Newsletter Archive And Articles

I will never forget the day I turned down Yale Divinity School. Since seminary first crossed my mind, I had wanted nothing more than to join my favorite UCC colleagues and scholars in Connecticut. Most of my favorite ministers and mentors (including Grinnell’s chaplain) were products of the esteemed “school on the hill” in New Haven. I couldn’t believe what my fingers were typing: “Dear Office of Admissions…It is with gratitude and sincere regret that I am writing to decline your offer of admission to Yale.” 
 
As a “fall school”, a second option, or an unlikely alternative…I also applied to Emory University’s Divinity School called the Candler School of Theology. When I visited Atlanta, however, I knew where I was called to go to seminary. It wasn’t because Candler felt like home. It felt far from home. It wasn’t because it was a safe LGBTQ UCC space. It was a United Methodist space in ugly turmoil over the “gay issue.” It wasn’t because I really had any interest in ever living in Atlanta. I love walkability and dislike car commuting and sprawl.  
 
It was because, even more than my year living in France, Atlanta offered a personal challenge. It offered the opportunity for me for personal growth: to truly try to face my own white privilege. I wanted and sensed that I needed to experience being the racial minority, to work on the lifelong effort of waking up, and to do all of this in a place steeped in the legacy, the life, and the teachings of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Atlanta is arguably the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. As a Spiritual Practice, almost every month I was in Atlanta, I went to the site of MLK’s grave and museum to think and reflect on ministry. As a privileged, white, French Major from Colorado, Connecticut, and Iowa, something called me to go to the Deep South. I went not only to study theology but also to learn the roots of my own privilege as part of my preparation for work in the Church. 
 
Every day, I am keenly aware that I am now well on my way to becoming another old, white man working in one of the oldest privileged institutions in North America. First Church Guilford is the 7^th oldest institution of any kind or form in Connecticut. As this institution gives me more authority, my responsibility to wake-up to my own privilege, as a daily Spiritual Practice, grows as well. While being an out gay person brings an embodied awareness of the heteronormative social structures of privilege and oppression, it doesn’t mean that I have any less work to do in terms of the daily Spiritual Practice of “Waking Up” to my own white privilege. 
 
Divinity School in Atlanta was more than it promised to be in terms of justice and personal work. I met my now husband. I fought the Methodist Church’s discrimination when they systematically looked for, then kicked my fellow LGBTQ colleagues out of the ordination process. Most of all, I saw the effects and impacts of racism, privilege, and the need for us to never stop striving to better understand, to better accompany, and to speak truth to power. 
 
I am in the unstoppable process of becoming an old, white man. All of us in Guilford, Connecticut carry vast amounts of agency in the social status quo. As a Christian, what are your Spiritual Practices that keep you from falling back asleep to the ongoing need for action, the call to Civil Rights, and the need to continue striving for awareness of our own privilege and opportunity to make change? The snooze button is too easy to press. 

For me, since the day I said “no” to Yale, my practice has been looking myself in the eyes in the mirror and telling that emerging old, white, male minster that he won’t win. I have promised my soul to Jesus the Christ who calls me to wake-up anew every day dedicated to the cause of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. 
 
The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph 
MLK Day 2020