Churches Get A Needed Shock
On Saturday, a wiring malfunction filled a landmark Spokane church with smoke. But a bigger fire may have started on Sunday.
In churches all across the city, pastors and lay people took the words of Jesus Christ seriously enough to reach across the economic, racial and denominational barriers that have made Sunday morning “the most segregated hour in America.”
At First Presbyterian Church - spared in Saturday’s fire - the mostly white congregation leapt electrified to its feet Sunday morning, applauding the message of black preachers and a gospel choir. This church, and many others, swapped preachers and musicians with congregations that share the same faith but differ in other ways - ways that seemed embarrassingly petty as Spokane’s first “Reconciliation Sunday” drew to a close.
The day ended at the Spokane Arena where scores of pastors offered apologies and forgiveness for divisions within the church, and vowed to work for the unity envisioned in their faith’s ideals.
Pastors who have ministered far beyond the spotlights of fame and fortune stood on the Arena’s stage and wept, while 5,000 spectators cheered them as though Michael Jordan had just slam-dunked a victory in the NBA finals.
The crowd fell silent as a soft-spoken woman told of turning to drugs and alcohol while growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. She respects tribal medicine that strives to heal the body, she said, but she now helps pastor a church where Native Americans hear of someone who “can heal the heart.”
Local pastors who planned this event call it only a first step, and say they don’t know where it will lead.
But cooperation among churches, if that is what this day began, does come at an opportune time. Society is searching for better answers to difficult challenges. The government’s attempts to relieve poverty, stop substance abuse and combat crime have been a fairly impressive failure.
Government social workers don’t address the deepest voids in the human spirit. Social science journals have published evidence that religion does. In a compilation entitled “Why religion matters,” the Heritage Foundation cites numerous studies linking faith with stronger families, better health, effective recovery from woes such as alcoholism, plus lower rates of suicide, drug abuse, crime and out-of-wedlock births.
Faith has outlived every political system in history and of course has reflected the worst instincts of the faithful, as well as the best. But the people who filled the Spokane Arena on Sunday would say that they have plugged into the very source of reconciliation. What do you suppose they could do, together?
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster For the editorial board