Dr. Palmer Chinchen is pastor of The Grove church in Chandler, Arizona, where he puts not only his advanced training in intercultural studies to use, but also the lessons he learned as a missionary kid growing up in Liberia. Chandler holds a doctorate in educational studies and is author of two books: True Religion and God Can’t Sleep: Waiting for Daylight on Life’s Dark Nights. UrbanFaith talked to Chinchen about his ministry values and about God Can’t Sleep. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
UrbanFaith: What is your primary calling as a pastor?
FAITH IS NOT PRIVATE: Arizona pastor and author Dr. Palmer Chinchen.
Palmer Chinchen: First, it’s to lead our people to know God and to know him deeply and intimately, and to have a rich, authentic relationship with him. With that comes the challenge to inspire them, lead them, and equip them to take his message of hope and to give our lives away to change what’s not right in this world, to love people that hurt in places that are broken.
What is the greatest challenge that you face in your ministry?
The biggest challenge right now is that I’m feeling like Christians in this country have historically and up to the present made our spirituality very personal. We talk about it in those terms as though it’s a private, inner relationship with God that happens on the inside. We limit it sometimes to our soul or to our mindset; it’s something cognitive. What I’m challenged with is trying to get people to see that when Jesus was here, he meant for us to live out the kingdom of God. Our lives are meant to be his vessels for changing not just what people believe, but changing the circumstances in which they live.
What sustains you spiritually, emotionally, and physically?
My wife, first of all. Walking with God with her is maybe the only way I’ve been able to do what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. Getting to know the pieces of the Bible that I missed early in my life has given me new energy and inspired me in new ways. In particular, exploring Jesus’ teachings around his kingdom and the “nowness” of that this last year has been absolutely reenergizing for me. And then, the people that I work with have had a profound influence in keeping me encouraged. I have a great staff at The Grove of other pastors and leaders.
How do you protect yourself, your time, and your family from the unique temptations that ministry families face?
I have four sons: a junior higher, a high schooler, and two in college so I feel like my time is always in demand. When my garage door opens at the end of the day when I come home, my cell phone goes off. I don’t take any calls on my cell phone over the weekend. I do not allow church emails to be forwarded to my home or to my phone. I only answer them in my office. And so, when I get home I want to be free of everything that happens at church. Another practical, simple thing I do is I take Fridays off. I like having Friday and Saturday back-to-back off, so all of my sermon prep work, all of our prep for Sunday as a staff is done on Thursday..
Your parents have been missionaries in Africa since 1970. How has their ministry influenced yours?
Lawrence Richard called it social learning theory. Just by being near people, you learn a lot. So just being around my dad and my mother, the first thing I learned was to live with great faith. When you spend 40 years in Africa, you realize quickly the only way you’re going to make it to the next day is to have a lot of faith and so I try to share that passion with the people that I lead and we talk a lot about faith. We take a lot of risk. I learned to take risk from my father and to not be afraid of failing.
How did growing up and then living in Africa inform your ministry perspective?
Growing up in Africa showed me how simple, and yet how powerful church can be. It doesn’t have to be about a staff and a building and payrolls. My church has a building so I’m a bit of a hypocrite, but we try to do it as simply as possible. To be honest, I think we have far too many ministries. I think we need to empower our people to meet each other’s needs, period, and stop paying so many people to do the things that people who call themselves Christians should be doing.
What influence is there from your training in intercultural studies?
We live in a globalized world and for me that’s an important part our church identity. I keep trying to tell our people that heaven is not just going to be filled with people like us. It’s going to be filled with people from every race and every tribe and every ethnicity. We can’t separate who we are as Christians from being a global people. I use that from my background to encourage people to live comfortably, to be moved towards people who are different in any way. I challenge our people that I speak to to include “the other” and to celebrate our differences, whether it be by language or skin color, or even denominations.
Is racial reconciliation formally a part of your ministry?
I haven’t termed it racial reconciliation. What we do at The Grove is racial celebration. We do all we can to make everything we do inclusive of the other and so we don’t want to be color blind. We want to celebrate those differences.
When I lived in Malawi, I got tired of doing funerals for babies who died of AIDS because their mothers had AIDS. I taught a class at a Christian university that I titled “A Theology of Suffering” that started with a Malawian perspective on suffering. I realized that this is the world’s common language, so it went from there.
