Churches: Is God Black?

Near closing time in the dining room of St. Louis’ Gateway Hotel last week, six customers were lingering over their table. “Why don’t you boys get out so I can go home?” said the white woman cashier. Unfortunately, the “boys” happened to be delegates to the annual conference of the National Committee of Black Churchmen, which was being held in the hotel. In protest against what they considered a racial slight, the 400 black ministers attending the meeting stalked out of the Gateway and finished their convention in an Episcopal church. The incident typified not only the touchy militancy of the conference but, in general, the mood of Negro Christian clergymen who enthusiastically support the contemporary secular demand for Black Power. Black caucuses have been formed within most of the major denominations to lobby for greater Negro participation in ecclesiastical decision making.

Many of the churches have tried hard to answer these demands. Last year, for example, the United Church of Christ elected the Rev. Joseph Evans of Chicago, a Negro, as its denominational secretary. The United Methodist Church has assigned black bishops to predominantly white areas of Iowa and New Jersey, and even to one district which encompasses parts of Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia. Last month the Rev. Richard Owens, pastor of the People’s Baptist Church in the black ghetto of Boston’s Roxbury area, was elected president of the Massachusetts Baptist Convention.

White Reluctance. Even so, the Black Power movement within the churches exists more in fancy than fulfillment. One reason for this is that Negroes constitute an extremely small minority within most denominations: despite its progressive policies on race, the 2,000,000-member United Church is only 2% black. Another problem, particularly for those churches which emphasize lay authority, is that the majority of white congregations still tend to be reluctant to accept a black minister in the pulpit, even when a well-qualified one is available. As a result, many Negro clergymen are turning away from the goal of parish-level integration and are focusing their attention on the revitalization of all-black congregations.

At the St. Louis meeting, composed largely of black caucus representatives, a number of speakers suggested that a major goal should be the creation of a fully developed black theology. Among other things, this theology might in-clude the relation of the struggles of the Negro to the Biblical experience of the Jews as God’s chosen people, and the black man’s demand for justice to Jesus’ ethical teachings. It might also justify, on a more practical level, the artistic presentation of Christ as black— something that has been done in a number of Negro parishes.

A more sophisticated black Christianity, it was argued, would transform the Negro’s religion, which since slavery days has been based on the hope of salvation in the hereafter, into a faith more relevant to his present social and economic concerns. This ideal was supported by Ron Karenga, Los Angeles leader of the black nationalist US, who accused churches of foisting “spookism” on his soul brothers. “Spookism,” he explained acidly, “means believing you’re going to fly away without the necessary means of transportation.”

Honkified Deity. Dr Nathan Wright Jr., an Episcopal priest from Newark, told the meeting that blacks must get rid of the “honkified God” who, he charged, has been imposed on Negroes by white Christians. The Rev. Herbert Bell Shaw, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and president of the committee, called on the group to evolve “a message and a dynamic leadership for the peculiar and urgent needs of the black people.” The present religious task, added the Rev. Melvin Talbert, a Methodist district superintendent in California, “is to help black people find themselves, to restore to the black man a sense of dignity and pride.” Once this is achieved, suggests Talbert, the time will have come “to move across racial barriers—if we want to.”