Hampton University Preachers Conference 2017 Speakers Forum Thursday

so at this moment of course you see all of our presenters are on stage to discuss the theme that our president dr riddick has developed during his tenure we're delighted and i am excited to introduce our moderator who is the past president of the hampton university minister conference and one of god's most gifted preachers the reverend dr william houston curtis the senior pastor of the mount ararat baptist church in pittsburgh pennsylvania so let's give god praise as he comes and lead this conversation and dialogue well let me say uh this is probably the first time in 20 years i can remember having all presenters on stage at the same time so i think it gives us a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate how much we appreciate what 365 days can produce would you help me thank god for all of our preachers and facilitators [Applause] and let me tell you why there's gratitude necessary because when you get an invitation from hampton you spend the whole year wishing the floor would open and that you would be swallowed alive dr so walter lee mack put it in context when he said hampton is the only conference where when you're invited to read scripture or pray you fast for 60 days that's the pressure that has been put on these preachers and facilitators but it also gives us a wonderful chance and i think this is ingenious as a vision of our president it gives us a wonderful chance to hear some best practices and some of the thought processes that go into the presentations we've heard i think we'll start by asking our president to speak for a minute about how the theme was birthed and what you had hoped to accomplish with it thank you dr curtis i think when we look around at the climate of our country and see the continuous plight of the people who set and our pews sunday after sunday and to merely just preach a gospel that will make people feel good and they go back home and have to deal with the same problems over and over perhaps we've missed the mark of what god's really called us to do and i really believe that the church exists to be a change agent in the world and that we ought to uh have a power uh dr cosby just finished preaching about the power we need power that transcends the sanctuary that when we finish preaching on sunday that we've empowered people to lead the sanctuary to go out into the community to make a change and sometimes that change is speaking truth to power let's let's define terms this week we've heard prophetic preaching defined and or described in a myriad of ways so so that we develop a lexicon in a vocabulary that is consistent define for me dr allison what you mean by prophetic preaching somebody ought to let you know what the questions are going to be is that always okay um for me prophetic preaching is kind of a responsibility to keep god's people moving forward okay um in gayron wilmore's book he talks about the black church initially being radical and then being de-radicalized and what happens in every society is that governments try to co-opt the power of the church and bring it and it's the prophet's responsibility to say we are not called to merely survive we are not called to belong to this world's government or organizations or any other kinds of institutions but we are called we're on a path to recreate a world that's hospitable to god's presence for all people and so you know with with all of the prophets they are given visions that are severely painful because they're way beyond where the people want to exist and i can't remember who it was who prayed um but she talked about the fist of god being in your back and pushing you forward uh dr teresa fry brown in a prayer when she was in richmond and so prophetic preaching requires that those that are called to do it are always listening for the next step for where god wants to lead the people and then the prophet has to translate all of what god has said to the people and i think particularly to the apostles because the apostles are the ones responsible for developing an infrastructure for the word to make to be made manifest and so it's it's almost like the prophet is the go between the bridge between heaven and earth always trying to move the people so that we will maintain being a people of faith and not just a religious organization dr crowder how would you define prophetic preaching sure i um i borrow a little bit from bruggeman who says that prophetic preaching has to number one question um the present authoritarian view that it questions whatever systems whatever structures are demeaning marginalizing or disentering any systems that are reifying or making others pit against each other so we have to question and call them to suspect those systems secondly i think prophetic preaching presents an alternative worldview and alternative cosmology so it just doesn't question what the current system is but it says no this is what the system should look like this is what the world view should be and i think we need to expand the definition not only to say just prophetic preaching but i think because evil is so calculating and evil is so organized i think we have to say prophetic work because i think we need all hands on deck so we don't want people to say i'm not a preacher then i'm not sure how i fit in right we're going to come back to that institutional angle in a minute okay bishop mckinsey i i think for me uh my late homeless professor dr miles jerome jones used to talk about conditions of existence and that for me prophetic preaching is calling out conditions of existence that bring about limitations in the gift of authenticity that there are conditions whether they be structures whether it be mindsets whether it be oppressions that keep people from fully expressing the divine authenticity they were born with individually and communally and i think for me prophetic preaching is calling those out being boss by none and loyal to god and expressing those conditions of existence in a way that you find yourself liberated to be free to be who god created you to be as an individual and as a community dr lisa wheel prophetic preaching [Music] has as it's already been stated i would just succinctly sum up that i believe it confronts the tension in the current conditions of the society and offers and challenges creative responses from god's people i believe that the challenge the call to action is an important piece of the prophetic preaching that it not just critiques and and uh and offers uh commentary but that it compels action that it it points out the tension in the society and empowers people to see their role in changing those conditions [Music] i think one of the the key portions of prophetic preaching is understand that it's two-sided while it challenges the system while it calls out um the problems and the issues and i think one of the ways that we have been able to survive in particular as an african-american people is that it announces the reign of god or it gives us hope that there is going to be a better day that there is going to be a better tomorrow that there is a god who will change our condition and our situation so i think it's really important that whenever we are engaged in prophetic preaching that there is the balance between challenging the system but also giving hope for better tomorrow so dr crowder kind of imaged this gap existence that those of us in ministry are called to function in