A moment in ecumenical history

W. Sterling Cary: Everyone had a say

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New York, July 1, 2008 – W. Sterling Cary was no stranger to controversy when he was elected the first African American President of  the National Council of Churches in 1972. He had been an active civil rights leader for years, and in 1966 he was a signatory of a statement on race published by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen in the New York Times.

White church members tended to be frightened by the statement, which many regarded as radical and threatening. "In the American mind, 'black' and 'power' did not go together," Cary said recently in an interview with National Public Radio.

"We as churchmen recognized the need to become engaged in efforts to empower people," Cary told NPR. "We felt it important to say that the will of God was that people be engaged in this struggle against the powers and principalities that were oppressing them. Racial injustice is a legacy of the slave period and continues until this day."

Looking back, the venerable United Church of Christ clergyman said the response to the statement was "polite" but did not lead to changes in society.

Contacted this summer at his home in the Chicago suburb of Flossmoor, Ill., Cary warned that 42 years later, racial problems persist in the United States. He expressed the fear that the potential nomination of an African American for president might obscure that fact.

Citing the media uproar over statements by Barack Obama's pastor, Cary said, "People are quick to condemn Jeremiah Wright, but you have to recognize that the history he is talking about is still with us. My greatest concern about the current presidential campaign is that the rhetoric gives people the impression that they can ignore the past and celebrate the future, but there are a lot of serious problems that cannot be glossed over – and this is especially pronounced in terms of race."

Despite important advances in four decades, the statement Cary made when he was installed as NCC president in December 1972 would be true today: "Empowerment today is limited to the placement of certain individuals in executive positions. That isn't empowerment."

Cary, who turns 81 this year, looks back his three-year presidential term with clear-eyed realism.

"It was a tense period when I was president," he says today. "We had Vietnam, we had tensions over Gay, Lesbian and transgendered people." Arguments on the floor of the NCC Governing Board were intense and often angry.

But one of his satisfactions, Cary said, is that his presiding style seemed to encourage more civil debate. "There was a tendency for our discussions to turn into dissentions ... but we created a climate where we could give everyone a hearing – we created an arena in which we could express our differences. Everyone had a say."

Another challenge faced by Cary's generation of leaders, including Claire Randall, the NCC's first woman general secretary, was the tendency of church people to turn their backs on national church bodies and channel their financial support to to local judicatories and congregations.

"There has always been a tension between the national and local parts of the body," he said. "We need to resell and promote the need for a national body. How do you emphasize the need for the total body rather than just a part of it?"

Cary noted the  staff and program cutbacks in the NCC and its member communions that are caused in part by a diversion of contributions. "What frightens me most is that it’s even more pronounced now, this emphasis on the local excluding national bodies. The UCC is certainly going through that stage. I’m not sure if you cut back so drastically that you can rebuild."

Cary, who was ordained a Baptist and served Presbyterian and UCC congregations, was executive of the UCC Metropolitan New York Conference when he was elected NCC president. He was later executive of the UCC Conference in Chicago, from which he retired.

Whenever he consents to media interviews these days, he is invariably introduced as one of the signers of "the black church manifesto." He also invariably explains that it was intended as a loving and reconciling document.

"The love that we know has been made known by Christ," he told the NPR interviewer. "Not to allow freedom is a sin against God."