This conversation explores the evolving role of the black church and its leaders in contemporary society. Dr. Brooks, a pastor with a global reach, shares his perspectives on how black culture informs his work, the church's historical significance in the civil rights movement, and the importance of equipping youth with values, history, and practical life skills. He discusses the challenges of engaging young people influenced by pop culture and social media, emphasizing the need to create spaces for meaningful relationships and tailored ministry. Through this dialogue, we gain a deeper understanding of the multifaceted responsibilities and evolving priorities of black church leadership in the modern era.
How does Black culture globally, inform your work as a pastor? And then do you see your role evolving in contemporary society?
I think our spiritual mandate as pastors and spiritual leaders is greater here in the West, but has more impact outside of here. As pastors, the Internet has allowed many of our churches that are kind of big to have international reach. Now we're seeing the influence of what we do on a Sabbath and for others, on a Sunday, impact the everyday life of someone in Europe. If you're in a small Black community in a place where there aren't many Blacks, you're looking for large groups of Blacks to connect to. So what we're able to do from pulpits across the US and globally, is connect with culture in our regions. And depending on the size of your internet reach, you can have a global impact. We many times want to use that impact to be able to draw people to Christ, into a saving relationship with Jesus. As a faith leader in a majority African American context, I have an opportunity to impact the world from my space in Southern California.
So staying on that reach part. Christian churches and religious leaders do have a large amount of reach but the general public seems to be fighting against religion. In art and music there are usually heavy religious themes, even from groups who go, "Hey, we don't want anything to do with religion." Can you speak to that and say why you think that is?
Art at its purest form is man's Search for meaning. The art can be music, paintings, poetry, or writing. It’s man's honest search for understanding the world around them, how they see it, and how they would depict it if they had the opportunity. That lines right up with every spiritual person's modus operandi. I want to know that my life has meaning. And if my life has meaning, how do I make it? How do I do this better? How can I get more? Is there someone I could be following who can help me be a better version of myself? How do I do that? So if you don't want to follow the latest motivational speaker, every church then we all say the same thing, “we've got this God that if you can connect to and follow the tenets of this God, you will see the impact and influence of your life expand exponentially.” It will never be about what you have financially, or what you can acquire physically. But you will be able to walk through this world with a peace that will allow you to function in a way that you'd be productive no matter what you do.
So, historically, the Black church has been essentially a cornerstone for civil rights and social justice. In the current society, do you still think that the Black church still has the same role and if they do, has there been a difference in how it's been manifested?
In the '60s and early '70s, Black churches, specifically in urban areas, were the spaces where our children got education, their tutoring, and where we taught people skills. When the culture shifted from the vocational to the more technical or erudite ways of being, our churches were the places where we pushed our kids to get into college. At the college level, go to the HBCUs, the schools that will not only enhance your character, but they'll teach you history so that you can advance in this world by having a sense of self over the years. The same kind of fervor from our Black churches to send our kids to HBCUs has waned. It was because we stopped seeing value in what we had, and thought there was more value in the state school or more value in the Ivy schools. We fought to get ourselves into those places, not because we needed to be there. Maybe we felt like we needed to be there. But we did that also to the detriment of our schools, which would be our HBCUs. Our government structures, put more money, effort, and time into the larger schools and ignore our HBCUs. HBCUs are all private institutions that operate using funds from alumni, so they need those who've attended the schools to come back and help. But if those who are alumni feel like the school didn't go the way that they wanted to, then you know, those money pits seem to dry up.
Unfortunately, when we go back to culture, we've not been taught to give back to the places that made us. We have those who are actors and musicians who came up the hard scrap way. What do they give back to? They don't give back to creating structures. They give a lot of charity. That's cool, but we're not creating systems that will perpetuate growth in our communities. A few people are doing that. But going back to your question on what the church's responsibility is to our community. It's to be those hubs. Those places where we teach our children not just to follow Jesus, but that there you can get jobs. You can be employed by the people here. We will teach you how to move to the next level. Whether you go to vocational school or technical school. For anything you want to do, there should be somebody in your church community who knows how to do that thing and help you to get to that level. I think that's something that our churches need to be able to do that we've not been doing very well, in the recent past.
Students from a church have to go to school, whether that's HBCUs, or the larger public schools, and sometimes some of the teachings that they may be getting at the schools may conflict with the teachings that they got at church. How do you reconcile some of the scientific understandings of the times with the religious beliefs in your teachings?
Over the years my experience has been, if we didn't teach right before those kids left it didn't matter. They didn't listen or we didn't teach them properly. When they went out and learned something different, they thought that what we were teaching was a bunch of fairy tales and fables because we weren't living according to what we were teaching. If we teach well at the local church level, we have no problem with our kids going away and learning something else. They have something to compare it to that they can value. What our churches do best is to teach values. The best of our African American churches not only teach values, but they teach our history, and they teach financial literacy. That will keep our kids from delving into great debt when they attend school. That's the best of us. The worst of us don't teach our children to ever think on their own and only teach them to follow. When they learn that they could have been doing things differently this entire time, they're disillusioned with the church and want nothing to do with it. So that's where we are on the spectrum. For me, my experience has been many of the young people that I have seen develop have gone into spaces where they were able to be challenged and learned what it meant for them to follow God. I may not have always agreed with it but I hope that we've taught them well enough that they can live their lives well.
In an age where youth culture is heavily influenced by pop culture and social media and things of that nature, how do you adjust your approach to engage them when you're fighting for their attention?
A lot of that has to do with whatever our parents are doing in the house. If parents aren't telling children it's important to listen to adults who are not their parents, I'm dead in the water. The other thing that helps is to create spaces where kids can talk with me and people who are in leadership so that we can develop relationships. In this space where I am now, there's a layer between me and the youth that I serve and the children that I serve. So it's not as easy for me to create those relationships. But there are still opportunities and we don't want to waste them. You have to spend time in the presence. I learned this when I was doing youth ministry in school. It's just the ministry of presence. Jesus's ministry of presence influenced 12 guys. 11 who stuck with it. Those 11 guys went out and changed the world. We're not going to impact everybody. And we're not going to do everybody the same way. But we must reach kids where they are in the world and give them what they need to be successful wherever they find themselves.