by UrbanFaith Staff | Aug 16, 2015 | Feature |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (RNS) At Alfred Street Baptist Church, the pews start to fill more than half an hour before the service begins. White-uniformed ushers guide African-Americans of all ages to their seats. Some stand and wave their hands in the air as the large, robed choir begins to sing.
In September, after using a dozen wired overflow rooms, the church will start its fourth weekend service.
So many people attend, church leaders are now asking people to limit their attendance to one service.
“Pick your service,” said the Rev. Edward Y. Jackson, an assistant to the pastor, at the start of a recent service. “Come in, come early, get your parking space so we can all enjoy and worship God together.”
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that Christians are losing their share of the U.S. population, dropping to 71 percent in 2014, down from 78 percent in 2007, with young people leading the exodus. But historically black denominations have bucked that trend, holding on to a steady percent of members during that same period.
As significant, the share of millennial-generation African-Americans who affiliate with historically black churches is similar to that of older churchgoers.
There are numerous reasons why some black churches retain their members, but, most prominently, the church has played a historic role in black life that has fostered a continuing strong black Protestant identity. Members and visitors at Alfred Street say the church’s holistic ministry — the preaching, the singing and the community outreach — are what draw them in and keep them there.
“I think black churches have always been very pivotal in social movements and outreach,” said Kelli Slater, 20, a Howard University student from Mississippi who was visiting Alfred Street at the invitation of her older sister. “I think black churches do a whole lot more than religion.”
In late July, the church held its annual “Brother’s Keeper” outreach project, in which it gave 2,000 low-income children backpacks and winter coats and provided health screenings for their families. In December, some members marched from the church to a local courthouse in support of the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
The Rev. David Daniels III, a church history professor at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, said black churches are not universally successful in holding onto younger members, but in some places, mostly black megachurches are gaining adherents even as smaller, aging congregations have dwindling numbers in their pews.
“In some cities, there are some congregations, often with younger pastors, either millennials or Gen-Xers, who’ve been able to develop ministries that are able to attract in their cohort group,” said Daniels, a minister of the Church of God in Christ.
The Rev. Howard-John Wesley, 43, has been pastor since 2008 of Alfred Street, which is affiliated with the historically black Progressive National Baptist Convention and National Baptist Convention, USA. He introduced a monthly “Come As You Are” Wednesday night service for millennials as well as “Hour of Power” summer Sunday services. In the last seven years, he said, his church membership has grown from 2,300 to 7,100, and 80 percent of the new members have been in their mid-30s and low 40s. Total attendance on recent weekends has surpassed 3,000.
“We decided to be very concise with time,” said Wesley, who knows families need time for their kids’ sporting events and who watches a 60-minute clock placed strategically at the back of the sanctuary. “The No. 1 thing people ask when they’re invited to a church is ‘What time do you get out?’”
The Rev. Kip Banks, interim general secretary of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, said societal issues such as police brutality as well as efforts to be relevant to millennials — from live-streamed services to marriage and mentoring ministries — continue to draw African-Americans to black churches.
“The church has always spoken to these issues and the church is addressing these issues,” he said. “The black church is the place that’s always affirmed African-American life.”
But Banks and others say black churches are not immune to some of the declines experienced by Christianity in general.
“There are some of our churches that are doing extraordinarily well in terms of captivating and being able to minister to young people,” said the Rev. Jerry Young, president of the National Baptist Convention, USA. “And then there are a number of our churches that also are suffering.”
Like the rest of the U.S. population, some African-Americans are disaffiliating. The Pew survey found that 18 percent of African-Americans describe their religious affiliation as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” compared with 12 percent in 2007. The share of U.S. blacks who fit in the “nones” category rose at about the same rate as the general population, said Greg Smith, associate director of research at Pew.
Recently, NFL running back Arian Foster revealed he does not believe in God, telling ESPN “faith isn’t enough for me.”
And in his new book, “Between the World and Me,” author Ta-Nehisi Coates, a prominent black nonbeliever, writes to his son about how he has a markedly different perspective on the black church than his elders do.
“I thought of my own distance from an institution that has, so often, been the only support for our people,” he wrote. “I often wonder if in that distance I’ve missed something, some notions of cosmic hope, some wisdom beyond my mean physical perception of the world, something beyond the body, that I might have transmitted to you.”
But Richard Wair of Springdale, Md., the patriarch of a family that has attended Alfred Street for more than a century, remains hopeful that the next generation of African-Americans will continue the churchgoing tradition.
“As an older person, seeing young people coming in, I feel great, I feel encouraged,” said the 84-year-old deacon emeritus. “They have to take up where we left off.”
