Sunday night at 6:00 pm
We invite you to bring something for the altar
that reminds you of someone who has been a “saint” in your life,
someone who has passed away or someone still living,
someone you know personally or someone you may never have met…
Who is “a saint?”
“Those men and women who relish the event of life as a gift and who realize that the only way to honor such a gift is to give it away.”
-William Stringfellow
This fall, we’re reading the book Hotdogs & Hamburgers as part of the UCC One Read. This great book highlights the issue of adult illiteracy and the church’s response to our neighbors who are struggling to read. We’re joining with our fellow UCC congregations to help through tutoring, advocacy, and being more involved in local schools.
Join us Wednesday nights at 7 for our Bible study to discuss the book with us!
Here is what Beloveds have to say about the book so far:
Continue reading Reading Changes Lives: Join us in the UCC One Read
“I believed there was a hunger for a church where people could come together across race and economic and religious backgrounds, a place where they all could be told they were precious in the eyes of God…There are not many churches where you’ll have a doctor sitting next to a homeless person sitting next to a college professor sitting next to a schizophrenic.”
Birmingham Magazine wrote a feature on Beloved Community Church. Check it out here!
By
Published on July 23, 2014 at al.com.
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama – Lauren, 23, stood up in the middle of Beloved Community Church in Avondale on Tuesday night, holding her Bible. “I’m a lesbian,” she said. “I really didn’t want to be gay.”
Continue reading Human Rights Campaign Faith Forum at Beloved July 22, 2014
Three of our Beloveds were recently featured in this short documentary by UAB Media Students focusing on gentrification in our Avondale community.
We hope you’ll watch and perhaps learn something new, or will have your own experiences to share. Please let us know what you think in the comments!
Across the Tracks by Rebecca Graber and Harsh Shah from UAB Documentary on Vimeo.
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama – The high winds that swept through Birmingham early Friday morning knocked the roof off the Beloved Community Church in Avondale, and also knocked a tree down on the pastor’s roof at her house in Homewood.
Beloved Community Church, which is at 131 41st Street South next to the Avondale Brewery, had roofing material knocked loose including bricks that fell into the street.
Pastor Angie Wright said winds basically swept the roof off the church, causing water damage. “We had some pretty significant damage to the roof,” Wright said. “It’s a flat roof. The wind lifted off the black tar roofing cover and rolled it up and laid it on the street. It looked liked rolled up carpet on Second Avenue, laying in the street. It tore off bricks and metal flashing. It’s caused some leaks on the inside. The carpet will have to be replaced. There were a lot of bricks in the street. It knocked the tree down behind the church and the brewery.”
Wright expects the Sunday services to be moved for at least a month. This Sunday at 6 p.m., the church will meet in Avondale United Methodist Church, a few blocks away.
“We’re going to be out of the building for awhile – I don’t know how long,” Wright said. Some pieces torn off the historic building that houses the church may be put to good use. “We’re saving the bricks for souvenirs,” Wright said.
The damage at her house in Homewood may be even severe. “My house is in pretty terrible condition,” she said. “We had an enormous tree crash through the roof.”
On the bright side, it could have been worse, Wright said. “Everybody’s fine,” she said. “Nobody got hurt.”
Beloved Community Church averages about 45 people in its Sunday night services and prides itself on a welcoming atmosphere and music with a jazz flair.
“It’s a diverse congregation,” Wright said. “We welcome all kinds of folks. We have dynamic music.”
Offers have poured in from other churches willing to host the congregation. Avondale United Methodist Church will be a nice temporary home for services, Wright said. “It’s a more traditional church,” she said.
See also: ‘It was quite the scene’ after strong winds in Avondale knocked tree into patio of Parkside Cafe
Beloved Community Damaged by Storm
Click here for video of storm damage at the church from WVTM-TV, NBC 13.
Dear Beloveds,
In the last year, we have been transformed by abrupt changes in the world around us. First, tornados blasted through our lives on April 27. Immediately we struck out to the homes of our members, and to the homes of strangers, helping to remove debris and to listen to the stories of loss and mystery. In the aftermath, we discovered that we were not alone in responding – sister UCC churches from around the country have come to live with us, a week at a time, to work in the driving Alabama sun, rebuilding homes for those who lost their homes. They, and we, and the lives of people whose homes are being rebuilt, are being transformed.
Many of us have been transformed by a different kind of disaster, Alabama’s immigration law, HB 56, which passed the Alabama legislature days after the April 27 tornadoes. We stepped out of our known world and entered into the lives of people affected the law, and we have been changed. We have had potluck suppers with young people and their parents who brought them here as infants. We have hosted many planning sessions for those opposing the laws. We have joined hands at vigils and rallies with other faith communities around the state standing against any law that dehumanizes our brothers and sisters. A number of us did different kinds of work, but I would say that it has been the relationships that were most transformative.
And now as we look around us, we see that our community is being transformed. When we held our first worship service in 2000, every building around us was in shambles. It looked like downtown Baghdad. We were warned that buying a building in Avondale was a bad investment; the value could only go down. Many people were afraid to come to Avondale for church, and to be honest, on a dark night it did seem quite scary. We renovated our dilapidated “little building” next door, now named the Brown Building after Beloved Marty Brown, which was one step in transformation of the neighborhood. Now there are new businesses popping up all around us! We took a chance on Avondale because there was a place for everybody here. Part of our work, as people of faith called to care for the least of these, is to help ensure that there will still be a place for everyone, as the process of transformation unfolds.
There were many other transformational moments in the last year, some I know about and many that I don’t. Our Spoken Word events are always the best thing happening in Birmingham (possibly short of worship on Sunday nights!) Watching our beautiful children grow. The way that you take care of one another. The joy you take in feeding the hungry and housing homeless families. The way we can feel our spirits rise when we sing with our Beloved Community Orchestra, or listen to LeNard and David sing ‘Guide My Steps.’
