Unity Day at Trinity UCC in Chicago

Sunday, August 10, 2008. It’s Unity Day at TUCC. This summer, the church’s capable young pastor, Otis Moss III, is preaching through 1 Samuel to 1000+ crowds at the 11 a.m. service (additional services at 7:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m.). In a subsequent post, I will dwell on the peculiar quality of a 3 hour worship service that is evangelical at its core with strands of liberation theology and re-enculturation woven in. For the moment, a bald outline.

9:00 a.m. Sunday morning

Part of the Italian side of my family and I are guests at the Retreat Center (the former Nabisco family residence) of the Focolari, a Roman Catholic movement founded by Chiara Lubich. From the Center, I can see a Secret Service agent and his vehicle in front of the Obama residence. We are that close. After magnificent pizza at Medici’s the night before, where the waiters sport T-shirts with “Obama eats here” on the back, my kids just don’t want to get out of bed.

10:50 a.m. Sunday morning

We approach TUCC, 11 of us in two vehicles, and run into a huge traffic jam in front of the church - as usual. There are demonstrators, too, with big white signs saying “GOD HATES OBAMA” (it’s Fred Phelps and company, giving the word “Baptist” new luster wherever they go). The police keep them on the opposite side of 95^th. My 17 year old son Giovanni says, “This is too political, Dad,” and suggests we go worship instead at the little AME church nearby. The commotion makes me all the more excited to be back at a church I have loved and learned from long before I found out that Barack Obama accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior through its ministry.

On the sidewalk a block away from TUCC, a young black man is distributing copies of Black Magazine, with articles like “The Homosexualization of the Black Nation” (it picks on some of my favorite characters from childhood, like the “gender-confused” Ernie and Bert, Big Bird, and Mr. Rogers), “A Message to the Black Woman,” and “Obama,” critical but constructive. The magazine is a street publication, full of misspellings and casual references to WE DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and Elijah Muhammad. Clearly, we have walked into the thick of a many-sided conversation of which most people know nothing at all.

11:00 a.m. Sunday morning

After the invocation, TUCC’s 150 member choir + band lead worship with a smashing soloist and plenty of improvisation. Gently swaying in brilliantly colored African dress, the congregation is brought to its feet time and again. We all sing “How Great Thou Art” in unison.

A “drill team” of young women in matching brown T-shirts and jeans dance out and shout out verses designed to impress on all the need to pray constantly and read the Word daily. Confidence and grit are plainly in view. Scripture memorization is alive among TUCC’s youth. How goes it among the youth of your congregation?

The 100+ men in white T-shirts who acted as a security detail in the face of the pre-announced anti-TUCC demonstration are called forward and applauded. Their response to the demonstration had been to ring the church and warmly greet everyone in the name of Christ, demonstrators included, with strong handshakes and the calm composure I have come to expect from the men of Trinity. Otis Moss III, at age 37 TUCC’s new senior pastor, gently prays for the “brothers and sisters” from Kansas out demonstrating. The demonstrators’ hatred is no match for the serenity of this worthy son of Otis Moss, Jr., a tireless advocate for non-violent change after the example of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Unity Day: Rev. Jeremiah Wright and members of his family are in attendance. Now officially Pastor Emeritus, his successor publicly apologizes for slights to Wright and his family in the difficult months just past. Moss reads aloud the statement approved the previous Tuesday which fully integrates Wright into the responsible leadership of the congregation. He is nonetheless emeritus, a minister as it were without portfolio, but one Moss and the congregation do well to listen to as they move forward into uncharted waters. TUCC has no intention of allowing itself to be defeated by demons within.

More than an hour has passed. It’s time for the Passing of the Peace, which lasts ten minutes. Warm hugs all around. One of my Italian kin-in-law has been sobbing uncontrollably for 45 minutes. Like many Catholics in Europe, she is alienated from her church of birth, in her case since the day more than a decade ago she last confessed, responded candidly to the question, “Do you have relations with your boyfriend?”, to which the priest curtly replied, “I cannot absolve you.” The presence of God was upon her, God’s love and forgiveness filling her with joy for the first time, she told me afterwards, since she was an enthusiastic teenage believer.

Joys and Concerns follow, with prayers of intercession for a host of named individuals. Two offerings are taken, the first for the church’s overall ministry, the second for TUCC’s multi-million dollar charter K-12 school in the making. Tithing is taken seriously at TUCC, which helps explain why the 8000+ megachurch has a large staff including a full-time pastoral team of 8.

Everyone stands and reads Scripture in unison (1 Samuel 5:1-11 [NIV]). If I were mean and nasty, I would point out that every mainline congregation that reads from the NIV is growing whereas every congregation that reads from the NRSV is dying, but I’m really a nice guy, so I will leave the fact unmentioned. (Why what translation of the Bible is read in a congregation should be such a leading indicator of embedment (or not) within the growing edge of American religious culture is an interesting topic I cannot dwell on here.)   KJV, NRSV, The Message, and TEV are translations I’ve also seen or heard quoted at Trinity.

