Say Their Names

by Curtis Bunn

  “That’s the nature of the times and that’s the nature of what it’s always been,” added Tometi. “I think about Bayard Rustin and James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, and just so many people who’ve come before us, who didn’t necessarily get their shine, maybe because of their queerness. Now we’re saying: ‘Yeah, let’s bring our full selves to the table, and all of that matters.’”

  One’s full self can be too much for some, whether you are an organizer, writer, or poet. “Within the Black community, or more so, within the Black church, many Black churches do not condone or necessarily support homosexuality or transgender people,” said the Reverend Dr. Keisha Agard, assistant pastor at Vanderveer Park United Methodist Church in Brooklyn, New York. “And it’s my belief and understanding that many of the people that do not go to church in this day and age are people that have been wounded or hurt by the church at some point, and not only just being hurt but being checked or challenged by the church.”

  One can point to the Black church’s initial slow and ambivalent response to the HIV/AIDs crisis when it was decimating the gay community and the prevailing line was: “Love the sinner, not the sin.” HIV/AIDS is still bedeviling African American communities, though not to the extent it once was. It is no longer a death sentence, given effective therapies, drug cocktails, and preventive measures. The church is more responsive, if not more tolerant, and does its part around raising awareness and providing some support for families afflicted with and affected by the disease, for which there is still no cure.

  “If we have a common goal, I don’t care where you come from, what you’re dealing with, because the reality is all of us come with stuff,” said the Reverend Agard. “We sometimes lose focus and we major in the minors and minor in the majors. And so we get to the point where we’re dealing with people that had AIDS, that pandemic, and instead of dealing with that reality, we were more concerned with homosexuality.”

  In the age of COVID-19, many are suffering physically, emotionally, and psychologically. But among the groups most hard hit are LGBTQ youth, who don’t always have the most supportive environments in the best of times. A report released in summer 2020 by the Trevor Project found that 68 percent had reported symptoms of anxiety disorder and 40 percent had contemplated suicide. Social distancing connected to the pandemic engendered limited access to mental health services, and if traditional organizations such as the Black church were unwilling to step up, young people, particularly African American LGBTQ youth, were the most at risk.

  “If an African American church, not the African American church, I don’t want to broad stroke this, but if an African American church is still struggling around sexuality and LGBTQ,” the Reverend Jacqueline Lewis said, “which by the way gets to biblical authority, gets to hermeneutics, gets to interpretation, if they’re struggling with gay, if they’re struggling with queer, if they’re still struggling about whether women can preach, come on, that is a huge handicap, a huge disability for Black churches to lead a movement that’s led by women and queer people. So that’s a theological problem. And it’s not the Black church, but many Black churches.”

  The Reverend Parker emphasized that the church is aging and “still stuck on who people love. They can’t understand that whether you’re LGBTQ, whether you’re trans, which is part of the LGBTQ [community], that there is still hatred in the form of policy and hatred in the form of brutality that still afflicts and affects the Black community. So, rather than seeing all people as God’s creation, the piety in them picks and chooses who is important, and in doing so, it has an impact on the broader community of people writ large called humanity. They can’t get out of their own way. So now what you’re left with is eighty-year-old and ninety-year-old Miss Johnson…sitting in the pews, not able to get out and do the footwork that’s important for social change…And I know this to be true in many churches, including mine: Where are the young people? They’re not here, and they’re not coming back. You dismissed who they loved. You dismissed how they lived. You dismissed everything except for the extension of your hand for their offering.”

  As an African American pastor of a sizable church—1,500 members, mixed congregation of about 45 percent Black and 40 percent white and Asian—the Reverend Lewis recognizes the “hugely odd animal that I’m in. Most of the multiracial churches in the country are led by white evangelicals.” The Reverend Lewis also acknowledges that too many churches, at the very least the large and mega churches, now focus on the gospel of prosperity and the attainment of personal wealth, which are not seen as part of Christ’s teachings and can turn people off. She mentioned the continuing work of the Reverend Barber, who has pastored Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, since 1993, and is co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.

  “Some of the things he talks about are what the church promotes on the grassroots level: the church that feeds people; tries to house folks,” said the Reverend Lewis. “But he talks a lot about the fact that lots of folks don’t talk about poverty anymore. A lot of folks are not connected to that kind of reality; sacrificial, collective uplift. We have gotten disconnected from social innovation, justice, right, and Black churches cannot be divorced from those realities, given who they are and what they are.”

  Many young people have moved on from traditional denominations to more progressive churches, or are eschewing church altogether for more tolerant, intimate communities of faith. Farrag emphasized, “There is a deep sense of hurt you can often feel from BLM activists. Relics of spiritual pain and abuse. Many of them were raised in traditional faiths and kicked out because some aspect of their identity didn’t fit.”

  But it’s not only homophobia, it’s sexism as well. As a female preacher, the Reverend Agard said she has had to come up against the “stained glass window” that limits the opportunities for women to lead and, by extension, maybe transform congregations.

