Passing the Mantle: A New Generation of Leaders in the Black Church

A report on the Passing The Mantle Clergy & Lay Leadership Institute program at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture

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For Rev. Najuma Smith-Pollard, the statistics that describe the plight of many urban AfricanAmerican communities aren’t abstractions— they’re everyday realities. St. James A M E Church, where Smith-Pollard serves as pastor, is at the heart of South Los Angeles. While problems like poverty and homelessness are acute, Smith-Pollard says that nowhere are her community’s troubles more apparent than in its high schools.

“Schools like [Alain Leroy] Locke and [ Thomas] Jefferson have an overall 95 percent drop out rate,” she says. “And half the kids in these school districts are foster-children, which means there are no parents around. Add to that the number of fathers who are in prison or in jail and you see the community is broken down on so many different levels. That’s why we need to push for programs that deal with re-entry for parents coming out of prison and that address gang violence, because that has become the new family for a lot of our children.”

Black churches like St. James have historically served as the primary reservoirs of social capital in African-American communities. But the tradition of advocacy and activism that reached its pinnacle during the civil rights era has gradually faded with the graying of the generation of leaders who came of age during the time of Martin Luther King, Jr. and activists like James Lawson—a key architect of the civil rights movement’s strategy of non-violent confrontation.

“At one time, social activism and social justice was the main message of the black church,” Smith-Pollard says. “I don’t think that is the message of most African-American churches today. Social justice action concerns are no longer necessarily on the front lines.”

This shift away from civic engagement reflects an inward turn among some African-American clergy and their congregations at a time when many black communities urgently need the kind of advocacy their religious leaders and institutions once provided. In a recent piece titled “Too Long Ignored,” New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert notes a number of grim statistics related to black men in the United States: a third will spend time in prison at some point in their lives; those who die in their young-adult years are most likely felled by homicide; and less than half will graduate from high school on time.

“The aspect of this crisis that is probably the most important and simultaneously the most difficult to recognize is that the heroic efforts needed to alleviate it will not come from the government or the wider American society,” Herbert writes. “This is a job that will require a campaign on the scale of the civil rights movement, and it will have to be initiated by the black community.”

Thus recovering its legacy of passionate social activism in response to the challenges that Rev. Smith-Pollard and others like her are facing is arguably the greatest task the black church has faced in a generation. The primary goal of the Passing the Mantle Clergy and Lay Leadership Institute is to provide a spark to help reignite that flame.

“As a pastor I preach and I run the church,” says Smith-Pollard, a graduate of the first PTM class in 2006 and the current president of the alumni association. “But I also have to be engaged in what is going on in the community as well.”

The skills and networking resources Smith-Pollard acquired through “Passing the Mantle,” a program of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, have enabled her to begin to develop Project Destiny, a series of interventions aimed at school-age girls, whose incarceration rates are increasing even more rapidly than their male counterparts. But perhaps even more importantly, she found in the program a kind of theologically grounded activism that honored the social justice legacy of the black church.

Finding a New Bottle for Old Wine

If helping African-American clergy and lay leaders reclaim that legacy seemed like an obvious way for the Center for Religion and Civic Culture to respond to the challenges facing black communities, the best strategy for shaping the PTM curriculum was not immediately apparent.

“In year one, we were still wrestling with where we were going,” says Rev. Mark Whitlock, director of the program and executive director of CRCC’s Cecil Murray Center for Community Engagement. “…she found in the program a kind of theologically grounded activism that honored the social justice legacy of the black church.”

The model for the PTM curriculum in 2006 was the Harvard Divinity School’s nearly decade-old Summer Leadership Institute, which provided executive training for clergy and lay leaders involved in community development. Two years later, administrators at the divinity school suspended their program, but the PTM team had already begun to adapt the Harvard curriculum.

“Their model focused on more economic development—job creation, constructing buildings, developing programs—that you can measure immediately versus civic engagement, which would take longer,” Whitlock says. “It was you come to class. You complete your class. You receive your certificate, and it’s over. In the second year we revised the PTM program to include a primary focus on civic engagement and policy analysis.”

In practical terms, this meant shifting from a classroom-oriented strategy that entailed two classes a month for four months—as well as a financial incentive to keep participants engaged in a protracted, non-residential program—to a practicum-focused curriculum that included residential components, hands-on mentoring and an integrated approach to policy initiatives and community development. A modest tuition fee also encouraged participants to have a stronger sense of investment in their training.

