A Call to Action for Liberals, Moderates

With the American presidential election just months away, there are growing signs in Southern California that old-line liberal Christians are trying to reclaim their once preeminent role in helping shape the nation’s political and moral agenda.

From a predominantly African American United Church of Christ congregation in racially diverse central Los Angeles to a well-known Episcopal church in Pasadena and religion scholars in Claremont, pastors and laity are speaking out about the need to connect moral teaching with political action.

Their concern comes at a time when conservative Christians, led by such personalities as religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Christian psychologist James Dobson, continue to press their views on issues such as abortion rights as election time draws near.

Among those enlisted by local clergy in the theological counterpunch is the Rev. James Forbes, senior pastor of historic Riverside Church in New York City, who will be speaking in Los Angeles tomorrow and Monday.

Unless religion can use its influence to bring about a sense of community, it becomes “so much sound and fury, signifying nothing,” said Forbes, who was recently named one of the 12 best preachers in America by Baylor University after surveying 341 seminary professors.

“We need to talk about a sickness I see spreading across the nation,” Forbes said in a telephone interview. “It is characterized by a diminished sense of tolerance, an erosion of the spirit of compassion and legitimization of unbridled selfishness and greed. [It is] a self-protective tribalism that dares to believe there can be security for the tribe to the neglect of conditions of people around the globe,” Forbes said.

Forbes will be speaking at 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. Sunday at the Congregational Church of Christian Fellowship, 2085 S. Hobart Blvd., Los Angeles, and again at 7 p.m. Monday.

Meanwhile, an interdenominational convocation is planned for June 1 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena on the theme “Mobilizing for the Human Family: All Christians Are Not on the Right.”

“The Christian Coalition has enormous power,” said the Rev. George Regas, rector-emeritus of All Saints church. “It has co-opted the media, and we need to . . . clearly articulate another voice that says the Christian church is pointing us in a different direction.”

Hopefully, Regas said, the convocation will result in the mobilization of Christians to “affect the well-being of our community.”

The agenda is broad. It includes children’s issues, civil rights, environmental protection, affordable health care for all, immigrant rights, sexual tolerance, solutions to violence and the welfare system, Regas said.

Among participants are All Saints’ rector, the Rev. J. Edwin Bacon; the Rev. Cecil Murray, pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles; John Cobb, a nationally recognized theologian who now teaches at the Claremont Graduate School; and Patricia Whitney-Wise, executive director of the California Council of Churches.

The convocation is sponsored by the Claremont Consultation, a group formed to counter the Christian right.

Over the last several months, liberal clergy at the national level have called for stepped-up political activism by liberal and moderate Christians. They include Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches; the Rev. Jim Wallis, an evangelical social activist and founder of Sojourners in Washington; and American Baptist evangelist Tony Campolo.

Until now, however, much less has been heard from Southern California.

“Something,” Forbes said, “has to be done to reestablish . . . a commitment to the common good.”

The Rev. Madison T. Shockley II--who invited Forbes to preach at his Los Angeles congregation--plans to make racial reconciliation a major priority in working for a common good.

To do that, Shockley said, there must be “revival,” a term he said is most frequently associated with conservative, evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

“We started in 1945 with three pastors: a Japanese, a white and a black. We were multicultural before multiculturalism was even coined. But that experiment failed,” Shockley said, and it has been an essentially black congregation ever since.

“I am reexamining the original mission in light of multiculturalism in this day and time. Now it’s Korean, Latino and black. That’s what’s in this neighborhood now,” Shockley said. “I feel an obligation to embrace the community to be an effective church.”