Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Sean McMillan . August 19, 2005

Read more of Kim Lawton's August 7, 2005 interview about black church activism and Darfur with the Rev. Sean McMillan, pastor of the Shekinah Chapel in Chicago:

What is your church doing to get involved in the Sudan issue?

Photo of Sean McMillan

We do a lot of things, participating with other congregations to raise awareness in the African-American religious community in Chicago, which oddly enough has not been as high and as intense as it should be. We are partnering with congregations in rallies, teach-ins; we're having an event showing a movie. We are also using that to do education about the Sudan and Darfur in house. We do set up teach-ins about it. Today we dedicated the whole service to this issue. I think it's important that if you release the conversation in the culture, the conversation leads to church. It's one thing for us as a body to do things with other congregations, but it's another thing for us to empower people to have personal and private conversations where they are. I think that's where the movement gets started. It doesn't get started in church; it gets started in the bathrooms, around the kitchen tables [and] breakfast cereal. What I'm trying to do is to make this part of the daily living conversations that people have.

Why is this an issue that church people or anybody needs to be aware of and should care about?

People should care about it because we are not alone in this world. Since 9/11, we are world citizens. We are part of a human collective, and we have to understand that our destinies are tied together, that they are connected, and they are deeply and profoundly interrelated on almost every level that we live. One of the things that people here in Chicago -- this very parochial, provincial setting -- have to understand is that suffering is something that knows no boundaries. It has no limits to it. When suffering breaks out in any community -- whether in Europe or Asia or Africa or Central or South America -- we have to respond to it. It is the moral imperative of our faith to do so. To be Christian is essentially to have a radical sense of optimism, yes, but to be willing to engage the forces and powers of darkness and evil [and] at the same time to preserve the humanity of the evildoer: I oppose what you do and what you stand for and the systems that you've created, but I reserve the right to say that you are redeemable.

What motivated this new sense of activism for you and for other people in this community who have really taken this on?

For me personally, activism and solidarity [were] fed to me with my cereal in the morning. I came from a family, from a setting that believed in the power and the need for justice, for solidarity with communities. It's something I've always been around. My admiration for men like Dr. King and others is just a foregone conclusion for me. Plus, I'm hoping as an individual and as a pastor for the coming of a better world. I feel that ultimately my responsibility to myself and to my family and to the people I serve as pastor is to do whatever I can to inspire the beginning of that world. Though I may not live to see it, though I may not be around when it is born, I will do everything in my power to make sure it gets conceived.

Is it unusual to have churches from such different denominational backgrounds coming together on this kind of issue?

It is, but it should not be. It is. That's a sad thing to me. I think that we should be able to put aside our denominational differences, all of the differences that separate us in terms of theology and morality, all those things, and say, "Look, ultimately at the end of the day we are called to preserve human life and to bring into being and into manifestation what we understand the gospel to be." Now it breaks down in many different camps about all the theology. But ultimately when people are dying it's just simple: millions of people are dying, millions more displaced. When it's just that simple, then we should be able to speak with a clarion and singular voice to say, "No, this is not acceptable." Whether we be Pentecostal or Lutheran or Presbyterian or Methodist or Baptist or interdenominational, nondenominational, AME -- whatever we are, we should be able to understand that death and murder and genocide are not acceptable to us. It's really just that simple.

Are these groups that you mentioned coming together?

Many of us are. Catholic, United Church of Christ, Shekinah -- a Lutheran congregation. We're coming together. Many are. Many Pentecostals are, but there are still some who have not signed on, so to speak, to this struggle. One wonders what is the driving force behind those limitations. Could the coalition be bigger? Of course it could. Could it include more prominent and powerful voices? Yes, it could. But those of us who believe in justice, believe that it is as essential to preach justice as it is to preach salvation -- we will do what we can until others come along. In the mid- and early Nineties, very few people were talking about apartheid in South Africa. In the late Seventies, Jeremiah Wright, pastor of a United Church of Christ [congregation] here in Chicago, could not get any black congregation to put a "Free South Africa" sign in their yard. His church was the only one that had it. But time passes and issues become popular. The issues become celebrities, so to speak, as was the case with apartheid. So you had a broad-based support, and a coalition was formed. Some of us have to stand on the wall and sound the alarm until the rest of us are able to understand that something is really going on on the other side that we should care about.

