The Black Church, here in town, is like a great and fearsome battle ship, with state of the art weaponry. Only, this ship never fights any battles. As the war rages, this elite battleship never leaves dock. Never fires a shot. Instead, all we do is polish the brass and put on grand celebrations of what a great and fearsome battleship we are, celebrating each passing year of our mighty vessel taking up space at the dock.

Part 3: The Walmart Factor

There used to be this great buffet joint most every black churchgoer went to after Sunday services. It was the social hub of black Christians. If you wanted to get any networking done or advance your program, you staked out this joint on Sunday afternoons. Black worshippers, who would routinely complain and have spasms if the worship service ran longer than 90 minutes, would adjourn to this restaurant and spend all day— I am not kidding— all day there. They'd be there for hours. Two at a minimum but often longer than that. I marveled at the hypocrisy of people rushing out of worship to come to this place where they whiled away the hours over fried chicken and apple pie.

You could nearly always tell who the pastors were in this restaurant because many if not most black pastors would, inexplicably, wear their hats inside the restaurant. Expensive and gregarious fedoras, evoking a kind of pimp image. This is something I never fully understood. First of all, hats are kind of out of fashion now except for the gregarious Puffy Gangster types posing as pimps for BET videos. Regardless, all around the room you would see men, overdressed in suits that range from sublime to ridiculous, Stacy Adams shoes and large, gregarious hats. Hats they surely could have left in the car, but chose to wear so, I guess, everybody could see their hat. Never mind how rude and barbaric it is for a man to wear his hat indoors, these guys would take off their coats and leave their hats on.

So, they're wearing a loud suit and a big hat, evoking the universal esthetic of a street pimp. These guys would go to the buffet counter with the hat on. Would sit and eat with their families— with their hats on. It was an astonishing sight, perhaps some southern or western phenomena. But it made these men look ridiculous. And, by extension, it made the black church look ridiculous. And all I could think was, my how ridiculous these white people must think we are.

Black pastors rarely if ever wear the basic clerical collar and black suit of a Catholic priest. Church of God In Christ wears this uniform for special occasions, but Baptists, by and large, range more or less away from clerical garb, favoring loud suits and big hats. I wear the clerical collar. I love wearing it. I love what it means. I love what it represents. I love what it reminds me of. In white culture, a man wearing a clerical collar is respected and admired. In our wretched, backward, ignorant fashion, a man wearing a clerical collar is often snickered at and ridiculed, “Who does HE think he is?” It is so mind-numbingly ignorant. What I like about the collar is not that it make me look important, but that it is simple. It is plain. It is humble. It gets right to the point. It is a simple smock that diverts attention from how fancy your suit and tie are. A pastor friend of mine said he only wears the shirt for special occasions and treats it with a worshipful deference, to which I politely disagree. The clerical shirt is a work shirt. It is designed for everyday use, not to be held in abeyance for special occasions. It is supposed to get dirty, to be used and reused and discarded. What I like about the shirt is it tells people Whose you are. When I am wearing it, nobody has to guess what I am about. I cannot hide or melt into the crowd the way these pastors in the loud suits can. Nobody mistakes me for a pimp, and I can get away with absolutely nothing because, once someone has seen me wearing the clerical shirt, I am become a marked man. They know I am a minister of the Gospel, and my life, my everyday walk, must now reliably support the simple cloth shirt I wear on Sunday.

But we are so painfully ignorant and so terribly unschooled in spiritual matters, our socialization is towards gregarious displays of clothing and jewelry, expensive cars Armour-alled up, and big hats. When I arrive in a simple smock I am snickered at and ridiculed by deeply ignorant and ultimately unspiritual people. People who attempt to undermine the work God is doing in my life by setting confusing and conflicting examples of Christian behavior. And people who, more often than not, hold the keys to the church.

We remain a fractured and marginalized people because who we are and how we conduct ourselves in the Black church is largely out of step with the example of Jesus Christ.

