The Glass House
Reason 6: Non-Relevance
Once upon a time,
local and even federal government would be careful to engage the
black church on matters of policy. Today, in most cases, the
black church simply isn’t a factor. This is due largely to the
fact many of our pastors don’t discuss civic issues or even
current events from the pulpit. In our tradition, Sunday is
usually the best day to impact the church body with a call to
arms, but that call is rarely made. A church with 500 members
often has 18 people in attendance on Bible Study night. Has less
than that when it’s time to volunteer for neighborhood outreach
or perform unglamorous tasks like church maintenance. For us,
it’s Sunday or nothing, but Sundays are usually reserved for
lots of singing and eloquent homilies about Goin’ Up Yonder and
how Trouble Won’t Last Always. Truthfully, there’s nothing wrong
with that, and I acknowledge Sunday worship was not intended to
be a town hall meeting, but the facts are these: for many of us,
Sunday is the only day we are within earshot of the pastor. The
pastor’s voice carries the most weight in the church. For many
of us, his voice alone is the only one we respond to. It has to
be the pastor, and it has to be Sunday. If the congregation is
not educated on matters of civil and social justice on Sunday
morning, if those seeds are not planted within the congregation,
then the church’s response will continue to be anemic, the
faithful few. To have influence within your city or town, the
church has to march. The only way to get the church to march is to
imbed the seeds of duty and responsibility in their hearts.
Which won’t happen on Wednesday night. It must happen on Sunday
morning.
That so many important decisions can be made and laws passed
without concern for possible objections from the black community
is evidence of how powerless we’ve become. That perception of
powerlessness becomes reality, taking root within our congregations, the younger people most especially. At
which point the church becomes only about the cross, with the
power of that cross diminished as the cross cannot, apparently,
fight city hall.
People begin to perceive the Gospel of Jesus Christ as impotent.
As an ethereal fairy tale about what happens after you die,
rather than the fiery sword determining how we live. Pastors: by
narrowing your focus to Noah and The Ark, you rob the Gospel of
its transformative power to effect change within society. A
society allegedly built upon Christian values and ethics.
Lawmakers and power brokers fear, to some extent, the Catholic
church, the powerful and rich white evangelicals, but the
African American church seems to be listened to for mostly
cosmetic purposes. Louis Farrakhan rallied a million
men—ironically, with the help of perhaps hundreds of black
pastors. But the black church itself either cannot or simply has
not come
close to mounting a national campaign of that scope.
Which leaves us with the faithful few, the black church
experience being about the choir and the hoop-sermon about David
and Goliath. The entire experience begins to lack teeth.
Congregants begin perceiving the church experience as marginal
or even as entertainment. The fire in the belly is extinguished
as we grow into increasingly selfish and self-centered
consumers, rather than focused, disciplined producers. The
church itself drifts from the center of African American life
into the periphery where, like a great-great grampa still
wearing war-era wardrobe styles, it becomes a beloved but
out-of-touch anachronism. A museum of a cherished pastime. Church
attendance, most especially in Bible Study and other weekday
areas, becomes thought of increasingly as superfluous. Attendance
drops. Your church stops growing.
To grow your church, your church needs to be about something.
Needs to have a voice and a purpose. Needs to have a reason to
exist beyond your Sunday song and dance. Pastors: make
yourselves men to be reckoned with. Men of purpose. Men of valor
whose passion for people becomes contagious. Pour yourselves into
their lives and lead by example, inspiring—not ordering—them to
march. Once your church starts marching, you’ll be surprised at
how quickly you can move from a quaint anachronism to a vital
force within your community. Then watch God move.
I came across
this essay by John J. DiIulio, Jr., Senior Fellow,
Manhattan Institute, Director, The Jeremiah Project: Living
Faith: The Black Church Outreach Tradition. He speaks eloquently
about the relevance of the black church and examines its purpose
within society. Here are a few excerpts:
Tradition Is Not Always Prologue,
and the plural of inspiring anecdote is
not hard data. Black church history and present-day examples
aside, just how common are black-led outreach ministries like
those of Lewis, how much of what The Reverend Eugene Rivers
terms “high-octane faith” is in the black church tank, and what,
if any, more systematic evidence is there to suggest that the
extent of youth and community outreach by black churches is
nontrivial? As Trulear has observed, “Simply stated, there has
yet to be a survey of the blessing stations and youth chapels
that do most of the actual work with the worst off kids in black
inner-city neighborhoods.” But the path-breaking research of
scholars such as Eric C. Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya,
combined with recent systematic research by Trulear and others,
should persuade even a dedicated skeptic to take church-based
outreach seriously.
The Urban Institute published the results of a survey of
“faith-based service providers in the nation’s capital” in 1998.
The survey found that 95 percent of the congregations performed
outreach services. The 226 religious congregations (out of 1,100
surveyed) that responded (67 of them in the District, the rest
in Maryland or Virginia) provided a total of over 1,000
community services to over 250,000 individuals in 1996. The
services included food, clothing, and financial assistance. The
survey was limited to religious congregations. Local faith-based
nonprofits like The Fishing School were not surveyed.
In the mid1990's a six-city survey of how over 100
randomly-selected urban churches (and four synagogues)
constructed in 1940 or earlier serve their communities was
undertaken by Ram A. Cnnan of the University of Pennsylvania.