  “When I was in seminary [at Howard University School of Divinity and the Alliance Theological Seminary in Nyack, New York], there were more females in my classes than there were males. I know in corporate America they talk about the ‘glass ceiling.’ But in the church community, which to many inside has become a corporation or business venture, many females often have to deal with the same thing. And let me say, it’s not only the men that question female leadership. Let’s be clear, it’s not just the brothers. I know that my biggest challenge has been from the females. It’s sad, women don’t necessarily always support women.”

  Believer

  If anyone ever exhibited the impassioned dedication to faith and the church, while embodying the things that the traditional church has been hostile to, it’s the Reverend Jasolyn Harris. Born and raised in San Diego, California, the bubbly and effusive millennial, whose speech is peppered with “like” and “kinda,” grew up in the church and is the kind of ride-or-die Christian the church yearns for. Her father had been a minister and pastor all of her life in the Black Missionary Baptist Church denomination, which she describes as being very conservative.

  “So, women can’t preach, women can’t pastor, women-can’t-even-stand-in-the-pulpit kinda conservative. Kinda, if-you’re-gay-you’re-going-to-hell conservative,” Harris said. “Just kinda your standard, what people think how right-wing Christianity is. However, I didn’t always know or understand that that was a bad thing growing up, so I really enjoyed church. I loved my dad and my mom, who were just like really good examples. And by good examples, I mean we saw them the same at church and at home. We never saw them being like different people. Although they had these really conservative views, they were still really like, they really believed in God, and there was some genuineness there that certainly came off to us as kids. It was truly an enjoyable experience for us growing up in the church.”

  When she was eight, her father got an opportunity to pastor a church in Stockton, California, and he relocated the family. In the beginning it was a struggle since the congregation was
small, around thirty people, recalled Harris. But within five years the congregation had swelled to several hundred, and it became one of the bigger churches in the small central valley city.

  “It was kinda a big deal,” she said. Then in an instant, one Sunday, her world imploded. As the family sat in church, a bombshell was detonated. “One day he [her father] got up in front of the congregation and was just like, yo, ‘I’m divorcing my wife’ and it was this whole announcement and everybody was devastated. It was really dramatic. I have three brothers, that I’m really, really close to. I’m the third born and the only girl. And so, I just really was impacted by the way he went about letting us know.”

  It was not just that one revelation that rocked her world, it was subsequent decisions made by her father that completely unmoored her family. Without warning, soon after the divorce, her father moved to Portland, Oregon. One day he was in the house, then the divorce, and then he was living in another state. “We were all like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Three months into it, my mom finds out he cheated with a lady in the church and he had moved to Portland with her and her kids.”

  It was a challenging time for the family, and her mother was alone, trying to raise four children with no financial support. Her mother plunged into extreme depression once she became a single parent. What sustained them all was their faith, and even though it was the site of the family’s most severe traumas, they continued to attend the same church. “For a while we were still going to the same church that my dad left, but that was traumatizing for my mom, so we tried different churches. But it still didn’t work.”

  Her father’s actions shook her foundation and haunted her for years through her teens, and that nightmare accompanied her when she left for college, at Fresno State, where she found herself questioning why she was even still attending church.

  “Why am I going? What is this about? I was lost, but also, I kept going because it was something that I did,” Harris said. “And then I was introduced to another group of people who were Christians, who were talking about, ‘There’s more to the Bible than going to church on Sundays. Church is about justice work and looking out for the poor.’ That really resonated with me. I had never heard that before. I got involved in that ministry.”

  Then, at nineteen, she had what she termed a “surreal” experience. She was walking from a classroom to her dormitory and got this sense that “I was called to ministry. Again, I’m nineteen. I’m like, huh? Nothing like this has ever happened. I didn’t know what it was and basically, I just kept walking. I kept living my life, but remembering that moment and not knowing what it meant. Again, this is in the context that I grew up in a Black Baptist church where women weren’t able to be ministers. But I continue to be involved in this urban ministry.”

  The call to preach the gospel is not to be taken lightly. It is not simply a desire or aspiration to do something, like, say, become a doctor. The famed Welsh minister Martyn Lloyd-Jones admonished that it is an obsession that grips one’s soul. It’s not a fly-by-night experience or a passing fancy. “You do your utmost to push back and to rid yourself of this disturbance in your spirit which comes in these various ways,” said Lloyd-Jones. “But you reach the point when you cannot do so any longer. It almost becomes an obsession, and so overwhelming that in the end you say, ‘I can do nothing else, I cannot resist any longer.’”

  When she graduated from college, Reverend Harris found herself at one of many crossroads that we all encounter. What to do next? Which path to take? How do I know that the choice I make will be the right one? She did have options: go to graduate school and study social work or stay at her job serving underprivileged children. Still living in Fresno, she ran a tutoring program and would take the mostly inner-city and underprivileged children on trips to Yosemite National Park.

