Evangelization In the Black Community: Some Thoughts
Bishop Joseph N. Perry

Evangelization, that is, bringing others to knowledge and faith in Christ, is not just about numbers to help fill our churches. Evangelization is about the wonderful experience of discovering the few who hand their lives over to Christ. Given that Christian faith in these times is represented by any number of traditions this will mean reaching out to others and offering them the richness of faith in Christ in our Catholic tradition.

The menu of Christian faiths is quite large and people can be overwhelmed. We black Catholics represent one of the smaller groupings. There are reasons for this in American history, not the least of which were former laws that barred blacks from assembly or mingling in places where white people gathered and the alignment of the churches with the nefarious practices of segregation and discrimination.

While Roman Catholics suffered discrimination within a generally Protestant milieu, black slaves and freed people of color found space to fashion their own Christian religious experience that has arisen in the self-styled or Free Church traditions many of which sponsored and supported the black experience in this country. To this day the black church remains a powerful agent of companionship, culture, social revolution and spiritual experience for us. In recent decades the Catholic Church has tried to merge salient features of this black experience with Catholic culture. This effort is often called “enculturation”. There are varying opinions about how successful the churches of European shaping have been with this adaptation.

What does it mean to be identified as “Catholic”? At first glance, inquirers to Catholicism will notice that we are a patchwork of dogma, doctrine, disciplines, traditions, ritual and spiritual wisdom all framed in adoration of Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity. Newcomers to the Catholic family will find attractive this diverse portrait of our faith tradition. They will be drawn to the sacramental system of the Church, namely, the gestures and the touch of Christ wrapped in scripture, sign and symbol wherein we encounter Jesus until he comes for us. In other words, we have an altar and a pulpit from which we draw our experience of Christ. Catholicism’s historical continuity and fidelity to the scriptural blueprint for Christ’s Church will be another impressive feature for some. Still others will find intellectually inspiring the leadership in the Catholic Church coursed to the apostles and their successors the bishops with Peter and his successors at their head whose tasks are to maintain the unity of the Church in teaching and doctrine. The Church’s record participation in the civil rights struggle and the simple lives of dedicated priests and religious ministering in the black community are other documented facts that draw people to consider joining the Catholic Church.

Historians comment that the Catholic Church lacked a corporate mission to blacks after Emancipation and during Reconstruction following the Civil War. 19 th century evangelization was left to certain heroic individual bishops, priests, religious and one or the other religious institute and certain lay leaders who broke through the confines of national parishes and legalized segregation patterns and generously ministered in the black community. Many of these individuals, some of them declared saints, loom large in our consciousness and local historical record.

These historical pieces bring us to our current 21 st century situation where we muse about the need for still greater numbers of black Catholics. After all, the Catholic experience is not simply a European experience. Black peoples were part of the very foundation of Christian faith in the Mediterranean and north east African experiences. The Acts of the Apostles which describes the early spread of Christian faith mentions certain individuals and places of black origin. Today, black Catholics are found all over the United States and principally in areas such as Maryland, Louisiana and Texas. We are a little over a million Catholics of African American descent. Continental African presence in the U.S. will bring black Catholic numbers upward of an additional several hundred thousand.

In instances, we have reason to lose patience with the human face of the Church. The sins and mistakes of Christians often prove stumbling blocks for some. But we forge ahead building, shaping, reshaping the world for the kingdom. We lament the apparent comfort level of the numbers of unchurched who subscribe to a personal direction without a practiced faith. We are troubled by quiet neighborhoods we pass by on Sunday with no one coming or going who might think of Church and worship on the Lord’s Day. We are bothered why the other nine are not inspiredto come and give thanks to God while we are worshiping with the one who comes through our doors. We are saddened by the fact of black Catholics returning to their Protestant origins in the various Assemblies of God, Pentecostal, Baptist and non-denominational traditions enjoying renaissance since the post-civil rights upward position of blacks in middle class and higher economic brackets. These traditions feature state of the art communications, musical rendition and artistic ambience whereas our Catholic tradition downplays the spotlight on the preacher and performance to allow the Word and Sacrament to be dominant.

