  The worst part about an overnight on-call at the hospital is how it messes up my sleeping schedule for the next day or two.
Luckily, most of my on-calls recently have been on the weekend. So I get home wired and can't sleep (even though I probably haven't had a decent amount of sleep in 36 hours). I stay awake until mid-afternoon then take a nap. I run around for the rest of the day, usually collapse around 10 PM.
Then I wake up around 3 AM and have trouble getting back to sleep. So I've been trying to fill my early morning today with finding a church to worship at tomorrow. ::sigh:: Okay, I'm Black and I'm Sacramental - rah rah Communion & Infant Baptism! I'd really like to commune tomorrow. I'd really like to be surrounded by Black folks while I'm doing it. My White contact factor is a bit high these days and I'm trying to be pro-active about my search for go-to Black folks.
So here's my dilemma, the kind of church I want to commune at really doesn't exist. I know I'm picky, but this shouldn't be this blasted difficult here in Chicago. What I want is this: 1. Lutheran sacramentology and communes every week at every Sunday worship service. If I can't get that, I'd go for an urlLink ELCA Full Communion partner that communes each week. 2.
Theologically - Jesus is divine Son of God, human Son of Man, not too much "washed in the blood of Jay-sus! ," they'd embrace my gay friends and encourage them to get married and become pastors, social justice-y without too many white guys with dreadlocks (preferably none if I can get it) 3. Lots of Black folks (including the pastor), at least 75%, and lots of them with bachelors & advanced degrees. I'm tired of sitting in churches feeling like the pastor and I are probably the only ones who've pursued higher ed.
And I hate the feeling that I'm one of the few scholastically bent folks around; people expect you to be smart and that just ain't true. 4. A good amount of approaching, eligible young Black men who could deal with dating a future pastor. Yeah, I said it - I want to hook up at church, damn it! 5. Good sense of mission and vision and a proper balance of outward/inward focus So yeah, this doesn't exist in the ELCA as far as I can tell. Or at least in Chicago. And it's bugging me. If I wanted this in a White Lutheran church (perhaps minus eligible young men) I could easily find it.
Chicago doesn't lack for Buppies, they just lack for Lutheran Buppies. So, this reiterates my desire to do a mission plant among Black, Young, Urban Professionals. The ELCA has some big issues with race, but they're usually tied up with class. The ELCA, on average, is comprised of congregations and congregation members that are fairly well off. Last I heard, the ELCA was only behind the Episcopal Church USA in average earnings of members among Protestant churches in the US.
There are a lot of Swedish farmers who left big estates behind. Now the ELCA finds itself trying to reach out to Black people, but it's usually Black folks in urban centers and urban congregations that decided to stand firm in the face of White flight. I'm grateful for the decisions of those congregations that didn't run off with their members to the suburbs. However, this leaves poor Blacks as the bulk of the minorities in the ELCA. So - painting in very broad strokes - the average White ELCA member is "rich.
" The average Black ELCA member is "poor. " Bad politics, that. But now, I'm part of the first generation of African-Americans that has grown up solidly middle class. The children of my cohorts will be the beginnings of the first generation of African-Americans that grew up solidly middle class with parents that also grew up solidly middle class (instead of urban or rural poor, my parents growing up as the latter. ) So my dream is to some day start a Lutheran version of urlLink Trinity United Church of Christ, a congregation here in Chicago on the South Side.
I figure part of my call is to help the ELCA integrate overall. I don't necessarily feel called to help integrate individual congregations. If the ELCA is going to ever hit it's goal of being 10% people of color (which is still pretty damn paltry in my opinion, but it's a start) it's going to take the influence of an ELCA brown-skinned megachurch that doesn't fall into all that Prosperity Gospel sludge.
If there are large congregations of upwardly mobile middle-to-upper-middle class, educated Blacks, they will be able to speak to the upwardly mobile middle-to-upper-middle class, educated Whites about the issues of race in Christianity and the ELCA. This will hopefully allow us to speak honestly about the issues of race without the mitigating factor of class also being thrown in. That just kills a lot of conversations, I think. We pretend the issues are the same - and lots of times they are.
But lots of times, they're different. And back to my current dilemma. The church I want doesn't exist. So I'm out on a limb, here. I've spent the past hour or so just breeding frustration by looking at churches online. There are a few I'm interested in worshipping with, but I can't find their worship times. One of them is a worshipping community (not a full church yet) so they don't have a set worship space. I think folks in their neighborhood know where they are, but they don't have an office number I can call to get the info. And this pisses me off to no end. I want to worship. I don't want to jump through the hoops.
It sucks being a Black Lutheran some times. This is definately one of those times. 
