Somewhere along the way we've confused tradition with theology. Busywork for Ministry. This city, like every city in America, is jammed with churches. And, except for the smallest fraction, nobody wants to do anything. Nobody is doing anything, and, most church folk will fight like hell to stop anyone who is doing anything.

Johnny Deuteronomy's bible weighs about thirteen pounds and pretty much needs a seat of its own in the backseat of the cranberry Lexus that ferries JD, the pastor of Yet Another Useless Church, across the thug-infested badlands of Ourtown in his twelve-minute commute to YAUC's pulpit. Week after week JD woos the thinning ranks of The Hat Squad- graying matrons lost in the shadow of ever-larger-and-more-bizarre Sunday hats- who whoop him thru the sweaty Baptist Eucharist and into the time-honored sing-song histrionics that portend the wind-up of yet another Fuzzy Sunday Thing.

If only I had a flamethrower.

One to scorch the heels of so many of our "reverends" who have lost their ideals, fervor and commitment; traded them for comfy pulpit chairs and a Via Dolorosa of ring-kissing. I know precious few "reverends" who don't deserve to be dragged out and shot. Their meretricious causality, the absence of urgent and immediate response to the fire-at-will twenty-four-seven onslaught on our community is a damming indictment and ringing testimony to their lack of ethics, morals, and spirituality.

If only I had a flamethrower.

Okay, maybe not a literal flamethrower because that could get me sent to jail. Perhaps a rhetorical flamethrower. A flamethrower of words that could atomize our slavish commitment to the unbroken cycles of busywork.

Useless, time-wasting auxiliaries. All my life I've seen people incredibly busy doing absolutely nothing. Practicing ushering drills, rehearsing ceaselessly, traveling, working well into the night. Putting on programs. This Day and That Day.

Frying chicken while ten year-olds are squeezing off the first rounds of an adolescent murder career and some girl barely into her teens is laying down in her mother's bed (or. just as often, the church basement) for some housing projects Don Juan who's ensorcelled her with affection she's not getting anywhere else.

Somewhere along the way we've confused tradition with theology. Busywork for Ministry. This city, like every city in America, is jammed with churches. And- except for the smallest fraction-  nobody wants to do anything. Nobody is doing anything, and, most JD's, Big Hats, Useless Freaking Deacons and The What-Nots will fight like hell to stop anyone who is doing anything.

If only I had a flamethrower.

All right, maybe not a rhetorical flamethrower but maybe a spiritual flamethrower. One that could re-ignite spiritual flames that have long gone out in so many of us. One that could set off smoke alarms of our conscience and hearts and spur us to do something. Or to at least get out of the way.

While no one seems to be mentioning the fact high ranking Russian soldiers, having not been paid in months, are forced to moonlight as cab drivers and delivery men. Enlisted men beg in the streets, panhandling to motorists caught in snarled city traffic.

The Russian economy is in shambles, a direct result of our having "won" the Cold War. Russian factories are operating on a barter system, paying the workers in goods the workers themselves try futilely to sell on highway roadsides. People in Russia are starving, two and three families jammed into tiny apartments. Disease is rampant, food shortages, power outages. And few of us know and even fewer care about this.

As the Watts riots in 1965 and the South Central riots in 1992 demonstrated, desperate people have nothing to lose. The Tutsis and the Hutus and the Serbs and the Croats practiced global genocide while we ignorant church folk didn't watch the news, read the paper, didn't once stop to wonder what the poor Russians- visions of fat and happy Americans gorging themselves on Pizza and beer while their fat and happy children wobble about the vast acreage of their front lawns-  might do if they got desperate enough.

Seems like black church folks never think about how this country's trillion-dollar debt and shell-game economic policy keeps us on the brink of the greatest disaster this planet's ever seen. Or the chilling reality that the desperate and starving Russians, easily as unenlightened as we ignorant Church folk, have access to weapons of mass destruction targeted at our major cities.

Like a storm brewing on the horizon, the world stumbles drunkenly towards the millennium like a fat guy on a balance beam. Black America, overwhelmingly obsessed with the pursuit of unchecked acquisitiveness, worship sneakers and cars and status and spend billions of dollars weaving their hair and trimming their nails and the worst of these is us ignorant Black Church folk. We who've lost all perspective of who God is or what kingdom Jesus came to build. Like dizzy heathens, we've abandoned our principles and live anyway we please as the storm moves ever closer. We don't know who Alan Greenspan is and we don't care.

Lazy, jealous, shallow, immature, nonintellectual and extremely un-spiritual. That is the general state of the Black church in this country. Carrying bibles we don't read, mouthing prayers we don't mean to a God we don't believe in. Planning picnics as storm clouds roll in.

War is here and war is coming. A twenty-four-seven, fire-at-will onslaught on our community. Drugs, disease and economic despair. Sexual immorality. Drunkenness. Rampant lack of commitment to or conviction about anything or anyone. Status as divinity. No love for knowledge, wisdom, art, education, or philosophy. Self-esteem hot wired to materialism. It's a disgrace. The black church is a disgrace. Especially and shockingly in this town.

Alan Greenspan, his bags no doubt already packed and his chalet in Monteserrat waiting for him, warned America against "unguarded optimism," but nobody listened. Nobody listened to Noah, either.

And nobody's listening to me. I'm talking to myself. I can't even get five people in this town to stand up for what they believe in. I can't get anybody to look up from whatever they're doing and see the storm coming.

The Russians are hungry.

It's only a matter of time. We are living in the last days. And we're shallow and selfish and uneducated and uncultured and our religious leaders are too busy empire building to remember why they strapped on the collar in the first place. It's a disgrace. We're a disgrace.

Father forgive us our ignorance and lack of faith. Lord open our eyes.

The Russians are hungry.

Christopher J. Priest
August 1997