Florissant and Ferguson: A Shelter in the Storm

By Neil Earle

MLK Day at Glendora's interracial service.

By now the whole world has heard of Ferguson, Missouri, the town where 18-year-old Michael Brown’s shooting by police led to tumult and dislocation this November. But very few have heard of Florrisant, Missouri, a town just to the north of Ferguson.

In the very days when the grand jury in Ferguson was deliberating the merits of the case against shooter Officer Wilson, Curtis May and his wife, Jannice, had been invited by pastors Karl and Carla Reinagal to speak to a group of police chiefs in Florrisant, just a few miles up the road from Ferguson. Pastor Reinagal looks after our St. Louis Church and the Florissant district. On October 6 judges and police officials from Florissant, Hazelwood, St. Ann, Berkeley, Olivet and Normandy and Flo Valley heard pastor May sketch out his message on racial healing and his own experiences as a citizen confronted by the police and also a minister whose son, Brad, is a police officer.

“Those in attendance were very receptive to the message,” Pastor Reinagal reported, “They asked pertinent questions about how to help strengthen relations with the communities they serve.”

For 17 years our local Glendora church has supported the efforts of Pastor Curtis May’s para-church ministry known as ORM, Office of Reconciliation and Mediation, in effective operation since 1996.

Karl and Carla Reinagal

Sowing Seeds in Florissant

According to Pastor Reinagal, the “meeting after the meeting” in Florissant was even more productive with ORM members being asked questions most would not feel free to discuss in a more public setting.

Curtis May brought some useful experience to this event and at all the workshops he conducts across the country. Curtis was a veteran of the Reconciliation and Police Legitimacy Summit hosted by the United States Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. in January, 2013. The event was sponsored by the then director of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), former Pasadena police chief Bernard Melekian, a long-time friend of ORM. He invited Curtis to address law enforcement officials from all over the country and to share his insights into the tensions between the majority and minority cultures in this country.

Many seeds of understanding and insight were sown at those meetings in Washington as they were at Florissant – Christian counteraction against the dominant consensus. Only 15 people but seeds start out very small and have a habit of enduring tenaciously.

Counteracting Emotionalism

Most involved in these issues agree: The issues are complex but not hopeless. In some cases, extremism and quick media responses are a complication that works against sound thinking in racial controversies. Even Biblical texts can be read differently by different people. We see in the Gospels that while Jesus verbally protested his illegal arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane he did not retaliate in kind or use the sword his disciples were so eager to brandish.

In America’s teeming cities, long-established background factors such as unemployment, suspicion, lingering Jim Crow attitudes are always there, of course, and this is where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. (see box)

Tony Pierce, Cliff Parks and Bob See from the Peoria, Illinois chapter of the Office of Reconciliation and Mediation (ORM).

So how should Christians respond? In our multi-racial denomination GCI, many congregations have been educating themselves on the principles of reconciliation and peace. We know that if we just let extremists or the sensation-prone media fill the vacuum we will come away with distorted views. I told my congregation on November 29 that Isaiah the prophet was very right when he showed how hard true judgment was, that the godly person would “not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears” (Isaiah 11:3).

President Obama was wise to caution the media about their role when the verdict was coming down. Reporters rushing up to the families of victims make it difficult for emotion not to take over and sit in the saddle. Numbers 35:9-28 shows how Israel had a “cities of refuge” program whereby those accused of manslaughter or accidental death could flee for safety from the vengeance of family members.

One commentator of Jewish persuasion alluded to this. He mentioned that for 3000 years justice has meant drawing the emotion out of such cases rather than a perpetual airing of grievances. The Old Testament contains many helpful principles along these lines – reflecting an astonishing fairness to minorities and immigrants along with the need for justice to be impartial (Proverbs 11:1; 16:11).

It’s from the New Testament, however, that most Christians take their cues about such painful, emotionalized issues as we are seeing too often these days. In the quest for racial harmony we must remember what Jesus called the weightier matters of the law. These are justice, mercy and faith.

What did he mean by that?

ORM newsletter editor Neil Earle (left) conferring with Curtis May at Fuller Seminary in 2004.

The Rule of Law

The very worst thing that can happen after the events in Ferguson or more recently New York City is that we, all of us, will allow these events to harden us in our harmful attitudes and biases. That would be the worst tragedy of all. Negative attitudes block the flow of mercy and compassion we need in carrying out Jesus’ plea to “judge righteous judgment.” Jesus started with justice and the element of law and order is foundational to keeping society grounded. Would-be nations such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia are ripped apart by tribal elements that have yet to learn the lessons of fair treatment and even-handed justice.

Yet the New Testament is very strong on law enforcement in the quest for civil peace. That’s in Romans 13:1-4,

“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted…For rulers hold no fear for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right…For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoers.”

That seems blindingly clear. Even Jesus, who engaged in an act of civil disobedience (cleansing the temple) and protested his illegal arrest by the Jewish hierarchy (Luke 22:52-53), even He submitted in the end to unjust laws when it meant his death (John 18:19-23). He even went to great lengths to conform to society’s expectations (Matthew 17:27). But Jesus didn’t stop with justice, as important as this is for the orderly running of society. He knew justice could be corrupted as seen in his parable of the unjust judge and calling King Herod a fox. Martin Luther King in his day warned us that everything Adolph Hitler did was “legal.” This is why Jesus moved on to talk about mercy as well, and so should we.

Mercy over Judgment

Ah, mercy. Such a grand concept. Where would we Christians be without it? James 2:13 says it so well, “Mercy triumphs over judgment.” Justice is inveighed in both Old and New Testaments but it’s justice tempered with mercy. Mercy involves a softening of our hearts, the opposite to what some will take away (unfortunately) from the events of Ferguson.

