by Christine A. Scheller | Jun 20, 2011 | Feature |
Will Graham
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) may not be the first organization people think of as a leader in reconciliation ministry, but at the Jersey Shore Will Graham Celebration that took place in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, on May 20-22, the ministry’s emphasis on diversity brought Christians together to meet the spiritual needs of an ethnically, racially, and denominationally diverse population, as the legendary evangelist’s grandson, William Franklin Graham IV, and others addressed enthusiastic crowds.
“For us to move into a city and begin to work with churches, it’s understood that we look for denominational and racial inclusiveness. It’s not something that we have to be told. It’s in the BGEA DNA, and that goes back to Dr. Graham’s commitment to racial inclusiveness,” said Rod Barnett, director of BGEA’s North American crusade field staff.
Christians counseling new believers at the Jersey Shore Will Graham Celebration
“We look at the number of churches in each denomination and make sure that at least the top five or six denominations are represented on our executive committee. And then we look at the ethnic mix. … The strategy of each of these committees is they have a reach into each of these areas that nobody else does,” said Celebration director Terry Wilken, adding that BGEA requires women and business leaders to be represented as well.
Owen Alston is pastor of Harmony Ministries in Lakehurst, New Jersey, and was on the executive committee for the Jersey Shore Celebration. Alston said he’d met and become friends with pastors of white churches that he wouldn’t have otherwise met.
“Most of the pastors and leaders project unity. They push for it, but they still have to deal with all the people in their congregations,” said Alston.
“I’ve put extra effort into mobilizing what we would consider the black churches to get them on board and to allow this to be a tool to help break down the racial barriers. What’s unfortunate is I’m getting more negative input from the black community than I am from the white,” he said.
Alston had invited nine black pastors to participate when UrbanFaith talked to him this spring and only two had declined. UrbanFaith was unable to contact these two pastors.
“It’s always challenging convincing the churches that we want them to be involved. … That happens in almost every city,” said Wanda McCurdy, a longtime BGEA employee and the only African American staff member on site at the Jersey Shore Celebration.
“The Graham Association always goes the extra mile to make sure everyone is involved and has opportunities,” she said.
James Taylor Jr. teaching youth in preparation for the Jersey Shore Will Graham Celebration
James Taylor Jr. taught at a series of youth training events before the Celebration. He had previously volunteered with BGEA after his predominantly African American church didn’t want to support its efforts to host a festival in his city, he said.
“It was kind of more of a politic thing,” said Taylor. “What are you going to do for us as blacks? But I felt like it would really help integrate our students, because what was a problem for me was that I had so many black students and white students at a predominantly African American church. … I knew when the Graham festival came, that was a way for our kids to see more diversity,” he said.
Now Taylor pastors a racially and ethnically diverse church in Portsmouth, Virginia. He said BGEA’s diversity commitment is one of the top two reasons he works with the organization.
“[Dr. Graham’s’] concept of racism was basically that it’s not just a social problem, that the root of racism is sin. The only way to overcome that sin is through Jesus Christ. It’s the changed heart of an individual. You’re not going to legislate it. He was saying you gotta’ change the human. That’s always been BGEA’s stance,” said Barnett.
Alston said denominational “spirits” are just as bad as racial ones, but both were overcome at the Celebration through the prayers of spiritually mature people.
“Our prayers were to break down these barriers. We really shouldn’t have to break them down. Jesus already did that. He broke down the wall of partition, but here again the adversary has built them back up. It takes concerted effort to [break them down] and if you don’t do it, it won’t happen,” said Alston.
Barnett recalled a 2006 event in Gainesville, Florida, where there had been a white ministerial group and a black ministerial group that had never worked together.
“As an outcome, at the end of the festival, there had been such a movement between these two groups and a softening of the heart that when we finished the festival there, two weeks after the festival, both ministerial groups met and dissolved and they formed one ministerial group,” said Barnett.
“[Dr. Graham] had one single focus and that was leading people to the cross, leading them to Christ. For us to do that way of evangelism, you work through the local church and when you work through the local church and that is your single focus, one of the outcomes is a better sense of unity,” he said.
On June 25-26, BGEA will hold its first ever bi-lingual American Hispanic Festival at the Home Depot Center in Los Angeles. According to its website, more than 600 Hispanic churches are involved.
“The Hispanic population in southern California is looked at and treated many times as second-class citizens,” Festival co-chair Danny de Leon told BGEA. “For a Crusade to come for them sends a very important message that they are loved and cared for.”
Barnett said Franklin Graham’s interest in this community is born of his passion for people.
