AME conference in Oak Brook preparing for 'election of a lifetime'
The Rev. Garry Mitchell keeps thinking back to the Emanuel 9.
They were killed more than a year ago inside one of the oldest black congregations in the South by a white shooter in Charleston, South Carolina. And they were members of the same denomination as Mitchell.
"Those were exactly the same people that would be sitting at this meeting," Mitchell said.
The meeting he referred to is an annual conference in Oak Brook this week for about 70 African Methodist Episcopal churches across the Chicago area and parts of Iowa and Wisconsin. It's a chance to conduct official church business, but also to recognize a history of resilience and social activism in the 200-year-old institution.
And so Mitchell, one of the organizers, also keeps thinking about the "issues of the day," the racial tension in the country and the violence that the church has felt "personally."
"It reminds us that we have to triumph over tragedy," Mitchell said of the June 2015 shooting in the Emanuel AME Church.
The five-day conference runs through Sunday at the DoubleTree Hotel in Oak Brook and should draw roughly 800 people. A closing worship service is set for 10 am. Sunday in the hotel's ballroom.
And with about a month to go before Election Day, church leaders are making sure members show up to the polls in November. It's so much of a focus at the conference that they're exchanging ways to register voters.
"It is the election of a lifetime," said Mitchell, pastor of J.W. James AME in Maywood.
As a nonprofit, the AME church doesn't endorse a presidential candidate, says the Right Rev. John White, bishop of the Chicago-based fourth district. But leaders are putting an emphasis on early voting and encouraging churches to host voter registration drives.
"The right to vote is a right we cherish," he said.
At the conference, the stories of blacks who were denied voting rights "are many and vast," Mitchell said.
"Many of them are seniors now, but they've been in the struggle a long time," he said.
They, too, will be on his mind when members of his church canvass Maywood neighborhoods urging residents to vote and to resist a "passive" mentality ahead of the election.
"I think it is a time when we have to be vigilant," he said.