A lot of times as Christians, we don’t have answers to life’s most difficult problems and to the problem of pain and we end up saying really cheap things like, “God will never give you more than you can handle.” That’s not even in the Bible, and the truth is we often end up in situations when on that week, for that moment, in that year, it feels like far more than anyone can handle and it is.
I talk about where God is and the things that happen in those dark times. I don’t want to oversimplify it, but there’s often a kind of spiritual change or growth that only happens on the most dark nights of our lives. If you think of anyone you would consider a mature Christian, I can almost promise you that person has been through some pain. God makes us deeper, wiser, more gentle people full of grace and mercy through it and we understand and we walk maybe a little closer to God.
HIS OWN JEREMIAH WRIGHT?: Texas governor and GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry was forced to distance himself from his pastor's statement that GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney's Mormon faith is a cult. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
Mitt Romney wants his fellow Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry to disavow the Texas mega-church pastor who called Mormonism a “cult” at the Values Voters Summit last weekend, but Perry has declined, The Associated Press reported yesterday.
“The governor does not agree with every single issue of people that endorsed him or people that he meets,” said Perry spokesman Mark Miner. “This political rhetoric from Gov. Romney isn’t going to create one new job or help the economy. He’s playing a game of deflection and the people of this country know this.”
This Story Is Old News
At the media criticism site Get Religion, Christianity Today online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey argued earlier that this story is old news.
“If you have been paying attention to religion and politics for at least the last four years, you know that [Robert] Jeffress’ belief that Mormonism is a cult isn’t terribly newsworthy to religion reporters. …Jeffress has been saying these things for quite a while now and political reporters are just now taking notice,” Pulliam Bailey wrote.
Bruised Feelings and Fundamentalists
At The Huffington Post, Episcopal priest and Columbia University religion professor Randall Balmer wrote that Mormons are sincerely wounded and confused by the charge that they aren’t Christians, right before he engaged in a bit of mud-slinging himself.
“For Jeffress and for millions of other fundamentalists, the word ‘Christian’ is a specialized term reserved only to those who hold certain beliefs. Having grown up fundamentalist, I spent the first two-plus decades of my life convinced that Roman Catholics were not Christians – because they were not fundamentalists,” Balmer wrote.
Impotent Labels
What interests me is the power of the labels bandied about in this discussion. Does the term cult hold any real power in an increasingly laissez-faire culture? Does it even approach the dismissive power of the word fundamentalist, which is identified not only with intolerance but also with religious terrorism?
It was 1978 when “cult” leader Jim Jones’ fanatacism led to the murder/suicide of 909 Americans and 1993 when the 50-day FBI siege on the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, left 86 people dead. It seems to me that the word cult has lost some of its verve in the intervening years, perhaps in part because of controversy surrounding the Waco siege.
Aside from the celebrity goings-on and abuse charges related to the Church of Scientology, the latest “cult” story to dominate the news involved the 2006 arrest of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints leader Warren Jeffs. Jeffs was charged with sexual assault and arranging illegal ploygamist marriages between adult men and underage girls. He was convicted of two counts of sexual assault earlier this year and, just yesterday,The Salt Lake Tribune reported that one of his 78+ plural wives requested police assistance in leaving the sect’s home base.
Normalizing Outliers
But then there was Big Love, the HBO hit drama series about a Utah polygamist sect that ran for five seasons (2006-2011) and helped normalize polygamy and other alternative family structures for an American audience.
Last month at the Religion Newswriters Association annual conference in Durham, North Carolina, the Darger family that the series was reportedly based on talked to journalists about their marriage. We were offered free copies of their book, Love Times Three: Our True Story of Polygamous Marriage, which I just finished reading.
Supercharged Words in a New Context
One of the things that struck me most about the Dargers’ storytelling was the way terminology was used in an unfamiliar context. For example, they repeatedly describe their family structure as a “lifestyle choice” and write about bigotry in a way that is similar to arguments for the legalization of same-sex marriage.
On the other hand, they describe themselves as Independent Fundamentalist Mormons, whose sect they say emerged from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) after polygamy was outlawed and the LDS church changed its position on the practice. For the Dargers, fundamentalist is a positive term, one with which they want to be identified.
The idea of one man looking to religion to justify having sex with three women involves a sexual taboo in American culture, but the term fundamentalist carries with it the idea of sexual repression. The phrase lifestyle choice is sometimes used to argue against inherent homosexual identity and is thus rejected by some homosexuals, but here it is embraced to argue for personal freedom.
