Just Discipleship

When a white college student named Jim Bullock and a Black college student named Joe Purdy tried to attend Memphis’s Second Presbyterian Church on Palm Sunday in 1964, it was the church’s commitment to segregation that inspired church leaders to physically block their way. Bullock and Purdy’s commitment to justice inspired them to kneel on the front steps and pray in response.

That same commitment to justice inspired dozens of Christians to join them over fourteen Sundays in the civil rights movement’s longest sustained “kneel-in” campaign. The kneel-ins took aim at church segregation by drawing on the lessons of the sit-ins that desegregated restaurants, buses, and other public spaces across the South. “We really were very concerned about segregation not being just,” Purdy recalls. “And the churches should have been the last places on earth to be segregated, in our minds” (Stephen R. Haynes, The Last Segregated Hour).

The line separating praying protestors outside and praying worshipers inside was a dividing line between a Christianity committed to justice and a Christianity in which concern for justice was conspicuously absent, at least in relation to American racism. Of course, many Christians at Second Presbyterian claimed that Bullock, Purdy, and others like him were not “true worshipers,” but simply angsty agitators who wanted to make a scene at church (Haynes, Last Segregated Hour). But historian Stephen Haynes’s extensive study demonstrates that the majority of the protestors at Second Presbyterian were devout Christians. They genuinely believed the church was both uniquely positioned to address and uniquely complicit with the injustice of racism (Haynes, Last Segregated Hour). At least for Christian activists whose commitment to justice grew out of their theological convictions, praying on the steps of a segregated church was itself—in the words of one protestor—“an act of worship” (Haynes, Last Segregated Hour).

What about those praying worshipers inside the church? Although many of the members and pastors of Second Presbyterian were against the hardline segregationist stance of the elders, this majority failed to end the rampant racism on display outside their church for many months. This silent majority found it “extremely difficult . . . to openly defy men whom they regarded as pillars of the local community, generous supporters of the church and its ministries, and paragons of personal piety” (Haynes, Last Segregated Hour). The church had a reputation among its members and many in the city for its commitment to “evangelism, foreign missions, education, and benevolence” (Haynes, Last Segregated Hour). The members of Second Presbyterian saw themselves as—and by all accounts were—deeply committed Christians. But their theology embodied a justice-less Christianity, at least in relation to racism.

In 2014, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Memphis Kneel-Ins, I walked into the sanctuary at Second Presbyterian Church, the church in which I was baptized, confirmed, catechized, and sent out as a missionary; which I continue to visit regularly, and which planted my family’s home church. I greeted the Black woman next to me on a pew in a sanctuary where I’d spent a lifetime of Sundays worshiping, and asked her how she was doing.

“I’m okay,” she replied. “It’s been fifty years since I visited this church, and my memories from the last time aren’t so great.”

That was the first time I got to thank one of the protestors whose courageous commitment to justice helped integrate the church I grew up in. If it had not been for them, the church that raised me might have remained openly committed to racism for much longer. Thanks to their activism, the church I grew up in was a congregation in recovery from racism. Like alcoholics still working on the first of the Twelve Steps, we—and I mean we—had then and have now a long way to go. But the acknowledgment that our Christian lives had become unmanageable came about, in part, because of the just activism nurtured primarily in Black pulpits and pews across the country and that showed up at our sanctuary door for fourteen Sundays in the mid-’60s.

The story of white Christians worshiping inside a church while another group of Christians protested their segregation on the steps outside might sound extreme. The failures of just discipleship explored in my latest book, however, suggest that this seemingly extreme story offers us a glimpse of the way many Christians and churches, in a variety of ways, have offered the world a justiceless, or at least, justice-light, version of our faith.

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