ie:missional

Last week my friend Matt McGee of the Duke Law School emailed me with an interesting chart tracking the total membership of SBC churches as a percentage of the United States population since 1971. After seeing his work (the top line in the graph), I asked him to check the total attendance figures for the UMC (US members, second line), the ELCA (yellow line), and the PCUSA (purple line). It is plain to see that, as a percentage of total US population, the SBC has been in nearly unceasing decline since about 1985. Keeping in mind that “active membership” is only about twenty-five percent of reported membership, it appears that current active SBC membership represents about 1.3% of the U.S. population. With that as a backdrop…

By most reputable accounts we are entering or are already into an economic slowdown that will almost certainly turn into a recession. The housing market collapse in much of the country, the burst of the sub-prime mortgage bubble and related financial market uncertainty will take our country into places unknown to people under the age of 20. Writing in the March/April 2008 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Nouriel Roubini gives five falling dominoes which will lead to a “financial pandemic”: a drop in trade, the weakening of the dollar, worldwide bursts of housing bubbles (already happening in France, Greece, Hungary and Italy, on the verge in Britain, Ireland and Spain), falling commodity prices (projected to happen as the economies of the U.S. and China slow, though drops in oil and grain prices would be welcomed), and faltering financial confidence. He summarizes,

During the last recession, the United States underwent a nearly 6 percent change in fiscal policy, from a very large surplus of about 2.5 percent of GDP in 2000 to a large deficit of about 3.2 percent of GDP in 2004. But this time, the United States is already running a large structural deficit, and the room for fiscal stimulus is only 1 percent of GDP…President Bush’s fiscal stimulus package is too small to make a major difference today, and what the Fed is doing now is too little, too late. It will take years to resolve the problems that led to this crisis.

The Economist seems to agree. A lead story in the May 3-9, 2008 issue says:

The malaise that started the crisis-the American housing market-is still getting worse. The month-on-month decline in the Case-Shiller index of house prices in 20 large cities is accelerating; on the latest reckoning, it was down by 12.7% over the 12 months to February 29th.

Also, this:

After a long period with scarcely any bond defaults by companies, there have been 21 failures this year, according to Standard & Poor’s, a rating agency; some 122 issuers, with debt of around $102 billion, are deemed vulnerable to default. Ominously, corporate debt is the shaky foundation for trillions of dollars of derivative contracts.

Consumer confidence is in the tank and both individuals and churches will soon begin, if they have not already done so, making the difficult choices about which budget items will stay and which ones will go. Add to this (at least in the SBC) Dr. Frank Page’s warning that 1/2 of all SBC churches will close by the year 2030. Do we really think that 22,000 churches will suddenly call it quits on December 31, 2029? No, there will be a consistent downward slide as aging churches, refusing to move to a missional mindset, simply die away with neither pastor nor members to keep them alive. This recession may prove to be more than scores of small churches of all denominations can weather.

Many churches that do survive will, for the first time, begin to scrutinize their support of their denominational structure. They will begin asking about waste, mismanagement, bureaucratic overlap, and redundant ministries concluding that far, far too much of their donated funds are not making it to benevolent ministry, education or missionaries, but are going to support a structure. Many will conclude, as many already have, that if the only vision offered is to “keep Denominationalism alive” then it will no longer hold any appeal. (I recognize that giving has bounced back from recessions of the past, but during those times there were no legitimate options for “doing missions” except the denominational structures; that has now changed.)

Denominations’ tenuous relationship with technology will exacerbate the situation going into and leading out of the economic downturn. Most denominations would be satisfied to have their annual sessions broadcast live via streaming video and that would be fine…for a year or two. Why is it so stinkin’ difficult to grasp the concept of satellite feeds to multiple locations?

Way back when Dr. Jimmy Draper alerted the Southern Baptist Convention that the “younger leaders leaving the SBC” was at the “Severe” level, one of the commonly seen online suggestions was the exploration of multiple meeting sites and the ability to vote either online or at a satellite site. The ignoring of the money saving suggestions will come to haunt any denomination as a generation arises that is hardwired for efficient spending of Kingdom dollars. Through a video conferencing website called Genesys, I simulated an SBC meeting being held in Denver. The total estimated costs of video conferencing 7,000 delegates was about 17% of the cost of flying from various U.S. cities to Denver, saving an accumulated 31 years of cumulative travel time and 8,555 metric tons of carbon footprints.

