Quiet changes are taking place in black church circles. For example, there is less emphasis on issues of race, more on evangelism and higher education.
To get a closer look at what is happening, CHRISTIANITY TODAYsent correspondent James C. Hefley to study a bustling congregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, and stringer James S. Tinney to cover the annual meeting of the National Black Evangelical Association in New York City. News editor Edward E. Plowman culled files for an update on denominational groups. Their reports follow:
Infiltration, not confrontation, is the watchword at the black Friendship Baptist Church in Charlotte, an evangelical congregation whose active membership is approaching 1,400. One result: Friendship holds a list of civic, community, and political firsts perhaps unequaled by any other black church in America.
Pastor Coleman Kerry, Jr., 52, was the first black member of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Board of Education. Member Fred Alexander was Charlotte’s first black councilman; last November he was elected the first black state senator from Mecklenburg County. Charlotte’s second black councilman is architect Harvey Gantt, also from Friendship Church. A senior high Sunday-school teacher and deacon at the church, Gantt holds a master’s degree in city planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before that he was the first black graduate of Clemson University.
From Friendship have come Charlotte’s first black fireman, policewoman, police public-relations officer, United States commissioner, graduate of an integrated high school, and student-body president at the local junior college. Also from Friendship: the first black chief district judge for Mecklenburg County, the first black executive director of the area Manpower, Inc., agency, and the first black director of the Neighborhood Center system of community-help programs.
“We say at Friendship that Christian citizens have a responsibility to get into decision-making organizations,” explains Pastor Kerry. Adds Councilman Gantt: “I think many of the problems in our country have come because we Christians haven’t taken an active role in community leadership as we should.”
The church is involved in a number of educational and youth concerns.
Attorney Julius Chambers, a church trustee, filed, fought, and won the successful Supreme Court suit that opened the door for equal education in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg public school system. A senior partner in a prominent Charlotte law firm, Chambers also serves as legal aid director for the national NAACP.
A delegation of students from South Boston’s embattled public high school last fall came to see how Charlotte students made integration work. Two Friendship students were in a Charlotte delegation that returned the visit.
Four nights a week at the church, adult church members—many of them public school teachers—tutor students needing help. Over 90 per cent of Friendship’s forty-six high school seniors this year expect to go on to college. Currently, ninety-seven of Friendship’s young people are in colleges and universities.
Black college students unable to afford textbooks can draw from a book bank at the church. When they finish, the books are returned for others to use.
Kerry heads up an informal program called “Careers Unlimited” that has helped 367 blacks go to college who might not otherwise have gone. If he spots a youth who really wants an education but needs financial aid, he often lines up someone in the church or community to send a check for the student to the college finance office.
A day-care center with an enrollment of seventy is operated under a separate board.
Adults are not forgotten. Whether it’s home ownership (most Friendship families now own their homes), borrowing money (the church is considering a credit union), starting a new business, or cutting red tape at the welfare office, members stand ready to help. (Kerry encourages people to make appointments by telephone with welfare officials; that way, he says, they don’t have to suffer the indignity of taking a number and waiting—and wasting time.)
Prior to each election, all Friendship members are polled to see if they are properly registered. During the last two elections the church led registration drives that put more than 5,000 blacks on voter rolls. “The politicians have found they need us more than we need them,” quips Kerry.
Beyond all this, the church operates much as any other evangelical church would. Kerry’s sermons are strong in Bible content. He applies the Bible to social issues. He gives a revivalistic altar call. New members are welcomed “to all the privileges and responsibilities” of the church, then shuttled off immediately to meet with an enlistment committee. Membership has been increasing at the rate of more than 150 each year.
There were only forty members when Kerry became pastor in 1948 (the church was organized in 1892). The son of a traveling evangelist active in educational leadership circles in the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Kerry preached his first sermon at age 9. He graduated from Morehouse College, where one of his classmates was Martin Luther King, Jr., and from the American Baptist Seminary in Nashville, which like Friendship is affiliated with the NBCUSA.
Friendship’s Sunday school has a leadership-training course going year round. David C. Cook materials are used under the imprint of the Progressive National Baptist Convention (see box, page 41). “This is the best literature we’ve found that relates to what we’re trying to do,” Kerry says.
Tithing is emphasized, and the budget has doubled to $210,000 during the past five years. When the church applied for a building loan, the white banker reportedly was so impressed by Friendship’s plan of organization that he recommended it to four white pastors. All major church departments are interlinked so that, for example, the chairmen of enlistment committees in all the departments make up the church-wide enlistment committee.
