The Gospel Truth
Meacham, Jon
The Gospel Truth Politicians propose laws to save the inner city, but the black church—the most enduring institution in the nation's most troubled communities—can show us how to save people from...
...That's exactly the kind of liberal prescription—the problems of the poor can be fixed by expertise, social services, and, inevitably, social spending—that has traditionally failed and which Tucker shrewdly questions...
...Take away from Me the noise of your songs, For I will not hear the melody of your stringed instruments...
...Robinson's kindly voice rises a little...
...The boy sheepishly nods...
...First Rock Baptist Church, Southeast Washington Churches with more people and more resources—not necessarily money, because the key ingredient here is time and attention, not spending—have much to learn from Robinson...
...Shouts of "Amen...
...He smiles broadly, a patriarchal, consummately charming grin, and he takes out a handkerchief to wipe his brow...
...And according to an exhaustive survey of the nation's urban black churches by C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya for their 1990 The Black Church in the African American Experience, even many churches themselves are failing to make a strong enough stand for the young people who are at greatest risk...
...Come on, where is he...
...And so he thinks about what it was like before the cities were all built, a lesson he heard upstairs, in a church, from a preacher...
...black political leaders plump for public works projects...
...But the kids seem to sense something about the church, something that Tucker and Corbin and Robinson know in their bones: It may be a physical safe haven, but there is more to it than that...
...He then jogs on to the field, joining the team in the twilight...
...Marching won't do it anymore," Robinson preaches...
...But here in the study hall, for a few hours, Robinson struggles to structure lives that, at home in the apartments upstairs, tend toward disorder...
...Within four blocks of the central Edgewood complex, there were four murders in 15 days this year...
...Guys like myself have taken so much out of the community...
...What...
...In the backseat of the car, a portable stereo rests precariously next to a crumpled plastic garment bag which protects the one extravagance in Robinson's life: the liturgical robes of his Unitarian faith, a black pulpit gown and light blue stole...
...It is too much for the choir member behind Tucker...
...The policy talk is important, but the evidence of the streets suggests that one answer has been always with us: religion...
...A group of girls practice cheerleading off to the side...
...She collapses, shouting incomprehensibly...
...He is also a real life example of how the black middle class can respond to the problems of the inner city...
...Tucker paces, his voice rising and falling...
...As he walks the streets outside the church one evening, he calls the names of boys clustered at the corners: "Where's Dion...
...Like what...
...A whole lot...
...For Belk, the church's appeal is pretty simple: "It's something to do besides being in the street...
...Behind him, still swaying, is a choir, the women dressed in white blouses and black skirts, the men in dark suits...
...We're sometimes all they've got...
...He drives past the steeples of All Souls' Unitarian and past the towers of Catholic University, past clusters of churchgoers making their way into large, well established churches...
...It would never close...
...Today there are 18 kids inside, working on the traditional problems of childhood (long division, writing sentences), while outside the problems of contemporary childhood fester...
...The overhead lights dim, and the beam trained on the pulpit subtly accentuates Tucker's stocky frame...
...Gray is there to meet him...
...Amid cries of "Amen," Pastor Frank D. Tucker, his bald head framed by graying temples, steps to the pulpit...
...We stopped at nothing to get a good time, and we considered alcohol, drugs, fancy clothes, and women a real good time...
...a Mrs...
...We're not going to straighten up this mess in our world and we're not going to fix our families until we confront and accept the power of God in our daily lives...
...Take Tucker's congregation as an example...
...He lives about 12 miles away in a Maryland suburb now, with five kids of his own, but comes back several times a week to carry on as an associate pastor...
...Robinson keeps driving, going farther east and farther south, away from the center of the city, into this rough neighborhood...
...It is where you come to as a natural part of the order of things, where you meet your family, your friends, and raise your voices against the disorder of this world, anticipating the coming of the next...
...Tucker continues: "Ohhhh, thank God almighty...
...There are no commuters to this service...
...you can only fight human entrapments with divine encounters," Tucker says, then shifts, preacher-like, into the vernacular...
...The church is the one magnet that draws middle class blacks into otherwise desperately isolated neighborhoods...