Transformation is what the Spirit of God does. We don’t get to decide when, or how, or what it will look like. We just open our minds. We open our hearts. We open our doors. And invite the Spirit to do with us as the Spirit will. That’s what we have done for 12 years. I know I have been transformed, and am ready for more. What about you?
-Rev. Angie Wright
Summer 2012
Originally featured on Sojourners God’s Politics Blog
We lost a bitter legislative battle this year, as Alabama Legislators voted to make the nation’s most toxic anti-immigrant law more poisonous than anyone imagined. Added to the notorious HB 56 is a requirement that the names and faces of undocumented persons be plastered on the web and in prominent public places — the new law stops just short of putting targets on their backs.
Protests at the Alabama Statehouse. Courtesy GBM
Teachers are still required to interrogate schoolchildren about their immigration status. People of faith, Good Samaritans, and family members are now felons if they knowingly drive five undocumented children to the store, the doctor, or Vacation Bible School. Racial profiling provisions make every trip to school, work, and church a nightmare.
The legislators — all Republicans — must have laughed all the way to golf games waiting for them back in their districts. They think they won.
Just because they were sitting at the front of the bus, they think they were driving.
Little do they know that they have created their own worst nightmare. Their efforts to rid Alabama of ethnic diversity have backfired on them, bringing forth a multicultural, bilingual movement that would not have emerged in Alabama for another 50 years were it not for HB 56 and its evil twin, HB 658. Legislators’ wrongs have dared people to claim their rights as human beings. Republican efforts to divide have united a new people — brown, black, and white — who lock arms and sing, “We Are One Family, One Alabama.” Lawmakers’ fear of change is no match for this new people’s determination not to go back to Alabama’s old days of hatred and shame.
Alabama’s new hate laws were written expressly to terrorize people so irreversibly that they would flee the state. Some did. Others hid inside their homes like Jesus’ disciples locked inside the upper room, huddled in fear of what the authorities might do to them. But instead of being driven out by vicious legislation, Latino leaders have emerged in 22 communities across the state to stand up for the human and civil rights of their people.
How were they affected by a year of battling against hate? In their own words: They learned to overcome fear. What perfect poetic justice: lawmakers used fear as a weapon, but it backfired. They unwittingly taught their own victims to stand strong against fear and intimidation, how to work together, how to win allies, how to make change in a hostile world.
When the legislature opened in February, many Latinos, regardless of citizenship status, were barred from visiting Statehouse galleries and offices of their legislators. By the time it closed in May, a new reality existed. Crowds chanted, “The State House is Our House,” and in doing so, they took on the responsibilities of citizenship by standing against unjust, immoral laws at no small risk.
There are relics in the legislature who may choose to stand in the Statehouse door, staving off change as long as they can, and they’ll end up right where George Wallace did — with the door of history slammed in their faces.
While it may look like nothing in Alabama changed this year, everything did.
There is no turning back.
Rev. Angie Wright is Pastor of Beloved Community United Church of Christ and Faith in Community Coordinator for Greater Birmingham Ministries in Birmingham, Alabama.
I’ve seen a lot of angel dust around here lately. Angels have been swooping down all over the place and believe you me, these angels are not like the ones you’ve seen on the front of all those Christmas cards. These angels, they’ll take your breath away. When you are in their presence you can tell they are like something you have never seen, something radiant, something shimmering with the spirit of God. You may wish all your life to meet an angel, but it’s true what they say — be careful what you wish for. Because if you are one of the people God sends an angel to visit, your life will never be the same. Not that that’s a bad thing, but believe you me, your life will be turned every which way but loose. I mean that literally — once God gets hold of you, God will never turn you loose!
The first thing an angel will say to you is, “you need not fear.” That’s what they say but it’s not really true, because they’re about to ask you to be a part of something truly frightening. Even so, somehow you know that they’re not here to hurt you but to hurl you into the thrilling drama that is God.
If you are one of those nobodies who turns out to be one of those somebodies that God sends one of those angels to visit, well, it will leave you speechless. And I do mean that literally — take the case of that old couple Elizabeth and Zechariah. An angel told Elizabeth that even though she was old as dirt, she was finally going to have a baby. Just like the angel promised, God had taken away the disgrace that she had endured her entire married life.
Her husband Zechariah was a preacher and you know what that means – a big talker. So when the angel came to him, he asked impertinent questions and took issue with what the angel said – how brazen is that? Because Zachariah didn’t believe the unbelievably good news, the angel struck him speechless, and I do mean that literally — he didn’t speak from that day until the baby was born. That must have been the second miracle God sent to Elizabeth that day!
That same angel visited Mary and told her not to fear. How could she not be scared to death about the prospect of being stoned to death? The angel also told Mary that she had found favor with the Lord. She must have been frightened, I know I would have been. But in the end, she said, here I am, let it be.
So many angels, so much angel dust . . . what are these angels up to?
The angels aren’t through, you know, they are still doing God’s bidding. They are messengers and some of them look just like us. Angels bring the good news that God is taking away that which brings us disgrace among our own people. The angels clasp their hands over our mouths so that we will stop talking and listen until we find our own true voice and recognize the true voice of God. The angels bid us to do God’s work, to birth God’s new world into being, to embody God’s spirit, to protect God’s precious ones.
Sometimes we are the nobodies who turn out to be the somebodies who God sends angels to visit. And sometimes, sometimes, we are the angels, the messengers, the ones sent to the nobodies who really are somebodies who need to hear a good word from God.
-Rev. Angie
