PraiseNet.Org: Zion: A Love Story

Zion: A Love Story Chapter 5 SKIP PREVIEW

Pastor Everett smiled as the girls came in.

“Take these girls, for example,” he said, gesturing towards Shaquia and Taleise, bony Pigtail Girls ordered to church after school, who rolled their eyes as they made their way through the tiny, run-down sanctuary, finding a place among mis-matched folding chairs. “They could become doctors or welfare queens.

“Although we doubt many nine year-olds dream of becoming impoverished unwed mothers, a great many end up becoming exactly that. Welfare Queen is a career path. It is not an inevitability. It takes the same skill and initiative for a kid to pursue Welfare Queen, Junkie, Hoodlum, Lowlife, or Inmate as it does for them to pursue Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer or Rocket Scientist. It's really a simple matter of values. Of deciding what is and what is not desirable and essential.”

Pastor Everett spoke with clear enunciation, eschewing the carnival theatrics of most of his Brooklyn peers. Which was why many black churchgoers regarded him in such low esteem: they could understand every word the man said, therefore, he was a terrible preacher. He was broke all the time. He had almost no members. And he was a broken record about salvation, salvation, salvation. They’d heard it. They’d read that chapter. Move on, already.

His light skin and emerald eyes would make him a real contender in the pastoral dog sweepstakes, but his focus was faith and sharing that faith with others. Which resulted in his being one of the best known and least popular of hundreds of black preachers in hundreds of Brooklyn storefronts.

“This is a crisis of values. Guess, Versace, Lexus, Nike. These are things worth dying for. Worth picking up a pistol for. Materialism as self-esteem. The absence of visible material wealth is a crushing blow to most adolescent blacks and has a direct influence on their popularity.

“A couple years ago, teens were murdering each other over 8-Ball jackets. But, see, those jackets are no longer in style, likely discarded in closets all over urban Black America. But those kids are still dead. And the kids who killed them are spiritually and emotionally dead; victims of encroaching maturity along with its inevitable resetting of the moral compass.”

Chip wore jeans in the pulpit. That was his uniform: a short-sleeve grey tab-collar clergy shirt and a pair of jeans. Timberland knock-offs and a Walmart wristwatch. The only jewelry he wore was Dallas’s wedding band, which she routinely and repeatedly asked him to get rid of. Chip was stunningly ordinary amid a culture that wanted their pastors to look like pastors: barrel-belly, pinky ring, gold chains, designer fashions. Chip’s reverse polarity made him a curiosity, and not much of one, as black church folk tended to give the unknown only a quick sniff before retreating to the safety of the familiar, mocking the new guy along the way.

“Every time you abandon your kid in front of BET and let him or her ingest this garbage, you are committing them to a career path more likely to lead to Welfare Queen and Lowlife than Doctor and Lawyer. Kids are impressionable and they subliminally process this stuff into their value system. By showing them this material, you are validating this way of thinking. Materialism as an end in and of itself.

“While the Ku Klux Klan is most certainly still in business, the most effective weapon forged against our community is this subtle and insipid distortion of reality and corruption of our value system. Show me a single music video where we see Lil’ Wayne actually go to a job and do something for a living. Let me see him agonizing over the monthly bills the way we all do. Let's see him writing a check for that car note. Let's see a girl who isn't a perfect size two and maybe she wears glasses and maybe she's got a degree hanging on her wall!”

Grace Chapel was not a lot bigger than the modest bodega it had replaced after the cops closed it down as a crack dealership. A storefront church on a south Brooklyn street jammed with storefront churches, Grace sported a handmade sign and wrought-iron security gate mangled from several break-in attempts. The church had no air conditioning, and the stifling August heat was nearly unbearable.

“There can be no change in the rushing current of moral and economic decline without a fundamental shift in how we perceive ourselves and our world. In how we think and in what we think about. In what constitutes our values.

“Fanatic conservatism, the bleaching of America, is hardly the answer. Extremism in the employ of even the most noble cause is still extremism. The concept of absolute truth, of a singular vision and a singular correct application or expression of that truth or vision, is dangerous.

“It's the buy-in to The Lie: the great diviner between mythology and theology. Mythology tells us Good People Go To Heaven, Bad People Go To Hell. This has nothing to do with theology, that reveals heaven to be populated by sinners saved by grace, and the road to hell paved with the best of intentions.”

As sparsely attended as Chip’s Sunday worship was, his noon Thursday prayer services were practically empty. Drucker, Ed and Eddie—a delegation of local winos—attended because Chip always handed out Arch Cards—gift cards for MacDonald’s. There was faithful Sue, on disability and home all day anyway, Mother Preston and Mother Slater who despised each other but needed an excuse to get out of the house. Father Jack from Holy Redeemer up the street, hunched forward, his head in his hands. Jack was just bored and argued with Chip for sport. The Pigtails were there because they were ordered there after school, Grace being a lighthouse in a rough neighborhood.

And then there was Oletta.

“In the lifelong struggle between emotion and intellect, perhaps the most difficult concept for many of us is the fact that each of us, individually, is entitled to our own Truth. The Apostle Paul taught us to each work out our own soul's salvation, and repeatedly cautioned us against simply imitating him or parroting his words.

“Paul was not preaching The Lie or The Bleaching. He was preaching Christ and His Kingdom. He was telling us to know God for ourselves, and not to just be robots or lemmings, blindly following anybody.

“Which is, after all, religion without discipleship. Conviction without consecration. Allowing this MTV and Facebook garbage into your home strips the Gospel of its dignity and power and renders it moot and impotent. Our children have all become Gideons, who can't even recognize God when He appears to them, to whom God has become an oblique reference, an abstraction of our parents’ quaint yestertime. God is dead, because we do not allow Him to live outside the church walls.”

Chip tended to flex his vocabulary when he got cranked, realizing he was likely flying at too high an altitude for his congregation. But he didn’t care, he wasn’t watering it down. These folks had had decades of watered-down Gospel.

“It is the road to Welfare Queen. To Junkie, Hoodlum, or Lowlife. Not BET specifically, but our abandonment of our values. Our apostasy. Our resignation to inevitability. Or, in the other extreme, our buy-in to The Lie.

“Ministry begins with each of us, in each of us. It begins with a simple resolution: think.” Chip pointed to his temple. “Use this for more than a hat rack.” He then offered the classic shepherd’s gesture, extending open arms as a sign of benediction.

“The rest is easy.” He smiled at his tiny, rag-tag family. “C’mon, let’s go home.”