2060 Conscience and Complicity: Confessions of the Liberal Ministry
Urban Church Coalition

Speaker: Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs

Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs "Too often the stories we tell are what we want to believe about who we are, rather than the truth of who we actually are," said the Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs in the annual Jenkin Lloyd Jones Lecture. A founder of the Urban Church Coalition, Eller-Isaacs served for eighteen years as minister of our congregation in Oakland, California (fourteen years with his wife, the Rev. Janne Eller-Isaacs) before becoming co-minister with Janne of Unity Church-Unitarian, in St. Paul Minnesota. Sponsored by the Urban Church Coalition, this lecture honors Jones, a Unitarian minister and activist for social change. Through an exploration of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, Eller-Isaacs looked at how liberals, and Unitarian Universalists in particular, often live at the intersection of complicity and conscience. Our consciences and beliefs have us working for the good of the world, but sometimes through our lack of vision and attention, we actually are complicit in continuing the very actions and thoughts we are striving to change. And we are closer to the center politically, and more middle class with greater access to power than we wish to believe. In the 1920s and 1930s, we relinquished our place among those with access to power, and are now too content to define ourselves on the margin. Yet the good news, said Eller-Isaacs, is that we can reclaim that power and use it to better ends. He cited the work of the congregation in Oakland in this regard. When he went there in 1982 as the first urban extension minister, not only did the congregation grow, but they did that partially through their commitment to community partnerships, and also through a vibrant worship life open to the spirit. It was through listening to and learning from neighbors that they never knew before that the congregation took on a special spirit. It is through the quality of attention that some call prayer, and through daily practice and cleaving to worship that Eller-Isaacs said congregations can, and have, found a new vitality for work in a community. He wants churches to be places where we speak truth to power, rather than imagine ourselves as peripheral and powerless. That sense of powerlessness takes us off the hook, and removes a sense of responsibility. Yet, Eller-Isaacs said, we do speak truth to power, and more powerfully than we or they admit. It is time to stop the complicity with the very forces we are called to stand against. Our self-deception drives away the very people we need the most. It was not until the Rev. John Wolfe, then a minister in Tulsa, said that it was time for the white community to repent the Tulsa riots, that a white man called for collective repentance. Now the Rev. Marlin Lavanhar continues that work in Tulsa by working for restitution for the victims. The funds available for restitution contain a $25,000 donation from the UUA. The UUA and the Tulsa congregations have been some of the partners restoring the Greenwood Cultural Center, located at the center of the riot site, to vibrant health. However halting, however hesitant and under funded, Eller-Isaacs said, we have plunged our hands into the nation’s wound, and he prays that we will not turn again, no matter how it hurts.

Rev. Yielbonzie Charles Johnson The Rev. Yielbonzie Charles Johnson, Acting Director of the UU Urban Ministry, and former founding minister of the Church of the Restoration and former intern in the Oakland congregation, was one of the respondents to Eller-Isaacs presentation. He stated that the Tulsa Race War, and the persistence not to deal with it showed the segregation of memory that exists. The white community rehearsed one oral memory, and the Black community told another story, and they never got together. He shared with us that there is great need to desegregate our memories. Johnson reminded us that Tulsa was Indian territory before oil was discovered. It was also a slave state, too, and there was racial mixing and racial trauma in Tulsa’s history. Settled by natives, at one point African Americans was the second highest population. Johnson was brought up in an all Black community, and it was to this community to which he returned in 1987 to found the Church of the Restoration. Yet the media that heralded his return was the same media that had been implicated in the race war. Johnson was also asked by his congregation not to preach about the race war. Yet the story needs to be told of the African American veterans of World War I who took up their weapons, unwilling to stand oppression without counter violence. In response to words of W.E.B. DuBois, they acted against those who would act against them. In the race war, somewhere between eight and 300 people were killed, and there are no marked graves for them, so we literally do not know how many were killed. Yet also, since the Race War, no other Black person was lynched in Tulsa. Johnson ended by leading the attendees in a moment of remembrance for those who were killed.

Rev. Lindi Ramsden The Rev. Lindi Ramsden, minister of the First Unitarian Church of San Jose, and a former intern in the Oakland congregation, was the second respondent. She spoke about how there are a variety of stories that we need to hear. We need, like the blindfolded men and the elephant, to get another sense of the truth. Ramsden said that the reaction of the Chileans in her congregation to the violence of September 11th was different than the non-Chileans, for they remember that as the day that Allende was overthrown. Those in the congregation from the US did not want to know about this, and the Chileans in the congregation once again felt that "you never get it." Trying to build bridges between these two is very difficult. In response to the concept of not owning the power we have, Ramsden quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. King said that love without power is anemic and sentimental. Ramsden spoke of the ambivalent relationship to power that exists in our UU movement. There is a way that we are powerless as individuals, and that we live within the power of the lie that so much has to deal with individualism. We suffer from lack of time to have a history, to know our own history, to be with each other, as well as share and desegregate our memories. Urban congregations have the opportunity to try to create the conversations at the intersection of conscience and complicity. It is not an easy path, and they are learning much about how to put this conversation together. Ramsden also said that it is important that we do not tell ourselves fairy tales, but the dynamics of power and complicity do not lie neatly along racial or economic lines. There are more commonalities than we acknowledge, and we can make connections across the lines that we draw. Reporter Lisa Presley

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