White Churches Research Articles

Social Capital, Race, and Personal Fundraising in Evangelical Outreach Ministries

This study examines the relationship between social capital inequality, race, and personal fundraising within evangelical outreach ministries (EOMs). Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data that assess the personal fundraising experiences and outcomes of a large sample of EOM workers (N = 715), I demonstrate that the fundraising challenges and deficits faced by EOM workers are best understood as deficits in the social capital of these individual workers. Multivariate analyses affirm that social capital deficits (that is, having smaller social networks and networks with fewer resources) negatively affect the fundraising experiences and outcomes of EOM workers, especially for racial minorities. Findings also evidence a strong correlation between the paucity of minority EOM workers’ social capital and the extent to which they must seek bridging social capital from white individuals and churches. This study concludes with implications for the financing of American evangelical parachurch organizations, the sustained racial and socioeconomic homogeneity of EOMs, and theories of social capital exchanges within interracial religious organizations.

“Just a Bunch of Agitators”: Kneel-Ins and the Desegregation of Southern Churches

AbstractCivil rights protests at white churches, dubbed “kneel-ins,” laid bare the racial logic that structured Christianity in the American South. Scholars have investigated segregationist religion, but such studies tend to focus on biblical interpretation rather than religious practice. A series of kneel-ins at Atlanta's First Baptist Church, the largest Southern Baptist church in the Southeast, shows how religious activities and religious spaces became sites of intense racial conflict. Beginning in 1960, then more forcefully in 1963, African American students attempted to integrate First Baptist's sanctuary. When they were alternately barred from entering, shown to a basement auditorium, or carried out bodily, their efforts sparked a wide-ranging debate over racial politics and spiritual authenticity, a debate carried on both inside and outside the church. Segregationists tended to avoid a theological defense of Jim Crow, attacking instead the sincerity and comportment of their unwanted visitors. Yet while many church leaders were opposed to open seating, a vibrant student contingent favored it. Meanwhile, mass media—local, national, and international—shaped interpretations of the crisis and possibilities for resolving it. Roy McClain, the congregation's popular minister, attempted to navigate a middle course but faced criticism from all sides. The conflict came to a head when Ashton Jones, a white minister, was arrested, tried, and imprisoned for protesting outside the church. In the wake of the controversy, the members of First Baptist voted to end segregation in the sanctuary. This action brought formal desegregation—but little meaningful integration—to the congregation.

Shepherding a Flock of Different Fleece: A Historical and Social Analysis of the Unique Attributes of the African American Pastoral Caregiver

Scholars researching and writing on the roles of pastor-caregivers in predominantly black congregations have done so using models originally designed to examine the roles of pastor-caregivers in primarily white churches. This study offers a revised model based on the historical development and present reality of black churches that more closely matches the historical and present roles of the black pastor who can trace his or her roots back to African spiritual traditions.

A Tale of Two Cities: Implicit Assumptions and Mission Strategies in Black and White Majority Churches

Drawing on my experience in two urban parishes, one predominantly White and the other Black, I seek to show how it is legitimate that we interrogate our present age through the lens of faith. I argue that by its experience of being forced into difference, the Black church has much to offer the White church, especially as the former in cities is growing, unlike the latter. Black-driven mission must be a challenging concept for the White-led dominations. By a genuine commonality, there is much to hope for in a new expression of church that is driven by mission and sustained by prayer.

Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?

Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?