The former print mag, Business 2.0 (now online here), in an August 2007 article entitled, “The Rise of the White Collar Nomad,” told of Anthony Page and Simon LePine, among others, who had ditched their offices (and sometimes homes) to spend the majority of their working hours out of doors. Armed with a laptop and a few hundred dollars worth of wireless connectivity equipment, these folks have taken moofing to a whole new level. Their offices were the entire outdoors. Mountains, lakes, London, Canada, India, they simply live where they want at the time, get paid through Pay Pal or other online account and see as much of the world as they desire. Sure, most of them are in consulting or sales, but it is technology that makes this wireless lifestyle possible. The same kind of technology could, and should, be helping denominations make better use of kingdom funds.

The Siemens corporation, as reported in Fast Company, September 2007, is working on a wireless check-in system for airports by which there would be no paper ticket, no kiosks, no boarding passes, only a bar code downloaded to your cell phone scanned at the gate and presto, you’d be good to go. Wouldn’t that be nice at the annual meeting? New Bethany’s partnership in Siberia is going to be strengthened as the M there takes advantage of a satellite connection that will allow video conferencing. Last year we hosted, via Skype, our missionary in Eastern Europe who actually taught three sessions through the video hookup and cost us absolutely nothing. Completely free. This while many M’s routinely have monthly meetings requiring multiple day excursions from their country of ministry. Some Regional Leadership even fly back to the states for meetings that could easily be held online or via satellite saving their denominations thousands and thousands of dollars.

Trustee meetings, board meetings, Executive Committee meetings (state and national) could all be streamlined and made much more efficient if advantage was taken of existing and developing technologies. In the Southern Baptist Convention alone, the six yearly meetings of one entity’s trustee board costs $500,000 of Cooperative Program missions giving. With almost no effort, change could take place immediately. But it will not and we all know it.

Instead, denominations will hunker down and try to ride out the coming economic storms. (In fairness, per capita SBC giving has been increasing over the past few years. IMO, that trend will change within five years.) As they prove more inflexible structurally and wasteful economically, churches of all sizes will conclude that money given to support the inherent denominational bureaucracies is no longer good stewardship of God’s money.

The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning. The fact of change itself is undeniable: it has happened, and will continue to happen.
Philip Jenkins, The New Christendom

Change brings fear and fear is the wrong state of mind to provide leadership. Where denominations are concerned, fear and limited perspectives put behemoth organizations at risk. In our day there is a shift of tectonic proportions taking place, but if we do not see it in the light of history it can provide a basis for fear instead of faith. It should not.

Consider these facts from Exploring World Mission: Context and Challenges:

–The Christian era began in the Middle East with largely Jewish believers, but within 100-200 years had expanded to Asia becoming largely Gentile in the process.

–By 600 AD, the church had spread to North Africa and southern Europe. It’s language was primarily Greek.

–By 1,000 AD, the church had been mostly displaced from by the influx of Islam shifting the center toward Western Europe where it was solidified by 1,500 AD. Theology and mission became largely European.

–By the mid-20th century, the church was declining in the West and this decline has continued unabated.

–At the beginning of the 21st century the center of gravity for the church on planet earth is in Latin America, South America, Africa and Asia. The church is now non-Western and its theology and mission are rapidly following suit.

–By 2050, only about 20% of the world’s three billion Christians will be non-Hispanic whites.

What do these last statements demonstrate? They mean that the center of gravity of the church (or, as Jenkins terms it, “the Christian heartland”) is moving. Most American Christians have no idea what is going on around the world and many seem to think that without the American missionary force the world would go straight to hell. While it is true that by the 1950’s America was supplying 2/3 of the Protestant missionary force to the world, it does not follow that converting the world’s population to Christ was dependent on Western missionaries. African scholar John Mbiti has said:

It is utterly scandalous for so many Christian scholars in [the] Old Christendom to know so much about heretical movements in the second and third centuries, when so few of them know anything about Christian movements in areas of the younger churches.

Consider that the number of Christians in Africa grew from an estimate 10 million in 1900 to a mind-boggling 360 million in 2000. This means that there are more Christians in Africa than there are people in the United States. Adrian Hastings, in his book The Church in Africa, said:

It sometimes startles [them] to see that the three combined bodies are from Europe, and along with them there is a title “Christendom”…If [Africans] had power enough to communicate [them]selves to Europe [they] would advise them not to call themselves “Christendom” but “Europeandom.”

