As a Philadelphia resident I could easily imagine former Mayor John Street standing in the pulpits of several different African American churches following his election declaring that, “The brothas have taken over the city!”   When he woke from his celebratory stupor, he realized, the hard way, that unlike his years on City Council, his entire life would be played out in a racially-mixed public forum no matter where he was.  Understandably, upon hearing this, the response from white constituents was that of betrayal and bewilderment: “Is he the mayor of all city residents, or did he pursue this office so he could exclusively give the brothas in the ‘hood the hookup with jobs and contracts?” These are reasonable questions unless you know that racially-divisive language takes place in the pulpits of black churches as regularly as worship itself. Dr. Jeremiah Wright helped to confirm and bring this to wider public awareness. His viral YouTube sermons bear testament.

Well, as my Mom used to say, “We got it honest,” because we inherited the worship conditions of our slave ancestors. In slave quarters or in a clearing in the woods, we resorted to using inverted wash kettles or large pots to capture, deflect and muffle the sound of our highly-charged and emotional preaching, praying and singing to God. Another method was to hang wet blankets from tree branches in the woods, also to muffle the sounds of loud, energetic worship. Slave masters and overseers severely controlled and limited worship opportunities for black slaves, and we were sometimes severely beaten for worshiping without permission or when we should have been doing something else. The worship context also served as a type of military barracks for devising maneuvers for escape to freedom. Consequently, to this day, black worship usually has more than praise to God on its agenda. It is black folks’ weekly opportunity to chart their practical and spiritual course through an endless maze of prejudice and evil.

Today there are 3 conversations going on when it comes to race and mainline denomination churches: the one that takes place in Black churches, the one that takes place in White churches and the one that takes place in the public square or “offline,” if you will. When white people show up in an all-black church where everyone is welcome, someone is bound to ask, “Who are those white people, and who do they know here?” Or “What are those white people doing here today?”  In the white churches there is an ongoing – whether sincere or insincere - plea for more diversity and multi-ethnicity, by any means necessary, even if blatantly ineffective – as if seeing a diversity of skin color in the congregation automatically means their church is not racist.  

In the public square, on the other hand, white folks will openly admit that the extreme emotion displayed in Black worship is superfluous, distracting and disturbing; while black folks declare that whites are “too stiff” and lacking a real manifestation of the Holy Spirit. No wonder true multi-ethnic and successful cross-racial/ cross-cultural worship is so evident in non- and inter-denominational congregations – they apparently, abandoned these 3 conversations and started their own.