Orishatukeh Faduma

“ There is a form of oratory prevalent among us, a mere jingle of sounds, an expression of nothing of much value. Under its spell the man of the world is caught, received into the church as a convert, but not being impressed with the divine life and ideal, he soon falls away. ”

“ Paradoxical as it may seem, in religion the Negro’s emotions constitute his strongest as well as his weakest point. The fact that he is largely developed in the emotional side of his nature would, other things being equal, give him a vantage ground in matters of religion. His defect is not that he is emotional, but that he is excessively so. Like other races in their childhood, he is a bundle of feelings. He does not think after God, he does not will after God, but he feels after God. ”

“ The Negro needs more thought in his religion, but religion is not all thought. To have a proper balance in religion as in every-day life, the faculties of thought, feeling, and volition must be present, distributed in fair proportions. When reason is overfed in the exercise of religion, the result is a dry and barren rationalism. When the emotions are overfed the result is a wild and sickly sentimentalism, a neurotic religion. ”

“ All attempts to organize men without a spiritual organ must be a failure. The organization of a church is more than the putting together of bricks and other dead materials, it is the bringing together, in an orderly manner, of living souls possessed with spiritual power and renewed in the image of God. There is another form of outwardness to which the Negro church is tending at oneself and valuing oneself from appearance. It tends to make religion a puppet show. The growth of the church is estimated at number of dollars collected, number of churches built, and number of followers. ”

“ The interests of the church demand that the pulpit shall lead the pew. Considering the influence [Pg 9] which the Negro ministry has over its laity, the demand becomes more and more imperative. It is not a learned ministry but a cultured ministry, a ministry with higher tastes and aspirations, a ministry which in spite of the materialism of the times will make the time to study and see the beautiful, the good, and the true, in God’s handiwork. It is this lack of culture which makes many a preacher narrow-minded. To them the beauties of nature are dead. ”

“ The modern teacher and preacher of today must be acquainted with the humanities. If not a scientist he must know the trend of scientific thought and its relation to the Bible. The best poetry of nations should be at his command on account of the refining influence which it has always exercised on mankind in all ages. The masterpieces of the world’s best prose writers, the history of art, the study of the philosophy of history, and the too neglected study of the history of ethnic religions must be in his possession, not simply in the library of his home but in the library of his mind. ”

“ From being uncultured the Negro ministry finds it an easy descent to being immoral. It must be borne in mind that all the defects enumerated of the ministry or laity are defects not of the whole ministry or laity, but are defects found among them to a large extent. The salvation of the church and the race is due to the faithful few, pure and noble men and women among us. They are the salt of the race and are growing in numbers as years increase. ”

“ The spirit of God can not do what man is intended to do. He can only illumine where the mind is prepared to pass through the process. Revelation requires a medium, otherwise it is powerless. To understand the mind of God in the Bible presupposes a mind to comprehend His mind. With the Negro’s deficient ministry, religion becomes irreligion. He believes too much in the non-essentials of religion, his heaven and hell are too much in the distant future, he prays that after death he may go to heaven but sees no heaven on earth. ”

“ It will always take men of the strongest moral fibre in any race to elevate those who live either in the slums of cities or in the cabin life of plantations, otherwise the gain to Christian missions will be in quantity rather than quality. Hence the need of specific training of the best kind in schools where students of the race will find healthy environments to inspire them to higher and nobler living. Hence the need of higher education for the race because it subjects the recipient to an atmosphere of healthy environments long enough to saturate his life. ”

“ To the use of emotions in religion the writer has no objections, he is heartily in favor, but he seriously objects to excessive emotionalism for the following reasons:
(1) It fails to recognize the moral and ethical judgment.
(2) It fails to recognize the volitional side of human nature. “With a man’s will-power dormant, undeveloped, unknown, all attempt at really training and moulding the character is foolish because impossible. Man sometimes attempts it; God never does. He calls into activity first of all a man’s will. He seeks to know what a man’s own free choice is. ”

“ Many disruptions between pastors and churches could have been avoided were church finances not kept in a confused state. Pastor’s salaries and other church obligations are not raised and met in a systematic way, but are left to appeals to the feelings of the people whose ethical sense has not been cultivated. We have thus enumerated among the defects of the laity, worldliness, untrained Christian consciousness, restricted meaning of the gospel, the non-concreteness of the Christian virtues, and the lack of a missionary spirit and of business methods. ”

“ The primitive stage is poetical and imaginative, in fact religion is then in its barbaric state. In its rational stage we see the religious man under a developed rule of conduct. He still feels but his feelings are controlled by reason. There is nothing new in the religion of the Negro. He is by no means a peculiar man from a religious standpoint. The physical contortions and gyrations noticed in his Christian worship are as old as the history of religion itself, if not older than it. ”

