Churches struggle to overcome racial tensions, poverty, and inner-city violence.
Los Angeles is a city on edge. Police helicopters patrol nightly, circling buildings, shining their searchlights into dark corners. The ominous sound of helicopter blades along with the firing of handguns and automatic weapons makes sleep difficult for residents in neighborhoods where gangs battle each other.
Yet sleep may be difficult for all of Los Angeles’s 12 million inhabitants. The tensions that led to last year’s riots remain unresolved. Two court cases, the retrial of police officers in the Rodney King beating and the three teenagers accused of beating Reginald Denny during the 1992 riots, uncanny in their parallels, have unfolded in the California court system in the glare of intense media coverage.
In the meantime, committees, coalitions, task forces, prayer teams, and watchdog organizations gather in board-rooms, church basements, and city hall council rooms to ponder how Los Angeles will face its future, asking themselves: Why has so little of the promised federal money come in? How will it be distributed among the various ethnic communities? How well has the Los Angeles police force prepared for the possibility of more rioting when the trials are over? Should Korean liquor store owners whose businesses were burned be allowed to reopen their stores in black neighborhoods?
In all these discussions, the 7,000 churches of Los Angeles play an important role. Churches are often mentioned in the same breath with community and civic organizations when participant lists are drawn up. However, despite the church’s visible efforts immediately after the riots, those outside the church community perceive the church as marginally effective in its impact on the city’s tense social issues. “The city has not felt the church’s presence,” says Bong Hwan Kim, executive director of the Korean Youth and Community Center. An experienced urban minister, John Perkins, says, “The church is no farther than before the riots.”
Yet Los Angeles churches are not the only group whose effectiveness is in doubt. Cynicism abounds about organized relief efforts. Of the stores destroyed during the riots, only 18 percent have reopened. Community groups seem trapped in race politics as they compete with one another for scarce funds. The highly publicized Rebuild L.A. effort, headed by former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth, has produced meager results and has been accused of not fairly representing all ethnic groups.
Aside from the effects of the outcome of the trials, the systemic injustices that have the different communities seething are not being addressed.
“What happened in L.A. was not a riot, but a rebellion,” says Franz Schurmann, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Jesse Miranda, a Latino educator, says, “Desperate people do desperate things.”
L.A.’s complexity seems to defy the best of intentions. As civic and church groups meet frequently to wrestle with Los Angeles’s future, and as more than 50 candidates vie for mayor in the coming elections, they must all grapple with the region’s complex dynamics.
“I wish I could be hopeful about the church’s ability to effect change,” says Michael Mata, director of the Bresee Institute, a leadership-development and resource center for urban ministry.
Few churches in Los Angeles have purposefully undertaken the role of becoming a means for mediation and racial peacemaking. Some urban church leaders fault the Los Angeles-based church-growth movement and its emphasis on growth through creating homogeneous groups. This trend, some have pointed out, has moved churches away from the reality of cultural and ethnic diversity in American life today.
Some of the largest Los Angeles churches have joined with several hundred others in well-attended and earnest prayer gatherings to seek God’s mercy and healing for the city. But so far the results are mixed. The risks some key church leaders are taking to cross racial barriers do not seem to have translated into substantive change. Perkins says, “These coalitions are just shells that are not doing much to address structural problems.”
Not just a black and white issue
The real Los Angeles routinely clashes with the six o’clock news in L.A. The media’s continual packaging of the conflict in black/white terms ignores the reality that half or more of South Central, Watts, and Koreatown is Latino. This explains the little-reported facts that more Latinos than blacks were arrested for looting, that one of the areas hardest hit by the rioting was a predominantly Central American barrio called Pico Union, and that the “all-white jury” that acquitted the four officers in the Rodney King case included one Latino and one Asian.