Innovation or Aberration?
In the Associated Press article that I opened with, reporter Kasie Hunt says rightly that “some evangelical Christians believe Mormons are outside Christianity because they don’t believe in the concept of a unified Trinity and because they rely on holy texts in addition to the Bible.” But then she adds, “For conservative Protestants, the Bible alone is the authoritative word of God and the innovations of Mormon teaching are heresy.”
Innovations is a loaded word here. It carries with it a positive connotation, whereas earlier in the piece she had described the controversy over Jeffress’ statement as a “highly charged, emotional issue” that “raises the specter of religious bigotry.”
But does it really? In an age when the polygamy of Mormon-related sects is celebrated on TV and Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with religious marginalization, is this really a “highly charged emotional issue” or just a diversion, as Perry’s spokesman contends?
What do you think?
Do words like cult and fundamentalist still have power to marginalize or are we all so jaded by the exploitation of language that we don’t even listen anymore?
With the recession bearing down so heavily on African Americans and Latinos, one would think that the “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement that has spread across the country might appeal to people of color, but they are under-represented, Janell Ross reports at The Huffington Post.
Progressives, again, Fail to Reach Out
“I think that what we see in this movement is really not much different than what you see in a lot of progressive causes,” Julianne Malveaux, president of historically black Bennett College, told Ross. “Progressives frequently are so convinced of their cause and its merits that they don’t do enough to reach out. The problem is if we aren’t there, everybody’s concerns ultimately won’t be addressed.”
People of Color Feel Excluded
Iqua Ukpong, an unemployed visual artist who lives in Brooklyn, told The Grio that she is disappointed, but not surprised that more “brothas and sistas” aren’t represented. “Even though this is a protest for the marginalized … black and brown people feel excluded.”
Ignoring the Link between Poverty and Race
“While the racial dimension of the criminal justice system is obvious to many people, the movement to reform Wall Street may be less so,” said Colorlines publisher Rinku Sen. “In economic justice, it is particularly tempting to ignore the links between race and poverty.”
Too Busy Trying to Get through the Week
“Millions are neither lobbying Congress nor marching across the Brooklyn Bridge; they’re trying to make it through the week without another crisis,” Kai Wright wrote earlier at Colorlines. “They are also overwhelmingly and not in the least bit coincidentally black people. And I suspect that until we build our politics around their participation, we will continue to miss the point.”
Progressive Answer to the Tea Party?
“Occupy Wall Street may be a momentary political side-show, but it has the potential of becoming the Left’s answer to the tea party,” Tobin Grant wrote at Christianity Today. “Both are protest movements aimed at changing who holds power in American politics. The tea party took aim at government overreach; Occupy Wall Street points to the power of corporations.” But does an alternative to the mostly white Tea Party that doesn’t better represent people of color really count as a legitimate democratic alternative?
Stealth Leaders, Spiritual Analysis, No Black Voices
Meanwhile, Cathy Grossman considered the spiritual side of the Occupy Wall Street movement at USA Today, but didn’t include black voices, and Neil Ungerleider traced its “stealth leadership” to the Adbusters collective’s “media savy culture of art student resistance” and the Anonymous collective’s “hacker libertarianism” at Fast Company. Neither group is immediately identified with economic justice for people of color.
What do you think?
Does this movement represent you and your interests or does it seem like a protest for people with little to lose?
Dr. A.R. Bernard speaking at Movement Day in New York City.
Dr. A.R. Bernard is pastor and CEO of the 35,000-member Christian Cultural Center (CCC) in Brooklyn, New York, but spent ten years as a banker before he and his wife, Karen, founded the church 33 years ago.
Bernard was a keynote speaker at Movement Day, a New York City conference designed to accelerate gospel movements in America’s cities. While Dr. Tim Keller, pastor New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, talked about the injustice of ignoring the needs of the poor, and Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic in Los Angeles, talked about the “spaces between us,” Bernard focused on how to build an institution and about “sanctifying” the customer service policies of American Express and Disney World.
An expert in organizational operations and best practices, Bernard told the audience, “Whereas others got into church planting and some started para-church organizations, we decided that we would establish an institution.”
People sometimes have negative perceptions of institutions, but “when creativity, innovation, and faith keep that organization alive and on the cutting edge, an institution becomes an entity that preserves not just history, but a record of progression,” he said.