...I would like to have heard [the president] talk about a think tank group or getting us together to sit down and discuss it, and then come out of there with some kind of plan that's going to be corrective in nature...
...Long the most hospitable institution in a legally segregated society, it's no accident that the civil rights movement was born and sustained in the pulpits and pews of the South...
...the liquor stores and boarded-up convenience stores increase in number...
...And the conversation rambles, about how a lot of kids hustle for the money and the fun, how going to the movies is—outside of church—about the only thing that's safe to do, about brothers and sisters and half-brothers and half-sisters and cousins...
...The Gospel Truth Politicians propose laws to save the inner city, but the black church—the most enduring institution in the nation's most troubled communities—can show us how to save people from the streets, one soul at a time BY JON MEACHAM We are climbing higher and higher...
...But I'm staying here in the ghetto, trying to show kids there's a better way than the one I took...
...Another beat...
...The church, unlike social service agencies, community action, or a host of other antipoverty strategies, occupies a unique place in black culture...
...I. like...
...The music—an organ, a grand piano, a bass guitar, and drums—picks up...
...Adams grew up without a father, dropped out of the eighth grade, and underwent a classic prison conversion...
...But they will have to drift home eventually, through streets where people kill each other for drugs, for money, and for no reason at all...
...There are 1,600 businessmen, domestic workers, government employees, schoolteachers—a mix of members not unlike what an urban Roman Catholic church might have...
...Peering out over the congregation, his eyeglasses refract tiny flecks of light...
...It's the center of our communities...
...And that's precisely what Robinson's after: normalcy...
...Forty percent of First Baptist's members drive into services from outside the neighborhood, and other urban churches have even higher commuter populations...
...preached his last sermon), he wisely went to the strongest link in a large, disjointed, and troubled national minority community...
...For many people, the church provides an early training ground for leadership...
...yes, I'll make it home someday...
...no, sir, I know that's not right...
...Oh Lord, I'm coming up, coming up, the rough side of the mountain, and, Lord, I'm doing the best I can to make it in...
...And it's hard to imagine that they are the ones in the neighborhood who most need to hear Robinson's message, one drawn from the book of Amos: I hate, I despise your feast days, And I do not savor your sacred assemblies...
...One little girl first started coming to study hall when her mother showed up looking for food...
...This is the central event of the week for the 32 people who gather on folding chairs arranged in front of Robinson's makeshift pulpit—a card table covered with a white tablecloth...
...And if all of us weren't here, the kids would be up in those apartments together, becoming mothers and fathers themselves...
...It was a call to arms for the 5,000 black pastors gathered before him and the nation's 24 million black churchgoers, a call for the Frank Tuckers—the preachers with faithful flocks and good hearts—to take the crusade out of the pulpit and into the streets...
...Practice is beginning...
...One instant he's pleading—"We've got to stand up against these evils out here in our streets, to protect our children and our homes"—and the next prescribing, in a shout, the way to a better day—"If you walk with Him, stay with Him, live in Him, He will deliver you...
...For the moment at least, the kids are safe...
...Corbin, now 42, knows the neighborhood...
...shines, on...
...But in the darkness, for a moment, there is a connection...
...If we weren't here, these kids wouldn't be here...
...But in the chinstroking reaction to Clinton's speech, one pastor, Donald Sharp of Chicago's Faith Tabernacle Baptist Church, said on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour that...
...And as the minister adjusts the kid's helmet strap, he says: "I haven't seen you in study hall—where you been...
...No—but when churches, as First Baptist does, offer day care, basketball leagues, karate classes, or anything at all that might appeal to the young, then the battle is joined in a way that maximizes the church's odds against the disorder of the contemporary street...
...Be calm: The storm is passing over...
...we don't know when we might be snuffed out ourselves, with the dangers that run rampant through our streets...
...We can come to church and still not know God," Tucker thunders, his cadence stressing "God," which he majestically gives two syllables...
...God took away his children and his sheep and his cattle to prove a point...
