Black America is under siege, and its casualties are falling at the church’s doorstep. The issues pressing on the African-American church are detailed daily on the front pages of newspapers: black-on-black violence, widespread drug use, the breakdown of the nuclear family, rampant teen pregnancies, and rising high-school drop-out rates.
“We are killing each other,” says Hycel Taylor, senior pastor of Second Baptist Church, a 2,000-member black congregation in Evanston, Illinois. “Racism alone cannot explain the 5,000 black-on-black murders in one year!” he shouts across the packed sanctuary.
AIDS is also ravaging inner-city communities. On AIDS Awareness Sunday in 1995, Pastor Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ had people rise who had someone close to them die of AIDS. One-third of the 2,000-member church stood up.
These challenges are taxing church resources while proving resistant to traditional responses. “The black church is in a serious crisis,” says Gayroud Wilmore, a retired professor of church history at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. “At stake is whether the black church will remain a viable institution in the African-American community in the twenty-first century or whether it will become irrelevant.”
BLACK PROBLEMS, BLACK SOLUTIONS
The African-American church is in a time of redefinition as vigorous debates ensue about the value of the welfare system and affirmative action in the lives of blacks. There is growing agreement that the civil-rights integration agenda has had an unintended result of being detrimental to blacks, and that a new model for advancement of the race is required. Within the black community itself there is a growing diversity of voices articulating causes and solutions. Especially prominent is a chorus of voices calling for black self-sufficiency.
To be sure, most black voices are of one mind in decrying the effects of slavery and the U.S. brand of apartheid, which included legal and de facto segregation. “I know whites are tired of hearing about slavery,” says Raleigh Washington, senior pastor of Rock of Our Salvation, an interracial Evangelical Free Church on Chicago’s West Side, “but the fact remains that it set the stage for the breakdowns we are seeing today.”
Especially worrisome to many blacks is what they perceive as a hostile political and social climate against minorities, including Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. “When Gingrich talks about normal Americans, most black folk know he means white Americans,” says Bill Pannell, professor of evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of “The Coming Race Wars?” “The attack on welfare mothers, affirmative action, and other hard-fought-for social programs instills in many a sense that these are perilous times to be black in the U.S.A.”
This can only add to an already deep-seated feeling of alienation. In a recent University of Chicago survey, 83 percent of blacks felt the U.S. economic system is unfair to blacks, and 79 percent felt the same way about the legal system.
But many black church leaders keep coming back to the need for black solutions. “We can’t keep looking to whites to help us out,” says Second Baptist’s Taylor. “We’ve got to do it ourselves with the help of God.”
The crossroads for African-American churches is signaled by a 400-year-old tradition of the church being the social glue and center in black communities. This dynamic has been lost in today’s cities. A generation ago, 80 percent of blacks went to church. Today that figure is 40 percent. “The old ways aren’t working anymore,” says Wilmore. Cain Hope Felder, professor of New Testament at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, D.C., laments that many black churches offer a meaningless religiosity that lets people off the hook and is seen by many as the “priest of the status quo.”
“Too easily black leadership has imitated the excesses of the white church,” says William Turner, director of Black Church Affairs at Duke University Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. “They have defined success out of American corporate reality (fancy cars, corporate career, itinerant executives) even as their communities languish in poverty. We have jettisoned the gospel of the uplifting of the downtrodden. It’s a bleak picture of missed opportunities; a rhetoric of concerns, but where little is being done.”
The black church, say some thinkers, is in need of reengineering. “Only those ready to change will survive,” says Pannell. “We’ve lost the black male, the black middle class has forsaken the city, and the church’s disconnection with the community is nearly total.” As government resources are reduced while social ills intensify, the only institution left in many urban black communities is the church and, increasingly, the mosque.
Amidst the bleak news and the pressure points on the church, there is another story: the story of prophetic black churches that have recaptured the traditional place of the church in the community while using cutting-edge, sophisticated methods of ministry. There is a rising class of black church that is energizing whole communities through economic empowerment projects, effective work at getting kids off drugs, keeping them out of jail, and sending them to college.