“The Kerner Commission Report’s conclusion in 1968 that there were two nations in the U.S., one black, one white, separate and unequal, simply does not fit L.A.,” says Richard Rodriguez, a leading California writer. The racial landscape has changed, but few seem to have noticed. “Some of the demographic changes predicted for the year 2000 set in in 1989,” says Mata. One-hundred-forty nations are represented in L.A. County. By the end of the 1980s, 40 percent of Angelenos were foreign born. Fifty percent spoke a language other than English at home.
Latinos will soon be a majority in South Central and Watts, areas long assumed to be primarily black.
Despite their larger numbers, Latinos remain largely invisible to the Los Angeles mainstream. Although there has been a long-standing Mexican-American presence, much of the Latino population consists of newly arrived immigrants representing 16 different nationalities. It is nearly impossible for them to build a cohesive political base and have clearly identified spokes-people, which leaves them poorly represented.
Korean dilemmas
The Koreans are wrestling with dilemmas of their own. Bob Oh, pastor of the Oikos Community Church, a Korean congregation, says, “Some Koreans feel God is punishing them for opening up liquor stores in the black communities; that they were making a living off tainted money.” Some also believe Korean business owners need to repent of abusing their black and Latino workers.
For Koreans who have emigrated from a largely homogeneous country, the multicultural nature of Los Angeles is tough to handle. Though Koreans are the most Christianized ethnic group in the United States, Oh says he knows some Korean pastors who refer to blacks in clearly racist terms.
“But I also have been stopped by blacks demanding I give them money because they say I have exploited them.” Some feel that Koreans have become scapegoats in the ongoing conflicts between blacks and whites.
“The white dominant society has pitted minorities against each other,” says Tom Wolf, pastor of the Church on Brady in East Los Angeles. Kim says, “Blacks deal with daily injustices. They have in front of their faces a hungry, ambitious, college-educated immigrant community that left everything behind to come realize the American Dream.”
Whites seem to have abandoned large parts of Los Angeles. They were nowhere to be seen during a recent three-and-a-half hour ride through different L.A. neighborhoods. “What I’m not sure about is what white America is going to do,” says Kim. “Is it going to build walls higher or realize that they have a stake in the outcome? As long as they run away from the problem, it’s going to increase despair.”
L.A.’s churches are simply ill-equipped to deal with the city’s complex racial mosaic. Many pastors have not known a single person from another ethnic group and so have not developed the cross-cultural skills necessary to address L.A.’s conflicts.
Of immediate concern to Angelenos is whether the simmering racial anger will escalate into violence. The verdicts in the two beating trials might be muted due to the extraordinary security measures established by police chief Willie Williams.
Yet, L.A. residents are preparing for the worst regardless of whether the four white officers accused in the Rodney King beating are acquitted or whether the three black men on trial for the beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny are convicted.
After the 1992 riots, gun sales skyrocketed. Oh says, “Next time, Korean shop owners will not hesitate to use them if people threaten to loot their stores again.”
Church success stories
The church is having much more impact taking care of its own. Counseling has been offered to countless church members to deal with posttraumatic stress disorder. “We were captives of a military state for several days,” says Mata. “Here was the National Guard patrolling the streets with M-16s.” To help church members heal, a group of Latino Assemblies of God pastors recently organized a seminar to help parents articulate their fears for their children’s future.
Churches such as the Los Angeles First Church of the Nazarene and the Church on Brady have been successfully working on reconciliation for many years. The First Church of the Nazarene has four congregations—Korean, Spanish, English, and Filipino—which are jointly administered by a multicongre-gational council. The English congregation is quite mixed with whites, Africans, African-Americans, Belizeans, and second-generation Latinos and Asians who feel more at home in an English-speaking service than in one conducted in the language of their parents. Quarterly joint services among all the congregations are held to affirm the different groups’ oneness in Christ.