After more prayer and music ministry, Otis launches into a 45 minute sermon. It is in the night, while everyone is sleeping, that Dagon falls on his face to the ground and breaks into pieces, an arm here, a leg there, the torso all by its lonesome, before the ark of the presence of the LORD. Dagon, the grain god, the god of the market, goes up and goes down, but the LORD remains forever the same. There will always be Philistines who seek to capture the ark and make it one element among many in the inclusive worship which Dagon smiles upon. But the Philistines will live to regret their endeavor. The red-hot core of the sermon is a “rap” through the entire length of the Bible in which God's mighty acts of salvation are highlighted one at a time and one after another. It is “in the night” that God does God’s best work, from creation to the cross, when the sun refused to shine.

Otis preached on 1 Samuel 4 in the early morn, and he summarizes for the sake of the late-to-rise. The Glory of the Lord has departed (Ichabod) with the capture of the Ark. The Glory of the Lord has departed from this generation of black Christians, because, like Israel of old, they have forgotten that they were slaves in the house of bondage. The glory of the Lord has departed from this generation because boy-men wear pants than hang down halfway across their buttocks, and spew words in public that are not fit to say in private. The glory of the Lord has departed from this generation because girl-women let it all hang out, and mother and daughter compete for the attention of the same male.

Raw honesty and humiliating self-criticism are hallmarks of the black church, outside of which the black church’s fierce criticism of perceived external enemies is incomprehensible.

Altar Call. I’ve never been to a service at TUCC which has unfolded without a straight-up invitation to accept Jesus Christ as one’s personal Savior. Rev. Moss leaves no stone unturned in pressing everyone present to accept the invitation to dedicate one’s life to Christ and his Church. Personal conversion is the bedrock of TUCC’s transformational ethos. A number of people stream forward and are greeted by spiritual counselors. Moss prays with all and we with them a prayer of repentance and acceptance of forgiveness through the saving work of Christ. The invitation is the focal point of the entire service.

 

At various points during the service, Moss invites everyone to hold hands and pray with a neighbor. The intensely personal and unscripted interaction which followed speaks volumes about the spiritual poise of TUCC’s members. My prayer partner is a matriarch who looks me straight in the eye and asks me how she can pray for me. “For my ministry as a pastor,” I say. She asks me for my card, and assures me I will be in her prayers and those of her circle, in the days to come. “I will also pray for safe travel home. Pray for my family,” she says, and in the reflection of her eyes I see that combination of joy and pain which is the lot of believing parents and grandparents of all generations.

Another call forward. This time all the college students rise and come forward to be prayed for and challenged. Over two hundred fill the front and clog the aisles. We ourselves are sitting among many college students home for the summer. Each and every one is a tribute to TUCC’s fierce commitment to education within a city that has an appallingly low black high-school graduation rate. Less than one in a 100 black Chicago youth go on to attend and graduate from a university.

You might never guess what it means to be unashamedly black at TUCC unless you see it with your own eyes. It means knowing your people’s history inside and out; it means excelling in all that you do; it means getting the best education in the best schools across the nation. I doubt there is any black congregation in Chicago that can match the percentage of youth in TUCC’s midst who are attending college and will go on to be civic and church leaders. This is Jeremiah Wright Jr.’s legacy, and no one, not even himself, can take it away from him.

The service concludes with the choir filling the aisles to sing a benediction that sends everyone out the door with a song in the heart and a smile across the lips. It’s 2 in the afternoon. Invigorated, we talk at length with friendly parishioners on the way to our vehicles.

 

Comments

[mike]

Wait, John, you were in Chicago this past weekend??? I wish I had known. My wife and I made our last visit to the city before our move to Vancouver in three weeks.

[JohnFH]

Mike,

I toyed with announcing my whereabouts when in Toronto and Chicago these past days. In traveling with a caravan of family, however, the best laid plans of mice and men are continually undone. So promises become hard to keep.

I trust we will cross paths at a future SBL meeting, or similar event.

[David E. S. Stein]

John, I appreciate your providing this window into a world that normally seems far away from my own.

QUESTION: What exactly does “Unity Day” mean? (I’m not familiar with that term.) In what sense was what you witnessed this past weekend different from a typical Sunday at this church?

[JohnFH]

Hi David,

Hey, that's a cool website you link to. I thought you were located in the Land of Milk and Honey. If the Land of Enchantment is your current location, congratulations on your new digs!

It is my understanding that "Unity Day" referred to a culmination point in a process of reconciliation between TUCC and its founding pastor and family.

A typical Sunday at TUCC would not include a public reading of a consensus statement from the pulpit about difficult internal affairs, nor would it weave in recognition of a security detail deployed in the face of hostile demonstrators, but the other details I mention are typical of TUCC at 11 a.m on Sunday morning.

[Owen]

John,

Love your posts on Trinity, very moving stuff. Brings back good memories, and makes me wish the media would dig a bit deeper.

Owen

[JohnFH]

Thanks, Owen, for the link on your fine blog.

I am a Chicago fan like you, it's been the "big bad city" of my life since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

[Marwan]

Im the Young Black Man who sold you the Black Magazines outside of TUCC. What exactly did you mean by "Clearly, we have walked into the thick of a many-sided conversation of which most people know nothing at all?"

[JohnFH]

Hi Marwan,

Pretty cool to meet you online. I meant that outside of your context, very few people even know who DuBois, Garvey, and Elijah Muhammed are. They may think that Black Muslims agree with Bin Laden or other nonsense. They might not understand that the Black community is not monolithic even if it will vote 95% for Obama.