From staff reports
TRUSSVILLE — A United Methodist minister who spent nearly two decades ministering to Birmingham’s homeless population is the subject of a documentary, “A Recovering Racist,” to be shown in the Trussville Public Library’s meeting room at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 22. The program is free and open to the public.
Writers and co-producers of the film are Trussville resident Marti Webb Slay and local writer-photographer Dale Short. The documentary features interviews with and about the Rev. Lawton Higgs Sr., who founded Birmingham’s Church of the Reconciler. The United Methodist church was established in 1993. As part of their commitment to the Biblical principle of hospitality, they extended a ministry with and for the homeless, offering food and clothing, and meeting the spiritual needs of “the least of these” in Birmingham.
Higgs moved to Birmingham in 1984 after being named pastor of McCoy Methodist Church. He explains in the documentary how, as an Arkansas-born, middle-aged pastor of a white church, he felt a conflict between reaching out to black residents in the church’s changing neighborhood and his upbringing as a privileged white Southern male.
Eventually he came to believe that if he couldn’t welcome black members, he wasn’t being true to the Gospel.
“At that moment, I became a recovering racist,” he said. The Church of the Reconciler, housed in a former warehouse, operates with the help of volunteers and funding from area suburban Methodist churches. Higgs retired as pastor of the church in 2006.
In addition to Higgs, the documentary features interviews with former Auburn University historian Wayne Flynt and others who discuss continuing dilemmas involving class and racial divisions in churches—many of which still continue.