Race Issues and Conflict in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Religious Life: The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family

Introduction The recent plethora of studies on female religious congregations in the United States reveals countless occasions when vowed religious women suffered degradations and humiliations at the hands of a patriarchal church. Indeed, gender discrimination has so affected female religious communities that it is not an exaggeration to say that it has been a central element that has touched the history of each vowed religious community, almost without exception. For African-American female religious congregations, however, gender issues, although important, have played a secondary role to those of race. There are three communities of African-American sisters. The oldest are the Oblates of Providence, founded in 1828 in Baltimore. Next in longevity are the Sisters of the Holy Family, who list 1842 as their year of origin. The youngest are the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, founded in Georgia in 1916, but since 1924 centered in Harlem, New York City. All three congregations have distinct histories and unique charisms that differentiate them from each other. At the same time, they have much in common as a result of their African-American racial identity. Race is the distinguishing characteristic that has set them apart from other female religious congregations and has defined their place in American church and secular history. The racial prejudices of white Catholics, including those of the clergy and other female religious communities, forced these three black communities to develop strategies for negotiating with the dominant white power structure. This essay will address one of these communities, the New Orleans-based Sisters of the Holy Family. It will attempt to show how the three Holy Family cofounders negotiated with white church leaders in transforming their community from a society of pious women to a church-sanctioned, vowed religious congregation, when it seemed that the social mores of the time made such a transformation impossible. In

The voice of conscience: the church in the mind of Martin Luther King, Jr

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOREWORD: WYATT TEE WALKER INTRODUCTION 1. The Roots Factor: The Church as a Second Home 2. The True Ekklesia: Toward a Definition of the Church 3. : A Balm in Gilead: The Black Church as Mission and Movement 4. An Uncertain Sound: The Ambivalent Soul of the White Church 5. Unrestricted Freedom: The Church and the World House 6. To Be Maladjusted: A Kingian Model for Church Renewal AFTERWORD: DAVID G. BUTTRICK NOTES INDEX

WHITE PROTESTANTS AND BLACK CHRISTIANS: The Absence and Presence of Whiteness in the Face of the Black Manifesto

ABSTRACTThis essay brings Critical Whiteness Studies into liberationist Christian ethics in order to analyze white Protestant responses to the 1969 Black Manifesto, which demanded reparations from white churches. The essay's primary argument is that the absence of a sense of white moral agency among white Protestants manifested itself in behaviors and rhetoric that ensured whiteness went unacknowledged, which caused Protestant responses to the Manifesto to fail. A related argument is that white behavior and rhetoric were particularly dramatic because of the call for reparations. Reparations assume that race is a material relationship in which there has been a perpetrator and a victim, rendering the acknowledgment of white agency unavoidable. This essay thus analyzes several ways in which whites can be seen turning away from white selves, turning a scrutinizing gaze instead to Black selves and, in the process, absenting white agency from the work of racial justice.

Perceptions of Social and Environmental Support for Healthy Eating and Physical Activity in Rural Southern Churches

The influence of church environments on healthy eating and physical activity was explored through in-depth interviews with rural adults aged 50-70 (n = 60). Data were analyzed using a constant comparative approach, with an emphasis on noting similarities and differences between African American and predominantly white churches. Findings suggest that church-based nutrition and exercise programs were rare, and existing recreational facilities were geared toward younger members. The majority of church leaders did not talk about nutrition or physical activity, but social support from church friends for healthy eating and physical activity was fairly common. Despite barriers to establishing healthy environments in church settings, churches are rich in social support that could be tapped to promote healthy behavior.

Fear of a Black Pulpit? Real Racial Transcendence Versus Cultural Assimilation in Multiracial Churches

The growing literature on multiracial churches tends to take the position that religious values can be influential in promoting racially inclusive religious communities. Marti offers further evidence for this argument: cosmetic changes predominately white churches make to their worship, music, and leadership in order to attract/retain “race-conscious” black congregants. In this response, I argue that these churches do not cause blacks to transcend their race consciousness. They merely offer havens for those blacks who have already transcended their race enough to pursue membership in these religious communities. I conclude with a challenge to scholars in this line of research to add evidence of religion's ability to promote racial transcendence for “race-conscious” white congregants.