Congregants waiting three and four hours at the buffet gossiping, and pastors eating at their tables while still wearing their loud, gregarious hats, have an obvious disconnect with the Holy Spirit as the Spirit would never inspire such foolishness. In a spiritual whiplash doubtless confusing to the observer, these people dismiss, with fiery rhetoric, most anything progressive while running the aisles hollering and screaming and turning cartwheels for exactly ninety minutes only to then adjourn to the buffet where they behave like pimps and utter heathens, collecting in little cliques gossiping about who's at the next table and what they're wearing and who's sleeping with who.

That this business continues to go on (albeit at other restaurants now) is prima facie evidence of the failure in leadership in the black church. It makes my strongest case for the dissolution of as many as 40 or more of these little churches all over town, as these churches continue to fail to meet the basic standards of effective ministry. Fail to teach. Fail to encourage. Fail to inspire. Our wretchedness— spiritually, socially, politically, economically —is an indictment of our leadership. There's far too much going-through-the-motions church. “Playing” church. Get-it-over-with-already church.

As many as two thirds of the black churches here in town could ideally close their doors and unite to become a single, larger and more effective ministry. That means letting go of old feuds and old wounds and petty differences and recognizing the power and obvious advantages of unity in Christ. Real unity, not just lip service unity. Not just Annual Day unity, but pooling a dozen building funds into one unity. Building Christian Life centers instead of little expensive churches unity.

I have this enduring concept of modeling a network of Christian Life Centers after the vision of Relevant Word Ministries, a holistic ministry embedded in the Hillside community that is evolving traditional worship into a fuller-ranged outreach. Relevant Word strives to meet the spiritual and physical needs of its community— not just its congregation.

To the south, New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church has, with economic savvy to back up its spiritual imperative, paid off its property and worked clever deals for new pews and parking lot resurfacing, even thinking to include a basketball court in the process. Inside you'll always find fresh coffee and a free ice cream dispenser. The church is a social hub of the community, open virtually all the time and available to local kids after school and a wide range of programs and church auxiliaries. I'd love to see both Relevant Word and New J (as we call it) equipped with larger and more modern state of the art facilities.

Perhaps five of them, sheepfolds led by New J in the south, Relevant in mid-town, Emmanuel in the west, True Spirit in the east and New City Community Church in the north. With the smaller satellite churches merging with the Christian Life Center in their area. By pooling the resources of dozens of churches, we'd have the economic clout to build these Christian Life Centers. Although smaller churches would lose their individual buildings, what they would gain is the resources of a church ten times their size.

The idea is Good News/Bad News in the sense of the Wal-Mart factor. Wal-Mart is good news in that it's kind of one-stop shopping, but bad news in that it's kind of the kiss of death to small and even medium-sized local businesses. My local Wal-Mart has literally wiped out all commerce around it, chasing K-Mart and Safeway off of the block, along with lots of smaller Mom and Pop shows. Wal-Mart has become, in many ways, a kind of secular Life Center. It is the social hub of the area. If you are looking for anybody, anybody at all who lives in the area, just hang out at Wal-Mart long enough. Wal-Mart is a kind of forced attrition, where we are forced to cooperate with one another and socialize with one another. In Wal-Mart, all vendors are equal, and share the enormous and daunting clout of the retail giant. A network of multi-million dollar Christian Life Centers would certainly order our steps more toward cooperation, but would likely leave those ministries that don't join up out in the cold and starved for resources.

Of course, this idea is a ridiculous one for as many reasons as there are for the existence of so many churches in the first place. The many differences of opinions, approaches, tastes, cliques, hurt feelings and other criteria that brought all of these churches into existence in the first place fuels and sustains the deep divisions among us and makes real unity virtually impossible. I mean, sure, we like each other, we wave to each other in Wal-Mart, but we're hardly going to risk losing our individuality in some grand merging.

The larger problem, however, is an even more obvious one: leadership. Before any discussion of unity could move beyond high concept, the first thing most black Christians will ask is, “Well, who'll be leading it? Who will be in charge?” In many ways, we are far more concerned about who's in charge than we are in who we are or what we are about. The Black Church, throughout America, is, in great measure, personality driven. We follow personalities more than we follow ideas, ideals or even the cross itself. Logic need not apply, as logic suggests the most efficiently run and most productive ministries should ideally take the lead. In that context, the best and most likely candidates to lead such a movement would be instantly disqualified simply because they are, in fact, successful at what they do. They are The Big Guys, and the “little” guys would tend to resent the larger ministries muscling them out of business.