Africans are dynamic about sending missionaries. While in Kenya in 1995, I met a young believer named David. David was 23 years old and served as a translator for one of the preachers in our group. In addition to English and Swahili, David already spoke four tribal dialects and was learning a fifth. Not only could he speak them, he was equally proficient at translating between any two of them! It was truly amazing to hear this soft spoken man who was passionate to get the gospel to all peoples in Kenya. He did not need a Western missionary to tell him what he ought to be doing in the kingdom.

We should not forget that South Koreans are sending missionaries, as are eastern Europeans. According to the East-West Church & Ministry Report, Summer 2005 newsletter, Hungary, Poland and Romania are slowly rising up as missionary sending nations having learned from western missionaries in their midst. “One Nazarene church in Bucharest consists of only six families, each with five or more children. Nevertheless, it fully supports a missionary family in Ethiopia because it has a vision to see that country reached for the gospel.” New Bethany’s strategy in Russia includes the possibility of sending Ukrainian or Belorussian, not only American, missionaries as they are the best adapted for the culture and the language. These opportunities will only continue.

As far as American denominations go, we should be assured that the King is well able to take care of His kingdom and that the passing of the era of Denominationalism poses no threat to either of them. Because we tend to view history through the myopic lens of our own lives, many do not realize that the West has not always been the center of God’s working in the world. From the Middle East to Asia to Africa and Southern Europe to the West and now to the South, God has always been at work. In the February 5, 2001 issue of Christianity Today, Philip Yancey notes:

As I travel, I have observed a pattern, a strange historical phenomenon of God “moving” geographically from the Middle East, to Europe to North America to the developing world. My theory is this: God goes where he’s wanted.

If Yancey is correct that God goes “where he’s wanted,” then that is a warning to Denominationalists in American: if we are not alert, we will find ourselves striving to save a denomination while claiming to be in pursuit of God.

Philip Jenkins warns of this mindset:

Southern Christianity, the Third Church, is not just a transplanted version of the familiar religion of the older Christian states: the New Christendom is no mirror image of the Old. It is a truly new and developing entity….If we are to live in a world where only one Christian in five is a non-Hispanic White, then the views of the small minority are ever less likely to claim mainstream status, however desperately the Old World Order clings to its hegemony over the control of information and opinion.

As the Kingdom moves, our temptation will be to find security in our institutions, the same institutions that are themselves fighting to maintain control and importance. Our denominational structures are a primary place of such security. Without an ability to envision a future without denominations, some will continue to put forth extraordinary amounts of energy to re-animate that which is dying or already dead. Such folks are not able to envision a future without denominations; I cannot envision a future with them.

One of the more replayed video clips over the last few years was that of NFL head coach Dennis Green of the Arizona Cardinals. Following a loss to the Chicago Bears in 2006, which his team had led 24-3 in the fourth quarter, came the inevitable press conference. An obviously ticked Green exploded like a man who’d been celebrating Cinco de Mayo for a month. “The Bears are who we thought they were,” has become a favorite line for sports fans ever since. What Green was saying was, “They had nothing on us. They were the team we prepared for and we let them off the hook. We should have won the game.” It was slightly more colorful in the original language.

In thinking through this series, the word “disintegration” was intentionally chosen over the word “collapse.” I do not think that we will wake up one morning in the next year to find that the United Methodists, the Lutherans, Episcopalians (in their various stripes) or SBC will have closed the doors and shuttered the windows. I do think that we will continue to see decreasing viability of meaningful gospel influence in these organizations to the point that, like water against a rock, the slow erosion results in an unstable foundation and eventual cessation of denominational existence.

Linked in Ed Stetzer’s warning shot were two papers by J. Clifford Tharp, Jr. one with the following chart indicating “Total Membership” and “Resident Membership.”

Tharp’s brief analysis included these three points: 1. Trends in Membership (both Total and Resident) are becoming very flat; 2. Total Membership is dangerously close to beginning to decrease; 3. The gap between Total Membership and Resident Membership is widening. Observant readers will notice that if the top line flattens and the gap between the two widens, then necessarily the bottom line is beginning or continuing a downward arc. On this chart, that means that Resident Membership is decreasing. As we know and will soon reconsider, Resident Membership itself is a misleading measure of biblical membership and should not be considered an accurate accounting.

