Pastors, parishioners on racism in America

'We do not ignore those realities'
The victim was an unarmed black man shot 50 times on the eve of his wedding. The police detectives acquitted in the New York case: black, Hispanic and white. Like so many who questioned the outcome, the Rev. Gabriel Salguero wasn't surprised by an e-mail asking what he had to say about racial injustice.

His reply, profound in its brevity: "Love."

Salguero shared his response with the multiracial congregation he has served for nearly three years. His wife and co-pastor, Jeanette, translated his every word — periodically switching between English and Spanish as her husband did.

Another e-mail followed asking what the pastor meant.

"It means you are committed to sitting at the table to hear a different narrative," Salguero said. "Listen."

"Escucha."

Salguero, who has relatives on the police force, negotiates the minefields of racial injustice and reconciliation with thoughtful diligence rooted in experience. He, too, has been stopped for "driving while brown."

Members of his Lamb's Manhattan Church of the Nazarene climb three flights of stairs in a building that once housed a library to hear the bilingual sermons, a feature introduced by the Salgueros. The diversity goes further: Salguero brought in Pastor Shih Fong Wu, who on the first floor simultaneously leads Sunday services in Mandarin to accommodate the large number of Chinese immigrants in the Lower East Side neighborhood.

Outreach ministries at the church, which catered mostly to the homeless when it was located in Times Square, now counsel a group that contends with legal, cultural and financial hardships and alienation daily.

"When we come to church, we do not ignore those realities," Salguero said in his sermon. "Justice demands that we recognize that people are oppressed and that the gospel is the liberating message."

Calling on a Moses
When San Marino Congregational Church launched a search for a new pastor, it had only one requirement: The candidate needed to fill the pews. The 60-member California church had struggled to recruit new members and was losing some of its most steadfast congregants to old age.

San Marino Congregational needed a Moses. What it found was the Rev. Art Cribbs — a Baptist-raised pastor from South Central Los Angeles. He soon became the church's only black member and its spiritual leader.

It was an unorthodox choice for the Christian church, a tiny, all-white congregation tucked into the quiet, opulent Los Angeles suburb of San Marino — a move so risky, the selection committee polled the congregation about Cribbs by secret ballot despite the church's liberal reputation. The vote was unanimous.

"When we brought it to the congregation, we were definitely very concerned because we didn't know, we really didn't know," said Donald Shenk, a pastoral assistant who chaired the selection process. "Those race questions are often things that when people are given the chance to be anonymous about it, the truth comes out."

Stretching the congregation
Before the 1960s, it was common for properties in San Marino to have a legal stipulation banning sales to blacks and Jews, and until 1989 the city was national headquarters to the ultraconservative, anti-communist John Birch Society.

Yet among the 145 applicants for the job, Cribbs could not be ignored. His audition tape was so powerful, it made Shenk cry.

"It just blew me out of the water. I was sitting there and I just remember thinking, 'Who is that?' I had never heard anybody talk like that," Shenk said. "He speaks from such a truthful place and such a completely heartfelt place."

In the year since he's been pastor, Cribbs has stretched the congregation on topics of social justice and race relations. That's something choir member Holly Ann Burns hoped for when she voted for Cribbs — and it's a perspective she feels will help her understand a hurtful story from her own past.

As a child, Burns' church youth group from the Cincinnati suburbs visited a youth group from an all-black church in the inner-city.

"I was all open and excited and the first thing out of this one girl's mouth was, 'Don't feel like you're doing us a favor by coming down here and visiting us and acting like you care,'" said Burns. "That put a stop to that conversation."

Burns, 56, still thinks of the experience.

"You're getting judged by what you look like," she said. "It really kicked me in the gut. I was really trying to make an effort to understand."

Cribbs doesn't shy from stories like Burns' and sometimes brings up his childhood spent in a housing development in Watts. San Marino's Bible study group is now called Soul Food, Cribbs wears an African jacket instead of vestments and the choir dances in the aisles.

And the congregation? It's grown by nine.

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