Jennifer Copeland: We started in 1935, and there were four purposes outlined from the beginning. Representatives from the denominations wanted to collaborate on race relations, economic disaster from the Depression, the threat of war and moral standards in culture.
They wanted to promote Christian unity, and this was kind of in the heyday of ecumenism, and there had been some national conferences and then a fledgling effort in the United States.
Shelton Smith was raised in North Carolina and had gone to Yale but was coming back to the South to teach at Duke Divinity School, so he brought with him a desire for ecumenical work.
He also brought with him a desire to have the churches be honest about their role in slavery and their complicity in racism. So that has always been one of the features of what we do.
F&L: How did the council work against the threat of war?
JC: In 1935, they certainly were aware of the potential for war in Europe. And even as America tried to keep its head in the sand with respect to what was going on in Germany, the council wanted to make peacemaking one of its objectives.
What would that mean for the churches to be focused on peacemaking while the rest of the world is preparing for war? That thread has continued throughout our history, and when we talk about peacemaking, we’re not just talking about an absence of violence or calling the country to beat swords into plowshares but actually to create communities where people live in safety and security and have the ability to flourish.
F&L: What does the day-to-day work of the council look like today?
JC: The work of the council is to influence the policies that bracket our lives and refract them through the lens of faith. That’s my elevator speech. We can show up and march and protest and preach and do all the things that people of faith are called to do. But until the [North Carolina] General Assembly changes the laws that bracket our lives, we’re still going to have too many guns on the street. We’re still going to have people who don’t have access to health care because we’re about to experience millions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid in this state.
My job is to help people of faith understand that the society that we want, the world that we believe God has called us to cocreate with God, has to move hand in hand with the legislative policies and the laws that bracket our lives.
And some may not like it that way. As people, we might like to say, “Well, if we would just give more food to the food banks, then all the hungry children would be fed.” But actually, there needs to be good legislation in place to make sure that the hungry children are fed and that the sick people are healed – all these things that Jesus has called us to do. So we have to work at the legislative level. We just have to.
There are also different members of staff focused on specific areas. Somebody focuses on the environment, and that’s pretty much her full-time job.
And we have some staff who focus on health and wholeness, and they try to equip congregations to achieve better, healthier outcomes for their congregants. And this is based on good research that says when people make lifestyle changes within a community, and particularly within a community of faith, those lifestyle changes have a tendency to stick.
If your doctor tells you to quit eating red meat and exercise more because you have high blood pressure, you might go home and try that for a few days or a week, and that’s that. But if you’re part of a congregation that says, “Hey, all of us are going to work to eat better, and when we have our Wednesday night supper, these are the things we’re going to serve,” or, “These are the things we’re not going to serve,” it creates a lifestyle change within a community that is more likely to have a lasting impact.
F&L: How do you organize those 19 denominations who are currently a part of the North Carolina Council of Churches?
JC: It really depends on the topic. There are times when I will go straight to the denominational leadership. A good example of that was wanting to send a letter to the Sheriff’s Association when the North Carolina General Assembly was proposing the idea of forcing all the sheriffs to communicate and cooperate with ICE.
That bill has passed now, but we wrote a letter to the Sheriff’s Association and said, “We’d really like to talk to you about this, and we’d really like to talk about how you do your work within the community.” And all of our denominational leaders signed it, and the Sheriff’s Association reached back out to us, and we did sit down and have a conversation with a representative from the Sheriff’s Association.
It was a fruitful conversation even though the bill passed, and that’s something that we can do as the North Carolina Council of Churches. We can put key leadership in the room with people to hold conversations about important things.
Other examples are I sometimes ask our denominational leadership to co-author a letter to the governor on a particular issue. We don’t do that a lot intentionally. I don’t call the denominational leaders every other week and ask for something from them, because I want it to be something of substance, and I want it to be something that they’re already of one accord on, so I don’t have to have a meeting and talk them into it.
Capital punishment is a great example. There was a huge commutation drive right before Governor Cooper left office. Every denomination that is a part of the council is opposed to capital punishment. I didn’t have to convince them that we needed to write a letter to the governor. I just had to write the letter and get everybody’s signature on it.
And then we were able to send a letter to the governor and say: “Governor Cooper, we know you’re a person of faith. We know you were raised in the Presbyterian church. We know what your faith commands in this moment, and we’ve got your back. If you want to commute the people that are on death row, we will stand with you and say, ‘Yes, this was the right thing to do.’” And he did. He commuted 15, but there were over 100 on death row.
F&L: Are there particular issues that sometimes the different denominations do disagree on?
JC: One of the beauties of the structure of our work is that we don’t have to have uniformity from the 19 denominations before we can take a stand. As long as our governing board believes that this is what the council should be doing, I could write a policy statement, or our governing board could issue a policy statement, that might not be in lockstep with all 19 denominations.
I think reproductive justice is a good example of that. The council’s been on record since before Roe v. Wade in favor of reproductive justice.
There are other times when we don’t have precedence on a controversial issue, and our governing board will wrestle with it, and they will make a decision. And then that is the decision of the North Carolina Council of Churches. Even if I disagree with it, if the governing board says, “This is what we’re going to do,” then I am beholden to them to make that statement or to follow that lead.
It’s often the case that the council is out in front of where our churches, denominations and often the public will eventually end up.
And LGBTQ rights were one of those places. We really stepped into that arena during the AIDS crisis. And we were one of the first organizations to come out and say, “Look, when Jesus said, ‘I was sick and you cared for me,’ that included people who have AIDS. So what are we going to do as people of faith?”
And the council had some pretty strong statements to say about that, and that also opened the door for us to be more engaged with the LGBTQ community. And then the Metropolitan Community Church approached our governing board and asked to become members of the council. And that was discussed for quite some time, I would say more than a year. And when the governing board voted to accept the Metropolitan Community Church, we lost a fair amount of funding from some of our denominations.
But we’ve never gone back. No, what we know now, on the other side of it, is we were leading the way to where many of our denominations eventually ended up. It was a painful path, right? Just look what the United Methodists have gone through. I’m a United Methodist. It was a painful path.
But I think because the council had already walked that walk, it was probably easier for me as a leader at the council to try and understand how the United Methodist Church could get to where they needed to be. And the Lutherans had already walked it, and the Episcopalians had walked it, and the Presbyterians had walked it.
F&L: What do you think is on the horizon for the North Carolina Council of Churches?
JC: I think the most pressing issue that everybody’s facing, and not just us, is what’s going on with our democracy? And how is that playing out in North Carolina?
If one of the continuous threads throughout our Scripture is to welcome immigrants, what is our call in this moment when national forces are about to show up on our streets in North Carolina to terrorize our immigrant neighbors?
I always go back to the prophets – the Old Testament prophets – and the New Testament Gospels as the places where the council takes its marching orders [from], which might be why we’ve never had to retract a policy statement, right? Those teachings and those calls from Scripture to make way for God’s justice is our plumb line. It’s not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party or the private sector; it’s the call to God’s justice.
