Get Your Pretense On!

Chapter 3: ”There’s Plenty Good Room” • 57

Still, the one place on this earth that respected them, nourished them, where they were full partners in kingdom life and ministry, was that little assembly, Grant Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Black America-remixed Anglicans in inner city Wichita Kansas! What a sight, and what a wonder! An embassy of the Most High God – in the ghetto community of Negro poor folk. God does work in mysterious ways, doesn’t he, his wonders to perform? I want to talk about the centrality of the church in forming our identity and understanding of God’s will for our lives today. Admittedly, things have dramatically changed since our family gathered in the little chapel property on Piatt Street in inner-city Wichita. On the surface, by all accounts, it would appear that the church is either in a holding pattern, or worse, in significant retreat. The church and its leaders tend to hold less and less authority in the affairs of our western society, and specifically in American society. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research’s figures reveals a church in wholesale retreat: • 600,000 clergy (pastors, retired clergy, chaplains, ordained faculty), and 335,000 congregations in North America • 1,400 leave the ministry each month (a burgeoning shortage of dire proportions) • 50,000 attendees leave the Church weekly (disillusioned American church-goers) • At least 4,000 churches die each year Grant Chapel A. M. E. Church was an outpost of the Kingdom of God for the poor, working class “Negroes” who attended it faithfully, sounding forth the Gospel in a community oppressed from the outside and ravaged by poverty and nihilism from within. It is hard to comprehend what our lives would have been