Pastor to the Community

I decided that serving the community was one of my core values.
—David Galloway

Strangely, I felt that there was hope for healing the divisions in my city when I saw what didn’t happen after Annie Ray Dixon was killed in the summer of 1992.

Mrs. Dixon was an eighty-four-year-old grandmother, a double amputee, and African-American. A botched drug raid went to the wrong house, and a white deputy busted through Annie’s bedroom door. Tragically, his gun went off and killed Mrs. Dixon as she lay in bed. The African-American community in Tyler, Texas, was outraged; the incident had the potential of blowing up the city.

I was about two hundred miles away in Houston when Mrs. Dixon was killed. Some fellow members of a citizens’ action group, Tyler Together, phoned me and asked if I could intervene and keep the peace.

Our first stop was the sheriff’s office; he was considering limiting the investigation to his internal affairs department. But we convinced him that such a limited approach would only increase the outrage and fuel the rumors of cover-up. He wisely decided to forgo an internal investigation and called in federal investigators instead. Adding to the frustration of the black community, though, the deputy was not indicted for misconduct, and he returned to the streets on active duty.

Then the NAACP called for a march and rally in Tyler to dramatize the racial situation there. Responding, the Ku Klux Klan announced a simultaneous counterdemonstration and filed for a parade permit around the courthouse square. Fans of writer John Grisham will see remarkable similarities in A Time to Kill, which chronicled a fictitious confrontation between the NAACP and the KKK in a Southern town.

But this wasn’t fiction. My fear of racial violence was heightened by the anger I heard as I visited both sides. The national news media descended on Tyler, with satellite trucks ready to broadcast any violence that might ensue. City fathers were up in arms about the image being projected of Tyler, a town known as the “rose capital of the world.” That August weekend was so tense it felt as if the city would explode.

Miraculously, the city kept its composure; both demonstrations took place peacefully. Through the whole affair, there was not one incident of violence.

Part of the reason, I believe, was the prayer of committed Christians. Another was the work done before the crisis erupted. Several leaders in the community had worked together to address the racial tension, which allowed a space for negotiation in the squeeze of confrontation.

My role in this crisis comes out of my philosophy of ministry. In the Episcopal tradition, the community is an extension of my parish. It’s not enough to have a happy church if it’s insulated from the community. Part of my pastoral role, I’ve determined, is leading our church to serve our community. Helping to heal the surrounding community is what I call “city therapy.” It’s a challenging vocation but ultimately rewarding. Here are five principles I have learned about making a difference where you live.

Loving the community

The first and most important principle in pastoring your community is to love it. When I came to Tyler in 1990, I wasn’t sure I even liked the town. East Texas is the antithesis of everything in my hometown of Atlanta. I grew up in a family with a long history of civil rights involvement in a city where race was constantly on the public agenda. Tyler, by contrast, was virtually in denial about the issue of racism.

A colleague, Ray Bakke, author of The Urban Christian, put my call to Tyler in perspective. The most important element in changing a community, he told me, is to love it. I began to pray every morning that God would give me a heart for Tyler. “I don’t think you can make me like it,” I told God, “but maybe you can help me love it.”

In time, God gave me a passionate love for Tyler. That inexplicable love helped me to decide that really serving the community—to help change it, to help heal it—would be one of my high priorities. To put it in terms Stephen Covey used in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I decided that serving the community was one of my core values.

Understanding the history

The second key to pastoring your community is to understand it. I began thinking of Tyler in the therapeutic terms I had learned in marriage and family therapy. I had studied systems theory (for example, how individuals operate within a family) in graduate school and decided to apply it to the church and city to assist me in diagnosing and treating the problems.

In individual therapy, you compile a history of the factors that formed the person into who he or she is. The same is true with a city. I began to study the history of our community.

