Black church leaders swap ministry strategies and address public-policy issues to strengthen troubled African-American families.
Without a doubt, American families are facing tough times. According to a newly released report from the National Commission on Children, one child in four is raised in a single-parent home; one of every five children lives in poverty; and more than a million babies each year are born out of wedlock.
Due to a complex set of sociological factors—not the least of which are economic disadvantage and continued racial discrimination—the crisis has hit minority families, particularly those in urban areas, hard. More than 50 percent of all black families are headed by single women, while “problems of teen pregnancy, crime, substance abuse, illiteracy, family dissolution, and unemployment are at all-time highs,” says the Detroit-based Institute for Black Family Development.
The real situation of African-American families, however, is much different from the negative images often portrayed in the media, says institute president Matthew Parker. “Solutions to the crisis of the black family are being generated by the black community itself, especially the church,” says Parker, who formed the institute in 1987 to equip pastors, youth workers, and churches to meet the spiritual needs of African-American families.
Today black churches are beginning to trade ideas and take an increasingly aggressive role in addressing a burgeoning set of educational, social, and economic problems.
Church Relevance
“The black church has always been actively involved in the educational and social development of black people,” writes Michigan State University professor Bonita Pope Curry in the new book The Black Family: Past, Present and Future (Zondervan). In the days just after slavery was abolished, it was the black church that took primary responsibility for educating former slaves who had been barred from formal education. After the Reconstruction era, it was the black denominations that took the lead in establishing institutions of higher education for black students banned from colleges and universities.
Yet while the black church has long emphasized social and family values, in many ways it “got a back seat” in addressing community problems in the past 25 years, says Parker. After the gains of the civil-rights era, “there was a segment of our community that said [to the church], ‘You’re not relevant anymore.’ … I think what you’re seeing now is that many of those same individuals … have come full circle and are recognizing that, indeed, the one institution that is constant and never changes in our community is the church.”
DeForest “Buster” Soaries, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens, New Jersey, says the black church is finding its new relevance after a time of great change. “For the past 400 years, the role of the black preacher has been to protect black people against brutal slavery and segregation,” he says. “This is the first generation of black Americans who have lived outside of segregation, and it takes some time to modify your means and to restrategize and regroup in light of your present predicament.” Now, Soaries adds, African-American pastors are “beginning to understand their significance beyond their local parish.”
Walter Tucker III, mayor of Compton, California, and himself a pastor, believes many black pastors are catching a new vision for themselves. He says, “It has taken these types of devastating circumstances to get us to look squarely in the mirror and realize there is a mandate on us to rise up and be part of the solution to turn this thing around.”
Culture Of Character
Two conferences held this summer may serve as cornerstones for defining black church involvement in family issues for the nineties. In late June, 350 pastors, youth workers, and Christian leaders gathered for Chicago ’91: National Conference on the Family, sponsored by the Institute for Black Family Development.
Keynote speaker for the conference was Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, who encouraged the black church to join with the government and other community groups to help develop a “culture of character” among the nation’s youth. “We are concerned, we do care, and we do want to reverse the trends that are harming our children, our families, and our neighborhoods,” Sullivan said. “By becoming personally involved and assuming personal responsibility, we can strengthen our families and those institutions and community organizations—like our schools and our churches—which help to instill and reinforce values.”
Much of the Chicago conference centered on seven demonstration projects in several cities, out of which effective solutions to deal with specific concerns of black families are being developed. Leaders also networked and shared curriculum materials, books, tapes, and other family resources. “People came away with the sense that this was the beginning of something that could have an impact in terms of us as a people,” Parker says.
Public Policy
During the same week as the Chicago conference, about 150 African-American pastors came to Washington, D.C., for a briefing on the Restoration of the Black Family, sponsored by the California-based Traditional Values Coalition. While Chicago ’91 was ministry-oriented, the briefing focused on the role of the black church in influencing public policy that affects families. Speakers included Sullivan, President Bush, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, members of Congress, and representatives of special-interest groups that concentrate on the family. Among the key issues addressed were abortion, homosexuality, school choice, and reform of the welfare and tax codes.
Many pastors pledged to mobilize their churches to become more involved politically, especially on “traditional values” and profamily issues. “If the black church would start understanding its stock in this, then we could really start seeing the dividends by becoming power brokers in the politics of the nineties,” said Compton’s Mayor Tucker.
Billy Ingram, pastor of Maranatha Community Church in Los Angeles, was involved with both conferences and says he believes there is a new “movement of God” at work within black churches. “God has thrust us out to main stage, basically saying, your time has come,” he says. “This will only be the beginning of the commitment we have made to see that our communities are resurrected from the confusion, the animosity, the turmoil, and the poor and shameful image that a few have given to all of us.… And I believe what God is going to do will reach far beyond the black community.”
By Kim A. Lawton, with reporting by Tammy Blackard in Chicago.
Integrating the Religious Right?
In the decade since the birth of conservative religious politics, the Religious Right has by and large been a white movement. However, Louis Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), believes that is changing. “The untold story of America is the black, traditional values-minded pastor and congregational constituent,” Sheldon told CHRISTIANITY TODAY. TVC is an evangelical public-policy group that focuses on a conservative agenda that includes opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and pornography.
At a TVC-sponsored briefing on the Restoration of the Black Family, several African-American pastors aligned themselves with Sheldon, the conservative movement, and the Republican party.
“We do not want to be recognized on the same line as Jesse Jackson,” said Phillip Goudeaux, pastor of Calvary Christian Center in Sacramento, California. “We don’t believe in abortion or a prohomosexual agenda, or some of the other liberal stands that Jesse has made … he is not speaking for the black race.”
“We have found [conservative] leaders in the Capitol and in the White House that believe in the principles of God, and we’re going to link ourselves with those people,” echoed Sherwood Carthin, pastor of the Church of the Living God, also in Sacramento. “Whoever wants to get legislation passed is going to have to deal with us. The black family is back.”
Still, the extent to which African-American Christians may join the Religious Right remains to be seen. Exit polls from the last presidential election found that 90 percent of blacks voted for Michael Dukakis. According to Robert Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, “The conservative label can be disturbing to many blacks” because of its historical association with opposition to civil rights and affirmative action. Yet, he says, “While most black Americans won’t identify themselves with the word conservative, when it gets down to defining the activities that define a conservative, they will agree.”
Matthew Parker, president of the Institute for Black Family Development, emphasizes that there has always been diversity within the African-American community. “We really have not changed,” he says.