Copyright 2015 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
by UrbanFaith Staff | Jul 14, 2015 | Feature |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
HOT SPRINGS, N.C. (RNS) As she prepared for her mission — scaling the 30-foot flagpole outside the South Carolina Statehouse to bring down the Confederate flag — Bree Newsome reread the biblical story of David and Goliath.
A youth organizer with Ignite NC, a nonprofit group challenging voting laws, Newsome appeared briefly to raucous cheers Saturday (July 11) on the main stage of the Wild Goose Festival after speaking to a smaller crowd at the four-day camp revival that celebrates spirituality, arts and justice.
The 30-year-old activist, a dedicated Christian, drew on the biblical story of the Hebrew shepherd boy who slays a giant with a sling and a stone.
“I don’t even feel like it was my human strength in that moment,” said Newsome. “I’m honestly just so humbled.”
On June 27, Newsome climbed the flagpole to remove the Confederate battle flag, a symbol that represents for many a war to uphold slavery and, later, a battle to oppose civil rights advances.
Her action came 10 days after the mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, S.C., in which nine participants of a Bible study, including the pastor were killed.
She was charged with defacing a monument, a misdemeanor, according to a statement from the South Carolina Department of Public Safety, and could face a fine of up to $5,000 and up to three years in prison.
On Friday, the Confederate flag was lowered for good after state legislators signed a bill authorizing its removal.
For Newsome, it was a step too late.
“Why did people have to die for people to realize the state had been promoting hate with this symbol?” she asked.
Newsome grew up hearing her grandmother’s story of her black neighbor brutally beaten by Ku Klux Klan members because he was a doctor who treated a white woman. She told of ancestors who came through Charleston’s slave market and others who died in lynchings.
Invited to speak to the mostly white audience long after the festival schedule was set, Newsome joined a roster of speakers on the theme of “Blessed Are the Peacemakers,” a nod to the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.
This year’s gathering honored the festival’s “Fairy Godmother” Phyllis Tickle, the Christian author and editor diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. Speakers included Ferguson Commission member Traci Blackmon, Moral Monday founder William Barber, and immigrant advocate Alexia Salvatierra.
“We were in the presence of history,” poet Merrill Farnsworth said of Newsome’s appearance. “I was really glad to catch a glimpse of the person who did this.”
The daughter of a Baptist minister and onetime president of Shaw University in Raleigh, Newsome said she felt a calling into a new civil rights campaign following the death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin, a killing she likened to the death of Emmitt Till, a 14-year-old boy mutilated in 1955 after allegedly flirting with a white woman.
After the police killing of Michael Brown in Missouri last year, Newsome helped to convene The Tribe, a grassroots collective dedicated to community building.
Her actions at the South Carolina Statehouse grew out of what she calls her “crisis of faith” following the Emanuel shootings.
“This is like 9/11 to me,” Newsome said. “I see people just going about their daily lives. I can’t do that. I can’t function.”
On one hand, she said, the victims’ families quick forgiveness of accused killer Dylann Roof was a “rare display of Christ-like behavior.”
On the other hand, she said, forgiving too easily has helped perpetuate racist systems.
Speaking to some 300 people who crowded into the festival’s Spirituality Tent, she said she preferred action.
“Jesus is one of the biggest agitators that ever lived,” she said. “The only time Jesus was in the temple was when he’s flipping stuff over and stirring things up.”
Activists from Charlotte, N.C., had already been planning to remove the flag and had taken photos of the pole in preparation when they asked Newsome to join. They talked about the symbolic power of having a black woman remove the flag.
“Hollywood’s created plenty of white heroes,” said activist James Ian Tyson, who appeared alongside Newsome Saturday and spoke of his role that day — kneeling on the ground so she could climb onto his back and over the four-foot fence surrounding the flagpole.
Newsome said it wasn’t an easy decision to climb the pole. She was afraid for her life and asked her sister, whom she described as a “prayer warrior,” to pray for her.
Her faith helped her overcome her fear. She recounted an argument with a police officer that ordered her down.
“You’re doing the wrong thing,” she said the officer told her.
At that moment, she said, she remembered her reading of David and Goliath.
And she kept repeating the 27th Psalm: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” as she descended the pole.
“If we really want to work for a peaceful society, we have to agitate,” she said. “Until the people in power have to deal with you, they won’t.”
Newsome recalled figures like Rosa Parks, whose acts of civil disobedience led to gains in racial equality. She said she hopes for a day when black people won’t have to face obstacles to voting, endure underfunded schools or fear losing their lives at the hands of police.
“This to me feels like the beginning,” she said.
Still, festival organizers provided an eight-person security detail to make sure no one tried to infiltrate the Hot Springs Resort grounds to harm the pair.
At an interview after her talk, festival producer Rosa Lee Harden introduced Newsome to Blackmon, a pastor helping people in Ferguson respond to the Brown shooting. The pair embraced quietly and Blackmon broke into tears as she thanked the young activist.
“You lit my fire,” Blackmon said.
“Y’all lit my fire in Ferguson,” Newsome said.
“God is a God of liberation,” she added. “I know that he heard my great-great-grandmother in South Carolina when she was praying for her children to be free, and we’re going to keep praying until we’re all free.”
Copyright 2015 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
by UrbanFaith Staff | Jul 2, 2015 | Feature, Headline News |
by UrbanFaith Staff | Jun 24, 2015 | Feature |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
(RNS) Inevitably, after the massacre at Emanuel AME Church, people are beginning to talk about arming congregants for self-defense. It is a sad image: 25 souls sitting around at Wednesday night prayer meeting, some packing heat in case the next church attacker should happen to be among them.
A mother and son stand at a makeshift memorial for victims of a mass shooting, outside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, on June 22, 2015. Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
*Editors: This photo may only be republished with RNS-GUSHEE-COLUMN, originally transmitted on June 24, 2015.
Some people consider it a ridiculous idea, or dangerous, or even sacrilegious: Guns don’t belong in the house of the Lord Jesus, who taught turning the other cheek and peacemaking; guns don’t belong in the hands of angry people, and Lord knows people sometimes get real angry in church. Imagine an enraged deacon calling for a vote on whether to fire the pastor, gun in hand. (This might affect the church’s democratic process just a bit.)
Others have been in favor of guns in church for a long time. “Open carry” and/or “concealed carry” legislation has already been passed in numerous states, with application to numerous public places, including churches.
In Georgia last year, local church leaders found themselves on opposite sides of the issue, breaking down pretty neatly along left/right lines — yet another reminder that political ideology almost always seems stronger than shared Christian commitment in our red/blue culture. In the end, opponents managed to get an opt-in rather than opt-out system, so that churches would have to declare “guns welcome here” rather than having to declare the opposite. (An interesting addition to the run-of-the-mill messages on church signs.)
My most core Christian convictions center in the lordship of Jesus Christ, who laid down his life but did not take anyone’s life — and taught his followers the same pattern. When he could have defended himself, he did not. When the early church could have defended itself, it did not. Martyrdom and not defensive violence became the Christian paradigm. The early church dreamed of and worked for a renewed world and an end to its bloody violence.
But eventually Christians came to a theoretically limited embrace of violence, first in defense of the (supposedly Christian) Roman state and then its successors after the fourth century. Sometimes they embraced violence in the name of both state and church — for example, in suppressing heretics. Christians tended to support and participate in the violence governmental leaders ordered them to commit in criminal justice and in war, though just war/just violence theory set some limits — which gradually became refined over time.
Just-war thinkers always drew a sharp line between defensive and offensive violence, between justified and unjustified force. But just-war theory was primarily focused on the defense of the community or the state, not the individual Christian or the congregation. Romans 13:1-7 was read to authorize state violence as a deterrent, as defense, and as punishment of the wicked for violating communal peace and harming innocent people. But responsibility for executing that violence was left in the hands of government and its officials, which could and did include individual Christians but was separated from the function of the church. I could be shown to be wrong, but my reading of the Christian tradition is that the idea of heavily armed congregations hunkered down in self-defense in their houses of worship is a foreign concept.
But maybe that’s because for most of Christian history and in most places Christians did not need to feel afraid when they gathered in church. Excluding Muslim-Christian violence on those particular frontier lines — and after Christians in Europe and the colonies figured out how to stop killing each other over doctrinal differences — the average Christian didn’t need to be afraid of violence when she went to church.
This, of course, has not always been the case for the historic black churches in the United States, as Emanuel AME’s own history attests — though most white American Christians did not really notice before last week. As the center of African-American communal life, and often as the focal point of resistance to racist injustice, the black churches have periodically been victimized by violence. And yet I am not aware of any general pattern of African-American churches arming themselves in self-defense.
Perhaps that will change after last week. Certainly a general posture of open hospitality to the stranger could well be threatened.
I keep thinking about one stubborn fact of my own (limited) experience: I have never attended a Christian church that employed armed security, and I have never visited a Jewish synagogue that was not guarded by armed security. I first noticed it at a prosperous synagogue many years ago in northern Virginia, but since then have seen it elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad. I will never forget when my wife and I visited the historic Great Synagogue in Rome — where a 2-year-old boy had been murdered, and 34 children injured, in a horrific 1982 attack on a Shabbat service. A machine-gun-toting Italian police officer guarded that synagogue the day we were there. Armed security was certainly present in Jerusalem when I visited a synagogue in that city.
