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In 1984 Eugene Rivers founded the Azusa Christian Community, a charismatic intentional community. In Dorchester, in Boston's inner city, he challenged black professionals to live in a neighborhood they could easily have shunned, all the while bemoaning the plight of the "underclass." Articulated in a "Ten Point Plan" that has served as a model for urban churches, Rivers' Spirit-filled holistic ministry has received national attention: a cover story in Newsweek magazine, a profile in The New Yorker, and much more. He visited Grand Rapids earlier this year to speak in Calvin College's distinguished January Series, after which he joined Calvin's Steve Evans and Gail Heffner for a conversation.
C. Stephen Evans: You've been a strong advocate for African American young people for a long time. Where does your passion come from?
My passion emanates from my Christian faith, my sense of the importance of a morally consistent Christian witness that advocates and defends the sacredness of human life and a real commitment to preaching and bearing witness, prophetically and pastorally, to the gospel for the winning of the lost.
My passion emanates also from my Pentecostal background. I am from the high-octane wing of a low church. My spiritual father, Benjamin Smith, from Philadelphia, was a powerful holiness Pentecostal minister, and I'm an ordained elder in the Church of God in Christ. What we need now is a postmodern renewal movement within the Pentecostal movement, to give it more intellectual and social grounding.
The notion of personal and public holiness is particularly important to me in the face of a declining secular civil rights industry. Throughout our society, there has never been a greater need for a biblical faith that is morally consistent, programmatic, and pragmatic. This is what we have to give our kids. I love my kids. I'm a big family guy, and I am dedicated to family ministry.
Gail Gunst Heffner: How have the challenges of urban ministry changed within the last decade?
We have witnessed over the last two decades or more the decline of any sense of norms and values. There has been a pornographic reduction of male-female relationships, accompanied by the acceptance of hip hop culture. We have witnessed the death of faith and hope, the erosion of any conception of the sacredness of human life. The children we work with today are almost two generations re moved from the pastoral, moral vision that informed their grandparents, the habit of prayer that was the basis of the civil rights movement. The sewage of the culture industry only further undermines any rational conception of human life. And all this is most brutally expressed in irrational violence that gets worse with each succeeding generation.
CSE: Your ministry is often cited as an example of the effectiveness of faith-based organizations. What was the origin of your Ten Point Coalition?
The concept of the Ten Point Coalition emerged out of a series of conversations I had with a young crack-cocaine dealer in Boston between 1988 and 1991. These were very intense conversations, and out of them came the first draft of the Ten Point Plan, an outline of practical strategies for urban ministry, which I initially tried to sell to black preachers. And the preachers rejected it.
GGH: Why?
I said to these preachers, Here's a plan that will make you guys famous. You can be the stars and do the press conferences, and I'll do the work. If we agree that you're the leaders, I'll be the soldier. They blew it off because they didn't see the point of it. That was in 1991. In 1992 when the Morningstar Baptist Church was attacked by gang members who stabbed a young person and shot up the church, then there was belated recognition that there was a problem.
