Refuge and Strength : On...

Pastor Kenneth J. Flowers:

The black church congregation was traditionally made up of mostly women. Many black men felt the church was weak. They couldn’t deal with “Love your neighbor and your enemy.” They thought that meant you were being a wimp. So a lot of men stopped coming.

In the last year, I’ve wanted to reach out to the African-American male. I started gearing my seminars to supporting and uplifting the black male. Now the major new membership is made of young black males from 18 to 20, up to 34 and 40. One ex-gang member joined in April. He announced to the congregation when he joined that he was an ex-gang member, and I put my arm around him and said “You’re in the Lord’s Gang now and I’m going to put you in my posse.”

On Fighting Back

Pastor Benjamin F. Reid:

We see black churches now doing a lot of work with drug addiction, with the homeless, with feeding the hungry, and then of course most are vigorously going after young people.

The most aggressive churches I know are trying to find ways of winning young people to a positive commitment to the Lord. It’s a more personal agenda than the civil-rights agenda. The civil-rights agenda was massive crowds, demonstrations. This is more personal, but we feel in the long run it is going to have more impact on society.

In the civil rights movement, we were fighting the enemy outside. In the black community, we have discovered that some of our worst enemies are within our own ranks. Now we are starting to fight (those) enemies--the guys who are getting rich peddling drugs in the black community. We’ve got to resolve the fact that the AIDS virus is spreading more rapidly in the black community. We’ve got to solve the problem that almost half of our black babies are born to teen-age mothers and that more than half of our black families are one-parent families headed by females.

The breakdown in family life, the difficulty in black men finding adequate, gainful employment and accepting the responsibility of fatherhood and family, these are the enemies within we are really struggling with. That 30% to 60% of our kids never finish high school and become non-productive, having no marketable skills.

Most black ministers in churches don’t like welfare (any) more than anybody else (does). We don’t see welfare as an answer to people’s problems. We are struggling to find a way to help young people finish school and to train them with marketable skills.

This is far afield from singin’ and shoutin’ and preachin’ and prayin’, but we believe it is the absolutely important part of our agenda. In the church, it’s imperative to resolve these problems inside of the black communities. It’s a big job.

Pastor Cecil L. (Chip) Murray:

Our basic roles have not changed, but the arena in which our roles are played has changed. The lion is more vicious, the equipment more costly, the risks and needs are far greater. The magnitude of every ill is intensified.

The coming-to-church-for-personal-salvation days are over. Now we are looking for not only personal salvation but (for) social salvation.

If you do not change the community, the community corrupts the individual. You draw upon the same basic schema displayed in Genesis . . . God creating something out of nothing. . . . The church exists to set the moral climate and moral program.

(Recently, at the funeral of a drive-by shooting victim) you saw those young men and women--19, 20, 21, hardened, aged, cynical, strung out with wine bottles and whiskey bottles in their hands at that time of day, thinking they were avant-garde . . . anxious, angry, spoiling for a way to vent the anxiety and anxiousness. And at the same time, utterly reduced to tears.

The fruitlessness of the human plight: that this 24-year-old boy, having been a bosom buddy and brother and support group, is now wasted. And looking into that casket and not only seeing the dead but the Self. And realizing that utter futility, the hopelessness of it ending this way. But then the nihilism that says “Everybody gotta die sometime” and the bravado, “Live fast. Die young. Make a beautiful corpse.”

The truth of the matter is, they’re unhappy. They need a way out whether they want a way out or not. They see no way out. . . . And anybody who would convert them, that person becomes the animal.

We must continue to address those who need redemption with job training, and reprogramming and isolation from their environment. . . . The other front is preventive measures such as the Lock-In (in which parents and children spend 24 hours learning how to talk to each other). This particular Lock-In was for teens 13 to 18. They are 80% formed but not yet deformed, in the crucial stage of seeking identity and seeking heroes and heroines.

(As a minister,) when you look out at those Damon Runyon characters at that funeral . . . you wonder, have they been reduced to the level of zombies, beasts, mechanical people? And yet you sit and worship, and you see 1,500 motivated, caring, sensitive people. You walk on different levels and entertain different groups, and this keeps you in balance. You realize that the middle-status blacks are doing reasonably well. It is the squeezed that are being crushed, and we must do all we can to relieve some of the pressure. It really takes an arrogant black person to fail to see that “There but for the grace of God go I.”

How to Be a Pastor

Reid:

They look to me to have a vision to what the church ought to do, what church ought to be about. They expect me to address that constantly. I have a very free pulpit here; anything I want to say, I can say. . . . They expect me as pastor to point the direction and to keep the vision clear, to inspire them, to address their spiritual needs, to make counseling resources available for them, to keep the church current with what we ought to be doing.

Flowers:

Preaching delivery comes from the spirit. The art of preaching in the black church--I don’t know how else to describe it--(is) a gift that God gives you. There’s a term in the black church called “to whoop.” I’m not a whooper. I tune up a little bit, but I don’t whoop. . . . Preaching should be a constant buildup. Like an airplane taking off on the runway, picking up speed, ascending and then reaching a climax, as opposed to a helicopter, which takes off and goes straight up. My teacher in Detroit told me, anything good doesn’t have to be eternal. Don’t wear people out. Have a message. Style and delivery will come later.

I’ve tried to always incorporate the spiritual with the social. The two cannot be separated. Jesus dealt with the spiritual and the social--feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick.

I preach a social gospel ministry, which deals with the spirit and the spiritual sides--so when you die you’ll go to heaven, but (it) also incorporates the political and economic and social side of life, the here and now.

If we loved each other, we wouldn’t live in poverty, kill each other, sell drugs to each other. Just remember two commandments, and all others rest upon those two: first, love the lord God with all your heart, mind and soul. And the second one says “Love thy neighbor as thyself. . . .”

Hope for the Future

Reid:

At the same time that we’re seeing the bleak side of the picture, we’re also seeing good things happening. I stood Sunday morning and saw 20 people join church, young adults. That’s exciting to me. . . . The good things that are happening keep us aware of the possibilities. There are times some of us get overwhelmed at the size of the problems, but we keep chipping away at (them). When I moved here I found an attitude of hope that I don’t think hardly exists anywhere in the country. There is still a can-do attitude among our people. . . .

If I keep before them what we ought to be doing, they do it. They raise prodigious amounts of money for outreach, drug programs, jail ministry, you name it. This is the kind of church that responds to a challenge, they want to help hurting people. As the pastor, I keep before them where the hurt is, and they respond with real vigor.

The Good Shepherds * Kenneth J. Flowers, 30, has been pastor at Messiah Baptist Church on West Adams Boulevard since 1989. Born in Detroit, he was called to the ministry at 17. Messiah has about 400 members.

* For 15 years, Cecil L. (Chip) Murray, 62, has led the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black congregation in Los Angeles. The First A.M.E. church has about 7,500 members.

* Benjamin F. Reid, 54, has been pastor to the 4,000 members of First Church of God in Inglewood since it merged in 1972 with his Holmes Avenue Church of God. Reid came here 21 years ago from Detroit.