“We take them right from the classroom into existing civic engagement work that’s going on,” says Rev. Eugene Williams, PTM’s co-founder who also heads the faith-based Regional Congregations and Neighborhood Organizations Training Center. “By year three, that became the standard we were using.” The four phases of the current iteration of the PTM program are designed to equip leaders with the skills they need to manage partnerships in the public arena and to encourage the cultivation of networks that can help sustain socially engaged activism in the black church and beyond. They are also geared to change theological mindsets that keep leaders from moving beyond the walls of their congregations and into the public square.

“Religion is personal but it isn’t private,” says Rev. Dr. Cecil “Chip” Murray in a typically pithy summary of belief capturing a tension that shapes the lives of individual Christians as well as the loosely confederated group of religious movements collectively called the black church.

Murray joined the faculty of USC in 2004 after retiring from his post as pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal Church (FAME). During his quarter-century at FAME, he transformed a congregation of a few hundred into an 18,000-member mega-church with multi-million dollar community and economic development programs that brought jobs, housing and corporate investment into many South Los Angeles neighborhoods.

His association with the PTM program as a senior fellow at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture has been essential to attracting participants, many of whom cite the opportunity to work in a mentoring relationship with Murray as a key reason they decided to enroll. But a selfinterested desire to emulate Murray’s success as a church-builder—particularly if that impulse is tinged with the materialism of the Prosperity Gospel—is a setup for disappointment.

“I would admonish those who preach prosperity to remember that the one who founded the Christian church had just one pair of sandals for his feet,” Murray says.

In Phase I of the program, which usually occurs over two days at the end of June, students have their visions of the social role of the church and faith leaders challenged and reformulated. The two-fold purpose of this mindset reorientation is to counter the institutional paralysis that often prevents African-American congregations from responding effectively to the urgent needs of their communities as well as the near-term focus on personal prosperity that PTM’s directors see as a betrayal of the spirit of their movement.

“We believe Christ came to set the captives free,” says Mark Whitlock, “to bring sight to the blind, to clothe the naked, to find shelter for those who are looking for housing. That’s the work of the church. We have to return to the values that made the black church an agent of positive social change.”

Still, there is often a tension between that goal and the desire of some participants simply to bolster their own membership rosters. A handful of students have left the program at this early stage, though the PTM staff say they are careful to establish that while their purpose is not to equip participants to build a personal pastoral empire, they are committed to helping students do the hard work of spiritually rigorous civic engagement.

“They can expect an experience that’s academic, theological as well as political,” says Eugene Williams. “But not political in a partisan sense. We try to help people to think differently about the world and their faith and to use that new thinking as a way to expand the public square.”

Mentoring Change

The clarification process that underlies Phase I of the PTM program includes presentations on the nuts-and-bolts of community development and policy advocacy as well as the theological and historical impulses that inform PTM’s mission. Equipped with this theoretical introduction to civic engagement, participants are then divided into clusters and assigned mentors from the PTM staff.

As they begin to shape their ideas for the projects that will be the focus of their written and on-the-ground work during the next phases of the program, students are encouraged to see both their mentors and the other members of their cluster as resources to help them assess and address the needs of the wider communities their congregations serve. In a practical sense, this emphasis on collaboration encourages participants to cultivate the kinds of skills and relationships that will allow them to sustain and build social capital over the long term. It also reinforces the premise that civic engagement is integral to the history and vision of the black church.

“This part of the program gave me a clear understanding that I can be a part of civic life without jeopardizing spiritual gifts,” says Robert Rubin, an alumnus of the PTM program in 2007 and executive director of the Crenshaw Christian Center’s Vermont Village Community Development Corporation, which works to seed affordable housing, business investment and home ownership in L.A.’s Vermont-Manchester corridor.

“It’s not a social service perspective versus a salvation perspective,” Rubin says. “People have to be saved in order to be changed, but the church has also been an organization that is socially oriented to do the right thing in the community.”

Reigniting Embers

About a month after their introduction to the PTM program, fellows meet for Phase II, a sixday residential intensive that deepens their relationships with mentors and peers in their cluster, who become key resources for trouble-shooting and inspiration as each participant is pushed to develop her or his plans for civic engagement more fully. PTM staff members expand on the community development and policy-oriented components of Phase I, and guest speakers— from prominent scholars like Lawrence Mamiya of Vassar College and public theologians like J. Alfred Smith to seasoned veterans of state and local politics—further illuminate the close connections between activism, history and applied theology in the black church.

“The speaker that stuck out in my mind was Dr. Aldon Morris,” says 2010 PTM alumnus Marcus Farrow, a lay leader at New Dawn Christian Village, where he co-founded a faith-based youth mentoring program to help keep ado- lescent and teenage boys out of the criminal justice system. Morris, a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Northwestern University, outlined larger trends that Farrow sees playing out in the lives of the young men he works to shepherd through an often treacherous cultural landscape.