In the 1930s, when the rest of the nation was fighting the Great Depression, Tyler was thriving from the east Texas oil boom. There’s a monument to that prosperity: a park donated by Sears & Roebuck, given to the city because Tyler was the only place the store chain turned a profit during the Depression.

The townspeople grew accustomed to living well. Most of the townspeople, that is. Like many communities, Tyler exists in two parts. Mostly African-American Baptists live in north Tyler; white, upper-middle-class Protestants live in the south. For most of its history after the Civil War, Tyler lived by an unspoken code: the African-Americans would continue to depend on the whites for their jobs and opportunities, and, in return, keep quiet. It was a modified plantation mentality, but with so much money to go around, everyone benefited to some degree.

My diagnosis grew out of a conviction that every city has its peculiar sin; Tyler’s is comfort. The oil bust of the 1980s changed much of that, however. The white community had trouble adjusting to the economic problems, and the African-Americans began to realize that if they were to make any economic and political gains, they would have to change their approach to life in the city.

Refocusing the church

Once you love and understand the community, it’s essential to help the church look outward. How can your church open itself to the community?

Our church wasn’t known for that. Christ Episcopal Church was a good parish but had a reputation as a country-club church. I joked that worshipers came for spiritual hors d’oeuvres before having lunch at the club.

I decided to find out what Tyler thought of the church. Within a week of moving to Tyler, I went downtown and to the mall, without my clerical collar. I interviewed the first twenty-five people I met in each place. “Tell me what you know about Christ Episcopal Church,” I said. Half the people didn’t even know there was a Christ Episcopal Church; the other half said it was a church of rich people.

“Would you feel comfortable there?” I asked.

No one said he or she would.

I reported my findings to the vestry [church board]. “How does it make you feel,” I asked, “that people either don’t know you’re here or think you’re a bunch of country-club people who are not welcoming?”

Such an image disturbed them, but we were not sure how to transform that perception within the community. “In what ways could we reach out to the community,” I asked, “that would reflect who we are as Christ Church?”

We divided the vestry into groups of three to brainstorm for an hour. The first ideas were pretty unimaginative and completely out of character for the church—knocking on doors, for example.

We broke into triads again for another hour.

When we came back together, one of the oldest and least-likely candidates for trying fresh approaches said, “Why don’t we reach out to people through television?” The idea was intriguing, but still we faced the tough issue of how.

Two days later I got a phone call from a church member who works for the local NBC affiliate in Tyler.

“We’re about to do this thing called ‘Discover America,'” she said, “a yearlong promotion tied to the Olympics and the five-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America.” The station wanted four blue-chip sponsors. It already had signed Southwestern Bell and McDonald’s.

“We have one opening,” the member told me. “And I was thinking you might want it.”

After talking with the staff and looking at the budget, we decided to be a sponsor. The logos appeared almost every hour for a year—McDonald’s, Southwestern Bell, and the Chi-Rho from Christ Episcopal Church. We also began “Episcopal Minutes,” thirty-second spots during the ten o’clock news on Sunday and Wednesday nights. I would simply talk to people on the air, introducing them to Christ Church in a nonthreatening way.

“Are you looking for a church,” I might say, “where you don’t have to check your mind at the door? At Christ Church we not only tolerate questions—we enjoy them. Come join us in your search for your faith.”

Our church got more mileage out of that opportunity than anything else we did. It created openness within the church to people in the community. The short spots also established a positive image of the church crucial for us to proceed with our task of making a difference in the community.

Taking action

Ultimately, it came time to take action, to lead the church to serve the community in some tangible way. In our situation, that began in the fall of 1991, when I helped launch Tyler Together, a group of concerned citizens with a common goal: making Tyler a better place to live. Eventually we concentrated on five issues: health care, regional identity, education, recreation, and—the hottest of the bunch—race.

The issues of race were hot because they hadn’t been publicly discussed before. So Tyler Together sponsored a yearlong series of public forums where Tyler’s citizens could talk about their experiences of discrimination and racism.