so we've got this is it bifocal we've got this one side where we're feeding god's word to his people this other side where the institution and the culture in which we do life exposes things that what we've heard from god forces us to say so talk for a minute about what your personal disciplines are that feeds your prophetic streams people hear you present and many will say if i go read what you read or go to the school from which you graduated maybe i'll come out a profit but we know it's not that simple so what are your disciplines that help to feed that prophetic edge i don't want to keep going in the same order uh doc crowder i um i teach new testament at chicago theological seminary and so my training is you know new testament scholar or researcher um and so my approach is rooted in how do we get to exegesis how do we help people to understand that there is a context out of which the biblical text was produced and that that context in many ways is quite different from our context but at the same time there are ways in which this biblical text gets re-contextualized it gets reinvented i think there's some code switching that happens if you will and so my discipline then says well how do we understand the biblical text then and yes what does this mean here and now in 2017 with what's his face in the white house with you know threats to medicaid threats to after-school program threats to health care we want to grab women but we don't want to pay for their maternal care so what does the biblical text how do we unpack the text how do we understand who joel was in the 5th century how do we understand matthew's version of the temptations over against luke's version of the temptation so my background then says well let's comb through and let's respect the context of the biblical text and then let's re-contextualize it to see what does it mean for us here and now your hermeneutical lens though so you're extracting truth you're lifting it from antiquity you're dusting it off you want to put some contemporary clothes on it what are your disciplines that help you to drop it into 2017 where it's not into the template of what average churches always drop it into prosperity um uh corporate upward mobility or personal elevation well i started on tuesday with the question who am i because i think so much of our interpretation begins with our own identity the problem becomes we don't necessarily want to reveal we don't want to mine our identity i think we for me it is i have to comb through who am i who told me that so my lens is who i am as a black mom i have two teenage sons and i am scared to death for them my lenses i am married to a pastor my lenses i grew up national baptist licensed progressive ordained uh national baptist with disciples of christ affiliations so i think all of our identities who where we come from our geography our political standing our economic status where we grew up with we grew up with you know big mama and nana in the house or we grew up as a single parent with the single parent all of that comes to bear that's our hermeneutical lens oftentimes we are not aware of that we don't own up to that but i think there are experiences people places things that have happened in our lives that shape how we even broach the bible long before we begin reading and interpreting the bible okay so dr proctor used to say uh the exegesis is the exegesis but you're the first best illustration absolutely we have to exegete ourselves first okay dr allison how do you feed the prophetic stream one of the things that people celebrate are our degrees right so [Music] i'm the director of the dmin program at the school of theology at virginia union i am also an ethicist right so when people find out that i have a phd in ethics then they fall on the floor like wow you're so smart but what i would say is that the discipline that i studied was mere preparation to be a conversation partner for how my community had formed me right so my understanding of ethics you know yesterday when i talked about as human beings and as people in communities our reality is that we should be making sure that the image of god and the likeness of god which i think ethics is the likeness of god should be converging so that we may be one like jesus is one with the father right so i would have to say my who i am my sense of community my sense of values informs how i look at the disciplines that i've come to participate in okay so i'm an ethicist but i'm also an engineer who was formed by a black community including the black church that saw beauty in black people so i don't see us as being in deficit right so when i think of how god created us i don't think of sin first i think of good first right when i think about how god created us i think that many of us have a theological plumb line that we operate in no matter what position we're called to be in my theological plumb line is that i'm a bridge builder as an engineer i took i saw problems and i thought we ought to have solutions i don't complain about problems i analyze the problem i bring about a solution to me that's what an ethicist does to me that's what it means to be prophetic we can speak true to power we can look at all of the systems and how they operate but at the end of the day because we've been gifted with both the image and likeness of god we are solution we are builders we are not beggars um and so i just um ethics and engineering makes sense to me in ministry because they're always focused on ushering in the good if that makes any sense so even when god calls us all to ministry it's because we already have a theological plumb line right and when i talk we're teachers we're artists we are writers we are and then god translates all of that and leads us to a discipline that helps us to unearth that but always meant to translate it for the building of the kingdom so let's get juicy uh-oh we got four working pastors two academicians in terms of profession even though all of us spend time in church institutional maintenance over 20 years drives me crazy because aside from trying to think about how systems are working to dismantle who we are as african-americans i've got staff issues i had building issues i have choirs at war i've got marriages that are in trouble i've got a counseling schedule funerals weddings i've got to out out-of-feed discipleship and encourage family and unit cohesion i've had so many pastoral responsibilities that every sunday trying to quote unquote speak truth to power and i only get 52 opportunities to do that how does the priority flow and here's what happens i'm also trying to teach the church how to be conscientious worshipers i'm trying to teach them how to create intimacy with god and there's this polarization that has created two different camps there's the camp that says that ministry is prophetic and the other says that ministry is charismatic and you got to be one or the other and you can't be a blend of either because whichever side you bleed towards you are identified exclusively with that can that cosby how do you balance your institutional maintenance demands with the want to be a prophet i don't know that i do um i know that it is my responsibility however to do both and i don't know that it is always my responsibility to do both in every sermon now i say that knowing that some people will harshly disagree with me and significantly take take issue with that but because i am pastor and because i know the needs