“There has been a tendency to say that there has been advancement in overall systemic attitudes about race in America,” Farrow says. “People like Oprah Winfrey or Michael Jordan are used as examples of progress in a situation that I don’t think has progressed that much. And having a black president has started this post-racial discussion—like we’ve gotten past something that I don’t think is really behind us.”

Morris’s lecture impressed on Farrow not only the importance of a clear-eyed view of the present but also the urgency of learning the skills needed to effect change.

“It was like embers being reignited,” says Farrow, who has spent two decades in the mortgage and banking industries. “It all goes back to interests”—personal and commercial as well as political—“and capital formation and access to credit. That’s the connection I needed to make.”

Building Human Infrastructure

Before she enrolled as a PTM fellow in 2010, lawyer and educator Lydia Hollie says that while she felt pulled to express her faith through the violence-prevention work she was doing with the Long Beach Human Relations Commission, she was at a loss for a conceptual framework that would allow her to integrate her on-the-ground activism with the spiritual life of her community at the Greater Open Door Church of God in Christ, where she serves as director of public affairs. The penny dropped for her during Phase III of the PTM program, a three-month practicum during which students hone their formal plans for future civic engagement projects and continue to work with the members of their mentoring clusters to meet the day-to-day challenges of leadership.

“I realized that what I was doing to try to shut down the pipeline to prison was the same as what was going on inside the church on Sunday,” says Hollie, who also studied as a fellow at CRCC’s Institute for Violence Prevention. “Community work is sanctuary work. That was the real ah-ha moment for me.”

Bolstered by her ongoing consultation with mentors and peers, Hollie began to broaden her relationships with key stakeholders in the Long Beach neighborhoods where she saw young people were at greatest risk. The confidence that she had professional and spiritual resources to match the needs she wanted to address prompted another revelation.

“It’s all about knowing where to start,” she says. “We often think of community development as bricks and mortar, or policy work as building the legitimacy of an issue. That’s true, to an extent. But in my mind, especially through my experience with PTM, both of those things begin with the development of human infrastructure. Real community change starts by having conversations with the people who are in it.”

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That imperative sounds far easier than it actually is. The people who live in many of the neighborhoods served by this city’s historically African-American churches are no longer predominantly African-American. In fact, parts of Crenshaw and Compton now have large Hispanic majorities. The census tract that is home to Najuma Smith-Pollard’s St. James AME Church is 82 percent Latino.

“Immigration,” Chip Murray tells the 2010 PTM fellows at their graduation, “is the single biggest challenge our community has faced since the civil rights era. We are becoming a nation of nations.”

One response of black churches to the loss of demographic cohesion in their communities has been to turn inward—a reversal of a legacy of religiously-inflected civic engagement that is in some ways indistinguishable from the history of the 1960s.

A recent report from the Public Influences of African-American Churches Project (PIAAC) at Morehouse College determined that black churches emerged from the decade with considerable political momentum both from their successful public policy activism and from enhanced electoral opportunities achieved as a result of that activism.

“But while there is ample evidence that African Americans have built effectively upon that electoral momentum,” the report states, “there is very little evidence of large-scale public policy engagement by rank-and-file blacks over the last 40 years.”

The PIAAC research team reached a pair of conclusions: first, that the influence of black churches within their own communities has been impaired by a lack of infrastructure devoted to policy advocacy and civic interaction. And, second, that the best remedy for this situation is civic capacity-building among church leaders through intergenerational and inter-ethnic dialogue about churches and public life.

Providing a model for building that needed infrastructure and coaxing the black church’s latent capacity for civic engagement back to life were the primary goals of the PTM staff at the outset of the program. The purpose of Phase IV—encouraging the ongoing accumulation of social capital through an active alumni network—is to sustain that momentum into the future.

And, to accommodate new demographic realities, this process of activism and network-building must eventually extend past the comfort zones within which many black churches have traditionally operated. 1

“We have to follow the Lord’s example,” says Dr. Michelle Stewart-Thomas, a therapist and PTM instructor. “That means we have to be willing to do a new thing—even if that means stepping outside our established religious and cultural boundaries.”

In fact, a number of program participants are already beginning to adapt to this changing landscape. “I live in suburbia,” says John Wells, head pastor of Mountain View Community Church in Temecula and a 2008 PTM fellow. “So even though I’m an African American pastor and we’re predominantly African American, because we don’t have a quote-unquote ‘black’ community, our church isn’t race- or ethnicity-driven. It is more community-driven.”