The major outreach of the church is conducted through the men’s Brotherhood and the Women’s Missionary Union (WMU). The WMU has divided the city into area “sheepfolds” named after the apostles and other Bible personalities. Women in sheepfolds provide a variety of services that run from arranging rides to church to providing food and child care for a family when the mother is sick. All organizations of the church participate in an “adoption” program for both black and white residents of nursing homes who have no relatives in the area.
“Black Christians are a love-oriented people,” Kerry declares. “We believe both in getting folks saved and in helping them find a whole life on earth.”
No black separatist, Kerry thinks churches should work together on what they can’t do separately. He is one of the pillars in Metro-Ministries, a coalition of twenty black and white Baptist churches in Charlotte. The churches join hands in mental-health and prison ministries. They also exchange pulpits, choirs, and home visitation. According to Kerry, this is not a “do-for” but a “do-with” relationship among black and white churches.
Still, except for the exchanges, few whites have visited Friendship. Only one white belongs, a partner in an interracial marriage. Leighton Ford, associate to Billy Graham, has preached from the pulpit. Cameron Townsend, the founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators, who lives at the Wycliffe air base about thirty miles away, has dropped in a couple of times. (Townsend and his wife Elaine belong to a small predominantly black Presbyterian church near the base.)
But word is getting around. Says James C. Peters, a regional executive of the United Methodist Church: “Friendship has something going that ought to make all of us sit up and take notice.” JAMES C. HEFLEY
A BLACK MAN’S VIEW OF THE BLACK CHURCH
Colemon Kerry, Jr., pastor of Friendship Baptist Church in Charlotte (see story this page), is a black evangelical who preaches—and practices—the Gospel’s relevance to all of life. He underscores that precept and offers his views on black-and-white church topics in this interview with correspondent James C. Hefley.
Question. How does the black evangelical church differ from its white counterpart?
Answer. Not in theology, insofar as we both preach from the same Bible. I think this idea of a black theology is a myth. But I do see us differing in two ways. First, we have a different background. At one time in America blacks and whites worshiped together. But we were never fully integrated. Even after emancipation our people could not participate on the same level as their slave masters. Friendship Church, incidentally, was formed by blacks who left the old First Baptist Church of Charlotte. They had been forced to sit in the balcony.
Second, our worship experience is not the same as whites. It’s a lot more overt, God-centered, and personal—the same as any oppressed people who have been exposed to the love of Christ and God’s delivering power.
Q. Where do you see the civil-rights movement in relation to the black church?
A. The black church was here before the civil-rights movement was born. It gave the movement its leadership. The emphasis on civil rights now has declined, but the black church is still here championing the causes of black people. The church is always bigger and more enduring than any movement or agency.
Q. What did the civil-rights push accomplish?
A. Much. The laws that were passed as a result opened the doors for the masses to claim their citizenship rights. Voting rights, for example. What happened in Alabama has produced benefits here. Whether we go on and claim all these rights is another question.
Q. There’s been a lot of writing and speaking about weaknesses of white evangelicals. What have been some shortcomings of the black church?
A. The black church has had a structural problem with lack of unity at the congregational level. Friendship once had a lot of little clubs that did little else than raise funds. Everybody was doing his own thing. What we did—and it took five years—was to bring the church under one policy and program. Then I think the black church in the past has talked too much about walking the golden streets, and too little about God’s promises for the here and now; too much about Hallelujah Boulevard and not enough about rundown housing. I’m not faulting this, for it was done when blacks had little else to hope for besides heaven. What we need to do now is preach a whole Gospel for the whole man.
Q. What can the black church do for America?
A. I don’t mean to sound presumptuous, but I believe the black church—if it doesn’t build a wall around itself—can help bring this nation back to a sense of maturity and responsibility. The black church can show other churches the way by reaching into the total community, by relating Christianity to every facet of life.
Black Evangelicals: Expanding The Fold
The past year has been a good one for the National Black Evangelical Association, the some 500 participants were told at this month’s annual NBEA convention in New York City. During the year, NBEA members completed a leadership-training course manual, set up a training center in Los Angeles that prepared sixty-five persons for street and church ministries, began sponsoring Operation LIVE—a street-level counseling ministry in the Palo Alto, California, area—and helped to recruit eighty clergymen in New York City for a government-funded community chaplaincy program.
“We are rewriting the meaning of prison ministries,” declared George M. Perry, pastor of Bethany Church in the Bronx and a supervisor of the chaplaincy program. The program enlists local clergymen to work with families of prison inmates. These clergy act as an arm of the resident prison chaplains at more than two dozen prisons and jails.