of some people in the in the congregation it is necessary for me to minister to the sheep as well as empower the sheep so i've got to figure out how to do both and sometimes i do not do some one of them in every sermon because i'm so busy trying to ensure that my sister who is hurting because of the reality of last week's experience hears a message and she doesn't necessarily care right now about what 45 just did right right and i understand that what 45 just did is important because i've got to empower people to go out and make a difference in the world but i've got to rip i've got to figure out as i'm led by the spirit how to minister effectively to the people who call me pastor um and i'm much i'm i'm i'm consistently consumed with trying to balance but understanding that if i have a whole 30 minutes about 45 and i never tell my sister that the god that she serves is concerned about her then i have missed the opportunity to be pastor i missed it i missed it or that another member owes god a tithe or that another member owes out a tithe absolutely and so i think we have to be sensitive to the spirit's leadership um and i i am consistently drawn to uh to what the what the world is going through and i believe that what the world is going through ought to be mentioned in our messages jesus intentionally got in the face of those who were who were the power structures intentionally he's all the way through the gospels and i know that that's my responsibility i have to do that but i have to do that but i cannot do that to the detriment of helping to put my hurting sister's heart back together right let me tell you when i come to that you asked about disciplines and all that and i'm gonna and i'm gonna be done with this um i grew up in a single-parent household uh and my mother um so the reason i i speak to people's pain as much as i attempt to do is because i saw my mother who was trying to raise three children uh i was the last of them i saw the pain she endured every day just trying to keep us in line keep making us live have a life that would allow us to be somewhat productive i saw that i lived that i was the last one in the house to live it with her my older siblings took paths that that she didn't want them to take and all i kept hearing like not all but what i would hear from her all the time was marcus i'm not going to strike out i'm not going to strike out and her her pain made her go to church all the time and when we would be riding the church she'd be singing i don't believe he brought me this far to leave me i grew up hearing that god have mercy i grew up hearing that all of my life and so when i come to church i can't just say he's the worst president we ever had although i agree i can't just say he's sick in the head although i believe that i can't just say we've got to we've got to you know be mad at the power structure i will say that but when i see sister friend and brother man with bleeding hearts i've got to figure out if there really is a bomb in gilead how do i put that salve on their heart and and maintain my position as pastor so that's that's that's where that's what i come from mostly so when when when people talk about you know um being a prophet i i know i got to be that i know i have to be that but i also know that i have dual responsibilities i have dual roles and that a whole lot of people in our church will never go back believing that god is the healer we say god is if i never speak to that broken reality in the messages that i attempt to preach and so i'm trying to deal with that yeah so rudy lisa president we we are we're all colleagues and friends so we talk about not buck shooting our sermon prep so as what marcus is talking about if we're talking to a young pastor who is present today and we are encouraging them about how you're shaping perhaps a preaching calendar how do you determine maybe some balance between all of the components of our pastoral responsibility sermonically do you have a template as to how you shape your annual calendar i think i try to be very intentional with exegeting the context of my congregation to know in other words what the hurts are and try to make sure whether it be in shamanic series or subject that i am touching as marcus just said the heart of the issues that they are dealing with and you're identifying their hurts how through counseling okay uh through emails i receive sometimes you know dr proctor used to always say to us make sure you read more than books about theology and homolytics read read time magazine read the newspaper get on the airplane pick up the magazine because when you do that you begin to see issues that are general okay that that person's face and so i think you know you got to be do more than be on facebook and looking at you know the hurts of people you've got to really understand the hurts that people are going through now if there is a certain issue that comes up that is of national significance that also impacts the african-american community to which i minister there might be a time i shift and then deal with that particular issue so that i can try to bring theological understanding so that the only voice that they're hearing is not the media or 45 or anything else so i do try to practice that discipline if there is something going on significant replacing repeal that kind of thing i i may shift from what i'm doing to deal with that particularly so that i try to bring the voice of god into their understanding of what is going on in the structures of the world do either of you do preaching calendars where you try to maintain the balance between all the institutional maintenance issues and what is our prophetic responsibility i want to say that i plan not just the preaching but the entire church year in such a way to try to maintain balance so that will include bible study it will include activities and projects that the church may be involved and engaged in so that when we approach the year we've looked at many of the things that we need to address and plan a lot of times based on the christian calendar what time of the year we're going to address certain things that helps us make sure that we maintain balance and that we do not miss opportunities to address those areas of need there are times based on what's happening what the climate of the country is or the climate of the community that we have to make some adjustments but approaching it through planning at the first of the year helps us to make sure that we maintain the balance of addressing all of the various issues [Music] plan our year thematically so whatever our theme is for the year it is dissected um in different seasons and so that the entire ministry program is flowing in the same direction so bible study even what the worship ministries are doing all tie in with the sermon series i recognize that most of my congregation is my agent younger and so they have add and so i only have a certain amount of time to plant whatever god is saying in their psyche and when they leave out they're going to facebook they're going to twitter they're on instagram they're going to all of these different media forms and they are used to sound bites coming at them from every direction and so i don't want god to become a sound bite that gets lost in the sea of all of the world sound bites i'm very intentional about how i plan the calendar and about what i'm planting and when rights movement we knew what the we knew what the big elephant