BLACK JESUS COMES TO OAKHURST

“BLACK JESUS COMES TO OAKHURST”

            Last week our daughter Susan posted on her FB page the link to an article that indicated that the Archbishop of Canterbury indicated that we perhaps should reconsider the idea that Jesus was white.  She then added these words:  "If y’all wanna see who was cool before it was cool, go check out the Black Jesus that’s been the feature of the stained glass windows at Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, GA since the mid-1980s, or if you can’t physically go there, just watch Sweet Magnolias on Netflix, because the church used on the show IS Oakhurst!  Also, if Nibs Stroupe or Caroline Leach has never told you the story of how the Oakhurst Jesus came to be, please ask them to. It’s quite epic and involves an opera diva."

            With an intro like that, several people have asked to hear the story of that process, so I’ll share an abbreviated version of it now.  If you want a fuller version, see pp. 68-71 of Caroline’s and my book “O Lord, Hold Our Hands:  How a Church Thrives in a Multicultural World.”  Oakhurst Presbyterian was a dying church when we arrived in the early 1980’s.  It had been a 850 white member church in the mid-60’s, but white flight had changed the neighborhood and decimated the church over a 15 year period.  Oakhurst had strong leadership in this period, however, and the pastors, elders, members, and Presbytery helped it to survive.  That was back in the days when Presbyteries still believed in providing financial support to urban churches. 

            When Caroline and I arrived as pastors, the church was 80 members (35% African-Americans), but whites were still firmly in control.  We had many battles to shift that, but the shift happened.  After a few years, we decided to take the big step of engaging the public art in the building.  Caroline had already been changing curriculum, coloring in materials to make them more intercultural.  Our first focus on the public art was the huge stained glass window of the Ascension of Jesus in the chancel at the front of the sanctuary, a European Jesus towering over us all, being adored by white angels and white, male disciples.  We enlisted our resident artist, Virginia Gailey , who along with her husband James (he taught OT – now Hebrew Scripture – at Columbia Seminary) were vital members, to think about it.  As usual, she came up with a fine proposal:  make Jesus the brown-skinned man that he was, darken several of the disciples, and add a woman to the disciples.  Wow – that was a great idea!  Virginia suggested that we get the company who originally put in the stained glass window in 1960 to come back and do the work on the revised one.  That should mitigate some of the criticism.  There was one HUGE obstacle though – the cost to do the work was astronomical, and the church had no money at all.  Virginia then approached her sister Frances Templin, who agreed to fund the project!

            We thought that the next obstacle would be the Session, the elders of the church, who are the decision-making body for the church.  We approached them with the proposal – fortunately, Virginia was on the Session at that time.  We had a great discussion on it – of course, our art should reflect our diverse membership.  There was, however, a great deal of anxiety over voting for it, because we had made so many changes, and in so doing, we had driven away some of the stalwart white members.  The Session did vote to make the change, but we were timid in our approach.  We did not do it in secrecy, but we also did not broadcast it to the membership.  Our approach was to make the change and then have people talk about it.  Ask forgiveness, not permission, as the old adage goes. 

            We got the company to get the panes that needed to be replaced on Monday, and they guaranteed that they could get them replaced and re-installed by Friday of the same week.   Thus, the changes would be made in between Sunday worship services. The company lived up to their timeline, but when the panes were installed, they were awful from an artistic point of view – some of our elders even wondered if the company deliberately sabotaged the project.  But, they were up on Sunday, and as we initially had thought, very few people (except Session members) noticed them that next Sunday.  We called the company, and they agreed to re-do the panes, but they couldn’t come get them until Thursday, and thus they wouldn’t have them back until after the next Sunday.  We gulped and decided to go with that.

            We had forgotten, however, that the next Sunday would bring a child of the church back to visit and sing in worship as an adult.  She was now an opera diva, having sung all over the world and several times at the Met.  As an Anglo child, she had grown up singing in various choirs in the church, and she wanted to return and do a mini-concert in Sunday worship to give thanks for all the gifts that she had received in her youth at the church.  This sounded lovely, and we had agreed, and we knew that many of the white folk who had fled the neighborhood and the church would return on this Sunday to hear her sing.  What did they see in the stained glass window of Jesus in worship?  A Jesus with holes for his head, his hands, and his feet, where the panes had been removed.  And now, EVERYBODY KNEW about it – no hiddenness any longer.  It was as if God was laughing at our timidity – “you’re afraid that people will notice and will cause an uproar?  Well now, everyone will know.”  And they did!

            The panes were returned for the next Sunday, and they were much better, but now everyone was talking about them and asking about them.  Most of the responses were positive, but there were a few long-time white members who objected to changing (defiling) the art work.  One wrote an official letter to the Session, saying that we had violated the integrity of the art by changing it.  Any guilt that we might have felt over this change was mitigated quickly when one of our longest tenured white members, Mary Reimer, spoke up in the Session meeting to let us know that the family who had donated the money for the original stained glass window had wanted to remove it and take it with them when they fled the church because they were afraid that the Black people who came would harm it somehow.   So much for artistic integrity!

            Though we did not label this new stained glass window as the “Black Jesus,” everyone else did.  And it became one of our strongest evangelistic markers.  We had many visitors, and that Black Jesus would greet them in worship – you could not escape him.  Black Jesus would ask you about your life, and at that time we had one of the few Black Jesus stained glass windows in the Metro Atlanta area.  Time Magazine noticed it and did a full page article on the church in 1995.  It reminded us then, and it reminds us now, in these days of shifts and rethinking, that Jesus was Black in so many ways.  And, it reminds us of the power of art on so many levels.  Keep Black Jesus in mind as you work on your art and your life together.