“ With the nerves as his guide it is impossible to tell where he stands on many moral questions. Neurotic environments appeal quickly to him, and are fostered by the church in sermons which appeal largely to the imagination, in weird pictures of the unseen, in apocalyptic sermons, and by mystic preachers known as mourners, shouters and visioners. As a subject of experimentation in physco-physics, the most fitting time is in seasons of revival in religion when his emotion is keyed to the highest point. ”

“ Churches and church authorities, and the educated sentiment of the race are on the alert and are quickly displacing these men whenever they are found. In the conflict of the church with the Titan of immorality, the church needs as helpers, men with a hundred hands like Briareus to hold down this elusive monster. The term immorality may include all kinds of conduct which the custom of our times supported by enlightened sentiment disapproves. But the object of the writer is not to charge the Negro ministry with all kinds of misdemeanors. ”

“ The world-spirit is in the churches and has taken hold of our ministry. A large part of church duties which should be performed by laymen is shirked and placed upon the minister’s shoulders. The result is that the minister is often overburdened with secular matters, is forced to leave the word and serve tables and loses much spirituality. When a minister’s success depends largely and primarily upon amount of dollars raised by him his spiritual decline is rapid. ”

“ It is only the few who are strongly imbued with a missionary spirit that are willing to labor and lift up the standard in the interest of God and fallen humanity. One of the surest ways of breaking down this prejudice is for the churches to send some of their best men to country churches and provide for their support. Missionary societies aiming at best results send some of their best men as pioneers and bishops to the heathen. It [Pg 8] is only by a selective method of appointing men to our country churches that these places can be reclaimed from heathenism and immorality. ”

“ His God is seen going up to some cloudless region instead of coming down to tabernacle with men. His sermons feed the feelings but neglect the intellect and will, they tickle the ear and subordinate truth to eloquence. The greater emphasis he puts on churchianity is a loss to Christianity. ”

“ One of the defects of the Negro Church is the defect in the culture of its ministry. In spite of all that has been said and done to create prejudice against the higher education of the Negro, statistics have failed everywhere to show that our schools have turned out a large percentage of College or University graduates. There are a few College or University graduates in the ranks of our ministry. A larger percentage has failed even to get through a High School course. The defect in scholarship and culture constitutes a grave problem in our church life. ”

“ But the point we wish to emphasize is this, that environments help to make the man, and the man helps to make his environments. There is a class of men among Negro preachers whose environments have not been other than those in the plantations, these are the men who are unfit to be the leaders of the people. When on account of their natural ability and gift of speech they are set aside as preachers, it only gives them a larger opportunity to demoralize themselves and those with whom they come into contact. ”

“ But the Bible can only be intelligently understood by the people when the mind of the people is prepared to receive it. One of the worst results growing indirectly out of the Protestant reformation, is the creation of an ignorant priesthood and the reducing of the Bible to a fetich. It follows as a matter of course that where the ministry is uncultured, the interpretation of the word of God suffers. ”

“ Worldliness follows when desire for position or recognition in the church overcomes the desire to save men, and when the ordinary tricks of politics are resorted to in order to gain church distinctions. ”

“ The leader of a people must be a man of broad culture, wide sympathies, and in touch with all the varied interests of the people. It is not enough to be able to read the Bible or pass an examination in denominational theology. ”

“ Too much self-centred and self-seeking, they make little or no sacrifice for others. Many self-supporting churches do not shelter weaker ones and have no thought for the heathen. There are churches that are fortunate in having in their official boards men of culture, piety, and business experience, but these are virtues very rarely found in the same men. Business methods are often low in churches because of the difficulty of finding strictly business men among the laity. ”

“ The immorality of debt not being known, churches are very often built without regard to the financial inability of the people, and deceive by suggesting rich parishioners when the people are very poor and live from hand to mouth. ”

“ Since the corruption of the best thing is the worst thing, it may be fairly stated that Christianity is receiving an unfair treatment in a professedly Christian country from a professedly Christian people.
(3) Funds being inadequate to support country churches, and men qualified to fill them being few even if funds were at hand, there follows as a necessity the employment of unqualified men to fill vacancies. So pressing is the need for preachers that in many cases any kind of men rather than no men at all seems to be the best that can be done. ”

“ There is only one kind of conduct which is so far-reaching in its results because it is fundamentally subversive of and destructive to the best interests of society, that the writer wishes to bring up as a defect of our ministry. ”

“ College and University courses are excellent, not so much for what one can remember out of the many things studied in them, but for the system and mental discipline as well as the social culture through which one passes. ”

“ But because there never was a perfect church is no reason why we should speak lightly or condone the defects of the Negro Church. Our ideal of the Negro Church is one which will have as few defects as possible. ”

“ Plantation life in American society where illicit sexual intercourse was the rule and not the exception, fostered and encouraged by white masters of the past, and still practised though less extensively by white men, is a product of Anglo-Saxon civilization. The environments of country life encourage illicit living, and to men already reared among them are a snare. Some of these environments are found in the log-cabin in which families are crowded together like cattle, and sexual privacy and decorum are impossible. ”