c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

(UNDATED) In December 1955, Robert Graetz was an idealistic 27-year-old minister, five months into his first pastorate. Like most young pastors, he, his wife and two children were adjusting to a new church, a new town and a new environment.

But for the Graetz family, there was an additional complication: They were white, their congregation was black, and the town in which they had settled was Montgomery, Ala.

Thus was the stage set for Graetz’s role as the only white pastor involved in the Montgomery bus boycott. Considered the dawn of the modern civil rights movement, the year-long boycott by local blacks of the city’s segregated public transit system made household names of people like Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and Rosa Parks.

It also served to alienate Graetz and his family from Montgomery’s white community.”I got used to being called a `nigger lover,'”he said during a recent telephone interview.

Little wonder. Arriving in Montgomery in June 1955 as the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, he enraged many whites by choosing to live in the church’s parsonage in the black section of town.

Yet the response of the white citizenry to his choice of residence was nothing compared to their reaction in December of that year when he endorsed the bus boycott _ from the pulpit _ and began chauffeuring members of his congregation to and from work.

His home was bombed twice, as were the homes of King, Abernathy and others. Several black churches were bombed as well.

Forty years later, in the wake of a series of black church arsons, Graetz says that we still have not solved the basic social issue that paralyzes our nation. What he sees in the bombings is”an expression of racism, not by an organized group, but by a series of individuals.” The fact that most of the fires appear unrelated to each other makes addressing the problem”much harder to deal with, because you’re dealing with the underlying layer of racism that really exists within everybody.” In Graetz’s opinion, the copycat nature of the arsons means that firebombing is currently in vogue with racists.”It’s the thing to do,”he says.

Still, Graetz believes that today’s arsonists constitute only a small fraction of the white community. The same was true, he says, of Montgomery 40 years ago. Most whites, he says, are not actively involved in racism; they’re just not doing anything about it. As a result, the nation is”facing the same kind of inertia among whites now, as we did then.” Such inertia underscores the importance of actions taken recently by the Christian Coalition, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Council of Churches, and the American Jewish Committee. By publicly denouncing the arsons and raising funds to rebuild the burned sanctuaries, these disparate faith communities are presenting a much-needed united front to the secular world.

Yet, as Graetz suggests, public declarations and fund-raising efforts are important, but constitute only the first step toward racial reconciliation. Ultimately, bridges between the races must be built at the local level.

An article in the current issue of the Covenant Companion, the monthly journal of the Evangelical Covenant Church, provides a case in point. In”Meeting at the Waters,”Steve Duin, a member of a Covenant church in Portland, Ore., describes a worship service in which two racially disparate congregations in his community come together to celebrate their common faith through the sacrament of baptism.

The baptismal service was the culmination of a relationship that had been established by the pastors of the two churches eight years earlier. In coming together, one of the pastors tells those gathered,”We have a bond that transcends time and transcends distance. … We are joining our voices with Christians across the centuries. We are connecting with those who went through John in the river Jordan.” In other words, though their races are different, their faith is the same. Such was the message of Jesus to his disciples.”Love each other,”he says in the Gospel of John,”as I have loved you.” As we stand together in the ashes of ruined sanctuaries searching for an answer to the race problem, this kind of love between God’s people might be a good place to start.

MJP END ATCHISON