was it was segregation and we knew we wanted integration and we knew that one of the vehicles for that was voting rights we got transgender issues we've got 45 in the white house we've got economic issues we've got urban gentrification we've got hiv and aids i'm trying to say we've got so many pervasive social issues that there is not this common thread or dna it appears to which an institution to get back to what you were saying earlier to which an institution can commit itself in terms of its prophetic edge and we are often criticized in our cities by not making the others priorities what would you say any of you say to how you identify what's the issue your church is going to be prophetic in terms of an institutional angle knowing you can't do it all yes absolutely um well i always say that my students are my church and um one of the things that i decided to do well first of all i've left academics a couple of times because i didn't think that it's valuable nor do i think it's scholarship to simply check your navel for lent especially when people are dying every day so i took a hiatus from what we typically see as academics i worked at chicago state doing helped them build an aquaponics facility where we raised fish and plants together i uh served at covenant united church of christ where i helped the youth minister develop the young prophets which is a curriculum that celebrates who god created each child to be and then gives them permission to be um transformative agents based on what they see other problems i also worked for the proctor conference and we were focusing on the aftermath of mass incarceration so when i came back to academics i kept all of that in my head and it helps me to do what i'm doing now and that i'm working within a foundation the soul ice foundation that is looking at the way uh con a convene group of churches can operate together to deal with the issue so this group of churches is geographically connected some of them are focused on developing businesses that employ the people in the community so that they can take care of themselves some of them are becoming almost like employment agencies that do critical life skills development and therapy and so what i'm suggesting is that we do community asset mapping which is something that i mentioned yesterday because we have all these national concerns that oftentimes make us neglect the people that god has placed in front of us and so we have to see what's needed in our communities and then as churches if we could learn how to see our own strengths and bring it to the party then each church can address the particular issue that it is gifted in dressing there are a lot of churches that have teachers in them so let that church be you know lead us in educational concerns not just critiquing institutions but educating our children some churches have gems let them focus on fitness i mean so i believe that god has given us everything we need for life for health for healing for holiness but we have to kind of decentralize how we look at ministry right we use a european model of hierarchies and conquest when in fact when we look at how things are done more in ethnic spaces different people's gifts help to mobilize how things are done it's it's what i saw at trinity there was the drama ministry there was the food ministry there was um the lawyers there were you know all of these ministries that existed because there were people in the midst that were gifted and there were people in the community that were also gifted i mean so i i think if we decentralize how we do what we do and we don't necessarily have an have to have a national agenda except for the healing of god's people and that takes care of food takes care of education takes care of the aftermath of mass incarceration and we don't i just believe that the revolution is not televised it may be tweeted but it ain't televised um and so we just i also believe that the artists have to lead because they do the messaging so scholars can do what we do but if you can't put it in a song a dance you know and so that would also be my my thing even with civil rights there had to be some songs you know um so that's if we decentralize and we work based on the gifts that are in our midst we'll know what the work is and we'll know what portion of the wall to build i think to be juicy like you just said the challenge of what you just asked is of how we prioritize or what we focus on here's the challenge everything you named is in my church hiv same sex everything you named is in the in the church and i think you know our ignoring it and shying away from it scared to deal with it doesn't help i think so that's the challenge of trying to pick and choose i don't know that you can pick and choose because all of it is in there and they all love the lord like you do yep now now let's let's push it okay because that's true in terms of embrace theological reflection conversation but you can't budget to make every one of them right the church's staple right right so how does a ministry identify what's going to impact its budget okay it's day-to-day reflection that for which it might even be imaged sure in the community and it can't be all of them no i think for for me it's almost like what allison said it's it's in finding ministry opportunities and education for us education is a big thing in our church because um bethel is 179 years old um it's called bethel baptist institutional church people who know black history know that back in the segregation days the term institutional was put on certain churches in the community as a flagship to know that that was the place you could come and get vocational training okay so that kind of thing has always been a part of the historical brand of my church so education becomes important for us so what i attempt to do is make education a part of everything educating them about hiv educating them about voting rights educating so we try to provide educational opportunities whether it be workshops uh whether it be groups where persons can come together and dialogue and talk and share in the atmosphere of an ethic of love and not an ethic of judging it and does that mean then that you perhaps would not be the big housing developer absolutely or the commercial development absolutely because you've got to decide who you are as a church and you've got to decide that you're you're okay not doing what they do say and i think it's i think it's critically important for pastors who are aspiring to hear yeah that you can't be issue center real estate mogul no increasing square footage right on the plant that's been given to you and an itinerant circuit revivalist right no you've got you've got to decide what the calling of your church is and and what god has called you to address and it's it is it not critical particularly for for those who are on this stage is it not critical that at some point as you're answering the who am i question that you become comfortable with that my pastor is a builder he's increased square footage i've watched him transition to church three four times each time to significantly exponentially more square footage it's not my calling but everybody because i'm from that lineage expects me to build so the first question always asks to me is bill when you're building i'm not because i wasn't called to build buildings i was called to build communities my ethic is different but it took me a long time to become comfortable with that