ACTIVIST SAN DIEGO

Tips from Mel White

Mel White is the national minister of justice for the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, the only Christian denomination with a primary outreach to gays and lesbians. For 30 years, Dr. White served the evangelical Christian community as a pastor, seminary professor, best-selling author, prize-winning filmmaker, communications consultant, and ghostwriter to some of its most famous and powerful leaders, including Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Dr. James Kennedy, Ollie North, and Pat Robertson. In 1993 he was installed as dean of the Cathedral of Hope Metropolitan Community Church in Dallas, Texas. With 14,000 congregants, it is the nation's largest gay and lesbian congregation. Dr. White is the author of Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America.
Dr. White delivered the closing address at the "Spotlight on the Right Conference," sponsored by the Institute for the Study of the Religious Right and the MultiCultural Collaborative held at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles on November 21, 1995. These five tips for social action are excerpted from his remarks.

Never be silent or inactive in the face of injustice. Never.

Secondly, a belief that the Creator, Allah, God, your higher power, the highest power is, at its heart, at her heart, at his heart, pro-justice. When you are doing something for justice, to make things fair for God's little ones, you are on the side of the universe! You have to believe that. Ghandi was not a Christian. He said, "I might have become one, but I never met one." Whether you are reading the Buddhists or the Hindus or the Christians or the Jews, at the heart of their understanding is that the Creator is - at the heart - pro-justice.
Jeremiah says, "Justice is where God sits." Micah says, "Justice is the place God lives." When you do justice, something happens to transform your life. Ghandi says he started out working to get the British out of India. But then he realized that what was happening to the people who got the idea, was that the captivity was getting out of them, whether the British left or not. Once you discover Soul Force, no one can keep you in chains.

The third rule is, we have an amazing ability to change. Our adversary has an amazing resilience to change for the good. You should read the correspondence of when Martin Luther King Jr. came out saying that Governor Wallace could become an integrationist. He got dumped on. And when I was in jail in Virginia Beach, Gary got me a newspaper photo of Mr. Wallace sitting at the bridge at Birmingham saying, "I was wrong." And King, from wherever his eternal soul rests, says, "I told you so."

The fourth rule is that the only thing we have to counteract misinformation is truth. Truth and love, relentlessly.

Fifth, don't confuse the adversary with the adversary's ideas. Separate the person from the idea. "They are victims of misinformation just like you were, Mel!" Pat Robertson has simply not caught on yet. He will catch on. He's a victim of misinformation. See him as that.

This article was first published in the March 1996 issue of Freedom Writer.