...It's true that the black middle class has been criticized for making it and then turning its back on poorer blacks—Vernon Johns, King's predecessor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, was famous for regularly accusing his genteel black congregation of snobbishly looking down on black laborers—but it is equally true that the church is one of the few spheres of life in which even slightly different classes mix (the successful contractor, for instance, sitting at the same covered dish supper with a cleaning woman...
...Tucker prays, "Our lives are threatened daily...
...Do these things, coupled with Tucker's formidable preaching, translate directly into a cure for the ills of the streets...
...he stops, lets the "Amens" and "Oh Lords" peter out as he pops a cassette in the stereo: Oh Lord, I'm striving to make it through...
...So the church is one magnet that draws middle class blacks into otherwise desperately isolated neighborhoods...
...A woman in the choir begins to shudder violently...
...The next afternoon, at Edgewood's Building 601, in a ground floor apartment stuffed with books and tiny schoolhouse chairs, Robinson conducts another kind of liturgy—his daily study hall for whomever of the project's 500-odd children come...
...But they do not teach people how to survive...
...God did all that, and Job wouldn't say anything bad about God or anything...
...I'm coming up, Lord, the rough side of the mountain, and I'm doing the best I can to make it in...
...Still more shouts...
...That's right—outside, it's crazy...
...Carrying the stereo and the garment bag, he double-times it into the lobby of 635, a narrow room of tile and cinderblock...
...Robinson runs his Beacon House Community Ministry on a shoestring and pays himself a scant $12,000 a year...
...Unemployed except for his duties at the church—he takes home only the occasional love offering—he recently married a woman he has converted to his brand of evangelical Christianity...
...In Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, and most of our major cities, the numbers are as dreary as they are familiar: high rates of poverty, crime, unemployment, and broken families...
...The hymn pushes the emotion of Tucker's sermon forward: The storm is passing over, the storm is passing over, Alleluia, the storm is passing over...
...For 15 year-old Bernard Belk, the church's appeal is pretty simple: "It's something to do besides being on the streets...
...Fifteen percent of pastors surveyed acknowledged that their church "does nothing for youth," and what programs there are tend to concentrate on inchurch evangelism (rallies, revivals, special services) and in-church youth groups (choir, scouts, clubs) instead of genuine outreach to the places where kids hang out and, more often than not, get into trouble...
...The people are with him...
...I made it because—and this is not just nostalgia—there was a sense of values, of right and wrong, that eroded sometime in the late sixties," he says...
...Consider First Rock, a 500-member congregation at the foot of a hill in Southeast between a working class neighborhood and a housing project...
...And a life of crime was how we got those things...
...And soon," (women weep out loud...
...That doesn't seem like much, I know, but it's a whole lot to me...
...Out of the shadows, a teenager appears...
...If you look at the most disadvantaged, low income communities, there have been two enduring institutions—the corner liquor store and the church," says Emmett Carson, a Ford Foundation officer who works with the black religious community...
...The weekly collection nets $27.97...
...dozens of hands wave in the air as the noise ebbs and flows), "and soon, we will reach the other side, and the victory will be ours—on the other side...
...That's not something you conjure up...
...The hymn begins: We're marching to Zion, Beautiful, beautiful Zion, Zion, The beautiful city of God...
...Smart's grandparents and aunts bring him...
...He looks out across the playground, and his words pick up some of the drama of Sunday morning: "Organized activity—that's the thing," he says, waving a hand through the gathering gloom...
...We have to reach people on a personal, human level...
...Yes, I'll make it home someday, With the Lord as my leader and the Lord as my keeper, I'll make it home...
...Talking won't do it anymore...
...This is my community," says Robinson, as Edgewood Terrace, a D.C...
...Robinson stops a boy at practice...
...Other problems abound: 85 percent of the families in the area are headed by unmarried women...
...I'd have tennis courts inside, swimming pools, music rooms—24 hours a day, 365 days a year...
...Edgewood Terrace, Northeast Washington Here is an ideal ministry...
...That's it as far as money goes...
...It's got stuff going on, and the people doing the stuff—the pastors, the associate pastors, the parishioners—are informed by evangelical belief...
...The stories they tell you give you an idea of what it was like before the cities were all built—you know, positive stories...
