- Coming up on American Black Journal, our 'Black Church in Detroit' series takes a closer look at the church's really significant role in the community during the holiday season.

We're gonna talk about how the church provides relief to people who are dealing with financial issues and support for those struggling with grief at this time of the year.

You don't wanna miss this conversation.

Stay right there.

American Black Journal starts right now.

- [Advertiser 1] From Delta Faucets to Behr Paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Advertiser 2] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of American Black Journal in covering African American history, culture, and politics.

The DTE Foundation and American Black Journal partners in presenting African American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Advertiser 1] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and Viewers Like You.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Welcome to American Black Journal.

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson, and as always, I'm really glad you've joined us.

Today we are continuing our series on 'The Black Church in Detroit', which is produced in partnership with the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

The black church's role as a place where people can find hope during trying times is even more important during the holiday season.

Although it's a time of great joy, the holidays can also bring a lot of pain.

Many families are struggling to pay for food and some are hurting due to the loss of loved ones.

I spoke with Rev.

QuanTez Pressley of Third New Hope Baptist Church, Dr. Portia Lockett, who's director of spiritual care at the Detroit Medical Center and Pastor Semmeal Thomas from City Covenant Church about the many ways the black church helps those in need during the holidays.

So this is a, a kind of strange conversation for me to have this time of year because I have to say the last three months of the year really are my favorites.

I am always in such a great mood and there are so many kind of high points in those three months, including my birthday which is usually the week of Thanksgiving, that that I often don't think about all of the the sort of flip side of that maybe the hardship that some people are enduring either because of money or, or because of, of loss.

So I just wanna start off with us just talking about how prominent that is.

How much of that you see, uh in, in your work.

Rev.

Pressley, I'll start with you.

- Oh, well, very much so.

You know, I always say that Frankie Beverly & Maze tapped into their theological spirit with that song, 'Joy and Pain', 'sunshine and rain', because often it is that close for so many families in this season, while it's so much joy in being able to gather together or for many there'll be empty seats at the table which will really cause, you know, a continuation of them navigating grief for their lost loved ones.

And so we take it as very important in this season to make sure that we create spaces and resources for our congregation community.

So here at Third New Hope, we started this during the pandemic, we had a strolling memorial where we had all of the pictures of those individuals that we lost throughout the year and we invited the families to come through and to share as a moment of processing.

And this year we've done the same with a memorial wall that will remain up for the remainder of the year.

Again, encouraging these families that we haven't forgotten about their loved ones, and that we're still here with them to journey with them through this season of sorrow.

- Pastor Thomas, this is a personal issue for you as well as a church issue.

Talk about the things not only that your congregation is confronting, but the things that you are now confronting this time of year.

- Well, you know, it's, it's very interesting, the community that we serve in Brightmoor is probably one of the harder hit communities and could arguably be one of the poorest communities in the state of Michigan.

And this whole thing wrapped around poverty and around trauma and the challenges that we're dealing with, it's just overwhelming.

There's several things that are happening and some there's nothing we can do about, just historically, I'm a, a baby boomer.

I was born in 1960 and my generation is going home to be with the Lord.

That's just natural.

That's just nature.

The next 15, 20 years, we're going home.

All right?

And so that's just happening.

On top of the carnage that's happening in our streets with the gun violence and then the amount of trauma that people within our communities have served and so, just two days ago, I lost my nephew, all right, to suicide.

And so his mother, my sister passed on Good Friday and it was just devastating to him.

He was just completely devastated.

And he started hearing voices.

We tried to wrap around services for him and we buried her ashes at Myrtle Beach in the ocean.

And so two days ago, he drove to Myrtle Beach and he drowned himself.

- Oh.

- And you know, how do you wrap your head?

- I'm so sorry.

- You know, how do you wrap your head around that?

Right?

22 years old.

And what it is, is this, as pastor was saying, Pastor Pressley was saying so eloquently, it's this compound.

