Saturday, November 29, 1997

Seminary professor practices what he teaches

By CHRIS KELLEY

The Dallas Morning News

FORT WORTH, Texas - Darryl Trimiew is imposing in size with ideas to match.

A lawyer-turned-seminary professor at Texas Christian University, Dr. Trimiew preaches liberation theology at a largely conservative school.

And he practices what he teaches in what is arguably Fort Worth's poorest neighborhood.

Liberation - true freedom - is found through service to the downtrodden, he contends. The greater our sacrifice to set free the captives of poverty, homelessness and addiction, the freer and happier we become.

"It is not the kind of liberal, political and economic notion of freedom," he said.

Rather, it is a brand of theology as much about radical faith as it is about the social mission of the church. It is a belief outlined in Luke 4:18 in the New Testament: The Lord "has sent me ... to set at liberty them that are bruised."

"The opportunity to help other people helps me to realize myself as a human being and as a child of God," said Dr. Trimiew, 45.

The professor plies that gospel in the Polytechnic Heights neighborhood of Fort Worth, where a third of the 4,000 households are mired in poverty, 40 percent suffer with alcohol and substance abuse and one in five adults is unemployed.

There, he is active as a board member of Liberation Community, a faith-based community development agency that provides housing, emergency food and clothing, legal services, and high-school equivalency and English classes. The agency also mentors probationers fulfilling community service requirements.

Chartered as a nonprofit agency 13 years ago, Liberation Community is steeped in conservative values: work is redemptive; homeownership instills dignity; program participants are viewed not as objects of service but participants in their own search for freedom.

The agency has helped more than 150 families renovate or buy new homes.

"We are not an agency that sees homeless people and other economically deprived people as objects for ministry," Dr. Trimiew said during a recent conversation at Liberation Community's offices in the heart of Poly. "We are in partnership with the Polytechnic community in its liberation."

Yet liberation does not come without struggle, he said, and most Christians are unwilling to pay the price.

As a result, "A very large part of the problem is the institutional church - its refusal to suffer for Christ's sake," he said.

"In modern Christianity, Christians do not have to suffer. Christians do not have to relinquish privilege. Christians simply have to tithe, not break any of the Ten Commandments and be born again. Give a little something to the poor and have good feelings about that."

"That is highly unpersuasive to me. In fact, the church starts as a church of the downtrodden and a church of the poor. We have to deal with its roots."

For Dr. Trimiew, it starts by letting go of the American dream. Americans feel obligated to avoid the problems of the poor, "to be risk-aversive calculators of interest," he said.

As people get caught up in pursuing the dream, "You are looking over your shoulder not to help other people but to see who is gaining on you. To avoid the problems of the poor and to further yourself - that will not liberate you. All that will do is widen the gap."

His provocative ideas have made Dr. Trimiew, an associate professor at TCU's Brite Divinity School, a highly sought-after teacher, speaker and writer.

His convictions are rooted in the urban unrest of his youth.

Raised in Newark, N.J., in a hotbed of black Presbyterianism, he was 17 when riots torched the city.

Simultaneously amazed and appalled by what happened to his troubled but vibrant hometown, he says memories remain fresh: kids playing Frisbee with looted record albums as tanks roll down the streets; teachings of Malcolm X side-by-side with Bible lessons; readings of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

His father, an auto-body shop foreman, and his mother, a homemaker, instilled roots, wings and obligation - an obligation to acquire useful skills to help revitalize a community shredded by turmoil, he said.

He became a lawyer.

Law, he said, taught him about irresponsible behavior - but little about what he wanted to achieve by his work: justice.

After five years of negotiating divorces, tenant-landlord disputes and insurance and workers' compensation claims, he found that he either could make money as a lawyer or have ministry as a lawyer. "I couldn't do both at the same time," he said.

Indeed, he concluded, urban distress - while heavily shaped by political and economic forces - is as much a matter for the church.

"We can talk political philosophy until the cows come home, but finally people have to care about each other," he said. "To do that, nowadays, generally requires conversion. You don't protest in front of churches. You try to get at the root. You try and form how ministers are formed."

To his law degree from Rutgers University, he added a master's from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1984. In 1988, he joined the the faculty at Brite, a seminary of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). In 1991, he received his doctorate from Emory University and was ordained that year as a minister of the Disciples of Christ.

He has let little grass grow beneath him.

A prolific author, in the past six years he has written two books, edited collections for three others and penned a number of essays and academic papers. Among the topics he has tackled: capital punishment, personal responsibility, economic rights and growing conflicts over class differences in the African-American church.

In addition to his teaching load and other duties, he is writing a third book, serving (unpaid) as associate minister at Fort Worth's Community Christian Church and working in Poly. Married for 22 years, he has two children, a 19-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son.

His next book, he said, will seek to bridge a widening gap between theologians "who have lost touch with the streets" and street ministers who lack time for new theories.

Storefront ministers and middle-class blacks and theologians must work together much more in the ongoing struggle of liberation in America's inner cities, he said.

"We have to have people see that our greatest good is tied up in helping people realize their greatest good," he said. "It's only when you have a feeling of solidarity that is tied to your own identity that you can consistently stay in a mode of helping with other people. You can't do it out of altruism because altruism doesn't give you enough kicks."

(c) 1997, The Dallas Morning News.

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