Fear Of A Black Church

Trapped Beneath The Glass Steeple

Sabbath Apartheid

Sunday is the most segregated day of the week. Each week, Christian believers, united by a common faith, nonetheless move toward polarized cultural spaces at the Sunday worship hour. While there are, indeed, a growing number of “multicultural” churches, here in Ourtown, at least, those churches tend to be white churches, founded by whites, led by whites, with white folks in the key power positions. These are ministries led by men and women who, following the conviction of the Holy Spirit, have made strides to reach out to the community at large, no longer satisfied by clear racial and cultural demarcations. Black churches, on the other hand, do almost no work in reaching out to whites. I’ve observed black churches being fairly hostile to or, best case, indifferent to whites, as we blithely go about our business of hollering and wailing.

I was greeted by a Latino pastor at one powerful multicultural church in the Denver area, who warmly greeted me and took me on a tour of the facility. Winding through the office complex, we saw all manner of ethnicities in the staff and leadership. But, the closer we got to the executive wing, the fewer minorities we saw. When finally arriving at the Bishop’s wing, the Bishop’s executive secretary and the top tier leadership offices were all staffed by whites—a clear signal of who was really in charge here.

I’m not sure why, in our city at least, blacks have continually failed to build anything even reasonably close, even a fraction of the size of even the most modest of modern white churches. Our buildings are, with low-single-digit exception, small, old, run-down, raggedy remnants of glories past. Every so often we slap on a coat of paint and reupholster some pews, but our finances are only a fraction of white churches because our incomes are lower to begin with. Whites can and often do write bigger checks because their disposable income is so much greater than ours. Whites tend to donate out of their excess, while, in the aggregate, blacks tend to donate out of their need. Many middle-class whites tend to focus on investment, while most lower-middle class blacks tend to focus on survival.

The fear of a black church, from many whites’ viewpoint, is likely not even racial so much as it is both cultural and financial. Opening their doors to us might invite a flood of benevolent fund applicants. Poorly-disciplined youth who wear down or damage the facility. Pushy, arrogant church ladies making demands. Well-meaning mothers frying chicken. And the music, what a headache. Gone is the soft strumming of acoustic guitars and the even tones of their praise ensembles, replaced by screaming Hammond organs and banging drums. White churches have no bass. $50,000 state-of-the-art sound systems and no bass. It's how you know you're in a white church.

Many whites become anxious about their property values when they see blacks move into the neighborhood. Having an investor's mindset, many whites view the arrival of blacks at their church in terms of value depreciation; perhaps fearing too many black faces will signal an exodus of their white congregants (and their checkbooks), replaced by blacks who will give little or nothing, or worse, will line up for handouts from the church's benevolent fund.

Long Gone: Abernathy and King: the church we emulate while lacking the courage to actually be.

The Black Church Whites Should Fear

Multiculturalism, in practical application, is usually lip service. It’s usually surface. It usually has little or no teeth. To my observation, multiculturalism is simply a structure set in place to relieve white folks’ conscience while protecting their interests. Following unwritten rules safeguarding their investment, they open their doors to us, they warmly receive us, perhaps even recruit us to sing and dance and what have you. But the glass steeple is firmly in place. We are welcome there, to be sure, but are welcome much the way a houseguest is welcome: we are extended every gracious thing, but the house clearly belongs to someone else.

The black church of today is nothing for whites to fear. We have no unified message. We do not, by and large, preach Jesus or even offer salvation. We have no demonstrable economic or political clout. White conservatives virtually run the tables at every election because politics are not widely discussed in the black church, and black Christians are easily as disenchanted with the political system as black non-Christians. The black church poses zero economic threat as the church is so fractured that no organized boycott of anything is reasonably sustainable anymore. Remember Black Solidarity Day, when Black America is supposed to point out its economic and political clout by taking the day off—literally boycotting everything and not spending money on anything that is not black-owned? Whatever happened to that?

Whatever happened to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s national holiday? Many if not most businesses either do not observe that day or force their employees to take a vacation day. And that’s just fine with the black church of today, having long ago forgotten the sacrifices of our fathers and mothers and all that blood shed to gain us the most basic of human dignity. We just go to work like it was a work day. Shamefully, I know churches—black churches—that don’t even close their church offices on MLK day. It’s just another day. At my former church, MLK Day came and went one year without one word, not one, mentioned about it from the pulpit.

This is not, by any stretch, an institution whites should have any reason to fear. They outnumber us. They outspend us. They out-vote us. And, even in their most benign “multicultural” configurations, they hold all of the power. All of which makes the anxiety of the average white believer just silly and foolish. Other than our occasionally screaming at the top of our lungs and racing around the sanctuary, there’s not a lot of harm we can do to their church.

The black church whites SHOULD be afraid of is the black church of Martin Luther King, Jr. The black church of Charles K. Steele and Fred L. Shuttlesworth and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The black church of Rosa Parks and Ralph Abernathy. The black church of James Meredith, Emmet Till, and the Little Rock Nine. The black church of Maya Angelou and W.E.B. Dubois. The black church of Medgar Evers and Thurgood Marshall. We should all fear the black church of Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins who were killed while attending Sunday School when a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963.

