February

I know it's been a long time since I wrote anything and my fans are starving for more... (Mom)
but I haven't been too inspired in the day to day lately. Just gettin' stuff done.
I've just returned from the annual Amish Furniture expo - we visit with all the builders and I usually have about three pieces of pie in the course of 24 hours. I might post a few pictures later, but the Amish don't want their photos taken.

What I wanted to write about was how our church celebrates Black History month as a liturgical practice. Every church has two or three distinctives that make it a unique expression of the Body: at Reba, anti-racism is a calling that the people work with. Most of my life has been mostly white, and most folks with that type of background are reluctant to dive into anti-racist books/ talks/ ideas/ politics - or religion. But Reba is intentional about facing into the highly charged issues of race and justice.
What we did this year was to hear from different teachers about the Gospel and how it touches with racism. We remember that the people of God were exiled slaves for a long time, and once the Hebrews got their own land God told them to live like they were sojourners and to remember the days of oppression. Contemporary white Christians might be able to remember the heritage of the oppressed people of God and have a deep empathy and compassion for the African american culture.
I'm a little nervous to write all that, because I don't want to get people on the defensive... what comes next is just about our community here.

When Reba the community was started there was a group of Mennonite people working on the near west side in Chicago - where the poor, minority labor force lived. In the industrial revolution it was european (Greeks, Pols, Italians, Romanian...) and then after the depression there were more and more black and hispanic. So then there was this group of Mennonite folks who were called to serve among the poorest of the poor in the big city, so they went to this part of Chicago. This was about 1955, and they were white, and the people of the neighborhood were black. It was reverse integration at a difficult time in the country's history.
Those Mennonites became a part of our community a few years later. I have dinner with the same people. We have small group together. My kids stay at their houses.
I looked through a photo album from that time in the near west side neighborhood, and the faces are people I know. This connection to a people doing the right work at the right time is hard to spell out - but it matters a lot to me.

I heard one of those people say this week, "It occurred to me that it would be easier to change the kind of people I hung out with (and become like them) than to just decide to change by my own will power in the circumstance I was in." This was his explanation for why he decided to leave southern California in the mid 1950's.