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Friday, May 03, 2002

By M. Ferguson Tinsley, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Each Sunday Mark Corbin attended church, he was reminded that all was not right in Christendom.

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Most of the 72 congregants at Pittsburgh Mennonite Church in Point Breeze were white. Although unintentional, as with many churches across the country, a racial divide still existed more than three decades after the civil rights movement.

On Sunday, Corbin, Mennonites and members of Bethany Baptist Church in Homewood plan to run in the Pittsburgh Marathon together, doing their part to knock over the barrier that separates the races.

"It seems to be needed now," Corbin said. "With the Baumhammers and [Taylor] murders and with the tension with police [and the black community]. That's what heightened the awareness [of the need for reconciliation] in our congregations."

Corbin, who is white, said his role in bringing the races together started eight years ago with the sale of the Mennonites' Thomas Boulevard church. The congregation moved to a larger building in Greenfield.

Instead of moving with his church, Corbin, a resident of Wilkinsburg, decided to join Bethany Baptist Church in Homewood, a nearly all-black congregation of 450.

Corbin felt the move from the racially mixed Point Breeze area to the predominantly white Greenfield neighborhood tempered the church's commitment to the racial reconciliation component of its community outreach program. He said he felt a divine mandate to work on racial harmony in his own life.

At Bethany, Corbin and his family were welcomed. He'd found a base where, brick by brick, he could continue dismantling the social wall that has kept most American churches segregated for generations.

He and 49 other members from both churches will remove another brick from that wall when they run in Sunday's marathon. A couple dozen will run the 5K, some will hand off in the relay and a few will take on the whole 26.2-mile course.

It's the third year for the church's members to run together and the second time they will don golden-rod-colored T-shirts emblazoned with a Bible verse, Galatians 5:3: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

The first year, more than a score ran. A full range of participants will come out this year, including 74-year-old Kitty Blair and Michael Antonio Forbes, 9. Both belong to Bethany.

Mennonite Ulli Klem, 43, a chaplain at the Allegheny County Jail, and the Rev. Luke Schrock-Hurst, the pastor at Pittsburgh Mennonite, believe like Corbin that they must run against race prejudice because they are Christians.

Klem said they still have a ways to go before they can put forward an example of complete racial harmony to the world.

"The differences are still entrenched," Corbin agreed, referring to the worship styles and the inherent instinct to cling to the way things have always been done.

Even now, although the congregations occasionally worship and sing together, only a few families socialize regularly outside church activities. The runners have begun training together on Saturdays "to try to create more interaction," Corbin said.

"You've got to be intentional about it or it doesn't happen," Klem said.

And God expects intentionality, said Schrock-Hurst.

"The kingdom of God has to do with breaking down social walls. Black and white together is God's dream," he added.

There was a practical reason for the Bethany members to run in the marathon, too.

"There was a tension, an almost negative feeling about [Marathon] Sunday," said Cynthia Corbin, 44, Mark Corbin's wife.

For the last 20 years, since the first Pittsburgh Marathon took place, the runners have trotted past Bethany on Tioga Street. The streets around the church are regularly closed to traffic and worshippers have been trapped in the parking lot.

In the last three years, Bethany members found it was easier to join the runners than to fight the roadblocks. Now they worship on Saturday morning and run on Marathon Sunday. They have made the best of an unhappy situation, said Bethany member Yolanda Forbes, 41, of Cranberry.

"We made lemonade [out of lemons]."