TOP STORY: RELIGION IN AMERICA: Megachurches at the epicenter of African-American middle class

c. 1996 Religion News Service BRANDYWINE, Md. (RNS)-The Rev. C. Anthony Muse sprinkles apologies about the inconvenient seating arrangement throughout his welcome to congregants of his growing Gibbons United Methodist Church in this suburb of Washington, D.C. Surveying the crowded sanctuary, he reminds everyone that they’ll soon be in a bigger, $4.5 million building, the […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

BRANDYWINE, Md. (RNS)-The Rev. C. Anthony Muse sprinkles apologies about the inconvenient seating arrangement throughout his welcome to congregants of his growing Gibbons United Methodist Church in this suburb of Washington, D.C.

Surveying the crowded sanctuary, he reminds everyone that they’ll soon be in a bigger, $4.5 million building, the steel skeleton of which stands across the parking lot.”Ain’t no fire in here except the Holy Ghost fire,”he jokes with the overflow crowd, many of whom are seated in folding chairs in the aisles.”If for any reason you need to vacate the premises, just take your chair with you.” Muse’s predominantly African-American congregation has grown from 250 to almost 3,200 members in the 12 years of his pastorate. Once a country church in the middle of nowhere, it’s an emerging black megachurch with three Sunday morning services attracting people from Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.


Across Prince George’s County, the nation’s most affluent African-American community, stands another testament of the blend between black middle-class success and spiritual renewal.

At Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church in Fort Washington, parking attendants guide worshipers out of their BMWs and Mercury Sables, and white-gloved ushers direct them to seats in the packed sanctuary, which holds 3,000 before an overflow room is opened. In 1983, the church, foundering in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, had 17 members. Eleven years later, the now-12,000-member church moved into its new $18 million octagonal building constructed in the shape of an African hut.

Throughout the nation, worshipers are gathering by the thousands in what have become the Christian epicenters of the black middle class.

Black counterparts of pioneer megachurches such as Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago and the Second Baptist Church of Houston, these are much more than big churches.

In a modern version of the smaller, traditional black church service, worshipers seldom sit still. Rather, they celebrate and participate. Congregants are often on their feet, clapping and singing along with gospel choirs. They shout”Amens”and”Hallelujahs”as the preacher turns a biblical story into a contemporary lesson on how God can help anyone overcome greed, racism and other social ills.

Fueled by the dreams and finances of upwardly mobile African-Americans, the megachurches offer opportunities for worship and a plethora of programs that satisfy the spiritual and social needs of the baby-boomer population.

With former business executives leading administrative staffs and dozens of ministries, these churches are places where members send their kids to school, attend workshops on financial planning, get counseling to improve their marriages and reach out to people who haven’t made it to the black middle class.”Primarily, they’ve grown because of very hard-working pastors who bring to those congregations traditional African-American worship that addresses the current problems of baby-boomer African-American Christians and younger,”said Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, a Baptist minister and associate professor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. The people who join these large churches”usually are geographically mobile, so church is the way in which they reconnect with the black community.” In many instances, middle-class African-Americans who may have relocated and left their home church behind discover that material wealth does not replace their need for spiritual nourishment.


Muse, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, says people in his congregation”can’t survive without the church.”Life in the suburbs is not a panacea for them, he said.”It was not helping us (African-Americans). It was not helping our children,”Muse said.”They were getting in the same trouble that we thought growing up in a middle-class neighborhood would deliver them from …. Man does not live by bread alone.” Leslie Martin, a 27-year-old co-director of the children’s choir at Ebenezer AME, agrees.”Some people come here who are already financially wealthy, and they get spiritual strength,”she said between Ebenezer’s two Sunday services.

Federal immigration judge Michael McGoings joined Ebenezer five years ago, returning to regular church attendance for the sake of his young children.

McGoings, 52, was particularly attracted to the church’s intellectual atmosphere-the Revs. Grainger and Jo Ann Browning, pastor and assistant pastor, both have doctoral degrees-and the variety of ministries it offers, including a law ministry, which allows him to socialize with others in the legal field.

He thinks the church has been successful because it combines an emphasis on the Scripture with pride in African-American success.”There’s not a Sunday when something about African-American history or African-American pride is not mentioned,”he said.”It’s always tied into the pastor’s sermon.” But even as these churches cater to the black middle class, many black megachurch congregants try to help those who haven’t made it out of poverty. Economic development projects and mentoring programs for young black males are typical outreach initiatives.”They (megachurch members) reside some distance from … the inner-city blight but are sponsoring programs to revitalize those communities,”said Robert Franklin, program officer for the Ford Foundation in New York, an international philanthropic organization.

