A consumer culture doesn’t affect only those who have too much. It also affects those who don’t have enough. One pastor who ministers in the middle of both plenty and scarcity is the Reverend Senator James Meeks.
Meeks bears that unusual dual title because he serves as pastor of Salem Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side, and as state senator in Illinois’s 15th District.
In addition, he is executive vice president of the RainbowPUSH Coalition. He also is on the boards of directors of, among others, the Chicago Fire Department, Korean American Merchant Association, Roseland Community Hospital, and Olive Branch Mission.
“You can’t have a healthy church if it isn’t working to improve an unhealthy community.”
Each summer, members of Salem Baptist take to the streets to pray on every corner of their neighborhood. They put shoe leather to their prayers by helping to transform the community in many ways, including countering violence, improving education, and removing corrupting influences.
As part of the Christian Vision Project, in which Leadership and sister publications Christianity Today and Books & Culture explore the question, “How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?” we asked the Rev. Sen. Meeks to speak to the issues of leading a church that makes an impact on a needy but still consumer culture.
When you moved into this neighborhood, what was it like?
In 1990 this was a poverty stricken community. When we moved to our building at 118th Street, we learned that 117th was ruled by one street gang, and 119th was ruled by another street gang. The war zone was 118th—right where our church was.
Welcome to the front lines.
Yeah. We moved in July 1, 1990. On July 3, I called a meeting of the gang leaders. I was surprised, but they came! We met on the steps of the church, and I told them I knew our church was in this war zone. I told them that we were now moving in our women, our children, our Sunday school, our choirs, and we were not going to tolerate putting them in an unsafe environment.
“If churches don’t get involved in redeeming communities economically because they’re scared of Mammon, that’s a copout.”
I said we would offer whatever it would take to alleviate the ills that you guys are going through. If anybody needed a GED because he didn’t finish high school, we’ll help him get a GED. If anyone’s in a gang who wants to get out, we will provide safe haven. But there are two things that we’re not going to tolerate: any kind of physical altercations from you guys while we are here on our block, or graffiti on any of our buildings.
As a result, several gang members came to drop their flags (meaning, in gang terms, that they wanted out of the gang). They became part of our church. We ended up getting them jobs at the local grocery store.
We never had any graffiti, and only one Sunday did they have an altercation.
That Sunday we heard gunfire after our early service. And so, in the second service, we turned the worship over to the women, and I asked all the men to go with me into the neighborhood. We went door to door, several hundred guys, knocking on doors looking for the people who were shooting in front of our building. We told everyone that we would not tolerate that. And the word got out that there’s a bunch of mad men at that church!
“Salem” means peace, and you were taking your name seriously.
The Bible says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” And I want to be a child of God, so we went out that day to make peace.
Can peaceful people transform a violent neighborhood?
We found out that there were crack houses within a block of our church. One afternoon I took 250 people to one of those houses. Our choir sang for an hour outside that home. I knocked on the door and asked the people inside to come out and talk. Naturally, they hid behind the curtains for the whole hour.
But who can come and buy drugs when a choir is singing out front? It dried up the drug trade for that hour, and the next day the people left, because by then everybody knew that this place was selling drugs.
When you were starting out, how would you have described your calling? Was it primarily to build a healthy church? To improve the community? To empower the powerless? Or what?
I’m glad you asked, because you can’t build a healthy church if it isn’t working to improve an unhealthy community. Many people have built “healthy churches” while the community around them is destitute. How then am I my brother’s keeper? No, in that case, I’m just my own keeper.
How can a church see a community week after week and be oblivious to what’s happening in that community? That’s not a healthy church!
Our mission was always to build a healthy people, and that automatically means that you are concerned about what else happens on your Jericho Road.
And on your Jericho Road, you not only care for the wounds of those set upon by robbers, but you go door to door telling robbers they’re unwelcome.
And we get the streetlights fixed!