Because Bernard believes managing both continuity and change are vital to longevity, he and his team at CCC came up with four “timeless fundamentals” that are implemented throughout the church’s departments:
1. clearly articulated, defined core values
2. clearly articulated, defined core purposes
3. remaining relevant and on the cutting edge of what CCC does
4. strength beyond the presence of any one individual.
“I’ve seen organizations that were built on a person,” Bernard explained. “That’s great because a charismatic leader does become the creative visionary force behind the establishment and building of an organization, but what happens is when it’s solely built on that person, when that person dies, the organization dies.”
“What one person begins, it takes a team of people to continue,” he added.
Dr. A.R. Bernard talking to an attendee at Movement Day.
This is where American Express and Disney World customer service training come in.
Bernard met with the American Express chief executive officer over marketing and customer service development in 1990 to glean principles that he could “sanctify” for ministry. The executive was so taken aback that a church was interested in customer service that she gave Bernard a copy of the company’s training manual, with the caveat that Bernard wouldn’t pass it to AmEx competitors.
“This was an awakening for many people. It really helped them to understand the difference between task and purpose because too many of them, without the proper training, become task oriented,” Bernard said.
For example, an usher whose task is to seat a person would defeat his or her purpose by treating parishioners rudely. “They’ve achieved their task, but failed in achieving their purpose, if the purpose is to make people feel warm and welcome,” he explained.
After a decade of using the AmEx model, Bernard looked to Disney for guidance, even taking 1,000 staff members to the entertainment giant’s training center in Florida for a staff retreat.
“Compliance and commitment are two different things,” he said. “People can comply just to be a part of the staff, just to be in the community. They’re not necessarily committed to the vision.”
That’s why CCC invests in both staff and volunteer development.
When UrbanFaith talked to Bernard during a break, he said he met with resistance when he first adopted customer service principles at CCC.
“There are those who are in a particular mind frame with regard to what the parameters of doing church and doing ministry is, and they were very critical,” he said. “Interestingly enough, here it is 20 years later and they’re now asking: how do we do it?”
“Ministry means serving,” he explained. “It means serving people and you need to be creative, you need to be wise, working within the principles of the faith, the orthodoxy of the faith, to achieve them. It requires structure. It requires organizational thinking and that’s my background.”
He looked to Moses as a biblical model for institutional leadership, he said.
“When I saw how God allowed Moses to grow and develop and learn and be educated in these things in Egypt, because he would then have to use it to lead and organize and structure over a million people that would become the nation of Israel, I appreciated that experience. I appreciated Moses in a different way.”
Bernard also talked about creating a home away from home for parishioners so that the emotional experience they have at church is a positive one.
“When people come to your church or whatever it is, your establishment that you are building for God, they leave with an emotional experience. If you don’t intentionally determine what that experience is going to be, then chances are great that it’s going to be negative and that will be the last time they come there. Environment is more than just a place that you gather to; it’s what you experience when you’re in that place,” he told the Movement Day audience.
So why not make the place they go to experience God their home away from home? Bernard asked. For Christian Cultural Center members, that home away from home grew from a storefront church into an 11.5 acre campus that is a catalyst for redemptive change in its community. And one man’s bold vision for “sanctifying” the skills he learned as a banker helped get it there.
NOT IN VAIN: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth (seated) in 2007 with then-U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama at a commemoration of the 1965 Selma March in Selma, Alabama. (Tami Chappell/Newscom Photo)
Two cultural pioneers died Wednesday: Apple founder Steve Jobs and civil rights champion Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. Both men were hailed as bold, fearless innovators who held sway over a younger generation and who used existing “technologies” to change the world.
For Jobs it was computer hardware and software; for Shuttlesworth, it was the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, which he invited into Birmingham, Ala. where he helped build a national stage upon which the battle for racial justice played out. Shuttlesworth rightly discerned that once Americans saw Police Commissioner Bull Connor’s hateful overreaction to African Americans’ pursuit of equality, their eyes would be opened to the cruelty and injustice of Jim Crow racism.
Jobs’ more recent triumphs may dominate the news cycle today, but for many Americans Shuttleworth’s legacy might be even more revolutionary.
A Courageous Visionary
The civil rights pioneer was 89 when he died in Birmingham, Ala. He had pastored Bethel Baptist Church there but moved to Cincinnati with his family in the early 1960s, CNN reported. In Cincinnati, he remained active in civil rights and pastored the Greater New Light Baptist Church from 1966 to 2008. Shuttlesworth returned to Birmingham in 2008 after suffering a stroke and was being cared for in a nursing home, according to NPR.