We’re not who we thought we were.

A second chart (below) tracks SBC baptisms from 1950-2004.

As you can see, baptisms have remained virtually static for more than 1/2 a century (there is a minuscule increase of 45 per year). The US population in 1950 was 152,271,417. Non-stop growth brought us to 281,421,906 by the year 2000. In a non-scientific but well thought through series of observations, Nathan Finn suggests that the Southern Baptist Convention is probably reaching no more than 100,000 “unreached Americans” per year while in their book, “Who Will Be Saved?,” Paul House and Greg Thornbury write:

Statistics compiled by the North American Mission Board…reveal that as many as half of all adults baptized in Southern Baptist churches are rebaptisms of persons already baptized by Southern Baptist pastors. Another 40 percent of adults baptized are Christians from other denominations who have never been immersed. Only ten percent of all adults baptized in Southern Baptist churches are making first-time professions of faith.

And this from what is widely considered the most evangelistic denomination in the U.S.

We’re not who we thought we were.

In her new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, Christine Wicker takes both Southern Baptists and evangelicals to task for their faulty reporting of their actual membership totals. She notes, for example, that:

Only 7 percent of members who’ve been in a Southern Baptist church five years of less are true converts, meaning sinners who weren’t raised in the church but came through a profession of faith in Jesus. If you took out the Southern Baptists who married unbelievers and brought them to faith, hardly anybody would be left.

Behind the thesis is that there are not nearly as many committed, Bible believing, Bible following Christians in American as we have all been led to believe, the former Dallas Morning News writer (and former Southern Baptist) pegs SBC active membership at just north of four million. Though Wicker finds herself somewhere between an agnosticism and an reluctant atheistism, her understanding of what genuine church membership should be is decent. She refuses to acknowledge that the SBC consists of 16+ million members, stating, “How many members a church has is a pretty worthless measure of reality…[only] about two-thirds are even residents of the same town as the churches they belong to.”

We’re not who we thought we were.

Not content with exposing the SBC’s lack of clothing, Wicker also points out that the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) does not have its claimed and oft trumpeted 30 million members. There are sixty denominations that make up the membership of the NAE including the Assemblies of God, Church of God, Church of the Nazarene and the Evangelical Free Church of America. According to Wicker’s research, the total membership of the fifty member denominations listed in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 2007, the American Religion Statistical Archives and the denominations’ own Web sites the grand total of the members is 7.6 million people. Active membership would be much less–less than half actually. So, what of the elusive 30 million count we’ve all heard. No one, not even NAE president Leith Anderson knows for sure. The 1990 NAE record listed only 4.5 total members.

We’re not who we thought we were.

What does this mean? Is the issue a matter of simple math? No. The issue is that, not only have we been well behind the population growth curve, we didn’t have as great a number in the starting blocks as we had been led to believe. Since every age group of baptisms is decreasing except those who are under five years old and since the number of those graduating from high school and leaving church is increasing and since the ranks of admitted unbelievers is the fasted growing “faith” category in the US, there simply are not going to be enough people to keep denominations, which are dependent on heavy financial investment, afloat. As denominationally oriented church members age and die (and they already are) younger people will not give tithes to churches that insist on supporting failing bureaucracies, thus leading further down the Post Denominational road.

We’re not who we thought we were.

Ten months ago when I began this blog, I purposed not to engage in discussion about the denomination in which I have pastored, the Southern Baptist Convention, unless it crossed paths with a subject about which I was writing. This is one of those times.

A recent report from missiologist Ed Stetzer of Lifeway Christian Resources indicated that the Southern Baptist Convention, once characterized (because of its cultural dominance) as the Roman Catholic Church of the southern United States, has entered a downward trend of growth which, he predicts, may not turn around. If you are among those who haven’t yet, you can read the initial report here and the follow up article here.

As would have been expected, the report was hailed in some places (see Ed’s comment threads) and questioned in others. The question that does not seem to have been asked during this is simple: Has the time for heavily organized, bureaucratically inefficient denominational structures passed? My thesis is a simple one and flows from what I see happening:

The era of denominationalism is ending, therefore, time and energy spent attempting to revive them is not redeemed time.

