Gut-Check; Soul-Check

Hot town; summer in the city…go lyrics from a golden oldie I still enjoy. Sad to say urban ministry hasn’t kept pace with music’s evolution. What’s a city church to be and to do at a time and place when the chief of police sends five-page memos to the city’s pastors, pleading with them to attend a meeting?

I’m still a fan of a, now, ten-year old article recommending that church folk establish new theologies of creation, redemption, teaching, worship – the hole nine yards - for post-modern metropolitan centers. These should take social realities into account, without using mono-vision. Rather, church folk must use both the lenses of social science and theological science in tandem to ensure faith claims are relevant (not trendy) and concrete (not more blue ribbon commissions), as they articulate the Good News of Jesus Christ. His proclamation was nothing if it wasn’t both concrete and relevant.

Reworking faith and church at this level would include taking into account the very evident urban / suburban apartheid where fear, as well as a variety of –isms, meet. But where to begin.

Let’s start with an old book. Recommended to me, by a brilliant scholar and man with a deep, contemporary, Christian faith, Dr. Stephen G. Ray, Associate Professor and Director of the Urban Theological Institute at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, is Howard Thurman’s, Jesus and the Disinherited.

In his forward, Dr. Vincent Harding highlights the maladies of soul and spirit for which Thurman’s spirituality is the remedy. These inner demons are: fear, hypocrisy and hatred. While Thurman’s insights predate both the civil rights movement, and our own postindustrial experience, those of us whom these demons still hound - and we are legion – still require the divine grace, as well as the determination of will, to acquire the “profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity.”

Dr. Harding also suggests that contemporary experiences of what Thurman addressed are detailed in a work entitled, Testimony. Published in 1994, the book is a collection of essays and poetry written by some forty young African American writers. Natasha Tarpley edits the piece.

If you’re at all feeling like your back is against the wall, (Thurman’s phrase) find someone with whom you might read and discuss Jesus and the Disinherited. It looks to be a way cool gut- and soul-check for would-be brave believers at the edge of a looming hot summer.