In 2007, I accepted a pastorate in an all-white church in a community where 95%+ of the residents were identified by the 2000 census as white. As an African American, in the beginning, I wondered if the deeply person relationship between pastor and people could go forward in a small (average attendance 70) church, given our racial particularities. And if so, how might these particularities make a difference?

It has been ten years since the Community Church of Barrington (CCB) installed me as pastor and we have been transformed. I have a deepened, intimate understanding of what it is to be white in America during the tenures of Obama and Trump, during a time of rising fear of terrorism and declining confidence in the future and in a time when there is both a deepened awareness of, and wariness about, “implicit bias”.

Conversely, the people of CCB know more, by association, about what it means to be the granddaughter and daughter of people born in Reconstruction and Jim Crow Mississippi, respectively, and the grandmother of one who looks much like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and one whose parentage is African American and Russian.

I, and my congregation, stand in the liminal space of being informed and transformed by both our God-given differences and our common call to transform the world in the name of Christ’s love.

I want to know if we are sui generis or are we one, among others, having this formative experience.

My project will seek to discern how the experiences of clergy/congregations who are different racially affect the communal life of the church and make possible the search for positive racial engagement and, even, reconciliation.