Racial Justice and Faith in Wesley Conventicle

Ed Stephenson shares Wesley Conventicle’s journey from studying the history of religion in 1990 to engaging in racial justice in 2021.

The Wesley Conventicle grew from a conversation that I had one Sunday morning with Jan Shipps during a mid-services coffee in 1989. As we chatted, I expressed the fact that I had helped with a previously long-running group called The Experiment in Practical Christianity. Jan, being an opportunist, decided on the spot that we should start a conversation and invite others to join. The class has run continuously since 1990.

In the early days, topics were drawn mostly from Jan’s extensive experience in religion, as she taught history and religious studies at IUPUI and was one of the country’s best authorities on Mormons (who was not herself a Mormon). We talked about the nature of religion, the history of religious movements in America, how religion interacts with social issues (or doesn’t), and the trends in how people chose to be a part of religious groups. Especially useful was a study by James Fowler called Stages of Faith. His characterizations of the different ways that people live out their faith resonated with the group and seemed to apply particularly well to what we were living and experiencing personally. This led to a serious consideration of spiritual experience and how to characterize it. Authors such as Jonathan Sacks (Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence) and Philip Jenkins (Crucible of Faith) were recently helpful in understanding modern tribalism and the original of the conceptual spiritual universe respectively.

When the virus came, the class stopped meeting. After the second surge started in the spring of 2020, I decided that for class to continue, I would need to restart it online. We started in mid-June, a few short weeks after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. There was a growing awareness in America about police brutality. Black Lives Matter demonstrations were spreading around the world. I was aware that a new book by Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, was just coming out. It dealt with the history of racism in America, and in particular, looked sociologically at the patterns of racism and white supremacy. His surveys found that white supremacists and Protestant church members were often the same people. We needed to understand this better, so we started.

In the meantime, Dr. Betty Hart was guiding many church members through Drew G. I. Hart’s book, Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism. I borrowed from both of these studies to expand the Conventicle conversation. Along the way, there were many incidental single class discussions based on articles drawn from the news, Christian Century, and other sources on a variety of topics. Most recently, we have discussed The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Having grown up in Birmingham, AL, I was personally acquainted with some of the modern history and its religious impact. This series for me has been a learning experience over the past year. Surprisingly, Alexander’s book has taught me the most. This is really the invisible systemic racism of the present day.

I think that at least some people in the Conventicle are ready to consider moving from education to engagement. So this is the right moment for some of us to gather around a new group known as the Inclusion Team. The Conventicle has always been an amorphous collection of individuals, and I would have to describe its role as a place where we can go to learn, ask serious questions, engage the best scholarship, and define the issues. It is a safe harbor, and I want to keep it that way. I don’t want to equate the Conventicle with only social justice. We are just at the beginning of this initiative, and I am waiting to see where it might go.

From Jones’ and Hart’s books, the first clear suggestion is that we on the Inclusion Team build a bridge between the Black and White communities and spend some time listening and learning from each other. That’s a role that we can define through the Inclusion Team. The second suggestion is that we enter into this new relationship with no agenda or plan for how to solve problems. Our role is to help and support, to walk beside and not in front. The long-term goal is to dismantle systemic racism. But this has a long history, and it is woven into the fabric of America. It is controversial and the road ahead is going to be bumpy. Perhaps we can find a piece that we here in Bloomington can address in a meaningful way. That’s where the Inclusion Team can start.

— Ed Stephenson, Wesley Conventicle