Click here to view the original April 10, 2009 story and additional Wintley Phipps videos.

Pastor WINTLEY PHIPPS (singing at National Prayer Service, Washington National Cathedral):  “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound . . .”

KIM LAWTON:  Grammy-nominated Gospel singer Wintley Phipps is a familiar voice at big national events. At President Barack Obama’s National Prayer Service following his Inauguration, Phipps’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” brought the entire National Cathedral audience, including the new president and first lady, to their feet. But he says it’s just as meaningful to him when he sings in places like prisons.

Pastor  PHIPPS: There is a sense that you’re giving hope to people who really need it.

LAWTON:  For Phipps, who is also a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, music is a ministry and, he says, one of the deepest expressions of his Christian faith.

Pastor PHIPPS: Music is almost to me an echo of the sounds of the divine world, and when you hear these sounds, it stirs something deeply spiritual within you.  Music also is the most powerful way of impressing the human mind with hope.

LAWTON: Hope has been a hallmark not only of Phipps’s musical career, but in his charitable efforts as well.  In 1998, Phipps founded the Dream Academy, a national nonprofit for at-risk kids. Born in Trinidad, he says hope was crucial in overcoming his own at-risk childhood.

Pastor PHIPPS: I was born to a troubled home, and I used to get away from my parents’ troubles — I had a little red tricycle, and I’d go in the back yard of my house, and I would turn the tricycle on its side and use one of the backside wheels as a steering wheel, and I would sit there for hours, and I would dream that I was flying to faraway places in the world and meeting important people when I was six, seven years old, and then I wanted to be like Tom Jones.  I’d go around the house singing, “It’s not unusual to be loved.”  I just wanted to be Tom. But something was missing to me.

LAWTON: Despite a difficult family life, Phipps says his mother always prayed for him and told him that God had a special plan for his life.  As a teenager, Phipps embraced her faith as his own.

Pastor PHIPPS:  t the age of 16, God walked into my life and said, “I’ve seen your dreams. Give me your dreams, and I’ll let you see what I’ve been dreaming for you.”

Singing at National Prayer Service

LAWTON:  He attended an historically black Seventh-day Adventist college in Alabama, where he met Linda, now his wife of 32 years.  Then, Phipps says, God began providing opportunities for him to sing in national venues such as a 1984 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” with Jesse Jackson.  He came to the attention of Billy Graham’s team and became a frequent performer at the evangelist’s crusades.

Pastor PHIPPS (singing in Washington): “Talk about a child that do love Jesus.”

LAWTON: Phipps also became a favorite in Washington. He’s sung for every president since Ronald Reagan.

Pastor PHIPPS: I’ve never had a manager or never had an agent, and yet some of the most wonderful moments that a singer could ever dream of have happened to me, and I believe it’s providential.

LAWTON: The idea for the Dream Academy came after he got involved with a prison ministry.

Pastor PHIPPS: I did not know that so many young men in prison looked like my sons. , and when I saw it I was shaken. One of every three young black men in America between the ages of 18 and 30 are in prison today or supervised by the court system either on probation or parole.

LAWTON: Phipps then learned that 60 percent of the young people who end up in prison are the children of prisoners. He wanted to break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration. The Dream Academy offers after-school mentoring and interactive academic tutoring to children of prisoners and kids falling behind at school.

Pastor PHIPPS: One of the most exciting things that can ever happen in a child’s life is to know that , “You mean God thinks about me?  Or God dreams about me?”  And he’s got a dream for my life?”  And when you catch a little glimpse of what that dream is, wow, it changes everything.

LAWTON:  Phipps has enlisted the support of some of his famous connections for the project.  One of his biggest benefactors is his longtime friend Oprah Winfrey.  The lesson of faith, he says, is that things aren’t always as they seem and that hardship can be overcome.  In these uncertain economic times, he’s released a new music DVD called “No Need to Fear.”

LAWTON:  It’s a theme he finds throughout the old spirituals that he often performs.

Pastor PHIPPS (singing): “Swing low sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home . . .”

The Negro spiritual teaches us that you’re going come up rough sides of mountains, and you’re going to have difficulties.  But faith gives you that ability to weather any storm.

(singing): “I looked over Jordan and what did I see?”

LAWTON:  It’s the core theme as well for the song that has become his signature, “Amazing Grace.”  He finds great spiritual lessons in the history of the song.

Pastor PHIPPS:  A lot of people don’t realize that just about all Negro spirituals are written on the black notes of the piano, and they just keep recurring.  Probably the most famous white spiritual that’s built on this slave scale was written by a man by the name of John Newton who, before he became a Christian, used to be the captain of a slave ship and many believe heard this melody that sounds very much like a West African sorrow chant (hums “Amazing Grace”).  And it has a haunting, haunting, plaintive quality to it that reaches past your arrogance, past your pride, and it speaks to that part of you that’s in bondage, and we feel it. We feel it. It’s just one of the most amazing melodies in all of human history.

(performing “Amazing Grace” on stage): “To sing God’s praise than when we’ve  first begun. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Amen.”

LAWTON: Another lesson, he says, on how hope always triumphs. I’m Kim Lawton in Vero Beach, Florida.

REV. CHRISTINE WILEY (Covenant Baptist Church): We pray for health, O God, that you would pour your spirit into them and heal their bodies, O God.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Reverend Christine Wiley has been ministering to AIDS patients in Washington, DC since the early1980s. Back then people were dying from a disease they didn’t understand and had no idea how it was spreading. Reverend Wiley first met AIDS patients when she allowed the health clinic across the street to move into her church when the clinic’s roof fell in.

WILEY: What I found was a profound privilege of being able to work with people who had contracted this disease, and being able to talk with them to help them get to a place where they had hope and understood that they were still loved by God.

Rev. Christine Wiley

SEVERSON: Twenty years later, Reverend Wiley is still preaching and teaching about HIV-AIDS, which we now know a lot about. We know that it’s preventable and treatable, and yet it has reached epidemic levels in the nation’s capital. The most recent statistics are sobering. Three percent of local residents have HIV or AIDS—triple the number that is generally considered a “severe” epidemic. But among African-Americans residents, the overall rate is above four percent, which is higher even than parts of West Africa. And among the District’s black men the infection rate is even more alarming—almost seven percent. Authorities are worried that the number is actually higher because so many residents are spreading the virus without knowledge they’re infected. This is Bishop Rainey Cheeks at the Inner Light Ministries Sunday worship service.

BISHOP RAINEY CHEEKS (Inner Light Ministries): We live in a city that has the highest infection rate in the country. We live in Ward 8, and it has the highest infection rate in the city, and here we still operate in a state of ignorance, and the Scripture tell us “my people perish for lack of knowledge.”

SEVERSON: Bishop Cheeks is not your typical preacher. He is openly gay and has been HIV-positive for 25 years.

CHEEKS: People would say, what would Jesus do? And I say stop asking that question. Do what he did. Heal people. Love people. He said feed, clothe, shelter people. That is all HIV is asking us to do.

SEVERSON: The church has long been the most influential institution in the African-American community. But Bishop Cheeks says when it comes to AIDS, too many black pastors have been silent, or preaching when they should have been teaching.

CHEEKS: Throughout our history, the information has always been disseminated through the church. Imagine if all the churches on Sunday morning gave just the facts and where they could go get help. How many people would we reach?

Bishop Rainey Cheeks

WILEY (preaching): Have you ever felt persecuted just for living, just for being who you are?

SEVERSON: At the Covenant Baptist Church, Rev. Wiley, who has a doctorate in pastoral psychotherapy, tells her members who have the disease that they are not sinners, that God loves them, and she explains ways to safeguard against the virus to anyone who will listen. Some think the epidemic has passed and don’t want to listen. Some don’t want to know. That’s why Rev. Wiley offers weekly AIDS testing like this, right in church. She says she discovered that many African Americans do not view the black church as a safe place to get counseling about AIDS.

WILEY: There is such a heavy stigma. Then often it’s not talked about. And, of course, within the context of the church one of the things that is difficult is interpretation of Scripture. Many persons within the black church, generally speaking, are very conservative. We find that the issue of sex is not talked about at all in many, many churches, and so if you don’t talk about sex it’s difficult to even talk about risky behavior.

SEVERSON: Bishop Harry Jackson’s Hope Christian Church is typical of many black churches, if not most. Many members here consider drug abuse, premarital sex, and homosexual activity as sins.

BISHOP HARRY JACKSON (Hope Christian Church): Black clergy typically are very conservative socially, and they are much more liberal in terms of other issues. But the heart of the black church is the preaching, and the preaching has to be from the Bible, and that biblical message has been the source of the conservatism of the church, and it’s also the strength.

JACKSON (speaking at rally): And I would rather be biblically courageous than politically correct.

SEVERSON: Bishop Jackson has been a leading spokesman in the District in favor of marriage only between a man and a woman. He agrees that black pastors have not done enough, but sees the problem more as the breakup of the black family.

JACKSON: We haven’t done the preventative work that puts it in the mind of a young teenage girl or boy, hey, you shouldn’t have sex this early. You’re having all the babies out of wedlock, all these things, and I’ve got to take responsibility for it. The only institution that stands between our community and what I’m going to call basically the destruction of family as we know it today is the church.

WILEY: We’ve got to talk about drug addiction. We’ve got to talk about sex. We’ve got to talk about relationships, because women who are heterosexual and have relationships are also having relationships with men who sleep with men.

SEVERSON: Nationwide, the leading cause of HIV-AIDS is still men having sex with men. But here in the District the principal mode of transmission for new cases is heterosexual for both men and women, and 70 percent of those infected are over 40 years old.

CHEEKS: We put condoms out right here in the church on Sunday. You can walk and pick them up right here, and people go, isn’t that a little extreme? Well, what do you call extreme? Saving someone’s life?

SEVERSON: Bishop Jackson remains skeptical about the reliability of condoms and is firmly convinced that abstinence only is the best policy. He blames much of the problem on immoral behavior and the prevailing culture.

JACKSON: The moral message is not being grasped. The culture is shaping much more what happens in the black church. If I say it this way, in all deference to our stars, Beyonce may be listened to more than the bishop.

