We're exploring the role of local black churches in larger faith-based social, cultural and community conversations.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt and additional supporting sponsors.

(Kipp Ortenburger) On February 16 and 17, Vegas PBS will air a two-part documentary entitled The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song.

Now, this documentary will provide an in-depth look at how black churches helped shape African American culture and history across the nation.

Now, of course black churches in Las Vegas, or churches that predominantly serve African American congregations, share similar parallels to this storied history.

They not only played a critical role in bringing worship and community to African Americans migrating to Las Vegas since World War II, they also played significant roles in civil rights and larger racial and social justice issues, and of course this history is unfolding right before our very eyes.

So in true Nevada Week spirit, we're examining this living history this week, the multifaceted roles of the black church in Las Vegas today and of course tomorrow.

Joining us for this discussion, please welcome Reverend Dr. Karen Denise Anderson from the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, Reverend Clayton D. Moore from the Second Baptist Church, Reverend Lucius Bowen from the Victory Missionary Baptist Church, and Reverend Kelcey Anderson West from Nehemiah Ministries.

Well, Pastor West, Pastor Anderson, Pastor Moore and Pastor Bowen, we thank you so much for joining us for such an important conversation.

I mentioned in the intro this documentary, The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song.

The host of that is Dr. Henry Louis Gates, also the host of Finding Your Roots on PBS.

I wanted to give you a couple of definitions, a couple of reference points of what he defines the collective black church to be.

He says in that documentary, "The black church is the seminal voice "in shaping the history "of the African American people."

He also says "It's the root of which "so many of the most celebrated aspects "of black culture would branch."

I wanted to give you some local perspective as well.

Reverend Marion Bennett, who was the founder and pastor for 44 years of Zion Methodist Church, said of the black church, "I just think that the church "ought to be the headlights "for a better quality of life."

Pastor Moore, I want to start with you.

If we take this context here in Las Vegas today, is it valid to reference the black church in similar ways?

(Rev.

Clayton Moore) I think so.

However, I must admit there's been some diminish of the influence of the black church within the community among some generations; however, it is our responsibility to reach out and include them in the amazing transformation power that the church through the redemptive work of Christ could provide to their personal lives and our community as a whole.

-Pastor West, let's get your take on that as well.

(Rev.

Kelcey West) I still view the black church today, she is the drum major.

She for many people yet today, she is the White House, she's the governor's mansion, she's city hall, she's everything that our community still needs from her, and so she is just as relevant today as she was years and years ago.

-Pastor Anderson, of course we want to talk about the collective black church is inclusive to a lot of different faiths and religions, not just Christian based of course here, that was very reflective of how our community has diversified quite a bit.

Can you give us some perspective on how the black church, collectively again, has maybe diversified in other ways?

(Rev.

Karen Anderson) Well, I think what it is is we have begun to reach out and understand the power of collaboration and working collectively across faith tradition.

I think that is part of, I think, here in Las Vegas, there is an interfaith group that works together as we seek to gain more understanding of one another, and that way we are more likely to work positively to affect change within our community.

-Pastor Bowen, let's talk a little bit about diversity of your congregation here too.

Your church, Victory Baptist, churches in West Las Vegas, have you seen the demographics of your parishioners change over the last several years?

-To some degree we have, but we've also made a conscious effort to not reach just the black community but other communities as well.

My mentor, Dr. Robert E. Fowler Sr., who passed last year, was a huge advocate of not just reaching one type of demographic but everyone because it's our duty as Christians to win souls and not colors.

-Yes.

If you could talk a little bit more about that, Pastor Bowen.

As you mentioned Pastor Fowler, 24 years as the pastor of your church, and then let's put this into context here.

Right in the middle of COVID, he passes away suddenly in May of 2020.

You're dealing with the loss, but then of course you're trying also to transition, I would assume, the church into kind of a rebirth or, you know, a new path itself.

How do you balance both of those things in this larger bubble of the challenges of COVID?

-You know, we were fortunate enough under his leadership that he had the foresight of-- you know, we actually have our services online, but we were, previous to COVID, having our services online as well as live in the church structure.

So we were kind of ahead of the game in that aspect.

Our church has pretty much remained the same as far as what he had placed as far as our leadership was concerned and our vision, but we are actively now trying to pursue another pastor to take leadership over at Victory.