Rather than reviving them, we should be having a planned euthanization. I will not be arguing “post-denominational” in the sense of personal preference or lack thereof, but “Post-Denominationalism” in the sense of no SBC, UMC, PCUSA, etc.

Though Stetzer’s commentary is specific to growth patterns in the SBC, all other denominations in the United States are and have been in decline with the single exception of the Assemblies of God which counts but 2.8 million members (2005). Even the respected National Association of Evangelicals has lost some of its luster since the fall of Ted Haggard, though, as we will see, it never had quite as much luster as was thought. Regardless of the denomination none have matched, via conversions, the growth rate of the population (excepting possibly the AoG), so in percentage of population terms all American denominations have been in decline for decades. At best, a few denominations have grown at the expense of others, the common scenario known as “swapping sheep.”

Is the motivation to “save the denomination” a good enough motivation to go into hyper-drive in funds promoting or doomsday scenarios? I don’t think so. When Jesus said to the people of Jerusalem, “Behold, your house [the temple] has been left to you desolate,” He was warning them that there system of belief was coming to an end. There were no more sacrifices needed, no more pouring out of animal blood, no more Day of Atonement; it was over. Their mistake was that they continued to cling to a structure that God Himself had abandoned. Shall we repeat the same mistake?

Writing with an eye to the Southern Baptist Convention, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary prof, Nathan Finn, recently asked:

So does the SBC have a future? It depends upon what you mean by “future.” I suspect the name will be used by some Baptists until Christ comes back. I also think the people called Southern Baptists will always have denominational entities that they financially support. So in one sense, I remain confident that Southern Baptists are here to stay. But if by “future” one means a vital existence in God’s economy, I have my doubts. Collectively, I fear we are too insular, too sectarian, too pugnacious, too “Southern,” too reactionary, too pragmatic, and for sure too proud to have any real future.

While I appreciate Nathan’s balanced thinking, I, for one, am not convinced that any denomination is here to stay and am convinced that the era, like the telegraph, is passing into the historical record and that we have entered the Post-Denominational (PD) era.

Commenting on Ed Stetzer’s original post, SEBTS prof Alvin Reid noted,

For several semesters I have asked our students “how many of you came from an SBC church?” The vast majority. Then I ask, “How many of you want to go back and serve a church just like that?” Almost none. These are seminarians, the ones we still have, and they see a serious need for change. Again, this is anecdotal and simplistic, but here is another idea–have someone do a survey of current seminarians to find out who they listen to on podcasts? Might be revealing.

This is not merely true of the SBC as other denominations are dealing with the same issues. No one is important enough to have cornered the market here.

Also responding to Stetzer was SEBTS president, Danny Akin, who said,

I could not agree with your assessment more! I go to bed thinking about this every night and wake up the same.We are in serious trouble. Our denomination is at a crisis moment and we will either repent, seek the forgiveness and mercy of God and perhaps experience a true and genuine revival from our Lord, or we will continue our present course and simply fade away with the Lord Jesus justly removing His hand of blessing.

But what if no amount of repentance and seeking of forgiveness will bring revival and revitalization to the SBC or any other denomination? What if, like the sacrificial system, their time has run it’s course and God is preparing a new thing? I pray that it will be embraced rather than feared.

Over the next few posts, I will be exploring why I think we will continue down the road toward a Post-Denominationalism world. We’ll see that the SBC and evangelicals have not had either the numbers or the power that we’ve thought and will continue to lose both in the US; that the Kingdom of God is shifting again (as it has before) this time from dominance in the West; and that technology has rendered the need for heavily bureaucratic, densely centralized, financially profligate organizational structures obsolete and that the lessening of the influence of denominations in culture will be inversely proportional to the influence of local churches networking in culture.

Yesterday I took my 17 and 12 year olds with me to see Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the new movie concerning discrimination in the scientific community regarding some scientists who hold to Intelligent Design. Hosted by actor/comedian/talk-show host/activist Ben Stein, Expelled attempts to demonstrate that a “Berlin Wall” has been erected in science and that only those scientists and theories on the “Darwinian” side of the wall are able to get a hearing, tenure and publication in scientific journals.

First, the movie itself. It was better than I expected it to be, though not as good as it could have been. There was almost a consistent use of video clips, some of which were funny, but many of which were just distracting or overblown. The way I see it, those clips will merely feed those who see the movie as primarily entertainment, rather than a serious documentary.