You know what I mean?

Okay.

One thing on top of another thing on top of another thing, and you know, uh, the pastor's wisdom to give people a place to process.

All right.

To process their grief and to be angry.

All Right.

You know what I mean?

And, um, and uh, again, this is, I'm with him.

I, I love, or I'm with you, I love this season, Stephen.

I love Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I was a poor kid, and I didn't have much.

But this was always must (laughs) you know, but to see the flip side that there are people who are not at the table.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

So, it's interesting to me that, that, you know for you, this is a balancing, a balancing act then, right?

You're trying to give yourself space and and deal with this unimaginable amount of trauma.

But you're also the pastor of a church where you have to make that space for other people.

I mean, that's, that's an incredible burden.

- You know, it's something that the body of Christ, especially in the African American churches have been doing from day one.

The church was always that space.

And I mean, generations who had it way worse than us, all right, didn't have air condition, didn't have praise team, didn't have all the fancy stuff that we have but they had the church and it was a place that they could come and be prayed over, hands could be laid upon them.

And so now we are at another stage.

And so we are embracing, uh, behavioral health and making room for development center to come in and to do sessions and to teach people about anxiety and about depression and those type of things.

And then empowering them to, um, to really acknowledge that we going through, not just the spiritual going through, okay, all right.

But we're, we're hearing voices or we're struggling with depression or whatever and that this is a safe place.

All right?

The body of Christ, the church is a place where you can come, where we're setting a culture or an atmosphere where you can come, all right?

And just be you, be authentic and take the mask off.

All right.

And if gotta we gotta cry, we gotta cry.

We gotta laugh we gotta laugh.

All right.

And it's kind of interesting for me because I've been told I can't say we crazy, you know, (laughs) it's not politically correct, you know?

All right.

But man, when you look at what African Americans have been through.

- Yeah.

- Historically.

- Yeah.

- And have, uh, have beared, you know, they throw around the, I don't wanna monopolize, they throw around the term, 'We stand on the shoulders of others', but we really do.

- [Stephen] We really do.

Yeah.

Well, Pastor Thomas, of course, I mean, I think all of us obviously feel the same way about the things that you're experiencing and hope the best for your family and your congregation, you know, as we get into the, into the holidays that's an unimaginable amount of, of sorrow and burden.

And so I think all of our prayers are are with you and your congregation and your family.

Dr. Lockett, your work is not in the church but it is of the church, and it's inspired by the church.

Talk about the things that, that that you see in your work environment that cry out for attention this time of the year.

- Absolutely.

So, as a director of spiritual care and community affairs for the Detroit Medical Center, you know, we see death and life simultaneously every single day.

You know, with a new mother coming in with the expectation of delivery to a full term baby, only to find out that that baby is, uh, uh, very unlikely to survive.

And being able to have that conversation with that mother and with that father, letting them know that unfortunately you're in this situation and you still have to give birth to this unborn child that would no longer be living.

So that's a whole different type of grief.

And then when you go down the the path of the elderly community, you know, who we expect to get to end of life when they're 80 and 90 and maybe even a hundred years of age that have come to that space.

But now, as you said before we are seeing so many people who are in that, that space of the 45 to 55 year old individuals who have not been listening to their bodies.

I was having a conversation with someone the other day that you have to be in touch with your temple because when you don't listen to your temple, guess what?

Your temple will do, whatever it wants to do.

And sometimes that temple will allow you to be taken out.

So we have to really pay attention to that.

There are so many people who are experiencing grief on so many different levels.

When we, when we come to the place of worship, we would typically go with the matriarchs of our family and the patriarchs of our family.

And sometimes those, right now, because of Covid and just because of life in general, a lot of those individuals are no longer at the table.

They're no longer the ones who are grabbing the grandchildren and even their sons and daughters, you know, into that place of worship.

And even once we get to that place of worship, you know, times have just shifted and just changed.

