Gospel singer and songwriter Jessy Dixon died at home in Chicago Monday, September 26, the Associated Press (AP) reported. The 73-year-old succumbed to an undisclosed illness, his sister Miriam Dixon told AP.
Dixon wrote songs for Cher, Diana Ross, Natalie Cole, and Amy Grant, but was best known for popularizing gospel outside the United States, AP reported, and for his collaborations with Paul Simon, according to an article in the Chicago Sun Times.
“He was a man of God, he loved to praise the Lord,” Miriam Dixon told the Chicago Tribune. “He had many opportunities to sing other music, but he loved gospel.”
“Dixon was born in San Antonio, Texas, and began singing there. In Chicago, he connected with gospel great James Cleveland and over the years performed with a number of gospel groups,” the Tribune reported.
An obituary on Dixon’s website says that he authored more than 200 songs, including the gospel classics “I Love To Praise His Name” and “He’s The Best Thing … To Happen to Me,” but was perhaps most known for his 1993 hit “I Am Redeemed” a song that “impacted audiences worldwide, and held a top-ten position on the gospel charts for over five years.”
Dixon had been “a cherished fixture on the Bill Gaither Gospel Hour television series and concert tours” for the past 16 years,” the obituary said. He also received numerous Dove and Grammy award nominations, earned five gold records, and was a 2008 Christian Music Hall of Fame inductee.
“Jessy Dixon was a great influence on me personally,” Grammy-winning gospel recording artist Donald Lawrence told the Sun Times. “He was a great representative of the city and defined the sound of Chicago gospel and introduced that sound to audiences all over the world. Jessy was the ultimate sophisticated gospel singer-songwriter.”
He is survived by a brother and sister. His website says a “Homegoing Celebration” will be held Monday October 10, 2011 at 6:00 p.m. at the Family Christian Center in Munster, Indiana.
Mari White is not only a beautiful woman, she’s an accomplished entertainer and producer. She got her start in modeling, but won rave reviews this summer in a New York production of “All American Girls,” a play about the first female African American baseball league. Her latest project is a reality show called “Mari White Presents the Newsboys,” which offers a behind-the-scenes look at the popular Christian band that happens to feature her good friend and veteran dc Talk member, Michael Tait, on lead vocals. It’s scheduled to premiere in October on multiple networks, including JCTV, NRB, Total Living Network, Miracle Channel, LegacyTV, Cornerstone Television, and FamilyNet. UrbanFaith talked to White about the show and about how she lives out her faith in the entertainment business. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
UrbanFaith: Your professional credits include film, hosting, theater, TV, and modeling. How did you get into the entertainment business?
Mari White: I started in my late teens to pursue modeling and acting. I grew up very shy and very quiet and I thought that it would be fun to push those boundaries and make myself more outgoing and make myself be comfortable speaking in front of people and around a lot of people. So I did it more as a therapeutic type of thing, but it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable journeys of my life up to this point. I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about other people. The modeling seems like it would be fun, but you also have to recognize, it’s just a visual. I was able to recognize the pros and cons of being in the modeling industry as a woman and as a woman of God.
What are some of those pros and cons?
There are always opportunities where, as a woman, you’re booked for jobs that you may not feel completely comfortable with. Along with experience and along with age, you start to realize there are things that you don’t have to do. You don’t have to compromise. Same thing with acting. There are roles that you don’t have to accept. If I feel like it’s a quality project and there’s a bigger meaning behind it, then it’s something that I would pursue. All the work that I’ve done, I’m proud of and I feel like it recognizes different sides of a woman. You can absolutely be a woman of God and still be in the entertainment industry as long as you know who you are.
What kinds of faith challenges have you experienced?
Being in the entertainment industry is a great opportunity to rely on God because you never know what the next week or the next month will be. You may book a lot of work or you may not book any work. When you do book work, it still takes a while for the checks to come in. It’s not consistent. Every day is an exciting opportunity to see what’s going to happen.
Newsboys performing in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, where their reality show trailer was filmed.
How did you come to produce a show about the Newsboys?
I met the group a few years ago with the new lead singer, Michael Tait, and I had the pleasure of attending one of their live shows. I had seen many other groups perform before and always enjoyed this type of music, but I was blown away at how they performed. Without all the bells and whistles and the gadgets and smoke, they were amazing. Then when I did see them with all the bells and whistles, it was just that much more fantastic. The thing that caught my attention the most was the fact that there was so much history behind the Newsboys and also [Michael’s earlier group] dc Talk. Once I started to see these guys, and meet their wives, their families, and their friends, I recognized that they actually practice what they preach off the stage. That was something that I felt really needed to be seen: positive men for young people and for adults. It’s something that you don’t see on television that much.
How did you meet the band?
