Show Faith With Pocketbooks, Leader of Black Baptists Urges : Finances: He declares at the group’s annual meeting in Los Angeles that greater cash donations are required to reduce a $7-million debt on a new headquarters building.

The truly converted show their faith with their hearts, souls and pocketbooks, declared the president of the National Baptist Convention U.S.A. Inc., during the black denomination’s annual meeting this week.

“Say what you will, but the best thermometer (to measure) black Baptists is what they give,” said the Rev. Theodore J. Jemison, who would soon cajole 10,000 delegates for donations at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Jemison, a Louisiana pastor, was seeking funds to reduce the $7-million debt on a $10-million Baptist World Center dedicated last year in Nashville. Before the five-day, 110th annual meeting ends Sunday, officials hope to have collected $1 million.

Money is crucial at this point, a critical juncture for the denomination, which is trying to live up to its numbers as the nation’s largest black church body and the third-largest Protestant denomination at 7.8 million members and more than 30,000 churches.

Jemison was elected president in 1982 as a relatively progressive pastor, succeeding Chicago pastor Joseph H. Jackson, whose 28 socially conservative years in the post were marked by the departure in the early 1960s of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others who wanted to move faster on civil rights. Jackson, now deceased, ran the skeletal denomination “from his hip pocket” as a personal possession, critics said when he was deposed.

Jemison quickly restored the denomination’s participation in the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches, sought to broaden its missionary and educational programs and make its annual meetings more than preaching, singing and socializing. He wanted to have a headquarters building for the first time--the kind of facility that predominantly white denominations take for granted.

The center, with its 162-foot spire and 3,000-seat auditorium, was dedicated in ceremonies 15 months ago on a Nashville hillside that cost an additional $2 million. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a National Baptist clergyman, stood at his side.

The building has been criticized by some black church specialists at divinity schools as an extravagant monument to Jemison at a time when they say the money could be better spent to fight drug and crime problems in their own communities.

But the Rev. Franklyn Richardson of Mt. Vernon, N.Y., general secretary of the National Baptists, said the headquarters has symbolic importance as a mecca for black Baptists and will serve practical needs. “Every department will have offices there eventually,” he said.

Richardson contended that the only criticism of the World Baptist Center is coming from outside the denomination.

Undeniably, within the National Baptist Convention, for all of Jemison’s progressive changes, the traditional deference shown to the denomination president was evident at the convention’s opening session Wednesday.

“We ought to do all we can to please our president . . . even pamper him,” said the Rev. Manuel Scott Sr., a Dallas pastor formerly of Los Angeles. Another pastor, whose church has given generously to the denomination, said it was “a joy to be under such a great, great leader.” Yet another said admiringly, “Nobody can beat him raising money.”

Jemison has made it clear that making only token contributions to the national church agencies, in spite of the traditional Baptist emphasis on the local church regardless of denomination, is unacceptable. Jemison once publicly chided an unnamed California pastor for giving only $50 a year to the national church even as he received a $40,000 gift from his congregation. “You can give $50 and see a chicken fight,” Jemison said.

Richardson said the denomination only receives between $20 million and $25 million annually for its various national organizations and agencies. The predominantly white Southern Baptist Convention--nearly twice the size of the National Baptist Convention in membership--has budgets totaling $135 million.

The National Baptist Convention U.S.A., Inc., officially organized in 1895, dates its origin from an 1880 meeting in Montgomery, Ala., of black Baptists, most of them ex-slaves, who had been involved in missionary work to Africa. Later disputes spawned two major breakaways--to form the National Baptist Convention of America in 1915 and the Progressive National Baptist Convention in 1961.

Today, however, Richardson said that black Baptist denominational differences are inconsequential. In addition, many black congregations are dually aligned with a black convention and one of the largely white denominations such as the American Baptist Churches of America or the Southern Baptist Convention.

As secular U.S. institutions integrated in the 1960s and 1970s, American and Southern Baptist churches sought to increase their black membership. Yet, black Baptists churches with their distinctive preaching, music and culture are still central to many black communities--much as black Methodist denominations have not been supplanted by the larger United Methodist Church.

“Black churches are still a force for order in black families and communities,” said H.A. Wiltshire of Long Beach, editor of The Baptist Journal, a monthly magazine scheduled to debut next month. “I shudder to think what would happen in urban neighborhoods without the black churches and their social services.”

Jemison made news this week with mild criticism of the American military deployment of troops to the Persian Gulf. He said he backed President Bush’s decision “as the right thing” on a practical basis, but he also said he was against any military action “over the issue of oil.”

But his stance was partly a lament over how suddenly the Bush Administration spent $1 billion for military moves while pleading poverty when faced with domestic urban problems. “Think of the good that the billion dollars could do for black America and poor white America,” he said.

The Rev. E. V. Hill of Los Angeles, a National Baptist vice president, said denomination leaders are not opposing the Bush Administration. The National Baptists have a patriotic flavor reflected in the opening ceremony for this week’s convention that began with reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

“It’s not a question of either/or, but we think the United States should come up with the money for both (the international and domestic crises),” Hill said.

Pastor of Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in South-Central Los Angeles, Hill is an energetic minister in tackling community problems.

“You wouldn’t think a black congregation could come up with the money, but somehow we manage to feed 4,000 people a week,” he said. Likewise, Hill asserted, if the U.S. government were really committed to reducing poverty and homelessness, it could also find the funds.