At Muse’s church, dozens of homeless people are provided with food, shelter and job-interview assistance in a rotating program that involves other area churches.

At Ebenezer AME, volunteers with the Family Outreach and Resource Center of Ebenezer (F.O.R.C.E.) distribute food and clothing, visit prisons and shelters, and offer substance-abuse counseling.”That really is the good news,”said Franklin, who helps the Ford Foundation determine the awarding of economic development grants to minority congregations.”The downside, however, is that, on a day-to-day basis, they (megachurch members) are not visible role models to kids who need them most, (who) never see people get dressed and going to work.” McGoings responds that the inner city is not the only place with crises.”There are problems in the suburbs as well,”he said.”You don’t have to go downtown to find crime and drugs and kids with problemsâÂ?¦. That’s right out here in (Prince George’s County), and I think the church is connected with that.” Ebenezer AME has sports teams and scouting troops that have contributed to the church’s large youth membership and steered young people away from trouble, he said.


Calligrapher Fred Lee Johnson, a 38-year-old member of Ebenezer AME, said he tries to be a role model to African-American boys in his Largo, Md., neighborhood who have no father figure in their lives.”Sometimes I take them fishing,”he said.”When I go camping, I take them camping …. Other members that I fellowship with, they do the same.”(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

Social outreach may be a more visible aspect of black megachurches than of some of their predominantly white counterparts.”I think that the black church … has a strong social-justice legacy that tugs harder at the black middle class and reminds them to engage Dr. (Martin Luther) King’s unfinished agenda in a way that many white churches simply don’t have,”said Franklin.

A Memphis, Tenn., church demonstrated its commitment to meeting community needs when it moved to the downtown area and began a seven-days-a-week operation there.

Located in the same city as Elvis Presley’s famous mansion, the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has been dubbed”The Real Graceland”by author and veteran civil rights leader John M. Perkins. Its members and staff provide poor families with a 30-day supply of groceries, support people affected by the AIDS virus, and run an academy for students from pre-school through the eighth grade.

The Rev. Alvin O. Jackson, the church’s pastor, said a”holistic approach to ministry”seems to be a key to the success of black megachurches.

Middle-class blacks in particular are looking for a place”where they feel that they’re being spiritually fed as well as being challenged to be socially involved,”said Jackson, whose mostly middle-class black congregation has grown from 350 to 8,000 during his 17 years as pastor.”The marriage of those two is very appealing.” And while Jackson’s church, like some other megachurches, emphasizes its members’ African-American heritage, it is also interested in reaching across racial barriers.”We say, for instance, that we are unapologetically Christian and unashamedly African-American,”Jackson said.”But we also see … a part of our mission to be a bridge between the black and white communities of the city.” In Memphis, which Jackson describes as”a very racially polarized city,”church leaders have helped calm the community when tensions arose over white police officers’ treatment of black youths, Perkins noted in his book,”Resurrecting Hope.”The Mississippi Boulevard church leaders met with other pastors and encouraged the police to train their officers in cultural sensitivity.


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Peter Paris, a social ethics professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, in Princeton, N.J., said well-known black preachers have drawn large congregations for more than a century, but nowadays the megachurch leaders-most of whom are in their early 30s to early 40s-are more likely to have master and doctor of divinity degrees and are either occasional lecturers, preachers or adjunct faculty at nearby seminaries.

Experts like Paris say these churches are growing as they attract new residents and people who haven’t been regular churchgoers, rather than merely”stealing sheep”from smaller black congregations. In many cases, people from smaller churches will visit and return to their own congregations with new ideas.

Muse, of Gibbons United Methodist Church, said a couple of months ago deacons from a Baptist church attended all three of his services because they were thinking about moving to a similar schedule.

Muse recalls how his mentor, the Rev. John Cherry of the 19,000-member Full Gospel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Temple Hills, Md., gave him about $5,000 in seed money for his new building and made his chief administrator available as Muse’s church developed.”We’re now giving money to smaller churches,”said Muse, noting that his church has helped congregations as varied as Baptist, AME and Pentecostal.”I’m loaning my staff to other churches.” The Ford Foundation’s Franklin said black megachurches provide”positive benefits for the entire black church culture”by inspiring the integration of proud African-American identity with Christian faith in small as well as large congregations.”That’s actually a kind of wonderful dynamic where a megachurch becomes a laboratory for testing community service projects as well as more innovative worship,”he said.

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