I used to host a Christian music television show based out of New York and I had the opportunity to meet multiple bands and performers in Contemporary Christian Music. I had the pleasure of meeting Duncan Phillips and Michael Tait of the Newsboys when the change had just happened with the band. While I was interviewing them, I felt bad because I wasn’t that knowledgeable about what was going on. They were sweethearts and they caught me up to speed during the interview. It was at that moment that I thought, “Wow, these guys are different.” In fact, something had happened with our transportation to pick them up from where they were performing, and they said, “No problem, we’re in Manhattan. We’ll just walk it.” They ended up walking like 14 blocks to our studio. That was the first thing that impressed me. I thought that was really down to earth and sweet and nice of them to do so. In the interview we had a blast. We just kept talking and talking. Ever since then, we all became friends. Their wives and I are friends. It’s such a great group of people, from the management to the label to the members, everyone is truly great.
What is your goal for the show?
I want to create a new type of Christian entertainment. I want to create entertainment that’s going to be fun, informational, and spiritual for everyone. Unless I’m mistaken, I don’t feel like there’s a lot of new and fresh family friendly, faith-based programming. The production value of the show is equal to any young adult program on any mainstream secular network. I feel like if you want to reach a faith based audience, a young audience, or even a new audience, you’ve got to be able to be on the same level of everything else that’s out there.
To watch the trailer for “Mari White Presents the Newsboys,” go to Newsboysshow.com.
Efforts to stay the execution of death row inmate Troy Anthony Davis continue today, including a last-minute offer by Davis to take a polygraph test to prove that he is innocent of the 1989 murder of off-duty Savannah, Georgia, police officer Mark MacPhail. MacPhail was killed while attempting to aide a homeless man who was under assault.
Seven of the nine witnesses against Davis have recanted or changed their testimony, but the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied Davis clemency Tuesday. The polygraph request was also denied, according to MSNBC. Davis is set to die by lethal injection tonight at 7 p.m. EST.
Christian Coalition Supports It
Jerry Luquire, President of The Georgia Christian Coalition, affirmed Davis’ scheduled execution in a statement to CBS affiliate WRBL3. Luqire said the parole board made “the only decision it could render if we are going to be governed by the rule of law” and “refused to substitute the emotions of those who disagree with the verdict with more than 20 years of legal decisions” upholding Davis’ guilt.
The Party of Death?
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that a headline at Addiction Info read: “The ‘Christian’ Republican Party of Death Kills Another.”
There the self-identified non-Christian, non-Republican Wendy Gittleson wrote, “More than 2/3 of Republicans identify as Protestant. Nearly a quarter identify Catholic, which means that less than 10% of Republicans don’t identify as Christian. You would think that people who call Jesus their savior would live up to the pro-life name they have given themselves.”
Pontius Pilot Redux
In a Jack & Jill Politics post that opened with the full text of John 8:1-7, Deborah Small said that although neither she nor any other member of the public knows the identities of the members of the parole board that refused Davis clemency, she assumes they consider themselves “good, upright Christians doing the Lord’s work.”
“I wonder if they ever consider what Jesus would think and do in their position? More importantly, what if they were making the same mistake Pontius Pilate made when he sentenced Jesus to death? History has not looked kindly on Pilate’s willingness to accept the unsupported claims of Jesus’ detractors that he committed capital crimes against Rome. History will not look kindly on the decision of this Board to execute a man who may in fact be innocent. He is certainly not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” Small wrote.
Barbarism on Display
In a letter to the editor of Cascade Patch, Rev. Robert Wright, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta, wrote: “Capital Punishment is state sanctioned lynching. Capital punishment is the exact opposite of civilization. Capital Punishment is the admission of our immature and barbarous tendencies as a society. While Capital Punishment may be the law in Georgia, it is not justice in Jesus’ eyes. … With the murder of Troy Davis, Georgia has admitted that Jesus’ will and ways are of secondary concern. Shame on Georgia.”
“We circled around him and we prayed,” Edward DuBose, president of the Georgia State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P told Lee. “I looked in his eyes and I saw peace, I saw a man of faith.”
What do you think?
Are you praying for a last minute reprieve for Davis or are you at peace with a just process?
Racial and ethnic congregations are bucking a trend toward decreasing vitality in American congregations, according to a new study published by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. The study, “A Decade of Change in American Congregations: 2000-2010,” was presented along with the latest Baylor Religion Survey at the Religion Newswriters Assocation annual conference in Durham, North Carolina, last weekend.
Congregations with 50 percent or more minority participants grew from about one-fourth of all U.S. congregations in 2000 to nearly one-third in 2010, the study revealed, but overall, there was a steep decline in the financial health of American congregations, as well as continuing high levels of conflict, aging memberships, and declining numbers.
