Comments     No. 420  |  June 2014     Study     Faith 101     The Church     Politics     Life     Sisters     A Preacher's Confession     Keeping It Real     Zion     Donate

The New Black

Our Cultural Elimination

Gilligan's Island

For the last few months, I’ve been surveying local churches here, and this is what I am seeing. The black church remains largely unchanged from what I remember before I more or less dropped out of the local scene several years ago. They are still singing the same—exact same—handful of old, dusty songs from these choirs’ extremely limited repertoire. The old, dusty deacons are still grinding the worship service to a halt ten minutes into it by insisting on lining up and conducting their dreary and completely useless “devotion.” Everybody is still over-dressed and ridiculously so, with many of the elder men matching their shoes to their belts and wearing incredibly loud pastel-colored suits. Our dear sisters are still spending a small fortune on ever more gregarious, huge, stupid-looking hats that make them appear to be wearing lamp shades on their heads, along with shiny skirt suits a size or two too small and gapping at the buttons, along with stiletto “Eff Me” shoes that make them look more like Madams at a whorehouse than “saints.”

What has changed, though, is, to my observation, attendance at these places is shrinking somewhat dramatically. There are several reasons for this. The main reason is the time warp these places are stuck in. As a kid, as a poor kid, summer left me with two choices: go outside and play (which we were not allowed to do; my single mom worried about us being on the street while she was at work) or lie around the house all day watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island, perhaps the most insipid show ever made. I found Gilligan’s Island ultimately very depressing because, no matter what those folks did, they could not get off of that island. I did not find it funny in any way, and the futility of their efforts literally depressed me. But it was on every day and every day my sister watched it (or, more accurately, selected that channel and then took the knob to the TV with her).

Black churchgoers, here, are similarly tiring of the rerun their local churches are offering them. The harsh reality of the country’s economic downturn impacted our families in terrible ways, while the black churches, here at least, failed to flex or adjust to the crisis confronting so many of their members. Facing joblessness and possible homelessness is a huge wake-up call, one which I suspect left many of our families desperate for more meaning and more substantiality from their local house of worship, only to discover there was no “there” there. It was just Gilligan’s Island, the church going through its weekly and annual motions, the pastor driving his luxury car, his wife waddling down the aisle in her fur coat. But I’m losing my house. Where is God in all of that?

Paradoxically in the white churches here, many of which dwarf the black churches by an easy factor of five to ten, I am seeing a dramatic un-clenching of butt cheeks. I am seeing white churches, once a little too tight, a little too snooty, having now been converted to something more evocative of a dance club, with laser shows and theater lighting and loud—extremely loud—rock music, wailing guitars and people, young and old, in jeans and wrinkled, oversized shirts jumping up and down while the drummer hammers away. Huh?! What the heck happened here?!? I am seeing more and more white churches becoming more Spirit led and more open to free worship, people crying out, raising hands.

Most of these places have rigidly-timed worship services which, on their face, seem diametrically opposed to the nature of free worship. Yet I’ve found most of these worship services to be, oddly, fulfilling. Quick, yes, but they don’t feel quick when you’re there. There is a genuine and well-planned, efficient service that includes both Holy Communion and a thoughtful and often in-depth sermon. I’ve left these places feeling quite full while glancing at my phone and realizing it’s still quite early in the day, which allowed me to then drive to a black church, one of which had a total of thirteen people in attendance, its worship beginning at 10:00 and the benediction not arriving until 1:15 PM. The guest evangelist there kept referring to the Ephesians as “The Church at Edifice.”

I’m seeing more and more black faces at these white churches. Jeans and sneakers, cappuccinos in hand, clusters of blacks appear throughout the warehouse-sized sanctuaries, nodding to the CCM-style (i.e. “white” contemporary Christian) music and amening the pastor, who just as often looks like he just rolled out of bed as he idly paces back and forth beneath huge, glitzy high-definition monitors. I tend to think of these places as Entertainment Churches. I also think of them as Low Investment Churches because they require very little of us. There is an appeal but very little pressure and absolutely no guilt-tripping over tithes and offering. There are numerous opportunities for involvement but, with typically no mass choir and just a small rhythm section, many onlookers likely despair about getting involved with worship. Besides, they’re not playing our song, anyway. Most of these places preach inclusion but they actually mean racial tolerance and not a genuine inclusivity which would include LGBT persons and even persons of other faiths. The lack of diversity in their music is a dog whistle that signals their openness is conditional: we are welcome but welcome as visitors. Should we wish to make these places our home, we must abandon who we are.

