At this West Texas church, “the Lord’s work” is helping the poor, not rewriting state law

  

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ODESSA — It was Sunday, July 21, eight days since former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt. Pastor Dawn Weaks and her co-pastor husband Joe Weaks had just returned to Connection Christian Church in this West Texas city from a weeklong Colorado vacation.

In the days they were away, Trump supporters, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, suggested the Republican presidential nominee was saved by divine intervention — proof that he was God’s chosen leader. Some Trump critics also pointed to the Bible. They insisted, however, that Trump’s brush with death was a sign he was the Antichrist.

It was the latest rumble in American politics, and religion was again at the epicenter.

“Church, you were in our prayers last week,” Dawn said beginning her sermon. “Through both national and local news events, you prayed together for the world and took care of each other.”

That Sunday she was inspired by a letter in the First Book of Peter: “God stands against the proud, but he gives favor to the humble.”

“What a statement of truth,” she said, bouncing with the spirit from behind the pulpit.

“We don’t have to prove that we are worthy, we are already named worthy by the God who created us,” she said. “Humility comes not from knowing we have gotten everything right, but knowing that God will make everything right. You and I don’t have to fix it all.”

She took a breath.

“Some of you have heard about Christian Nationalism in the news,” Dawn said, referring to an amorphous movement that aims to enforce white Evangelical Christian conservative norms in American society.

“Christian Nationalism is an example of this kind of arrogance parading as Christianity,” she said. “There is nothing Jesus-like about that.”

Church and state have been in constant tension since well before the First Amendment was written. More than 250 years into this democratic experiment, the country is still searching for an equilibrium, especially since 2016 when Trump won his first bid for the White House.

For the past eight years, Texans have watched how Trump and his allies remade the Republican Party — and in some instances, churches. In the Lone Star State, the party has evolved from the compassionate conservative platform of George W. Bush to one that demands obedience from its elected officials who are expected to take on “demonic, Satanic forces.”

The evolution of the Texas Republican Party has been largely driven by some of Connection Church’s neighbors. The Permian Basin’s oil fields are home to a few of Texas’ most prominent Republican mega-donors, including Tim Dunn, a billionaire who has financed a network of conservative political committees and nonprofits aimed at infusing his ultra-conservative brand of Christianity into state law.

Republicans in the Texas Legislature have worked to lace together Christianity with the government, starting with the state’s public school system. The Legislature approved a new law that allows chaplains to serve as counselors in public schools and mandates those same schools post donated signs that read “In God We Trust.” Lawmakers fell short of requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in schools, but similar and more legislation is expected in January when lawmakers return to Austin.

In Odessa, the Weakses see this blunt infusion of Christianity into state policy as religious malpractice. And they are offering Odessans an alternative.

While Trump and far-right Texas Republicans have successfully engaged their base by using apocalyptic language to demonize migrants, the Weakses have reminded their congregation Jesus was one. When the GOP promises tax cuts, the Weaks ask how the state’s leaders will help the sick and the poor. When the religious right suggests anyone who supports abortion access for women can’t be a Christian, they point out the Bible is silent on the matter.

“There’s all kinds of power in this world,” Dawn said, ending her late July sermon. “But there is only one that saves. So our door is open to all who humbly bend their knee to the one who lifts us up. Amen.”

Two days later, while the air was still cool and the West Texas sun had yet to reach its apex over the flat arid land, Dr. Dawn — as she is often called — stood in front of a modest ranch-style home. She watched from the sidewalk as eight teenagers from her congregation got to work rehabilitating the home of Kenna Hurley.

The teens spent the day painting the exterior of Hurley’s home. Hurley is not a member of Connection Christian Church. She’s a Baptist and retired school cafeteria worker who lost most of her sight. A friend nominated Hurley to receive help from a local nonprofit that recruits community members to repair homes for low-income, elderly, and disabled people.

“I feel blessed they came,” Hurley said from inside her home. “It’s the Lord’s work. I could have never afforded this.”

The Connection Christian Church repair team was part of the congregation’s annual summer week of service. During that week, church members — young and old — sorted vegetables at the West Texas Food Bank, tended a community garden and fed the homeless.

