Leadership Journal

In the shadow of inner-city crack houses, Eugene Rivers preaches a radical gospel.

It's the same message he preaches to Boston politicians, gangs, and the Christian Coalition: love, radical love.

Educated on the streets and at Harvard, Rivers's journey from gang member to minister began when he was confronted with his own mortality while listening to Billy Graham on the radio. Rivers, 49, now pastors Azusa Christian Community in south Boston. His work among gangs was recently a Newsweek cover story.

While in Chicago for a conference on violence prevention, Rivers talked with Leadership editors Marshall Shelley and Eric Reed about establishing community in a tough environment.

What have gangs taught you about community?

The gangs in Boston challenged the clergy about the absence of community in the church. The church had so failed to model an attractive and viable vision of community that children had to create their own.

They'll go somewhere to find fraternity in the midst of a crisis. The "all for one, one for all" ethic drives the gang. The loyalty, allegiance, and camaraderie that are cardinal dimensions of gang life are what they need in the church.

How has that changed the way you build community among young people?

I'm hearing some remarkable things. Contrary to a lot of rhetoric, Gen-X young people are looking for spiritual direction.

A young woman, a sophomore at Yale, wanted me to be a father figure for her because she had never had that kind of affirmation. She knew she could not flower as a woman until she had that. The absence of fatherhood in the black community has had catastrophic consequences. So for her and for these young people, there is a yearning for parents, for fathers, who will listen, laugh, correct, and enjoy the dialogue.

Is the family, then, your picture of community?

Nuclear family—father, mother, children—is the definitive basis for larger visions of community. Everything proceeds from God's concept of family.

How does that compare with other biblical models?

The church must be biblically consistent. We cannot pick and choose with Scripture. The vision of the common life in Acts 2 and 4 is as central to the story of the church as anything else. Pentecostals—and I say this as a Pentecostal—focus on the sensational events, but we ignore the community. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit was not manifested simply in tongues. We must embrace the full gospel. We must wrestle with koinonia. As a result of God's presence, oppressive divisions of class, ethnicity, race, and gender were eradicated among his people.

Not until the church engages the power of the Spirit in our life together will we be what God called us to be.

What prevents this from happening?

We don't recognize the difference between speaking truth and hearing truth. One thing you learn in community: if the right thing is said at the wrong time, the truth is lost. Truth out of context is over-rated.

Truth can be a weapon, more damaging than healing, in the ...