SEVERSON: And the bishop has no intention of bending his message about the sin of premarital and homosexual sex, although he doesn’t oppose testing and wants his church to do more to help those who are infected.

WILEY: Even with a person who is a conservative we still have to acknowledge that there is a disease in our community, and it has not gotten better. It has gotten worse.

JACKSON: It may be that we’re going to reach people that trust us and trust our interpretation of Scriptures. But if you don’t believe the Gospel as we believe it, maybe you will not feel comfortable coming to us for help, and maybe that’s where someone else has to work, and my point would be we at least need to touch the people we can touch, and I’m not so sure we’re touching them yet.

SEVERSON: On that point they would all agree.

CHEEKS: I’m more concerned with how do we save our community more than I need to be right or any of that. How do we save our community? And then we can have all the other theological debates later on. But right now, we are in trouble.

SEVERSON: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Lucky Severson in Washington.

DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: In Los Angeles, a group of inner-city clergy, many of them inspired by veterans of the civil rights movement, are taking their ministries out of the pulpit and into the streets. Instead of only preaching to save souls, they are returning to activism: confronting homelessness, unemployment, and violence. Lucky Severson reports.

Speaker at Bryant Temple AME Church service: It’s time to break the silence. It’s time to draw a line saying “this far and no farther.”

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the Bryant Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Central Los Angeles. The music will move you, but this is not a celebration. It’s a service dedicated to bringing an end to the needless deaths of all the boys who will never become men.

REV. EUGENE WILLIAMS (CEO and National Director, Regional Congregations and Neighborhood Organizations Training Center, speaking at service): Our young people have been dying in the streets day and night where we have hidden our light under a bushel.

SEVERSON: How many kids have been killed, say, in the last year?

REV. WILLIAMS: About a hundred.

SEVERSON: Pastor Eugene Williams managed to survive his inner-city childhood, but the odds are worse today. He says it’s partly because too many African-American churches have lost their way.

REV. WILLIAMS: And so we’ve gone from a period of ministers like Dr Cecil Murray and Dr. J. Alfred Smith, who taught that it was important to love your neighbor as yourself, to a place where ministers believed that it was important that the community love them.

SEVERSON: So that’s why Williams and other activist preachers started a program called Passing the Mantle, now in its fourth year at the University of Southern California.  It’s a nine-day course where pastors, now known as the Old Lions, teach younger pastors, African American and Latino, how to get civically engaged in the real-life drama of inner city Los Angeles.

(to Rev. Cecil Murray): Did you ever think that you would be called an Old Lion?

REV. CECIL “CHIP” MURRAY (Professor of Christian Ethics, USC School of Religion and Former Pastor, First African Methodist Episcopal Church, Los Angeles, Calif.): Bless the Lord, I knew I’d be called old, but not a lion.

SEVERSON: Cecil “Chip” Murray retired at 75 as the pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, which was the largest AME church in the country. He could preach hellfire and brimstone, but he was more concerned about social issues like homelessness, jobs, violence, and hunger.

REV. MURRAY: We must not only have life after death, but we must have life after birth, even as with the founder of Christianity. He would preach personal salvation, but he would also preach social salvation. He would reach out.  I have come that you may have life, not I have come to take you to heaven.

SEVERSON: Pastor Mark Whitlock is a co-director of Passing the Mantle. He says because of Rev. Murray he turned his life around, so he knows a pastor can make a difference, even with kids society deems beyond hope.

REV. MARK WHITLOCK (Director of Community Initiatives, USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture and Pastor, Christ Our Redeemer AME Church, Irvine, Calif.): I would probably be one of those people you would be afraid of in the community, yeah, sold some product that were illegal and did some things that I’m not very proud of.

SEVERSON: Now, as pastor of Christ Our Redeemer AME Church, he sees how much more difficult it is today for inner-city kids to break free of their environment. He was once one of those kids. The need for black churches to get involved, he says, is urgent.

REV. WHITLOCK: It’s immediate, and you look at the challenge of gang violence, the number of African Americans, Latinos that are locked up in this country, over a million, the absence of African Americans graduating, particularly African American men graduating from high schools and even elementary schools, the attention is necessary now, and it’s an immediate need to change.

REV. MURRAY: To say we are here to save souls and that’s all—you can’t save souls in isolation. It’s a totality of heart, soul, mind, strength, family, environment. It is essentially your environment.

SEVERSON: Pastor Murray earned his reputation as an Old Lion as a leader of the civil rights movement in California from the very beginning. Despite his quiet, humble demeanor, he has won many battles and concessions from the city and state, including one that the police would no longer hold suspects in choke-holds.

Pastor J. Alfred Smith is another Old Lion who led the civil rights movement in northern California. He is senior pastor emeritus of the Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland.

REV. J. ALFRED SMITH (Pastor Emeritus, Allen Temple Baptist Church, Oakland, Calif.): The church was the civil rights movement because the church understood the meaning of “go down, Moses, and tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.” The church understood the meaning of saying “we shall overcome.”

SEVERSON: And after they led the struggle against segregation and police brutality and eventually forced Congress to pass civil rights legislation, it was black pastors who calmed the fury of the LA race riots in 1992. Then things changed. Many black churches began focusing less on social justice issues and more on saving souls and preaching the gospel of prosperity, which teaches that the faithful will be rewarded with material blessings.

REV. MURRAY: I would just admonish those who preach prosperity to remember that the one who founded the Christian church had one pair of shoes.

REV. WHITLOCK: We believe Christ came to set the captives free, to bring sight to the blind, to clothe the naked, to find housing for those who are looking for housing. That’s the work of the church. We must return back to the values that made the black church a true success.

REV. WILLIAMS (speaking at Bryant Temple AME Church service): And we came by here to tell you young people that we’re sorry. We’re sorry because we left you to fend for yourselves.

SEVERSON: Outside the chapel at the special healing service, there was an empty casket. No one needed to ask why. They all know someone.

Woman praying at service: Bring, Heavenly Father, what only you can give…

SEVERSON: A few days earlier, someone dumped the body of a young man who had been shot in the head just a few hundred yards from the church.

REV. WHITLOCK: It’s wonderful labels that we’ve given our children—gang members, Crips, Bloods. I’m sorry. Those are our sons, those are our daughters, those are our cousins, those are our nieces. So we must not be afraid of our own, and if they’re doing wrong, they’re doing wrong.  Selling drugs is wrong. Doing crime is wrong.  Not going to school is wrong.  So the church must speak to the moral—take a moral position on it, but after we take a moral position then we must wrap our arms around them and love them back to a place where they feel safe in the church.

SEVERSON: Most parents in South Central LA are as caring and loving as parents everywhere, but with far greater obstacles. There are few jobs, few public parks to get the kids off the streets, poor schools, and not enough role models. There are now twice as many Latinos as African Americans, but people of all races are starting to realize they’re in this together.

REV. MURRAY: If under the skin all people are kin, if all human beings have an area that can be approached, then we need to find what that area is and go to it, because the problems are not going to fix themselves.

SEVERSON: There are some signs of progress. Inner city pastors have managed to wrangle some new affordable housing. Some of the estimated 40,000 gang members have been persuaded to try to go straight. Pastors are getting more involved. And there’s one more change on the front lines: A majority of those asking to receive the mantle are women.

Woman pastor speaking to group: …that we have to make the difference. That’s what I learned today.

REV. WILLIAMS: People are dying in the streets. We’re saying that people are engaging in risky behavior. So you’ve got to come out behind your stained glass windows and come out here and help people, because if you don’t, all of those problems are going to end up, and they are ending up, on your doorstep.

SEVERSON: They’ve heard promises of help before, promises often not kept. Now it’s the most trusted men and women in the neighborhood who are offering hope.

REV. WILLIAMS (speaking at Bryant Temple AME Church service): If we lock arms, if we continue to move and work together, we will improve the communities where we live, work, and worship. I came by here to tell you to stand on your feet, because we gonna be more better. Let’s give God some praise….

SEVERSON: So far, the Old Lions have passed the mantle to about 400 younger pastors who seem determined to do what authorities have been unable to do without them.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in South Central Los Angeles.

KIM LAWTON, anchor: A tense national debate about racial profiling has continued since Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested in his Cambridge home for disorderly conduct. Gates, who is African-American, was arrested by Sergeant James Crowley, a white officer who had responded to a 9-11 call about a possible break-in. The controversy intensified when President Obama said the police “acted stupidly” when they arrested Gates. The president later said he regretted his choice of words and he hosted both Gates and Crowley at the White House Thursday for a conciliatory beer. The incident and the ensuing debate show how divisive racial issues can be in this country.  Even though America has elected its first black president, efforts toward racial integration are often still fraught with difficulties, not least in churches where it’s been said that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week. Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: If something seems odd or unusual about these worshippers, maybe it’s the diversity, all the different colors and nationalities of their faces. This is the Wilcrest Baptist Church in Houston, and Pastor Rodney Woo couldn’t be more proud of the cultural and racial mix of his congregation.

Pastor RODNEY WOO (Wilcrest Baptist Church, Houston, TX): I think my main passion is to get people ready for heaven. I think a lot of our people are going to go into culture shock when they get to heaven, and they get to sit next to somebody that they didn’t maybe sit with while they were here on earth. So we’re trying to get them acclimated a little bit.

SEVERSON: Assuming Pastor Woo is right, there are a lot of congregations that need to get acclimated. A recent study found that only 7 percent of churches in the US are integrated. This comes as no surprise to Ohio State sociology professor Korie Edwards, author of the book “The Elusive Dream.”

Professor KORIE EDWARDS (Sociology Department, Ohio State University and Author, “The Elusive Dream”): We’re segregated in housing. Even the job market is segregated, and we end up going to churches with people who look like us.

Professor Michael Emerson

Professor MICHAEL EMERSON (Sociology Department, Rice University): Sometimes,you know, you’ll hear the statement of African Americans saying, “I have to work with whites. I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I want to — I don’t want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down.”

SEVERSON: Rice University sociology professor Michael Emerson, who authored the study on the make-up of churches in the US, says racial separation inside most churches is even more pronounced than it is outside for a number of reasons.