...This is very good, but we put periods after each sentence, not each word...
...And he knows that the world he grew up in—the world of the fifties and early sixties—was a more stable time in the black community...
...Jeremiah is frequently invoked in urban ministries: Call unto Me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not...
...But religion is a low-cost, essential part of any solution, and for too many years liberals have ignored or disdained the church's role...
...A police helicopter chops its wings overhead, its spotlight a few blocks away—another commonplace here...
...Today she writes the sentence, "The...
...they do not reach the people whose backs are to the wall...
...On a Sunday morning under a bright fall sky, Donald Robinson cruises along Washington's Harvard Street in Northeast in his mother's car—an old Ford Fairmont—after picking her up to go to church...
...the service ends with "Amazing Grace...
...The people whose backs are to the wall...
...They have seen a lot more than most American kids: a friend shot so badly in the face that they had to close the casket at his funeral...
...Corbin grew up poor just across the street, went to services, played high school football, attended Virginia Union and the University of Virginia, and became an Army officer and a minister...
...they don't do it," he says, to quiet "Amens" and murmurs of approval...
...Robinson is rolling now, and the small congregation is with him...
...All that will work—all that will work...
...I feel that ministers on Sunday just talk about religion...
...Robinson reaches the room...
...The congregation (26 women, 4 men, two children) is drawn entirely from the project...
...Those dangers are well-known...
...Be cool, and know God is on His way...
...But Robinson's work hasn't really begun...
...It is also clear that the church, far more than any other institution, exerts a tremendous hold on its people: Forty percent of First Baptist's members, for instance, drive in to services from outside the neighborhood, and other urban churches have even higher commuter populations...
...And many are already poised to do precisely what he does so well...
...We can come to church and still not know the spirit...
...But as the organ swells this Sunday morning, all of that seems far away...
...There are six people on staff, tutoring, coaching football, supervising the project's rec center, and no one else makes more than $10,000...
...But God has allowed us to come around His table once again...
...I'd build a huge rec center here...
...Tucker pauses: one beat, two beats...
...The volunteer coaches, who are here at Robinson's urging, are blowing whistles...
...Frequently, there are shootings just outside the sanctuary...
...A lot of these kids don't have fathers around, and you never know what's going on at home...
...The lesson was just because something bad happens, you don't have to go get even with somebody...
...Robinson rides a small, noisy elevator down to the building's basement and trots down a dimly lit hallway into a room whose barred windows offer a view of the project's parking lot...
...You can't tell me you ain't got no homework...
...Though you offer Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them, Nor will I regard your fattened peace offerings...
...Well, like that man Job...
...Also at First Rock on Sunday morning stands the Reverend Harry "Tyrone" Adams, a 39-year-old recovering drug addict, former narcotics salesman, and ex-convict whose last sentence (before a judicially ordered reduction) was 105 years for armed robbery...
...There are two elements peculiar to the church that give it the best chance to keep violence down, discourage out-of-wedlock births, encourage the healthy upbringing of children, and imbue a sense of work and responsibility that would help end poverty...
...I'd have gyms...
...You know, I'll tell you something else about church," Belk offers...
...Smarr nods...
...For the moment at least, the kids are safe...
...housing project, looms ahead...
...He ditched church as a kid, but the First Rock pastor knew Adams' mother, and visited him during his stretches in jail...
...God bless you, Reverend Robinson," she says, beaming at her itinerant pastor...
...This is resentment of what Robinson and his flock see as the black elite—the people who have moved up and out...
...Belk gets taken to church by Adams, an uncle by marriage...
...Behind the pulpit stands the Reverend Richard Corbin, a man who understands order and the fact that order stems from the church...
...Clinton talked about America's "great crisis of the spirit," a crisis manifested in 37,000 gunshot deaths a year: "The freedom to die before you're a teenager is not what Martin Luther King lived and died for . .. [U]nless we say some of this cannot be done by government because we have to reach deep inside to the values, the spirit, the soul, and the truth of human nature, none of the other things we seek to do will ever take us where we need to go...
...The boy mumbles...
...I know I'll make it...