“You look back through Dr. Graham, and you look back with Franklin and with Will, there is a passion to reach people for Christ. And with them, it doesn’t make a difference who they are, where they’ve come from, what their background is, what color their skin is. They realize that everyone stands in need of the savior, and they want to reach as many people as they possibly can,” said Barnett.
by Christine A. Scheller | Jun 17, 2011 | Feature, Headline News |
The U.S. Department of Labor has launched Partnerships Community of Practice (CoP) as a means to help combat unemployment, The Grio reported this week.
Ben Seigel, deputy director for the Department of Labor’s Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, told The Grio that churches “have a big role to play,” particularly when it comes to addressing the emotional challenges of being unemployed.
“What we have found, and churches have shown us, is that once they can get past the anger stage, and are helped in rebuilding their self-esteem, then they can become more productive job seekers,” he said.
In a blog post at the CoP site, Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis discussed employment ministries that include social media training, network groups, and work search round tables as means of support for the unemployed.
If your church has a ministry like this, tell us about it in the comments.
by Christine A. Scheller | Jun 16, 2011 | Entertainment, Feature |
The Book of Mormon, a play by the creators of South Park about two Mormon missionaries to Uganda, won nine Tony awards Sunday night, including Best Musical, but according to an April review that was reprinted at The Root this week, its plot is nothing to celebrate. Observes writer Janice C. Simpson:
If you’re black and your skin is even a little thin, there’s plenty in this show to rub you the wrong way, too. The Ugandans whom the missionaries encounter are plagued by poverty, AIDS and an evil warlord who forcibly subjects women to circumcision. Despite these woes, the villagers are portrayed as good-hearted, if simple-minded, people. One keeps referring to an old battered typewriter as her “texting machine.” Another stomps around talking about raping babies because he believes that doing so will rid him of HIV. A dream sequence is set in hell, where the devil’s main disciples are Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, and Johnnie Cochran, who, a song explains, is there for his part in helping to free O.J.
Simpson notes that the material is “played for can’t-you-take-a-joke laughs,” but she didn’t find the subject matter funny.
RACE, RELIGION & SATIRE: The cast of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical "The Book of Mormon" during the show's opening night in March.
“Parker and Stone [the show’s creators], who call themselves libertarians, have gotten away with this kind of cavalier attitude toward serious subjects for years because of their ability to sugarcoat it with faux irony,” Simpson declares before accusing the South Park provocateurs of “indulging in cultural colonialism of the most insidious kind.”
Sure, the head villager is seen as a wise man, and his daughter is the doe-eyed idealist who brings the sides together. But the show doesn’t work unless the villagers are seen mainly as noble savages who need white people to show them the way to enlightenment. And in the end, their salvation comes from believing in the white missionaries who have been dropped into their midst.
At The Grio, Earl Ofari Hutchinson read the play differently, writing today that it “skewers Mormons for the church’s decades of racial prejudice and for their prodigious proselytizing activities in Africa.” Hutchinson said the church’s history will “saddle” Mormon presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman with “the heavy burden of the religion’s racial history,” which he said includes its refusal to publicly apologize for its “long, stubborn, and dogmatic defense of alleged biblical encoded racism.”
Perhaps in anticipation of the musical’s Tony Award domination, Mark Oppenheimer reported on the black Latter Day Saints Genesis Group in his latest New York Times column. Oppenheimer attended a picnic with 300 members of the group in Utah and told stories of how they, as black Mormons, grapple with their church’s history of racial prejudice.
Oppenheimer quotes Max Perry Mueller, who is reportedly writing a dissertation at Harvard on African Americans and the Mormon church. Mueller told Oppenheimer that the Latter Day Saints have “made a very sincere effort” to welcome blacks, but few African Americans have joined. He also said the notion that until recently Mormons were “exceptionally exclusionary or racist is probably unfair” because “while no other large, predominantly white church barred blacks from the clergy in the 1970s, none was particularly integrated or had notable black leaders, either.”
If you’ve seen The Book of Mormon, what do you think? Is it racist, anti-religious, or just an equal-opportunity offender that shouldn’t be taken that seriously?
by Christine A. Scheller | Jun 15, 2011 | Feature, Headline News |
Given that court cases claiming reverse discrimination have been litigated since the 1970s, perhaps it’s not surprising that a new study shows whites think they are more discriminated against than blacks. Combine this finding with a host of other new facts and figures, however, and you get a lot of evidence suggesting these whites need a reality check.
The study was conducted by Tufts University psychology professor Samuel Sommers and Harvard Business School professor Michael I. Norton. They found that both blacks and whites believe racism against blacks has declined in the last 60 years, but whites believe the situation is now reversed, with racism against them surpassing racism against blacks.