There are some prominent leaders in Washington who have been working on Sudan -- before Darfur it was southern Sudan -- for quite a while. They've also been frustrated that there hasn't been as much grassroots involvement, especially from black churches. Were people a little slow to jump in?

Yes, and it still is [true] even with Darfur. I just attended a huge gathering in Atlanta -- over 140,000 black Christians. Darfur was never mentioned. Justice was never mentioned. It was a great event. It really was. I think a lot of religious leaders think it's an either/or. Either I'm focused on issues of justice and solidarity and equality or I'm focused on issues of salvation and sanctification and justification [in] the religious community. But I think it's a both/and. One does not make sense without the other. There has to be a coming together. When the southern Sudan issue came out [and] many black religious leaders, many black people did not respond to it[, that] has a lot to do with the fact, I think, that African Americans have a very strange connection to Africa. We have a very strange, tenuous connection. We know that we are rooted in Africa, but our cultural and moral sensibilities tend not to drive us to appeal for their liberation in the same way that we have been driven to appeal for our own. This cynical disconnect between Africans and African Americans, I think, is a driving force behind it. For some strange reasons, we don't seem to see ourselves connected to that community, to our community, to realize that we are Africans living in America. The relationship between African Americans and the continent of Africa is constantly being developed and understood. African Americans in this country really don't have a driving sensibility to stand up in solidarity with what's happening in Africa because there's a cultural disconnect, an imposed disconnection, but it's also one that admittedly African Americans have bought into [being] and allowed to exist. When we see suffering children and when we see genocide going on in Africa, in the Sudan and other places, slavery in Africa, we're not driven by our deep moral impulses to be outraged, the sort of righteous indignation that ... might drive us in Harlem or in Bedford-Stuyvesant or in Watts or in Atlanta or in Chicago. That same moral intensity does not drive us when we see this. And it's sad, but it is something I believe those of us who understand we are Africans who live in America and who continue to preach and teach this deep, profound, existential connection -- at the end of the day, we're going to overcome.

Put aside even the question of Africans. I think that even if there are religious communities that can't buy into the Africa/African American connection, let us make the case that we are human. Let us make the case that wherever human beings are suffering and dying, we have a responsibility. It's a difficult progression of concern, but I do think that, at the end of the day, we will overcome.

In Illinois it seems the grassroots religious community is having a big impact. Legislation has been passed that may be a model for the rest of the country. The grassroots really do have power.

Absolutely. Grassroots always have power. It seems to me, as I try to understand progressive undertakings, that the one power ordinary people do have is the power of their numbers, the power of their personhood, the power of their humanity, their willingness to take a stand. I don't care what political force or what political personality or what political demagogue seeks to overcome that. He or she will never be victorious, because the one basic and fundamental power that ordinary people have is the power of their being there. Pastors in this city and other religious leaders -- Jewish and Muslim communities, the Sikhs, Bahais -- what we've been able to do is to mobilize our numbers and to say that we're willing, so to speak, to lay our bodies on the line, because there are certain things which all of our faiths, all of our deep religious understandings compel us to do.

This fight has to be waged in the legislative houses across this country and ultimately in Washington. It is as much a political struggle as it is a spiritual or existential one. We cannot simply pray Darfur away. We can't simply fast it away. We can't "speak in tongues" it away. We have to be willing to speak truth to power -- to say to governors and state senators and senators and even to the president that the same sort of convictions that you have with issues like Iraq and the same sort of driving, mobilizing energies that you use to compel a nation to go to war -- we need to have those same energies when it comes to suffering and dying and genocide.