Also, the NBEA last fall held its first Black Christian Student Conference, an event considered a success by its organizers. The conference in Chicago resulted in an NBEA-published book called How To Survive on a White Campus, and accounted for the large youth attendance at this month’s convention. Blacks financed the Chicago meeting without outside help, an official noted proudly.
Finances was a topic at the NBEA convention, with leaders stressing the need for black evangelicals to give greater support to the NBEA (budget goal: $24,000). Funds from whites are accepted “if no strings are attached.” The Northwestern Meeting of Friends, predominantly white, pays the salary of NBEA field director Aaron Hamlin. Said one NBEA official, “If black folks don’t want to pay for liberation, then they don’t deserve it.”
Membership statistics are difficult to assess. Hundreds of persons are associated with the NBEA, some through individual membership, others through their work for an organization or institution that is a member.
The convention program revolved around four themes: an evangelical pan-Africanism, black youth, black unity, and increased involvement in social-action projects.
More input is being solicited from Caribbean and African sources. Speaker Ithiel Clemmons, pastor of Brooklyn’s First Church of God in Christ, urged evangelicals to view the Kimbanguist movement of Zaire, Africa, as an appropriate symbol for a developing theology. Calypso gospel music was provided by New Yorkers from the Caribbean, and the West Indian-oriented National Young Peoples Christian Association, representing scores of churches, had a display booth.
F. Kefa-Sempangi, former pastor of the largest Protestant church in Uganda, who fled to the United States in 1973 to escape the wrath of President Idi Amin, attended but was not on the program. His evangelical Anglican congregation in Kampala had grown to 12,000. “Idi Amin doesn’t trust anyone who can attract a large following,” explained a family member.
Within the next five years, the NBEA plans to hold its annual convention once in the Caribbean and once in Africa, commented NBEA president William H. Bentley, pastor of Calvary Bible Church in Chicago.
Black young people under 30 made up nearly half the attendance of some sessions. Observers viewed this as a sign of NBEA vitality and said it was important for young blacks to “celebrate” their blackness in such a fellowship setting. Paul Gibson, 28, an Inter-Varsity campus minister and the youngest member of NBEA’s board of directors, said the NBEA hopes to initiate an umbrella fellowship of the thirty-plus black Christian campus workers affiliated with the fledgling National Black Student Association, Tom Skinner Associates, Inter-Varsity, and other Christians groups. Black students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have all but “taken over” the campus radio station as a result of a planned Christian concentration in media studies, he also reported.
Evangelist Tom Skinner noted that the NBEA, like the black church generally, had never accepted a dichotomy between belief and social action. Bentley asserted that NBEA membership will always include those “from the far left to the far right, as long as Jesus is central.” Over the next year the NBEA will engage in a concentrated effort to “draw back into our fellowship those once in our number.”
Despite the inclusiveness, however, there will be no toning down of the emphasis on black modes, on the biblical definition of evangelism, or on social action, said Bentley. He warned: “To lose the emphasis God has given us will alienate us from our own people and by that very fact reduce our credibility among our white brethren. If we have no special reason for being, then we might as well disband and join those who proclaim they are blind to a man’s color so long as he is a Christian.”
The black evangelical’s “uniqueness is his black experience,” explained Bentley in an interview. “If we cease to interpret from a black perspective, we might as well cease to exist organizationally.”
Bentley lamented that “the one area in which we have made little headway is in the ranks of those black groups within white mainstream Christianity called ‘black caucuses’ ” (see following story). He also cautioned against complacency. Some change for the better has occurred, he acknowledged, “but we must not allow this to lull us into inactivity. Much remains to be done.”
Ann Douglas, the new executive director of the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), was a workshop participant, as was exdirector Lucius Walker. Special thanks was expressed to Walker for helping the NBEA secure free office space at the National Council of Churches headquarters building, located at 475 Riverside Drive in New York City.
Special criticism was aimed from the platform against such things as urban renewal (“there are moral problems involved when we pick a man up and move him somewhere”), white Christians in general (“all they want to do is preach the Gospel and let the world go to hell”), and the planning of the Lausanne meeting (“all the blacks there were handpicked by whites”).
But there was also time for self-criticism. Federal Communications Commissioner Benjamin Hooks, a Baptist minister, observed that black Christians “couldn’t stop the riots because we didn’t know the folk who were rioting. We have been too concerned about being a respectable, middle-class church.”
NBEA members say they are determined to change all this. As one speaker put it, “In these days people ought not to talk at all without feeding someone.”
JAMES S. TINNEY
COOK’S RECIPE FOR BLACK TASTES
For several years independent evangelical Sunday-school publishers have been imprinting curriculum materials for certain—usually small—denominations that for various reasons have not had the resources to publish their own. The arrangement usually calls for the publisher to supply the content for a royalty fee. The denomination’s name is stamped on the front cover of each booklet, and denominational promotion material is carried on the back cover and sometimes on the inside covers.