The congregations see their cross-cultural mission going beyond their church structure. The Nazarene church’s dozens of programs are offered to a community representing more than 40 different languages. The church’s doors are open all day, providing daycare, schooling, food, youth programs, and referral services to over 1,800 people weekly. A few months after last year’s riots the church sponsored a multi-ethnic fair that drew 2,000 people who celebrated differing heritages through food and music. “The fair reassured people that we can come together and enjoy life—that we can eat kimchee as much as we can eat salsa,” says Mata. “The community was appreciative that the church took the lead.”
In contrast to the First Church of the Nazarene, the Church on Brady, pastored by Tom Wolf, has only one congregation, which serves a mixture of people that is 60 percent Latino, 15 percent Asian, and 20 percent white. The church’s home groups, in which 87 percent of the church participates, are just as integrated. This comes so naturally to members that “having ‘integrated’ groups is a foreign concept,” says Wolf. “We just have groups.”
Do coalitions work?
“When I saw a black church pastor tell his flock to stop destroying the stores in the neighborhood and instead hit those in Simi Valley, I knew I had to do something,” says Billy Ingram, the black pastor of the Maranatha Community Church. A few days later Ingram had gathered 100 leaders from churches throughout the area to pray and develop a response.
They formed the Coalition of Religious Leaders of Southern California. The fruits of their efforts have included multiracial unity services. At the first one, 3,000 people gathered in the hard-hit Crenshaw neighborhood soon after the riots for a time of mutual repentance and forgiveness. Another service was presided over by David Yonggi Cho of Korea last October with 5,000 in attendance.
Crime And Punishment In The City Of Angels
In Los Angeles County, there are approximately 150,000 people in 411 known gangs.
There are two police officers for every 1,000 Los Angeles residents, the lowest ratio in the nation Over the past five years, 466,453 handguns were sold legally in Los Angeles County, one for every 19 residents.
SOURCES: Detective Paul Glascow, Gang lnfonnation Section, LAPD California Justice Department figures reported in the Christian Science Monitar; Atlantic
The coalition has spawned one-to-one interracial relationships among pastors that have been developed throughout the year in pulpit and choir exchanges. Currently the coalition is focusing on more structural efforts, such as setting up a credit union for small businesses and providing an entrepreneurs’ seminar. Another significant coalition is Love L.A., involving up to 1,800 pastors who come together on a quarterly basis to pray. These include leaders from urban and suburban churches such as Lloyd Ogilvie, Jack Hayford, and Fred Price.
“Some feel prayer is not a program,” says Bryce Little, pastor of mission and community outreach at Ogilvie’s church. “We feel otherwise.” On their own, some Korean churches have sponsored trips to Korea for black pastors to get firsthand exposure to Korean culture and establish understanding.
“The riots did provide a mixed blessing,” says Oh, who is part of Ingram’s coalition. For the first time, “it has gotten many of us pastors to establish significant relationships with church leaders of other races.”
Watchdog group in action
The group of 20 gathers slowly, members greeting each other warmly as they find their usual seats around a rectangular table and on sofas along the wall. This multiracial group, called the Community Conversation, led by African-American pastor Madison Shockley III, meets weekly to monitor the city’s response to the Christopher Commission’s findings on what led to the riots.
A young couple with a newborn attends. So does a Christian psychologist, some retirees, and a few lawyers. They painstakingly try to find their place in the effort to rebuild Los Angeles. They actively participate in hearings sponsored by the city and the police department, trying to hold them accountable to their promises to the citizenry. As they learn about confronting the city’s political realities, they also address the differences within their group. Some whites feel threatened by plummeting property values. In contrast, some blacks see an opportunity finally to be able to afford a house. Their quiet work has been effective—the group has remained together for a year now and has sponsored some community-development efforts, such as helping local businesses reopen.
The very suburban Azusa Pacific University is opening a campus in South Central. Spearheaded by Jesse Miranda, assistant director for Urban and Multiethnic Concerns, the university’s vision for this campus is to provide education to inner-city leaders and to provide suburban students with a real live opportunity to be in an urban context. The program is innovative in that the faculty is organized by ethnic group, with each of the major groups having its own dean and faculty, and classes especially tailored to its unique contexts. Plans provide for classes to be offered in theological studies, nursing, and business schools on this urban campus.
