In late September, PHS’s David Staniunas traveled to the Presbytery of San Francisco to speak at their Presbytery Day. While in the Bay Area, we were fortunate to be able to spend time with some congregations and to do work on collections. Our immense thanks go out to all the congregations who hosted us and to the leaders and staff of the Presbytery.
On my first day in the region I booked time with Rev. Roland Gordon of Ingleside Presbyterian Church in San Francisco. Gordon is already known to you – the creator of Ingleside’s Great Cloud of Witnesses, the ongoing project to collage the interior walls of the church building with inspirational images of African Americans.
Rev. Gordon started the collage with a single image of Muhammad Ali – an inspiration to Gordon as a peacemaker – on the wall of the church’s basketball court. Gordon played basketball in high school in Gary, Indiana, and at Baldwin Wallace College before moving west, and after receiving his call to the ministry, used his skills to appeal to the youth in Ingleside. Undersized for the NBA perhaps, but with an accurate jumper from distance, “I could beat most of those guys.” The greatest success in his 40-plus years at Ingleside, Gordon shared during our interview, was his work with young people, helping to raise generations of children, many during San Francisco’s crack epidemic, many who did not have a father figure. Seven children of Ingleside eventually finished PhDs.
Later on I stopped by the Presbytery offices in El Cerrito to help clear space in the office of the stated clerk. We did a rapid appraisal of records from Fruitvale Presbyterian Church in Oakland, packed 5 boxes for transfer to the archives, with records going back to 1890, and separated out 8 cubic feet of temporary material for disposal.
Fruitvale was organized in 1890, the congregation emerging from a Sunday School among German fruit growers going as far back as 1880. Its Sunday School boasted hundreds of members into the 1920s. The congregation built an art deco style building, with an indoor basketball court, in 1927; a nearby Hungarian Reformed congregation nested there. Following a boom in attendance in the post-Second World War period, in the early 1970s church activity declined. A 1989 church history attributes part of this to the “Saul Alinsky issue” and “Presbyterian activism in assisting minority persons.” Fruitvale was dissolved in 2012.
The next day I spent entirely with members of Sojourner Truth Presbyterian Church in Richmond, California, taking seven hours of oral histories with longtime church members, among them Sharon and LC Fuller, and the jazz trumpet and multi-instrumentalist George Spencer.
Sojourner Truth was organized among a group of young families from the Hilltop neighborhood who gathered on Sundays for morning bicycle rides. Eugene Farlough, then of Faith Presbyterian Church in Oakland, began meeting the group for breakfast in Berkeley, and the germ of the congregation was born. Sojourner Truth was commissioned by Presbytery in 1974. Eugene Farlough’s pastoral presence was a recurring theme of our interviews; his care for the flock went well beyond the Hilltop neighborhood. Farlough was a tireless worker for Black liberation inside the church, and a force behind the creation of the Self-Development of People program. He died in 1996 shortly after leaving the congregation for work at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.
Presbytery Day, held at First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, was keynoted by Patrick Reyes of Auburn Theological Seminary, on the theme “Are Presbyterians Good Ancestors?” Reyes walked the crowd through imaginative exercises designed to unearth the values and habits of mind that each of us intend to pass on to our chosen descendants. My own appearance, on how to faithfully leave behind and manage traces of those values, came after lunch. By 11PM Pacific I was in the air.
With apologies to everyone I missed during those three days, we look forward to deeper partnership with folks in the Bay.
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