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Fear Of A Black Church

TRAPPED BENEATH THE GLASS STEEPLE

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“They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” —Acts 2:42-47

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White Folk Will Build They Stuff.

White folk will build they stuff. Build their churches. Build their communities. White folk will sacrifice and band together and set their differences aside for the greater good. White folks will pour their hearts and their hopes into building a future for their families, for their community, for their children’s children. White folk will build they stuff. White folk will write checks. White folk will conduct fundraisers. White folk will write grant proposals. White folk will do what needs to be done. White folk will build they stuff. While we complain. While we argue. While our tiny little run-down churches split and then split again. While we battle one another with stupid names like “Greater” Bethel and then “New” Greater Bethel. While our pastors line their pockets and bed our women. While our deacons conspire and politicize.

In 200 weeks, I’ve learned our churches are cheap. They didn’t start out cheap, they started out frugal. Having limited resources, our churches had to practice acrimonious ledger-watching, pinching pennies and tightening belts. But, as we have prospered, as we have grown, our investment in ourselves has not grown with us. We tend to value dumb things like blood-red carpet and pews (pews being the most inefficient and costly manner of seating a church can buy), while not properly investing in, say, sound systems and communications.

Black churches, in my experience, have evolved from hardship and settled into an unbiblical culture of charity. Churches whom I know have lavished their pastors with Mercedes-Benzes and larges cash sums for annual fleece-fests like Pastors’ Anniversary, cry broke when it comes to supporting ministries like this one. The majority of churches listed or profiled on the PraiseNet have donated absolutely nothing, ever. Only a very few have lent minimal support to what we do, here, and only a handful of churches have actually sown into this ministry in any appreciable way.

The truth is, the PraiseNet exists in a realm few black pastors have much experience with. Decisions are made top-down, so if the pastors and trustees and deacons—most of whom never go online and have never seen this ministry—don’t support an idea, there’s little hope for anything to ever change.

With rare exception, the churches we have contacted have treated us like vendors, missing the point the PraiseNet is a ministry. A vendor is out to make money. The PraiseNet has never, I mean not one time in five years, made a single nickel. The only difference between a church supporting us or not supporting us is how deep we have to go into our pockets this month to keep this web online. We have no corporate sponsors. We sell no advertising. No Google Ads, no blinking YOU HAVE WON! Nonsense on our pages. The concept was for each church to pay an extremely small maintenance fee ($10 per month for an entire church; you can’t sell me on the notion your church, no matter how broke, can’t afford that). Those fees would, in turn, pay for our web hosting and bandwidth and, if there’s any left over, maybe pay the light bill or buy some groceries.

“How much?” is the first thing we’ve been asked by almost every church we’ve talked to. And, not a benign inquiry, but a hostile, cynical, suspicious one. “How much are you trying to fleece God’s people for?” The truth is, we don’t charge anything at all. The fee is a suggested donation, but we will cheerfully accept whatever your ministry can prayerfully afford. I’m just not buying the notion an entire church cannot raise ten dollars a month. To me, that’s just a lie and it informs me of the spiritual state of the people I am dealing with.

The black church, by and large, has not embraced the Internet. We’re starting to, we’ve made real strides over the past decades, but cruising around the web, most black church websites are simply tore up and ugly, while most white church websites are professionally done and efficient. In my experience, black churches do not, by and large, check or return email. The web is simply something out there, somewhere, and maybe they have a site put together by somebody’s cousin (for FREE!) that gives out service times and has a bad photo of the pastor.

Here in Ourtown, communication is all done exclusively by telephone. When people want to know what’s going on at the church, they call the church and hope somebody answers the phone. We kill trees printing out these elaborate bulletins, many of them like mini-TV Guides people tend to read and flip through sermons. The web is a far more efficient way of communicating. It is becoming the de-facto standard for communication around the globe. It is an inevitable evolution the black church is resisting mainly because of tech-challenged pastors. Many pastors here now have email accounts, but they are on AOL (oh, just kill me), or Yahoo! Or Hotmail: missing the point that having your own domain name puts a professional face on your ministry. pastor@bethel.org is far more professional than shonuffrite@hotmail.com, which makes the pastor look like an dilettante and the church seem like a storefront.