Miranda says, “These plans were already in the works last year, but the riots put them into high gear.”
World Impact is focusing on younger students, with an elementary and middle school that has been operating in South Central for ten years.
The African-American and Latino kids attending the school’s peaceful environment blossom as they participate in innovative science projects, such as building a model space shuttle. Their SAT test scores consistently are significantly above the national average for other urban schools.
A Promising Example In Pico Union
Two shots ring out. Jon rushes out of his apartment. “What was that?” he asks the boys standing silently in the darkened stairwell. Heads peer carefully out of windows and doorways and look out on the street. There is a collective sigh of relief as it becomes clear that no one got hurt in another drive-by shooting.
During the L.A. riots, Jon and Karin Primuth, John Shorack, and Jude Tiersma saw the destruction firsthand. They are part of a group of five whites who deliberately moved into Pico Union to do their part in reversing white flight and to show that whites can care. They are currently part of Innerchange, a church-planting ministry.
Parties, outings, and Bible studies fill out the week for these transplanted whites who are so rare in the neighborhood that police stop them to ask if they are lost.
Sixteen-year-old Valerie Vazquez, a Latina living in the neighborhood, felt initially suspicious. “When I first saw these white people move in I thought they were weird. ‘What do they want?’ we wondered.” At the time, Valerie was pregnant, had dropped out of school, and was in a severe depression. After a few months, she and another Innerchange member, Birgit Funck Shorack, struck up a friendship.
It was a life-changing relationship. Through counseling and encouragement, Valerie and her boyfriend married, she is finishing high school, and is very devoted to her two-year-old child.
“We’ve come in as neighbors, not saviors or providers,” says Shorack. “By moving into the neighborhood it is no longer us and them—it is we,” says Tiersma, as she ticks off a laundry list of problems with her tiny apartment: electrical outlets don’t work, water leaks from the ceiling, gas leaks from the stove. By living in the Cambria Apartments, Innerchange shares their neighbors’ struggles.
A second chance
Many L.A. Christians are asking themselves: Why did God allow the riots to happen? “It’s a wake-up call for the church to be the church,” answers Oh. “It shows us that we need to find a way for 140 different groups to live together. The problem is so big that the only alternative is God. He will allow the violence to happen again if we don’t learn this lesson.”
In the riots and their aftermath, the L.A. churches’ lack of relevancy was seriously exposed. Somehow there was not enough of the church’s leaven to hold together the city’s moral fiber during the crisis. This failure is not only a lesson for churches in Los Angeles, but also for churches nationwide.
As the spreading of the rioting across the nation demonstrated, Los Angeles is a preview of America’s future. Multiculturalism and economic struggles are a harbinger of what is coming.
L.A.’s churches have a unique opportunity to be a prophetic voice to the rest of the nation.
On the morning after the riots, Michael Mata, his wife, Kristina, and their three children put on their hiking boots and walked the one-mile stretch of broken glass and debris between their home and their church.
During their walk, they passed block after block of ransacked stores. In some, shop owners, with shotguns across their laps, stood guard over whatever was left of their life’s work. In others, the merchants wore white bandannas around their foreheads, a Korean sign of peace.
As Mata’s family offered exhausted National Guardsmen orange juice and distraught shopkeepers a word of encouragement, they were overcome by the realization that reconstruction and healing would require extraordinary efforts. They also understood that the city’s churches are sitting on the power, hope, and spiritual energy needed to rebuild for the future. The Matas intended their walk to be a demonstration of the church’s commitment to stand in the breach and help rebuild the city. Los Angeles now skeptically waits fulfillment of that promise.
By Andrés Tapia in Los Angeles, with a grant from Religious News Service.
