ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF ... TO MYSELF

In the beginning I was raised in the church — a native Arkansan, born and reared, and later acquainted with Jesus Christ in Mississippi County. Cotton was the cash crop at the time, and although we were desegregated, there was still institutional racism, classism, and intraracism where I lived.

Our mother made a point of making all the children attend church. She never made it an ultimatum and never directly expressed why we should attend; we just did because it was beyond our ability to resist. I never understood until much later, despite her protestations, why my father did not attend church with us. It wasn't until much, much later in my life that I understood.

My maternal grandfather, however, God rest his soul, made no bones about why he did not attend church. He believed that it was a money-making enterprise and took too much time away from people's real lives. Now in the South, the church was a very real part of people's lives, right down to the many programs, assemblies, ministries, meetings, auxiliaries, afternoon programs, worship programs, friends and family days, visits with other churches (same denomination, mind you — wasn't any mixing!), and, finally, raising money for the "building fund"!

It didn't help that my grandfather was a raging alcoholic and an avid baseball fan. He loved the Atlanta Braves most of all, but I believe that is because he almost always had the channel tuned to TBS Superstation, the Ted Turner-owned station out of Georgia that we viewed most frequently. His vitriol and speeches on Sunday afternoons when we would walk our grandmother from church are the stuff of legend and comedic genius.

My grandfather would often have in his hand a large dark cup of alcohol, and he was also a chain smoker. He sat with his legs crossed and apparently could not wait until we all arrived at his home in order to eat a home-cooked, after-church meal at my grandmother's home before we went to our home to eat another meal of our mother's food.

He would excoriate and mock my grandmother's unflappable obedience to God — and, more importantly, to the pastor and the church. My grandfather remained the same even after I left for college. In his last days, I did not sense any sort of repentance or remorse about his unchronicled experiences with the church or about his oft-anticipated monologues about churches and their insatiable need for your time and your money. To this day, I have no idea where it all came from. But as I said, his tirades were the stuff of legend!

Once we were at church, all the -isms I referenced earlier, all the awkwardness, and all my actual or imagined inadequacies disappeared — and I learned to love Jesus.

But before Jesus, I was regaled with the Old Testament prophets and their indoctrination into the causes of doing what God told them to do for His glory, and their willingness to serve.

Samson, David, Elisha, Elijah, and Moses. It helped that I was a great lover of fiction and a burgeoning avid reader — especially comic books. I was reading about the archetypes of some of the greatest superheroes of Marvel and DC comics such as Superman (Samson) and Batman (Moses, and his staff); only the Bible was real.

Because I was such an avid reader, I digested these stories and began to build the foundations of my belief in a higher power — a power greater than myself. The physical church, the building, was where my belief was fomented and expressed without fear, rejection, or ridicule. As such, I became the youngest assistant superintendent in that building's history.

Let me stop for a moment and clear something up. I am purposely distinguishing the word building from the word church because I believe the church is comprised of the actual human believers of Jesus Christ as expressed in the scriptures; it is not the myriad denominations and buildings that saturate our American landscape.

Let's face it. These buildings are ubiquitous in the black church community: they come with the standard crucifixes affixed atop the building, or they have one of those eight-foot-tall Sam's Club crucifixes on the church grounds. And there's an obligatory sign stating the title of the church, the hours of operation of Sunday school and worship services, and the pastor's name — and in some iterations, the names of the associate ministers (less commonly) and the name of the wife of the pastor (more commonly), who was titled at some point as the "first lady." I don't specifically remember or know the origin of this designation as it relates to black church bodies; nor do I understand its rise to prominence, relevance, or reverence in the black church. But at this time I will state a recurring theme that has no biblical or spiritual rhyme or reason with many things currently found in this exploration of the black church: it just is!

I was still the youngest superintendent in the church's history (ten years of age), and I was having a ball. I was quoting the scriptures and regaling my peers and my older contemporaries with my understanding of the principles of God's ultimate authority; I shared the lessons that He provided in his Bible and spoke about how they assisted us in our daily lives.

The fire and brimstone sermons of the pastor added to my own understanding. This black preacher, his son, and others would go into the pulpit — a place we were taught to never ever enter. By this time, I had seen the Easter classic film The Ten Commandments, directed by Cecile B. DeMille and starring Charlton Heston as Moses and the great Yul Brynner as Rameses.