and i spent mount eretz money on false starts and stops trying to duplicate where i come from rather than own who i am where i am it's important to get to that i was just gonna add we'll tell tell our mentees to develop your own preaching personality but we don't tell our mentees to let your ministry develop its own personality so the same way we should not be trying to be someone else as a preacher we should not be looking to make our church someone else's church the same it's the same pattern it's the same model and then we frustrate ourselves because god has a personality and a calling and a mission for each ministry as a personality and a model and a mission for each of us as a preacher i want to add also what are ways in which we can encourage collaboration exactly so that the church doesn't have to be one-stop shopping so how can we collaborate with united way with the red cross how can we collaborate with our theological at chicago theological in seminary we have you know various workshops and so it is a way because again we need this all hands on deck approach so that hey what a congregation cannot do but the seminary is offering this workshop there's something going on at the united way so how can we make sure that we are all community builders that we are all community collaborators because part of what we do at cts we teach people theology but we teach them also to go out with that theology that it's field education it's practical education the lawns of cts are rooted in social justice so how do we train leaders how do we train preachers to engage in community building and community organizing so what are ways in which we can collaborate so that the burden is not always on bethel the burden is not always on mount ararat but what are ways that we can share and again collaborate with each other and partner with each other because there are resources and there are idiosyncrasies at these theological educations that perhaps are not in our churches because our personalities our identities are different but yet and still we can all find some way of addressing these myriad and various issues that's just likewise that we relax our egos to work together as congregation right um right but part of part of the challenge is pastor so-and-so doesn't want to partner with pastor so-and-so because pastor can't share the light can't share the spotlight and i think if we would learn to be co-collaborate or co-creators of ministries and begin to work together as the sisters and brothers we claim to be then we may see more uh effectiveness in ministry worldwide um jesus sent them out two by two on purpose um he literally said you can't handle everything by yourself bill go find marcus and y'all figure out how to do this thing together and you'll have more effectiveness together than you will apart but i submit again that this is going to be the responsibility of each one of us to relax our egos part of our challenges we can't share with other brothers and sisters it's mine and and it it brings to question are we courageous enough to critique our models i was in a meeting and i heard dr higgins use a phrase and it caught me casually passing by just caught me when she says what we do good we do good but that doesn't mean we can't strive to do better when you think about most of the conferences we attend they are heavily programmed for our inspiration now i will say in a forum where i probably should not say this the thing all right you just make sure you got my back when i say it like person behind you talking about hit them bill hit them bill then the fight break out they gone right the thing we probably least need is preaching no way let me let me qualify what i'm saying because i want to hear i want to hear your opinions when you come to conferences with the reservoir of skill sets and the intellectual acumen you have to be stimulated to pay your registration [Music] stay in a hotel and better the context from which you have come a forum like this is a great place to talk about not just the possibility of collaboratives but here's the corporations we've brought together for collective purchasing yes here are the banks who have said given 7 000 plus churches we're going to mark we're going to serve your churches based upon different categories there are so many informational sharing forms we could have but here's the problem we bring your skill set to conferences across the country but when it comes to just literally monotone sharing information folk treat that as boring that's when you take your lunch break and then you come back for the inspiration and we shout ourselves back to having to spend more money for bulletins and each of us buying cars separately houses separately and biking if we can't discipline ourselves to sit in a room where it might not be a marcus cosby uh bishop mckissick uh dr leah and dr we and the you know the inspiring but literally saying in houston we were able to do x y and z this corporation is available to black churches i was sitting in delaware and i'll be quiet and i was sitting in delaware after having preached and getting something to eat and a white gentleman was sitting next to me and we struck up a conversation i found out he was an executive at meridian airline and i said to him man you are missing a market a segmented market that could make you so much money he's like what's that i said black preachers i mean i crisscross the country preaching every week and i'm always passing colleagues in the airport and in the air if you could get a ticket down to the price of a first class ticket for private aviation you got a market that would exponentially blow up he said well you get them all together and i said well that's the problem [Applause] and then you start thinking whatever kind of cars we drive we got every elaborate elite car out here that we're all paying whatever we negotiated to pay that rather than taking 7 000 people to chevrolet and saying we guarantee this market for you if you guarantee this kind of price reduction but trying to get us together to be able to do that in a forum that doesn't have to have preaching doesn't have to have a gospel artist opinion suggestion dreaming creative imagination share i think part of the problem is the people that are convening the conferences here's what i mean they want to convene to show us their preaching but not share their resources of providing a forum where they show us how they connected outside the bounds of kingdom to those in corporate america as opposed to showing us how to do that how to connect they just bring us together to show us their preaching prowess and that's what makes this so creative yes and that's what makes this and i think more of this has to be done to shift the paradigm because we know how to do church [Applause] we don't need we don't need to come sit down and just do more of what we do we've got to shift the paradigm and it might be then that there might need to be a collaboration to bring together a conference because those who do the conferences are going to be too selfish to share how they have done what they do well why don't you share your opinion [Applause] division is what keeps us as beggars and uh it was designed division is what keeps us as beggars and it was designed to be such right so according to the scriptures we have to separate ourselves based on male and female we have to separate ourselves according to something we've been given from manheim in