However, the arrangement between David C. Cook of Elgin, Illinois and the 600,000-member black Progressive National Baptist Convention goes beyond this. Members of the Progressive Baptist publishing board meet with Cook representatives four times a year to discuss ideas and to decide on changes that the black group wants. James W. English, Cook’s denominational sales manager, explains that biblical cover art remains intact, while contemporary cover art is altered to provide black identity. Cook content in adult and youth material is generally allowed to stand. But handwork for younger age groups and visual aids showing a family situation are revised to reflect black identity.
Cook assignments have gone to several black Christian writers. One is Dr. S. H. James, pastor of Second Baptist Church, San Antonio, who holds earned doctorates in both theology and law. James writes lessons for Cook’s adult quarterlies and material for Cook’s popular devotional magazine, Quiet Hour.
The arrangement has increased Cook’s circulation, says English, and has exposed Cook’s white readers to “some fine black thinking and writing.”
JAMES C. HEFLEY
Black Revival
In the late 1960s, black leaders in the predominantly white mainline denominations formed black caucus groups to plead—and push—black causes. Among the goals: more executive church jobs for blacks, money for black development projects, official statements voicing black concerns. Church bodies and boards slow to respond were usually visited by caucus leaders. Sometimes things were worked out quietly and cool-headedly; sometimes there were demonstrations, shouting, and near-physical confrontations.
For the most part, times have changed. Many of the most capable—and often most vocal—blacks accepted well-paying denominational and agency posts, and now they are a part of the establishment that years ago they knocked. A lot of white money has gone into black work, defusing explosive situations. Leadership at the national level is fragmented. Black separatism has many blacks feeling that they don’t need whites or what whites have. Other issues are occupying the time of thinned-out social-action staffs in the big denominations, and students these days are more inclined to be in books rather than streets. Thus key support is absent.
The caucuses themselves seem to be undergoing changes in direction. For example, at last month’s annual meeting of Black Methodists for Church Renewal, BMCR president Clayton E. Hammond said the caucus will continue to help the church overcome racism and injustice. “But from this moment in our history,” he declared, “our priority has moved from church renewal to black revival.” From this moment on, he exhorted, “let us … set our church aflame with black Christian righteousness and black Christian discipleship.”
Black people, he said, have learned “the bitter lesson” that they cannot solve the race problem; they must leave it to the whites who created it.
Much of the political tone of former years was gone. In a revivalistic atmosphere, the nearly 400 registrants gave major attention to outreach, Christian nurture, theological education and recruitment, and the like. (There are about 400,000 blacks among the ten million United Methodists; the number of black ministers—1,200-plus presently—is declining. As is the case with the caucuses of other denominations, it is unclear how many of the rank-and-file blacks really identify with the officially recognized black caucus.)
The bulk of black Christians are members of black denominations, and these bodies are much more conservative than the caucuses. Indeed, President Joseph H. Jackson of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., at last fall’s annual convention said black people should reject “black caucuses and black political conventions if they exclude other American citizens.” Jackson, elected by some 20,000 delegates to a twenty-second term as NBCUSA president, called on his people to “reject members of our race who advocate a return to segregation and discrimination and have taken a stand against integration.”
(The NBCUSA lists 6.3 million members in some 30,000 congregations—one-fourth of America’s entire black population, Jackson points out. The National Baptist Convention of America lists 3.5 million, the African Methodist Episcopal Church 1.1 million, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church 940,000, the Progressive National Baptist Convention 600,000, the Church of God in Christ 500,000, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church 466,000. These figures, however, are only estimates. The denominations do not have systems for maintaining national statistics, and some leaders confide privately that many local churches’ records are inaccurate.)
Nearly 10,000 persons at last year’s annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention of America heard President James Carl Sams plead for moderation on the issue of race. “Black is not more beautiful than brown or white,” he said. “If you buy a car you don’t sweat over the color. You raise the hood to see if a motor is there, and if it is working you can ride. Likewise, if you have education, intelligence, and a pure heart you can ride over prejudice, evil, and jealousy.”
In short, the tides of conservatism are flowing among blacks in both black and white denominations.
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
Lausanne Leader
Pastor Gottfried B. Osei-Mensah, 41, of the Nairobi (Kenya) Baptist Church will assume duties September 1 as executive secretary of the Lausanne Continuation Committee for World Evangelization.
The Ghana-born cleric was educated in England, headed an African evangelical student movement, and is considered one of the most able evangelicals in Africa.