...Adams thinks he knows how to do this, and his idea makes intuitive sense: stick around, stay in the mix of things, make church—or at least not hustling—an option for kids susceptible to the undertow of the streets...
...More shouts...
...As dusk comes on this Monday, the study hall empties, and "Revrob-son," at a time of day when most people are heading home, goes a couple of blocks away to a football practice field where 20 youngsters, wearing uniforms paid for by Beacon House, are getting ready to practice...
...Now, she follows the man she calls "Revrobson" around faithfully, writing sentences to be read and, more often than not, humming and scouting for the mini-doughnuts—white powdered and cinnamon—that Robinson keeps on hand...
...But they will have to drift home eventually, through streets where people kill each other for drugs, for money, and for no reason at all...
...When I'm in church, I don't have to look over my back all the time...
...New Democrats and New Paradigm conservatives press for urban enterprise zones or tenant ownership of public housing...
...But let justice run down like water, And righteousness like a mighty stream...
...Yes, they may have a food pantry, and they may have a clothes pantry...
...Thirteen people come forward to join the church...
...What is the church really doing...
...And second, there is the church's inherent faith in the possibilities of conversion and transformation: It is in the business, remember, of deliverance...
...It could be, save for the violence that these kids know intimately, any neighborhood, anywhere...
...First, the church's existing community networks give it an advantage that no government program could begin to match...
...Hey, Mr...
...All we got to do is stand where we are, and we don't need much money for that...
...Knots of young men loiter on the corner of the street, selling drugs...
...That's real," Tucker preaches, coming down off the rhetorical mountaintop...
...To be sure, the other key elements of inner city salvation—good schools, jobs, and welfare reform—do require a lot of money...
...This is a version of class warfare, a rap against churches that appear rich and indolent...
...Traffic thins...
...Never...
...Other Unitarian churches and private contributors help out...
...Robinson peers at the paper and grins as the girl clings to his leg...
...Secular social services simply cannot draw on the fervor that provokes women to faint and men to wave their hands in the air...
...Corbin's arm is soon around the kid, and the conversation becomes muted, private...
...So when President Clinton went to Memphis in November and addressed the leaders of the five million-strong black Church of God in Christ about crime and violence (from the pulpit where Martin Luther King, Jr...
...The stereo sits at the front edge of the table, gospel music cassettes stacked neatly next to the machine...
...I've been home for two years now," he says one weekday evening at First Rock, a well-thumbed Bible near at hand...
...An odd selection, really: The prophet is preaching against rich people, and this text is directed at anybody but the relatively poor people in Robinson's small congregation...
...That's not a fake...
...A lesson he wouldn't have heard anyplace else...
...The church's bulletin dramatizes its institutional and social networks: The Deaconess Board's Annual Ten Commandments Tea, Friday's Family Night supper, Tuesday's Gospel Aerobics, Saturday's Girl Scout and Cub Scout meetings...
...When I'm in church, I don't have to look over my back all the time...
...A veteran social worker who became a minister in 1990 and who has spent the last three years walking the beat at Edgewood, Robinson, 55, has founded an afternoon study hall for the project's kids, a youth football league for older boys, and this, a Sunday morning service in a basement function room of Building 635...
...working is all that will work...
...the first time they read out loud or lead a group or find a role model is in the pews or in Sunday School...
...Adams knows he's still got a lot to prove...
...Robinson roped the 6 year-old into his circle...
...I'd have study halls...
...You've got to put your arm around these guys," Corbin says, moving back toward the church...
...The battle against that undertow begins and ends with young men like Bernard Belk, 15, and Clinton Smarr, 14...
...Two female ushers in white uniforms go to her, and a burly deacon carries her out of the sanctuary...
...Right now, welfare reformers focus on carrots and sticks for single mothers...
...But the drama of Robinson's sermon is a critique of churches like the ones he drove past to get to Edgewood...
...home someday . . . Yes, Lord, I'll make it home The choir's voices slow to a stop, but there is no silence at Washington's First Baptist Church on this autumn Sunday...
...Corbin...
Vol. 25 • January 1993 • No. 12