germany we have to separate ourselves by generations it's unnatural right i was at um i'm a mother of three um teens yeah they're all teens still um but i was at an orientation for new students from my daughter going into high school and the principal stood up and said we do not want you all to help one another with your work we want everybody to do their work by themselves and in my mind i said you are setting our children up for failure and that's why our children flunk out of college because we have not taught collaboration at every level of development [Applause] we we can we can start with preachers but we can also start with families because in families we have favoritism we don't know how to collaborate in families right boys get privileges that girls don't girls get skills and work that boys don't if you like skin it's cool if you dark skinned we ashamed i mean so at every level of our existence we've got to teach the unity of god right one of the things that me and my colleague nate west are proposing after working with our doctoral students is marrying theology with social enterprise where people are taught the skills of collaboration because we all need to learn how to collaborate right because in every other area in every other discipline you're taught to do it by yourself right in our preaching courses everybody had to learn what they needed to learn exegete what they needed to exegete and then we all had to stand up by ourselves and preach and we'd get some score cards thrown up on us right right and then we had to like go before the sanhedrin i mean it was just like all of this stuff so even when somebody is called to ministry the first thing we do is divide them you know so if we have somebody that's called to ministry and we're called to nurture them our first thing is not to haze them say ouch as my son said no shame it's just the truth right so i i think yes with ministers and churches we can somehow figure out how to collaborate but we also have to teach collaboration as the [Music] being made flesh of the word it is it is emulating the god about whom you taught us yesterday you said the day before you said god said let us create in our image it was a collaborative effort and if we're going to be like the god we say we love then we have to likewise let us create let us work together let us provide opportunities if we're going to be like god god is the god who says we can work together to create a world and then we can look at it and say that's good if i could just raise a question because this kind of conversation um is not just starting this is a conversation we have heard over over decades and generations of how we've not been able to work together as a people and how we've always been separated and the need for collaboration so a question becomes when and where do we start how do we start this thing how do we get the process moving how do we go beyond conversation [Music] to action and begin to put things in place where we are working together i think this is a good beginning maybe beyond this putting some kind of action plan together that can go out uh i think you know we've got to go back to our communities and be intentional about putting action plans together um i i think that's the only way we're going to do it by putting these action plans beyond this conversation now how do we put feet to conversation and begin to walk out some of the things we're talking about maybe president you add another component to this beyond conversation we do know this we know hampton is still the largest ecumenical gas of african-american clergy in the country we know its heritage has been to give a week of intensive to black preachers who historically could not go to school and could spend five days as if they were in seminary the foundation is there the courage of an executive director and treasurer to blow it out into workshops where folk can have specific practicalities aside from what happens on the big stage i would i would dare say less not divide and go create something new let's stay in stay in the home and figure out how to do it in the place we've been we all been coming to for decades may also say that one of the things that's powerful about the black church is that it has infrastructure already and particularly baptist right so we have infrastructure because we also have we have ministers conferences locally right we have missionary conferences locally we have ushers locally that gather we already have an infrastructure the challenge is the message right and part of that challenge is going to be the re the taking back of our theological perspective right because in church we really didn't divide right we didn't divide god we didn't make god him only god you've been my mother and my father you've been my sister and my brother you've been the doctor you've been the lawyer you've been my teacher and so we already have an infrastructure in the beginning of a theological thing we just got to go back to some of it you know so what would happen if all the missionary groups like in virginia they have like you know they got the local ones in richmond they got some in norfolk and then they got statewide virginia missionary groups right what happens if those of us that are called who see what's going on are in relationship enough to invite the dropping of a message this is our message i need you you need me we're all a part of god's you know body i mean it's something my 19 year old daughter said she said mom preachers can preach but the people are the feet you want the feet to be the head when the feet are placed exactly where they've been placed and the only thing they have is the senses to say ouch this hurts this ain't level let me make a transition right and so it's it's almost like we haven't truly used the infrastructure the building both spiritual and socially that we already have let the head be your head let the feet be the feet let the ear be the ear let the mouth be the mouth let the hands be the hands if we could just find ways to excavate what that means for us and and for me it all has to be driven by stamping out poverty right on all of its different levels social poverty mental poverty economic poverty are we if we would just all read some of the books or make a powerpoint out of the books you know the divine mind of black church we we have a template for who we've been that has was really really productive and part of that productivity is that we had our own economy so in 1929 when some people were jumping out of buildings check your church history church people were building black churches were being built when other people were committing suicide so that was going to be my next question wouldn't you all's estimation is the biggest threat to either prophetic preaching and or prophetic institutional progression you say poverty um i would say poverty and lack of protection defined lack of protection okay so i'm from south side of chicago and on the south side of chicago there was a black economy it was both christian and it was muslim and what we observed from the muslim faith is that they had a economic infrastructure but they also have protection right you don't roll up in the nation of islam stuff without being fricks first not perfect but what i'm saying is that we have to put protections in place and part of that protection is knowing how the enemy operates the enemy is always going to try to seduce one of us by offering one of us some power so