When schools were unwilling or unable to engage with issues of race and the American experience, youth turned to the church. Two Texas pastors found a way to guide them into the holy spaces of wilderness and witness.
“Are we going in the right direction?”
This question hung heavily as we drove west on Interstate 10 from Houston toward San Antonio in a van filled with junior high students. We were heading to Mo Ranch retreat in the Texas Hill Country. Three days before, on July 7, 2016, police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had shot Alton Sterling to death while he sold CDs in front of a convenience store. We love Mo Ranch wholeheartedly, but we couldn’t shake the feeling that had we gone east, we might have had a meaningful conversation with young Christians about the church’s role in racial justice movements in the United States, historically and now.
As pastors serving in Texas, our concern was amplified by other political and cultural forces. As the Black Lives Matter movement gained shape and strength in the wake of tragedies like Sterling’s death, resistance emerged. Book-banning efforts in local school boards followed, as did a Texas state law restricting the teaching of critical race theory in the public school curriculum.
We are extraordinarily blessed to know and serve faithful, compassionate and intelligent youth who care deeply about systemic injustice and the well-being of their neighbors. When schools were unwilling or unable to address issues of race and the American experience, youth eagerly turned to the church. Thus, with our colleague Jonathan Britt, we vowed to make a Pilgrimage for Racial Justice with senior high youth one year later.
The power of the pilgrim
Pilgrimage is an ancient teaching tool of the church. Making a pilgrimage grows our faith as believers by shifting our perspective and bringing ourselves — body, soul and mind — to fresh and foreign spaces. Consider Israel’s journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land, Jesus’ journey to the cross and empty tomb, and Paul’s missionary travels. Our tradition is replete with images of the pilgrim way. Droves of Christians worldwide annually visit Rome, Iona, Taizé and the Camino de Santiago.
Making a pilgrimage grows our faith as believers by shifting our perspective and bringing ourselves — body, soul and mind — to fresh and foreign spaces.
To be sure, Edgard, Louisiana, and Selma, Alabama, haven’t enjoyed widespread visitation from the church universal. As we considered what it would mean to take youth to sites predominantly regarded as secular and less obviously centralized by the church, the image of the desert mothers and fathers of early Christianity emerged.
In wilderness space, desert mystics claimed places off the beaten path. There, they prayed and received seekers who desired a word from God or an encounter with the Holy One. Such havens offered quiet away from the noise of institutional religion and encouraged a different way of thinking. Is this place holy because something remarkable in church history already happened here, as in Jerusalem? Or is this place holy because something remarkable in church history could happen here? Hoping that these secular sites of racial justice work could become the grounds where future church leaders vow “never again” and discover their life’s work, we set our course.
How did we accomplish this?
As a method of faith formation, pilgrimage offers particular advantages. We are not tourists taking a break from our regular lives. Instead, each person brings their point of view, authentic experiences and identity to the task. How each pilgrim feels in their own skin is instructive for the whole community. So the boundary between expert and student becomes dynamic, fluctuating according to context. At home, we find our center; we are rooted in identity, and we claim our values. On pilgrimage, no one is home any longer — so with defenses down and habits altered, new horizons of belief become possible. These were the conditions for learning we hoped to establish. As poet and teacher Mark Nepo described it in his 2006 book The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic Life, “To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.”
Seeking such transformation, we agreed to curate a diverse collection of places as our teachers: museums and archives, churches and convenience stores, schools and courthouses, monuments and unmarked places we could barely locate. This quest quickly grew in scale. The more we researched, the more we found ourselves steeped in a Southern landscape filled with stories of pain and promise, all of which deserved our attention. Across these sites, we wanted our nation’s full story of racial injustice and the struggle for equality told well.
We strategically paired sites conveying key information about enslavement, sharecropping and reconstruction, racial terror lynching, Jim Crow segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, redlining, mass incarceration and more. Of vital importance was the examination of the problem’s legal, social, economic, educational and political dimensions — taught not independently of one another but with a constant eye on intersectionality and collusion of forces, patterns and systems that corrode human thriving.
The more we researched, the more we found ourselves steeped in a Southern landscape filled with stories of pain and promise, all of which deserved our attention.
We agreed there must be rules of the road. At every site, we first prayed and read Scripture as a group. We sought to respect the space and its inhabitants, acknowledging our transience. Then, we agreed to listen to the place, the stories and the information offered. We aimed to practice curiosity over judgment. We opened ourselves to people we met and learned beside. When we convened after site encounters, we told the truth about what we saw, how we felt, and how God was moving in us. We recognized that one person’s truth-telling and perception differed from another’s. We also developed practices to ensure space for the most vulnerable among us first and for all of us.
Believing this work would be best accomplished in the communion of the larger church, we planned our annual pilgrimage to reach the Montreat Youth Conference midway, allowing us to join peers in worship, keynotes, small groups and fellowship. With Montreat as a connecting point, we enriched our pilgrimage with visits to leaders like Heath Rada, former moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.); David LaMotte, musician and author concerned with social movements; and Wade Burns, who partnered with legendary civil rights leader and U.S. Representative John Lewis on issues of equitable housing in Atlanta, through which the two became lifelong friends.