People regularly victimized by violence, including in their holy places, will seek to protect themselves. I cannot fault them for it. I fault those whose crimes have evoked this response.
Bottom line: Mosques, synagogues, churches and other holy places should not require armed security. But sometimes, in our wicked world, they face real threats to the unthreatening people praying there. State officials bear primary responsibility to protect those who are vulnerable. If they won’t or can’t do their job, it is terribly sad but not inappropriate for houses of worship to pay for the level of security required to keep their children and senior citizens from being murdered. This is preferable to the other solution — arming lightly trained or untrained civilians whose weapons probably risk doing far more harm than good.
May none of us ever stop yearning and working for the day when all this killing will end.
Copyright 2015 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
by UrbanFaith Staff | Jun 19, 2015 | Feature, Headline News |
An evening view of the Emanuel AME Church June 18, 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina. Dylann Storm Roof has been arrested in connection with a mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church Wednesday night. AFP PHOTO/BRENDAN SMIALOWSKIBRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
(RNS) Two days after Dylann Roof allegedly opened fire inside of an historic black church in a city with deep black historical roots, the country is poised Friday (June 19) to celebrate black empowerment and freedom from slavery.
Based on comments floating through social media and on editorials from news organizations, Juneteenth will have particular significance in Charleston, S.C., the community where 9 people died after being shot during a prayer meeting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a house of worship founded by slave revolt organizer Denmark Vesey and others.
Juneteenth — a contraction of “June” and “nineteenth” — is a holiday set up to commemorate the day in 1865 when Major Gen. Gordon Granger came to Galveston, Texas, to inform a reluctant community that slaves had been freed by President Lincoln more than two years before and to press locals to comply.
Over time, the observance marked by dancing and music has come to celebrate freedom and black achievement nationally. Those concepts go hand-in-hand with with the theme of Charleston, a city steeped in black history and defiance.
Americans in the last 24 hours seem to have embraced the Juneteenth concept and rewrapped it as a way to honor the Charleston victims. Various organizations and people were sending out word that the victims would be remembered during already planned Juneteenth observances.
The National Black United Front was organizing a Juneteenth Inter-Faith Prayer Vigil for Emanuel AME Church, slated for 7 p.m. EDT at the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum in Washington.
“There is a long history of bombings, burnings, shootings and other acts of terrorism committed against the black church and we would like to bring more light to this,” said Salim Adofo, national vice chairperson of the organization.
“The members of NBUF are asking members of all faiths in the community to join them as they will offer prayers and condolences to the victims of the shooting, their family, their friends and the members of Emanuel AME church,” the invitation read.
Editorials detailed the connection between Juneteenth and what took place at Emanuel, the oldest black church in the South and host site for the late Martin Luther King Jr. and other major figures over time.
“Friday’s celebration takes on new urgency,” read an editorial on the NewsOne website. “Surely, it was no mistake that the gunman picked Emanuel, which has played a pivotal role in black history.”
Social media was sprinkled with posts urging people to use Juneteenth to remember the victims.
“We commemorate those who were born or sold into slavery, and those who died in the process of bringing about its end,” read one Facebook post superimposed over a poster that reads “Juneteenth.”
On Twitter, author Eric Liu tweeted, “Black people being slain in southern churches like it’s (18 or 19) ’63. Tomorrow’sJuneteenth.”
Charleston is a place that reeks of black empowerment.
It is home to the Avery Research Center for African-American History and Culture. About half of all black Americans in the United States can trace their arrival to the country from the Charleston region, according to the Avery center site. In history, the city hosted a sizable free black population.
“Charleston looks the way it does because of African-American hands,” Deborah Mack, associate director for community and constituent services for the future National Museum of African American History and Culture, told CNN. The facility will open next year in Washington.
Charleston and South Carolina’s Low Country are one of the few places in the United States today where basket weaving, language and other indigenous African practices are still evident. In 1822, authorities discovered plans for a major slave revolt being organized by Denmark Vesey, one of the founders of Emanuel. Authorities fortified the northern boundary of the city to prevent future rebellions and ultimately built the Citadel, which today is a commercial hotel.
One neighborhood, Harleston Village, features 1820s homes that were owned by free black men, including carpenter Richard Holloway and religious leader and shoemaker Morris Brown.
Holloway owned 20 homes by the time he died, according to an essay by Bernard Powers, chair of the history department at the College of Charleston. Emanuel and other churches that emerged after the civil war allowed black congregations to worship how they preferred, and according to their own customs, Powers wrote.
Read an editorial Thursday on the Al.com website, “Mourn today for a congregation that has lost so much … But tomorrow, in the spirit of Juneteenth, we work toward a yet another victory over blind, evil hatred.”
Copyright 2015 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission. c. 2015 USA Today