That morning Dawn, 53, was ready to work. She wore dark gray sweatpants and a T-shirt that read “Religious Liberty For All.” Her wavy brown hair framed her pale face.

“Does it make a difference in the world?” she asked. “Well, it’s on the corner. So maybe it will lift up the neighborhood.”

It was a subtle acknowledgment that the work her church does goes unnoticed by most people. Unlike a class of Texas preachers who have become household names — T.D. Jakes, Robert Jeffress, and Joel Osteen — and who command congregations of thousands, Connection Christian Church serves about 300 people. There is no media empire or best-selling book.

It’s days like this Tuesday, and weeks like this one in July, that illustrate what it means to be a Christian, Dawn reminds her crew. They read a passage from the Bible titled “The Greatest Commandments,” Matthew 22:36-40.

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

“Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”

Connection Christian Church — part of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denomination — is older than Odessa. It was founded as First Christian Church with 13 congregants more than 100 years ago when the city was little more than a dusty cow town along the Texas and Pacific Railway.

At the time, Texas was undergoing a religious evolution. For most of the 1800s, the predominant religion was Catholicism, according to the Texas State Historical Association. But in the time between Texas declaring independence from Mexico and becoming the 28th state in the union, Baptists and Methodists outnumbered Catholics.

Tucked inside the state’s new constitution was this unique provision: All candidates for office must “acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.” That law is still on the books but is considered unenforceable.

Today, Texas is one of the most religiously diverse states in the U.S., said Eric McDaniel, a professor at the University of Texas who has studied the intersection of race, religion and politics.

“It’s a classically conservative state,” he said. However, the state’s booming population comes with a more diverse religious experience. Christian churches for the Hispanic and Asian communities and non-Christian places of worship continue to open their doors.

And while they are all religious, “they don’t always think the same,” McDaniel said.

That religious diversity has prevented the Legislature from enacting some of the most conservative proposals debated during the last few sessions, he said.

When First Christian Church in Odessa was founded in 1906, 7% of the state’s church members belonged to the Disciples of Christ denomination. The young church held revivals under a tent or temporary wooden structures. Baked goods and chuck wagon lunches were sold to help pay for the church’s first permanent structure.

By the 1950s and 60s, Odessa had been incorporated as a city and oil flowed. The population boomed to 80,000. The church, led by the Rev. Wilbur J. Mindel, grew with the city. It was known as the “Country Club” church. Many of the town’s doctors and lawyers, and their families, worshiped there. And decades before the Weakses would arrive in Odessa, the church described itself in a newspaper advertisement as “FRIENDLY • PROGRESSIVE • COOPERATIVE.”

The church helped start local chapters of Meals on Wheels and Habitat for Humanity. It set up a residential community for elders working with the U.S. housing department. It created scholarships to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, which was established in part by the Disciples of Christ in 1873.

But in the 1990s, church attendance started to drop, said Gina Yarbrough, the church’s historian. Fewer people lived near downtown. Oil production slowed. The state eased so-called Blue Laws that restricted liquor sales on Sundays. Then in 2006, another longtime pastor retired and the once bustling church shrunk to just 45 worshipers — mostly older parishioners from families who founded the church.

It would take nearly a decade for the church to recover.

It’s hard to escape God in Odessa. Churches anchor major intersections. They line the highways. A cross sits atop the city’s tallest building. Upon introduction, strangers in the supermarket will inquire about your church. City Council members detail their religious backgrounds in their biographies on the city’s website.

“Religion is a foundation for a lot of our citizens in West Texas,” said Dustin Fawcett, Ector County’s top elected official. “We are a very conservative community. It really is a backbone and we call upon faith frequently.”

How conservative is Ector County? In 2020, Trump won Texas with 53% of the vote. He won Ector County with 73%.

Six years prior, church elders recruited the Weakses, who had been co-pastoring in Kansas City, Missouri, to help them resurrect the church. It was a homecoming of sorts. Dawn was born and raised in Dallas. Joe was reared in Houston.

The Weakses had been in Odessa for less than a year when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. While First Christian had a long reputation as being “progressive” — especially for West Texas — it was unclear how the congregation would feel about the couple officiating same-sex weddings.