Jawanza Kunjufu, author of “Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys” (four volumes), calls these innovative churches Liberation churches, in contrast to the 80-90 percent of the 37,000 black churches he calls Entertainment (sing, shout, and holler), and Containment (which only open their doors on Sunday) churches. The key, says Kunjufu, is, first, to teach who Jesus is, and second, to empower the community.
REACHING MEN, MENTORING BOYS
“The future of the black community depends on the viability of black men,” says Pannell. If so, the black community is at great risk. According to Kunjufu, by the year 2000, 70 percent of all African-American males between the ages of 17 and 44 will be in gangs, in jail, unemployed, murdered (one out of 20 black boys born in the U.S. today will be killed by his twenty-first birthday), on drugs, or have AIDS. In 1940, 90 percent of black households had a man. In 1992, it was 30.5 percent.
Seventy percent of those sitting in black churches every Sunday are women, according to studies by the National Bureau of Economic Research. At the same time, church attendance is the most accurate indicator of whether urban black men will become criminals.
Cheryl Sanders, associate professor of Christian Ethics at Howard University School of Divinity, believes that the authoritarian black pastoral model has driven males away from churches. “You have a male pastor at the top of the heap and a mass of women frying chicken. In our society, women are more socialized to be pushed around, treated like children; but men won’t take it.”
Laments George McKinney, pastor of Saint Stephen’s Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, “My personal pain is that as a pastor of an inner-city church, I find it so difficult to reach young black men. The black pastor is a joke in many of their eyes.”
Those churches that have found innovative ways of doing church have begun to attract males and grow rapidly in attendance. This is due in part because whole families come. Also, single mothers want to bring their children to churches with strong males.
In many churches there are promising efforts to reach boys and young black males. One example comes from racially war-torn Los Angeles: A leader of a South Central Los Angeles gang walked into the West Angeles Church of God in Christ one day with one question: “Who can lead me?” Around West Angeles, this is a regular occurrence, says Jermaine Johnson, director of West Angeles’s senior-high youth group, who attributes significant growth in the group to ex-gang members searching for a new life. But they won’t listen to just anybody. “They can spot a hypocrite quickly,” Johnson says. “They’re looking for real people who really care about them and will stick with them.”
As a church, West Angeles has made a concerted effort to link older men with younger men. The men’s discipleship program encompasses job-networking, monthly prayer breakfasts, weekend retreats, outings to Promise Keepers, and other events. But at the core is a commitment to relationship.
Since few people take time to listen to young men, Johnson says, he makes a special place for dialogue in his own outreach. After Sunday and Thursday Bible studies, “a lot of young men stick around and ask questions. They say, ‘You’ve talked; now you have to listen to us.’ “
“Outreach to young black males works only so far as we put people in relationship with them,” says Derek Perkins, executive director of the Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, California. Harambee Center, a nonprofit neighborhood-based ministry, focuses on long-term relationships with black boys in hopes of developing future community leaders.
“Society sells athletes and rappers to the inner city as role models. But these so-called ‘role models’ can’t walk a mile through hard times with these guys,” Perkins says. “What kind of impact can you have when you don’t have a relationship with a kid?”
Since nine out of ten boys at Harambee Center are without a father in the home, Perkins focuses his ministry on filling the gaps. At a six a.m. Thursday Bible study, Perkins intermingles theology and biblical history with economics, the future, how to treat women–whatever they need to know.
The ministries of West Angeles and Harambee Center are giving young black men in need more than a sermon, a visit from an athlete, or a public-service announcement. They are offering them self-respect, significant relationships with positive role models, a relevant faith–and job opportunities. “If we can reach the boys, we lift the entire community,” confirms John Perkins, Pasadena, California, and founder of the Perkins Foundation for Reconciliation and Development.
ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT
As factories have shut down and government has retreated from the inner city, African-American churches contemplate how they can fill the job vacuum. “We can no longer look to government to do this for us,” says John Perkins. “We must passionately teach personal involvement and individual responsibility.”
“It has become evident that black people are simply going to have to stand on their own feet, and the black church, with all of its economic power, can help facilitate that by creating businesses,” says Melvin Banks, founder and president of Urban Ministries, Inc., in Chicago. Banks feels that unemployment among black men results in low self-esteem, family breakdowns, poor health, poor education, and unstructured leisure activity that leads to crime. “After people are saved, they still need a job,” adds Banks.
And the black church is in a strategic position to stimulate economic development. Emmett D. Carson, author of “A Hand Up: Black Philanthropy and Self Help in America,” writes that “90 percent of all black giving is channeled through the church” ($2 billion in offerings, according to the studies of black church historian C. Eric Lincoln). This resource makes the black church the one enduring institution in low-income black communities with the ability to secure major credit.
The irony is that until the second half of the twentieth century, the African-American church was in the business of building communities, says Gregory Reed, a Detroit attorney and author of Economic Empowerment Through the Church. “The church built schools, set up insurance companies, built housing. It was also the backbone for African-American entrepreneurs.” Soon after slavery was abolished there were 240 African-American banks. Today there are fewer than 30. Similarly, in 1910 blacks owned 20 million acres of land. Today they own fewer than 4 million.
Reed says the integration process of the sixties helped dismantle black businesses. “Integration really became doing it the white way. Blacks also believed that black was inferior, and so in the rush to be accepted, the African-American community, with the church at its center, forsook resources they had developed on their own. Black-owned businesses were sold to whites. Today our goal needs to be to keep what we have and then integrate.”
Reed has taken his message to nearly 500 churches. Because he has found that ministers are ill equipped to provide leadership for economic revitalization, he deals with technical know-how issues such as how to acquire assets and set up a credit union and a development corporation.
Many African-American churches have been leading the way in revitalizing their communities. One group of Detroit Christians realized that all the good jobs are in the suburbs and that public transportation from the city to the suburbs is weak. So they began Charity Motors, a ministry of having people donate cars, training people to fix, then sell cars for an affordable price. Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, also in Detroit, has bought crack houses, leveled them, and built businesses on the property.
“Most churches don’t see themselves in economic development,” says Reed. “But the typical pastor is looking at what brings people to church and what are their problems. A lot of those have to do with economics.”
CLASS GAP
There are not just two Americas, one black, one white; today there also seems to be two black Americas, one middle class, one underclass. The black church has had to wrestle with both the growth of the black underclass and the emergence of an affluent black middle class. In the 1980s, there was a 52 percent increase in black managers, professionals, technicians, and government officials. For the first time, blacks were elected as mayors and as governors of large cities and states. The percentage of black families earning more than $50,000 increased from 10 percent to 14 percent between 1970 and 1990. But at the same time, the percentage of black families earning less than $10,000 rose from 21 percent to 26 percent. “We now have Cosby, Winfrey, Jordan, and Jackson, but also more black homeless than ever,” says Washington.
Economic prosperity for some blacks has led to flight from the inner-city neighborhoods. As happened with many white city churches, many black churches have gone from being community congregations to being commuter congregations, says Pannell. Middle-class blacks still feel a cultural tie to the urban black community and want to maintain that connection through Sunday visits. They seem less willing to cast their lot with a struggling community as opportunities open up for them to provide a better education and safer lifestyle for their children.
With the urban centers already abandoned by businesses and government, when black middle-class families also decide to leave, they take with them much-needed talent, training, education, and resources. “It is one of the challenges of discipleship among the middle class,” says Malcolm Newton, professor at Denver Seminary. “When I give talks to black urban congregations, I ask how many live in the community. Usually in a roomful of people only three to four hands go up.”
