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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