Injecting Vitality into American Religious Life
The contrast between the growth of racial/ethnic congregations and the weakening of others was presented in light of census projections that show people of color becoming a majority of the U.S. population by 2050 and the number of non-white children born in the United States exceeding 50 percent by 2023.
Non-white Americans are, “by and large,” creating their own congregations rather than participating in historically White ones, the report said. Nonetheless, racial/ethnic congregations are injecting a “strong dose of growth and vitality into America’s religious life.”
These congregations are disproportionately Evangelical Protestant or non-Christian, urban and Southern. Their worship is more likely to be contemporary and innovative, which is significant because the study found that innovative, contemporary worship correlates with high spiritual vitality and numerical growth.
Racial/ethnic congregations are more likely to hold to a theology that is moderate or liberal than majority White congregations, but their use of technology tends to be modest to marginal. On average, they count less college graduates amongst their numbers, but they benefit from retention of their young adults.
Poor Financial Health, but Encouragement for Entrepreneurship
Black churches may be in better shape spiritually than White ones, but they lag behind in financial health, Hartford found. And yet, they are unique in their encouragement of entrepreneurship and profit-making.
Baylor’s researchers also found that more African American working adults attach religious significance to their work than do Whites or Hispanics. Half said they view their work as “a mission from God” and pursue excellence in their work because of faith, as compared to approximately one-third or less of Whites and Hispanics.
Work as a Calling
“The idea of work as a religious calling is most prominent in the Black church tradition of American Protestantism,” said Kevin D. Dougherty, associate professor of Sociology and a research fellow at Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion. “It’s in these churches where adherents are making stronger connections between work and faith.”
Black Protestant respondents are more than two-and-a-half times more likely than the religiously unaffiliated or adherents of other religious traditions to say that their faith community encourages them to start a business. Likewise, they’re more likely to feel encouragement from their church to make a profit in business, Dougherty explained.
Responding to Economic Reality
“There are both pragmatic and theological reasons why this might be so,” said Dougherty. “The black church has played an instrumental role in the African American community on a whole range of issues, including economic issues.”
He suggested that the emphasis on entrepreneurship and profits can also be understood as a response to high rates of unemployment and underemployment in the African American community.
“A second reason though is theological, the belief that God rewards faithful believers with financial prosperity and good health. The ‘health and wealth’ gospel is a popular message within African American congregations,” he speculated.
Afterlife Beliefs Lead to Good Work Habits
The study additionally revealed that 75 percent of Black Protestants believe in Heaven and 73 percent, more than any other group, believe in Hell. These beliefs were overwhelmingly associated with a commitment to job satisfaction.
“Persons who absolutely believe in Heaven and Hell overwhelmingly agree that the organization for which they work has a great deal of meaning to them,” the report said. These believers are also “always” or “often” motivated by their faith to pursue excellence in their work.
Dougherty noted, however, that among people affiliated with a religious group, there’s no difference in whether or not people pursue excellence because of faith.
“Catholic, Jew, and Protestants answered about equally in this regard. It’s only on the issue of calling that we find these differences of religious tradition,” he said.
What do you think?
Are racial and ethnic churches healthier than majority White churches?
Does your church encourage entrepreneurship and profit-making?
Do Black churches embrace the prosperity gospel message more than other churches, or does the researcher need to stick to the numbers?
RADICAL MISSIONARY: Sam Childers at the New York premiere of 'Machine Gun Preacher,' which is based on his action-packed life story.
Machine Gun Preacher, a new film starring Gerard Butler and Michelle Monaghan, poses challenging questions about just how far a Christian should go in the pursuit of justice for the world’s most vulnerable members, in this case children who were kidnapped in Sudan by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, also known as the LRA.
The biopic is about Sam Childers, a Pennsylvania drug dealer whose radicalism was redeemed by Christ and redirected toward preaching the gospel and saving orphans in East Africa. In the process of rescuing those orphans, Childers engages in gun battles with LRA soldiers, but he also manages to pull hundreds of children from either death or the murderous grip of the LRA.
The movie is a cross between The Blind Side and Rambo. For a faith-based film, it certainly doesn’t shy away from Rambo-style action. But The Blind Side might be the even more apt comparison, since both it and Machine Gun Preacher are based on true stories that navigate tricky racial issues. In fact, The Blind Side, just like this summer’s The Help, reignited the ongoing debate about films featuring benevolent white heroes who come along to help needy black victims. When I spoke to Childers at Machine Gun Preacher’s New York premiere, he insisted he was no “white savior” going into an African nation to save black children.
“If anything the children saved me,” Childers told me. “The children gave me a purpose. I wasn’t always a good person in life. I believe probably the only good thing that I ever done and stuck to doing was helping the children of Sudan.”