In your own congregation, what has been the spiritual impact for people as they've really gotten mobilized on this issue?

The strangest thing happens when communities begin to organize themselves. There is a sense of empowerment and a sense of refreshing that comes, that really cannot be had any other way. We can talk about something and we can have conversation about it and can teach it and be in dialogue, but when people actually begin to move, to organize, to say "I'll meet you at such-and-such gathering," to be there and to mobilize our numbers and to take a stand, there is a sense of individual empowerment that happens in this collective drive to organize. I have seen in my congregation men and women, teenagers, adults who are completely driven by this and who have a new sense of themselves, who have a new sense of purpose for their faith, in addition to their own personal lives, because often our understandings of ourselves are born in the struggle. We learn more about ourselves sometimes in a fight than we do when we are not in the fight, so to speak. It has been refreshing. It's one of the strange benefits of a struggle. Sometimes struggles deplete us and they wear us away, but there are also times when the struggle will give you a greater sense of yourself and your purpose and what you're here for than anything else will. You understand in the struggle that perhaps [you were] born to do this.

You spoke about Darfur and Sudan as being a moral issue. Has that in some way raised the level of activism and given it a higher purpose?

Absolutely, absolutely, and then the goal of it, with this moral sense of it, is moral consistency. It is to say that sure, this time it's Darfur, this time it's the Sudan. But wherever this is, let us have moral consistency. Let us stand up for freedom and for justice and equality wherever those things are being threatened and wherever those things are being haunted and stalked by the forces and powers of evil. We are, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, children of light. We have a responsibility to bear that light and to take it into darkness, even when darkness will not receive it. That's just fundamental for me. Without the moral, religious undertones of this, the struggle has no way to sustain itself. It becomes a struggle between political powers, between governments that wage war and issues of legality against each other. But with this moral and existential drive, we can turn this argument, this struggle rather, into something more significant and greater, so that what happens in Darfur becomes greater than Darfur. It becomes an indictment and an indication of who we are as American citizens: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Well, we have to hold them to be self-evident everywhere. Darfur, with this moral undertone, becomes a way for us to analyze who we are.

You have turned your sights to the national and international level. What are you trying to accomplish now?

One of the major things we are working on right now is to get our government to make a bold and clear statement first about this issue and secondly, to do more than just ask the Sudanese government to stop murdering its African citizens -- to take a real, legitimate risk, to take a stake in this issue whether that is as significant as militarily, or at the very least to pull together a coalition of other governments who will impose restrictions. The Sudanese government still has an inflow of economic resources, military resources. I think the government of the United States of America could do more than just ask.

Eight years ago, a lot of the Sudan activism seemed to be coming from the conservative evangelical churches that really started all of this. Are you still working with them? Are they still part of it, and are you partnering with them? Do you see this as an opportunity for black leadership to step into a gap?

Oddly enough, I can't say that I am partnering with evangelicals at this point. That's not because I'm unwilling to do so. I think it's because the organizing flow has been the more mainline churches and "mainline" Pentecostal churches here in the city. It's a matter of the disconnects about our vocation more than it is [about] proclivity, because I'm sure the pastors with whom I work and many women are more than willing to work with whosoever has a heart. I do think it is an interesting opportunity for mainline and evangelical Christians to come together and just see how we can disagree without getting a divorce. There are still certain basic things that hold us together. Liberal Christians and conservative Christians are so polarized in this country -- to the benefit of certain political realities. I think the members of those churches who claim those dogmatic positions have to reclaim their churches and reclaim their faith and reclaim the priority of their church. I would wager that this concern for Darfur that started in the evangelical church probably started with the people and not with the leadership, as it is in the liberal churches. It starts with the people who say to their leaders, "Your agenda may not be our agenda right now. We the people have a say." I think that's powerful, so I'm hoping that it will give us a chance to dialogue, because I think the split and the disconnect is a dangerous one and must be overcome.