"100 For Oakhurst!"

 "100 For Oakhurst!"

        This past weekend culminated the 100th Anniversary celebration for Oakhurst Presbyterian Church - they have been celebrating on a monthly basis for the past year.  We attended the 100th Anniversary service at Oakhurst yesterday, and it was fun to see old friends there.  The church was founded on September 25,1921, in a tent meeting at the corner of East Lake and Second Avenue in Decatur.  Caroline and I were pastors there for over 30 years, almost one-third of the existence of the church.  Our kids grew up there, and it was a good place for them to be nurtured in the faith and in the multicultural world.

           Oakhurst is a remarkable place, and I want to share a short summary of its history.  If you want a fuller story, see the book that Caroline and I wrote about it: "O Lord, Hold Our Hands: How a Church Thrives in a Multicultural World."  It was a white, mostly working class church in its beginnings and throughout the first 45 years of its history.  It grew to be a church of almost 850 members, but by that time in the early 1960's, changes were underfoot.  Atlanta had decided to go to the Big Leagues in sports teams, so Black housing was taken for stadia for the baseball Atlantans, the football Falcons, and the basketball Hawks,  The people who lived in that housing began to move to the east Atlanta area, which included the Oakhurst neighborhood in Decatur.  White flight in the neighborhood and in the church quickly took place. Oakhurst Presbyterian went from 850 members to 80 members in about 20 years.  It was a demoralizing time for the church.

        During this difficult time, the church had strong leadership from its pastors and its members.  Jack and Joy Morris, Dr. Lawrence Bottoms (the first and only Black Moderator of the former southern Presbyterian Church), Jeanine Wren, and Bruce Gannaway were all remarkable pastoral leaders.  Oakhurst also benefitted from the PCUS consolidating all its denominational offices into one city:  Atlanta.  The Stated Clerk of the denomination, Jim Andrews and his spouse Elizabeth became members at Oakhurst. Other denominational leaders like Evelyn Green joined, giving Oakhurst a sense that it could survive.  The white membership who was left at Oakhurst were very conservative theologically, but they were also tenacious about Oakhurst - they were determined that it would survive, even if it meant inviting the new neighbors in, the neighbors who were Black.  The first Black member joined Oakhurst in 1970.  Atlanta Presbytery provided financial support, paying off the mortgage on the building, and providing financial support for the operating budget for over 30 years.  Some white people stayed, and sone Black people came - enough to form a nucleus for a new church. 

        When Caroline and I came to Oakhurst in 1983, the executive of the Presbytery told us that he would give us two years to show that Oakhurst was viable.  If there were no signs of progress, they would cut off the Presbytery funding.  On one level, that was a big advantage.  We told the elders of the church that there was no time for gradual changes - we had to move towards being a multicultural church as quickly as possible.  Caroline worked on Christian education and community ministry, getting in families with children.  I worked on worship and on opening the doors to Black leadership in the church.  At that point we were a white church with Black members, and we worked to make it a multicultural church with shared leadership in worship style and in church government.

    We lost some white members at first, but eventually the vision began to take hold.  Black people took a chance on the church and on us.  We used art and music and education and sermons to begin to shape a new congregation - in today's language, it would be called a new church development.  We changed the main stained glass window of a white Jesus in the sanctuary to a brown Jesus, and we began to seek publicity throughout the metro Atlanta area.  The plan worked - John Blake of the Atlanta Journal Constitution (now a CNN online columnist) did a full page article on the church.  Christine Callier invited Sylvester Monroe of Time Magazine to join us in a Supper Club discussion of his book on growing up in Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago.  He was so impressed with Oakhurst that he wrote a full page article in Time in April, 1995.

    We began to move from trying to survive to the idea that we could thrive.  We ordained an openly gay elder in 2002 (we had ordained another gay person in 1992, bur they were not out yet).  There were many books and studies of the church, and in 2003 Oakhurst Presbyterian was named as one of 300 Outstanding Congregations in the country by a Lilly study.  The church grew, and we had several capital campaigns for the old building.  We were grateful to have been part of such a vital community of faith - as our evangelism slogan described us: "Multicultural, Bible-based, Jesus-centered, Justice-seeking."

    In 1989, the Rev. Joan Salmon Campbell was the first clergy woman ever elected as Moderator of the Presbyterian Church.  She was an African-American preacher from Ohio, and she preached at Oakhurst in September of that year.  In her sermon that day, she shared one of my favorite quotes about Oakhurst:

    "It has been a long, long time since I have worshipped in a congregation quite like this one. I celebrate who you are.  I dare say that you are one of the best kept secrets in the entire denomination, for rarely do I see a congregation so diverse, as you represent so many different kinds of people.  Rarely am I in the midst of God's people who bother to take the time to hear the concerns of the people in the pew, and then intentionally lift them up before the Lord and rejoice.  I thank God for you and for the privilege of being in your midst this morning."

    We give thanks for Oakhurst!