In a nation-wide sample of 208 blacks and 209 whites, some 11% of whites gave anti-white bias the maximum rating on the scale, while only 2% of whites gave the maximum rating for anti-Black bias. Sommers and Norton found no significant variation for other demographic factors like respondent age or education. They also said “whites linked lower levels of anti-black bias with higher levels of anti-White bias.”
“This emerging perspective is particularly notable because by nearly any metric—from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education—statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for Black than White Americans,” the researchers concluded.
Coincidentally, last week Gallup published results of a poll that indicated 30 percent of African Americans think unemployment is the nation’s biggest problem while only 19 percent of whites think so. (Senior citizens and those earning less than $30,000 per year also named unemployment as the top problem, while Americans overall said it is the economy in general.)
Meanwhile the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on June 3 that the unemployment rate for May was “essentially unchanged” from the previous month. That rate was 16.2 percent for blacks, 11.9 percent for Hispanics, and 8 percent for whites.
An article yesterday at The Grio reported this rate as a factor in the disproportionate impact of the housing market collapse on African Americans. Other factors include “stricter credit score requirements, a severe decline in loans made to blacks, and predatory lending.”
“After peaking at 50 percent in 2006, the African-American home ownership rate has now fallen to 44.8 percent, Census Bureau data show. By comparison, the home ownership rate for whites in the U.S. is 74.1 percent, and the nation’s overall home ownership rate currently stands at 66.4 percent,” the article said.
Additionally, “The Center for Responsible Lending calculates that about 11 percent of African-American homeowners are in some stage of foreclosure, and that 1.1 million black families will lose their homes by 2012.” If the Qualified Residential Mortgage Rule that is being recommended by Federal regulators is signed into law, buyers will be required to put at least 20 percent down when purchasing a house, sending home ownership further out of reach for many Americans no matter their race, The Grio reported.
Finally, in our statistical mash-up, Psych Central reports that researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California interviewed 1,271 black men and found that they reported better mental health overall than whites, but the kinds of realities reported in these other statistics threaten it.
The National Survey of American Life: Coping with Stress in the 21st Century indicates that “lower socioeconomic standing including lower levels of education, unemployment and poverty were associated with poorer mental health status” in black men, but “only one out of 20 respondents reported major depressive disorder during the previous 12-month period,” and only 3 percent indicated the presence of serious psychological distress. “Overall, these prevalence rates are relatively low compared to non-Hispanic whites,” Psych Central concluded. (It’s important to note, however, that African Americans are less likely to seek and receive quality treatment for mental health concerns.)
Is there anything significant to be derived from the fact that whites think they’re being discriminated against more than blacks, while blacks actually are but report better mental health overall? Tell us what you think.
by Christine A. Scheller | Jun 7, 2011 | Entertainment, Feature |
REAL DEAL: Rapper Tedashii is back with fresh beats and a sweet deal for fans.
Beginning today, GroupTune.com is offering an exclusive $11.99 download bundle of hip-hop artist Tedashii‘s May 31 release Blacklight, plus his 2009 album Identity Crisis, three videos about the making of Blacklight, and six exclusive music videos from both albums.
Blacklight “is an attempt to uncover what we all often conceal, as Tedashii deeply exposes himself as an artist, Christian and human being, while infusing the common themes of hope and living with the end in mind,” wrote a reviewer at Rapzilla. “The singular message of a future hope to be realized in eternity is woven into the array of sounds, outputting songs that offer a social commentary on today’s culture and address the day-to-day struggles many face,” wrote the reviewer.
“After a brief hiatus and 2 teasingly-epic singles, Tedashii is following up his sophomore Identity Crisis with an even more diverse and mature album called Blacklight. While I worried that the Tron-like cover would make the album seem like a rip-off or even corny, rest assured the hype for this album is highly deserved,” wrote another at ChristianMusicZine.com.
Like all GroupTune offers, this one is available for one week only, said GroupTune founder Matt Shamus.
GroupTune works like GroupOn in that subscribers receive exclusive offers through email, Facebook, and Twitter, but GroupTune specializes in downloads of Christian music, books, and sermons, he said.
Some artists are not comfortable promoting themselves and their work through social media platforms, so Shamus created GroupTune (after 10 years at DiscRevolt) to help them connect with fans on their own terms and market directly to them, he said.
Summer deals will include music by Israel Houghton and Tadashii’s fellow Reach Records artists including Lecrae, said Shamus.
If you try this new service, let us know what you think.
