by UrbanFaith Staff | Jun 18, 2015 | Feature, Headline News |
c. 2015 USA Today
“He was a giant, a legend, a moral compass.”
Senior Pastor, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, speaks to those gathered during the Watch Night service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on December 31, 2012. Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Randall Hill
Those are the words used by fellow state senator Marlon Kimpson on CNN Thursday morning to describe the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor and politician who was among nine people killed when a gunman, believed to be white, opened fire Wednesday evening at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
Pinckney’s sister also died in the shooting, said J. Todd Rutherford, the minority leader of the state’s House of Representatives. Her name is not known and the other victims, two men and five women, were not immediately identified.
Rutherford, who has served in the State Legislature with Pinckney since 1998, told the New York Times that his colleague was “a man driven by public service” whose booming voice inspired his congregation and constituents.
Pinckney, 41, was married with two children and had served in the state Senate since 2000, according to an online biography on the church’s website.
The pastor was a magna cum laude graduate of Allen University with a degree in business administration and went on to earn a master’s degree in the same subject at the University of South Carolina, the site said. He then obtained a master’s of divinity from the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary.
According to Rutherford and the website, Pinckney started preaching at 13 and received his first appointment to be a pastor at 18. At 23, he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representativesthe youngest state legislator in South Carolina history, and in 2000 was elected to the State Senate. Washington Post columnist David Broder called Pinckney a “political spirit lifter for surprisingly not becoming cynical about politics,” the site said.
A black mourning cloth was draped over Pinckney’s seat in the senate chamber in the capital, Columbia, Wednesday, according to news reports.
In 1999, Ebony Magazine named Pinckney as one of 30 African-American leaders of the future. He and his wife, Jennifer, have two children, Eliana and Malana.
State Rep. Wendell Gilliard told the Charleston Post and Courier that he visited Pinckney’s wife and daughters after the shooting. saying that the family is “surrounded by friends.”
In April, Pinckney helped lead a prayer vigil for Walter Scott, a black South Carolina man who was shot dead by a police officer as he tried to run away.
The veteran civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton, who was also involved in the vigil, tweeted on Wednesday night: “Rev. Clements Pinckney, a SC legislator is among the 9 killed in SC church. I am reminded that he helped lead our prayer vigil for Scott.”
The church is one of the nation’s oldest black congregations. It is housed in a 1891 Gothic Revival building which is considered a historically significant building, according to the National Park Service, which said that the church is the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore.
The congregation was formed by black members of Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal Church who broke away “over disputed burial ground,” according to the park service’s website.
In 1822, one of the church’s co-founders, Denmark Vesey, tried to start a slave rebellion in Charleston, the website added. The plot was discovered and 35 people were executed, including Vesey.
The Rev. Joseph Darby of the AME Church in Beaufort, S.C., described Pinckney as “an advocate for the people.” He told MSNBC that “he was a very caring and competent pastor, and he was a very brave man. Brave men sometimes die difficult deaths.”
Copyright 2015 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
by UrbanFaith Staff | May 1, 2015 | Headline News |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
Members of the community hold hands in front of police officers in riot gear outside a recently looted and burned CVS store in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 28, 2015. The day after rioters tore through Baltimore, the city’s mayor was criticized on Tuesday for a slow police response to some of the worst U.S. urban unrest in years after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died in police custody. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said he had called Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake repeatedly Monday but that she held off calling in the National Guard until three hours after violence first erupted. (Photo Credit: REUTERS/Jim Bourg)
WASHINGTON (RNS) In the past week, the Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, a black Episcopal priest and religion professor at Baltimore’s Goucher College, joined students as they watched, analyzed and agonized about their city erupting in protest after the death of yet another black man, Freddie Gray, in police custody.
On Friday (May 1), the Baltimore state’s attorney criminally charged six officers involved in Gray’s death and declared his arrest was illegal.
Douglas, author of the new book “Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God,” writes about the death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin, the acquittal of George Zimmerman in his killing, and the deaths of other unarmed black people that followed.
Douglas talked about violence faced by African-Americans and the black church’s response. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Q: From your perspective as a theologian, what do the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray and other young black people say about our society?
