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Reflections on Beloved’s 12th Year

Dear Beloveds,

In the last year, we have been transformed by abrupt changes in the world around us.  First, tornados blasted through our lives on April 27.  Immediately we struck out to the homes of our members, and to the homes of strangers, helping to remove debris and to listen to the stories of loss and mystery. In the aftermath, we discovered that we were not alone in responding – sister UCC churches from around the country have come to live with us, a week at a time, to work in the driving Alabama sun, rebuilding homes for those who lost their homes.  They, and we, and the lives of people whose homes are being rebuilt, are being transformed.

Many of us have been transformed by a different kind of disaster, Alabama’s immigration law, HB 56, which passed the Alabama legislature days after the April 27 tornadoes. We stepped out of our known world and entered into the lives of people affected the law, and we have been changed. We have had potluck suppers with young people and their parents who brought them here as infants. We have hosted many planning sessions for those opposing the laws. We have joined hands at vigils and rallies with other faith communities around the state standing against any law that dehumanizes our brothers and sisters. A number of us did different kinds of work, but I would say that it has been the relationships that were most transformative.

And now as we look around us, we see that our community is being transformed. When we held our first worship service in 2000, every building around us was in shambles. It looked like downtown Baghdad. We were warned that buying a building in Avondale was a bad investment; the value could only go down. Many people were afraid to come to Avondale for church, and to be honest, on a dark night it did seem quite scary. We renovated our dilapidated “little building” next door, now named the Brown Building after Beloved Marty Brown, which was one step in transformation of the neighborhood. Now there are new businesses popping up all around us! We took a chance on Avondale because there was a place for everybody here. Part of our work, as people of faith called to care for the least of these, is to help ensure that there will still be a place for everyone, as the process of transformation unfolds.

There were many other transformational moments in the last year, some I know about and many that I don’t.  Our Spoken Word events are always the best thing happening in Birmingham (possibly short of worship on Sunday nights!) Watching our beautiful children grow. The way that you take care of one another. The joy you take in feeding the hungry and housing homeless families. The way we can feel our spirits rise when we sing with our Beloved Community Orchestra, or listen to LeNard and David sing ‘Guide My Steps.’

Transformation is what the Spirit of God does.  We don’t get to decide when, or how, or what it will look like. We just open our minds.  We open our hearts. We open our doors. And invite the Spirit to do with us as the Spirit will.  That’s what we have done for 12 years. I know I have been transformed, and am ready for more. What about you?

-Rev. Angie Wright

Summer 2012

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Immigration Justice, News, Social justice

No Turning Back: Alabama Anti-Immigrant Laws Unite Opposition

Originally featured on Sojourners God’s Politics Blog

We lost a bitter legislative battle this year, as Alabama Legislators voted to make the nation’s most toxic anti-immigrant law more poisonous than anyone imagined. Added to the notorious HB 56 is a requirement that the names and faces of undocumented persons be plastered on the web and in prominent public places — the new law stops just short of putting targets on their backs.

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Protests at the Alabama Statehouse. Courtesy GBM

Teachers are still required to interrogate schoolchildren about their immigration status. People of faith, Good Samaritans, and family members are now felons if they knowingly drive five undocumented children to the store, the doctor, or Vacation Bible School. Racial profiling provisions make every trip to school, work, and church a nightmare.

The legislators — all Republicans — must have laughed all the way to golf games waiting for them back in their districts. They think they won.

Just because they were sitting at the front of the bus, they think they were driving.

Little do they know that they have created their own worst nightmare. Their efforts to rid Alabama of ethnic diversity have backfired on them, bringing forth a multicultural, bilingual movement that would not have emerged in Alabama for another 50 years were it not for HB 56 and its evil twin, HB 658. Legislators’ wrongs have dared people to claim their rights as human beings. Republican efforts to divide have united a new people — brown, black, and white — who lock arms and sing, “We Are One Family, One Alabama.” Lawmakers’ fear of change is no match for this new people’s determination not to go back to Alabama’s old days of hatred and shame.

Alabama’s new hate laws were written expressly to terrorize people so irreversibly that they would flee the state. Some did. Others hid inside their homes like Jesus’ disciples locked inside the upper room, huddled in fear of what the authorities might do to them. But instead of being driven out by vicious legislation, Latino leaders have emerged in 22 communities across the state to stand up for the human and civil rights of their people.

How were they affected by a year of battling against hate? In their own words: They learned to overcome fear. What perfect poetic justice: lawmakers used fear as a weapon, but it backfired. They unwittingly taught their own victims to stand strong against fear and intimidation, how to work together, how to win allies, how to make change in a hostile world.

When the legislature opened in February, many Latinos, regardless of citizenship status, were barred from visiting Statehouse galleries and offices of their legislators. By the time it closed in May, a new reality existed. Crowds chanted, “The State House is Our House,” and in doing so, they took on the responsibilities of citizenship by standing against unjust, immoral laws at no small risk.

There are relics in the legislature who may choose to stand in the Statehouse door, staving off change as long as they can, and they’ll end up right where George Wallace did — with the door of history slammed in their faces.

While it may look like nothing in Alabama changed this year, everything did.

There is no turning back.

Rev. Angie Wright is Pastor of Beloved Community United Church of Christ and Faith in Community Coordinator for Greater Birmingham Ministries in Birmingham, Alabama.

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