Prof. EMERSON: What we found in the study is that churches are 10 times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in.

SEVERSON: Emerson also found that churches in the South were the least integrated, partly because African Americans are concerned about whites taking over their congregation.

Prof. EMERSON: That’s a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate them. There are so many more of them, and they’re used to being in the position of power, so they’ll just take over, and we’ll lose the one thing we do have.

Prof. EDWARDS: And so what happens in these congregations where you have whites and blacks, even though they may be well intended, people coming together and wanting to do the Christian thing, wanting to serve God together, you’re going to find that these kinds of issues that occur outside of the church come into the church.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rufus Smith of the City of Refuge Church in Houston is one of very few African Americans who lead an interracial church. Smith says when he took over the evangelical Presbyterian congregation it was mostly white, bored, and dwindling. He said he would only agree to be pastor if members promised to integrate.

Pastor Rufus Smith

SEVERSON: Today the church is about 45 percent white, 45 percent black, and the rest Hispanic and Asian. But Pastor Smith says the “grand experience” hasn’t always been pleasant.

Pastor SMITH: You’re certainly up against the natural stereotypes. You’re up against ignorance. You’re up against some hard-heartedness and, you know, some outright evil with respect to some people.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rodney Woo, half Chinese, grew up in a black neighborhood, went to an all-white church, and married his Hispanic childhood sweetheart.

Pastor WOO (preaching): The poor rich. Let me tell you who they are. They are the people who have a lot of money and nothing else.

SEVERSON: When he came here, the church had only two black members out of 180. Today Wilcrest Baptist has 500 members divided almost equally among whites, blacks, and Hispanics, with the remainder made up of Asians. Woo says he didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be integrating his church.

Pastor Rodney Woo

Pastor WOO: When we started a lot of people were going, “Ah, this is making me feel uncomfortable.” Whether the kids were in the nursery together, or their kids were in the young group, a lot of parents were fearful that their kids might start dating somebody that was a different race.

Prof. EMERSON: In the beginning stages, there’s often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion. A lot of people leave. Maybe there’s even anger. But if they make it through that, it becomes something that people just a lot of times will say, “I couldn’t live without it.”

Pastor SMITH (preaching): Ask me how I feel.

CONGREGATION (responding): How do you feel?

Pastor SMITH: If I was any better, I would have to be twins, and that’s the truth if I ever told it.

SEVERSON: Pastor Rufus Smith has succeeded in not only integrating his church racially. His congregation comes from all walks of life. When it grew, he deliberately located the church between affluent and low-income neighborhoods. Carol Vance, a former district attorney, was one of the founding members.

CAROL VANCE (Founding Member, City of Refuge Church): We picked Rufus because he’s a great pastor, not because he’s black. But I think it’s wonderful that he is, because we’re sitting right here on the edge, and I sort of like to think of our church as the “bridge over troubled waters.”

Pastor SMITH: To me, one of the true tests of the power of the Gospel is to unify people across socio-economic, racial lines, which is what the heart of Christianity is and was.

SEVERSON: Karen Giesen has a doctorate in theology. She says she grew up in a white church where people bowed their head, folded their hands, and worshipped quietly — very different from what she experiences at City of Refuge.

KAREN GIESEN (Congregation Member, City of Refugee Church): The worship style is an issue. None of us are right in probably our heart language style. We’re all making a sacrifice to be there. It’s a mix. A lot of people go looking for churches saying, “I am looking for the one that ministers to me,” and to go here we’ve obviously all made a choice that we want to serve there.

SEVERSON: Rebecca Miller wants to be a pastor. She says she searched to find a church that felt like a community.

REBECCA MILLER (Congregation Member, City of Refuge Church): People worship the way the spirit leads them to worship. I really don’t think that there is anybody saying you can’t shout, you can’t scream, you can’t say “hallelujah” or you can’t clap your hands. It’s not the typical Presbyterian “you can’t raise your hands” church.

Pastor WOO: Where we really changed, and we saw the growth, grow at exponentially, was when the church became less than 50 percent white, and so there was no majority group, and that just changed the entire mindset.

SEVERSON: Church guitarist Jim Kruse married a Hispanic and adopted a Hispanic child. He says he’s learning a few things about his own prejudice.

JIM KRUSE (Guitarist, Wilcrest Baptist Church): What we’re learning is that you may not come to it thinking you are prejudiced. You may be seriously trying not to be prejudiced. But then you find out the things you are doing come across as prejudiced. So I think a lot of our effort has been to learn to relax, to let people be people.

SEVERSON: It would be difficult to find a more graphic example of religion bridging a racial divide than Dwight Pryor and Rick Taylor. Taylor describes himself as a reformed “redneck.”

RICK TAYLOR (Congregation Member, Wilcrest Baptist Church): From where I come from, to be honest, I was taught to hate people like Dwight and to not have anything to do with them and that they were less than I was, and I believed that most of my life. I truly did. But the Lord has a way of showing you your prejudices in your life.

Dwight Pryor and Rick Taylor

DWIGHT PRYOR (Congregation Member, Wilcrest Baptist Church): I grew up in North Mississippi. As a little kid on those school buses, watching those people would shout racist names at me, and some of them were deacons and pastors in our community. It left a cold chill in my heart — a hatred.

SEVERSON: Dwight is a control systems designer, and Rick is a retired general contractor. The bond that has grown between them is plain to see.

Mr. TAYLOR: Racism colors the truth. It makes people not look at other people as if they were human. It goes that deep. It truly does, and Christ teaches us that we are all the same.

SEVERSON (to Prof. Emerson): Are churches that integrate richer because they did it?

Prof. EMERSON: Yeah. I never meet a church that wishes they didn’t do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn’t do it. They will all say, to the person, “It’s hard. It’s difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion.”

SEVERSON: And they will say, if they’re like Dwight and Rick, that church integration may not always come easy, but it comes with rich rewards and improbable friendships. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in Houston.

Professor Michael Emerson

Q: Fewer than ten percent of churches in America are integrated.

A: Yeah, that comes from our research here, actually.

Q: The number is that low?

A: Yeah, seven percent. That’s what it is.

Q: Were you surprised at that?

A: Yes. Well, yes and no. But yeah, that’s pretty low.

Q: Why? What are the reasons for its being so low?

A: There are three things, and it depends on the group that we’re talking about, but there’s history, there’s culture, and then there’s social networks. So, you know, historically black and white, they worship together until about the end of slavery, and people started moving out into separate churches. But it was because of discrimination and racism and such that blacks began to establish their own denominations and their own churches.

Q: They worshipped together before the Civil War?

A: Absolutely. In part because they had no choice, right? If you were a slave, you did what the master said. And they said to worship: “You’re going to worship with us.” Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they’d even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together. So we didn’t get the denominations and the separate congregations really till about into Civil War time. What’s happened then, of course, is now that we’ve had well over 100 years of this history to establish separate cultures, different ways of worshipping, and different ways of understanding theology so that when people try to come together makes it very difficult. And then, of course, social networks, you know, how do we find a place to worship? We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you’re immigrants, you’re not part of that history. So it’s a little bit different experience. So it may be a language that separates you — again, social networks. But second-generation Asian and Hispanics, second, and third and fourth and so on, they are much more likely to be in integrated churches than are blacks or whites.

Q: Are churches a reflection of our society? We live in different neighborhoods. We work in different jobs.

A: They are. But what we found in the study is that churches are ten times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in. So there’s something more going on than just reflecting the neighborhood, yeah.

Q: What is going on? Is it cultural — that it is difficult to accept an outsider? Is a black church accepting whites, or the other way around?

A: I’ve been in both settings and observed, and I think when non-blacks visit a black church they will feel, they always talk about feeling so welcomed and warmly greeted but being surprised or shocked or whatever by the length of the service, by the different worship style. If we go into white congregations, non-whites will sometimes say it felt like worship never started. It was sort of dead and didn’t feel that warmly received. But so — and there are different realities either way, and it makes it difficult for all groups to try and cross boundaries.

Q: Generally white services are more calm and by the book and a lot more emotion in black services. Is that difficult for whites when they go into a black church?

A: Right, right. Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn’t happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they’re quite a bit different.

Q: The congregation saying “Amen”?

A: Call-and-response style, yes, exactly. So whenever different groups get together then there has to be this long period of negotiation. How will we worship? What’s acceptable? What’s not? If I want to say “Amen” can I? It’s one of the things we find in these congregations is that they are much more likely to be sort of up-beat worship styles, more likely that people in these congregations say “Amen,” maybe get up and dance some, tend to be a little bit more lively than a typical white service would be, but not as lively as a typical black service would be.

Q: What is most likely, a black church that’s integrated with whites or vice versa?

A: We rarely see that. Almost never.

Q: Why is that?

A: Because I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, “People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?” I meet almost no one that goes to an African-American church or thinks, “I’m going to do that.” Now there are whites in African-American churches. They’re interracially married. They’re highly committed. Maybe there’s a professor or two, or a student. Once in a while you get people that maybe because of economic reasons, or have a social network, they get attracted. But it’s a very tiny percent so that when we look at, you know, who are pastors and who are the head clergy of these congregations, they’re overwhelmingly white, just a few African Americans, and those folks are usually called to what were formerly white congregations, or they started interracial church from the get-go.

Q: If the pastor is black, are whites going to be less likely to go to that church because the pastor is black and in charge?

A: Yup. It’s the sad fact of how race still works in our country. We find that over and over again.

Q: But a white church doesn’t feel very welcoming to African Americans, right?

A: That’s right, that’s right. So you can see what is the difficulty. I mean, how do you make these things happen? We’ve done a lot of studies to see when they do happen, why, and I mean there’s a variety of reasons. But one, it starts with a commitment where they decide this is going to be who we are. Maybe it’s out of their faith, a new way of looking at their faith, that we must be integrated across race. So they actually put it into their mission statement, and they start changing things as a result. They may change how worship works. They may actively recruit folks and try and get them to come and help them to feel comfortable and get them involved in leadership, and there’s a variety of ways.

Q: Are they glad they did it? Does the church end up being richer for it?