I think the Good Samaritan did a great thing. He cared for the victim. But when he left, the road was still unsafe for the next traveler. Who cleans up the road conditions to make sure it doesn’t happen again?
How has Salem “lit up” your Jericho Road?
There was one area they called “the dirty block” in our community, known for violence, shootings, and prostitution. One Saturday a couple hundred people from our church cleaned up the whole block. We put in new storm doors. We painted every porch. We put in new sod. We cleaned the vacant lots and put in gardens. Then we installed lights in front of everybody’s home.
What a joy that night to drive back through that community to see people out watering their lawns and to see children out riding their bikes. And to see all the porch lights on.
What resources did you have to do this?
Just people willing to work. We did the planting. We hung the storm doors. We did the painting. All we had was good will and the resources of people willing to be the church.
What fears do you have to help your people overcome?
Safety is everybody’s first priority. Nobody wants to do anything that could put them in harm’s way.
I remember the first night I told the ladies of the church that I was taking them out to redeem prostitutes. We were having a big prostitution problem in our community. Nine prostitutes had been killed. Somebody was preying on them.
We naturally wondered who has reached out to these women to offer them an alternative lifestyle? So we decided that the women of our church should reach out to them. The plan was that we would take four hundred women from midnight to 3 a.m. to go out and find these women. Now imagine coming home, and saying to your husband, “Honey, Friday night our church is taking a group of us to an area where they just killed nine women.” Imagine being a husband hearing that.
I asked all the women of the church to wear red. We took roses with us. A group of ladies would find a woman and give her a rose and to remind her of her beauty and of her value to herself, to her family, and to God.
Our approach was not to be antagonistic and judgmental. We were there to give the love of Christ. And to offer a way out.
So how did you speak to those natural fears?
I preached a message on Rahab and the Israelite spies, entitled “Did They Save the Prostitute, or Did She Save Them?” It’s such a remarkable story. The spies go into the land; Rahab saves them. They come back into the land; they save Rahab’s family. But my argument is that they saved her once, but she saved them twice. Not only did she hide the spies, but in Rahab’s family line is Jesus. Which means that through them saving Rahab, Rahab’s seed saves the whole world.
I told the church, “When you save a women of the night, you don’t know, you may be saving a person whose seed will cure cancer or the race problem or whatever it might be. We have to treat these women as Rahabs, as if in them is the seed of Christ.”
That changes how you perceive that woman. She’s not just a morally corrupt person. You see her as …
As the grandmother of Jesus.
Preaching is what changes the mindset of members.
You also took on the local liquor stores. Why?
I got that idea from Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps, the book about people who asked, “What Would Jesus Do?” They tried to get the local bars closed because they had lots of problems with town drunks, and they thought that’s what Jesus would do. But in the book they don’t succeed.
After reading that book, I was driving down a street in our area and counted 26 liquor stores in 19 blocks. I thought, They don’t have that kind of proliferation in the suburbs.
I got our attorneys to research what it takes to vote a community dry. In Chicago, we learned, you can vote a whole precinct dry.
So I preached a sermon (everything is connected to a sermon, by the way), “The Real Truth Behind the Liquor Industry.” I talked about how it’s destroying communities. I talked about how affluent communities don’t have four liquor stores to each block, and it’s something that keeps impoverished people in poverty. I told the church we had to go out and get 10 percent of the registered voters to sign a petition to put the issue on the ballot.
We accomplished that. Then, the Sunday before the election I preached a sermon called, “Let’s Get Ready To Rumble.” It was about Jehoshaphat going out to battle, and he takes the choir with him. They do all this singing. So we took our choir, and put them in front of this great, big march.
We had a band on the back of a truck and music and our church marched through the community. And as people came out on their porches, we reminded them that this was the week that we vote our community dry.
It worked. All those stores in our district are gone. Then to anyone who lost a job working in one of those liquor stores, we offered to send them through job training and we would pay their salary until they got another job.