Wells’ identity as one component of a broader mosaic points toward the two most important elements of Phase IV of the PTM program: first, a network of 200 alumni in the Los Angeles area who will continue to serve as sources of knowledge for one another and, second, a culture of civic engagement that honors but also reaches beyond the particular concerns of African-Americans and the black church. In practical terms, this ongoing collaboration ensures that alumni  will begin to reflexively look for ways to effect positive change in the increasingly diverse communities where they live and worship.

Moreover, like sturdy scaffolding that can be used to construct a variety of buildings, the essentials of the PTM program are designed to be useful not just in the black church but in any community where religious commitment entails a call to social engagement. In other words, the broad outlines of PTM’s curriculum can serve as a template for training programs in an array of faith-based organizations—from Latino advocacy groups to Muslim civic leadership initiatives.

“Every major faith tradition speaks to justice,” says Jared Rivera, former executive director of L.A. Voice PICO, part of a national organizing network that works with religious congregations to increase community activism and civic engagement. “What that means in modern-day America or a modern-day Los Angeles when you have to have decisions about how to create more affordable housing or how to improve schools—it’s very difficult to navigate. So what we try to do is try to translate those collective religious values into the creation of just public policy.”

Refining and then replicating the PTM formula will thus be the real measure of the program’s success. In other words, the leadership network should ideally grow beyond the boundaries of ethnically or denominationally distinct communities to serve as the matrix for broad-based movements for social change. The center of gravity for any given iteration of the program will vary—perhaps there will be a Muslim or Latino gray eminence like Chip Murray, or a supportive institutional home like Harvard Divinity School or USC—but the common result should be a diverse community of activists who can speak the same language.

“If the questions are asked by the leaders of our faith communities,” Murray says, “the solutions will ultimately present themselves in a way that includes all of us.”

That sentiment may sound naïve. But at a time when the constituencies served by many congregations are suffering and no othersource of succor is apparent, the leadership and advocacy of people of faith is not simply desirable. As Bob Herbert reminds us in “Too Long Ignored,” it’s essential.

PTM survey results

In Fall 2010, CRCC conducted an online survey of all PTM alumni to get a better understanding of their participation in the program, from recruitment to what they learned during the program, to determining the areas that they believed they still needed to develop. The majority of the survey items were discrete response items, but we also included several open-ended questions that required the respondent to articulate an answer. The survey was administered through an online methodology, alumni were initially contacted through an email message, and then were reminded (through email) twice.

The response rate for the survey was 43 percent, which exceeds the average survey response rate of 33 percent. In addition to the survey, we have included data gathered from our records of PTM alumni, so that we can see the makeup of the entire group of graduates.

Who are the PTM Alumni?

Overall, more men (60%) than women (40%) have participated in the PTM program. However, graduates of the PTM program are almost evenly divided in terms of the roles they have in their churches. Lead pastors make up 26% of the graduates, associate pastors 25% and congregational lay leaders comprise 30% of 13 graduates. The remaining 19% include participants who are part of para-church ministries in their communities. The majority of these church leaders have either taken academic work at the graduate level, or have a graduate degree (65%). Yet, despite this relatively even distribution of roles among the PTM graduates, and their education levels, the majority (66%) receive no financial support from their church, with only 18% receiving full financial support.

PTM graduates are from 134 distinct churches or organizations, with several being from the same churches. These congregations are from the five Los Angeles area counties (Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside) in addition to four more (San Diego, Kern, Alameda and Santa Barbara).

Themes from PTM Alumni

Several themes emerge from the survey data regarding what PTM graduates gained from the program and the areas that they wanted to develop further. The top two areas that graduates identified as being the most benefi- cial to their work were training in community development (18%), and the expansion of their network and developing new relationships with others doing similar work (15%). PTM alumni also ranked as priorities several areas that they wanted to continue developing: strategic planning (22%), grant making (18%), foundation relations (14%), capacity building (18%), and community assessment tools (9%).

Graduates were also asked to rank what were in their view, the most significant issues facing their communities and congregations. Economic development was ranked as the first or second most significant issue by 21% of PTM graduates, followed by education (20%), gang violence (12%), health issues (13%), drugs (12%) and immigration (5%). Finally, the PTM respondents were asked whether their congregations would be interested in participating in a variety of programs or trainings. Overall, the responses suggest that the churches represented by the PTM graduates were very interested in participating in a variety of such programs, as follows: economic development programs (85%), leadership training (80%), disaster relief/preparedness training (70%), prison reform (70%), marketing/ advertising development for their different programs (66%), and inter-religious dialogue (49%).

Description of PTM Participants

PTM Alumni survey responses: