Truehill and Kirby both say, First United’s members have only begun to probe the dividing power of race in their lives.

A poll on hot-button issues like affirmative action and the O.J. Simpson verdict would probably produce the same racial split within First United as among black and white people elsewhere, Kirby said.

Moreover, there’s still a reluctance among black and white members to face each other to begin the risky, painful conversations that might lead to deep understanding between two mutually wary cultures.

“There’s a feeling like, `We’re happy. What’s that got to do with us,”’said Kirby.

Even after more than a year of living together, “We’re certainly not yet mature in confronting racial issues,” said Truehill. “We’ve learned to be comfortable with each other, but how deep is the interaction?”

Truehill, for instance, wonders whether First United’s white members truly understand how black people viewed the Simpson trial-how, apart from the facts of his case, Simpson became for black people a kind of surrogate for every black man caught in a criminal justice system they see as endemically dangerous to blacks.

Do white people understand, he asks, that when a black man goes on trial, many blacks feel as if they are all on trial under the eyes of white people?

And do whites understand, asks Kirby, how deeply conservative blacks can be, fighting to hang onto their families and faith in a corrosive culture?

“This kind of talk has yet to go on to any great degree,” said Truehill.

Still, both seem astonished at what has happened at First United over the last two a half years.

And both men believe that the young, tentative effort at interracial trust signals a belief in a Gospel that seems more authentic, riskier, but ultimately more rewarding than the separate worship that characterizes the landscape of faith in America.

“Because of what I’ve been exposed to now, I know that’s not the best,” said Kirby. “It’s not wrong, but it’s not the bestâÂ?¦. Are we willing to settle for what’s comfortable and acceptable? Or are we willing to strive to do something that’s the best, but it’s going be hard, be difficult, uncomfortable, maybe sometimes painful?”

“If we practice inclusivity,” said Truehill, “we get a truer picture of what Jesus was all about, of what the Gospel was intended to be about, what God is about, what his purposes are.

“He’s about bringing people together.”

JC END NOLAN