| In Preaching to the Black Middle Class, Marvin McMickle cites a 1998 television special entitled "The Two Nations of Black America", during which a crucial question was raised: "How have we reached this point, where we have both the largest Black middle class and the largest Black underclass in our history?" McMickle, looking at the implications of this study for the Black Church, asks....what are the ministry obligations and opportunities for black middle-class churches that are physically located within America's inner cities? Increasingly, these churches have two separate congregations. One church is the membership that drives into the inner city each Sunday for worship and fellowship....The other church is the people who live in the neighborhood that surrounds the church building....In many instances, the first church is composed of people of the middle class, and the second church is composed of people of the underclass. How should the one relate to the other?1;If the church is to model for the world the ultimate telos of humanity---the kingdom of God, and if the church does so by its practices, then based on McMickle's inquiry, we must ask what are middle class urban black churches modeling before the world around them, especially when they stand in the midst of poor urban communities. In particular, we must ask ourselves, for these churches which have a "two-church" problem, do they serve as a mirror for the world to assess its behavior against or rather are they a reflection of a world gone horribly wrong that has no place for the poor, disadvantaged and marginalized?;From my perspective, the problem with "two-church" churches is that they fail to "discern the body of Christ in a worthy manner" (1 Cor. 1: 10--31; 11: 17--29). Rather than demonstrating unity within the body of Christ that defies the world's fragmenting of human bodies based on hypercapitalistic and hyperindividualistic logics of race, class, gender, or even sexual orientation, two-church churches maintain these same divisions instead of providing a glimpse of the reign of God that typified the early church, and that John Howard Yoder maintains is the responsibility of the people of God.2 Simply put, I suggest that two-church churches are churches which are to be unified in the sacramental, liturgical and ethical practices, but who in many ways, mimic the divisions of the world and fracture along the same lines.;Thus, this document is an attempt to look at the historical and current causes of this fragmentation and to offer ways to assist these two-church congregations in "discerning the body of Christ" correctly by remembering and re-membering the body of Christ through both sacramental and ethical practice. Specifically, I suggest that what is needed for these two-church churches is the remembering in terms of the early church's understanding of anamnesis and epiclesis within sacramental practice which calls the church to action and re-membering in terms of reconciling the gathered community to one another that has direct impact on the liturgical and ethical practices of the church. While review of all of the church's practices and rituals is well beyond the scope of this document, I offer that there are specifically two areas within the worship and moral life of Black churches that display the two-church problem that provide opportunities for hope, healing and transformation: (1) the practice of the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion and (2) the opportunities that Black churches provide for their members to engage in acts of social justice either through advocacy or direct action as espoused by the model of Christian Community and Economic Development as developed by John and Vera Mae Perkins.;1Marvin Andrew McMickle, Preaching to the Black Middle Class: Words of Challenge, Words of Hope (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2000), xi. 2John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2001) ix. |