A: They are connected and, in fact, what happened to Trayvon, and now what has happened to Freddie Gray, is really part of a larger history in our society in that we simply have not ever dealt with the issue of race in our society.
There are certain privileges that have been accorded to the white body. One of those privileges has been the ability to be in a free space, and that has not been a privilege that has been accorded to the black body. The black body was introduced in this country as chattel and, as such, was never intended to be in a free space.
We can see throughout history that anytime the black people have enjoyed some measure of increased freedom from the time of emancipation, through Reconstruction, through the civil rights movement, there has been an intense backlash.
Q: Some critics say the black church has become irrelevant to the youth on the streets protesting these deaths. Do you agree?
A: Yes and no. The black church has a role to play and it always has. It’s been that institution that has been a resource of survival as well as resistance and liberation struggles for the black community. The black underclass has been abandoned and the black church has to take some responsibility for that. Too many black people are continuing to be disproportionately victims of intense poverty and entrapped in the inner cities. Not only has our wider society not adequately responded to them but so too has not the religious community. And black youths do feel disaffected from the black church.
Q: You’re in Baltimore. Do you see anything different in how black congregations and their leaders have responded, compared to other cases where black men have died at the hands of the police?
A: What we have seen in Baltimore in particular is that the black community did indeed respond to the black church presence; the black church has been the center of refuge for people within the community that has been most affected by what has gone on by the protests of Freddie Gray.
One of the things in the media was looped images of the rioters. But the image that they weren’t looping continuously was of the black clergy who marched through those neighborhoods on that very night of the riots. Some knelt and prayed, and people respected that and people went home.
Q: You write about the “inherent absurdity in black faith.” What do you mean?
A: There is this certain absurdity of how do you believe in the hope and the justice of God, how do you have any hope in the face of what I call crucifying realities. The paradox of that in Christianity is the cross itself. How do we believe in justice and the kingdom that God promises when you have a crucified savior? And it is because of the cross that black people are able to believe, because they know that the God that died on that cross is one that knows their very suffering.
What’s so very powerful to me is that in the face of the death of his son, Trayvon Martin’s father could say, “My faith is unshattered.” How do you have an unshattered faith in the face of the death of your son? That is what black faith has always been about.
Q: What’s next for churches in Baltimore and across the country?
A: There has to be a conversation that trickles down on every level of our communities in churches locally, in churches nationally, about the injustice that plays out racially. We have to have this conversation so we can begin to change the systems and structures that create the kinds of conditions in which people are forced to live. The church has to take the lead, not follow. It has to begin to be that critical conscience of our country.
Q: Your book will be released on Mother’s Day, and you’re the mother of a 22-year-old son and college student. Do you speak as both a theologian and a mother?
A: Oh, definitely. As President Obama said once, if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon. I do have a son and he does look like Trayvon. When my son leaves my home, I tell him you must be aware of how you’re perceived and if the police ever stop you — even if you think that that stop is for no other reason than the fact that you are black — I tell him: “I don’t care if they tell you to get on your knees. You get on your knees because in that moment of humiliation you can save your life.”
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by UrbanFaith Staff | Apr 14, 2015 | Headline News |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON (RNS) First lady Michelle Obama hosted a discussion with musicians and students on gospel music at the White House on Tuesday (April 14), praising gospel’s role as “a ray of hope” in American history.
First lady Michelle Obama spoke of her admiration of gospel music as she welcomed students to a workshop at the White House on gospel music on April 14, 2015. (Photo Credit: Religion News Service by Adelle M. Banks)
“Gospel music has really played such an important role in our country’s history,” she told more than 100 students gathered in the State Dining Room, “from the spirituals sung by slaves, to the anthems that became the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, and to the hymns that millions of Americans sing every single day in churches all across the country.”
Here are some of the lessons learned during the 75-minute event, where Grammy Museum Executive Director Bob Santelli interviewed a panel of singers and songwriters ahead of a star-studded concert that will air on PBS on June 26 as part of the “In Performance at the White House” series.
1. Gospel music is personal for the first lady.
“I’m really thrilled that we’re really focusing on gospel,” Obama said of the series that has previously featured classical, country and soul music. “It’s something that I wanted to do since we started.”
As Obama grew up, her aunt directed the church choir and her mother was one of its members.
