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Detractors and promoters alike agree, in any case, that his "quick tongue" is both the boon and bane of his calling. "He speaks his mind in your company or not in your company," says colleague Bruce Wall, copastor of the Dorchester Temple Baptist Church. Adds long-time friend Ray Hammond, pastor of the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Jamaica Plain, "The way he expresses his urgencies can be—alienating." But, says another colleague, Hurmon Hamilton, pastor of the Roxbury Presbyterian Church, "he challenges and rebukes in a way that gets people thinking," which also, says Hammond, "challenges the church's assumptions of what the gospel requires of us."

Pioneering the Ten Point Coalition, a growing network of religious entities in Boston (and more recently, nationally) committed to reclaiming the inner cities, and being a key fashioner of the Ten Point Plan, the definitive map for this outreach, exemplify some of what Eugene Rivers has done. But who he is is not so easy to define. He is a man of contradictions, not easily pigeonholed. He has been called the "Socrates of black Boston," though his emotional connection to the "brothers in the 'hood" triggers discomfort for him in polished settings; he has excited the wrath of the Nation of Islam, calling them (among other things) a "nationalism of fools," though his own father—personally recruited by Malcolm X—was one of its key figures; he has railed against the days of Reagan and his "domestic war on the poor," though, in the same breath, he calls the liberal Democrats "brain dead"; he is a champion of a rising black intelligentsia, though he left Harvard College after his third year of study; he asserts that the only hope for the renaissance of the black ghetto is the black church, though he is quick to say that the inner-city "nightmare" is due in no small measure to the black church's own failures.

He is a hustler, says sociologist Anthony Campolo, who has known Rivers for over 20 years. "But he has raised hustling to new levels—coupling it with intellectual savvy and baptizing it for the service of Jesus." But what he is "hustling" is, in the words of one local pastor, "controversial, to say the least." He is on a jihad (Rivers's word) to reclaim the city streets from gangs and drug dealers, to repaint the picture of black self-understanding, and to redefine the terms of racial reconciliation. And he is not looking to white people for strategies.

Before the black poor can rise from the urban ash heap, Rivers maintains that some well-guarded doctrines of civil-rights orthodoxy need to be dismantled, then reconstructed under a new model. The very underpinnings of the black identity (Rivers consciously avoids the term African American—"it's too narrow" to include Caribbeans and others who don't identify with the term) must be radically redefined.

His ideas and his intensely personal commitment to them have earned him a serious hearing among black and white spiritual leaders, intellectuals, and political innovators. "Any minister who has been effective enough to get people to shoot into his house is having an impact," says Hurmon Hamilton. "I don't know anyone who has sacrificed more," adds Ray Hammond. He is "on the firing line," says Perry Smith, elder at Roxbury Presbyterian, "in the courts with the young people, and fighting the battle on the turf." In December he stood with Ron Sider, Cornell West, Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, and others when they protested welfare cuts in the Capitol's rotunda. He participated in a forthcoming Bill Moyers special on the relevance of the Bible for modern life. He has conferred with Boston mayor Thomas Mennino, Massachusetts's Gov. William Weld and Sen. John Kerry, and he has been solicited by both Newt "at-least-he's-not-brain-dead" Gingrich and President Clinton. In addition to his coleadership in the Ten Point Coalition and his pastoral responsibilities at Azusa, he also serves as a fellow at the Center for the Study of Values and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School.

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August (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45