Ironically, this is a black church most white churches would actually welcome, with open arms. That black church, that effective black church, that powerful black church, could actually be a threat to white churches in a way the black church of today never could be. But the discipline, integrity, and genuineness of that institution likely would have made it a welcome addition to most white churches today. This isn’t a church today’s white church would fear, though they should. The black church many white churches fear is one they have absolutely no reason to fear—the black church of today.

The black church of faith, the black church of sacrifice, the black church of risk, of integrity—that church has evolved into the Crefloe Dollar clown school and the Juanita Bynum makeup academy. That church, which once polarized the entirety of the free world, has spiraled into pathetic self-parody, fighting amongst itself while fleecing the flock. Careening off into “prosperity” doctrines at one extreme while desperately clinging to the 1960’s at the other—with both extremes being completely wrong.

I do understand the anxiety. I do understand the hesitation, and I do understand the safeguards white ministries put in place before “welcoming” blacks and other minorities, conditionally, into their midst. That hesitation is fair condemnation of not our culture, not our race, but of our failure to honor the proud legacy of men and women who suffered and died to make our materialistic, petty, lazy, selfish way of life possible.

Separate But Equal: Whites head to air-conditioned cathedrals, blacks to run-down hand-me-down buildings.

Celebrating Differences

I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.  -- I Cor 9:22

Diversity is a gift. Differences of opinion. Differences of doctrine. Not to fuss and fight but to win all to Christ. We should celebrate those differences, not use them to divide us and to paralyze the work. The very best sense of multiculturalism never needs to be announced. A truly multicultural church never has to actually call itself “multicultural.” A truly multicultural church will be all things to all people, that all visitors might find something of themselves there in your worship, in your smile, in your love. And they’ll know they’ve come home.

Christopher J. Priest
October 2000
28 January 2007
editor@praisenet.org
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National Day
of Segregation

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Sunday is the most segregated
day of the week. Each week, Christian believers, united by a common faith, nonetheless move toward polarized cultural spaces at the Sunday worship hour. The National Day of Prayer, enacted by Congress in 1962, is an ideal opportunity for believers cross lines and practice the unity most all of us preach.

Recent NDP events, as coordinated by Pastor Bill Cole of Circles of Love Baptist Church, have seemed like ads for The United Colors of Benetton with an array of speakers, including this editor, ranging from Asian to Latino, youth to senior citizens. Events at New Life Church were likewise inclusive, simulcasting in Spanish and making good use of former pastor Ted Haggard’s strong ties to traditional black churches.

For at least the third consecutive year, current organizers of the Springs’ evangelical community’s citywide NDP observance have failed to invite even a single pastor from a traditional black church to participate in their event. When lobbied recently to invite Cleveland Thompson, Senior Pastor of Emmanuel, the city’s largest black church, event coordinator Pastor Kelly Williams of Vanguard Church replied, “I would love to meet with Pastor Cleveland and talk about him joining our pastors merge and discussing 2011 NDP. Unfortunately this year’s leaders are already assembled.” This was word-for-word what Pastor Williams said last year when he was lobbied to invite Pastor Thompson. The Reverend Al Pitman, Senior Pastor of the multi-ethnic Calvary Worship Center, will be the noted African American pastor on program.

Before the 2009 event, when the omission of black pastors was brought to his attention, Pastor Williams agreed this was an important consideration for city unity, most especially for something being billed as a “citywide” event. This year appears to be more of the same, which is ironic considering local news reporting of the upcoming 2010 event, in the context of a recent judicial ruling that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional, often features B-roll of this editor preaching on the steps of City Hall at the 2009 mid-day event..

Our first thought was to invite the black pastors anyway. Not to the event, but to Vanguard’s parking lot, where we can gather and pray for our city, for our state, for our country and, yes, for the NDP organizers. But the day of prayer should be a day neither of segregation nor protest. Our purpose should be precisely the same as those inside the building. Only that will be a gathering to which the Springs’ black community is not even symbolically welcome.

It is doubtful African American Christians will either notice or care. The NDP rarely shows up on the radar in our community, with noted exceptions such as Emmanuel and True Spirit Baptist Church opening their doors for prayer. The African American community often seems unconcerned by how increasingly marginalized and irrelevant we are to the goings-on of Colorado Springs. Year after year, NDP organizers simply ignore us, failing to welcome even a single traditional black church pastor, and they seem perfectly comfortable with that.

And so, apparently, are we. It seems that’s what we are good at. It is perhaps our chief commodity, making people who marginalize us feel comfortable doing it. We won’t show up. We won’t ask questions. We won’t make waves. They know that.

So there’ll be no prayer in Vanguard’s parking lot on Academy Blvd. near Austin Bluffs Parkway say, at 7PM on May 6th. We won’t show up. Because many if not most of us aren’t reading these words. Because many if not most of us don’t even realize these words are written in this publication. Which is nobody’s fault, I suppose, but it is, in fact, where things stand. Outside the building and off in a corner, praising the Lord as we continue to go our separate ways.

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