But because of COVID, it's caused a delay because naturally you want your congregation to physically meet and greet potential pastors to kind of get a feel for them, and trying to do that online is just not ideal.

But we do have a pastoral search committee that is actively trying to locate a pastor or potential pastors for us.

-Yes, and that's so reflective of the challenges you have not only in, you know, doing your daily work, but when you're looking for something like a new pastor and the challenges that COVID can provide there.

Pastor Moore, I want to come to you.

Second Baptist Church, how have you been faring since the onset of COVID?

-I think we have done well; in fact, there's been some growth in this COVID-19 experience virtually, mass media, radio, things of that nature.

So how we do church has changed, and yet I think it requires us to embrace different approaches.

It also requires us to try to be as tech savvy as we can to involve more mass media, social media, things of that nature.

However, it is us learning.

We have to learn this curve, and it's constantly changing which is a good thing because it requires the church, that we involve ourselves in how to connect with the masses of the population and not simply be comfortable with the radio audience.

Now we have to move to that social network, Facebook, Twitter, all varieties of YouTube.

There are various platforms which we have to find ourselves on in order that we can connect to the membership as well as those who are not necessarily a part of the church but would view online.

-Pastor West, all those tools that Pastor Moore is mentioning there, some of those may be your carry-overs when you are at a point where you can reopen and get to business as normal.

Maybe some of those tools would still be used.

Where is your church at in kind of thinking about those aspects of what sermons and really everything related to your church could mean in the future?

-Well, everything has changed now.

What we saw last year, and let me just share this.

We are taught from the scriptures to give thanks for everything, so we had to find the thanksgiving in the midst of COVID.

What we saw last year was an opportunity for us to really take the inside black church experience outside, and in doing so via our outreach efforts, we saw 70% of the people who we were helping were brown people.

So that changed how we preached, how we were evangelizing, and so moving forward, we have no plans of returning to how we used to quote, unquote, present and operate the black church.

Now we see this as an opportunity to really invite people like never before from different backgrounds to become a part of this rich experience, spiritual and physical experience.

-And Pastor Anderson, I want to get your perspective on this too.

On both sides here, we are obviously talking a lot about innovation and new ways to be able to reach new audiences and your current congregation as well and your parishioners.

Give us your take on how the challenges have maybe been on the online side.

One thing I wanted to bring some attention to is, you know, churches, your sermon is so much about engagement and music and joy and frenzy, and there's, you know, so much energy there, and of course I understand trying to do a show like this, you know, in front of an online screen, the challenge on engagement just on that side.

Can you speak a little bit of how you kind of keep that engagement level up?

-Thank you for asking.

I concur with my colleagues, it has been a learning curve for us.

We didn't engage all these social media platforms.

It's been a challenge because somewhat like Pastor Bowen, I'm the newest kid on the block.

I got here about a couple of months before COVID hit, and so I immediately was thrown into virtual worship.

So that was an experience for the congregation to begin to know me, but I found it to be a wonderful learning experience for us.

We've adjusted our worship a few times to see what works.

We realized that online, people are not going to engage for two hours, so you can't have a two-hour worship service online.

You have to learn to restructure and re-energize or re-engineer your worship while trying to maintain spirituality, trying to maintain the level of excitement about worship.

So we've tried different things.

We've come together with just a praise team and then, you know, having the clergy come later.

We've tried having clergy and just the praise team.

We've tried having it outdoors, what we call the park and praise, so people could at least be in close proximity yet maintaining social distance.

So the beauty of this is that-- the challenge is people always say when are we getting back to normal, and I keep trying to say we never will.

Normal is gone.

So now we have the opportunity to define what normal looks like for us in this day and age, and it won't look like it used to.

I tell my church all the time when we get back in the sanctuary, we're going to have a service to grieve what we lost because it won't look like it used to look, and then we'll celebrate what we've learned and what we're doing moving forward.

Like Pastor Moore, we now have people who watch us from across the country, and it's been a blessing.

-And to that point, and Pastor Moore maybe give us some-- I'm sorry, did somebody have something to say?

Please jump in.

-For the first time in the history of the church, there's a generational gap where people that were 30 years and younger had never even set foot in the physical structure of a church.

So we've been trying to fight that battle and reach those individuals so they can know the Christ that we've come to love and adore, and it's incumbent upon us to continue to try to do that.