Machine Gun Preacher is a unique faith film in that it is R-rated and its main character is not sanitized either before or after his conversion. Its realism in this regard is its greatest strength. Too often our heroes are portrayed as one-dimensional converts who go from bad to good in one fell swoop. In Machine Gun Preacher, the converted Childers character has a crisis of faith and takes it out on everyone around him as he struggles to raise funds for a ministry that eventually threatens to consume him. Its strength may also be its greatest weakness, because it fails to adequately address the questions it raises.
When I interviewed Childers, he said his son “was killed” a number of years ago, but there is no mention of a son in the film. Instead a friend dies of a drug overdose and this too fuels his rage. At the after-party, Childers said his son had died from heroin.
ON THE RED CARPET: Michelle Monaghan and Gerard Butler at the 'Machine Gun Preacher' premiere. Butler and Monaghan portray Sam and Lynn Childers.
The intensity of the character is well served by Gerard Butler’s bold performance. When I spoke to Butler, he said he was raised Catholic, but that he had tapped into his Scottish heritage more than any religious faith to bring Childers to life on the big screen.
Michelle Monaghan, who plays Childers’ ex-stripper wife, Lynn, was also raised Catholic, and described herself as “a very spiritual person” when I inquired about her faith.
“I definitely think there’s someone out there greater than me,” she said.
Machine Gun Preacher is Monaghan’s first faith-based movie, she said, and she is “incredibly proud of it.”
“It’s faith based, but I think it’s something everyone can really identify with. … I don’t think anybody can see this movie and not be impacted by it in a positive way.”
Monaghan spent time with Lynn Childers and sought to honor her in her portrayal.
“I consider her the quiet giant of this relationship. Without her strength, I don’t know if Sam would be able to pursue the things that he does on a daily basis,” Monaghan said. “I wanted to understand who she was as a person, and what I’ve realized is, still to this day, her faith is what guides her. She really believes that he’s doing God’s work.”
Monaghan used her interviews on the red carpet to encourage the public to support the Childers’ Angels of East Africa Foundation. As the film was introduced and again as guests exited the theatre, they were encouraged to support the ministry.
Angels of East Africa took in close to $878,000 in 2009, according to its IRS tax form 990. The filing says that the organization runs one of the largest orphanages in South Sudan, serves 1,800 meals a day in Africa, runs a medical clinic, and has reunited over 1,500 orphans from displacement camps with their families.
The ministry is an outgrowth of Shekinah Fellowship, the church the Childers founded in Central City, Pennsylvania. Although the church website lists Sam as its pastor, he said Lynn is now the pastor. Their daughter Paige Wirick accompanied Sam to the premiere and said at the after-party that she works in the children’s ministry and that her husband Justin is the church’s youth pastor.
Although the film portrays the strain Sam Childers’ devotion to Sudanese orphans put on the family, Wirick said she supports the work.
“Every young girl eventually goes through where she needs her dad, but I don’t hold any grudges,” said Wirick. “I think everything I went through has made me who I am today, and I completely back my parents on everything that they do. I even want to run the ministry along side of them. I don’t take anything to heart where it pushed me away.”
She was born after her father’s conversion, she said, not before, as the film suggests.
And that’s not the only instance of artistic license that the filmmakers take with the story. The film version of Sam Childers’ life “amped up” the violence, he said. And while he doesn’t condone violence, Childers asked me what I would want him to do if the child he was trying to save were mine?
I posed a similar question to Christian peace activist Shane Claiborne when I interviewed him before he co-hosted the anti-war Jesus, Bombs, & Ice Cream variety show in Philadelphia on September 10. To hear what Claiborne had to say about the appropriate use of “redemptive violence,” listen here.
Childers’ question is a good one. Another is: how does a lone American citizen engage in armed conflict in another nation and continue traveling freely into and out of that country? Is it ever appropriate for a Christian to do so?
Tell us what you think. Is there a place for “redemptive violence” in the life of a Christian? Do you plan to see Machine Gun Preacher when it opens this weekend? If so, please come back and share your thoughts.
UPDATE:Christianity Todayreports that Sam Childers is accused of neglecting children at the orphanage he founded in Sudan.
“Witnesses have said that the children at Shekinah Fellowship Children’s Village are malnourished, unhealthy, and unhappy. Several locals — including pastors, government officials, and a high-ranking member of the military — tell Christianity Today that Childers has exaggerated or outright lied about his work in the African nation,” the article said.
Childers denied the accusations, saying they ultimately stem from an employee he fired for corruption and theft.
Gospel singer and songwriter Jessy Dixon died at home in Chicago Monday, September 26, the Associated Press (AP) reported. The 73-year-old succumbed to an undisclosed illness, his sister Miriam Dixon told AP.