A: I never meet a church that wishes they didn’t do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn’t do it. They will all say, to the person, it’s hard. It’s difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion as you’re trying to go across cultures, and you don’t understand, you didn’t mean to offend somebody but you’ve offended somebody. But they will all say it just does something. They could never go back to being a uniracial congregation again. It brings excitement. It brings life. It allows them to be able to know people they would never know, to meet people that are outside the congregation they would have never connected with, you know, through the networks that they developed in the congregation.

Q: Would our society be a better society if we had more integrated churches?

A: I certainly think so, and I argue so, and I give talks on that. Are there risks by putting people together? Absolutely. Is there value in the black church? Absolutely. Is there value in having immigrant churches? Absolutely. But if we don’t have congregations gathering with people of different races, what we’re doing is we are redefining racial division, a racial inequality. I spent a lot of time developing in books why worshipping separately actually impacts inequality, economic, social, on and on. So I really do believe there are huge advantages to being together even though it’s difficult, even though we have a lot to learn.

Q: Is this integration happening more in one part of the country than in another part?

A: It happens a little bit more in the West, where there’s more fluid — where everybody’s originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it’s a bigger social cost. One of the things we find when we talk to people that attend these congregations, they all have social cost to it. People want to know why they’re doing that. Sometimes they’re questions about selling out on their race or “Are we not good enough that you have to go to this kind of congregation and not ours?” So there are costs to it, and I think they’re a little bit higher in the South because of its history.

Q: I guess a pastor really sometimes has to walk a tightrope as well as really be an amazing politician, too.

A: Absolutely. Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they’re African American they’ll say, “I’m not black enough for African Americans. I’m not white enough for the whites. I’m not Hispanic enough.” There’s always that sense of because we’re so racially defined, if you’re trying to cross the boundaries you don’t fit into any particular space. We just say there are five, you know, racial groups in the US. I say that these folks are what we call a sixth American. There’s something different. They are somebody who — they don’t exist in any particular racial category, so they all feel it and they kind of congregate to each other. So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.

Q: There is an impression that in many ways church has meant more to the black community over the years than any other particular section of America.

A: Absolutely. It may be changing, but still it’s the one place, that total control of an institution, that African Americans have. So sometimes, you know, you’ll hear the statement of African Americans saying, “I have to work with whites. I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I don’t want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down.” It’s also, of course, as we know, the seat of political organization and the affirming of your blackness and so on.

Q: And hearing liberation theology. Is that fairly common, as in Jeremiah Wright’s church?

A: Yeah, there are variations of it. He says that very strongly, and you’ll find congregations that do that and others that would not say it as strongly. But it is a very common strain. Yeah, absolutely.

Q: Do African Americans worry that if whites come to my church, they’re going to take over?

A: Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate then. There are so many more of them, and they’re used to being in the position of power. So they’ll just take over, and we’ll lose the one thing we do have.

Q: I imagine there are phrases in the Bible they have to be very careful how they use.

A: Absolutely. There’s a lot of terminology, like “washes whiter than snow,” and these things which when they’re said in a uniracial congregation, they just go fine. But when they’re said in a mixed congregation, some people will get offended and wonder, “Why are you saying that? What are you saying?” And sometimes the clergy are blindsided by that. Other times they realize that ahead of time and say they’re not going to use those terms. So it gets complicated for sure.

Q: Is there a trend? Even though it may be slow, are we seeing more integrated churches?

A: We’re going to see more, and we are seeing more, and I’ll tell you exactly why. Not because white and black are more likely to get together. Only a third of the seven percent of congregations that are interracial are black and white. What’s happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures. We do not have an American culture. We have a white American culture and a black American culture. So when those two groups try to get together, [it’s] very difficult because they each feel like they have the right to their culture. If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I’ll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I’m in somebody else’s homeland. So I’m going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean. But in the US, when you have two separate cultures, each with its right, each of which has come to exist in this political entity in the last couple hundred years, each feeling like, “I have the right to hold onto my culture,” and that’s what makes it difficult.

Q: If you have a white church and Asians move in and Hispanics move in, is it less of a problem than if African Americans –

A: Yeah, I think it’s still a problem, but I think it’s easier, I really do, because of not having that similar history, so that’s why I think two-thirds of these mixed congregations are either white with Asian and Hispanic, or black with Asian and Hispanic.

Q: But if you have a white church, and you have a mix of Asians and Hispanics, it makes it easier for African Americans to come?

A: Yes and no, because what happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they’re mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it’s still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.

Q: Music is very, very important in a black church.

A: Absolutely, although every congregation will say, you know, every worship leader will say it’s vital. It’s very important, but again these are, you know, these are different cultural styles. So the tradition from Europe is that you’re supposed to emphasize the mind over the body, so you sing from a very kind of staid perspective. Again, there are charismatic white congregations all over, and they don’t sing that way. But, you know, on the average.

Q: I was recently in South Philly in a neighborhood that has a lot of violence. If the churches there were more integrated, do you think that would work more toward healing the wounds that are there?

A: It would because, you know, think about it. I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you’re an integrated congregation? It doesn’t happen. But I see it happen in uniracial congregations all the time. But people — when they’re in mixed company, we speak differently. So one of the profound things we found when studying these congregations, the mixed ones, is just how much overlap and interracial ties that develop not only with the people in the congregation, but they start meeting each other’s families, and their friends, and they go to each other’s neighborhoods if they live in different neighborhoods, and at work they meet people they wouldn’t otherwise met, and so it creates a whole new definition of what the group is. So I think it’s a lot harder then to have racial violence against each other.

Q: Are you familiar with the City of Refuge Church and Reverend Rufus Smith?

A: I think they’re doing an amazing thing in that they have all groups. But they have large segments of white and black, and so I think it’s the most difficult of these kinds of congregations to have, and it takes a very deft leader, and him being African American, I mean I’m sure it’ll be interesting when you talk with him. He’ll have to be very knowledgeable of white culture, black culture, and walk these fine lines.

Q: His is more multiracial than, say, Pastor Woo’s –

A: Oh, Pastor [Rodney] Woo would be more multiracial and more groups, right. I think they have people from 40-some different countries. International church is what I would call it. They’re immigrants from all over the world, be they black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern.

Q: I assume that Pastor Woo’s church is the way it is either because the congregation wanted it, or because he wanted it. How did it end up being that way?

A: It was an all-white church. It was starting to decline. They had to hire a new pastor, and they hired him. But he came under the condition that “I want and I’m called to make this a multiethnic church.” So they knew. He’s interesting because he’s part-Asian, part-white. He’s married to a Hispanic woman, so that’s their family and that’s their vision.

Q: What’s it feel like in one of his services? I’m sure you’ve been there.

A: I think it’s pretty dynamic. There’s a lot of energy there and life, and you’ll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they’re listening in Spanish.

Q: So it’s a rich cultural experience.

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: And Pastor Rufus Smith and the City of Refuge. Tell me a little bit about that.

A: Same thing. There’s a lot of life there, but it’s a different sort, because there’s a lot less immigrants and a lot more racial, the mix of black and white in particular. I’ve actually never been to their worship for an extended period of time, so I can’t comment wisely on it. I can say that I’ve talked to people in both congregations, and there are both positives and negatives. I mean, so if I’ve talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they’ll wonder, “Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?” And what’s happening is they’re falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It’s not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That’s certainly common in mixed churches.

Q: So there are downsides, but the downsides are outweighed by the upsides?

A: Downsides, yeah, and when there are more downsides when churches first start — they go through stages of transforming to becoming multiracial. So in the beginning stages there’s often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of people leave. Maybe there’s even anger. But if they make it through that they come to a new agreement, and they start creating a new culture, and it becomes something that people just — a lot of times they’ll say, “I couldn’t live without it. I just have to be there.”

Q: You see it manifest in any other ways, for instance, in the neighborhood? Do they socialize together if they go to church together?

A: They do, and that’s what really surprised us, because it was such strong effects. They’re more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods after they start being in these kinds of congregations. They are much more likely to say that their two very best friends are of a different race, that their circle of friends, their friends in the church, but also in their whole social network, absolutely. We’ve had people say, “Now when I go to work, I don’t feel uncomfortable talking to people of different races, and I go up and introduce myself, and I start making a new friend I wouldn’t have done otherwise.” And again, this connection that you get: I meet Joe at church. Joe’s connected to a whole network of people I don’t know. Joe likes me. He invites me over to his son’s birthday party, and I meet his whole family. I meet his friends. I get to know his neighborhood. That happens all the time.

Q: Will the election of Barack Obama have an impact on interracial churches? Will we see more of them?

A: Oh, yeah. I think with President Obama there’s going to be a discussion, because he himself is multiracial, because we have for the first time a non-white president. There’s going to be talk about what does this mean? What is it? Are we in a new era? And I think it’s going to open up a wider place for a discussion about we ought to come together in our churches, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, in our clubs and our networks. I think it’ll be more acceptable to talk about it. We’ll see what happens. It’ll take some time. But I think it will.

Q: But generally you think it will be positive.

A: Yes.

Q: Can you talk a little bit more about why it is difficult to integrate churches?

A: What sort of difficulties would happen when people of different cultures try to come together to worship? Tiny little things such as let’s tell jokes with each other. Humor is so culturally based that when I try to tell a joke as me being a white American, if I tell other white Americans, they’ll laugh. If I tell an African American, they might not laugh. In fact, they either might not find it funny, or they might find it offensive, and I didn’t mean it to be offensive. So these are the sort of little things that build up over time, just like in a marriage. You know, the little things can build up over time. Then of course there are bigger things that matter, like who do I see up there in the congregation? Do I see myself up there? Well, I don’t. So I ask the clergy why don’t I see myself represented in leadership? And I’m told, and this happens quite a bit, “We don’t think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job.” So then I have to conclude, oh, the best people are all somebody other than my own race. So that’s difficult. How do we interpret the Bible? Should we stress things like justice and that God is somebody who cares about equality of all people? Or is he a God of love and a God who’s there to give me an afterlife? And different traditions stress different — so then there’s that. I talked to an African American who says before she goes into an interracial church, she sits in her car and she listens to gospel music to get her fill, and she goes into an interracial church where they don’t do gospel music, and she’s ready to accept the other sorts of ways of worshipping. So there’s that. There’s always the question of time. Does time at 10:00 mean 10:00 sharp? Or does it mean give or take a few minutes? And a few minutes, is that plus or minus two minutes? Or plus or minus ten, or maybe a half an hour each way? So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we’re going to work through these.