All of which seems perfectly fine for an increasing number of black families here. I say “black” because Latino Christians have it going on, here. Evangelical Latino churches is an enormous growth industry in Ourtown, with several Latino churches now approaching MegaChurch status. There is only one black church in town that has seemingly escaped the time warp and achieved mini-Mega, on its way to MegaChurch. It has achieved this largely on the strength of its pastor being wholly unconcerned about fitting into the Good Ol’ Boys club or about breaking traditional dreary customs (like the singing deacons and so forth) while remaining disciplined and focused on building families and lives. The church is both revered and hated on and her pastor routinely criticized not for any professed acceptance of LGBT persons but by his staunch refusal to turn them—or anyone else—away. Several smaller churches here privately grouse that this church is stealing their members, which is not true, their members are leaving. There’s a difference. Some are surely heading to this fast-growing ministry, but many are also heading to the white Entertainment Churches as well. Their departure has less to do with any other ministry “stealing members” as it has to do with the absence of Jesus from their own house. They’ve replaced Jesus with the singing deacons and the vain pastor’s wife and with Gilligan’s Island reruns. The recession was the defibrillator jolt that dislodged many black churchgoers from their home base and sent them out surveying, as I have been surveying, the landscape in search of a more meaningful Sunday experience. But, at what cost? What does the migration of blacks to white MegaChurches mean for our tradition and culture?

Harder Than It Looks: Real diversity means everybody gets something, everybody gives up something..

Seat Fillers

I am seeing lots of persons of color in these churches. I am not seeing them sitting with white people so much as sitting with other black people surrounded by white people. What I am not seeing are persons of color in executive positions at these places. I am not seeing cultural diversity in their graphic presentations, in their branding, not hearing it in their music. I have seen no sincere effort put forward to truly open any of these places to blacks in the sense of having a black pastor on staff or any black music as part of their worship. We are, at best, guests, welcome so long as we park our culture and tradition at the door. We are welcome to join, to become a part of their family, like the adopted Vietnamese girl who is loved and cherished by her new American family who then systematically erase all aspects of the child’s heritage.

In a more cynical sense, many of these churches use blacks as seat-fillers. We are welcomed and encouraged to come—perhaps through some outreach or, as one Denver church smartly devised, a community choir—but we have no actual voice in the church’s decision-making. The rationale behind recruiting minority groups is largely to make the place look fuller. People want to come to a full church. Like dance clubs, most people become suspicious of half-empty churches. It’s likely many white church leaders know or suspect blacks won’t contribute much financially to the church, but are welcome to take up space in the sanctuary because that helps the place look fuller and paints the church as inclusive.

The shot callers at many large white churches are near exclusively white. Several have black worship leaders, but a worship leader is a safe gig to give to a black person because worship leaders are not usually a deciding voice in church administration. But he’s there every Sunday, down front, making the church seem inclusive when it is anything but.

I was recruited as co-pastor of a white church, here, given the specific mission of increasing diversity. But every effort I made to do that made the lead pastor uncomfortable. Every idea tabled, every objection or concern about choices the church was making dismissed. The lead pastor’s failure to take me seriously became the model for the church, which continued to operate as if I wasn’t there because, for all practical intents, I wasn’t. These weren't bad people. They certainly weren't mean or evil people. Change simply made them incredibly nervous, proving it's far easier to intellectualize cultural diversity than it is to institute it in a practical and meaningful way.

Shout To The Lord: Not our music, not even concerned about it.

Know Your Purpose

Real diversity requires sacrifice. Lip service diversity says, “Come be our seat-fillers,” while we have our service just as we’ve always done and just as we like it. Real diversity allows all involved to get something and causes all involved to give up something. An inclusive church will have at least two persons of color in key executive positions; a real minority voice in decision-making.

Real diversity moves beyond tolerance and into patience. Patience means wait your turn, or, more specifically, Everybody Gets A Turn. You don’t get to run your white program dominated by your exclusively white pastoral staff and call your church “diverse.” Blacks may be filling seats at your white church, but that’s all they’re doing. Somewhere, on some level, many of those people are wishing, every Sunday, for just a crumb from the table; one song, one guest speaker, that connects to them in a meaningful way.

I digress to underscore the exact reverse is true of black churches, stuck in their 1965 time warp, here. There is no serious effort that I am aware of to multiculturally evolve our black experience. Whites are welcomed, but they’re also stared at as we wonder what they’re doing here. Whites are welcome to sit and watch US have OUR service.