So, nine years ago, the Weakses asked their elders. A group began to meet with Pastor Joe to study the Bible.

Joe, 53, is taller than the average man. But otherwise, he is unassuming. He wears glasses and sports an auburn goatee speckled with gray.

“Our guiding principle has been taking care of people,” Joe said. “No one has to earn our love.”

Months of prayer later, the church wrote a new mission statement that read in part: “We celebrate who you are: male or female, single or married, gay or straight, brown, black, or white, Democrat or Republican, churchy or not churchy, Red Raider, Longhorn, or Horned Frog — welcome!”

The statement kicked off the church’s next chapter.

“They’ve got guts,” Yarbrough, the historian, said of the Weakses. “Our pastors are gifted at guiding us — not telling us.”

Since Trump won his first presidential election, there has been a resurgence of the term “Christian nationalism.”

Generally, supporters believe the United States was founded as a Christian nation and Christian values should guide its laws with the most extreme Christian nationalists believing they are soldiers in a war for the soul of America. They tend to support strict laws, especially around sexual morality and establishing a homogenous culture based on white Evangelical Protestant values. They likely believe in the Seven Mountains mandate, that Christians must “bring Godly change to a nation by reaching its seven spheres, or mountains, of societal influence.” And they are part of the New Apostolic Reformation movement that wants dominion over politics, the economy and culture.

This year, Pew Research reported that 80% of Americans believe religion is losing influence in American life. And nearly half of those who say religion is losing influence said it is bad for society.

“Democracy depends on religion and virtue,” said Daniel Darling, director of the Fort Worth-based Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Before joining the seminary, Darling was a spokesman for the National Religious Broadcasters, where he was eventually fired after he endorsed the COVID-19 vaccines. He wrote a book encouraging Christian unity, an appeal to his fellow believers to rethink how they interact with each other in political spaces and when debating social issues.

Darling believes more Christians should be involved in civic life

“We want people of faith bringing their ideas to the public square,” he said. “That’s how democracy works.”

That is not, however, an endorsement of Christian nationalism, he said. Rather, he is worried that national news organizations, liberal academics, and authors are fear-mongering and fixating on a “small cohort” who do not represent Christianity as a whole.

“I don’t think this is a looming threat,” he said.

Most Americans do not support the idea of a theocracy, with only 13% of Americans in that same Pew survey agreeing with the statement that Christianity should be declared the official religion in the United States. In the same survey, less than a third, 27%, of white Evangelical Protestants wanted Christianity declared the official national religion.

Other surveys, including a nationwide poll of Southern Baptists and congregational leaders by the Land Center earlier this year, found similar results.

“I’m still hopeful in America,” Darling said. “People are getting along with their neighbors more than you think.”

In 2019, First Christian Church moved into a new building with a new name: Connection Christian Church. While most of today’s congregation joined since then, there is a small group of elders who have attended for decades. A handful, now in their late 80s and 90s, have attended their entire lives.

“Change is very difficult for a church that goes back to 1906,” Gina Yarbrough said. “We had a large group of old guards. And their families bought the bricks and stained glass windows.”

Gina and her husband, David Yarbrough, moved to Odessa from the Rio Grande Valley in 1978. David was raised Methodist. Gina was a Baptist. David, a mild-mannered conservative, told his wife he did not want to go to church to be yelled at. Gina, a school teacher, replied she didn’t want to be put to sleep during a sermon.

A year after moving to Odessa, the Yarbroughs and their two children attended First Christian’s Easter service with several neighbors, who had their own young families. The Yarbroughs have attended ever since.

It might have been the greatest compromise they ever made.

About 15 years ago, David joined a Bible study group for the church’s senior members. It first formed decades ago for young married couples. Several original members still attend regularly.

Now known as the Carpenter Class, the group outlasted divorce and death, seven U.S. presidents and Texas governors, and oil booms and busts. They witnessed the the political violence of 1986, Watergate, the Columbia shuttle explosion, the first woman named to the Supreme Court, the Branch Davidian raid, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Through it all, politics never broke the group, they say.