These four pilgrimages included 35 youth and six adults (many of whom were repeat participants) and five PC(USA) congregations: St. Philip, Houston, Texas; St. Thomas, Houston, Texas; Faith Presbyterian, Colorado Springs, Colorado; University Presbyterian, San Antonio, Texas; and San Marino Community Church, San Marino, California.
The impact: What difference has it made?
If the inquisitive spirit of the pilgrim launched our journey, the desire to testify to what we learned brought us home. In our journeying, we grew in knowledge and conviction of truths we needed to join in voicing. Each time we practice the spiritual discipline of testimony with our home congregation, family and friends, we experience the Holy Spirit’s guiding hand in interpreting our experiences. To convey the hope, healing and discovery of pilgrimage, we share just a few vignettes of profound impact:
- Eleven days after we arrived home from our first pilgrimage, with people across the nation, we watched news coverage of the horrifying Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of our youths experienced a haunting revelation. Just days prior, on the pilgrimage, nearly every photo of a White supremacist donning a Ku Klux Klan hood was captured in black and white, subconsciously imparting a sense of safe distance from such evil. When the youth got home, she watched footage of White supremacists brandishing torches in vibrant color on LCD flat-screen televisions. With new urgency, she was the first youth to sign up to teach adult Sunday school about what she learned on the pilgrimage.
- The Whitney Plantation in Edgar, Louisiana, is the sole plantation in the South dedicated to representing only the experience of enslaved persons on plantations. Using architectural features original to the site and others brought in for education, the team recreates the facilities of a working plantation to teach the abhorrent realities of enslavement. We visited the outdoor kitchen, a separate wood shack built apart from the main house. The heat put off by the wood fire stove was unbearably hot and created a perpetual risk of fire — both features the White enslavers preferred to locate outside the main home. One youth explored the kitchen, feeling its staggering heat in the late July afternoon. He grew quiet over the rest of the tour, so a pastor checked to see how he was doing. He is a first-generation American in his family, which had emigrated from Kenya. Colonial Kenya only gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1963. All his life, his grandmother had told him stories of cooking for a British family she worked for, working in a kitchen he thought sounded strange because it wasn’t in the house. Across an ocean on another continent, he suddenly understood what his grandmother’s life had been and why she risked making a new start in another country to give him freedom she didn’t have.
- Our group’s arrival at the Triple S Mart, where police killed Alton Sterling, held gravity, as that killing was the event precipitating our journey. We were a sight, with teenagers and adults pouring out of a giant van at a tiny corner store in north Baton Rouge, looking as lost and disoriented as one would imagine about those who’d never visited the neighborhood, let alone set foot on this street.
- We had no way to prepare for what we found: a community-built monument to Alton. His jovial smile radiated from his muralized portrait on the building. Beneath it, we found a massive offering of stuffed animals, votive candles, flowers, photos and treasured mementos. We stood in awe before this altar, stumbling into prayer and Scripture. We didn’t get far before a man entered the edge of our huddle. He wondered aloud honestly what on earth we were doing, in the absolute loveliest way, and we told him. Tears welled in his eyes as he shared that Alton was his friend. He’d watched us arrive and suspected our appearance had some connection with Alton. We showed him our liturgy, and he eagerly worshiped with us in the parking lot.
- A beloved Sunday school teacher in our congregation, a teacher in a Houston-area school district, left worship crying in the winter of 2023. In the narthex, she conveyed the depth of her despair that a 2020 book called The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person, by Frederick Joseph, had been banned from the school. It was not required reading in the curriculum; it was merely available in the library. She urged us to listen to the video from the previous week’s school board meeting to learn about the issue.
Each time we practice the spiritual discipline of testimony with our home congregation, family and friends, we experience the Holy Spirit’s guiding hand in interpreting our experiences.
To consider the motion to ban the book, the district had called a special meeting on a Wednesday at 1 p.m. We listened to the video in the church office while we handled other items on our to-do lists. The voice of the meeting’s second speaker was unmistakable. When we raced to the screen to see the video footage, we saw a pilgrim from our first trip in 2017, now a 21-year-old graduate of the district. With integrity, clarity and authority, she articulated the importance of free thought in libraries and advocated for students who needed this book to feel represented and, therefore, to flourish. How many 21-year-olds speak in school board meetings on Wednesday afternoons?
These stories from trips across the years offer only a sample of the first fruits springing from seeds planted in pilgrimage. Yet each holds power and potential, distinctive from almost any book study, Bible study or group discussion we’ve hosted on the topic of race. Stories gently unearth unexamined assumptions. Stories dislodge frameworks of convenience. Stories spur deeper reflection. Presumably, that is why our Lord favored them in his own teaching.
In our current political polarization, what chasms can we bridge, and what distances can we reach if we journey together? In a climate of contentious conversation, what will we discover if we leave behind the old stories we recite to maintain stasis and tell deeper truths that transform society?
Come and see! Pursue a personal, congregational or family pilgrimage to come and see what Jesus longs to teach his church. Come and see where Christ dwells in our neighbor, in the world beyond our stained glass and our nation’s history. Visit painful places and lift to Jesus the sin and sickness of the world, petitioning him for new life. Follow the Spirit’s call to come and see all that is still possible when Presbyterians confess historical sin, repent and raise our voices in justice movements as apostles of Christ’s gospel of reconciliation.
