United Methodist pastor and social activist leader George D. McClain will be the Interfaith Lecture Series speaker at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, after Friday’s CrowdStrike software outage and ongoing flight delays forced Najeeba Syeed, the El-Hibri Endowed Chair and executive director of Interfaith at Augsburg, to cancel her Chautauqua appearance.
Instead, McClain will be opening the week’s discussion on “Spiritual Grounding for Social Change.” McClain is the author of Claiming All Things for God: Prayer, Discernment, and Ritual for Social Action, and is one of the coauthors, with his wife, Tilda Norberg, of The Call: Living Sacramentally—Walking Justly.
During his career, McClain served for 25 years as executive director of the Methodist Federation for Social Action, where he is now director emeritus, and has taught urban ministry, theology of mission, and United Methodist studies at New York Theological Seminary, in addition to directing the Rising Hope theological studies program at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility on Staten Island.
It’s a career rooted in social justice and theology, and McClain once wrote that the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer was the “shock treatment beginning of my real-world theological education.”
“Just after graduation from seminary, I was recruited by the National Council of Churches to serve as a project chaplain,” McClain wrote in 2014 for UM News. “Stationed in Holly Springs, I came to understand social sin — the systematic oppression by the ‘principalities and powers.’ ”
There, he said voter intimidation, abusive law enforcement, and a bullying, oppressive white church defending segregation.
“I tasted the deep fear that perpetuates evil, as three of our project volunteers had ‘disappeared’ just as we left our week of training in Ohio. My own fear was most palpable when visiting white clergy while the police menacingly followed us around to their churches. No wonder some of the sharecroppers we visited were scared to talk with us about voting (though most, remarkably, were willing),” he wrote. “I also experienced first hand Christian resistance. Black churches, including some where I preached, courageously hosted movement meetings, despite dozens of church burnings that summer.”
In Mississippi, he wrote, he learned more deeply what “church” is: “gathering to pray and sing, to hear the Word and renew one’s hope, to nurse one’s wounds from the struggle, and to again take up the cross for a new reality.”