A scene that continues to captivate me to this day was when Moses appeared before the burning bush, and the voice of God told him to take his sandals off his feet because he stood on holy ground. Moses's fear and obedience at that moment resonated with me, and for several years after that, every time I walked by the pulpit, I had that fear. Even if someone told me to grab a fan or get a water tray, I stood with fear and trembling because I literally thought I would hear that same voice and face some type of curse by setting foot on the pulpit because of my unholiness.

So there I was, between being accepted by this group of believers and having a place where I was not mocked or was pleasantly mocked, depending on the day, because of my race, size, where I lived, or how I dressed. There at the church I was doing something and believing in something that transcended all of those petty human beliefs. Why not love Jesus the way He showed love for me?

I was baptized at the age of twelve because I just believed there had to be something greater — something better — and my actions and my life at that time were defined by it. I had several talents, and I was going to use them for the greater glory of God by serving in as many capacities as I could in the black church I attended.

My belief system at that time in my life as a big black southerner helped me get through a very rough and confusing childhood. My size and my ethnicity were the only stereotypes that were spot on at that preteen-to-teenage stage in my life. I was an avid reader of comic books, loved music, could sing first tenor, and was deathly afraid of women. I was not a particularly great athlete because I cared more about reading and girls than I did sports. And this was partly because I believed most athletes were not the most educationally adept people at my school.

For the most part, they were braggarts who could not cut it in school but had enough physical prowess in their respective sports of choice that it endeared them to the female populace of my junior high and high schools.

What did I have to offer? I could sing, but I was too shy and awkward to engage in any lengthy conversation about what the females were interested in because they quickly grew bored of me. I was too shy to sing to them publicly because I was just "too big to be singing that high," which was a common phrase I would hear from people. Plus, most of the crew I hung out with were athletes who would rib me from time to time about not playing football very well but singing like a bird. I tell you, some nights, if it had not been for the Lord on my side ...

My belief, attendance at church, and getting around a church crowd were the only things that stopped me from getting too depressed. At church, I was lauded and supported because I could speak and sing freely, and I was only judged on how I treated my peers and the elderly at the church.

There were times, however, that I wanted something more. There were ... incidents ... snippets of gossip ... about the pastor's philandering, about children out of wedlock, about fornication, adultery, and mental illness, and about other things that I chose to ignore because I believed they would have destroyed what I wanted my church to be. All the evils and deception that existed outside of the church had come into the church, making my church no longer a safe place for me anymore. I consciously disregarded these rumors and steered clear of them because I could not have gone another step further. I mentally did the physical equivalent of putting my fingers in my ears and shaking my head from side to side, frantically shouting to keep all outside noise from piercing my ears. I didn't know it then, but this is what the black church had been doing for years.

I had no idea how much it would affect me until much later in my life.

GROWING UP GOSPEL

As I grew older and looked back, however, there were a lot of practices that confused me and had no place in my religious experiences. Here are just a few.

I am a native southerner, born and raised in the Mississippi Delta in northeastern Arkansas. We were forced as children to attend church by our mother. There were certain religious practices that we were taught early on that were the surest way to Hell. The first was "do not step in the pulpit." That's right. The pulpit sat on a raised dais of the church between the choir stands. The superintendent desk, you know, the big desk that offering plates and communion plates were set upon under a sheet, sat before it, and in the pulpit, of course, was the pastor/ preacher's lectern.

We were chided even during choir rehearsal to go around this "holy ground," otherwise we would incur the wrath of the Lord as well as our parents or any adults around who witnessed such an affront to church tradition and etiquette. Even if church was not in session, you could not traverse or even play upon the steps leading up to the pulpit.

Another practice I saw in the church was forcing pregnant teens to sit on the front row of the church before the congregation on a particular Sunday and publicly condemn them for having intercourse. Because of the gossip in the church, everyone knew who was pregnant and who was having relations; it was just the nature of things. However, when, apparently spontaneously, you make these young girls go before the church and sit in public view of members and visitors and publicly humiliate them with parental consent, it was horrible! I don't quite remember the young men being called to the front of the church in the same fashion, but I was embarrassed for the girls and knew better than to ask for a reason for such practices.

