MAYBE IT’S MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE CHURCH [Su, 5-8-22]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

On Sunday mornings, including today, I pray/think through all the churches that have been important to me, starting with the first one I can remember, East Park M.E. in Indianapolis, where I started to Sunday School when I was four, and where I was confirmed when I was nine.

One of my favorite churches to remember and pray for is one where I never went to worship. Indeed, I was there for only one evening, for a meal. It wasn’t even a Methodist church. Some would say it wasn’t even a Christian church. It was the Unitarian church in Birmingham, AL.

The Alabama Methodist Student Movement had called the Indiana MSM and asked us to come down to march into Montgomery with them, to hear MLK, Jr. give his famous civil rights speech at the end of the Selma March. We sent the campus minister and a prof and a student from each of our campus ministry units around the state, on a chartered DC3.

It was a tense experience.

On the way down, our flight attendant and pilots took turns chatting with us, questioning our mission, wondering if we weren’t doing more harm than good, suggesting that we just needed to give the racists more time, if we shouldn’t just stay home because it was none of our business.

As we tried to fly back to Indiana, the Montgomery airport flight controllers refused to let us take off until a hurricane from the gulf was almost on us. Our pilots tried to outrun it, but that DC3 was no match for a hurricane. They did an emergency landing at the Birmingham airport.

We wouldn’t be able to fly again until the next day. We called hotels, to try to get a place to stay for the night, but knowing that we were “Yankee agitators,” there were “no rooms available”. There were places to eat in the airport, but none of them would serve us, even our sweet little grandmotherly IU education prof who tried to buy takeout sandwiches.

The hotels had room for our flight attendant, a pretty young white woman in a uniform that did not reveal her agitator associates, but our pilots spent the night in the plane, staying awake in turns, to be sure no one sabotaged it overnight.

But we had an outlier in our group. When the Unitarian pastor in Bloomington had heard about our trip, he asked to come along. Now, from the Birmingham airport, he called his colleague at the Unitarian church. Those questionable Christians sent cars to pick us up, took us to their church building for a sudden pot-luck, and took us to their homes to spend the night.

On the way home, the stewardess—as they were called then—and the pilots took turns coming back to chat with us. “My God,” they said, “we thought you were just trouble-makers going where you shouldn’t. This race thing is serious business. Somebody needs to do something about it.” Well, yes.

The real Christians tried to get us killed in a hurricane. The sort-of, agnostic, non-theological Christians took care of us. The Unitarians in Birmingham… one of my all-time favorite churches.

John Robert McFarland

Speaking of Sundays: You have other things to do on Sunday morning, but in case you need something else, I’ll be preaching at St. Mark’s UMC in Bloomington, IN on May 22 at 10:30 am, EASTERN DAYLIGHT time. It will be on livestream at smumc.church. Just click on the Livestream button. But you don’t need to “attend” at 10:30 on Sunday morning. Shortly after the service concludes, it will go into the St. Mark’s archive on YouTube. You can access the archive by clicking on the Video Archive button on the smumc.church site.