So many doors are not even open right now because of Covid.

And so, like one of the ministers said earlier, we have, have shifted and we're trying to transition and making sure that we are welcoming anyone who wants to come through the doors of the church.

But with that being said, we have to make sure that those individuals that are on the welcoming team are trained to be able to see when there's someone who is having a challenge.

I'm a, a very active part of the Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network and the faith community there.

And they do a wonderful job of training faith leaders.

I just attended a seminar not too long ago about suicide prevention.

What are some things that we need to look out for when we see those individuals that walk through our doors and not making them feel unwelcome because of their behavior and how they're dressed and how they smell.

You know, the word of God says, you know, come, you know let them come, come as you are.

So they're coming as they are, but we have to make sure that we are welcoming those individuals in that space.

- Yeah.

- In that safe space without being judged.

- Dr. Lockett, you also are balancing the professional with the personal this year.

Talk about how, how that works for you.

- Yeah, so, you know, my son received his wings through gun violence in December of 2020.

So it's coming up on 20 years, I mean, on two years, that that's taken place.

And for me, I had to step, I had to take a step back because I deal with that every single day.

And so I had to take care of me because if I don't take care of me, I can't take care of anyone else.

So I had to take a few months off and go into that therapeutic space to make sure that I was equipped spiritually, mentally and emotionally to go back out and make the impact that I make in other lives.

One of the things that I started just September, the 9th which would've been his 30th birthday, we started the Azal Benne Lockett Foundation.

We're here to help you heal, offer you hope and hold your heart as you're going through that grieving journey.

And that grieving journey doesn't always necessarily have to look like the loss of a loved one.

It could be the loss of a lifestyle, losing um, an a, a a ligament, losing a home, losing a relationship.

There's so many different ways that we lose, you know, in this space, losing a pet, you know, some people de-emphasize, you know, the loss of a pet when that furry animal is that is part of that family.

And so some people go through that grieving journey because the loss of a pet, the loss of a neighbor, I mean, we have just amplified the way grief looks.

And nowadays, you know, you, you, you, you're given that two week period to grieve because it's like... You... Do believe her name is Alexandria Grande has a song out that says, 'Thank you, next'.

So you got that two week window that says, okay, we've given you, we've served you your chicken dinner and we've sent you a couple of cards threw you a couple of dollars.

Okay, thank you, next, because we've gotta get onto the next person and we have to make sure that we're giving people time to grieve and not putting a time limit on it.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

Yeah.

Rev.

Pressley, that reminds me of, of the sort of sustaining work, I guess, that the church has to do here.

I mean, we're talking about the holidays and that's a particularly tough time for folks but the church always is called to this space.

And because of the things that we experience as African Americans, not just in Detroit, but all over the country, the need is always, the need is always there.

And so the demand on the church is always kind of at a high level.

- No, very much so.

And I'm blessed here at Third New Hope because we have a significant amount of licensed counselors and therapists who are also members of our congregation.

And as a result, we started a ministry called Seasons of Grace, which provides people an opportunity to access these counselors in order to process the grief that they're experiencing.

And so we situated the month of October as our mental health awareness month and we even had settings for our youth and children to be able to process as well because along lines of the items of loss that Dr. Lockett mentioned, divorce, family separations are things that children are having to encounter, particularly in this holiday season, that we wanna make sure that we're providing them the resource to think through and to find healthy ways to navigate the challenges in which they're experiencing.

And so it is a, you know, constant and persistent need in our community and we're trying to find ways to be able to meet that need.

And so again, for us, you know, I come to the point, having done enough of these funeral services to realize that we don't do them quite well with the five or six stages of grief, depending upon which one you would ascend to, oftentimes people are still in the state of denial at the moment of the funeral service and that's when we believe that they receive closure.

But the real hit of grief doesn't occur until months or weeks later.

And at that point, people have moved on, many of their friends and the like are back to their regularly scheduled programs.