You know, we've been fortunate here at Victory under the leadership of our interim pastor Charles Smith who was the assistant pastor of Dr. Fowler, that he has the foresight as well and the wisdom to try to keep things where they are as far as our vision but to continue to move forward.

We've done tremendous things at this church with the expectation that we will come back, but we still need to continue to reach those that again have never even stepped foot in a church.

We have this footing now through the internet for different people that may not have been to church.

You have people that can "friend" other individuals on Facebook for instance, or Instagram or YouTube and say check out this service and see what's going on.

We are able to win people to Christ that way as well.

-May I say one more thing?

-Absolutely.

-One of the things this has done is opened an opportunity for our young adults to take leadership in the church.

They're the ones who understand technology.

They're the ones that I have had to turn to to put technology in place for the church.

They're the ones that I go to to say what system do we need?

How do we need to do this?

So I think it has opened an opportunity for us to also engage more with the age group that we had been losing.

-Yes, great point.

Well, listen, as the present becomes the past, it's very important of course to collect and preserve this living history, a lot of what we're talking about right here, technologies and otherwise.

We had an opportunity, our Nevada Week team, to go out and go to the UNLV Library Special Collections department to learn a little bit more about how oral histories are captured and how they're curated for any of us to be able to access.

I, myself, access those quite a bit for preparation for the show.

Let's take a look.

UNLV's Claytee White is in the business of saving history.

On the third floor of UNLV's Lied Library is Special Collections, a place where information is collected, documented and shared, and within the Special Collections division is the Oral History Research Center.

(Claytee White) This is a place where we collect stories that give us the oral history of Las Vegas-- Southern Nevada, I should say.

Oral history is the oldest method of recording and sharing the past.

Long before books and other methods of historical documentation, people shared their stories with others verbally.

The advantages of using oral history, there are a lot of communities that don't have any written history.

So for instance, the African American community started migrating here in 1905.

Well, a lot of those people came from different agricultural pursuits in places like Fordyce, Arkansas and Tallulah, Louisiana, so those were not the kind of people who had the time to write down their story.

They were just trying to work as much as possible to support their families.

So in order to get their stories, we need someone to be able to collect their oral memories of that.

So that's why it's so important.

Many of Las Vegas' early African American settlers arrived with little more than their families, a sense of hope and their religious faith.

Numerous churches were founded.

When you are living in a system of systemic racism, one of the things that you have some control over is the spiritual life, so you find a lot of churches in the African American community.

It's a place of freedom.

When you don't have any other place of freedom, the church is that place.

We still see in this small African American community here, the Historic West Side, on a Sunday morning, we still see 18,000 people attending church in that area.

And that's thousands of African American Las Vegans continuing a quest for a rounded spiritual life in Sin City.

For Nevada Week, I'm Heather Caputo.

Thank you very much, Heather, for that clip.

That was great.

I want to take a deeper dive into two things that Claytee was talking about.

She was talking about first off her comment about systemic racism and the role of the church.

She mentioned the freedom the church gives.

I want to talk a little bit about one of the other roles that has been prominent collectively in black churches is of course civil rights movements and becoming a hub, an epicenter for racial injustice conversations and actions.

I pulled this right from one of those oral histories.

Again, this was Reverend Marion Bennett who commented-- and granted this was 2004 when this interview took place-- but he commented and said that churches today are for the self.

They're too selfish to lead and be leaders in racial injustice conversations.

There are scholars that have said similar things, post-civil rights, that the church has lost its capacity to mobilize for reform.

There are scholars that are saying the opposite and saying the black church is very much alive in these racial injustice conversations.

I wanted to get your take on that, and Pastor Moore, let's start with you.

What's your take?

-I love the church and yet I really must admit, I think that our role has been somewhat diminished not because it is not a just cause, but because so many of those, the power structure that we deal with within our local congregation may not afford the clergyman or, for that matter, the membership to be as actively involved with social justice.

Contrary to popular belief, Dr. King, Gardner Taylor and Caesar Clark were removed from fellowship at the National Baptist Convention during the Civil Rights Movement.

So it's not a new phenomenon that the church does not rise to the occasion.

It's just the idea that once it has started, we need to continue that movement.

The method that we use may differ somewhat.

