Summary: Riverside Methodist Church in Occoquan has a black Jesus. Pastor Harley Camden noticed it the first time he walked into the small sanctuary and looked up at the stained-glass window at the front of the church. At first, he thought that the glass was simply dirty, but as he moved closer, he realized that the window had been designed that way, with Jesus looking more like a Palestinian Jew than an English Methodist. Then he looked closer and saw the date on the lower right corner of the window: 1885. The dark-skinned Jesus had been installed in an era when most stained-glass images were as white and as blond as Norwegians. But this Jesus was definitely a person of color. Not truly black, but certainly not white. And then Harley realized why this was so: the church had been founded by a pastor named Bailey, a former slave, and for over a century it had been an African-American congregation called Emanuel Baptist Church. Harley visited the church on his first trip to Occoquan, a small river town in Virginia. He knew that it had become Riverside Methodist after the Baptist congregation outgrew its building and moved to a larger structure. As the new pastor of Riverside, Harley walked between the neat rows of oak pews and tried to imagine himself leading worship in the creaky old Sanctuary. Something was stirring within him - an emotion very different from the anger that had been burning him up since the deaths of his wife and daughter a year earlier. He couldn't quite identify it, but it was calming instead of corrosive. Running his fingers along the backs of the pews, he imagined that the space had been the site of countless milestones: baptisms, weddings, funerals. Anguished prayers had been said there, rousing sermons had been preached, lives had been changed. Generations of African Americans, in particular, had looked up at the Jesus in the stained glass and found strength to live with faith and dignity in a segregated society. A trickle of tenderness was beginning to flow into the dry canyon that was Harley's heart.
