Discover how Chester’s churches blend faith and action
CHESTER » “Historically, if you look across the country in the African-American community, there is basically no disjunct between black leadership and the church,” said the Rev. Dr. William “Rocky” Brown III, pastor of youth and community at Bethany Baptist Church. Bethany is one of many churches in the city whose pastors, deacons, trustees and members have been active this summer giving veracity to Brown’s statement for the city of Chester.
The churches’ current work in the arts, education, youth outreach and anti-violence efforts continue a tradition stretching back over 100 years in the city. As church leaders face the prospect of bringing the millennial generation into the fold and strengthening unity between churches to improve the city, they’re finding new ways to continue the traditional roles of the church for its members and those in need of its outreach.
“We all look at it from different lenses and perspectives, and participate according to our strength,” said the Rev. Joseph Purnell, president of the Ministerial Fellowship of Chester and Vicinity, of using prayer and outreach to curb violence and spur prosperity in the city. The organization has held antiviolence prayer vigils around the city on Tuesday nights this summer, along with ministering to those affected by violence in the neighborhoods it visits.
“We’re working with other groups who are the mechanisms that make up this phenomenon,” he said. It’s Purnell’s hope that ministerium’s spiritual work will go hand in hand with city officials, police, and groups working for business and education interests to restore peace and prosperity.
“For Chester – this is my belief and I’m sticking to it – the city is under spiritual attack. Demonic forces have been operating here big time,” said the Rev. Dr. Dexter Davis, pastor of Christian education at Bethany. For Davis, it’s important to remember the biblical perspective on believers coming together, be it for Sunday service or working to improve city conditions. “Throughout the Bible it tells you that when two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, he is there also.”
For Don Newton, president of the trustee board of Grace Community UMC, four decades of working with youth has given him a chance to pass on the values that being raised in the church imparted on him. “The church became an outlet for me, a way to keep me grounded because I lived in a hostile environment with my stepfather,” said Newton, whose involvement included Sat-
urday custodial work at Range’s Temple Church of God in Christ. “It was a training in many ways: Responsibility, completing the job, finish what you start – the importance of those kinds of adages. Those teachings growing up in the church saved my life many a time.”
One of Newton’s outlets to work with city is through the Grace Community Resource and Enpowerment Center. He and James Harper, president of the church’s Community Development Corporation, run a 10-week Fast Track 2 Success program three times a year to get city youth involved in the STEM field (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), with an ultimate goal of competing in soapbox car racing competitions.
The program combines tutoring, guest lectures, field trips and hands-on projects to show students the importance mathematics in the world, teach life skills, and expose them to potential career paths, in and out of the STEM fields. The program takes a hands-on approach to life skills through skits and guest speakers who have succeeded from practicing their own advice. “We look at the process of dealing with peer pressure and bullying,” said Harper. “If you act it out, it sticks with you, it seems real. I can see the difference in some of the kids as the year goes on.”
Giving city youth a hands-on experience has been a longtime focal point of New Life Ministries, who put on a theatrical production weekends in July this summer. Founder and Pastor Apostle Joyce Scott and her daughter, Youth Pastor Joy Scott, see the performing arts and other youth activities as a way to teach life skills and show that the church and its teachings can be an engaging place, not one that only means sitting through Sunday service.
“Ministry is a joy and fun. I want to reach people who might not sit in a service, but will sit through the message in a play,” said Pastor Joy. “They’ll get that same message of Jesus Christ and that message of hope.”
With many school cutting back on the arts, Pastor Joy wants to give youth a play to find their performing skills. “Sometimes kids don’t know what they’re good at,” she said, encouraging the discovery by not turning any child during the audition process for her plays and adding new parts for any child who wants to participate.
“I’m holding auditions, but not to see who makes it. I hold it to see what their gifting is,” she said, looking for innate skills children can work on to better themselves as performers and as a whole person.
“It’s not just dance – she builds character,” said Apostle Scott. Like the Fast Track program at Grace Community, New Life Ministries uses its play rehearsals as a time to teach youth life skills through discussions on daily life, and skits and role playing on how to handle it.
“Young people need to know someone’s going to be with them for the long haul,” said Pastor Joy. “I never saw my mom quit on people, and I want them to know ‘I’m not going to quit on you.’”
“One of the things that happens in the black church is we encourage talents of young people,” said the Rev. Brown. “If you look at most of your major singers in R&B, they started off singing in the church when they were young.” As youth pastor at Bethany, Brown has an open door policy during the church’s monthly Youth Sunday for children who aren’t members to come in and take an active role in the service.