I believe that we'll just take on-- Monday mornings there will be billions of dollars deposited in financial institutions where many of our membership cannot even be afforded the opportunity for a home loan.

They'll give you the loan for a depreciating liability, but not for an appreciating asset.

So I think the church, being the most financial and the most powerful institution as it relates with money, we need to be better stewards of God's people's resources to impact the standard of living as it relates to our membership receiving the opportunity for financial growth and development.

We go and deposit money in banks as a member, and no one in that bank looks like you.

I think that's a problem, and I think the church needs to take a stance on that.

It's convincing the membership that the holistic approach to the ministry of the church should not simply be involved in worship on Sunday morning.

We also have to be willing to be present in the boardroom on Monday, or for that matter, in the classroom; or for that matter, on the plant floor, that our Christian representation does not stop on Sunday morning worship, but in fact in the society around us.

-Pastor West, I want to come to you.

A great point Pastor Moore is making there.

We're talking about systemic racism here.

This is something we have talked about a lot on Nevada Week.

A lot of that goes to or leads to the wealth gap as being one of the most restrictive pieces when we're talking about systemic racism.

How much of a focus is that in your particular church too, empowering your parishioners, your congregation, to look at things like wealth growth as being one of the ways of overcoming something like systemic racism?

-Yes.

Scripture teaches there's nothing new under the sun, and so last year, I really felt like we were back in 19-- the mid '60s, and I felt like God was grooming us to be like Dr. King who would have to sit with President Johnson at that time and fight for the rights of our people.

Right now, especially as we work to engage the younger generation and even more so men, our voice when it comes to racism, our voice when it comes to wealth gaps, it's imperative right now.

People are looking for the church to say something, and I'm proud to be a part of the church and a part of the movement that was on the front line last year that marched for justice, that held meetings.

There were so many Zoom meetings that we were a part of.

I'm so grateful.

We took an active role in the election.

There's no way that we'll ever be able to remove ourselves from being on the front line if we're going to continue to be the black church.

-And Pastor Anderson, I want to get your take on this too.

Let's talk maybe more broadly about the future of the black church.

You focused on the systemic racism conversation.

We've already talked about some of the technological innovations here too.

What's your take on the vision of the black church as we move into this new post-COVID era?

-Well, first it's almost impossible for me to talk about the vision of the black church because we're not monolithic; let's just start there.

The black church is not monolithic, so we don't all have the same vision.

We don't have all the same direction, so I have to only speak for what I see as the vision.

My vision is that we are more engaged, that we-- there's a thing called "sankofa" where you look back to the past, you get the good stuff, and you bring it forward.

So one of the things we need to bring forward is our social activism.

In the past the church was the place where-- the black church was the place where you went if you needed to impact policy, if you needed to impact legislation, because we have the greatest influence.

So we bring people together, then we educate; what are the issues?

That's where we need to start.

If we're going to talk about systemic racism, we must talk to our congregations about what are the things impacting our community, and then what do we do about it?

More recently we've had this whole conversation about separation of church and state and the church shouldn't get engaged in politics and the church shouldn't get engaged.

That's a fallacy.

Jesus was involved in politics.

You know, we want to say He wasn't.

Jesus was involved in politics.

He went to challenge unjust systems that oppressed the least of these, so we must engage in those systems.

We must have access to those who are representing us.

I was so proud in 2020 to see the movement of the black church to turn out the vote, to educate on the issues so that we-- because here's the thing.

We can work in our churches individually, but if there are not laws passed, then we're not going to accomplish anything.

--overturn the Voting Rights Act.

They have made it more difficult for our people to vote, so we must be concerned about who sits in positions of power and understanding that we have the numbers to influence their vote.

They must know if they don't represent us, we're not voting.

-Great point.

I'm sorry, we're out of time.

I wish we could continue this conversation, and maybe we will have you all back and continue this conversation and talk a little bit more about the future of the black church collectively, and as Pastor Anderson mentioned, individually as well.

We thank you very much for your time.

Well, thank you as always for joining us this week on Nevada Week.

Now, the broadcast of The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song will air on Vegas PBS: Part one on Tuesday, February 16, and part two on Wednesday, February 17 from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. both nights.

Now, for any of the resources discussed on this show, please visit our website at vegaspbs.org/nevada-week.

You can also always find us on social media at @nevadaweek.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next week.

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