Which is just insane. But the truth is, we as black church folk are motivated more by fear than by faith. I know of several churches who have gone to enormous lengths and great expense just to NOT vote in a certain pastor. We make decisions based on our worst fear more often than we make them on our greatest hope.

So we keep struggling to pay the bills, to raise the building fund, to make the mortgage payments. We continue to pressure the handful of people in our respective congregations and we continue to be a wholly ignorable political demographic because we're not a block of voters but are a deeply divided community that supports each other in only the most marginal ways.
Worrying overmuch about who's in charge is, again, contrary to the example of our Lord (Mark 9), and is further evidence of our increasing distance from a real knowledge of and relationship with God. God could not possibly be at work in our lives and bear fruit like this.

Ephesians 5:
Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling saviour. But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints; Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but rather giving of thanks. For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God ...And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. ...See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

“Followers of God.” This is what we claim to be. This is certainly what we SHOULD be. But, if we were, we would be with that one accord Luke speaks of. We'd be more interested in building God's kingdom than our kingdom. And the blatantly un-Christ like behavior on our part— the gossip and backbiting and resentment and jealousy and all that eye rolling— simply wouldn't happen. We'd be more mature than that. If we were walking in the Spirit we'd learn to love one another.

When you think of Black church people in general terms, which of Paul's statements seems truer of us?

Galatians 5:
Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

Galatians 5:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections F12 and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another.

The obvious remedy for this is the cross. For us to become on one accord, truly on one accord, and not just with lip service. And with all due respect to my dear sister from bible study, I maintain that we, as flawed human beings, are incapable of the kind of divine synchronicity observed on the day of Pentecost. Try as we might, we cannot simply decide to cooperate, to be on one accord. That will only happen when we surrender, truly and fully, to the will of the Lord. Once we stop relying on our wisdom or pushing our agendas but turn such matters wholly over to the Lord, once we are in sync with Him, we will, by definition, be with one accord.

And, then, nothing can stop us.


2 Kings tells us this story about the Prophet Elijah fleeing from Queen Jezebel and hiding in a cave. An angel of the Lord appears to him and asks him why he's hiding. Elijah, despondent, tells God, “I'm the only prophet left. I'm the only one left who truly believes in You. Who truly believes this thing. And they're trying to kill me.” Pastor Reynolds, who should have been somewhere laughing it up with his parishioners and scarfing up fried chicken and greens, was instead nibbling on leftover banana bread, huddled in his office, while we all went to party somewhere. In his eyes: exhaustion or despair? Was he thinking, Lord, I'm tired, or was he asking, What am I doing here? King on the mountaintop or Elijah in the cave?

I know that feeling. I know that exhaustion. I know the anger, the frustration, the sheer futility of trying to get people to work together. But if we don't do it, who will? We have some wonderful leaders here, but, taken as a whole, the Black Church here in Ourtown still scores a D Minus because we're so very fractured.

The pastors I've profiled here have, to a man, expressed to me their frustration at our seeming inability to work together. Oh, we take stabs at it, but it's mostly pomp and circumstance. It's dating without commitment. It has no teeth to it. Our “unity” is ineffective.

As I see it, our leadership role should, ideally, be superceded by that of the pastor once he is in place. And then we should either submit to his leadership or fire him. There's no scriptural example of the kind of nagging, browbeating defiance we see in many churches. There's absolutely no scriptural example of the Chairman of Deacons or even of Trustees having contravening authority over the pastor once he is seated. As I understand scripture, these men are ordained to help the ministers, not order them around. The board should either do as the pastor asks or vote him out. But all of this pastoral hog-tying is part and parcel of the dysfunctional spiritual eco-system here.

Men and women of faith need to take the risk, need to risk the wrath of sheep who have taken over the shepherd. Those of us who have long ago parked our spine at the door need to risk it all, bet our entire lives and livelihoods on the perfect will rather than the permissive will. Pastors need to stand up and say This Is What We're Going To Do. And we, as the flock, need to fall in line behind our pastors. We should have the courage to match our convictions.

There is far too much good here for us to be running in circles like this.

Christopher J. Priest
10 January 2004
editor@praisenet.org
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