Q: Are you looking at Protestant churches, Catholic churches?

A: Protestant, Catholic, even Muslim. We studied a mosque, and this is when we were at Notre Dame, and in this mosque they had people from a variety of countries, most of them immigrants. In some of the countries, when you go into a mosque you remove your shoes. To not do so could be punishable even by death in that nation. In other countries, it would be a great offense to remove their shoes when they come into the mosque, a sign of disrespect. So there was great clashes when, you know, if you believe you shouldn’t remove your shoes and someone’s taking their shoes off, how can they do this? That actually was such a big clash in this case that they had to put a curtain down the middle of where they would worship. And then they would have the shoe removers on one side, and the non-shoe removers on the other side until they could work through coming to understand why we might both be trying to worship authentically, and because of our cultural background we have these different ideas. But it took a while.

Q: Any particular denominations that you’ve seen the most progress?

A: You find the most in not any particular denomination specifically. It’s the style of worship. So if we have what we call a charismatic worship style, that means upbeat music and a more lively style of preaching usually, people are allowed to clap, say “Amen,” whether they’re mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, and Catholics, whatever, they’re much more likely to be integrated. There’s one denomination in particular, though, that has pushed very hard to be multiracial in its denomination — not only its denomination but, I mean, in its congregations, and it’s called the Evangelical Covenant Church, http://www.covchurch.org/ which is headquartered in Chicago. Their whole goal is that’s the kind of churches they start, multiracial, and I think they say now 20 percent of their churches are that.

Q: Is there particular Christian scripture that points to interracial acceptance?

A: Scripture is vast, and people can pick and choose what they emphasize, and so for hundreds of years verses that said that you are to welcome the stranger, that with Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, we’ve broken down the dividing wall with the original church, where Christians were first called Christian was the church of Antioch in which for the first time you had Jews, Gentiles of all different ethnicities come together as one people. That’s when they were called Christians. So these are the kind of things that now when people are trying to move towards multiracial congregations that they’re stressing. They’re talking about these scriptures that say we ought to come together, and that at Pentecost, when that the Holy Spirit is said to have come upon the first Christians, they were given the ability to speak in different languages, and so that no matter who the people were, they could all worship together. But you know, interestingly enough, those things were not talked about much at all for a few hundred years at least.

Q: But it’s there. It’s a fundamental part of Christianity that you should welcome people of all races.

A: That’s right.

BOB ABERNETHY (Anchor): We have a story today about a remarkable man in California.  He is a Catholic priest from Ireland who has ministered for 37 years to both African Americans and Latinos in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Saul Gonzalez reports.

SAUL GONZALEZ (Contributing Correspondent): The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts has long been synonymous with inner-city desperation and despair. It’s the neighborhood that exploded in urban unrest, after all, in 1965, and then again during LA’s 1992 riots.

Today, Watts is still home to some of the meanest streets in the city, but they’re streets walked regularly by Father Peter Banks, a Catholic priest who, dressed in his robes, rope belt, and straw hat, looks like a fish very much out of water.

Born and raised in rural Ireland, Banks arrived as a young priest in Watts in 1973, assigned to the Saint Lawrence of Brindisi Church.

FATHER PETER BANKS: My picture of America before I came was Hollywood, Disneyland, and the beach. So I got into the car, we drove up Century and we crossed Vermont, and I began to realize this is a very different world. It was all black, and the very first Sunday I stood up on the altar and I said what am I doing here? How will I ever understand the people? Will they understand me?

GONZALEZ: In the decades since, though, this Irish priest and the people of Watts have come to know each other very well, and Father Banks has become a beloved figure both in his church and the wider community. Father Banks says his taking an active role in the day-to-day life of the community has been key to being accepted by the residents of Watts.

(Speaking to Father Banks): How important is it for you to do what we are doing now, to get out and to walk the streets?

FATHER BANKS: Oh, I feel part of the flesh and blood and soul of Watts.

GONZALEZ: As he walks through the community, Banks meets and ministers to the casualties of drugs, poverty, and violence in Watts. One of them goes by the name “Red Man.”

FATHER BANKS: Now, he never minds me saying this, but this man was shot thirteen times and survived.

RED MAN: I love this man. Really, he is the only white man who can walk Watts with no gun, just walking by faith, and walk here and know everybody. Everybody knows Father Peter. He is the true father of Watts. He is a real servant of God.

GONZALEZ: Red Man and a friend then ask Father Banks to lead them in an impromptu street corner prayer.

Central to the story of Watts and Father Banks’s church is the incredible demographic shift that has occurred in this community in recent years. Once synonymous with the African-American community, Watts is increasingly Latino. With that change has come tension.

FATHER BANKS: They call it the black and brown conflict. How do we get black and brown to come together?

GONZALEZ: That conflict sometimes expresses itself in violence, but often its face is a soft, unofficial form of segregation. Latinos largely stick to themselves, African Americans as well.

(Speaking to African American girl): You wouldn’t go out of your way to hang out with Hispanic kids?

AFRICAN-AMERICAN GIRL: Definitely no, I really wouldn’t because, I know it might sound racist, but if I see a Mexican girl or a Latino girl I’m just, like, not hanging out with her because she is just not my people. I know that’s wrong, but that’s just, like, the way it is in our society and our community.

GONZALEZ: It’s such feelings that Father Banks has tried to battle in Watts, making both African Americans and Latinos feel welcome in his congregation and breaking down walls of mutual suspicion and hostility. He’s done that by learning Spanish, slowly integrating some church services, and developing sensitivity to the problems of both Latinos and African Americans.

GONZALEZ: Father Banks says being Irish can actually be an advantage in his work in Watts.

FATHER BANKS: I feel it is. One time I was talking to the black kids, that’s when I came first, and they were saying something about the whites, and I held up my arm and said, “Look at me,” and this little girl said to me, “Father Peter, you aren’t white, you’re Irish.”

I can relate very much to the black in the sense of the Irish being persecuted. It used to say in the States, I think, “No black or Irish need apply.” So I feel I do identify a lot with the African-American people and their pain and their suffering. I’m able to relate to the Latinos and say I am an immigrant, and I tell the Latino people, I say, I am an immigrant, too. I came here and, I said, I am far away from my own land. I know what you go through, too.

GONZALEZ: Members of Father Banks’s congregation say they appreciate his efforts to build bridges of understanding between African Americans and Latinos.

MARIAN ANTUCHA (Latino parishioner speaking in Spanish with English translation): He helps all the people, African Americans, Latinos, the entire community. To us, Father Peter doesn’t recognize borders. He’s a person who helps everybody, and that’s why we’re here.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN PARISHIONER: If PR and public relationships, communications was a gift from God, poof, he got it ten times, you know, because he can get out there and talk to different people, and they just feel his love, and he will tell them to come here, and then they feel the love. It’s just a relationship that blossoms.

GONZALEZ: As he’s gotten older, Banks says he’s increasingly focused his ministry on the education and safety of Watts’ youngest, at the elementary and middle school operated by his church.

FATHER BANKS: They know more about pain than I do in my lifetime, and they are only six, seven, eight, nine years old. You saw them this morning there, dying for affection. If I don’t feel optimistic and I feel tired, I come over to the school. I get energy from the school, energy from these children.

Hope is to be able to sing in the middle of the darkness, and I think that’s what hope is for me. I can still sing in the middle of the darkness.

GONZALEZ: However, after serving the spiritual and material needs of this community for much of his adult life, Father Peter Banks will soon depart Watts. He’s been asked to take a job as a church recruiter in a rural area of California. Although he says he feels duty-bound to fill this position, Banks acknowledges he feels conflicted about leaving this community.

FATHER BANKS: That’s an emotional issue for me. It’s going to be a big struggle to leave here. It’s going to be—I’m at peace with God. That’s all I can say. I am at peace with God. I feel it is God’s will that I continue his work, and we need priests for the church and brothers and…

GONZALEZ: But it hurts?

FATHER BANKS: Oh, it hurts deeply. I have put so much of my life in here. I have invested so much in children. It is the biggest change of my life. I feel I am leaving home twice. I left Ireland 37 years ago, and I feel like I am leaving home again, too. But I’ve come to terms with it, and I know that I am doing it for a higher cause, a higher power.

GONZALEZ: The people whose lives Father Banks has touched in Watts hope his example will inspire others to continue his work of cultivating peace and understanding in a community that so needs them.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.

Read more of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly’s July 1, 2009 interview in New York City with Riverside Church senior minister, the Rev. Dr. Brad Braxton:

I would say it’s a time of relief, at least for me personally, to know that this moment has the potential to teach so many lessons. So it’s not relief as a “phew” because there’s so much sadness, because we came together with such great hopes….It’s more a sense of scripture teaches us, Christian theology teaches us that out of difficult moments like this so much positive can occur, so many wonderful transformations might happen. And I first want to acknowledge that there’s a sense of relief in the sense of teaching, in that this is teaching me lessons. I have learned lessons of leadership about what it might mean for me to be a clearer communicator, about how the next time I am called to leadership I do a better job of preparing people for the inevitable changes that an institution might have to go through. So I’m relieved in the sense that this moment has opportunities to teach me something, and I’m trying to be a good student, and I feel a sense of relief in that I believe the congregation if it gravitates to this moment and really stays with this moment prayerfully, it also has some wonderful wisdom to impart to the congregation.

I think what I’m going to do is to reflect, obviously, on these lessons of which I’ve been speaking and then prayerfully pursue the next phase of my ministry. My wife, daughter and I are walking in faith. The next calling has not presented itself, but this will be a time for us to be prayerful and reflective and look for the next creative opportunity to use the gifts of ministry that have been given to us to make a significant difference in some community.

