A Multicultural Mission

At an African Methodist Episcopal Church conference in Texas in 1998, Bishop John Richard Bryant startled his flock by proposing that they raise an offering for a Latino church holding a revival a block away. “For what?” he says his membership asked. “We’re up here and they’re down there.”

“Yeah,” replied Bryant, then AME bishop of the Texas region, “but we’re all brothers and sisters in Christ.”

Bryant can’t remember how much they raised, but he recalls that the Latino congregants were “shocked out of their socks” when he presented the offering. Today, he shrugs off the act as no big deal--what any Christian would certainly do. “We’re all supposed to be worshiping the same Lord,” he says in the slow, soft drawl of his native Maryland.

Now Bryant, 57, is in Los Angeles as the new bishop of the AME Fifth Episcopal District, which encompasses 250 churches in 14 states west of the Mississippi. As the church wrestles with dramatically changing demographics, which are reshaping historically black neighborhoods into multicultural ones, church members say no better man than Bryant can lead the way.

“He is the renaissance man of racial reconciliation,” said the Rev. Mark Whitlock, who started a multicultural AME church, Christ Our Redeemer, in Irvine in 1999. “The church serves today as the most self-imposed segregated institution in the USA. Bishop John Bryant is breaking the yoke that binds God’s great commission to preach, teach and baptize all nations.”

New census numbers show that the African American population in Los Angeles County fell by 3.6% from 1990 to 2000, while the numbers of Latinos and Asians grew significantly. In places from Hollywood to Santa Ana, demographic changes are challenging AME ministers to broaden their reach.

Some, such as the Rev. Clyde Oden of Holy Trinity Church in Long Beach, have learned Spanish. Whitlock, whose 350-member congregation is about 60% black and 40% white, Asian and Latino, says he has recalibrated his sermons to speak less specifically on African American themes and more broadly on such topics as racial reconciliation, the theme of last week’s service.

Bryant, who says he hopes to learn Spanish, said younger pastors seem more flexible in making the transition. But he said the overall church would probably heed the “wake-up call” he plans to sound on the issue.

“The AME Church, as with black people generally, doesn’t have a problem with inclusion,” Bryant said. “You never hear about a black church fighting to stay black. Our problem has always been the other way around. It’s simply been difficult for Americans, especially for whites, to join anything that is black-led.”

Since his appointment in July, Bryant has logged more than 70,000 miles visiting churches in his region. An elegant man, he was born in Baltimore, the son of AME Bishop Harrison James Bryant.

At age 10, he says, he was called to preach through a vivid dream of Jesus holding his arms outstretched, asking him to follow. Bryant said yes--but it was not until age 18 that his father let him answer the call.

Bryant graduated in 1965 from Morgan State University with a bachelor’s degree in history, spent two years with the Peace Corps in West Africa, earned a master’s degree in theology at Boston University, and then a doctorate in ministry at Colgate Rochester Divinity School.

He was consecrated a bishop in 1988 and returned to West Africa, where he presided over 101 churches and 25 schools in Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Africa transformed him, he says. A bright but rebellious youth, Bryant said he never finished a book in college and slid through by cheating, ending with a 2.3 grade point average.

He says he rebelled against his father’s fame, the perfect grades of his siblings, the expectations he thought he could never meet. He was wounded by racism; he fought for entry into his high school, in just its third year of integration, quarreled with teachers and felt abused, he says.

But Africa changed all that.

“I became my own person--not Bishop Bryant’s son, but John,” he said in his office at the district headquarters on West 48th Street in Los Angeles. “I discovered a John who was not a minority, who could live without looking over my shoulder. It was exciting.”

Africa also unlocked his spirit by exposing him to a people who had not forgotten the wisdom of their ancestors; who possessed uncanny healing powers that he, with his fancy degrees, could not explain. He says he scoffed at stories of a female witch doctor until he saw her touch a man’s lame leg and heal it.

He once was so sick with dysentery that the Peace Corps doctor was preparing to send him home. Bryant visited a local medicine man, drank a native tonic and said he recovered within three hours.

“I took a greater interest in the Holy Spirit and it opened new vistas for me in ministry,” Bryant said. “I believe in prayers of healing, deliverance and the power of prayer. The AME has not traditionally done these things.”

As bishop, Bryant hopes to continue to bring healing to his people through a variety of new initiatives. He is planning several conferences to celebrate black men who are “silent heroes”--not headline grabbers who are athletes or celebrities, but those working hard to keep their families together. Similar programs have been conducted by the Rev. Cecil L. Murray at First AME Church in Los Angeles.

Bryant and his wife, the Rev. Cecelia Williams Bryant, have also initiated the “Save Our Sons” project, offering programs of faith, academics and cultural pride to black male youths. He and his wife, the district’s Episcopal supervisor of global ministry for women, have two children: the Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who has started a church in Baltimore, and Thema Simone Bryant, a psychologist in Boston.

“The young black male is in serious difficulty,” he said, citing problems of education, incarceration and self-hate.

Economic development, reawakening spirituality and establishing new churches open to all people are other priorities, he said. He expects California to lead the multicultural effort.

“I come here with the same mandate we’ve always had: The church must be the voice for the voiceless and the vehicle for the empowerment of our people,” Bryant said.