Most of the interviews were enlightening and informative. Anyone who has read ID materials would recognize the names of Stephen Meyer, William Dembski and Jonathan Wells. To their credit, the producers also include agnostics like David Berlinski rather than those who can easily be traced back to religion or “young earth creationism” (which, it seems, no one in the movie holds). Berlinski, a virtual unknown to evangelicals, was thusly described by Slate magazine:

A secular Jew born in New York City, the 66-year-old began his career in academia. After earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton, he spent time teaching at Stanford, working as a management consultant, and completing postdoctoral work in mathematics and biology. Nothing took—as he describes it, he “got fired from almost every job [he] ever had.” And then, at some point in the last few decades, he decided to remake himself as a maverick intellectual operating out of a flat in Paris.

For an entertaining and wide ranging interview with Berlinski see here. It didn’t take long to determine that he was probably the smartest person being interviewed in the film.

Interviews with Darwinists were also enlightening. One, with a prof named Provine, easily demonstrated that Darwinists are as closed minded as they accuse Christian fundamentalists of being. Atheist Richard Dawkins’ arrogance comes across as clearly here as in his books and debates. Interestingly, he does admit that an intelligence could be responsible for “seeding” life on earth, but said intelligence would likely have been beings from a super-advanced civilization from another galaxy who would “necessarily” have evolved according to Darwinian evolution. How does he know this evolution would be necessary? He doesn’t say.

(In an interesting turn, ID theorists tend to reject the idea of “alien seeding” even though the theory itself does not rule out that very possibility. Upon rejecting the possibility that super intelligent aliens could have planted the first cell which became the common ancestor, they have nowhere to turn for the intelligent source but God which then becomes self-fulfilling of the accusation that ID is mere religion in cheap scientific terms or creationism in sheep’s clothing.)

Second, as might be expected, the basis for the movie (loss of tenure and/or grants for ID promoting professors and scientists) has already been challenged. The website Expelled Exposed is claiming that there were plenty of extenuating circumstances in each situation that renders the claims of ID discrimination impotent. I am not persuaded by each of the arguments, but if you are going to debate the veracity of Expelled, you need to be aware of the objections as there are always two sides to each story.

The most important part of the movie, IMO, is not the ID issue, but the inextricable tie between Darwinian thought and both Nazism and eugenics. This was not news to me, but it will be for many who see the movie and while critics will cry “foul,” it will make no difference, it is absolutely true. But further, if Darwinism is true, then there was nothing wrong with either the holocaust or eugenics. Survival of the fittest, we know, is an ugly, bloody, violent concept and whether you are talking about lions, tigers, bears or humans, the ones who adapt and find a way to maintain their existence are the ones best suited for survival. Ergo, it matters not that huge gas chambers were built all over Europe and vast ovens for the disposal of corpses, the Nazis were simply better suited to survive than 13 millions Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and crippled. The same with eugenics: why cry over the fact that scores of imbeciles were sterilized? The strong and smart were simply asserting their superior fitness to survive. As ugly as it is, that is the logic of naturalistic Darwinism. To appeal to morality or conscience is to recognize an objective law or truth outside ourselves.

The reality is that we don’t need Darwin as an excuse to kill and maim each other; as sinful creatures we did that quite efficiently before he ever came around.

Expelled is rated PG for a curse word, thematic material and holocaust film footage.

Has Paula Abdul ever said anything original IN HER LIFE!??!?!?!

That’s it.

You cannot imagine how bad these are:

Worst Album Covers

About a month ago, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper advertised for the opportunity to participate in a book discussion for Douglas A. Blackmon’s provocative work of history entitled, Slavery by Another Name. Those who desired to attend the discussion were to send a 100 word email describing themselves and why they would like to be a part. I sent mine and was pleasantly surprised two weeks later, with no acknowledgment or other response, to find a complimentary copy of the book in my mailbox with an explanatory letter. I began reading the book immediately (I had about 10 days to read the 400+ pages not including the notes section) and attended the discussion Wednesday night hosted by the AJC’s Richard Halicks, moderated by editor Jay Bookman and attended by the book’s author and around 13 other readers.

