The First Congressional Church of Oakland, a progressive religious establishment whose members call it "First Congo" for short, has vowed to stop calling police shortly after the story went viral about a white woman calling the police on a black family for barbecuing on a non designated area of Lake Merritt, an incident that seemed cringeworthy to people on both sides of politics.
Lay leaders Nichola Torbett and Vanella Riles claim the decision was spurred out of the church's solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement as well local mentally ill and/or drug addicted homeless black men.
According to The Daily Caller, Torbett told NPR that the church had some to the conclusion that:
"...white people conflated comfort with safety and that the church most often called the police on black homeless men who walked into the church in the midst of a mental illness or drug induced outburst. Riles claimed that calling the police on such people, even if they present a potential threat to safety, was somehow out of line with Jesus’ teachings since, in her view, inviting police intervention risked the lives of 'the most vulnerable of society.'"
The congregation now says they've agreed to stop calling the police when they have a problem, and have instead created their own community security force (whose legality seems murky) and using the Black Panther Party as their template:
“Their full name was the Black Panther Party for Self Defense... It was about, how do we defend ourselves, who really is the violent offender, and even if it does come to something within the community, then how do we deal with that, without putting more lives at risk.”
They seem to have come to a specifically Leftist, "Liberation Theology" interpretation of Christianity, simplifying it to be a narrative about racism and class warfare, saying, “[Jesus] was part of an occupied nation, a colonized people. A brown-skinned man, who was surveilled, targeted, harassed, finally arrested, beaten, and killed by state forces.”
What they fail to note is that Jesus was betrayed by people of his own ethnicity, who sold him out to the Roman occupiers because they disliked his religious stances and politics. After Jesus had alienated many of his own ethnicity by calling out moral hypocrisy (such as the incident where he "cleansed" the temple of moneychangers who were using it as a marketplace) they voted democratically that they would rather have the murderer Barabbas freed than him. He also accepted his fate to be executed willingly, as an opportunity to atone for humanity's sins. It's concerning that this part of the gospel is being reinterpreted as a racial struggle narrative rather than a fight for virtue and religious identity.
Naturally, Christianity as a 2000-year-old religion has many interpretations that can be skewed to both Left and Right-wing politics. But allowing dangerous individuals to walk the streets unchecked is a policy that can harm the multi-religious society as whole.