I shared with the church leadership that I would be a pastoral presence as much as it is useful for me to be so, and I have received warm invitations from the congregation and the church council and other leaders to continue to lead. There are many initiatives that we have started, and the work of social justice ministry and spiritual empowerment will continue on in a fervent way even in these remaining weeks that we have. And also I will do the best that I can to outline the contours of healing. This is a community that needs some healing, and I think it would be fanciful to believe that in a matter of a few weeks or even a few months that all of us would have sorted this out. But at least we begin, we can begin to talk about this is what healing looks like, and we can fill in the data as we go along and color in the lines as we go along. But at least let’s talk about the boundaries, and we’re going to be having services, even beginning tonight, Sunday service and other services, and other opportunities to lament what happened, because first of all, before you can ever talk about healing and joy on the other side, you have to really rest for a moment with the fact that something didn’t go quite right here, and that brings pain to our hearts, and I also believe, my theology, at least, would teach me that human brokenness touches the heart of God. So there’s a lament in heaven, as well, and we need to rest with that and have ways to ritualize that spiritually, and then once we go through that process, carefully, joy can and will emerge. Hope can and will emerge. I am confident of that.

Scripture that I’ve been sharing with the congregation and the leaders is Isaiah 43. It’s a wonderful passage where God says when you go through the waters, when you go through the fire, I will be with you. The waters, the rivers, they won’t overwhelm you. The fire will not burn you. I think moments like this have the possibility to create despair. But the promise of God is even in what seems to be the most desperate circumstances, my presence will be there to undergird you, and I will be there to walk beside you, and most of all I’m going ahead of you to lead you. And that’s what speaks to me personally. I think that speaks to my family, and from the body language and comments of leaders and members of this congregation, that passage and the promise of that passage has spoken to them as well. So, Isaiah 43 has become a touchstone for many of us in the last 48 to 72 hours.

For me, the awareness began to take the form of what is really my assignment here. I would like to say, maybe this will be helpful when the congregation hears me say it in a more public way, that I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that I was called to serve as pastor of this congregation. There were too many divine signs along the way. It was a very elaborate search process. The church searched for the better part of a year and engaged a search firm, and there was an eight-day confirmation process…so that notion of a real prayerful, reflective process where we said the goals of the congregation and my gifts of ministry seem to be in line with one another. So I have no sense of despair about the fact that I was called. This was not a mishap in any way, shape, or form, at least in my perspective. There is absolutely no regret at all. The lessons that I have learned and the love that I have received have blessed me and my family in some wonderful ways. But there was a growing awareness that maybe my assignment, my calling, was not what I thought it was to be. Now, it’s a very complex process of sorting through the providence of God, more than we could ever do in one interview. But I began to realize that maybe my thinking that I was here for 10 or 15 year pastoring missed something, or I had not really latched on exactly to what God’s assignment was for me here, and one of the assignments was to clarify with greater intensity some of the unresolved issues here in the life of this congregation, issues that may hamper any senior minister from working collaboratively with this congregation. And when those issues are sorted out lovingly, the possibility of this place reaching its fullest potential is right there. It’s right there in the offing. But the congregation will have to reach, stretch, to get it. But it’s there. So maybe my assignment was to highlight that possibility that comes from addressing those internal challenges and not, and there was something in this experience that God wanted to use to teach me. I have learned some profound lessons about leadership and about patience and about standing firm in the midst of the storm that I believe God will use in the years to come. I will share this thought. Years ago when I first met Dr. [James] Forbes, I came here to preach a service for the New York Presbytery. Dr. Forbes came. It was one of the first times he and I had ever really sat down. He took me on a tour of the church, took me in his office, the office that I now occupy, and he began to theologize and he said, “God is an economical God.” That thought has stayed with me for years. That is to say that God does not waste experience. There are things that have happened that I have pledged to God I will not let that become waste. You have used the blessing of this experience, and you’ve used the burden of this experience, and all of it can work for my good, and I want in these few remaining weeks to invite the congregation to consider that same paradigm, that the blessing and the burden of all of this, none of this is waste. God has a way of turning it all into something profound. If you want to talk about current parlance around being green, God is the ultimate agent of green. Nothing is wasted in God’s universe, and I think God wants to use this and perhaps recycle some of these experiences for the greater good, I hope, for the congregation and for the greater good of my forthcoming ministry.

I think it would really be a misapprehension of the circumstance to try to say it’s one thing. Riverside Church is an incredibly diverse and complex community, and with that diversity and complexity comes an assemblage of opportunities and challenges. So let me quickly try to identify some of the challenges I’ve been sharing with the leaders that I believe if grappled with can lead to opportunities. I think some serious conversations need to occur about more creative and healthy ways of dealing with conflict and dissent. Related to that is a larger issue, and perhaps this is one of the issues that the friends we have in the neighborhood at some of the other institutions might help us think through, and that is what is the relationship between rights, as an individual’s rights in a liberal progressive institution like Riverside, and communal accountability. To be sure, each of us brings rights. We value the democratic process here. The liberal progressive tradition is born out of a sense of protecting the rights of those who have been disenfranchised and marginalized. But we also must realize that there are times when I may have to momentarily set my individual rights aside in order to find common ground for the common good. So there’s a tension that needs to be wrestled with between rights and accountability, and that’s not just, I think, an issue at the Riverside Church. I think that’s something that’s endemic to many progressive institutions. I would also say that some serious conversation needs to occur about what it means to invite a leader, a pastoral leader, into this community. Is this congregation really ready for and interested in a pastoral leader who actually wants to lead? Not autocratically. Certainly collaboratively, but lead, and that’s something that I think will need to be grappled with. How is power dispersed and shared so that you can honor the congregational style? I think it is a misnomer that has been sometimes bandied about, even here at Riverside, that I and others have misunderstood the congregational nature of this congregation. I’ve been Baptist all my life. Baptist churches are congregational. Indeed, we sometimes forget that Riverside Church historically began as a Baptist church and continues as a Baptist church, as well as a church affiliated with United Church of Christ. So being a congregational church should not mean that you don’t make room for strong, faithful, pastoral leadership. I think that’s something I would lovingly and respectfully encourage the congregation to consider. How can you have an empowered laity and an empowered pastor? I do not believe that they are mutually exclusive.

I believe, going forward, this congregation would receive significant benefit from some significant work in clarifying terminology. So let me say just a bit more about that. I have read articles over the last few weeks as people have covered the controversy where people will say things like, again, it’s an inaccuracy, but “Dr. Braxton was trying to foist upon the congregation an evangelical approach as opposed to the intellectual approach.” You know, there’re all these terms get bandied about, as if people who do have evangelical commitments, which simply in my vantage point means people who want to take the good news of God seriously, that’s all, etymologically, being evangelical means, because of certain characterizations in the culture, evangelical means a certain demographic and a certain litmus test, religious kind of dogmas. But a church like Riverside should rise to the occasion and begin to clarify terms such that if I say, as I have, that I certainly do have evangelical commitments. I am concerned about God’s good news, but from my very first moment in this congregation I have been talking about an understanding of God’s good news that makes room for all of God’s children. So what often happens in a community that is unclear about terminology and where there is some degree of fear is that people begin to stereotype one another. So, for example, even in the coverage of my departure, you have caricature and stereotypes. This past Sunday at the Riverside Church was Pride Sunday, and I publicly on multiple occasions, including my Sunday sermon, declared myself proudly to be a heterosexual ally for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer persons and preached a sermon about struggling for the rights and dignity of persons in that demographic and with that sexual identity. Now one would say that’s an interesting kind of evangelical, isn’t it? Or the third Sunday of May, I hosted along with the congregation an interfaith dialog where I preached a sermon from the Riverside Church asking, exhorting, calling for Christians to repent of their Christian imperialism that belief that Jesus Christ is the only way. That is so far from my theology. I have always believed that there are many ways to have a relationship with God and to be in just relationships with one another. And so I would say, well, if someone also has evangelical commitments, whatever that means, and for me it means I’m simply concerned about God’s good news, do we need to have knee-jerk reactions when we haven’t clarified terms? And Riverside Church as a cathedral has the opportunity and maybe even the responsibility in the 21st century to chart new paths and to clarify terminologies and to say all of us in some sense should be concerned about God’s good news and making room for all of God’s children at the table. That has been the fundamental message that I have preached over and over and over again. How do we genuinely appreciate diversity?

What we will attempt to do in these next few weeks is, as I mentioned, continue on with all the good work that has gone on in the various ministries of the congregation and also begin in collaboration with the church council and commissions and staff and leaders, put procedures in place and begin to look for who some of the interim leadership might be and trying to leave the house as much as we can in order and create as many opportunities for the honest sharing of emotions. As you witnessed, this is something we did in a wonderful way. We had an all-staff luncheon and church council came, and it was a great experience of the process of, again, beginning to draw the outlines of healing. And we’ll try to do that with as much earnestness and tenderness as we can in the next few weeks. My final Sunday, I believe, will be the first Sunday of August, August 2nd, and to be quite honest, on August the third I’m not exactly sure what happens other than to say my wife, Lazetta, and our daughter, Karis, and I will relocate to some other part of the United States. We have some hunches where that might be, but we’re trying to sort all that out, and we will certainly need to enmesh ourselves in a community where we can find some healing, because right now we’re kind of just trying to get through this and help the congregation and help ourselves. But we will need some time to decompress and to reflect about all that has occurred and really just rest with this for a moment. And then I’m open, I’m wide open to possibilities. I have such a deep commitment for pastoral communities and pastoral leadership and mentoring younger clergies. I’ve had a longstanding commitment to theological education. And I’m looking for something that will allow me to continue to address in creative ways the progressive social justice agenda and spiritual empowerment agenda that I came to implement here at Riverside Church. So we are walking in faith.

My words for my successor would be words from the Apostle Paul: Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. For as much as you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a Lucky Severson report now on the divisions in one of the most prominent places of worship in the country—Riverside Church in New York. It’s affiliated with both the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ and was built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in the late 1920s for its first and much admired senior pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick. Riverside became widely known for its great preaching, liberal theology, interracial congregation, and commitment to social justice. But now it’s also known for a bitter controversy surrounding its new senior minister, Brad Braxton.

Unidentified minister performing a blessing: Dear God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, we now bring this servant of God, this man of God before you.