The study was commissioned and published by Partners for Sacred
Places, a Philadelphia-based national nonprofit organization
dedicated to the care and good use of older religious
properties. Congregations were surveyed in Philadelphia, New
York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Mobile, and the Bay Area (Oakland
and San Francisco). Each church surveyed participated in a
series of in-depth interviews.
Among the Cnnan-Partners survey’s key findings were the
following: 93 percent of the churches opened their doors to the
larger community; on average, each church provided over 5,300
hours of volunteer support to its community programs (the
equivalent of two-and-a-half fulltime volunteers stationed
year-round at the church); on average, each church provided
about $140,000 a year in community programs, or about 16 times
what it received from program beneficiaries; on average, each
church supported four major programs, and provided informal and
impromptu services as well; and poor children who were not the
sons or daughters of church members or otherwise affiliated with
the church benefited from church-supported programs more than
any other single group.
Typical of the churches behind these heartening statistics is
Hyde Park Union Church, located in a Chicago neighborhood where
half of recent murder victims have been juveniles. Pastored by
Reverend Susan Johnson, the church sponsors Vigil Against
Violence, an antiviolence grassroots initiative, and houses the
State Attorney General’s Support Group for Victims of Violence
program. The church also houses a Parent Support Network and
operates an 89-year old daycare center that serves fifty
neighborhood children, none of them congregation members. “It’s
our mission,” explains Pastor Johnson, “to offer programs that
stabilize family welfare.” “We don’t have much money,” she adds,
but her church and others like it are the “most durable
institutions in the community—more so than many businesses or
(even) public schools.”
The best-known and still the most comprehensive survey focusing
exclusively on black churches was published in 1990 by Lincoln
and Mamiya. In their book
The Black Church in the African American Experience, they
reported on the results of surveys encompassing nearly 1,900
ministers and over 2,100 churches. Some 71 percent of black
clergy reported that their churches engaged in community
outreach programs including day care, job search, substance
abuse prevention, food and clothing distribution, and many
others. Black urban churches, they found, were generally more
engaged in outreach than rural ones. While many urban churches
also engaged in quasi-political activities and organizing, few
received government money, most clergy expressed concerns about
receiving government money, and only about 8 percent of all the
churches surveyed received any federal government funds.
A number of site-specific and regional surveys of black churches
followed the publication of Lincoln and Mamiya’s book. So far,
all of them have been broadly consistent with the Lincoln-Mamiya
survey results on black church outreach. To cite just two
examples, in a survey of 150 black churches in Atlanta, Naomi
Ward and her colleagues found that 131 of the churches were
“actively engaged in extending themselves into the community.”
Likewise, a survey of 635 Northern black churches found that
two-thirds of the churches engaged in a wide range of
“family-oriented community outreach programs,” including
mentoring, drug abuse prevention, teenage pregnancy prevention,
and other outreach efforts “directed at children and youth.”
The raw data from the Lincoln-Mamiya surveys were reanalyzed in
the course of a 1997 study of black theological education
certificate programs (Bible institutes, denominational training
programs, and seminary non-degree programs). The study was
directed by Trulear in collaboration with Tony Carnes and
commissioned by the Ford Foundation. Trulear and Carnes reported
no problems with the Lincoln-Mamiya data. Rather, they compared
certain of the Lincoln-Mamiya survey results to data gathered in
their own survey, 724 students representing 28 theological
certificate programs that focused on serving black students.
Again, the findings were quite consistent with those of the
Lincoln-Mamiya study. For example, three-quarters of those
surveyed by Trulear and Carnes reported that their church
encouraged them “to be involved in my local community,” more
than half said relevance to “my community’s needs” was of major
importance to them in choosing a theological certificate
program, and about half were already involved in certain types
of charitable community work.
New outreach surveys are underway. As Trulear’s colleague,
P/PV’s Dine Watson, told Newsweek. “there is a lot of
interest in this area now, because secular institutions have
failed.”
But, then again, if black church outreach is so potent, then how
come inner-city poverty, crime, and other problems remain so
severe? That is a fair question, but it can easily be turned
around: How much worse would things be in Boston and Jamaica
Queens, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and other cities were it
not for the until recently largely unsung efforts of faith-based
youth and community outreach efforts? How much more would
government or other charitable organizations need to expend, and
how many volunteers would suddenly need to be mobilized, in the
absence of church-anchored outreach? The only defensible answers
are “much worse” and “lots,” respectively.
Citizens who for whatever reasons are nervous about religion or
enhanced church-state partnerships should focus on the
consistent finding that faith-based outreach efforts benefit
poor unchurched neighborhood children most of all. If these
churches are so willing to support and reach out to “the least
of these,” surely they deserve the human and financial support
of the rest of U.S. corporations, foundations, and, where
appropriate, government agencies.
I agree with Father Richard John Neuhaus of First Things
magazine when he characterizes one of my earlier writings on
black poverty as advancing the view that “religion is the key to
anything good happening among the black poor” (well, at least
the key to most good things that are happening among them). And
I confess to being doubly in agreement with Father Neuhaus when
he writes that, rather than turn our heads and harden our hearts
to the plight of the black inner-city poor, rather than merely
exposing “liberal fatuities about remedying the ‘root causes’ of
poverty and crime . . . there must be another way. Just
believing that is a prelude to doing something. The something in
question is centered in religion that is both motive and means,
and extends to public policy tasks that should claim the
attention of all Americans.
Next: Reason Seven: Non-Inclusiveness
Christopher J. Priest
20 July 2008
editor@praisenet.org
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