“If you see something you want to do, come on and do it,” he said. While many want to perform the mime and praise dancing that has gained popularity, others still build public speaking skills through traditional roles like worship leader, scripture reading and leading prayer. “One little girl, she must be about 5, wanted to be ‘one of them that puts their hand like this’ (gestures like an usher directing people to a pew),” Brown said, laughing.
Besides getting to youth participate in the current state of the church, Bethany is exploring ways to transform itself to meet the needs of the next generation. “We find ourselves in the situation of attracting Millennials to church,” said Pastor of Communications and Strategic Planning Michelle Davis. “What I’m finding is that to them church is service and is experience, it’s not necessarily sitting in a service or traditions or things we call church. Millennials want to know how the Word is going to impact their lives and how can you make it relevant to what’s going on now.” As a part of a new strategic plan to be implemented in 2018, Bethany is looking for new opportunities to work with those in need in the surrounding Ruth Bennett Homes and elsewhere in the city, giving younger members a chance to work hands on with Christian ideals of charity.
Other churches with a storied history in the city are forming new ways to perform those traditional Christian ideals.
“History is good, but we don’t want to rest on our laurels,” said the Rev. Dr. Bayard S. Taylor, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, home to Bethany’s founders when they arrived in Chester in the 1910s from Georgia and the church of the Rev. Dr. Martin Lu-
ther King, Jr. during his time at Upland’s Crozer Theological Seminary in the 1940s.
The church is in the final stages of starting a Community Development Corporation, Neighborhood Care. “We’re expanding our work with young people who have been emancipated from their homes, ages 16-22,” said Pastor Taylor. “The program gives tutoring, direction, and a meal if needed.”
Besides the services available, Pastor Taylor hopes it develops the initiative in young people to better themselves. “Many of the young people do not ask, and don’t want you to probe in their lives,” he said. Calvary plans to present the program as an available tool for those in need of it; one that can improve upon the initiative to succeed that the youth started by walking in its doors.
Calvary’s latest initiative carries on a tradition of outreach typified by one its most famous members: Ruth Bennett was the wife of Pastor John Bennett, who led Calvary during the Great Migration, the movement of Southern African Americans to the North for industrial work in the 1910s. She had created the Ruth L. Bennett House in the 200 block of Reaney Street during the Great Migration to house single black women, and advocated for public housing projects in the city throughout the mid-20th century. The city honored her legacy by bestowing her name on the public housing development that today surrounds Bethany Baptist Church.
City youth get a close up look at the full scope of African-American history when 35 children along with 15 adults visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture in July, courtesy of a community summer camp hosted by Temple of Brotherly Love CC Church.
“The greatest thing we accomplished was that our children were allowed to go down to Washington to experience something that they may never get to experience again,” said Pastor Calvin Williams. “They act different now than they did just a day before,” Williams told the Times the day after the group returned from the trip.
For Dahkeem Williams, nephew of Pastor Williams and a director for the camp program, it was “not exciting, but different” to see the exhibits on early African-American history going back to 15th century and the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade, learning “how African Americans started all the way back as kings and queens.”
“I was amazed. I learned a lot of new things, like how African Americans impacted us today,” said Kiaira Montgomery. “They started a lot of movements. If they didn’t do the things they did back then, our lives would be a lot different today.”
Students were also receptive to the cultural exhibits at the museum. “I liked the red Cadillac the man was driving every time he went to a concert,” said Dra’Onna Lawson, referring to Chuck Berry’s car on display that he would drive on national tours. As Pastor Williams read from students’ written responses about their experience, many liked the chance to see the exhibits on fashion and technology that gave them a chance to experience everyday life and trends from past decades.
A common idea voiced by many of the pastors and laity who spoke with the Times is the idea that faith needs to go hand in hand with good works. “If I’ suffering and I’m hungry, and you come over to pray but don’t feed me, then prayer’s not enough,” said the Rev. Brown, who has been working with other religious leaders in the city’s Christian and Islamic communities to minster to violent perpetrators through mentoring. The group is also developing literacy programs to reach city residents turning to crime because of illiteracy keeping them from legitimate employment. “You need multi-faceted ministries. That’s why you don’t see me out there praying [at public events], ‘cause I did that. I want to do something else.”
