The gospel truth.

• Author: Meacham, Jon
• Position: Role of African-American churches in social services

The choir's voices slow to a stop, but there is no silence at Washington's First Baptist Church on this autumn Sunday. Amid cries of "Amen," Pastor Frank D. Tucker, his bald head framed by graying temples, steps to the pulpit. The overhead lights dim, and the beam trained on the pulpit subtly accentuates Tucker's stocky frame. Peering out over the congregation, his eyeglasses refract tiny flecks of light. Behind him, still swaying, is a choir, the women dressed in white blouses and black skirts, the men in dark suits.

"We can come to church and still not know God," Tucker thunders, his cadence stressing "God," which he majestically gives two syllables. "We can come to church and still not know the spirit." Shouts of "Amen." "We're not going to straighten up this mess in our world and we're not going to fix our families until we confront and accept the power of God in our daily lives." Tucker paces, his voice rising and falling. One instant he's pleading--"We've got to stand up against these evils out here in our streets, to protect our children and our homes"--and the next prescribing, in a shout, the way to a better day--"If you walk with Him, stay with Him, live in Him, He will deliver you."

Tucker pauses: one beat, two beats. He smiles broadly, a patriarchal, consummately charming grin, and he takes out a handkerchief to wipe his brow. Another beat. More shouts. "Be cool, and know God is on His way." Still more shouts. "Be calm: The storm is passing over." A woman in the choir begins to shudder violently. Tucker continues: "Ohhhh, thank God almighty.... And soon," (women weep out loud; dozens of hands wave in the air as the noise ebbs and flows), "and soon, we will reach the other side, and the victory will be ours--on the other side.

"That's real," Tucker preaches, coming down off the rhetorical mountaintop. "That's not a fake. That's not something you conjure up." The music--an organ, a grand piano, a bass guitar, and drums--picks up. The hymn pushes the emotion of Tucker's sermon forward: The storm is passing over, the storm is passing over, Alleluia, the storm is passing over... It is too much for the choir member behind Tucker. She collapses, shouting incomprehensibly. Two female ushers in white uniforms go to her, and a burly deacon carries her out of the sanctuary. Thirteen people come forward to join the church; Tucker prays, "Our lives are threatened daily; we don't know when we might be snuffed out ourselves, with the dangers that run rampant through our streets. But God has allowed us to come around His table once again."

Those dangers are well-known. In Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, and most of our major cities, the numbers are as dreary as they are familiar: high rates of poverty, crime, unemployment, and broken families. Right now, welfare reformers focus on carrots and sticks for single mothers; black political leaders plump for public works projects; New Democrats and New Paradigm conservatives press for urban enterprise zones or tenant ownership of public housing. The policy talk is important, but the evidence of the streets suggests that one answer has been always with us: religion. The church, unlike social service agencies, community action, or a host of other antipoverty strategies, occupies a u n i q u e place in black culture. Long the most hospitable institution in a legally segregated society, it's no accident that the civil r i g h t s movement was born and sustained in the pulpits and pews of the South.

So when President Clinton went to Memphis in November and addressed the leaders of the five million-strong black Church of God in Christ about crime and violence (from the pulpit where Martin Luther King, Jr. preached his last sermon), he wisely went to the strongest link in a large, disjointed, and troubled national minority community. Clinton talked about America's "great crisis of the spirit," a crisis manifested in 37,000 gunshot deaths a year: "The freedom to die before you're a teenager is not what Martin Luther King lived and died for ... [U]nless we say some of this cannot be done by government because we have to reach deep inside to the values, the spirit, the soul, and the truth of human nature, none of the other things we seek to do will ever take us where we need to go." It was a call to arms for the 5,000 black pastors gathered before him and the nation's 24 million black churchgoers, a call for the Frank Tuckers--the preachers with faithful flocks and good hearts--to take the crusade out of the pulpit and into the streets. But in the chinstroking reaction to Clinton's speech, one pastor, Donald Sharp of Chicago's Faith Tabernacle Baptist Church, said on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour that ". . . I would like to have...