Historically Black
WHY WE'RE HERE
TWO
“But as the believers rapidly multiplied, there were rumblings of discontent. Those who spoke Greek complained against those who spoke Hebrew, saying that their widows were being discriminated against in the daily distribution of food. So the Twelve called a meeting of all the believers.” We apostles should spend our time preaching and teaching the word of God, not administering a food program,” they said. “Now look around among yourselves, brothers, and select seven men who are well respected and are full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom. We will put them in charge of this business... These seven were presented to the apostles, who prayed for them as they laid their hands on them. God's message was preached in ever-widening circles. The number of believers greatly increased...” —The Acts of The Apostles 6:1-7 (New Living Translation)
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She was 17 years old and she fought with her mom a lot
and so it came to pass that Tammy ran off and moved in with her
drug dealer boyfriend. And this is where the police found her
after the drug dealer's rivals broke into the house and started
shooting. They didn't even know who Tammy was, nor did they
care. She died to make a point; to punctuate a sentence. And,
much as I'd like to tell you this is a scene from a movie, the
truth is Tammy was a friend of mine. A nice girl from a nice
neighborhood who lived in a house and had mom and dad and a cat
and a station wagon. She wasn't Shareeka the Jheri Curl Reefer
Queen, cracked out and staggering down Fulton Street mangling
Busta Rhymes tunes. She was third from the left in the photo I
took when our team won the flag at summer camp in 1974. She was
Nancy's best friend and, though Nancy was Lucy Van Pelt to my
Charlie Brown, Tammy was always my bud. Rustling around
somewhere in Priest's Big Bag Of Regrets is the fact I never
tried to be more than a friend to Tammy, as though decisions we
make could actually stay the hand of an often perplexing God.
If you've never had a .45 automatic aimed at you in anger,
you're really missing something. It looks like the biggest,
blackest, meanest piece of metal ever created by man, and you
suddenly move somewhere to the right of yourself and become a
casual observer; a lowly extra in the film of your own life's
story. You want Tom Cruise, but you get Jon Lovitz. You become
Jon Lovitz as frame after boring frame of your life clicks by
while the guy holding the gun plays keep-away with your dignity.
I grew up in daily mortal fear and with an acute awareness of
where I could and could not go, the difference between the two
being as little as a city block. For three consecutive years I
never once came in alone through the front door of my own house,
but went out the back and jumped over neighbors' fences to avoid
bad guys and worse guys. In the jungle you look no one directly
in the eye. You practice invisibility, and the best days are the
ones that pass without incident. There is a casual acceptance
among even the youngest jungle kids that death could come
literally at any moment, and this acceptance becomes license to
define their own morality based on consequence and circumstance.
Mine was a world of bad guys and worse guys, and no matter how
hard I prayed for Superman or Jesus to come and save me, neither
ever did. I kept looking for the man with the white hat or the
man on the white horse to ride to the rescue, but the reality
was more my mother, sister and I standing in waist-high snow
waiting for a bus that wasn't coming.
The world beyond the church doors is a harsh one. A place where two basic species exist: winners and losers. Victims and perps. Players and the played. Here in Ourtown, the black church is, by and large, a quaint anachronism. A familial symbol of a pleasant bygone yesterday. A place with no real impact on a world that has gone on without it. The church stands largely impotent and wholly unable (and unwilling) to speak to a growing youth and young adult population that lives in the actual world. A demographic who often attends church the way we attend dinner theater or a good movie. It is my basic belief that God is a God of today. A Now God. God knows what year it is. An arrested fashion sense can't fool Him, and He does not gauge our holiness (or lack thereof) by how closely we emulate the year 1965. While I never profess to speak for God, I do profess to speak to Him and He to me. I have to imagine the black church's refusal to move out of 1965 displeases a God whose divine self-revelation is, by definition, a progressive one.
The practice of the church is, therefore, often out of sync with
the nature of a divine and progressive God. Meanwhile, the
common currency of black culture is shockingly anti-moral and
anti-intellectual. Intellect and academia have been supplanted
by a capitulation to a lowest common denominator mentality and a
wholly disingenuous artificial culture invented and financed by
corporate America to keep us buying expensive shoes and big
cars. To lay claim to the ultimate sacrifice of Calvary while
being nothing at all like Christ.
It is my conviction that ministry, real ministry, is as much
about education, dialogue and discourse as it is big hats and
organ music. We should all be what we choose to be— from playaz
to preachaz. But we should be an informed people. A
knowledgeable people, about ourselves, our culture, and our
belief system.
The church should never have a routine, but should always have a purpose. The two are rarely congruent and almost never interchangeable. In routine we find comfort and reassurance in the structure of ritual. In purpose we find the anxiety of the unknown and the reward of the unexpected. The unexpected gifts of unexpected people.
These are words I have chosen to believe. While harshly critical of religion in general, and the Black Church in specific, these are truths I have chosen to embrace. Not blindly, or by rote or virtue of family tradition, but by examination, trial and perseverance. At times in spite of my intellect and against my nature, I find meaning, comfort, purpose and fulfillment in the scriptures, which I believe to be God's Holy Word, and by which I am empowered to reach beyond my earthbound state and commune with something on a higher plane of awareness and existence.
I choose to call that God. And I choose to believe in His Son,
Jesus Christ. Faith, in the final analysis, is a choice. A
choice to become something greater than what you already are,
and to recognize the greatness within yourself. The absence of
some expression of spirituality implies a bleak existence, our
entire lives summed up as a collection of breaths and
heartbeats. I believe it's important for us to decide who God is
and pursue some manner of connection. Without it, we're only
half of what we could be.
The PraiseNet provides an essential communication and growth
tools set to our community. Many churches do not have and have
never had basic communication tools such as eMail or basic web
pages. In addition, communication among ministries is still
based largely on an inefficient oral tradition which polarizes
the many ministries into groups of peripheral affiliation.
PraiseNet.Org encourages and promotes the obvious strength of unity among these ministries, celebrating our diversity while capitalizing on our commonality and oneness in Christ. The walls PraiseNet.Org is designed to tear down can never be rebuilt. Once our many sister ministries begin to understand the spiritual, social, political and economic strength a unified voice provides, we cannot ever continue with the business as usual of competitive impotency. Communication is key to achieving parity with the better resourced ministries in this city, and PraiseNet.Org is intended to provide an even playing field where all ministries, large and small, have the same opportunity to be heard, to be effective and to grow.
There are a lot of Gospel websites out there. 95% of them are
concerned only with Gospel Music. With who's hot and what's new
and promoting the Next Big This. Brothers and sisters, we need
to be concerned with more than Gospel music. We need to be
concerned with the Gospel. We need to be concerned with each
other. We need to drop our form of godliness and embrace the
power thereof. The PraiseNet is not at all concerned with the
latest CD release. The PraiseNet is not at all concerned with
who's the new hot artist. The PraiseNet won't be bowing and
scraping to some multi-millionaire MegaBishop you're all so very
impressed with. It's time we, as a people, outgrow that mess.
It's time we, as God's children, learn who He is and what He
wants us to be. If you're looking for the inside scoop on the
hot new releases, please go somewhere else. If you're looking
for interviews with the gospel “stars,” please go somewhere
else. But, if you're looking to grow in Christ, to up your
spiritual maturity from sheep to shepherd, you're more than
welcome here. Christopher J. Priest
17 June 2007
editor@praisenet.org
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