Another holy and traditional practice that has been the subject of contentious and raucous debate in the black church, second only to paying the pastor/preacher, was tithing. In all my years of attending church, I never quite understood why I had to pay a tenth of my monthly gross pay to the church. All I know is that you were in danger of being killed by God or facing financial ruin if you did not tithe. And somehow, the pastor knew if you were not tithing. Then the church would find out about you not tithing. As I got older, I knew of some local area churches that would post delinquent tithers' names in the open as if they were exam scores in the church.

Now this is an example of how deathly egregious nontithers were considered. In 2006, I asked an older churchgoer about the reasoning behind the whole church tithing and my personal intentions to ask the pastor of the church I was attending how the collected tithes were utilized. This person informed me that she actually questioned the pastor about the dispensation of the tithe, and days later fell ill to a mysterious disease that left her in pain. She took it as a sign from God that she did not need to question the pastor, as he was responsible to God alone and did not have to answer to a member about church finances.

I was appalled, and it really took everything I had not to laugh in her face. She was deathly serious about being stricken with a disease. Almost every member I questioned about this issue of tithing and pastoral accountability gave me the same response: "If there is malfeasance, God will put a stop to it. We can't worry about it. Let God handle it. I'm just going to do what the Bible tells me to do and let the pastor be answerable to God."

As I became older, I noticed a control structure within the church that started and ended with the pastor. I would hear of my mother's consternation about having to tithe more than once during service. However, that was quickly cleared up, as every subsequent request for money was quickly categorized and its purpose was specified before those trays came out again.

There were times, in retrospect, where I believe the pastor would make people walk up to place money in the plates in order to embarrass them before their peers for not believing and trusting enough in God to return to them what they were willingly giving to the church.

In 2011, I sent out a survey to various member churches of the National Baptist Convention, and one of the questions concerned tithing. As in real life, the questions about God and money and church in that combination are anathema to church, as poisonous as ultraviolent rays are to vampires, silver to werewolves, water to fire; you get the idea. Any concern about money and where it went after it left your hand and went into the offering plate was deemed nearly heretical in the church I grew up in and attended as a young adult.

As a child, I was waylaid with the story of the god born as a man who loved me so much and endured so much physical suffering as an expression of love for all humanity that he willingly allowed himself to be put to death for the further propagation of humanity as it exists today. Wow! Being on the lower end of the financial spectrum in Mississippi County, Arkansas, where racism and classism and intraracism were parts of my everyday life, to go to church and be told of love like that was simply mind-boggling. Give me some of that! Jesus?! I will take it! What do I have to do to join that band? Who do I have to kill to get me some of that?!

Essentially, though, time passes and the world moves on; there have been certain paradigm shifts with the black church as a whole and within individual black churches as its members sought only approval from the pastor as the only source and inspiration for church action as opposed to the will of God. I believe the quote that the Word is the same yesterday, today, and forever." As I became older and matriculated through life from high school to college, I still believed, but I was ill-prepared to deal with the world on its terms.

Instead, I contrived a way to deal with people as I had been instructed to by the Bible. However, a funny thing happened. I found that there were many times I would deal with people, real churchgoing people such as myself, who shared a zeal and a common belief in God, who treated me just as poorly as those who were "of the world." If we all looked at the same tome and shared the same disadvantages and trials and tribulations of this life when we agreed to follow Jesus, should we not recognize each other from the world? Should we not reach out and assist those like-minded individuals first? Should we not have some honor?

I have learned that even though this country was founded on "Christian" principles, although our currency has the slogan, "In God We Trust," there is not equality on this earth when it comes to Christians or believers. It was around this time, after I got married and attended a church for nearly seven years, when I received my real education about the business of Christianity and the business of black church so that I no longer took to the appellation of "Christian." I didn't even feel comfortable saying the word "Christian" anymore because to me that was a connotation, a wink that I had assimilated into this business of hat wearing, tithing, slogan-speech, anthem song-making, shouting, Jabberwock speaking, highly traditional, Matrix-frenzied community of black church that was being boxed and shipped to the masses of America and beyond. It was during this time I began to enter the dark night of my soul.