Then we put a Christian bookstore in the building where the largest liquor store used to be.
You’ve focused on bringing healthy economic development to the area. Jesus says you can’t serve God and Mammon. Is there a danger of a church that focuses on economic development serving Mammon?
Was the feeding of the 5,000 about food? Or was it about feeding people?
When Jesus said, “I was hungry and you fed me not; I was naked and you clothed me not,” he’s telling us that serving God involves using material resources. Using resources to meet human need is not serving Mammon. It’s using Mammon to serve God.
If churches don’t get involved in redeeming communities economically because they’re scared of Mammon, that’s a copout.
To redeem a community, what leadership skills are needed that you might not learn in Bible school or seminary?
Many pastors are not ready to redeem a culture. Schools may produce theologians who can explain the Greek and Hebrew words for sit, but I want to spend my time saying, “Get up! Do something!”
You start by seeing the underlying problems.
We discovered that 65 percent of all the third graders in our Zip code were reading below grade level. So we met with the local public school officials and offered to provide one-on-one tutoring for every student for eight weeks if they would open up the school on Saturdays from nine to noon. We wanted to bring up their reading scores.
The school administrator initially said, “You can’t get kids to come to school on Saturdays.”
“You can if you offer an incentive,” I said, and offered to give a personal computer to every kid who completed eight weeks with perfect attendance.
Did you know where those computers would come from?
I had absolutely no idea. I didn’t know how much computers cost. But we stepped out in faith, and as people heard what we were doing, computers started coming in from everywhere.
People who couldn’t donate eight Saturday mornings said, “I’ll provide a computer.” Some people in the computer industry donated a bunch of them and sold us others at a discount. We ended up with almost 300 kids who had perfect attendance, and we gave away 300 computers.
And the next year, our district’s test scores showed the greatest improvement of all the Chicago Public Schools.
When many people come to church, they assume church is about getting their own needs met. How do you transform that assumption into an attitude that a healthy church means we work to redeem the world around us?
I have a message called, “Don’t Keep the Faith.” It plays off the famous saying from the Sixties by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., “Keep the faith, baby.” People are familiar with the saying. But I argue that faith is one of those things that cannot be kept.
If you keep it to yourself, it dies.
That’s right. It’s like air. You can’t keep air.
I tell people, “Hold your breath …” And everybody inhales and holds it. Then I say, “For a week.”
They all exhale immediately because they know you can’t keep air for a week. In order to get more you have to release what you have. Likewise when you tie a string around a finger to keep the blood there. You eventually destroy the finger. You can’t keep blood in a certain spot; it has to circulate.
Faith is the same. If people just come to church and “keep the faith” but never put it to work in some way, we’d lose it. Faith dies.
For our church to flourish, we have to keep finding ways to put our faith to work!
Otherwise church would be like training and training for an Olympic meet, but the Olympics never come. I’m the coach, getting people ready for the swimming event, but if I never schedule a meet, the training is futile.
That describes a lot of churches, though. Lots and lots of warm ups.
Exactly. But if the event never comes, what’s the purpose of the training? If believers don’t find ways to put their faith to the test, it dies. Faith without works is dead. You can’t build up your faith without exercising it.
So how are you currently exercising your faith at Salem?
Our church is currently fasting for 50 days. It started the day after Easter. We’re fasting every day from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. until Pentecost Sunday. We purpose to see 3,000 people saved at our worship service on Pentecost Sunday. Why?
Because it happened in Acts 2. And when Peter preached, 3,000 souls were added to the church. We now are aiming to win 3,000 people to the Lord who are not members of a church.
Some things come only by fasting and praying.
But again, that’s countercultural. That’s trying to get people who are moving in the wrong direction to come in God’s direction. But so many churches want to be successful accidentally. And you can only be successful on purpose.
So if 3,000 people come to Jesus that the first Sunday in June, it won’t be an accident. It’s an exercise of faith.
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information onLeadership Journal.