“Fred Shuttlesworth had the vision, the determination never to give up, never to give in,” Georgia Rep. John Lewis told NPR. “He led an unbelievable children’s crusade. It was the children who faced dogs, fire hoses, police billy clubs [in Birmingham] that moved and shook the nation.”
Shuttlesworth “personally challenged just about every segregated institution in the city — from schools and parks to buses, even the waiting room at the train station,” Historian Horace Huntley of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute told NPR.
After an Alabama judge outlawed the NAACP, Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and then helped create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He also asked U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to protect the Freedom Riders, NPR reported.
Shuttlesworth was repeatedly jailed, and his home and church were bombed, but he refused to be intimidated. In the documentary Eyes on the Prize, he said that after one bombing he told Klansman police officers to go back and tell their fellow racists, “If God could keep me through this, then I’m here for the duration,” NPR reported.
A Testament to Strength
President Barack Obama said yesterday that Shuttlesworth “dedicated his life to advancing the cause of justice for all Americans” and “was a testament to the strength of the human spirit.”
“America owes Reverend Shuttlesworth a debt of gratitude, and our thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Sephira, and their family, friends and loved ones,” President Obama said.
In 2001, President Bill Clinton awarded Shuttlesworth a Presidential Citizens Medal for his leadership in the “non-violent civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s,” according to CNN. In the video below, Rev. Shuttlesworth reflects on his commitment to nonviolent resistance in the face of racist violence.
Shuttlesworth’s Unique Contribution
UrbanFaith asked two scholars of religion and race for their thoughts on Shuttlesworth’s significance. Here’s what they had to say:
I. Fearless
Curtiss DeYoung
For over twenty years I have taught a course each semester to undergraduates on Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Always in the process of learning we discover that the struggle for civil rights, racial justice, and human dignity in the United States was the result of tens of thousands of committed people. One of the brightest shining stars and greatest exemplars of courage in the struggle was Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.
In 1963 Rev. Shuttlesworth invited Dr. King to bring his national efforts at confronting the evils of racism to Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most racist cities in the United States. The images of police dogs and fire hoses assaulting brave protesters, many who were children and youth, are burned into our collective memory. The entire Birmingham protest was marked by an extraordinary expression of courage. And it was Fred Shuttlesworth that most embodied this fearlessness for others to emulate.
It is not an overstatement to say that the success of the protest in Birmingham in 1963 was built on the foundation of several years of courageous acts against racism in Birmingham by Rev. Shuttlesworth. The courageous actions of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth helped produce the achievements of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and subsequent movements for social justice in the years that followed. He leaves a legacy of always speaking and living truth—something we need more of today.
What Shuttlesworth’s story shows is that the movement was precisely that – a movement. Too often, Americans search for individuals as icons; too often they set up one person as the epitome of a story. Bill O’Reilly, for instance, often credits Abraham Lincoln for ending slavery, winning the Civil War, and healing the United States. By lodging social change in one person, Americans fail to see their history for what it was. And Shuttlesworth knew that to change a nation and to change history, it took more than one man.
Shuttlesworth was one of many heroic Americans of the mid and late twentieth
century who transformed the nation. Martin Luther King Jr., was his friend, not
his leader. They were colleagues who joined with other women and men, children and adults, to obliterate segregation. And they did so through faith – in God, in Christ, and in themselves.
Faith led Shuttlesworth to bear violence on his body (as so many others did); it led him to strain on amid death, even of children. Shuttlesworth was a movement man. No individual was bigger than the goal. When we think back to Reverend Shuttlesworth, we can remember him how he would want to be remembered: fortunate to be part of a broad struggle for freedom and uplift.
—Edward Blum, Ph.D., historian on race and religion in the United States at San Diego State University and author of several books, including W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet.
Your Thoughts?
Former Georgia Rep. Andrew Young told CNN that Shuttlesworth helped launch the national careers of other leaders but chose to serve his churches and work locally to advance the civil rights of all people. What are your thoughts on the passing of this lesser known, but incredibly courageous leader? How does he inspire you?
Your new book, God Can’t Sleep: Waiting for Daylight on Life’s Dark Nights, is full of stories of profound suffering. What inspired you to write it?