A wide variety of people attended the forums. We intentionally held them in various parts of the city—at the predominantly African-American high school on the north side, at a predominantly white high school in the south. We held a forum at a large white Baptist church and another at Christ Church. We also sponsored one forum at Texas College, an African-American teacher college.

In addition, we worked hard to involve city officials. We wanted them to listen to the pain of the community, a pain many denied was present. One city official, in a telling interview with a major newspaper said, “Tyler does not have a racial problem.”

In twelve-step language, many in the city had to stand up and say, “Hi, I’m Tyler, Texas, and I have a racial problem.” As they say, this is the first step to recovery. The forums, at least the first few, were a hot media item, complete with remote broadcasts from the town meeting sites. The coverage provided a lot of exposure to the racial problems African-Americans felt, resulting in some positive feeling in the black community that access to influence was finally beginning to be opened to them. However, many people in the white community wondered whether Tyler Together was stirring up problems.

Meanwhile, many people in the African-American community were skeptical that anything positive would result. But the value of the forums was proven the next spring, when the Rodney King verdicts came down and Los Angeles erupted. Suddenly, race was the big national issue. We were already doing something about it: Tyler Together had been proactive.

Then Annie Ray Dixon was shot. Her death became the focal point for a lot of the rage seething in the African-American community. But because we had organized those town meetings, we were able to defuse, in a positive way, much of the anger. Later, in fact, a biracial coalition prompted the city’s educational board to move to single-member districts that promoted racial representation on the school board.

There was resistance, of course. We were involved in the politics of race, after all. Some resistance came from white families who no longer held as much economic or political clout and who feared a loss of control. But the big surprise to me was the reaction that came from some people in the African-American community, who could not see that each sector of the community would need to be responsible for its future.

Developing leaders

Whatever action you take to pastor your community must include developing strong, capable leaders.

About two years ago I started Leadership Foundation to train minorities in leadership skills; financing came from an agency called the Communities Foundation of Texas. The classes meet at the Christ Church building, with about thirty people in each yearlong program. I lead some of the training, but my main job is to interest other people in committing themselves to one Saturday per month for a year. We bring in top trainers from around the country, people who consult for IBM, Texas Instruments, and other companies.

We start by describing the personality of a community leader. We also run the Myers-Briggs type indicator, to show trainees what they bring to the task of leadership. We teach communication skills. Then we move to a practical session, “Running an Effective Meeting.” Many people come with passion about community issues but don’t possess the skills to run a meeting. We also help people with conflict resolution, change management, and organizational skills. However, the greatest value of the training is that we awaken people to their power to influence their community.

Waking up

It’s easy for us in pastoral leadership to limit our focus to the pressing problems inside our parish. But our communities need us, and we can make a difference in them.

When the NAACP scheduled its rally after Annie Ray Dixon’s death, I was the only white person asked to speak. While I knew that my speaking would anger some in the city, even my parishioners, I knew that it was an opportunity for a prophetic word to our community to imagine a city respectful of all of God’s children.

In crafting my words, I felt prompted to borrow a metaphor from the last sermon Martin Luther King, Jr., preached—at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Dr. King used the image of ringing alarm clocks to talk about the nation’s need to wake up. In my speech, I talked about alarm clocks, too, and added something new: snooze alarms.

“You set the clock,” I said, “and the clock tells you when to get up. But when the alarm goes off, it’s cold, and you don’t want to get up. You want to slap that alarm and shut it off. Tyler has been doing that in various ways throughout its history. The alarm clock’s going off, saying, ‘Wake up, Tyler.’ And we’ve slapped it and said, ‘Just a few more decades.’

“But now the time has come for Tyler to wake up. The alarm has sounded, and it is time for us to get up, to take action, to enter a new day together.”

That rally was a tense reminder of how much reconciliation remains to be accomplished in Tyler. But the black and white community joining for the common good in Tyler Together served as a sign that healing had begun.