“Gospel music is what fuels my love of music in general,” the first lady said. “I know that for so many folks across the country and around the world, there’s nothing like hearing a choir sing an old gospel classic. When you hear that music, it gets your feet tapping and your heart pumping. It gets you ready and prepared to take in that sermon for the day. It is what helps connect us to God, to that higher power, and for so many when times are dark and when you struggle, gospel music is that ray of hope and it gives you that strength.”
2. Much of American pop music has its roots in gospel.
“Even though it is a sacred music form, essentially born in the church and sung in the church, it has a lot of connections to the kind of music that’s on your iPod today,” said Santelli. “When Africans came to this country by way of slavery, they weren’t able to bring too much with them in terms of material possessions, but they brought the most important and the most valuable thing. That’s what was in their heart, what was in their soul, and that was almost always music.”
3. The church birthed musicians of numerous genres.
“I sang my first solo at the age of 7 — a hymn called ‘Blessed Assurance,’” said former Destiny’s Child member Michelle Williams, who continued as a solo gospel artist. “Gospel music really is my first love.”
Santelli cited others — Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, James Brown.
“I had a chance to see Whitney Houston when she was 16 years old,” said Santelli, who, like Houston, grew up in New Jersey. “She sang in the New Hope Baptist Church Choir in Newark. … It’s not surprising that she became who she was in terms of a singer. She learned it in the church.”
Country music singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett told the gathering that he sang in his church’s children’s choir before becoming a country music name.
4. Churches didn’t always celebrate the musicians they birthed.
“Like Aretha and Sam Cooke, my father was a pastor,” said Darlene Love, who sang backup for Elvis, Cher and Cooke and is an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “My father actually got a lot of flak when I started singing secular music or, as they called it, ‘the devil’s music.’”
When she appeared in the 1960s on the “Shindig” television series, her father really heard about it when members spotted her on the show.
“They would go to my father and say, ‘I can’t believe you’re allowing your daughter to sing that devil’s music,’ and my father would say to them, ‘Well, why were you watching it?’”
5. Elvis loved gospel music.
The “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” may have been a hit on the secular stage, but the three Grammys he received were for gospel music, Santelli said. He won two for “How Great Thou Art” and one for “He Touched Me.”
Love attested to Presley’s love for the genre.
“He said that he used to go on a Sunday night to a black church in the South, and back then they didn’t have air conditioning,” she recalled. “The windows were open and he would go and just stand at the windows and listen to the music.”
Copyright 2015 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
by UrbanFaith Staff | Apr 14, 2015 | Feature, Headline News |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
(RNS) Nigerians on Tuesday staged ceremonies to remember the 219 schoolgirls abducted by the militant group Boko Haram in Chibok one year ago on April 14.
A girl holds a sign during a march to mark the one-year anniversary of the mass kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls from a secondary school in Chibok by Boko Haram militants, in Abuja on April 14, 2015. Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Afolabi Sotunde
In Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, demonstrators sang and waved placards calling for the girls’ release. Some wore T-shirts with inscriptions such as #365DaysOn, #NeverToBeforgotten” and #BringBackOurGirlsNOW.”
The girls were abducted from their boarding school by heavily armed Muslim militants. The kidnappings provoked outrage around the world and offers of assistance from the U.S., where the #BringBackOurGirls campaign got widespread media attention.
Meanwhile, a Catholic priest in Nigeria said it was likely the children were still alive since their Muslim captors wanted to use them for ransom.
“They may not be all in one place or together,” said the Rev. John Bakeni, a priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Maiduguri. “Some may have died, for obvious reasons. But from the way some politicians are talking, I see their faces beaming with optimism.”
About 50 of the girls were seen three weeks ago, according to reports, although none has been rescued. In Chibok, there were high expectations as the military started combing the Sambisa forest, where the militants are believed to have hidden the children.
Boko Haram translates to “Western education is forbidden” in the Hausa language. Its insurgents have unleashed waves of violence in northern Nigeria, but the girls’ abduction is viewed as the most terrifying so far.
“It is a deep pain for the families whose daughters disappeared suddenly without a trace,” Catholic Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama of Jos, Nigeria, told Fides News Agency. “I can imagine their anguish.”
