“This is our turn as Free Methodists to stand up, to speak up, to stand with those who are targeted by injustice and racism. It is my heart that, as the church family, we need to cross over and walk with those who live in fear. We cannot just bury our head in the sand,” said Bishop Kenny Martin during the podcast conversation that also included host Brett Heintzman and Fraser Venter, the denomination’s strategic catalyst for love-driven justice.
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“We’re just going to have real talk from our heart as family.” – Bishop Kenny Martin
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“We must address those who are trying to erase the history of slavery, and not just the history of slavery but those who have contributed to our nation — Black and Brown,” said Martin, the Free Methodist Church’s first African American bishop, who added that he thinks “about my ancestors, of the dream that they had for their children’s children, and so this is our opportunity as a Free Methodist family to have real talk. … We’re just going to have real talk from our heart as family.”
Martin said he had “never heard of the Free Methodist Church in the African American community” until he joined the denomination in 1991, “and all I know was God said, ‘Go.’ … We’re at this place, I believe, as the Free Methodist family, to really cross over as a church family, because we still are not known in urban centers and especially in the African American community.”
Life Together
Opportunities exist to cross racial and ethnic boundaries, but societal divisions also threaten the possibility of greater cross-cultural ministry.
Bishop Kaye Kolde said that in her “30 years as a Christian, I feel that we’re on the precipice of a real slide into ignoring what is sin amongst us, and to be really specific, we are in a moment where calling out things like racism is often considered woke or some sort of political statement, but for us as the church, we have to acknowledge that racism is a sin, and sin is something we need to speak to, especially if it becomes a part of who we are within our churches and how we understand our calling to live together as one.”
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“The Apostle Paul was so gracious when he calls the church to love one another through giving. And there are ways to creatively partner across the lines that could be a real blessing.” – Fraser Venter
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While pastoring a multicultural church, Bishop Keith Cowart said, “we began to do life together in real and meaningful ways. We began to eat together. … It’s a biblical ideal that says we need to be close, and we need to be in community in order to see the beauty of the way God has created us in all of our differences.”
While pastoring in St. Louis after joining the denomination, Martin formed relationships by speaking at church camp meetings in rural areas and by inviting rural and suburban Free Methodists to his church in the city. He said community residents questioned what was happening because previously “they never saw our White brothers and sisters in that community, and so from that, we started working together, dreaming together. … We need to be able to work together, and it gives us credibility.”
Venter also emphasized the importance of partnering across rural and urban lines.
“The Apostle Paul was so gracious when he calls the church to love one another through giving. And there are ways to creatively partner across the lines that could be a real blessing,” said Venter, who wants to see rural and urban churches supporting each other.
Venter said “the gift of hospitality” is “a spiritual gift we don’t talk about a lot.” He described hospitality as “hosting people at such a level that they feel the delight of the Lord without having to get an applause for it. There’s such a beauty of creating that space so that, whoever walks through your doors, your church will be a place where anyone feels welcomed.”
Learning From History
Cowart discussed the danger of “whitewashing our history in order to highlight the positive and diminish or minimize the negative, and that’s really concerning to me in a very personal way, because I grew up in the Deep South. My class was the very first one to be integrated from first grade on. I was in a public school in which I was a minority.”
Cowart added that after graduation, “I would have said, ‘I don’t have issues with racism.’ And then I began to realize it’s largely because there were still these social boundaries that kept us at a distance to the point that we didn’t truly know each other.”
When Cowart visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, and located the section for his county, “I saw people who had been lynched who had the same last names with classmates.” When the Legacy Museum opened several years later, “I saw stories of things that happened in my county, and then I realized that the county right next to mine, which only had about 6,000 people in the whole county, had the second most lynchings of any county in the state of Georgia, and I had never heard any of that. There was a history that I was completely ignorant to.”
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“The Bible is filled with reminders and warnings for us for how God’s people have gone astray… we really need to check ourselves, because what God is calling us to is remembering these examples.” – Bishop Kaye Kolde
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Cowart said many people “still don’t understand the depth of the pain of those years, and I don’t just mean slavery years, but the years following slavery and well into my lifetime. And if we’re going to be truly great, it has to come out of authenticity and the reality of who we have been together, so that we can become something great together.”
Kolde said that “we like to remember God’s faithfulness, but one of the ways that we recognize God’s faithfulness is that He remains faithful even in our failures and our sin. The Bible is filled with reminders and warnings for us for how God’s people have gone astray, and I think when we begin to say we don’t need to remember some of these more difficult parts of our history because they make us feel uncomfortable or we feel blamed, we really need to check ourselves, because what God is calling us to is remembering these examples.”
The FMCUSA is a “majority White church, but we have many, many sisters and brothers who are people of color having a very different experience than I have had growing up in the church and in ministry,” Kolde said. “We need to be about remembering and listening first of all, and that’ll lead us to some of the ways we need to actually do some things.”
Heintzman noted that early Free Methodism “contended for freedom for slaves,” but “what we’re contending for today is for us to awaken to the reality that we are all made in the image of God.”
The church has not always led culture in racial reconciliation.
“That’s tragic, because the church has something that the world cannot offer. We have answers to this issue that go far beyond politics and social engineering,” Cowart said. “We have a gospel that is truly transforming, that not only saves but radically changes hearts. It replaces hate with love, replaces apathy with action, replaces an unwillingness to step into hard situations with a courage and boldness that causes us to reflect the heart of God, which is so clearly evident — all the way through Scripture — that God’s heart has always been especially for the marginalized and the oppressed.”
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“Our young people have had a very different experience, and they can lead us, and I’m prayerful that many will.” – Bishop Keith Cowart
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Ambassadors of Reconciliation
Kolde said that “one of the ways that I view our work in reconciliation and redemption is that we choose compassion as a highest value, as one of the expressions of love being made perfect in us, and then we let that drive us and move us and change our priorities.”
Venter noted that “an ambassador role is to represent the character and nature of the king and bring that into every space that they enter in, and if that’s true, then we can trust that these conversations about racism we’re entering in with the heart of Jesus, not our own right to be right.”
Cowart noted that he sees young people who “love each other deeply” across some of the barriers “that have been in our nation for so long. … Our young people have had a very different experience, and they can lead us, and I’m prayerful that many will.”
Martin said that based on the recent Seeking Together Gatherings and his experiences at annual conferences, “there’s a shift, because we’re doing this real talk, and God is honoring this.”
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