Sub-titled, “The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” the volume deals with a little remembered period in the southern US that followed emancipation and continued into the first decades of the Jim Crow era during which “separate but equal” led inevitably to “colored” water fountains, back of the bus riding, serving African Americans out of the back of restaurants, turning a blind eye to crimes against African Americans, etc. Having lived in the south my entire life this book was intriguing on its face, but I had no idea just how ignorant I was about the history of the places of my raising. The essence of the book is that slavery in the US did not end in the 1860’s as we have believed, but in the mid 1940’s. The argument is bulletproof. Slavery did not disappear; it simply changed names.

Immediately following Lincoln’s Proclamation that granted freedom to all slaves in the US there was confusion in the South. Was it really freedom? Where would these millions of freed slaves live and work? Could they really vote? What would happen to the land belonging to whites? Would there be an occupying army from the North for months or years? How would the economy, which had become substantial in steel and cotton production, be rebuilt without slaves? It would not take long for these questions to be answered in the most horrifying way-a way that would make some antebellum plantations and the sipping of mint juleps while black hands deftly cleared cotton bolls under the threat of the lash pale by comparison. Blackmon writes, “By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites.”

The core essential to the re-enslavement was the “convict lease” program entered into by many corporations and plantation owners. In order to provide cheap labor for the burgeoning mining industry, lumber yards, mills, and turpentine production, businesses as large as U. S. Steel (via its subsidiary Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.) would “lease” convicts for labor–convicts that could not pay off the fines and debts charged to them in court. The problem was that the legal system that grew from this arrangement had a single purpose: the arrest and conviction of African American men who had no means of paying the fines and fees assigned to them so that they could be “leased” to a corporate entity for a period of time (say, 100 days) after which time they would supposedly be freed.

Across the “Black Belt” of the old South, small town governments gave wide latitude to local sheriffs, constables and justices of the peace to arrest, on the flimsiest of evidence, convict, sentence and lease prisoners. The laws that were passed and enforced were, primarily, those of which African-Americans would be found “guilty”: vagrancy (vaguely defined as not being able to prove at a given moment that one has a job), making a pass at a white woman, leaving employment without permission from the employer (creating permanent servitude). At sentencing a “friend” or corporation would pay the fine and associated fees thereby taking possession of the prisoner until the debt was paid or lease the prisoner from the controlling government. The “convict” would then be taken to a place such as the Pratt Mines in Birmingham, the Chattahoochee Brick Company in Atlanta or one of any number of plantations or forests across the south. Once in the system, any person could be sub-leased any number of times making it almost impossible for concerned family members to ever find them. Powerful Atlanta families as well known and honored in memory as the Woodruffs and the Hurts were involved in this chicanery to various degrees.

Additionally, once leased, any infraction could add days, weeks, months or years to a sentence that might have been as short as 30 days. Broken tools, stolen food, lack of productivity and others infractions real and imagined could and did accumulate at the time of impending freedom for many, if they were blessed enough to live that long. Because of the endless supply of African Americans to be arrested, there was little to no incentive for the corporations or landowners to take care of those they had leased. In the slavery era, each slave represented a capital investment from which the slave owner expected a return. To kill a slave was akin to throwing money in the wind. The convict lease program removed all need for such “compassion.” At the Slope No. 12 mine outside Birmingham, AL, men were daily loosed from their barrack shackles at 3:00 AM, taken into a labyrinth of tunnels underground, worked all day in excrement fouled waters, brought back above ground after nightfall only seeing the sun on Sunday. That, of course, was the Lord’s Day and the white folks did not work.

Murder, contagion, rape and intentional sickness from drinking the defiled tunnel water were common. Those who died were dumped unceremoniously into unmarked graves at the edges of the massive compound. The call would then go out for more workers. Which meant more trumped up charges. More arrests. More money changing hands. In a single year, 25% of the income for the State of Alabama came from the convict lease program.

With the exception of an extended investigation under President Teddy Roosevelt and a tenacious, heroic effort by an Assistant U. S. Attorney named Warren Reese, virtually nothing was done to stop, as the author phrased it during our discussion, this “malevolent exclusion of justice.” In the aftermath of the Civil War and the still tenuous relationship between North and South, the investigations ended in minor penalties on some very guilty men with most sentences being suspended. Had he been supported with a little backbone from those in Washington, DC, Reese may well have gone down in history as the William Wilberforce of his generation. But it was not to be.