Grace Community UMC has taken up efforts against recidivism in the city and beyond through its Prison Ministry, providing an “Inside Out” program with inmates coming up for release at Chester State Correctional Institution. “We do about 15 weeks helping them reconnect with their kids or family, and what they need to do once they get out,” said Harper. The program focuses on reestablishing trust with family and overcoming the stigma attached to convicts seeking employment.
The program gives Grace Community Pastor John Lewis Sr. a chance to perform hands on ministry for a need he is familiar with, having worked for 20 years as a corrections officer in the Philadelphia prison system. “It wasn’t preaching at all, it was equipping them with life skills – how to handle themselves when they get out of prison so they don’t return.”
For those still with significant time on their sentence, the fellowship holds a fatherhood program to encourage inmates to maintain bonds with their children. For those children with a parent serving a prison sentence, the church holds an Angel Tree program at Christmas to provide children with presents on behalf of the incarcerated parent.
The Prison Fellowship and the church’s Men’s Fellowship also extend the spirit of Christian love to lifers through correspondence and visits. Harper, a military veteran has a longstanding relationship with the Vietnam Veterans of America Graterford Chapter 466 at SCI Graterford in Montgomery County. “Here’s guys 40, 50, 60 years in prison – just to have contact with the outside, that really helps them,” he said.
“During the civil rights movement, they were praying. But the reason we were able to advance is because they did nonviolent direct action,” said the Rev. Brown, whose journey into the ministry was closely tied to 1960s civil rights figures. Growing up with a grandfather active in community issues and a father serving as a district justice partially put Brown on the path to becoming city controller and later a city councilman, but it wasn’t until arriving at Cheyney University that he started to consider the ministry and a serious look at getting into public life.
“As God would have it, I developed a relationship with Coretta Scott King’s sister, [Cheyney Professor] Edythe Scott Bagley,” he said. After seeing Brown’s devastation at the recent loss of his godmother, Prof. Bagley offered to fill the void as a mentor.
When gauging Brown’s interest in attending a 1978 Congressional Black Caucas dinner shortly after his graduation, Bagley said a few key words. “She said, ‘You can stay in the suite and the room with my nephews.’ She’s telling me if I can get $150 dollars to pay for this dinner, I could stay in the room with Dexter and Marty. So I came home and told my grandfather that for $150 I could spend the weekend with Martin Luther King’s kids. He said, ‘Here’s $200.’”
Besides the perks of Michael Jackson and President Jimmy Carter visiting the suite, coming down an escalator and seeing a gala filled with the country’s highest-profile black leaders was a lifealtering sight. “After that weekend experience, I came back and said, ‘I want to be like King, I want to be like Jesse.’ That started my path to go into the ministry and to get involved politically more so in an independent perspective.”
At the time King was working in nonviolent direct action across the South to end its legally enforced segregation, church members in Chester were working to end the de facto segregation practiced in their city.
“The Apollo Theater, the Boyd – I’ll never forget it. All the whites were one side and we were on the other. It was hell in them days,” said Mary Smith, who joined Chester civil rights activist Stanley Branche in the 1963-64 downtown marches and sit ins to end school segregation, amongst other issues facing the city’s black population.
“Segregation was terrible in those days, I had to walk past white schools all the way down to Douglas [Frederick Douglas Junior High School],” she said of her time in the public school system in the 1940s.
Smith would go on to ensure that 150 future city students had higher education opportunities after graduation through her Chester Scholarship Fund, founded in 1967 after the original Chester High School was gutted by fire that year. Smith singlehandedly got the project – which turned into a long-running series
of galas first at Springfield’s Alpine Inn and later the Bradywine Club in Chadds Ford – off the ground, using skills she learned in her church. According to a 1968 Times interview, Smith attributed the success of her fundraising to the experience she gained working for the city’s Fifth Presbyterian Church, today Thomas M. Thomas Memorial Presbyterian Church. “For the past 15 years I have devoted myself to various civic and church charities around the country. Fundraising isn’t a new thing for me,” she said at the time.
Following 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision striking down the South’s de jure segregation, the Chester School Board voted Aug. 21 of that year to fully integrate and end the policies that kept Chester schools segregated in practice but not formally in name.
According to the Times archives, the school board member who raised to the motion to vote on integration was the board’s lone African-American member at the time, the Rev. J.L. Link, a former pastor of Murphy AME Church and a presiding elder of the AME Church’s Wilmington District. The Rev. Link’s popularity as a pastor in the city had led to a failed 1946 nomination by a group of independent Republicans to fill a school board vacancy before winning the support of the city’s Republican machine in the 1947 elections.
