THE GOSPEL OF DIVERSITY

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

AT THE OAKHURST PRESBYTERIAN Church, there's a black Jesus in front, a white Jesus in back and folks of both colors in between. The black Jesus depicted on a stained-glass window in front used to be white, but the pastor of Oakhurst, the Rev. Gibson Stroupe, and his wife Caroline Leach tinted the once pink portrait brown. Both Leach and Stroupe are white, and she admits "we did get some flak" for the racial alteration. There were those who thought Oakhurst was caving in to the dogmatizers of diversity, the whistle blowers of melanin management. Some chose to leave the church and the neighborhood, looking for greener pastures and whiter places in which to live and worship. And then there were those that came, saw and stayed. In a perfect world, religion should be color-blind. Oakhurst isn't in that perfect world. It's in Decatur, Georgia.

Oakhurst, which has a congregation that is roughly half black and half white, is what diversity is all about: people of different races coming together not in the mournful, candle-bearing aftermath of some urban riot or the artificially arranged precursor to some political photo op, but because they want to be together. Things in America tend toward being all one thing or all the other. Schools, parties, circles of friends, television sitcoms are often mostly or entirely white or mostly or entirely black. It's especially rare to see a church that is racially mixed with such equanimity. The neighborhood where Oakhurst is located used to be all white, but once a few black families moved in, most of the whites moved out. Oakhurst's congregation was 900 members strong in the 1960s, but after the white flight of the '70s, membership dwindled to only 80 by 1983.

That's when Stroupe took over the church. He was 36 years old then, a youthful, activist minister who had campaigned hard for prison reform in Norfolk, Virginia, and elsewhere. But the decrepit physical state of the 62-year-old church and the demoralized yet intransigent spiritual condition of some of the Oakhurst congregation initially startled and depressed him. "The white people who stayed at the church wanted things done their way," Stroupe recalls. "And the blacks weren't talking, but it was clear they wanted some changes." What intrigued Stroupe, and made him stay on, was that the congregation was an unusual ethnic mix of white holdovers and black newcomers. Oakhurst's most difficult problem, he decided, could become its greatest strength.

Stroupe began to make changes. He added something to the worship service that he calls "a sharing of concerns and joys" where congregation members stand up and tell anecdotes from their lives. "It's a way to get some of the spontaneity of the black church into our service," he says. "It's also a way for people to see that our lives are more alike than we think." At Palm Sunday service, a black woman got up to say she believes in miracles because the last of several boys in her family was graduating from college, despite the fact that so many young black men are on drugs, in jail or dead. Stroupe also changed Oakhurst's music, switching from stiffer Presbyterian hymns to songs from the black gospel tradition. At first the choir director resisted, purposefully playing off tune during gospel hymns. Now the church has its own mostly black gospel choir. No one in it knows how to read music, but they learn songs "by ear" and sing them from the heart. And, by most accounts, the music is heavenly.

The changes are working. The congregation has grown and now boasts almost 200 members, many from other neighborhoods. Betsy Cameron and her husband Mark Gray, both in their 30s, heard about Oakhurst while they were teaching English in Malawi in southeast Africa. "To [white] people who have stepped outside their own culture, you feel uncomfortable going to a white church," says Gray. "This is the only church we have attended since we came back in 1993. We feel at home here." Inez Fleming, 46, a family counselor, made a promise to attend the church of her new husband several years ago. She has since been divorced from her mate, but not from Oakhurst, where she has become an outspoken church stalwart. "I had a lot of problems accepting a white person as my spiritual leader," says Fleming. "But Stroupe [whom she calls Nibs] has really been a driving force in my life."

The mayor of Decatur attends Oakhurst, as do some affluent white gays who have settled in the area. "When you come here, you are going to shake the hand of somebody you don't know and would not normally meet," says Stroupe. "We are proclaiming a different reality." This month, Stroupe is releasing a new book on ethnicity in America titled While We Run This Race: Countering the Power of Racism. But the real lesson of Oakhurst isn't on a page, it's in the spirit of the gospel music swelling out of the church every Sunday at 11 a.m. Anyone who wants to learn this tune is going to have to do it by ear.

--Reported by Sylvester Monroe/Decatur

With reporting by SYLVESTER MONROE/DECATUR