that we will sell out the rest of us right i don't know if you all know but underground has been taken off the tv show on wgn because underground shows some ways that communities not only protect themselves but build right i mean so there i think we have to stamp out poverty because some of us that are trying to figure out what to eat are some of the most gifted who can really lead us right right others i i think the biggest threat to prophetic preaching and prophetic institutions are the fake prophets can you define the fake prophets because there is now this fake prophet that has now developed a philosophy of selfishness and materialism and because preachers are trying to keep up with the prophets because that becomes the norm that now that becomes the norm so that all of your preaching is cheerleading about selfishness i'm going to get mine and it has caused us to lose a sensitivity to community that i can't get mine if you don't have yours it has caused us now to focus on materialism so so now the preacher and i've been guilty of this the preacher develops more their after offering skill than their homiletic skill so that you spend more time trying to learn how to teach people how to give a seed that you're going to split 50 50 when you get to the back i think that's hurting us so that now we don't have a sense of community i want to go to a church where somebody's going to teach me how to get mine how did how to be prosperous because they've got in the vestibule pictures on the prosperity wall of everybody who just bought a big new house and because i think that's hurting us that materialism that selfish theology and us not being loyal and trying to keep up some dr crowder you were gonna i was gonna say um previously in analysis and intimated on them i think we also have to engage in interreligious interfaith conversations yes and not just say oh you know we have to address what's happening with the muslims and the executive orders or not just lift them when they are executive orders but i think there are lessons we can learn from our muslim brothers and sisters knowing that there are variations of muslim at cts we have hindu students we have buddhists and so what are these lessons you know how if we're talking about again all hands on deck how can we be bold enough courageous enough to say even with you know here at this baptist institution that we have to engage in interreligious dialogue and into religious conversations does the church's ability or inability to converse is that the result of our authority cannot be questioned and our theology cannot be discussed and our practices cannot be critiqued like this transgender issue becomes very interesting because in conversations you have with people who believe that they were born with sexual preference and that god has in fact infused this sexual preference their major question is if we're going to have a conversation why does it start with you thinking you need to fix me i was sitting at a basketball game with at one of my daughter's basketball games when she was in high school not knowing i was sandwiched between a lesbian couple and we just struck up conversation and then that question hits that when you know it's axed of you it's going to change the conversation so bill what do you do you really don't want to know right well after it's exposed the one lady asked me a question and it's been like this beginning part of this journey of conversation for me with my staff and my church and others she said could me and barb join your church yeah you join church could we feel welcome in church oh yeah church for everybody we wrestle to find jesus in your church and what they meant was if your institution believes that our sexual model is wrong can we sit hugged up and listen and wrestle with it or do we have to come in fixed and the fear of the conversation hurts us until now the lbgtq and there's some other acronyms that have been added qa community is writing its own bible and has decided since you don't want to converse with us whether we're right or wrong we know we love god and we believe god loves us so we're going to go and do our own institutional thing since the church won't talk to us so is is this the kind of well thank you for throwing that my way you know it's it's the whole thing we broach it's not just gender and sexuality but i think interreligious engagement and dialogue with a made-up mind because we've already made up our minds about who's in and who's out we've already divided and part of the thing that we forget it says love the lord with your heart with your soul and with your mind and that's with an open mind part of the fear is it's not saying that you know it's being open to who can come to the table and part of the problem is we don't want to make room at the table because we like the people who are already sitting at the table and we don't want to make space you know if we're talking about be transformed by the renewing of their mind no many of us are saying i like being just conformed and i like staying the way my mind is um so part of the transformation is just at least having dialogue having conversation that there's humanity in everybody there's god in everybody for our muslims and our buddhists and our you know students who are say they're secular humanists they call the divine by different names but we honor who they are as human beings why because like martin niemoller says they are coming for all of us at some point and we have to be willing to say will there be someone to stand up for me when they come for me i think part of it dr curtis is also we've got to deal with our own fears our insecurities it's it's our fears and be honest that we might not even believe the condemnation we preach on them but we preach it because we've been taught it as opposed to admitting you might be evolving and need a conversation um because that's where i am evolving or you might be okay to be it yes yes you know we've got because the reality is you're standing up there preaching condemnation against it but your minister of music is back there who you're not gonna fire [Applause] you're not really there's a family member or you got a family member that folks know is in your family i really wish you would stop cloaking everything you want to say you know just and just say what you want to say you know so we've got to wrestle with this and but i think it starts with honesty with yourself you know okay i i'm very concerned that that it is not just the resistance to evolution but it is that we cannot accept the reality that our churches are filled with differing kinds of people who need to understand that we pastor we church leaders do not excommunicate people because of preconceived notions about people and i think part of the challenge that we have we have faced is that we have not had the opportunity to be confronted firsthand face to face with people who are different from what we say is the norm so when the child this is my story when the child came into my office when her mother sent her to my office and said she was trapped in a boy in a girl's body but she knew she was a boy now i have to sit face to face with this daughter whom i have known since she was five and now she is 21 she has graduated from vanderbilt university she's brilliant she's on her way to law school and she says i am not supposed to be in this body and so now my theology has to be of such that i can have a conversation with this