LUCKY SEVERSON: It has become an occasion worthy of note when the Riverside Church installs a new senior pastor. His name is Brad Braxton, and he has come a long way from his humble beginnings as the son of a Baptist preacher in rural Virginia.

Rev. BRAXTON: Pastoral ministry is a wonderful vocation. The opportunity to guide a community of faith amid its joys and sorrows is a significant and high calling.

SEVERSON: Riverside spans the blocks between the ivy-covered walls of Columbia University and the largely African-American Harlem neighborhood. Jennifer Hoult discovered Riverside when she was attending nearby Barnard College and has been coming to services for over 20 years.

Jennifer Hoult

JENNIFER HOULT (Member, Riverside Church): We have had some of the most extraordinary preachers leading this church. I mean Fosdick, Bill Coffin, Jim Forbes — these are extraordinary gentlemen in the clergy, and brilliant theologians and brilliant preachers, I can add.

SEVERSON: Dr. Braxton seems well prepared for the job. He’s a Rhodes Scholar, has a PhD in New Testament studies, and was a religion professor at Vanderbilt. Betty Davis says it’s the kind of resume that stood out among the 200 applicants for the job. She has been a member here for 19 years and was on the selection committee.

BETTY DAVIS (Member, Riverside Church): And what impressed me most about Dr. Braxton was, first of all, his deep spirituality combined with his masterful knowledge. So he really stood out. His energy stood out. He came prepared.

SEVERSON: It seems like a perfect fit. So why, on the day of his installation, did the new senior pastor speak about fear within the congregation?

Rev. BRAXTON (preaching to congregation): Fear not. Fear not. I’m going to preach it until the Holy Ghost tells me to stop.

SEVERSON: He is speaking of the fear some in the congregation have about their new senior minister. His selection has proved controversial, and division within the church is an issue he has not shied away from.

Rev. BRAXTON (speaking to congregation): Move the mountain of distrust and animosity in this congregation by speaking the truth in love.

Ms. DAVIS: As soon as his name was announced, the attacks started. One of the things that some people are afraid of is that the church will turn black. And, you know, I really resent that.

SEVERSON: Betty Davis says Dr. Braxton’s predecessor, Dr. James Forbes, a world-class preacher, also black, also suffered congregational harping, and that the elephant in the room people aren’t talking about is racism. Lois and David Carey have attended Riverside for over 35 years and have seen the church’s membership shift from predominately white to predominately black.

Lois and David Carey

DAVID CAREY (Member, Riverside Church): I feel that Dr. Braxton is getting a holdover from Dr. Forbes, who went through the same thing he’s going through. Only he was there taking it for 20 years.

SEVERSON: Racism have anything to do with it?

Mr. CAREY: I think so, yeah. I’m sad to say it but I think so, you know.

Rev. BRAXTON: I’m obviously dealing with, as did Dr. Forbes, some of the issues of what it means to guide an institution of this magnitude when this institution, like the United States of America, is still wrestling with the great hold that racism has on this country.

SEVERSON: But Jennifer Hoult says her problem with Dr. Braxton is not about color.

Ms. HOULT: My concerns about Dr. Braxton had nothing to do with his race or his personal history. They had to do with his theology.

Rev. BRAXTON (preaching to congregation): Listen again to a portion of James, chapter 3.

Ms. HOULT: What he says consistently in sermons is talking about the only way to God is through a particular fundamentalist path, which is to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and that’s a huge change in our theology. It’s a huge change in our openness and our inclusiveness.

SEVERSON: Braxton denies that he is changing the theology and says he has written articles critical of fundamentalism.

Rev. BRAXTON: I must say as a theologian it is laughable to me that someone would consider me a fundamentalist. My thinking on Scripture, my support of gay marriage, I mean, you roll it out, there is no way, shape, or form that I am a fundamentalist.

SEVERSON: But Braxton’s evangelical preaching, his focus on Scripture, and his leadership style has made some of the congregation ill at ease.

DIANA SOLOMON-GLOVER (Member, Riverside Church): What troubles me the most is that I feel the direction of the church with the new leadership is — has strayed or is straying from the mission of the church, which is open, affirming, and inclusive, interracial, interdenominational, and international.

SEVERSON: Diana Solomon-Glover is in the Riverside choir, has a master’s degree in voice, and works with children with special needs. She’s been a member over 20 years and says Riverside is no stranger to controversy and contentiousness.

Diana Solomon-Glover

Ms. SOLOMON-GLOVER: I look at it as a laboratory experiment. This is the place where we find out if people of varying backgrounds and faiths can actually come together and figure out how to be one people.

SEVERSON: But, she says, the experiment does not seem to be working very well. Riverside has long been known for its concern with diversity and social justice. Braxton agrees he may bring a new take on those issues, but pushes back at critics who think he is not committed to the church’s longstanding mission.

Rev. BRAXTON: I just think that’s patently false, and I think as a pastor, though, it’s born, again, out of fear. What I believe we are actually trying to do in our best moments is to suggest that if in fact we are going to be who we are — that is, a Christian congregation — we must take seriously Jesus and Scripture. Those are non-negotiables for Christian congregations.

SEVERSON: It’s not just theological concerns that Braxton faces. Solomon-Glover was among four church members who filed suit over what they alleged was a violation of Riverside’s bylaws. Among their claims was that Braxton’s compensation package included a $250,000 salary, a housing allowance, and other benefits totaling over $600,000. The church says in reality that package is actually closer to $460,000 and is comparable to that of other leaders of large churches in New York City.

Ms. HOULT: The argument has been made by the council that the reason we’re paying so much is because this is what everyone else does, and what I would say is Riverside has never been about doing what everyone else does.

Rev. BRAXTON: What my family and I were simply trying to do was to respond to a significant calling and one that had significant burdens and liabilities associated with it, and I think it was sensationalized in a way that’s very unfortunate.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN (handing Rev. Braxton a bouquet of flowers): We love you so much. We appreciate you.

SEVERSON: There’s no doubt that many members are quite fond of the new senior pastor, and he of them. But the congenial atmosphere apparently does not extend throughout the congregation, and his critics argue there is a substantial voice of dissent.

Ms. SOLOMON-GLOVER: Those who look at us as dissenters would like to believe that we are small in number. But there are a lot of people who have left the church because of what’s going on in the church, and there are a lot of people who have watched others of us be marginalized and who are sort of in the shadows.

Ms. HOULT: What’s happening right now at Riverside is contentious, hateful. You know, not only do we go and get called names, but we get screamed at by groups of people out of control. There’s no effort by Dr. Braxton to rein it in.

SEVERSON: In a recent Sunday sermon entitled “Speaking in Tongues,” Dr. Braxton appeared to be calling out his detractors on what he called fearful and mean tongues.

Rev. BRAXTON (preaching to congregation): Some days we speak in merciful tongues, other days in mean tongues. We all speak in tongues, and we all one day will have to give an account to God for the kind of tongues we used when dealing with other people.

SEVERSON: The one area of agreement we found among most everyone we spoke with is there is still a lot of healing to be done on both sides. Dr. Braxton says he is hopeful.

Rev. BRAXTON: Amid all of the rancor, much of which has been directed to me, I think unfairly, you keep loving, you keep preaching, you keep teaching, you keep serving, and after awhile maybe some of that fear will dissipate.

SEVERSON: While Dr. Braxton keeps preaching, it is still unclear where Riverside will go from here. Both he and his divided congregation share a hope that the church will continue to stand out, not just as the tallest church in the US, but as a beacon for mainline Protestants everywhere.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in New York.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, guest anchor: In inner cities across the US high numbers of African-American men are caught up in the criminal justice system. It’s costly to keep them in prison. It’s also costly to the communities they leave behind — and return to. Phil Jones reports.

PHIL JONES: Welcome to Brownsville — a pocket of poverty inside Brooklyn, New York, a place where crime and prison often are a way of life.

RONALD HERRON: Both my parents were drug addicts. My father wasn’t at home.

Ronald Herron

DEJUAN SMITH: I went to prison for murder in the second degree.

NATHANEL RICE: The first time for robbery — two years; second time for robbery —12 years; third time for drug possession.

VINCE MATTOS (Community Activist): I was out hustling narcotics. What I would have to tell Mom is, “Look, I found a whole bunch of money!” I would see Mom crying because she was behind on bills or something like that. I would come in and say, “Mom, look I found x, y and z.” You know, she was like, oh, you know, “God is good” — this and that.

JONES: But Vincent Mattos’s mother is proud of her 42-year-old son.

Mr. MATTOS (speaking to men): Hey brothers. How you doing?

JONES: He now roams these troubled streets as a community activist. He knows the turf.

Mr. MATTOS: Young men that’s out on the corner from sun-up to sundown, falling back to do what they know to do to earn a living because there’s no jobs for them. There’s no helpful reentry program that’s in place right now. Whatever you want, you can get it on this strip. Drugs, sex, and guns, that’s what’s major out here.

JONES: What else is major — the pervasive presence of police with the task of arresting the bad guys and putting them behind bars. There is no doubt that police activity decreases crime. But is there a tipping point, when legitimate law enforcement, designed to protect the public, may have unintended consequences: promotion poverty, even more crime?

ERIC CADORA (Director, Justice Mapping Center): The current overuse and overdependence on criminal justice is a complete failure. It’s having no impact on these issues of public safety and crime. That’s not to say there isn’t a need for a level of criminal justice. But this radical overuse is not accomplishing those goals.

Eric Cadora

JONES: In the 1970s, there were about 200,000 inmates in US prisons. Today there are about two million. For years law enforcement used crime mapping to target places where the crimes were being committed. Eric Cadora, director of an organization called the Justice Mapping Center, is an advocate for sentencing reform and prison alternatives. He proposed another use for mapping.

Mr. CADORA: I said, “Well, what if we don’t do crime mapping? What if, instead, we mapped where people lived who are going into jail and prison every year?” When we started doing maps of where people lived, we found hugely concentrated neighborhoods where vast majorities of people were going to prison and jail and coming back, and other neighborhoods where nearly none were.

This is New York City. The brightest red show the highest rate per thousand adults, male adults, admitted to prison for a single year. Let’s say there are about 100,000 people living in Brownsville — about half of them are male, that’s about 50,000. About — between 10 and 13 percent are going to prison and jail every year.

