Beyond the White Church is about Doug Cunningham’s personal and faith-inspired journey as an ordained United Methodist Church pastor and missionary. It begins as a love story and continues on as a devotional memoir to the principles of justice, diversity, and the author’s struggles against white supremacy and white privilege within a white church.
The love story begins when Cunningham, a 2nd-year student at Pacific School of Religion (PSR), meets a new student from the Philippines, Rebecca, a Deaconess. At PSR, as a Caucasian person of faith, Cunningham recounts his journey from being initially unaware of his privileged status as a white person to his growing awareness of social justice issues. First, through his exposure to ideas by professors like Fr. Daniel Berrigan and speakers invited on campus like Daniel Ellsberg. And most importantly, through African American classmates like Don Matthews, who makes him conscious of his white privilege: “As ethnic students, we’re constantly fighting racism…”.
Meanwhile, his bonds with Rebecca grow stronger, and when Rebecca completes her studies and returns to the Philippines, Cunningham follows in pursuit through a United Methodist Mission internship, a 3-year program that enables immersion. This is fortuitous. As Cunningham prepares for this assignment, he learns that the Philippines is a country whose U.S. colonial occupation was rationalized through America’s white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny.
During this internship they get married, and Cunningham gets a taste of Filipino stereotypes about Americans. In the waning days of the Marcos dictatorship, he even experiences a Philippine-style protest demonstration that includes water cannons, tear gas, and being fired upon with rubber bullets. A trip to the Bataan Export Processing Zone, an industrial area devoted to processing Philippine goods for export, reveals how cheap Philippine goods often result from the exploitation of workers. Their plight is illustrated by workers living in dormitories and working in shifts, who often share a bed by sleeping in turns.
Cunningham’s immersion in a society rife with social unrest and social justice issues, along with his marriage to Rebecca, a progressive Deaconess, would provide a faith-based moral perspective from which his subsequent assignments would be viewed. During assignments as a pastor in predominantly white congregations, Cunningham sought to create a more open church. In most cases, he felt resistance from the white leadership of these congregations. These experiences inspired Cunningham to envision a church that would be welcoming of everyone while committed to fighting injustice and racism. This led him to start a new church—New Day Church (NDC)—in the Bronx which “connects with God in an authentic relationship that was transforming our lives”; crosses “boundaries of race, class, sexual orientation, gender and age”; and confronts “injustice with the compassion and abundance of God.” In effect, the NDC seeks to create a community where everyone is welcome and challenged to cross boundaries of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
In addition, the NDC also sought to develop leadership and empower its members through meaningful involvement in the many aspects of church life and worship. One notable example is the sharing of preaching duties, a function that is normally reserved for the pastor only. In addition to conducting worship services and promoting faith-based fellowship, the NDC was also involved in organizing around community issues. One notable success story is NDC’s partnership with the Kingsbridge Redevelopment Alliance (KARA), which forced the City to revise its development plans for Kingsbridge Armory to include jobs that provide a living wage rather than just minimum wage.
The establishment of the NDC was a resounding success and provided a model and a compass heading for the UMC. But Cunningham soon finds out that establishing a reformed church, an organization that serves a local community or a New York borough, is simpler and easier than reforming an organization with a national reach. Introducing reforms to sensitize the UMC to white privilege turns out to be a much more difficult struggle, even at the diocese level. The later chapters of his book paint glimpses of this. One such is the resistance of white congregations to having a Black pastor. Another is the resistance of the church hierarchy itself to meaningfully address issues of equity and racism. An example that Cunningham sketches out in detail is when the New York Annual Conference chapter of Black Methodists for Church Renewal (BMCR) released an open letter that laid out steps to combat racism in the church in 2020. A couple of years after its release, Cunningham’s efforts to follow up on the open letter lead him to observe to a church official: “We are more concerned about the comfort of white moderates and conservatives than equity for Black pastors and churches,” and he concludes that
“prioritizing white comfort over racial equity takes a heavy toll. I mourn the dozens of creative, effective, and committed pastors who have left local church ministry because of this inequity and harm.”
These are weighty observations made towards the end of his memoirs. White privilege, it seems, is a very comfortable knapsack, which many Caucasian Americans, even in faith-based communities, are loath to give up.
Cunningham’s journey from a privileged white person to a person devoted to the struggle against white privilege within a white church is a compelling read, especially for those who struggle with similar issues within their faith-based communities. It is noteworthy how Cunningham draws inspiration for his themes, stories, and perspectives from the gospel, using passages to frame his stories or synthesize their lessons. In memoir form, Rev. Cunningham continues to preach in an engaging and inspiring way that keeps the pages turning.
