PYM participates on the board of the National Council of Churches. This week we are sharing PYM’s General Secretary, Christie Duncan-Tessmer’s, trip to the Conference of National Black Churches (CNBC). Christie is posting the second of three stories about the CNBC conference, sharing how the Conference of Black Churches is speaking to religious and secular communities today. The CNBC’s goal is to improve the quality of life for African Americans through their unique perspective on faith, and channel that energy into advocacy efforts.
Our morning preaching was again spectacular.
The preacher was a woman. Reverend Dr. LaKeesha Walrond, is the recently named (and first woman) President of the New York Theological Seminary. She started with the well-known Bible story of Jesus inviting the children to come to him and telling his disciples they need to be like children to see the kingdom of heaven. She told her own story of wanting to go to Jesus as a child of 4, and how she wanted to be baptized.
In her faith tradition four is much too young for baptism, and church elders turned her away. She just walked right back up to the alter when she was five. They asked her; why do you want to be baptized? And she said, “because I love Jesus.” They baptized her. It was a sweet beginning, although it turns out that many black churches don’t baptize children that young.
She built on this story by bringing in questions of ‘who else are we not allowing support to on the spiritual path?’ She brought in ageism, sexism, and hetero-sexism and asked us to identify where our isms were. She ended her story with a question: “What if those people who said no to my baptism when I was four knew that I was going to grow up to be a bishop? Would that have changed anything?”
As Revered Dr. Walrond left the pulpit, a hundred more unspoken questions were hanging in the air for us to answer in our own minds as we convened later for silent reflection.
Dr. Walrond is the author of two books. Her e-book is Stronger Than Your Worst Pain: A Guide to Activating Your Inner Power; her children’s book is My Body Is Special.
