Todd is a friend on our MySpace page and recently shared his experience attending Barack Obama’s church...

"My name is Todd, and I live in Chicago. I am a white guy. For the sake of admitting my biases, I am a liberal. My preferred candidate for president was John Edwards, but if Obama is my party’s nominee, I will not be disappointed. That being said, I am taking this time to write a response to an email I recently received about Barack Obama, or more to the point, Barack Obama’s church. The email states that Barack Obama’s church (Trinity Unity Church of Christ) has a non-negotiable commitment to Africa and that you will only be welcomed there if you are black.

"According to the church’s mission statement, they do in fact have a strong commitment to Africa. Such a statement can be taken a number of ways, though I suspect it is quite benign. Most likely, his church’s commitment to Africa is a call to ’remember our roots and be proud of being black.’ Their mission statement is heavy on the black community, but what do you expect? They’re a black church in a black neighborhood. All Christian congregations experience Christ differently, and this has been so since 33 AD. I do not see anything wrong with applying Jesus’s teachings to your personal struggles. The paradox of the black church is that they try to project individual struggles into endemic, representative struggles for the entire black community. It is both a source of strength and of weakness. It helps draw them together as a community, but at the same time there is always an accompanying charge of racism or exclusivity. But what community shouldn’t be closer? These are the people in your neighborhood, who will take you to work when your car dies. We remember, for instance, the story of stone soup.

"At the same time, I do not think twice about seeing a Greek Orthodox church; a Russian Orthodox church; the church down the street that offers a sermon in Polish every Sunday; or the Horeb House of Worship, an Indian-Christian church that shares the building with my mostly white Presbyterian church. Say, did anyone ever ask Huckabee how many black people go to his church?

"The more serious charge in the email was that one can only join Barack’s church if he is black. Realizing I had to put my money where my mouth is, I decided to attend worship there and see for myself. So last Sunday I made the 15 mile trek down to the Trinity Unity Church of Christ. I was going to be very disappointed if they did not let me in after all that trouble! We elected to go to the 7:30 a.m. service and parked in the neighborhood near the church. When we got to the front door, I took a deep breath. The moment of truth! We opened the door and went inside… and nothing happened. The greeters greeted us, handed us bulletins and smiled. It was all pretty normal.

"We walked into the sanctuary and sat on the back pew. The lady in the pew in front of us turned and told us we could not sit there. Was there some sort of segregated seating arrangement, I wondered? No. According to the woman, ’That pew is where the ushers sit.’ As we walked to another pew, I looked around and saw very few white people. I would estimate that the congregation was 99 percent black, though the 11 a.m. and the 6 p.m. services may have different make-ups.

"We moved to a different pew and sat. In the few minutes before the service started, several people welcomed us. When the service began, the pastor asked that all the visitors stand and be welcomed. We stood, and more people came over to welcome us. I was hugged a couple of times, and many people shook my hand. The pastor told us we were welcome and said, ’If there is anyone here who does not have a church home, we ask that you make us your home. If you already have a church home, we hope you will take our prayers and blessing back to them.’ I noticed that there were several visitors that day -- I would say that 10 were black and six were white. I also noted that the pastor did not say, ’All of you are welcome to join except for the white people.’

"The sermon was about learning to take pride in what you are doing for the greater glory of God, along with the stern statement that nothing in life comes free. We have to work for it. But, he also talked about how, as a community, we have an obligation help keep each other on the right path. The pastor told of his upbringing in Georgia, and how his father had explained that the black community there conducted itself largely along the same moral and ethical code as the West African villages from which many of the people there had emigrated. Everyone in the village was Aunt So and So or Grandmother So and So. When you spoke to an adult, it was ’No, sir’ or ’Yes, Ma’am.’ When one of your friend’s parents met you for the first time and asked, ’Who are your people,’ you did right to explain which church you went to and what they stood for. That was how they knew you were not going to be a bad influence on their kid.

"Then there was a performance by the children’s choir, numbering around 100 kids of various ages, and a group of dancers performed an interpretive dance to the music. The dancing was a little too charismatic for my taste, but to each his own.

"The pastor asked us to pray in silence for a while. The man sitting next to me took my hand and asked if there was anything that I would like to pray about. I told him about the upcoming decision regarding my tenure at work, and he told me he would pray about it. I asked him, and he told me of his son, Dierre, who was about to ship out to Iraq. He said he would appreciate my prayers for him. And so we prayed.

"After the offering, the pastor talked briefly about an editorial in the Chicago Tribune that labeled Trinity Unity as ’a bunch of crackpot black supremacists.’ He said that if any of us wanted to respond to that charge or invite the columnist to attend service and see for himself, that the address for letters to the editor was in the bulletin. As I recall, none of the churches I ever attended were subjected to negative editorials in the daily paper. Yet, aside from some peculiarities, such as church dancers, everything seemed pretty much like any other Christian service I’ve attended. I was welcomed, told to put my faith in God, reminded of the sacrifice of Jesus, asked to help keep others in the flock on the path of virtue, urged to be a better person, and invited back the next week."