  “These kids had never been to Yosemite, and it was forty minutes from where they lived. I said, ‘We got to get them here.’ I got a bus and we ended up there. I was really happy, but something inside me said, ‘At least apply for graduate school.’”

  She did not get into Fresno State or San Francisco State, so she thought that was a sign from God to continue working with kids. Then one day she received a letter in the mail from San Francisco State stating that she was still in the running. Two weeks later, she got an acceptance letter, and with it the realization that she would have to move north to the Bay area.

  It took her over a year to find her spiritual footing and a welcoming church community. Her younger brother, Moses, sixteen months her junior, moved to Oakland a year after she did, and within a week, he called her and said, “‘Jas, I found us a church!’ We went to The Way and that was that; we’ve never left. The Way just felt like home.”

  The Way Christian Center, a West Berkeley holistic ministry founded by Pastor Michael McBride, known as Pastor Mike, has been a huge influence on Harris. “Pastor Mike was just such a gem from the moment I met him…super empowering and looking over my life, and always saying, ‘Let me know when you’re ready to get into leadership’ and really encouraging me. I was like, ‘What is this guy talking about?’”

  What McBride pushed is activism and fostering leadership of young people. His mantra is “My pulpit is wherever the people gather, and my parish is the neighborhood.” His greatest area of concern is gun violence that plagues so many cities and specifically communities of color, and he co-founded the National Black and Brown Gun Violence Prevention Consortium.

  “At both the leadership and participation level, many of the young people that I know didn’t find their ‘people,’ whether they were Christian or Muslim,” said the Reverend McBride, who had spent time pastoring in Ferguson, Missouri. “Now, they just find a home or primarily identify being with a movement, work, not necessarily religious work. So, I do think that the particular take around leadership models is the necessary draw-out.”

  The more he guided Harris, the more that “calling” at nineteen weighed on her. It became more intense the more she got involved with The Way. As much as she resisted, it was clear to her that her destiny lay in ministry, and she finally decided to attend seminary after completing her graduate degree from San Francisco State University in social work.

  “I had a lot of barriers around me being a woman in leadership, given the way I was raised and what theologically I was exposed to,” Harris explained. “But if I was going to do this, I wanted to be responsible and ethical. And my two mentors both went to Duke [University’s Divinity School]. So, I applied, and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I actually got in. Then I freaked out! ‘I can’t do this; I can’t move to North Carolina!’”

  She deferred her enrollment for a year and taught sociology at Diablo Valley College while also studying for her LSCW exam to be a licensed therapist in California, which she would go on to pass. In 2016, she finally matriculated at Duke. Yet, throughout her entire journey, she dealt with the familial breach orchestrated by her father and a lifelong struggle with her weight.

  “I’m a plus-sized person, but a little while after graduate school I ended up losing about a hundred twenty-three pounds. I became this thing I never thought I would be. And all my life I was kind of obsessed around if I’m small, that’s going to be the answer to all of my problems. Once I’m small, then this. Once I’m small, then that. I finally got small, like a size four, and life still sucked. Wait, this really sucks!

  “I was always trying to be small and not confident in who I was. I thought everything was going to be different, but it wasn’t, and in a year’s time, I gained all the weight back before starting seminary school the next month,” she added. Each month she gained twelve to fourteen pounds back, she said, and each month she fell deeper and deeper into depression.

  “In my mind, I got to the point of ‘If I gain all the weight back, if I get fat again, there’s no point in living.’ That’s how much I despised being fat. I thought it was the end of the world.”

  Compounding all of this, Harris questioned her
sexuality. “I identified as straight most of my life, but since I was twelve there was something there, some sort of attraction to women. But it was not a viable thing for the community I grew up in, my family and my church community. Also, my eldest brother is queer; he’s a gay man, and I saw what his life was like and how he was treated, and subconsciously I was like, ‘No. I’m going to keep doing this thing over here because it works for me.’

  “I repressed and denied for as long as I could, but as I got older, this was more and more on my mind, and [I] felt really ashamed about it and didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. Mind you, at this point, I was also like an affirming person. I wanted to become a minister. I wanted to marry queer people. But when it came to me, I was just like, ‘I cannot be this as well as a Black, fat, queer woman.’ I’m like, ‘Jesus! Please don’t let that be my story. That sounds so heavy and so difficult.’ My life is already so difficult as a big, Black woman living in the world. I didn’t want to add another thing.”

  Everything descended on her: weight gain, wrestling with sexuality, starting seminary, being away from her beloved family on the West Coast, a pause on her career. But the time was also transformational in so many ways as she addressed some of those core theological beliefs that confronted her.

  “I was able to address them and be freed from them,” she said. “I was able to understand all the complexities of how this particular faith was so colonized, so shaped by white, Western Christianity, like learning about queer theology, liberation theology, womynism, which is Black woman theology, all these other ways that people were thinking about God in an academic and scholarly way. It was really transformational.”