VISIT to Ferguson Continued Shortly after we arrived at a Catholic retreat center in South St.

Louis, we were introduced to a panel of folks from the St. Louis community. They were lawyers, politicians, academics, and even the former Police Chief of St. Louis County. St. Louis, by the panel’s description, is a fragmented city

with more than 90 municipalities, each with its own government, police force, mayor, etc. St. Louis is a border town to two rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri. Our panelists told us that one had been a tributary for the slave trade; the other a highway for white flight.

Because of the fragmentation in the city, the systems in St.

Louis reflect no parity. There are gross racial inequalities in educational and medical systems, recreational facilities, and mental health services. One academic described a map he and his research produced; he called it, “the geography of inequality.” The city desperately needs people working in areas of

organizing, training, and building capacity because what happened in Ferguson is not an anomaly in St. Louis; two more young black men have been killed there since Michael Brown died. Policing in the city of St. Louis has evolved from a model of community policing, where we shared relationships and watched out for each other, to almost a police state. We drove by the Ferguson police department and saw police lined up in riot gear along the streets. This was, for me, perhaps the most gut wrenching, stunning sight. In America? This? The former police chief of St. Louis County told us that whenever you need a police force to control your community, the system has failed. Because when people don’t perceive the system as legitimate, when people do not have a voice in the conversation or relationships on which to build, you cannot control them. You can’t. Violence doesn’t stop until everyone has a seat at the table. We stopped at The Big Mound where an Indian

burial ground was destroyed so that the city of St. Louis could build a massive highway, under which there is a large correctional facility. The sight was striking: a huge new highway; a tiny plaque marking the former holy site; a sprawling correctional facility. The stop was meant to show us: something is wrong here. We stopped at the St. Louis courthouse, where

Dred and Harriet Scott brought a lawsuit in 1857, asking for their freedom. That case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was ruled that African Americans were not, in fact, citizens, and as such did not have the right to sue in federal court. It was striking to stand there on the courthouse steps, where slave auctions took place, and look toward the Mississippi River, across which is the state of Illinois, a state in which those slaves would have been free. They could see it, but they couldn’t reach it. This stop showed us the wounds of systemic injustice run deep; they are stamped on our psyches through generations of history; they will not let us rest. We stopped at the apartment complex where Michael Brown

was killed. The road where he lay for four and a half hours after being shot runs through a quiet, middleclass apartment complex. My first thought was: “What must it be like to live here now?” In the middle of the road where he died and along the sidewalks there were makeshift memorials – notes, flowers, stuffed animals.

26 BAPTIST WORLD MAGAZINE

Above: A prayer summit at First Baptist Church, Ferguson, Missouri, in the United States.

(Photo courtesy of The Pathway, official newspaper of the Missouri Baptist Convention)

All day long I wondered: what does all this mean for the church universal?

The Church has lost its voice. I am speaking here of the

Church, large C. What we remember as a definitive authority in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s is gone. It’s gone. We, both in individual congregations and in larger church organizational structures, are not organized to respond prophetically. We don’t have a clear sense of what our gospel call is. Somehow it has gotten watered down, comfortable. We don’t know each other and we spend most of our time fighting internally over who is in and who is out, and living with panic about our institutional decline.

While any child’s death is tragic, what I came to Ferguson to learn was not about Michael Brown. This stop showed me that making this about Michael Brown will cause us to miss the boat, to miss the deeper opportunity of this moment to confront large and insidious structural problems to which Michael Brown fell victim. Last, we stopped at Greater St. Mark’s Family Church in

Ferguson that had its doors open 24 hours to shelter protesters who needed a place to rest, get something to eat, charge their phones. This church has been breached by police three times. We shared a meal with eight young organizers who were on the front lines protesting in Ferguson and behind the scenes organizing volunteers for nonviolent direct action. They spoke with passion, as they did when several of them met with President Obama at the White House. And they said, with weary voices, some very hard things.

I was struck by the eloquence and bravery of these young

people. They were not angry, hormone driven teenagers. They were exhausted young people who spoke in the language of vocation and said over and over that they were called to give up their lives to fight this fight. This stop was meant to show us there are people ready to make change; they need our support.