CHURCHES AND POLITICAL RECONCILIATION IN POST‐APARTHEID NAMIBIA

Following Namibia’s independence in 1990, racial politics divided the churches. The dominant white churches supported the government and black churches—especially member churches of the Council of Churches in Namibia—largely supported the South West Africa People’s Organization. There were also conflicts between the liberation fighters, including unjust treatment of dissident detainees. The Council of Churches in Namibia played an important role in repatriation and integration of exiles in society, the evangelicals showed interest in a united church council, and some racially divided churches initiated unity discussions. Despite these developments, the churches could not overcome longstanding divisions and their contribution to reconciliation was limited.

Mission Effort in the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa

The Apostolic Faith Mission of SA (AFM) is the largest indigenous Pentecostal denomination in Southern Africa. The AFM followed the nationalist emphasis on apartness and by the end of the 1950s consisted of four separate churches: a White (mother) church, and three daughter churches — a Black, a Coloured and an Indian. This article attempts to outline events, persons, institutions and values that might be grouped under the heading `mission effort', along with insights and comments from personal experience.

Theological, Denominational, and Organizational Influences on Ecumenical Involvement between Black and White Churches

This study examines the relationship between denominational, theological, and organizational indicators and ecumenism between Black and White churches based on a national sample of Black churches across seven denominations and logistic regression modeling. Findings suggest that denominational and organizational indicators are consistently important in explaining ecumenism. Churches associated with the Presbyterian, United Methodist, and African Methodist Episcopal Zion traditions are more likely than Baptists to engage in ecumenism. Furthermore, congregations that: have larger memberships; are located in rural areas; are frequently exposed to sermonic references to racial situations; sponsor youth programs; and, have formally educated pastors are more likely to engage in ecumenical activities.

Robert Adams and the ‘Persistent Beauty’ of Colorado Landscapes

Robert Adams established his reputation in the burgeoning Front Range suburbs of Colorado, yet, during that same period, 1965–1975, he was photographing traditional communities in the eastern Great Plains and the Hispanic counties in the southernmost part of the state. This less studied set of images complements the other, more familiar body of work. In the white churches and adobe structures he saw history, values and relationships that were being lost in suburban developments. In both settings he photographed life that persisted in ruin.

Trends in Black-White Church Integration

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that “eleven o'clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week” (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King's statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King's classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002]).

Introduction: Why a Forum on Racially and Ethnically Diverse Congregations?

As far back as 1899, in The Philadelphia Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois spoke about the and the White Church. He continued to do so throughout his long career, one that extended into the 1960s. Though he had his critiques, he largely praised the Negro Church as an adaptive institution that empowered African Americans in a racist nation. Curiously, when he attended church as an adult, Du Bois almost always attended racially/ethnically diverse ones. This was no accident. Because Du Bois held that religion was at the core of the creation of whiteness and racial inequality, he considered segregation in religious congregations to be an abomination. Segregation in houses of worship legitimated racial division by strengthening the conflation of whiteness with godliness (Blum 2007:16). He found hope in diverse congregations, beginning with his involvement in New York's Community Church in the 1940s.

Benjamin Mays, Global Ecumenism, and Local Religious Segregation

Born in South Carolina in 1894 to tenant farmer parents, Benjamin Mays made the improbable rise to a distinguished career spent at the administrative helm of two black educational institutions, first, the School of Religion at Howard University during the 1930s, and then, from 1940 to 1967, at Morehouse College. From both positions, Mays became one of the most prominent and influential black theologians, educators, and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Memories of Mays' stature have been eclipsed by the outpouring of attention to his Morehouse student Martin Luther King Jr. who claimed him as his mentor and whom Mays would later eulogize in 1968. Unlike his student, Mays was blessed with a long life that stretched from Jim Crow to black power. Mays lived out the complexities of being a southern black liberal Protestant who believed that black and white churches should function as progressive political agents, resting on the moral foundation of global Christian universalism and an enduring faith in the institution of American democracy. Mays advocated a church universal that could build a worldwide movement for social justice. At the same time, he understood the innately local nature of religious and racial policy and practice. He argued that Christianity ought to be color-blind and desegregated while at the same time he adhered to a belief in the political necessity of black controlled institutions, especially churches and colleges. Still, Mays did not believe only in the power of the sacred or of private institutions; he coupled that with a faith in an interventionist egalitarian state believing that both church and state were essential to achieving racial equality. Mays' early and eager engagement with global religious organizations provided him with opportunities to travel the world. Many other prominent politically engaged African American religious intellectuals in the pre-civil rights era came to a concept of global politics in just this way, through travels to and participation in ecumenical world gatherings. In this way, Mays' life is more emblematic than it is unusual. For that reason, our understandings of African Americans and international politics also must make way for religious universalism as one route to a compelling critique of colonialism and of the oppression of people of color around the globe. Toward the end of his life, Mays came to understand better that local churches, black and white, served not only as religious sanctuaries but as racial and political ones as well. As a whole, neither blacks nor whites wanted to sacrifice institutions with distinctive cultural, theological, and political natures; born and bred in segregation, each group's churches had grown its own separate way and neither group wanted them to be subsumed in a quest for liberal universalism or color-blind Christianity.