However one is inspired to be part of the church, from a Catholic perspective, the work of evangelization, -bringing numbers of people in- is secondary to the personal conversion of heart that the Scriptures speak of by those who have heard the message of Jesus and have turned their lives around to the direction and spirit of the Gospel. This is primarily a response to grace and the movement of God in people’s lives, not a marketing or consumer exercise.

Acts of the Apostles 8, 26 gives us an example of this primordial personal response with the evangelization by the apostle Philip of the Ethiopian eunuch, an officer of the Ethiopian court, who was reading the book of Isaiah while traveling back home from visiting Jerusalem. This passage is often taken to be Africa’s introduction to Christian faith. When the apostle Philip, his invited traveling companion, asked him if he understood what he was reading, the Ethiopian answered, “How can I unless someone guide me?” So, Philip began to narrate for him the story of Jesus of Nazareth. In response to what he heard the Ethiopian asked to be baptized.

Hungry for God, the dark man was willing to be guided but he needed a good guide. Like this Ethiopian, we all need proper guidance. We are part of a faith handed down from generation to generation and we depend on guidance from others to learn our faith. By definition, disciples (followers of Jesus Christ) are people who are willing to learn. The Church, therefore, is made up of people who are looking to learn something more about God, something more about Jesus, something more about the scriptures. Ours is a faith that thrives on mutual nurturing and modeling of the Christian life. We must take seriously our responsibilities to offer guidance to others, showing them by word and example the Good News about Christ. Through our lives of faith we continue to nurture others as we have been nurtured.

The Ethiopian that Philip met was such a God-fearing man, one of those who could not convert to Judaism because biblical law excluded sexually maimed men from fellowship. (Deuteronomy 23). This passage from the Old Testament echoes ancient cruelties where slaves were sterilized for purposes of service in the royal courts. Castration specifically was an institution in a time when customs kept a king’s harem or women-in-waiting under close surveillance. These women were tended to and protected and instructed by a man who was made safe. Today we judge such practices in retrospect as exploitation of women and disenfranchised peoples. Perhaps, that was why the eunuch was reading Isaiah. The ancient prophet taught God’s love for all humanity, not just a certain group of people. As the Ethiopian searched further through the scroll of Isaiah’s writings for hints that he too was dear to God he struggled to grasp the Scripture sensing somehow that it will lead him to God in ways he has never known. Christian faith was open to easily absorb this dark man.

Thus, mission or evangelization is not triumphalism or coercion however these terms have been misused over the centuries. Evangelization is about sharing the person of Jesus Christ with others, a responsibility that belongs to all of us the baptized. And our evangelizing territory most often is going to be close at hand, places in our own families, neighborhoods, among our friends where there is always found people hungering for goodness and images of faith and inclusion, heroism and service. In these places we will find people whose hearts are disposed and open to promptings of grace. We should do our best to articulate our faith in the richness of our Catholic tradition that explains Him best.

So before anything else we are confronted with the profundity of God’s grace and the mystery of human response in the enterprise of evangelization.

In addition to multi-generational black Catholic families, our schools have been a principal arm of evangelization in the black community. We are concerned about this established rich source of converts while our parochial school system downsizes across the nation due to some harsh economic realities. This shift in practice will have to mean new strategies to religiously educate our children as well as to attract families to the faith. The Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) and for Children(RCIC) means that people come to us largely voluntarily in response to their attraction to the Catholic Church. Catholicism is not a proselytizing tradition. Membership in the Catholic Church comes principally through the generational passing on of the faith through the baptism of our children and secondarily by converts to the faith. Nevertheless, in this religiously syncretistic and increasingly secular society which rests comfortably without sacred symbolism and religious influence, more proactive strategies are called for principally addressing the unchurched, those who have fallen away from Catholic faith, and the indifferent.

We were raised to practice our Catholic faith, not to necessarily articulate it. Catholics trained in apologetics are few in number. We are principally a religion of observance; others are trained to teach the faith and to defend the faith. And today, we are increasingly more professional in the science of catechetics as represented by a large number of the laity in parish and diocesan programs of religious education and evangelization. This should not prevent the average Catholic in the pew from becoming more knowledgeable and conversant about their Catholic faith.