I am currently working on a memoir of my spiritual and personal journey.
Every Thursday I plan to share a short except from the writing.
The following is an excerpt about how my sister and I ended up in church without our parents.
From Chapter One
Photo by Kevin Gent@kevingent
Although my memory is vague, I think my parents usually dropped us off for Sunday School and then returned an hour later for worship where we would sit together. But that didn’t last long. When I was in fifth grade our parents dropped their membership to the church in protest of a decision at the national level. In 1970 the Council on Church and Race of the United Presbyterian Church gave $10,000 to the Angela Davis Defense Fund. Angela Davis, a black political activist, California philosophy professor, self-avowed Marxist and member of the Communist Party (USA) had been accused of murder, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy in connection with a deadly armed takeover of a Marin County courthouse. My understanding is that the donation was not to indicate the denomination’s belief in her innocence, but to make sure she received a fair trial in a country not friendly to black, Marxist members of the Communist Party.
The donation to her legal defense fund angered many conservative white members and congregations of the United Presbyterian Church. There are no exact numbers of how many members left in protest, but we do know that 1,300 churches refused to pay mission pledges to the national body and forty congregations left the denomination in protest. My parents dropped their membership at the local Presbyterian Church we were attending.
I was in fifth grade and my younger sister was in third grade. This is where our story took a dramatic turn, although neither of us knew it at the time. Our parents had left the church. It would have been natural for us to follow suit. But my sister and I walked the 1 1/2 miles every Sunday to church. We didn’t know it at the time, but much later I was able to articulate “that the church felt more like home than our own family home did.”