very intelligent individual who can speak about her reality and say that her reality is different from whatever reality i think is the norm and i think we have to be able to say something more than you're wrong you're going to hell and i think part of what is our responsibility is to have enough love in our hearts to have conversation if we say that this god we serve is so loving if we say that this jesus we serve is so loving if we say that is the foundation of our experience with god then how can we sit and treat a whole other group of people with such hatred that it literally no longer be speaks the love that we say we are christ like means love so how can i be christian and hate this child whom i've known since she was five whom i i cried when she prayed a prayer in worship one morning and i know she loves god and now she has this issue with which she's wrestling and i say that she's going to hell that that something just doesn't divide right there something just doesn't make sense to me and i think we're going to have to i think we're going to be confronted with the need for conversation more and more as the years pass and then we've got a mother don't forget this now i told you i deal with hurting people that's my thing so i got a mother who is saying this ain't my child right right i've got a mother who's saying pastor fix her right right i've got a mother saying pastor i brought her to your disciples you know it's that kind of thing i got a mother who is believing that this her one and only child it's just been the two of them in the house daddy's elsewhere it's been the two of them in the house all of the years of her life and she's now struggling with the reality that she's losing her baby girl yeah and i've got to figure out how does pastor play into that to both of them to both of them and could i say that i think this is why forums such as this is so important because i'm not sure if we've had a place where we've been trained how to address problems that we have never encountered before and just as we are addressing this not now emerging but but an issue that is already prevalent as we continue other issues that the church has not faced before will emerge and i'm not sure we've been given the tools on how to do things or to address matters that we've never dressed before so this is why that's why it's important for us to talk together and to share together and have these forums what it does say is all of us probably came up in ministry looking for ways to go to whatever our institutions are to create order but ministry is messy and the better your ministry the messier it is like anybody who asked me a question about uh in the immediate aftermath of having been called to a church what do i do in the first five years and all that when you go through the preach consistently and love on the people and when you go through all of the templative answers i've learned now at 50 to tell people get used to every day balancing messiness from the time i get out of my car to the time i lay down i'm juggling all of the mess and the mess covers a myriad of issues our biases our um sexual um uh homophobia uh every everything you can put in there becomes the very thing that is the substance of our work if we don't have the messiness we don't have a ministry wow right so i think we have to be careful about entering into discussions that are really not ours you know i mean even when we have these battles between women and men we internalize this it's a an article that iva caruthers wrote a long time ago we entered into a battle between white men and white women and now sisters don't feel comfortable receiving their call to the ministry unless they can preach like a brother because we entered into a conversation and a problem that wasn't ours i mean so i think we have to be careful about who designs and who decides what problems we have and then to be able to do some research you know because this country the way it has carved out what christianity is is very incongruent with what it means to love dr cosby one two three books you're reading well i teach preaching so part of my diet you want to write these down he was preaching books and um and now i'm preaching about the the teaching about the preaching of jesus so he came preaching is one of the preaching books that i'm preaching doctrine the dances i saw robert smith uh a little while ago and that's one of the older books that i'm i'm reading right now and so those books are kind of informing my my preaching um the voice of preaching by teresa fry brown uh is wonderful for me and so those are three the preaching books that i'm i'm focused on right now allison one two three books you're reading reading um rereading katie's canon every day um reading beyond my discipline it's not a book mostly articles and public health um reading haki mahubootis black man what's the rest of that um it has to do it's black man um obsolete it's like these three things related to black men i can't remember the the last of the titles but i i'm just rereading stuff i already had in my library okay um because nothing's new dr crowder speaking of you know sexuality and gender i'm reading james baldwin because he's very open about his own identity but also because there's a i think a prophetic recontextualization that i'm seeing that we're reading james baldwin there's so many parallels it seems with what's going on here now i'm reading poetry by audrey lloyd who was also very open about her her sexuality um and reading works my background's in womanis biblical interpretation um so how are black women as mothers and as researchers as artists how are we appropriating the biblical text bishop rereading actually uh dr proctor's community in crisis which was the book that birthed a certain sound of the trumpet and the dialectic method reading insurrection by peter rollins and visioneering is a book i've been reading by andy stanley so those are three uh two of them i'm re-reading and one visioneering i'm reading for the first time dr weir rereading certain trumpet with mine um [Music] mr president there's a book that's uh entitled when better is not enough um i've been spending some time as the author challenges us to really look at re-engineering what we're doing but much of the problem with the church is that we keep trying to do the same thing better and we end up getting the same results when perhaps we need to re-engineer uh much of what we're doing and then of course uh getting ready for this conference we've been reading a lot where have the prophets gone let me just say the third book i'm trying to read more of is the bible well as we get ready for as we get ready for our moderator he always trying to tell me what to do you know anything to white hopkins you want to read dwight hopkins you want to read anything that he's he's written so i enjoy uh him as an author hampton help me thank god for all of our presenters and facilitators we we get ready for noonday but come on help me thank god for all that they've poured into us and getting a chance to peek into their disciplines so

Channel: John Sconiers

Views: 1,157

Keywords: Preachers conference, Hampton, Hampton Preachers Conference, Hampton University, Hampton University preachers conference, Hampton University preachers conference 2017, Hampton ministers conference, black preaching, preach the word

Id: BUoXzT5G3nE

Length: 83min 29sec (5009 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020