The class gap has affected the church’s standing within the community. “When all black folks lived in the same place there was an overlap among educators, business people, and church leaders,” says Turner. “This set the tone and values for the community.” With black middle-class flight, the bonds that used to be there are gone. For the first time there is a large portion of a generation for whom church has not been a part of their lives. People nurtured in church don’t know what to say and do with those without a shared world-view.
Several leading African-American thinkers want a reversal of the increasing black flight on the part of middle-class African Americans from the cities to the suburbs. “The church has to be the voice that says ‘stay,’ ” says Sanders. “And it has to offer compelling reasons. We need to tell them, ‘You are going to be challenged by people who don’t smell like you, look like you; and this is good.’ ”
In this spirit, some black churches are making bold moves to deepen rather than uproot their presence in the city. The 15,000-member Apostolic Church of God in Christ pastored by Bishop Arthur Brazier, Chicago, is one such church. After having outgrown two other sanctuaries in a span of five years, the church, made up of both large numbers of middle-class and poor blacks, contemplated moving out of the decaying Woodlawn community to the suburbs to build their $7.2 million facility. But ultimately, the leadership chose to stay. “We cannot call ourselves Christians proclaiming to know and love God and turn away from people who are our brothers and sisters,” one church leader says.
The ripple effect of their decision is tangible. The gleaming marble facility with multipurpose rooms, a TV studio, and an opera house-type sanctuary is a visible presence of renewal in the midst of decay. Attendance in a nearby public school has gone up, partly as a result of financial support from the church to make the school more attractive to local residents. Also, black-owned businesses have returned, and a recent transportation agreement was made with the city to add an additional train to the existing line to make the church more accessible. For Brazier, “our goal is to be a model of what we as black people can do when we pull together and stop viewing ourselves as victims.”
IN PLACE TO REACH THE WORLD
Urban communities have been affected also by the influx of other ethnic and racial groups into formerly solid black neighborhoods such as Watts and South Central L.A., which are now 50 percent Latino. “Black churches need to address whether they are going to respond to the needs of these new groups, to reach out cross culturally,” says Pannell.
“The African-American church has remained primarily an urban church,” reflects McKinney. “And with God bringing all peoples to our cities, this could be the black church’s finest hour if we catch the vision to reach across racial and ethnic lines.”
McKinney and others stress that the black church has to make a conscious decision to break out of the pattern imposed on the black church by racism. “God’s plan as revealed in Pentecost is a rainbow church. God never intended for there to be black, white, brown, and yellow churches,” says John Perkins. “Are we going to imitate what happened through segregation or are we going to carry the gospel to those who are hungry, hurting, and lost? If so, we will see a radical change in the people that gather on Sunday.”
McKinney feels that blacks reaching across ethnic lines could be an especially powerful ministry. “Despite having dealt with daily insults, humiliation, and a negative political climate against blacks, many of us have taken seriously the gospel regarding forgiveness. The black church is best equipped with how to deal with the urban crisis, because we have been in the crucible of pain,” says McKinney. For all the challenges, the black church has not lost sight of the holistic nature of the gospel; it has a better vision for this than the white church because its survival depended on it.
“We need to not lose sight of the transformative vision of mission as found in Luke 4:18-21,” says Newton. “Jesus pinpointed ministry at the social periphery.” The black church’s call for a whole gospel is a prophetic voice that, if heeded by both the black and white church, can unleash a powerful work in cities.
The bottom line for the African-American church is how it will respond to our troubled times. “Unless the church steps up to the plate, our community will be in total disarray,” says Tony Evans, senior pastor of the Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, and founder of Urban Alternative. As it was during the time of slavery and later during the civil-rights era, the African-American church is at the threshold of another historic opportunity.
Will the black church say amen?
Andres Tapia is associate editor of Pacific News Service and the coauthor of “Haunted Marriage” (InterVarsity). This article incorporated reporting from Rudy Carrasco in Los Angeles, Victoria Johnson in Milwaukee, and Jo Kadlecek in Jackson, Mississippi.
Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.