“We don’t get up in arms about anything,” said David Yarbrough, who now leads the group every Sunday. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a prickly person. We try to show love to one another.”

The seniors meet each Sunday after the 9 a.m. service to discuss the sermon and catch up on life: A member had a birthday, someone is in the hospital, and there is a volunteer opportunity coming up at the food bank. The goal in discussing their faith, David said, is not to blindly believe, but to challenge their doubt.

“It deepens your faith if you examine things,” he said. “It’s advantageous.”

Collages of crosses hang on the walls of their meeting room. Each cross represents a member who has died.

Marita Hendrick, who in the 1980s became the first woman elected to leadership in the church, takes roll and tallies the weekly offerings, used to buy Christmas gifts for children.

If there ever was a major disagreement over a political flashpoint, she has forgotten, she said. She can guess the political leaning of fellow congregants, but she doesn’t know for sure. She, herself, has voted for both Democrats and Republicans.

When politics comes up, especially outside of church, she tries to change the subject. Though, that temperance will be tested this fall as her son, Cal Hendrick, is running for mayor.

“Why ruin a friendship over politics?” Hendrick said.

In September, the Weakses will celebrate their 10th year at the church. At the same time, the church is expected to pay off the mortgage on its new building, a converted dialysis center near the mall in northeast Odessa.

Unlike most buildings in Odessa, the exterior of Connection is a bright blue. It pops among the sandy landscape. And yet, most of the interior walls are plain. Some relics of the old building, including the church bells, the crosses in front of the altar, the communion table, and a stained glass pane featuring Jesus made the move.

Modern touches include a banner near the altar that proclaims: “We all have a place at the table.” Lyrics and Bible verses flash across a big screen. During one of the Weakses’ sermons, corresponding images roll by, PowerPoint-like.

During the last decade, the church did more than move and rebrand. The church’s building doubles as a hub for several nonprofits, including the Red Cross and Centers for Children and Families, a counseling center. It created an arts and lunch program for children of a low-income housing community.

The Weakses were among the first faith leaders to counsel families after a shooter drove through Odessa killing seven people. The church would later host meetings charting the city’s path toward healing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was among the first to host drive-in services, attracting many new families. And the church was called on to distribute water to the most vulnerable populations after a citywide water outage.

Dawn is “an active community member,” said Fawcett, the Republican Ector County judge. “She’s one of the vocal ones. She’s always got a smile on her face and she is trying to help those folks who have challenging circumstances in life. She is a pastor who lives out something I believe in: Grace for all.”

One of the newest members of the congregation is Tracy Austin, a queer woman who is the executive director of the American Red Cross chapter in Odessa.

Tracy and her husband, River Austin, had long felt alienated by faith communities.

“I wasn’t a Christian,” she said.

Then Tracy met the Weakses following the 2019 mass shooting. The pastors had to be phony, she thought. Christians, in Tracy’s experience, weren’t that nice.

Dawn would visit with Tracy at her home. Tracy did her best to challenge Dawn, pointing out contradictions in the Bible. Dawn would smile, not argue. Dawn reassured Tracy that doubts were natural, that the Bible was not a literal document, but a guide and encouraged her to stake out her own relationship with God.

“There was no thorn in the side,” Tracy said. “When we found this church, we found belonging.”

The Weakses acknowledge they’re political and progressive, but stress they are not partisan. They reject mob rule in both political parties.

“Jesus’ story in the gospel is very political. It’s a political story,” Joe said. “It’s a story of someone who is crucified as part of a political process.”

On election night four years ago, the Weakses opened the church to anyone who wanted to pray. Few attended. Despite the low turnout, they’ll offer the sanctuary again this November.

They’ll encourage their church to vote. But they’ll never say for who. They know members will vote for both political parties.

“We don’t keep a list of who people vote for,” Dawn said.

In the meantime, Dawn and Joe will pray.

Dawn will pray for people to “expand their circle of who their neighbor is.” She’ll pray for people to engage in conversation and not succumb to social media manipulation.

And Joe will pray for kindness.

Disclosure: Texas Christian University and Texas State Historical Association have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.