In 200 weeks, I’ve not been able to convince a single pastor of this reality: that their ministries and they themselves are not taken seriously when the do business via an AOL email account. That spending eight dollars a year on a domain name has inestimable value in terms of both their personal credibility and the overall impact their churches have on their community. I have been routinely waved off and ignored, and have since given up trying to make Church Folk understand this. The officers manning NORAD, here in the Springs, don’t conduct NORAD business via personal Yahoo! Accounts. The State of Colorado doesn’t send out email from AOL. New Life Church, the biggest church in town, sends out email from newlifechurch.org. But our pastors continue this sad, head-shaking business of using AOL and Yahoo! email to communicate because, frankly, they're afraid to admit they don't know how to use Microsoft Outlook. They're afraid to switch and use their own domain names because they don't know how. But, rather than admit they are afraid, most pastors will simply go on the attack, ridiculing and dismissing things they secretly fear. For many black pastors, simply getting an AOL account is a huge step forward. They are daunted by the anxiety the learning curve of moving to their own domain name provokes. It’s most gross when they send Yahoo! email to places like New Life, where we are inevitably perceived as being broke and disorganized. Eight dollars a year for a domain name. While even the smallest and underserved churches tend to lavish their pastor with fat envelopes of cash at every pastoral anniversary.

White Folk Will Build They Stuff. We will squander thousands on sending the pastor on a cruise. And put up tacky web pages on Netministries and use free email like Yahoo! because we’re so incredibly cheap when it comes to everything BUT showering the pastor with gifts. Until this mindset changes, we are doomed to remain dozens of laps behind the white church.

In my personal experience, both here and back east, black churches give to the needy only reluctantly and exceedingly sparingly, and only after subjecting those in need to an invasive and humiliating battery of means tests. It’s meant to send a message: don’t ask us. The last place I’d ever go for help would be a black church, which is likely the reasoning behind their methods. White churches, by contrast, often support missions and other churches. They build schools. They invest. Black churches survive.

The fear of a black church, from many whites’ viewpoint, is likely not even racial so much as it is financial. 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.

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 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 today is nothing for whites to fear. We have no unified message. We do not, by and large, preach Jesus or even offer salvation. Watch the Word Network all day if you want, and count the number of times black ministers actually talk about salvation. Then count the number of times they actually spell out how one can be saved, the literal process. Then count the number of “offers” that pollute these broadcasts—books and tapes and DVDs and CDs for sale, cruises and conferences and all that mess. If salvation is offered at all (and I have never seen a black minister on TV offer it), the aggregate time spent offering salvation (if any) is only a fraction, the merest nano-sliver, of time comparative to time squandered offering deals, products, trips and conferences. It’s all a bunch of clowns preaching to the choir.

We have no apparent 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?

The biggest civil rights event in recent memory was the Million Man March on Washington, and it was organized by the loudest and most credible voice in black civil rights—Minister Louis Farrakhan, a Muslim. A Muslim who has won the hearts and minds of black Christian America, largely because no voice in black Christian America speaks as loudly, as truthfully, and as articulately as Farrakhan’s. We politely disregard his religious doctrine, as he does ours, and we make vague noises about all worshipping the same God.

I do not worship the god of Louis Farrakhan. Of Hagar and Ishmael. I worship the God of Sarah and Isaac. Of Jehovah and His Son Jesus. I respect the minister a great deal and applaud his courage and his efforts on behalf of social justice. But I haven’t forgotten who my God is. I talk about Jesus. I offer Jesus. I want everyone to come to know Jesus.

Today’s black church is in grave danger because they have allowed, generationally, a move towards a kind of social religion that doesn’t keep the banner of Christ front and center. Our pastors are just tired of preaching the same sermon over and over and so have gotten off on these flights of doctrinal fancy, trying to impress one another by how deep their exegetical theses might go or how colorful their oratory. They act more like TV producers, assuming the audience has been with them all along and thus they’ve already seen the episode where salvation was offered, so no need to re-run it.

We should be preaching Jesus. We’re not. We’re just not. We’re entertaining the crowd, saying what itching ears want to hear and embracing men like Farrakhan because there are none among us with the strength of character to stand up for what they believe. We used to be preachers. We used to be men of God. No we’re all a bunch of pot-bellied clowns.

So, 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 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. That’s the root of white anxiety. I understand it. After all, it’s not a church I want any part of, either.

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
17 June 2007
25 February 2007
editor@praisenet.org
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