Anyone raised in the south should read this book. Anyone interested in racial understanding or reconciliation issues should read this book. IMO, it will set a standard for understanding this period of American history. It is a deep and profound work.

On Wednesday evening last the selected readers gather at the AJC building on Marietta Street in Atlanta. What was to be a two hour discussion lasted a little over three and I did not get the sense that anyone was really ready to leave. If my memory holds, the group consisted of nine African Americans and five of anglo heritage, among us a judge, state representative, community activist, grad student and college dean all of whom spoke openly and passionately about how the book made us feel and the issues that it raised. While the subject matter was limited to the substance of the book itself, I could not shake the feeling that another two hours and we would have begun making progress on how these issues affect each of us personally. It would have been time well spent.

Today’s AJC featured a summary of the meeting which can be found here.

My friend Richard Mark Lee at First Baptist Sugar Hill, GA, (“The Family Church”) lit it up yesterday with a message seeking forgiveness from those in society for the church’s judgmental attitude. It was called, “We’re Sorry, Really.”

You can read about it here, from Joe Westbury of the Christian Index, or listen here.

Great job, Richard!

A California District Court handed down a ruling this week declaring home schooling in the state to be unconstitutional. From the article:

“California courts have held that … parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children,” Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. “Parents have a legal duty to see to their children’s schooling under the provisions of these laws.”[...]

The ruling was applauded by a director for the state’s largest teachers union.

“We’re happy,” said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. “We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting.”

Of course, Lloyd.

Our three children have never been in a public school for classroom instruction. When our oldest was about nine, she was invited to be the guest of a neighbor child by doing the reading time for his class. The teacher was shocked at how well she did. Of course, she’d been reading the newspaper since she was 5.

Our middle child, Timothy, recently opted to try for the GED. On his evaluation test he scored as a high school graduate in each section. When we sat down with the instructor for the explanation, he began with the reading scores first saying, “I always start with the reading scores first. Unfortunately, we still have people go through high school who are functionally illiterate.” Astoundingly, functional illiteracy does not seem to be a problem with home schooled students.

Our youngest probably reads 300 books a year (no exaggeration), most of which have to do with some aspect of world and US history. She usually greets each new section of history with, “Oh yeah, I read about that in ______________.”

Like most kids, each of them have areas in which they have excelled and each of them have had areas where they have struggled. They weren’t (and aren’t) perfect as students, nor are we as teachers.

Though many homeschoolers can be virulent and even insolent about their position, most that I have encountered came to the decision after lots of thought and prayer. Most do not claim Deuteronomy 6 as their basis, but simply what is best for the family in a given situation or distinct period of time. Our original decision was made because we had two options for our kindergartener: drive 40 miles cumulative daily taking her ourselves or put her on a K-5 through 12th grade bus at 7:15 am and let her be dropped off at 5:00 pm. Neither situation was right for us, so we opted to homeschool.

Most homeschoolers do not get a tax break for purchasing their own textbooks, workbooks, study guides, tests, beakers, bunson burners, modeling clay and the rest. At the same time, most pay property taxes to furnish everyone else’s child with all the same equipment. We pay for the public system and yet receive no compensation for our homeschool expenses. It is an inequity that most willingly accept for the option of making sure their kids are not overwhelmed by a 180-day a year education that ignores or mocks the existence of the biblical God.

Another statement from the judge is equally as troublesome. Citing a 1961 case, Judge Proskey wrote:

“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.”

Uhm…educating children is not on the menu? The educational system in the United States of America, circa 2008, has absolutely nothing to do with “protecting the public welfare.” It has to do with getting the almighty tax dollars allocated to the various states and school districts via the No Child Left Behind legislation. The 1961 ruling could surely have been updated to reflect the new reality that “The primary purpose of the educational system is to brainwash school children in bad philosophy, materialism and subservience to the state and nation as a means of prolonging the public fealty.”

The U. S. government educational experiment has been (with some exceptions) a dismal failure and (as my Momma used to say), “Anyone with one eye and half-sense can see that.” I hope that California parents are successful in getting this ruling overturned either through lawsuit or legislation. I also hope that the U.S. supremes, if given the opportunity, leave it as an issue for the states to decide rather than pulling another Roe v Wade.

Ah, California. The state likely to let a parent kill a child, but will not let them educate it once it is born.