JONES: This increased prison population has come at a staggering cost to taxpayers.

Mr. CADORA: We can now calculate, block by block, how much we’re spending to remove and return people en masse from and back to that block.

JONES: This cluster of housing projects is what Caldora calls a “Million Dollar Block.”

Mr. CADORA: We found about 150 individual blocks in New York City for which we were spending more than $1 million a year to remove and return people to prison and jail.

Vince Mattos

JONES: Cadora uses dark red to show the concentrations in other states. They are maps that call for new directions.

Mr. CADORA: What these maps have done is accumulate the effect over the course of a year of a criminal justice and imprisonment system. What’s heated up here is a mass migration with the costs of having to move back and forth from this neighborhood to prisons upstate and back. So what we’re seeing here is constant grappling with resettlement, with disruption, cost of split families, tough health care.

JONES: Greg Jackson, another civic activist and a life-long resident of Brownsville, doesn’t need a map. He’s seen his own community imprisoned.

GREG JACKSON (Community Activist): Incarceration is not just the individual going to jail, but it’s the whole family going to jail, for Brownsville. Everybody’s suffering from it.

JONES: How’s that?

Mr. JACKSON: Because when this individual comes out of jail he still can’t find employment. And that person, the kids he left behind, the parents he left behind, the wife he left behind, they all suffer in the interim. So, when he comes out you think, “Wow, it’s a good time, my father’s coming out of jail, my mother’s coming out of jail.” There’s nothing good about it.

JONES: For one thing, felons aren’t allowed to live in these public housing projects, although some do. Others end up homeless, and most are jobless. Ask Dejaun Smith, still struggling eight years after his release.

Mr. SMITH: I’ve done odd jobs like — I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many. I went to an interview several months ago, and once they learned about my conviction they looked at me like, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

JONES: After decades of hard-line policies on crime — tough justice — more and more communities are looking into what is called Justice Reinvestment.

Mr. CADORA: Let us take the investments that had been built up over the years from criminal justice, redirect them to investments in civil institutions in those neighborhoods — better schools, better health care, better mental health support, and so on. In many of the states where the Justice Reinvestment initiative has taken root, prison populations are either dropping or the trend line in growth has been radically reduced, and that’s from Connecticut to Kansas — liberal to conservative.

Matoka Belton

JONES: Most of the crimes are connected to violence, drugs, and alcohol. But researchers found another culprit for the increased prison populations.

Mr. CALDORA: We found states where 60 to 65 percent of everyone entering prison each year were entering as a result of a revocation of parole and probation.

JONES: That was the case in Kansas, so legislators passed a new law — a new direction —committing taxpayer dollars to cities and communities that change parole and probation regulations that’ll reduce the prison population by 20 percent.

Mr. CALDORA: That’s kind of what the reinvestment project is about. It’s about saying, “Look, if you can reduce it, we’ll give you the money to keep reducing it.”

JONES: According to Caldora, states are being forced to rethink their hard line throw-the-criminals-in-jail attitude because, especially in these hard economic times, the criminal justice system is too costly, both financially and psychologically.

Mr. CALDORA: They realize that this overwhelming overuse of criminal justice is one of the greatest threats to sort of civil society.

JONES: This threat to society, this impact on communities in prison, can be felt on the streets and inside the crowded housing projects. We met Matoka Belton. She didn’t want us to see her three children. Their father went to prison.

(to Ms. Belton): What was he in prison for?

MATOKA BELTON: A number of things, and it was due to survival.

JONES: What was impact on the children of him being away?

Mr. MATOKA: It’s hard because they’re like, you know, what “school” is this, because you try not to say he’s in prison. “What school is this that they don’t come home? College?” But then it comes to the point where they’re a certain age and you can’t lie anymore. I was once an inmate myself. I know what it was like for my children to feel like, “Wow, my mother’s not here. Why can’t mommy come home with us?” It’s hard to leave a visit.

JONES: It’s a cruel cycle — poverty, crime, prison — passed from one generation to the next. A child whose parent went to prison is likely to end up behind bars too.

Mr. MATTOS: When you look at a kid and you say, “How could that kid, you know, have done such a crime like that?” Because he was never really told that was something wrong to do. He never celebrated Christmas with the family or sat down at the dinner table with the family.

JONES: About 700,000 inmates come back home every year. Most are unprepared for re-entry, and their communities are unprepared for their return. As the US government is making huge investments in industries and businesses, it is now being forced to also address a broken justice system, a system in desperate need of a stimulus package of sorts — justice reinvestment.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Phil Jones in Brooklyn, New York.

Pastor WINTLEY PHIPPS (singing at National Prayer Service, Washington National Cathedral):  “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound . . .”

KIM LAWTON:  Grammy-nominated Gospel singer Wintley Phipps is a familiar voice at big national events.  At President Barack Obama’s National Prayer Service following his Inauguration, Phipps’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” brought the entire National Cathedral audience, including the new president and first lady, to their feet. But he says it’s just as meaningful to him when he sings in places like prisons.

Pastor  PHIPPS:  There is a sense that you’re giving hope to people who really need it.

LAWTON:  For Phipps, who is also a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, music is a ministry and, he says, one of the deepest expressions of his Christian faith.

“I would dream that I was flying to faraway places in the world and meeting important people when I was six, seven years old”.

Pastor PHIPPS:  Music is almost to me an echo of the sounds of the divine world.  And when you hear these sounds, it stirs something deeply spiritual within you.  Music also is the most powerful way of impressing the human mind with hope.

LAWTON:  Hope has been a hallmark not only of Phipps’s musical career, but in his charitable efforts as well.  In 1998, Phipps founded the Dream Academy, a national nonprofit for at-risk kids.  Born in Trinidad, he says hope was crucial in overcoming his own at-risk childhood.

Pastor PHIPPS:  I was born to a troubled home, and I used to get away from my parents’ troubles — I had a little red tricycle, and I’d go in the back yard of my house and I would turn the tricycle on its side and use one of the backside wheels as a steering wheel, and I would sit there for hours, and I would dream that I was flying to faraway places in the world and meeting important people when I was six, seven years old.  And then I wanted to be like Tom Jones.  I’d go around the house singing “It’s not unusual to be loved.” I just wanted to be Tom. But something was missing to me.

LAWTON: Despite a difficult family life, Phipps says his mother always prayed for him and told him that God had a special plan for his life. As a teenager, Phipps embraced her faith as his own.

Pastor PHIPPS: At the age of 16, God walked into my life and said “I’ve seen your dreams. Give me your dreams, and I’ll let you see what I’ve been dreaming for you.”

LAWTON:  He attended an historically black Seventh-day Adventist college in Alabama, where he met Linda, now his wife of 32 years. Then, Phipps says, God began providing opportunities for him to sing in national venues such as a 1984 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” with Jesse Jackson. He came to the attention of Billy Graham’s team and became a frequent performer at the evangelist’s crusades.

Pastor PHIPPS (singing in Washington):  Talk about a child that do love Jesus.

One of the most exciting things that can ever happen in a child’s life is to know that “you mean God thinks about me, or God dreams about me?”

LAWTON: Phipps also became a favorite in Washington. He’s sung for every president since Ronald Reagan.

Pastor PHIPPS: I’ve never had a manager or never had an agent, and yet some of the most wonderful moments that a singer could ever dream of have happened to me, and I believe it’s providential.

LAWTON:  The idea for the Dream Academy came after he got involved with a prison ministry.

Pastor PHIPPS:  I did not know that so many young men in prison looked like my sons, and when I saw it I was shaken. One of every three young black men in America between the ages of 18 and 30 are in prison today or supervised by the court system either on probation or parole.

LAWTON:  Phipps then learned that 60 percent of the young people who end up in prison are the children of prisoners. He wanted to break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration.  The Dream Academy offers after-school mentoring and interactive academic tutoring to children of prisoners and kids falling behind at school.

Pastor PHIPPS: One of the most exciting things that can ever happen in a child’s life is to know that “you mean God thinks about me, or God dreams about me and he’s got a dream for my life?” And when you catch a little glimpse of what that dream is, wow, it changes everything.

LAWTON:  Phipps has enlisted the support of some of his famous connections for the project.  One of his biggest benefactors is his longtime friend Oprah Winfrey. The lesson of faith, he says, is that things aren’t always as they seem and that hardship can be overcome.  In these uncertain economic times, he’s released a new music DVD called “No Need to Fear.”  For Phipps, it ties back to the Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus.

Pastor PHIPPS:  To know that I can put my faith in someone who walked out of a grave. The Easter message to me is a message of tremendous hope, and if we don’t have to fear death, what else is there that should cause us to fear? Nothing.

(singing at Easter event):  Arise my love.  Arise my love.  The grave no longer has a hold on you.

LAWTON:  It’s a theme he finds throughout the old spirituals that he often performs.

“A lot of people don’t realize that just about all Negro spirituals are written on the black notes of the piano.”

Pastor PHIPPS (singing):  Swing low sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home . . .

The Negro spiritual teaches us that you’re going come up rough sides of mountains, and you’re going to have difficulties.  But faith gives you that ability to weather any storm.

(singing):  I looked over Jordan and what did I see?

LAWTON:  It’s the core theme as well for the song that has become his signature, “Amazing Grace.”  He finds great spiritual lessons in the history of the song.

Pastor PHIPPS:  A lot of people don’t realize that just about all Negro spirituals are written on the black notes of the piano, and they just keep recurring. Probably the most famous white spiritual that’s built on this slave scale was written by a man by the name of John Newton who, before he became a Christian, used to be the captain of a slave ship and many believe heard this melody that sounds very much like a West African sorrow chant (hums “Amazing Grace”). And it has a haunting, haunting plaintive quality to it that reaches past your arrogance, past your pride, and it speaks to that part of you that’s in bondage, and we feel it.  We feel it.  It’s just one of the most amazing melodies in all of human history.

(performing “Amazing Grace” on stage): To sing God’s praise than when we’ve  first begun. Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Amen.

LAWTON: Another lesson, he says, on how hope always triumphs. I’m Kim Lawton in Vero Beach, Florida.