"To Love the Wind and the Rain": African Americans and Environmental History (review)

Reviewed by: “To Love the Wind and the Rain”: African Americans and Environmental History Barbara L. Allen (bio) “To Love the Wind and the Rain”: African Americans and Environmental History. Edited by Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. Pp. 288. $55/ $24.95. The emergence of environmental history as a distinct field during the last few decades—essentially as a post–Earth Day discipline—has produced a rich array of research. This scholarship has often been politically charged, even passionate. While the field has expanded to encompass regions beyond the United States and to examine environmental issues of Native Americans and women, comparatively little has been written about African Americans. So it is that "To Love the Wind and the Rain" is a welcome addition to the literature. Arranged chronologically, most of the fourteen chapters are concerned with the twentieth century, although a handful cover topics in the nineteenth century and the antebellum South. Mart Stewart and Scott Giltner both address African Americans and their relationship to the environment under slavery. Stewart focuses on the agricultural contributions of slaves, showing how, in an explicitly repressive institution, people found positive expressions of freedom in the landscape. Hunting and fishing, both in ser-vice to white elites and as subsistence living, are explored in the Giltner chapter. The defiance of authority and the ingenuity of slave customs are interwoven in the rich environmental tapestry that both authors present. Progressive reform and agricultural extension services within the realm of African-American women's gardening are problematized by coeditor Dianne Glave. She argues that productivity rather than proper femininity defined their labor, both in the home and the garden. In "Turpentine Negro," Cassandra Johnson and Josh McDaniel expose the harsh realities of life in the forest, living in camps under the repressive system of debt peonage. The view of living in nature as "the hard life" and moving to the city as "a step up" is a theme repeated in a number of contributions. [End Page 200] Another common theme concerns the difficulties experienced by African Americans seeking to enjoy the amenities of urban parklands and suburbia's green landscape. Colin Fisher's chapter begins with the incident that started the Chicago race riot of 1919—a boy drowning after being hit by a rock when his raft floated into a "whites only" part of Lake Michigan. Fisher ties this incident to a fear of nature by some urban African Americans: while they viewed outdoor leisure and green spaces as an antidote to the ills of urban living, their access was stifled by racist attitudes. This narrative is repeated in Christopher Sellers's intimate oral history of one immigrant family's path from the Virgin Islands, to New York City, to an effort to capture the dream of suburban homeownership on Long Island. His oral history documents a family traveling to Levittown after the 1948 Supreme Court decision banning racially restrictive covenants, only to be told that the development was for whites only. Both Stoll and Glave address the important role of the church in African-American environmental history. The church funded some of the first environmental-justice research in the late twentieth century, and still plays an advocacy role in environmental-justice activism contra that of many white churches, which not only tend to ignore the topic, but in the case of some evangelical sects even oppose the Green movement on the basis of its alliance with liberal politics. In the final chapter of the book, Carl Anthony characterizes African-American environmentalism as a concern for an ecology of life. He explains that "the hidden narrative of race . . . has to do with the fragmentation and disruption of personal and community life, and therefore the quest for wholeness" (p. 205). While this is a very different version of environmental history than narratives about the destruction of forests, the loss of species, the uprooting of indigenous cultures, and the settlement of the West, it is a history that is uniquely American and that also provides an opening for "other," more community-encompassing environmental histories to be written. Barbara L. Allen Dr. Allen is director of the graduate program in...

