In African-American churches across the country, including in Toledo, services on Sunday had the focus that black lives matter. Congregants wore black in a demonstration of solidarity during a time when demonstrations have been held to protest nonindictments of police involved in killing black men, and they wore black to mourn the lives lost. Many churches prayed for the men in their congregations.
The top bishops of several denominations, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church, AME Zion, Christian Methodist Episcopal, Church of God in Christ, and other faith traditions joined in declaring that Sunday’s worship in most of their churches would be on the topic that black lives matter. Local congregations of other denominations took part as well.
In Toledo, Center of Hope Community Baptist Church had “Black Lives Matter” on its sign. Congregants of Collingwood Seventh Day Adventist Temple wore black for their service Saturday.
At St. Paul AME Zion Church, the Rev. Dwight Gutridge preached Sunday on “signs, symptoms, and signals” that say “don’t ignore the warning [of] a bigger issue for us, that the lives of black males may not be as valuable as we believe” in American society. After the sermon, all men in the congregation were called to the altar to be prayed for, and an earlier prayer spoken by the Rev. James Wilson included petitions for victims of racism, for “young men here in this community, even here, where we are going through this,” for people involved in peaceful protests, and for oppressors.
Pastor Gutridge spoke about “raising a standard,” he said after the service. “We understand how serious this moment and this matter is.” He said the church is not the center of the community, as it once was, and “we need to at least try looking at ways to get that back.”
In his 36-minute sermon, the pastor made a connection between events today and a part of the biblical Christmas story, when Joseph was told in a dream to take Mary and the baby Jesus to Egypt at a time when King Herod ordered the killing of boys to eliminate the possibility one might rise to be a king.
“It almost sounds vaguely familiar to me,” he preached. “Males of a certain age, of a particular race, in low-income areas who look like they are a threat would be targeted by the establishment and would be killed and — watch this — it’s legal.”
The pastor said that the “signs, symptoms, and signals” are saying “we’ve got to go in a different direction as an ebony people in what we believe about education. High school’s not good enough anymore.”
Direction must change “in how we use our finances,” he said. “We spend it in places that continue to try and oppress us.”
And, Pastor Gutridge said, “We’ve got to go in a different direction in how we raise our children. We must not allow them to make excuses for their mediocrity because of the color of their skin. We must insist on excellence from our children.”
Earlier in the sermon he said, “We are going to have to discipline and correct our sons before they get in those streets and are disciplined by the wrong one, and they end up in a news story gone wrong, which will result in marching and protest, folks lying in the street, and walking around with their hands up.”
After the service, he said that it was not easy to preach a sermon like that. “I’m not quick to jump to conclusions and to speak against certain things that are going on, because you never know all the variables. … It took me a minute, really, to decide that I want to deal with some things that I’m saying, and the other issue is that the Lord has allowed us to see some things, some warning signs, that if we ignore them we’re going to be in trouble, we really are. And I’m saying that [assuming] we’re not in trouble already, because anytime a 12-year-old boy [Tamir Rice] can be shot within two or three seconds of the police getting out of the car, that’s a problem.”
He said in the sermon that there is accountability. “Sometimes we bring incidents onto ourselves. … There’s some things that happened that we can’t ignore in Missouri [regarding Michael Brown and theft]. There’s some things we can’t ignore, that we need to deal with before we jump out there and make ourselves look bad.”
Keenen Fisher, 26, who was in the congregation at St. Paul, said it was important to have a service about racial awareness.
“Some of the stuff that I see on TV and the Internet going on really hits close to home,” Mr. Fisher said. “This happens to anybody — not particularly black lives; I mean, all lives matter, but like pastor said today, you want to make sure you raise kids right and following directions. Have them surrounded by positive African-American males. That means a lot.”
Mr. Fisher graduated from the University of Toledo in 2013 and works for the university.
Church member Roxie Vines said, “We should pray over our young people, not even young men, but our people, that they have the protection.”
The Rev. Darvin Adams, who gave scripture readings on “the Lord is my shepherd” and “Jesus is the good shepherd,” talked after the service about “the reality and the challenge that we come out of this building and take the ministry of Christ out into the highways and byways and get involved in the social, political, economic, spiritual, and educational roles of black people. It’s not just what we do here on Sunday morning.”
Coincidentally, the “Black Lives Matter” Sunday happened on the fifth anniversary of the police shooting of Linda Hicks, 62, an African-American woman in Toledo. Officer Diane Chandler was responding to a call Dec. 14. 2009, about a person with mental disabilities threatening people with scissors. She fired four shots when Ms. Hicks advanced toward her with the scissors. Officer Chandler was not indicted, and the shooting was reported by the police department’s firearms review board to be in self-defense.
Contact TK Barger @ tkbarger@theblade.com, 419-724-6278 or on Twitter @TK_Barger.
First Published December 15, 2014, 5:00 a.m.
