Must Christians go to church: yes! The church remains force for political and social change

Our kidnapped African ancestors knew Christianity was not an isolationist institution in which everyone worshiped alone in their own corner. There are such individual activities as seeking, fasting and praying. But the highest expression of the faith is communal, when every believer adds his log to the bonfire of praise until it becomes a conflagration of power and wonderment.

Our ancestors found in corporate worship the spiritual power, the moral direction, the intestinal fortitude and the organizational genius to survive, resist, defy and finally destroy the monster of slavery. The church was our one institution that slavery could not destroy. While many of those enslaved were sneaking off to visit family on distant plantations, escaping to freedom on the Underground Railroad or going to our cousins among the Native American nations, many were headed to church to organize revolts and to simply be their complete selves, which is essential to any people's spiritual, psychological and emotional well-being. They came together to celebrate the goodness of God. They knew that God would deliver them some day. The moral teachings of the church strengthened families, upheld marriages, provided for children sold away and the care of old people. The teachings of Jesus and the wisdom of ancient African traditions showed them how to construct families based not on blood but on spirit. Blood is thicker than water, but spirit is stronger than blood. The church was their chief educational institution. The church sermons, prayers and songs taught them they were sent here by God to be husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, freedom-fighters, seekers of wisdom, makers of history, builders of institutions and keepers of the flame of civilization.

So effective was the church that when freedom dawned, our forebears were more than ready to meet the challenge. The Great Migration to escape lynch laws, chain gangs, mob rule, share-cropping and the thousand other everyday humiliations of legal segregation was largely organized in the church.

In the '60s, when civil tights victories convinced many of us that we were free, a confused multitude lost their way and began to abandon the church. They gave two primary arguments: They were "spiritual but not religious," as though the two were separate categories in opposition to each other. And they claimed that there were too many hypocrites in the church--too many failed preachers, scandalous deacons, church fights, out-of-control choir members, multiple offerings and unruly children.

The first argument comes from a European thought pattern that compartmentalizes aspects of life and separates the sacred from the secular as if evil owns its part of creation and God has his. They call for the "separation of church and state." They separate politics from morality, fertility from sexuality, faith from healing, and prayer from education. Spirituality is not the opposite of religiosity; it is the other side of the coin of holistic humanness. Spirituality is the inner impulse. Religiosity is the outward manifestation

People who say they no longer go to church because of the hypocrites are being hypocritical themselves. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The church is not a museum for plaster saints but a hospital for dying sinners.

We continue to go to church because its ancient mission is not yet fulfilled. We now face a crisis worse than slavery. An African proverb says: "The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people." The Black family was not destroyed by slavery but is being surrendered in freedom. We face this crisis in our communities because we have abandoned the spiritual, moral and ecclesiastical ways of our people. The weakness of the church has led to family collapse and community catastrophe. We have reared the most at-risk generation in our history--it is known as "the Lost Generation." Their pathway rushes downward and backward instead of upward and onward. They have abandoned marriage and family to the extent that more than 70 percent of our children are born out of wedlock. They look with contempt upon education. More of our sons go to prison than go to college. Their most popular entertainment encourages every sort of criminality. They kill one another for sport. Innocent children are murdered every year as "collateral damage." Their comedy is pornography. Schools are an internationally known disaster with hundreds of thousands of teachers leaving the classroom every year because they can no longer tolerate being cursed out, threatened, beaten up, sexually harassed and shot by their own students.

These are just a few of the reasons that Christians need to go to church. Only the church retains the moral authority to speak with power to parents, teachers, politicians, policemen and entertainers.

The Rev. Clarence L. James St. is founder/president of Youth Leadership Development Programs and national evangelist of the Prince of Peace Sanctified Baptist Church in Chicago. Formet administrative dean, Morehouse School of Religion, he is also author of Lost Generation? or Left Generation/ The Loss and Recovery of Black Family Values.