Last month’s election of Muhammadu Buhari has inspired a new hope over the children’s rescue. But in a statement on Tuesday (April 14), Buhari said he did not know whether the girls could be rescued.
But he added: “I say to every parent, family member and friends of the children that my government will do everything within its powers to bring them home.”Nigeria marks one year since Boko Haram kidnapped schoolgirls
Copyright 2015 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
by UrbanFaith Staff | Apr 6, 2015 | Feature, Headline News |
c. 2015 Religion News Service
The Rev. Gardner C. Taylor prays during his sermon at a historic meeting of four black Baptist denominations at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tenn., in 2005. (Photo Credit: Michael Clancy, Religion News Service file)
(RNS) The Rev. Gardner C. Taylor, widely considered the dean of the nation’s black preachers and “the poet laureate of American Protestantism,” died Sunday (April 5) after a ministerial career that spanned more than six decades. He was 96.
The Rev. Carroll Baltimore, past president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, confirmed that Taylor died on Easter Sunday.
“Dr. Taylor was a theological giant who will be greatly missed,” he said of the minister who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000.
PNBC President Rev. James C. Perkins said Taylor “transformed America and the world for the better. How appropriate it is that God called Dr. Taylor home on Resurrection Sunday. In both life and death Dr. Taylor gave a clarion call to the transformative power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Concord Baptist Church of Christ, the imposing, block-long, brick church Taylor pastored for 42 years, became a beacon of hope and vitality for many African-Americans in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a model for the nation. When the church was destroyed by fire in 1952, Taylor defied naysayers by not only rebuilding the edifice, but also doubling its size.
Concord, one of New York City’s largest churches, operated its own elementary school, nursing home, credit union and million-dollar endowment used to invest in the community. But for more than four decades, it was Taylor who made Concord’s pulpit “the most prestigious in black Christendom,” proclaimed author and scholar Michael Eric Dyson.
Dyson described Taylor’s preaching style as a blend of technical aspects, brilliant metaphors and an “uncanny sense of rhythmic timing put to dramatic but not crassly theatrical effect.”
The tall, charismatic pastor was renowned for the memorable sermons he spun from tales, anecdotes and Scriptures, but rarely captured in manuscripts. Taylor, a preacher’s preacher, kept his thoughts in his head before ushering them forth, and kept a black pocket Bible handy when he wanted to refer to the sermon’s Scripture reading for the day.
“When you talk about Gardner Taylor, it’s more than just the words,” said the Rev. Bernard Richardson, dean of Howard University’s Rankin Memorial Chapel.
Richardson, who first heard Taylor preach when he was a student at Yale Divinity School in 1984, said, “It’s his presence and I mean, everything about him preaches … his mannerisms, his sincerity, his love of God, love of Scripture. … When he mounts the pulpit, one immediately feels they’re in the presence of someone who is truly gifted.”
This gifted clergyman appreciated the accolades and honors he received during his ministerial career, but relished humility. “I’m appreciative that people take notice of me,” he once said, “but when I go to worship, I’m not looking for that.”
There is a divinity school series, the Gardner C. Taylor Lectures in Black Preaching at Duke Divinity School, and a street in Brooklyn named for Taylor.
Taylor also will be remembered for a thorny page in black Baptist history struck by his allegiance to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., during a tense time in the National Baptist Convention, USA. In 1960, Taylor, King and other black ministers split from the denomination after a fierce debate over King’s civil rights agenda, which many black clerics of the day thought was too politically liberal. As a result, Taylor and other King supporters seceded from the convention and formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention, of which Taylor was once president.
Those were troublesome days for Taylor, who said he lost friends as a result of the split, but his fervent preaching and ministry never waned.
When he was asked during an interview about what makes a great preacher, Taylor responded, “In the Book of Ruth, Naomi says, ‘I went out full, and I’ve come back empty.”’
For Taylor, “That was the story of life. It’s also the story of preaching; we must keep ourselves full so we can empty ourselves in the pulpit.”
In 2011, Taylor described what principles contribute to someone being a great preacher.
“I think the secret of preaching is a deep religious conviction, a knowledge of the Bible and the attempt to express it as well as one might,’’ he said. “I think that is the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary.’’
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