And so that's really when the church has to step in and to provide that support system to help them to know that it does indeed take time.

And that's a part of the motivation between our for our memorial kind of presentations.

Because again, some of the faces that are on the wall, they passed November, December last year they passed on February or March.

But we are helping these families to recognize that while others may have moved on, we haven't forgotten that you're still trying to adjust to this new normal.

And we want you to know that we're here, with and for you.

And so churches have played this role.

Oftentimes it may have gone overlooked and taken for granted, but I think that numbers of families who have gotten that phone call that card in the mail, that invitation to their family dinners, knowing that that person is now without their family, that is again, created that beloved community that lets them know that they're not in this by themselves.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

Yeah.

Pastor Thomas, I wanna talk a little more about money and the financial strain of this, not just this time of year, but you know, all year.

You minister in Brightmoor, which I always marvel at how much, how much is asked of you and how much, how much people in that community still need.

Talk about this time of year though and the way you try to meet those financial needs that people have.

- You know, we've got a dual approach.

You know, I was looking at this thing when charity to change, charity to change.

And so, you know, on one side, I don't want a foster dependency.

I want to empower people.

And so I make sure that I let them know, first of all, Christmas comes around the same time every year.

All right?

And we have to become better stewards over what we've been given.

And there, there are 'soul food' industry, based of us taking a little and making it into a delicacy.

All right?

We have a art of doing that.

And that we have to learn about financial literacy.

We have to learn how to invest and how to save, how to, you know, five years ago you could have bought houses in Brightmoor for $500, you know, and so that's one part, one part is me trying to empower and try to reframe their, their thinking, their paradigm that there is, there is money in the hood.

It's what we putting it on.

- It's what are we do with it, right?

- Right.

What are we spending it on?

All right.

You know, and so we're not as poor.

I've been to Africa, I've been to the shanty towns but we're not as poor as we think we're.

All right.

In America, you know, that's a whole different thing.

Then the other side is the real needs.

All right?

You know, in Brightmoor we have a significant portion of people who are homeless and they're unhoused.

They're living in abandoned homes, no running water, no utilities.

All right.

And so when we first started feeding people, we thought we'd get 30, 40 people and we're up to 200 people a day.

- Wow.

- All right, we're doing 200 meals a day, four days a week.

All right.

And then inflation, you know, to a person that's doing well, to the middle class and upper middle class inflation, it affects everyone.

But to the poor, it hits straight to the core.

All right.

You know, so I was watching a brother the other day, who had a UCAR.

He had a older UCAR at the gas station, putting almost a hundred dollars worth of gas.

- The tank, yeah.

(indistinct) - For his like.

Now, I'm sure when he bought that UCAR, (laughs) he thought it was a good deal (laughs) but now he doesn't think it's a good deal.

We laughed and joked at the pump, but it is causing people to make very, very serious decisions.

'Cause some of them were already making but just making from a deeper standpoint.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- So we try to do a dualism, if you will, to hold people accountable.

All right.

But also to represent in a manner that gives them respect.

And if you're, if you need, that's what the church is here for.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- All right.

- Yeah.

Okay.

I would love to continue this conversation with the three of you, I think for hours and hours.

But we are out of time.

I really appreciate all you being here to talk about these challenges and talk about how in your work you meet them.

But I mostly wanna say, look let's have a good holiday season, all of us and all of your congregations and the people that you work with.

There is still joy to be had this time of year.

(laughs) Thanks for being here.

- Thank you, Steve.

- [Dr. Lockett] Thank you for having us.

- That's it for us this week.

You can find out more about today's guests and view all of 'The Black Church in Detroit' episodes at americanblackjournal.org.

And you can connect with us anytime on Facebook and on Twitter.

Take care, and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) - [Presenter] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Presenter] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of American Black Journal in covering African American history, culture, and politics.

The DTE Foundation and American Black Journal partners in presenting African American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Presenter] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(light music)