2 of 3

You talk a lot about "the new black church." What do you mean?

I coined that phrase in my book High Impact African-American Churches, which I coauthored with George Barna. In our research, we discovered that there's a disproportionate number of black megachurches in relation to blacks in the general population. In every major urban area, there are all these huge black churches that no one has ever heard of. The leaders in most of these huge churches have an entrepreneurial kind of orientation. Kirbyjon Caldwell of Windsor Village United Methodist in Houston would probably be the consummate example of a new black church pastor. They're trying to restore the city through community outreach that includes housing, businesses, and multiple streams of income into the church. Yet they're equally committed to improving the moral values of their community.

Aren't these the churches that some civil rights leaders recently accused of preaching a prosperity gospel?

There's definitely an emphasis on teaching people how to excel in the world, but I don't think all of them are dealing in a "prosperity gospel." Most are simply entrepreneurial. My church, Hope Christian, tends to attract middle-class folks—doctors, lawyers, a wealthy crowd. So an entrepreneurial sensibility comes naturally for us, but we're engaged in transforming our communities both spiritually and socially. For those civil rights warhorses, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, to say churches like ours have abandoned Jesus' call for social justice to preach a gospel of wealth shows how out of touch they are with the current needs of the black community.

You also use the phrase "new civil rights movement." How do you define it?

I believe it's time for African Americans to focus on a new set of issues that are relevant to our community today. There are six key points in our "Black Contract with America on Moral Values" that I believe can guide this new movement. They include family reconstruction, poverty relief (or wealth creation), continued educational reform, prison and justice reform, health care reform, and African relief.

The items you've just ticked off could just as easily be coming from someone with a more liberal bent.

Could be, except my goals are to attack those issues a bit differently. The liberal side makes grand statements about these things, but their follow-through is terrible. We need to see a merger of the family issues with the important justice issues. The justice issues have been the purview of the Left, but then they tend to overlook the personal responsibility side of things. They'll say poor people's problems are because society is bad and racism is real.

Do you deny the existence of systemic racism and injustice?

Of course not. I'm simply saying it's going to take a little more of a redemptive intervention, such as the kind of faith-based prison aftercare that we see from ministries like Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship. With many conservatives, there tends to be an all-or-nothing personal responsibility thing over and against systemic issues. Sadly, you don't see many people from either side of the spectrum saying, "Hey, could it be that the truth is somewhere in the middle? Perhaps there's a genuine role for society, government, and the church working together with the family and individuals to make a difference." I believe that's closer to the biblical balance of social justice and individual responsibility to which Christ calls us.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11