Breaking Down Walls

Karen Johnson

I don't think I'll ever forget it.  In September, 2007, Glen Kehrein installed a stove in my apartment.  Glen and his wife Lonni were my landlords.  They were also my heroes.  For over 30 years, Glen had been living out a life committed to racial reconciliation, which caused him (a white man) to move to Chicago’s Austin community (which had just flipped from white to black in 1973), and to found a non-profit called Circle Urban Ministries.  In his years of service, Glen, a white evangelical Christian, addressed racism and its effects at the personal and structural level - building friendships and rehabbing hundreds of apartments, partnering with a charter school, providing wrap-around educational services for neighborhood children, and offering GED classes, among a myriad of other endeavors.  With Raleigh Washington, a black pastor who had served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army, Glen wrote a book called Breaking Down Walls, which offered a model for racial reconciliation based on their experiences.  Together, Glen and Raleigh had built a unique partnership that made Raleigh’s church, Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church, deeply committed to racial reconciliation.  By the time I came to Rock, Raleigh had been gone for nearly 10 years, having taken a position at Promise Keepers.   

In a region as geographically segregated as Chicago’s, interracial, religious spaces continue to matter for breaking down walls between people and working toward racial justice.  But how effective are these places?  How effective has Rock Church been?

  

Four and a half years later, on a Saturday in November, I sat in a packed gym, participating in Glen's home-going service.  Glen had lost a year-long fight with colon cancer, and my life – and the lives of so many others – would be less rich without Glen (for more on Glen, go here and here).

Recently, I’ve been doing a little research about the history of Rock Church and Circle Urban Ministries for a conference at the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation.  My presentation will consider Protestant and Catholic approaches to reconciliation and the value of interracial, religious spaces.  Rock Church, which I have attended for the past 6 years, is my Protestant example. I have been conducting oral history interviews and reading published material, including Glen's and Raleigh's Breaking Down Walls.

In light of the critique of white evangelicals Emerson and Smith offer in Divided by Faith, Glen's and Raleigh's book Breaking Down Walls fall short.  Emerson and Smith argue,

Although their faith directs them in many powerful ways, white American evangelicals, unless burdened by an individual ‘calling,’ assume that faith does not ask them to change the material aspects of their lives for this cause.  Given their aversion to discomfort (a universal human trait) and cultural tools, they offer “Christian” solutions such as asking forgiveness, converting people to Christ, and forming cross-race friendships (130). 

Armed with this knowledge, I reread Breaking Down Walls expecting to see Glen and Raleigh call all white Christians to make substantial sacrifices, beyond forming interracial friendships.  Their call to sacrifice, however, was limited. 

In their own lives and their ministry, for sure, Glen and Raleigh sacrificed and the solutions that they lived out addressed structural racism.  For instance, they did promote interracial congregations, which Emerson and Smith lay out as a key solution for promoting racial justice, especially among white evangelicals because it prevents them from being isolated racially.  Raleigh and Glen wrote,

The American church today doesn't like to be uncomfortable.  It's part of the seduction of the age to equate our comfort level with God's blessing, unlike fellow believers in China and the former Soviet Union.  The more comfortable things are, the more we feel blessed.  White and black churches in the same city are comfortable in their sameness, and because of that comfort level, there is no felt urgency to cross the barriers that divide us (180).

In addition, through the non-profit Glen founded, white and black Christians have worked together to promote institutional, political, and structural change.

But in the end, while Glen and Raleigh may have addressed structural issues in their own lives, they did not challenge white evangelicals to do so in the book.  They made the call to racial reconciliation for white evangelicals (who, with the Moody Press imprint, were the main audience for the book) easy. Like being called to evangelism, all Christians are called to reconciliation, Glen and Raleigh argued.  Most Christians can fulfill that call by forming a cross-racial friendship, they suggest, and Breaking Down Walls offers a great road map for doing so.  But Glen and Raleigh seemed to let most Christians - white and black - off the hook.  They suggested that only some people, and hopefully a growing number of those with a special call, should sacrifice by moving into a poor, black neighborhood for the cause of reconciliation: "Beyond the general call to be ambassadors of reconciliation, some of us will receive God's specific call to make racial reconciliation a primary ministry focus" (210).  Those with the special call will do radical things.  The rest can be radical in their own way, by forming personal relationships across racial lines.
  
As Paul Harvey put it in a blog post a while back, focusing only on "the personal can allow the powerful to ignore the structural."