(RNS) — When the news got out that the Rev. A. Roy Medley, a former leader of the American Baptist Churches of the United States, would win the denomination’s Edwin T. Dahlberg Award this year, it seemed both timely and urgent: Jimmy Carter, one of the award’s most prestigious recipients, had died days before, and in a few more we’d celebrate the birth of its first recipient, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on the day that Donald Trump would be inaugurated president for a second term.
Medley is receiving the award in recognition of a lifelong commitment to racial reconciliation, interfaith dialogue and religious liberty, just as we particularly need individuals keen to defend people of all faiths and stand in solidarity with the oppressed not just from their own group or faith, but also vulnerable “others.”
An unstoppable force, Medley, who retired in 2016 after 40 years leading Baptist congregations in southern New Jersey, spent his career crossing the boundaries of his denomination and Christian faith. He has advocated for both Christians and Rohingya Muslims oppressed by Myanmar’s military forces and extremist Buddhists. In 2010, in the company of 40 other faith leaders, he founded the Shoulder to Shoulder Campaign, an initiative challenging Islamophobia in the United States.
The American Baptist engagement in Myanmar has a long and often controversial history. Following a mission to Burma in 1813 by Adoniram Judson and his wife Ann, Baptist missionaries established schools and hospitals while spreading the gospel. But Indigenous Burmese scholars have critiqued their work for undermining traditional values and introducing Western imperialism. Medley saw the ABCUSA’s obligation to reckon with that history by standing with them in their suffering.
It is this commitment that has cemented Medley’s reputation in interfaith circles. Many followers of Jesus are incensed by persecution of Christians (a large problem in North Korea, Nigeria, Yemen and Iraq, among others) but remain unmoved by the victimization of Muslims that happens alongside it in Burma, India, Sri Lanka and China.
The Rev. A. Roy Medley. (Courtesy photo)
Medley “is very much loved by Muslim scholars,” Mohamed Elsanousi, the executive director of the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers, told me with tenderness, because of his commitment to “interreligious dialogue and religious freedom not only for the Christian overseas, but his advocacy for the Rohingya Muslims, for example.”
Becoming general secretary of ABCUSA shortly after 9/11, Medley felt a call to reconcile American Baptists to Muslims at home as well. Developing relationships with Muslim communities at the time required courage, as American Muslims were being taken as proxies for perceived Muslim foes overseas, becoming the target of discriminatory policies and hate crime. Many other faith leaders engaged in hateful antics, such as the Quran burnings carried out by Florida Pastor Terry Jones.
Medley’s rejection of that kind of Christian response was both principled and personal: “The narrowly-drawn boundaries of Southern evangelicalism in which I grew up were undermined by gospel stories of the breadth of Christ’s love, first with regard to race and ethnicity and then towards those outside the Christian faith.”
The idea behind Shoulder to Shoulder was that people of faith had to demonstrate solidarity with Muslims precisely because, not in spite of, their faith. The organization’s executive director, Nina Fernando, said of Medley: “His ability to build relationships across differences and to draw from his own faith to work in solidarity with those of other faith traditions is a powerful witness for Christians today. The Shoulder to Shoulder Campaign aims to be a reflection of the call to love your neighbor, and it is because of leaders like Roy that we can live into that call.”
In 2016, Medley was invited, alongside other non-Muslim faith leaders, by Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, an Islamic scholar who has been lauded for his interfaith outreach, to review the Marrakesh Declaration, a groundbreaking document focused on the rights of religious minorities in Muslim-majority nations, drawing its principles from the Quran and Hadith.
Medley also set out to create space for Baptist-Muslim dialogue in the American Baptist world. He was instrumental in organizing a series of conferences bringing together Baptists and Muslim leaders for conversation and fellowship. One participant, the Rev. Trisha Manarin, executive director of the District of Columbia Baptist Convention, wrote at the time that the dialogue “opened my eyes to see my experiences living in a variety of places — and now residing in a county where there are more Muslims than Baptists — as one of interfaith engagement.”
The Rev. Chakravarty Zadda, an Indian American Baptist minister who was instrumental in creating the National Council of Churches’ “Resolution on the Persecution of Religious Minorities in India and Beyond,” called Medley a mentor, pointing to his own work leading the ABCUSA’s Committee on Christian Unity and Interfaith Relations.
Zadda called Medley a model for how to approach the Trump administration. “I think in the next four years, it’s all the more impending for us to emphasize the legacy of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., to remember those saints who have gone before us, to be the voice for justice for those who have been marginalized and to become the voice of the voiceless.”
The memory of the “Muslim ban” is still traumatic for the Muslim community. As Christian nationalism rears its ugly head again, emboldened by the politics of the incoming president, what we need most is concrete examples of how to live out lives dedicated to interfaith solidarity. Roy Medley is one individual showing us how to do just that.
(Anna Piela, an American Baptist Churches USA minister, is a visiting scholar of religious studies and gender at Northwestern University and the author of “Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US.” She is also the senior writer at American Baptist Home Mission Societies. The views expressed in this commentary are the author’s alone and do not represent the ABCUSA or the American Baptist Home Mission Societies. Nor do they necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
