Giving Witness and Testimony:
The Life and Ministry of Albert (Pete) Pero

Currents in Theology & Mission
June 2004, Volume 31, Number 3

For more than forty years I have known and grown from the insights and admonitions of Pete Pero. His has been a life of firsts-the first African American Lutheran called to the faculty of an American Lutheran seminary, for example, the first full African American professor, etc. He has lived and mastered two cultures, two theological disciplines, two lifestyles. He has enunciated and embodied the pain and anger of African American history, even and especially in the church. He has also been a bridge to, and a teacher of, the majority culture in church and society. Amid the anguish of his experience he has lived with contagious joy and rollicking good humor. "Giving witness and testimony" to what he has known and experienced and learned is his frequent summation of what it means to be a Christian today in a multicultural context that acknowledges the gifts of all, regardless of culture, ethnicity, or gender. The essays in this and the next issue of Currents are the opportunity for many to give witness and testimony back to him and out to you about this unicum, this unprecedented man and his life and ministry.

James Kenneth Echols looks back to his personal experience of the life and ministry of Pete Pero. He recalls Pero's leadership in articulating and clarifying the challenge of indigenizing the Lutheran tradition in African-American and other communities of color. This leadership includes meetings of the Conference of International Black Lutherans in Harare, Bulawayo, and Wittenberg and the "messages" from these conferences, for which Pero has been a principal author. The Harare conference led to the publication under Pero's editorship of the essays in Theology and the Black Experience. As Echols' soul looks back, he also shares insights into Pero's personal life and the "Peroisms" that many of us have heard and treasured.

Homer U. Ashby, Jr. reflects on a course he taught with Pete Pero twenty years ago on the relationship of theology to psychology in pastoral care. In the years since that experiment, contextual theology and its rootedness in lived experience have come more to the fore. If that course were taught today, they would speak of Black Theology or Womanist theology, on the one hand, or of Black Psychology or Asian/Pacific Islander Psychology on the other. Today they would begin with African American experience rather than with mere theology or psychology. The center of their investigation would reside in the real lived experience of African American people. From a black perspective, the blurring of the boundaries among disciplines can lead to a powerful synthesis that gives greater insight for creative application. African American diminishment through the use of science has a long history. But now psychology has been and is increasingly becoming a science with which evangelical blacks are comfortable. Blacks are willing to look within their own psyches for healing, but not at the cost of their faith.

James H. Cone reminds us that the themes of justice, hope, and love are the product of black people's search for meaning in a white society that does not acknowledge their humanity. African American slaves used the term "heaven" to describe their experience of hope. It was their way of affirming their humanity in a world that did not recognize them as human beings. Martin Luther King took the American democratic tradition of freedom and combined it with the biblical tradition of liberation and justice, and then he integrated both traditions with the New Testament idea of love and hope. Malcolm X rejected Christianity as the white man's religion. Malcolm pushed civil rights leaders to the left and caused many black Christians to re-evaluate their interpretation of Christianity. African Americans want to know whether there is any reason to hope that the twenty-first century will be any less racist than the previous four centuries.

Rudolph Featherstone affirms that the gospel can never be appropriated a-historically or a-culturally. Creative tension between his nurture in an African American context and his upbringing in the Lutheran Church provided Pete Pero with the forum in which he struggled continuously to understand his "twoness." In the crucible of tumultuous Detroit in the 60s, Pete Pero and his African American Lutheran colleagues wrestled with what it means to be African American and Lutheran. He and others in the Conference of International Black Lutherans considered culturally monolithic an approach to ecumenism that focused on creedal theology alone. Ecumenical contacts raise deep questions also about ethics and praxis. Creative educational endeavors have been instituted by Pero, including a program in Michigan entitled Black/White/Black, that linked black communities with white pastors to black mentors. The tri-dimensional understanding of life that has molded Pero is the dynamic interplay between self interest, interest in others, and relationship to God.

Dwight Hopkins notes that a basic claim of black theology is that there is a positive relationship between people of African descent and the liberating message of Jesus Christ, and that God's presence manifests itself in the particularity of oppressed people's culture. One definition of culture notes its seven pillars: politics, economics, aesthetics, kinship, recreation, religion, and ethics. One only knows what she or he is created to be and called to do through the human created realm of culture. The ultimate goal or vision of what it means to be human in community is continuously challenged by evil or that which prevents individual full humanity in relation to healthy community. Culture is contested terrain between marks of life and death. Whatever fosters the freedom of the individual self and the interests of those structurally occupying the bottom of community is good culture.

Richard Perry cites three items in Pero's theological and ethical legacy: theology must develop in context; the way he conceptualized the African American Lutheran experience; and the challenges of developing an African American Black Theology of Liberation for the twenty-first century. People of African descent within Lutheranism experience a double consciousness: marginalization because of their identity as Lutherans and, within Lutheranism, marginalization because of their identity as African Americans. Pero's controlling conviction is that self transcendence or cultural transcendence describes the yearnings of all people for spiritual and social wholeness. The self goes beyond itself and fulfills itself when the self build relationships with other selves. The African American community does not support people who pursue their individual dream with no sense for the diverse history and heritage of the African American community. True discipleship is not cultural uniformity, but an affirmation of cultural diversity.

Vitor Westhelle cites a characteristic of culture that moves between the outer space of the streets and the intimacy of the home. In its catholicity the church is also a movement between "house" and "street" that bridges the cleft between globalization and fragmentation. Word and sacrament function as the formal criteria for the being of the church; the cross is the material criterion, the crucible, that marks the church's existence between the house and the street. The church lives under the sign of the cross-in transience, trial, weakness, infamy, vulnerability, doubt, and even abandonment, attesting that in these realities, as in the forsaken Cross of Christ, there is God. The church is comprised of the followers of Jesus who will not be surprised to know that Christ is to be met among those who in this world are lowly, excluded, and shaken. In the transit between house and street and in this cross-ing between globalization and exclusion, in this crucible (in persecution and uncertainty) the church of the crucified God finds and founds itself.

We are part of all whom we have met. All whom we have met give texture and color, fiber and depth to our being, our self-understanding, our character. I think of my family of origin, my great teachers and colleagues, students who came in and out of my life and always surprised me by how much they knew and how much they grew, and lay people struggling with creativity and risk to live out the tension between street and home. And I thank God for the witness and testimony of Pete Pero in my life. He has never let us forget that we could do better as Christians and as human beings, and he has also let us know that he shared our risks and our mistakes, and loved us all deeply even when we did not get it.
Ralph W. Klein, Editor

In the August issue of Currents, the following essays will also be published in honor of Pete Pero:

Mark Bangert, "The Gospel about Gospel-The Power of the Ring"
Kathleen D. Billman, "Albert (Pete) Pero: Called to a World House"
Philip Hefner, "Spiritual Transformation and Nonviolent Action: Interpreting M. K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr."
Ralph W. Klein, "Africa and Africans in the Books of Chronicles"
David Rhoads, "Children of Abraham: Metaphorical Kinship in Galatians"
Jos David Rodrguez, "Hanging on a Ghetto Cross"
Linda E. Thomas, "Into the New Millennium: The Impact of the Academy on the Church"
Mark Thomsen, "Reflections on the Priority of Belonging"