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Black America is under siege, and its casualties are falling at the church's doorstep. The issues pressing on the African-American church are detailed daily on the front pages of newspapers: black-on-black violence, widespread drug use, the breakdown of the nuclear family, rampant teen pregnancies, and rising high-school drop-out rates.

"We are killing each other," says Hycel Taylor, senior pastor of Second Baptist Church, a 2,000-member black congregation in Evanston, Illinois. "Racism alone cannot explain the 5,000 black-on-black murders in one year!" he shouts across the packed sanctuary.

AIDS is also ravaging inner-city communities. On AIDS Awareness Sunday in 1995, Pastor Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ had people rise who had someone close to them die of AIDS. One-third of the 2,000-member church stood up.

These challenges are taxing church resources while proving resistant to traditional responses. "The black church is in a serious crisis," says Gayroud Wilmore, a retired professor of church history at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. "At stake is whether the black church will remain a viable institution in the African-American community in the twenty-first century or whether it will become irrelevant."

The African-American church is in a time of redefinition as vigorous debates ensue about the value of the welfare system and affirmative action in the lives of blacks. There is growing agreement that the civil-rights integration agenda has had an unintended result of being detrimental to blacks, and that a new model for advancement of the race is required. Within the black community itself there is a growing diversity of voices articulating causes and solutions. Especially prominent is a chorus of voices calling for black self-sufficiency.

To be sure, most black voices are of one mind in decrying the effects of slavery and the U.S. brand of apartheid, which included legal and de facto segregation. "I know whites are tired of hearing about slavery," says Raleigh Washington, senior pastor of Rock of Our Salvation, an interracial Evangelical Free Church on Chicago's West Side, "but the fact remains that it set the stage for the breakdowns we are seeing today."

Especially worrisome to many blacks is what they perceive as a hostile political and social climate against minorities, including Newt Gingrich's Contract with America. "When Gingrich talks about normal Americans, most black folk know he means white Americans," says Bill Pannell, professor of evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of "The Coming Race Wars?" "The attack on welfare mothers, affirmative action, and other hard-fought-for social programs instills in many a sense that these are perilous times to be black in the U.S.A."

This can only add to an already deep-seated feeling of alienation. In a recent University of Chicago survey, 83 percent of blacks felt the U.S. economic system is unfair to blacks, and 79 percent felt the same way about the legal system.

But many black church leaders keep coming back to the need for black solutions. "We can't keep looking to whites to help us out," says Second Baptist's Taylor. "We've got to do it ourselves with the help of God."

The crossroads for African-American churches is signaled by a 400-year-old tradition of the church being the social glue and center in black communities. This dynamic has been lost in today's cities. A generation ago, 80 percent of blacks went to church. Today that figure is 40 percent. "The old ways aren't working anymore," says Wilmore. Cain Hope Felder, professor of New Testament at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, D.C., laments that many black churches offer a meaningless religiosity that lets people off the hook and is seen by many as the "priest of the status quo."

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March 4 1996, Vol. 40, No. 3