Mercy’s gentle appeal should help Caucasians understand why a black mother in my congregation said on a Martin Luther King Day service in Los Angeles: “I fear the day my son gets his driver’s license.”

Mercy’s softening sway helps us share the hurt of a 77 year old elder who confesses to my wife over a race discussion at lunch “My father was lynched,” and wept at the memory. Some wounds go deep, deep down and only the healing balm of mercy can go where the law cannot go.

Ferguson is Strong: Natalie DuBose has received over $200,000 in donations to help rebuild her cake shop.

Justice is violated when so many black businesses are burnt in Ferguson but mercy triumphs when baker Natalie DuBose receives more than $200,000 in rebuilding money to keep her shop productive during thanksgiving. Her tears on ABC-TV conjured up grief with joy. That’s the healing balm of redemptive mercy which we are to love, to love, to build into our daily walk and not just talk about (Micah 6:6).

Mercy breaks up the emotional log jam. It creates space for genuine life-saving change to take place. In Rustenberg, South Africa in 1990 when the country often looked on the edge of a race war, Pastor Willie Jonker of the Dutch Reformed Church confessed to the black leader Bishop Desmond Tutu his church’s complicity in apartheid all those centuries. Bishop Tutu’s reply was eloquent: “I believe that I certainly stand under the pressure of God’s Spirit to say that…when confession is made then [we] must say, ‘We forgive you,’ so that together we may move to the reconstruction of our land.”

It’s good to remember that race is not just an American problem. That spirit of Rustenberg leads to Jesus’ third consideration – living faith.

Kingdom Living Now

Someone once defined success as moving from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. Faith is almost like that. We go forward together, as Bishop Tutu said, because we see evidence that the Holy Spirit is still working. The Kingdom may be small and weak and just a mustard seed – only 15 people met in Florissant compared to the media deluge in Ferguson – but it is in such small gatherings that the Kingdom takes root. And where the Kingdom takes root, said Jesus, its effect is irreversible. It grows to eventually become the greatest force of all.

After the upheaval in Ferguson, police chief Lowry of Florissant responded to an encouraging note from Curtis May saying “you guys have a tough job.” Chief Lowry replied: “Thanks for your kind thoughts and prayers. I promise you and the entire community that this difficult time will make us a closer community.”

Bishop Desmond Tutu

Faith sees a way forward. Faith lives in the future. The Kingdom that is coming is here now (“at hand”) but it’s in the lower case, in weakness, in small acts of reconciliation and kindness. There is always something to be thankful for. One hundred cities did not burn as in 1968. Only 6 of 54 arrested that first night were from Ferguson. The NAACP and others worked overtime to register black voters so that they can have a greater share in the running of their community. People are waking up to the fact that we’re all in this together.

Remember how some protestors stood arms locked to resist the looters outside one store? The seeds of the kingdom are small like that, and the Holy Spirit is often like a salmon swimming upstream but we are reminded in such cases that the cause of racial peace is not hopeless. A beachhead of cooperation can push back the jungle of suspicion. It has worked before. It will work again. Our challenge as Christians is to flee the stereotypes and prejudices we all carry around in our heads. With God’s help we will replace them with the merciful outlook that rejoices against judgment.


Community Policing: A Pro-active Remedy

CNN’s Candy Crowley redeemed much of the media glare on Ferguson the Sunday of November 30 when she interviewed four police chiefs, two blacks and two white. It almost turned into a twenty minute promo for the virtues and benefits of community policing, an idea whose time has surely come.

Thomas Margen of the Maryland police stated that the events in Ferguson have had an effect on every police department in this country. “Ferguson started a lot of conversations about policing.” Chief Malik Aziz of Dallas added that “the conversation has started up again.” He attributed a lot of the trouble to a failure to be proactive, “a failure to build effective community relations with leaders of the community which explains some of the chaos coming from outsiders.” Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerick agreed: “The police were too aggressive on the first day and then not aggressive enough with the looters. The key here is a dialogue with the community leaders.” Knowing who to go to before the troubles begin is so vital, all the chiefs agreed.

This is community policing of the kind ORM has been engaged with for some time. Back in 2005-06 future COPS Director Melekian was chief of police in Pasadena, California. With the help of ORM, the Western Justice Center, Melekian and other agencies launched a community-oriented “Days of Dialogue” in Pasadena, CA. This pioneering event helped bring together 30 gang members and about 40 police officers. It was a significant day of learning and interaction for all. The police came in civvies and gang members were promised immunity. “Eighty percent of complaints about police misconduct are about perceived attitudes and misunderstandings,” Chief Melekian stated at that time.

Back in 2013 the chief exhorted that the crisis of inner city violence has become a matter of “restoring public trust” between the police and the community. Activists from Operation Safe Cities in Chicago, Operation Cease Fire in Boston and individual community leaders from other parts of America agreed. Superintendent McCarthy of Chicago commented that this rift between ethnic groups and the law “is rooted in the history of this country. The most visible form of government in most places is the police force.”

The real fix is in and it’s not what some might think. Background conditions are what author David Kennedy calls “new tools of intimidation” such as draconian drug laws with 15 year “mandatory minimums,” unrealistic prison terms along with the slow privatizing of the prison system – “the prison industrial complex.” These are some of the deep-rooted realities that fan the flames of tensions.

On CNN the chiefs were optimistic. They told Candy Crowley that Ferguson represents a “greater turning point” than events of the past. As a Christian-rooted organization ORM understands the complexity of issues even where some indications of criminality and resisting arrest exist. Bernard Melekian and his former colleagues in COPS are on record showing how the attitude of empathy for all involved – including most especially the families of the slain – is the first necessary step in transforming inner city police work. This can help to keep true justice rolling on like a river.

(Further info on atimetoreconcile.org.)