Michael Emerson Quotes
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So they actually put it into their mission statement, and they start changing things as a result. They may change how worship works. They may actively recruit folks and try and get them to come and help them to feel comfortable and get them involved in leadership, and there's a variety of ways.
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It's the sad fact of how race still works in our country. We find that over and over again.
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So there was great clashes when, you know, if you believe you shouldn't remove your shoes and someone's taking their shoes off, how can they do this? That actually was such a big clash in this case that they had to put a curtain down the middle of where they would worship.
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I meet almost no one that goes to an African-American church or thinks, "I'm going to do that." Now there are whites in African-American churches. They're interracially married. They're highly committed. Maybe there's a professor or two, or a student.
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So the tradition from Europe is that you're supposed to emphasize the mind over the body, so you sing from a very kind of staid perspective. Again, there are charismatic white congregations all over, and they don't sing that way. But, you know, on the average.
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I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I don't want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down." It's also, of course, as we know, the seat of political organization and the affirming of your blackness and so on.
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I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, "People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?"
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You find the most in not any particular denomination specifically. It's the style of worship. So if we have what we call a charismatic worship style, that means upbeat music and a more lively style of preaching usually, people are allowed to clap, say "Amen," whether they're mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, and Catholics, whatever, they're much more likely to be integrated.
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I liked the scenes with the baby, but the baby steals all the scenes that you're in. So that would get old after a while, because the baby is too perfect. I liked being high on ecstasy.
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Maybe there's even anger. But if they make it through that they come to a new agreement, and they start creating a new culture, and it becomes something that people just - a lot of times they'll say, "I couldn't live without it. I just have to be there."
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And then they would have the shoe removers on one side, and the non-shoe removers on the other side until they could work through coming to understand why we might both be trying to worship authentically, and because of our cultural background we have these different ideas. But it took a while.
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I mean, so if I've talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they'll wonder, "Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?" And what's happening is they're falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It's not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That's certainly common in mixed churches.
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What sort of difficulties would happen when people of different cultures try to come together to worship? Tiny little things such as let's tell jokes with each other.
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There's a lot of life there, but it's a different sort, because there's a lot less immigrants and a lot more racial, the mix of black and white in particular. I've actually never been to their worship for an extended period of time, so I can't comment wisely on it.
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There's always the question of time. Does time at 10:00 mean 10:00 sharp? Or does it mean give or take a few minutes? And a few minutes, is that plus or minus two minutes? Or plus or minus ten, or maybe a half an hour each way?
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If we go into white congregations, non-whites will sometimes say it felt like worship never started. It was sort of dead and didn't feel that warmly received. But so - and there are different realities either way, and it makes it difficult for all groups to try and cross boundaries.
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I've been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.
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I ask the clergy why don't I see myself represented in leadership? And I'm told, and this happens quite a bit, "We don't think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job."
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There are roles that are terrifying because they're large or you may feel that they're out of your line, but I'm never terrified once the actual work begins. Once you begin rehearsal, then it's small building blocks. It's solving little problems one at a time.
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And sometimes the clergy are blindsided by that. Other times they realize that ahead of time and say they're not going to use those terms. So it gets complicated for sure.
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I have to conclude, oh, the best people are all somebody other than my own race. So that's difficult. How do we interpret the Bible? Should we stress things like justice and that God is somebody who cares about equality of all people? Or is he a God of love and a God who's there to give me an afterlife?
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Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they'd even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together.
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What's happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures.
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It worries me a little bit the reach and power of TV. More people saw me in The Practice than will ever see me in all the stage plays I ever do. Which is sort of humbling. Or troubling. Or both.