A decade later, the vote was not translating into significant integration nor improved conditions for the city’ black students. “[Branche’s] goal was to have the city do the right thing that they weren’t doing at that time,” Smith said.
While Branche’s contentious relationship with many church leaders was reported in the Daily Times and national coverage by the New York Times, it was Temple Baptist Church, at its former location at Sixth and Parker streets, that served as the site for demonstrations and the launching point for marches to the city’s downtown.
At a spring 1954 special session between the Chester School Board and the city’s black leadership that set the buildup to the August vote for integration, the Rev. J. Pius Barbour, then pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, spoke with prescience on the schools situation. As reported in the Times on April 20 of that year, he told the board:
“We want to see this done in the American way — by sitting around a table without pressure, strikes, parades and mass meetings. Don’t force us to resort to the things we don’t like,” he pleaded with the board, pointing out that if results couldn’t be obtained through these methods, it opened the field to “left-wingers who will deliver.”
During its history in the city, the church has balanced its role in hard-pressing social activism and working within the formal infrastructure of government. “You can influence people in both ways,” said the Rev. Davis on what he saw during his time growing up in Bethany with its many socially and politically engaged members. “There’s activism that has its role and its place, and there’s some people intentionally working in government who that believe you can make greater gains if you get in the system.”
Church leaders and active members have accounted for many of the first African Americans to hold elected office and prominent appointed positions in the city, whether through the long-dominant Chester GOP, as independent Republicans, or in the rise of the Democratic Party over the last 25 years. For that quarter century, a prominent example in the latter category is former state legislator and current Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland, pastor of Community Baptist Church.
“One of the things that I respect about him is that while he’s the mayor of the city, he’s still a pastor,” said the Rev. Davis. “I know some folks in the community criticized him when he made a statement to the fact that his spirituality and prayer will help to alleviate some of the ills that the city is facing – he believes that. I do believe that also.”
While Davis respects the idea of separation of church and state and believes that Kirkland’s actions demonstrate he too is committed to the idea, he believes that believes that “folks in the religious community felt and stand united in his making that point [the relevance of spirituality in his administration],” touching on the idea of unity that was a common thread in interviews given to the Times, be it through formal meetings or all churches working towards the same set of goals and values.
“We love our city, every Saturday morning we meet and pray for the city, thank our leaders, thank God for everybody that is involved and trying to make things happen,” said Apostle Scott.
“Here in Chester, we’ve got churches just about on every corner,” said Don Newton. “People’s living rooms to storefronts to the main churches – and when we come together as one, even more unified than we are now, we can turn Chester around. From the further West End to the farthest East End, north and south – I pray to witness that day.”
“I think that with our ministerium alliance that has reformed itself, casting vision and work throughout the community, we’re more unified today than ever,” said the Rev. Taylor.
For Newton’s pastor at Grace Community UMC, the Rev. John Lewis, Sr., the importance of church unity lies in working towards the same goals for peace, prosperity and a good school system, and not necessarily sitting at a table to follow the same missions at the same time. “If all the churches came together, who would be pastor?” said Lewis. “We have different callings and face different situations.”
“Unity was a prayer of Christ when he organized his disciples,” said the Rev. Joseph Purnell, president of the Ministerial Fellowship of Chester and Vicinity since January. “He wanted 12 men who were individuals and had their own character, but were united for one vision.” Purnell expressed gratitude towards longtime Ministerium president and his mentor in the organization, the late Rev. Joel McGee. “He introduced me to this and gave me a platform to carry on, God bless Pastor McGee” he said, telling the Times he plans gather city pastors this autumn to discuss the future of the Ministerial Fellowship and which interpretation of unity will best serve the city going forward.
“It’s important to take the ‘I’ out of ‘pride.’ When we lose our pride and walk in humility, then I believe we can get something done,” said Purnell. “It’s not about the ministerium, it’s about everybody.”
For pastors at Bethany, whatever the way forward in unity is, for the betterment of the city it has to include faith put into action. “During slavery they prayed, during segregation they prayed, but the change was about when they did the action,” said the Rev. Brown, calling for “an action orientated community of faith” to take hold in the city.
“I believe there are better times ahead for the city of Chester,” said the Rev. Dexter Davis, with a mayor and city council active in their churches, and a religious community “continuing to do the things that we do.” “It’s going to take the people of faith, regardless of ethnicity or denomination, to come together to get to Chester to where it needs to go – and the church has to be there in the middle of that,” he said. “That’s my belief and I’m sticking to it.”