{"id":7712,"date":"2019-08-29T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2019-08-29T16:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/?p=7712"},"modified":"2023-07-25T18:19:33","modified_gmt":"2023-07-25T22:19:33","slug":"a-must-read-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/2019\/08\/a-must-read-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"A must-read interview"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Religion News Service (RNS) published an interview today with Rev. Lenny Duncan,<\/a> a black minister in the 94% white Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ECLA). Duncan has written a new book, “Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S.” According to RNS, Duncan’s book counters the notion that churches are dying, and challenges the ECLA to overcome white supremacy within the denomination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interview goes on to talk about other topics. And since the Unitarian Universalist Association is something like 95% white, I was very interested to hear what Duncan had to say about his own overwhelmingly white denomination. Here are a few key quotes from the interview:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In speaking of the necessity of reparations to person of African descent, Duncan says such reparations must go beyond money: “It is time for all straight white males in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to remove their names from ballots for bishop. It\u2019s the same thing when we come to some of the positions that we see in our churchwide organization \u2014 to just self-select their way out.” The equivalent for the UUA, of course, is that all us straight white men should stop applying for senior staff positions in the UUA, e.g., Regional Leads — and of course we should not run for elected positions like UUA Moderator and President.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duncan also believes in the value of shutting up: “As someone who shows up as a cis male, if I\u2019m quiet long enough typically a female or femme in the room will say the same thing I was gonna say much more succinctly and probably more intelligently than I would.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How can you motivate white people to actually do things like leave their names off ballots? Duncan suggests that “…the American white Protestant church is obsessed with legacy. If you want your church to survive, if you want your denomination to be relevant in the 21st century, if you actually want a viable Lutheran legacy in the American context, then you\u2019ll take these suggestions….” Same goes for white folks in the UUA: if we want the UUA to survive even another couple of decades, then we had better start dismantling white supremacy now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duncan also believes that, just because your pews aren’t filled up on Sunday morning doesn’t mean that your local church is dying: “I think we need to rethink church and we need to rethink the way that we count membership. I might have, like, 40, 50 people in my church on a Sunday. But there\u2019s 200 people who are engaged in our community in various ways.” This point ties in with what we know of Millennials (who are a white-minority generation): they want to do church the way they want to do church, and if you tell them that the only way to do church is to show up on Sunday morning they’re going to ignore you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interview is short and worth reading in its entirety. Read it here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Religion News Service (RNS) published an interview today with Rev. Lenny Duncan, a black minister in the 94% white Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ECLA). Duncan has written a new book, “Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S.” According to RNS, Duncan’s book counters the notion … Continue reading “A must-read interview”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,17],"tags":[722,1008,1004,236,1007],"class_list":["post-7712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion-news","category-uua-politics","tag-ecla","tag-intersectionality","tag-millennials","tag-racism","tag-white-supremacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7713,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7712\/revisions\/7713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}