I've known some white churches who attempt a kind of cultural neutrality, which means, essentially, Nobody Gets Nothin.' Which isn't entirely true because, in American culture, neutral defaults to white. A culturally neutral recital of a popular hymn, scrubbed of any possible stylistic interpretation, will sound white. Thus, even a decision to forego any cultural accretions at all is a decision to promulgate white culture.

This leaves many black seekers in a real bind. Far too many black churches simply aren't getting it done. Crumbling infrastructure, egregiously bad and, worse, irrelevant preaching, consistently oppressing people for money, loud, mean divas running everything, always crying broke while the pastor lives in relative luxury. Many of us are simply tired of that; we want off Gilligan's Island. Which leaves us with the choice of perhaps starting our own church and struggling through overwhelming stress or giving up on church altogether and staying home. In that view, many blacks who wash up on the shore of these white churches are a kind of refugee class, desperate for a meaningful experience with Christ and, finding little or no alternative, willing to abandon everything that makes them unique and special in the eyes of God in exchange for a reasonable and stable church life. For me, this is a false choice. First, our own churches need to get in the game but, beyond that, all churches—of all ethnic persuasions—need to go back to the bible and repent of being so culturally constipated.

Jeans And Flip-Flops: Doesn't look like church, doesn't sound like church..

The Fix

So, what’s the answer? As I get older (and older, and older) I am realizing the answer to complex questions often lies in the simplicity of the scripture, The source of most Christian conflict is our failure to place Christ at the center of our lives. Instead, our own ego resides in the space where Christ should be. For, if Christ were there, we wouldn’t have the dead Gilligan’s Island churches or the exploitative White Entertainment Churches using minorities as seat-fillers. Instead, we’d have church; an inclusive and diverse experience modeled in the second chapter of Acts. This group of people were incredibly diverse, "God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven," who'd assembled in Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks. "When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language."  [Acts 2:5-6]

This was the practical need for the phenomena of speaking in tongues. This spiritual gift first appeared not to convince anybody of God’s presence or to lord it over people who do not speak in tongues. The gift was given—write this down someplace—to communicate. Most people today use this gift as a cheap trick to convince others of their holiness or their connection to God, but this is an improper use of tongues because our contemporary usage fails to communicate anything to anyone. It is, at best, a mystery. At worst, it is gibberish. I assume an overwhelming number of the faithful babbling in "tongues” are simply faking it or are repeating a genuine experience they once had by repeating fragments they’ve heard or learned over and over. This is not a genuine move of God, and as Paul taught in 1 Corinthians 14, it is an inappropriate distortion of this particular gift.

The gift of tongues was given to increase diversity. Diversity was important to God and, by biblical model, ordered from the very birth of the Church. It is the height of vanity and, yes, stupidity for churches—black or white—to run around screaming in “tongues” while doing nothing to increase their diversity, since diversity is what tongues was all about. It was a practical gift given, write it down, to communicate with vast numbers of people from many lands who spoke many languages and dialects within those languages. The early church was all about diversity, about unconditional acceptance and love, giving to each other as they had need.

We don’t do this anymore. Nobody’s going to sell their house and pool their money with the church because the church can no longer be unconditionally trusted. Pastors will line their pockets or will send the money overseas to fix potholes in Uganda (not joking) while people around the corner from the church go hungry. But this is the model: we work together. Nobody owns anything, nobody is in over their head with some crazy mortgage or healthcare costs. Everybody helps everybody. There is no “them” or “us,” and, rather than homogenize or eliminate, the church spoke to each one in his or her own language, in their own culture.

Today, churches white and black practice something much closer to cultural elimination. All are welcome, but all are welcome to speak our language and embrace our culture and values. I’ve seen virtually no effort in the black church to make itself in any way relevant to whites, and I am seeing mostly half-hearted lip service from white churches unwilling to make diversity a real priority because, let’s face it, there’s no upside to it. Blacks aren’t going to contribute to the church in significant amounts to make much difference if they all walked out en masse, and the white majority is largely indifferent to black culture or the moral imperatives of cultural inclusion. This sounds like I am excoriating whites, but blacks are so much more guilty of this behavior. Any given Sunday, your average black churchgoer thinks not at all, I mean not even one bit, about addressing the cultural iterations of whites or modifying their Sunday experience in any way to accommodate them. Neither extreme has anything to do with the biblical model or the personal example of Jesus Christ.

Until we are willing to humble ourselves, to stop being so culturally selfish and myopic, we can only expect the reruns to continue.

Christopher J. Priest
19 May 2014
editor@praisenet.org
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No. 420  |  June 2014   Study   Faith 101   The Church   POLITICS   Life   Sisters   A Preacher's Confession   Keeping It Real   Zion   Donate