Gift of Faith by Robert Fleming

Author:Robert Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Urban Books
Published: 2013-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

SOULSVILLE

Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.

—Revelations 2:10

I was still shaken by the audacity of Reverend Arena’s assertion about the role of the church in the lives of the poor. However, many of the church’s followers felt this way, ignoring the historic foundations of the mighty African American religious institution that propelled the race to equality and triumph. I was completely disappointed in how the meeting went.

During the at-risk meeting that afternoon, I gathered the dozen young souls around in a circle, with me in the center of it. These were the kids everybody wanted to abandon. None of them are gangbangers or thugs, but troubled nonetheless. I usually wore a dark suit for these young people, but I now decided to pursue a casual presence. Most of the youth in the group were black teens, mere boys who had no idea what the world was about. For some reason, the number of girls were very few.

“Do you know what Henry McNeal Turner or Richard Allen accomplished in our history?” I asked the teens.

One of them yelled, “Allen plays point guard for the Celtics. I know him. Good three-point shooter.”

“Turner sang with Mary J. Blige at the Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve bash they have every year,” another shouted. “Had a tune with rapper Kanye West and Drake. It dropped last month, right?”

“No, wrong, wrong, wrong,” I said.

“Are they politicians or professors?” one teen yelled.

“No, they were ministers of the faith,” I explained. “Freedom fighters in a sense. They fought to earn our equality as a race and to destroy the barriers of race hate. They were mighty warriors. However, they didn’t fight to give us the right to shoot, stab, rape, and kill one another.”

“That’s cool,” a thin brother said, smiling. He was trying to dial his cell phone while talking to me.

I shook my head and asked him to put the phone away. “I want to talk to you about something. Deacon Bailey couldn’t be with you today. You know he is with his wife, who is expecting another baby. But he sends his greetings to you.”

Eagerly, the circle of boys and a handful of girls tightened around me, who they respected as a straight-shooting guy. Nobody had anything bad to say about me.

“First, let me say that I’m really worried about you all and our future,” I said. “I think you have lost faith in yourselves. I think you have bought into that idea that you are less than human.”

Some of the teens shook their heads and waved their hands in dismissal of my suggestion. Others just stared at me as if they were hearing this for the first time. But they were curious to see what I would say.

“I know the modern black church must try something new,” I said. “In a sense, the church has failed you. It has failed to understand you, to reach out to you. It has failed because it has given up on true Christianity, which teaches us to be selfless, tolerant, and generous.

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