MARK NEWMAN. Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2005. Pp. xvii, 352. cloth $54.95, paper $22.95

Although there is no shortage of books about the civil rights movement, Mark Newman's study of the Delta Ministry sheds light on an important but neglected aspect of the struggle for racial equality in the United States. In September 1964, the National Council of Churches (NCC)—the principal institutional expression of American “mainline” Protestantism—established the Delta Ministry in Greenville, Mississippi. The founding of this organization represented an ambitious attempt not only to support the political and economic advancement of African Americans but also to encourage white Christians to become involved in the civil rights movement. While the resistance of white church people both in Mississippi and elsewhere eventually frustrated the achievement of the organization's goals, the Delta Ministry still made a significant impact on the lives of many black Mississippians and by 1967 employed the largest field staff of any civil rights group in the South. Over sixty-three percent of the U.S. population belonged to churches in 1960, and the NCC was itself composed of thirty-one Christian denominations with a total membership of approximately forty-two million Americans. Although the churches that made up the core of the NCC membership were then at the height of their influence and power, some denominational leaders worried that those institutions were actually in danger of neglecting their responsibilities in the larger society. Despite the tremendous expansion of American Christianity following World War II, liberal theologians such as Harvey Cox and Colin Williams warned their fellow church members against focusing exclusively on internal matters such as evangelism, worship, and fundraising and called them to pursue a sacrificial “servant ministry” (p. 3) in the secular realm as well. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation, they argued, demonstrated God's engagement with the ordinary concerns of humanity, especially with men and women seeking dignity and justice. According to Robert Spike, one of the activist clergymen who helped organize the Delta Ministry, twentieth-century Christians needed “to let the world set the agenda for [their] work—to take the world of the civil rights struggle seriously, and to develop a ministry in response to that” (pp. 7–8).

On the frescoes of the Bela crkva (white Church) of karan and the contemporary painting of Raska

The results of a more careful examination of the painting in Raska from the period of the king and later, of the emperor, Stefan Dusan (1331-1355) render untenable the earlier assessments about its strikingly provincial character and negligible artistic value. The fragmentarily preserved painting of the exonarthex in Djurdjevi stupovi, in Budimlja (spring 1343 - autumn 1345), and St. Nikola in Palez near Studenica (probably the fifth decade of the 14th century), undoubtedly indicate a highly progressive style and very high artistic value. According to their pictorial features, these two monuments are no less sophisticated than the most advanced fresco ensembles of Dusan's times in Macedonia. Besides that, in the painting of the Budimlja exonarthex and the church in Palez, one can also perceive certain iconographic and programmatic novelties, which are characteristic of churches from that period in the south eastern parts of the Serbian state (the Menologion, the elevation of the rulers' portraits to the second zone of the fresco paintings, etc). The coordination of the iconography and the programme with the principles of the Palaiologan high renaissance can also be observed in the fresco painting of some other monuments of Raska from the reign of Stefan Dusan. We refer to the Church of the Annunciation in Dobrun, the exonarthex in Sopocani, the Chuch of St. Nicholas in Baljevac, the so-called Latin Church in Prokuplje, and St. Nicholas in Usee. In the majority of the said monuments, one can notice traces of the rather lively cultural relations with the central and southern parts of the expanded Serbian state. Nevertheless, the painting in the enumerated churches has been only fragmentarily preserved. Consequently, considerations about the fresco painting of the Bela Crkva Karanska (the White Church of Karan) as a rather well preserved monumental ensemble, acquires particular significance for art research in the north western part of Dusan's state.