I was raised in the church and I still have an appreciation for what it used to be. The fact is, the church has historically been the spiritual, social, and political hub of the Black community since the end of slavery, and it's been critical to everything we've gained in this country from 1865 all the way through the 1980s.
Yet, for me, the change really came with the growth of the "megachurch," movement, when the emphasis dramatically shifted from spiritual and general community empowerment to the establishment of an oligarchy where great wealth and power was ammassed by a handful of pastors around the country, with virtually no attention being paid to the needs of the community. In less than a generation, we went from pastors like Martin Luther King, Jr., C.T Vivian, Andrew Young, and Arthur Brazier, to Creflo Dollar, T.D. Jakes, and Clarence McClendon.
I'm writing this on a Monday afternoon in Houston where I've lived for close to 20 years, and you've got a bunch of HUGE black churches in this town, like Windsor Village United Methodist, Church Without Walls, Lighthouse Church and Wheeler Avenue Baptist, along with all the other midsize and smaller churches in town. Just yesterday alone, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, were raised within those Houston black churches? What about last Sunday, and the Sunday before that? And that's just Houston. What about the hundreds or thousands of black churches in Dallas, in St. Louis, in Chicago, in L.A., in Birmingham, in Atlanta, and in Detroit? How many millions upon millions of dollars were raised, just yesterday alone, in those churches? How about last year and the years before that?
In the last thirty years, for example, if the major Black denominations like the National Baptist Convention, the Church of God in Christ, and the largest non-denominational megachurches could have formed a conglomerate and committed just 1-5% of their financial intake to collective community-building, there would be no limits to what could be done for the uplift of our communities in education, in housing development, in small business development, and in all types of other areas. There are still a few pastors who are throwbacks to the past, like Bishop William Barber. Yet, in most cities, with all of the thousands of churches in our neighborhoods, a struggling family couldn't get as much as a ham sandwich from any of these churches. They lost me in those years, and I can't see myself ever going back.
