Storefront Salvation
“I was a pimp, a hustler, a drug addict; I would’ve been a murderer except the man lived.” - Pastor Samuel Vann of The Church of Deliverance, Richmond, California
Late for services at Perfect Peace and Praise Ministry (PPPM) one Sunday morning in spring I’m greeted half a block away by the throbbing beat of an electric base, a full drum kit, an organ’s soulful growl, an ecstatic tambourine, and the powerful singing of Missionary Regina Crawford, the newest member of the congregation.
Inside the little storefront church the service is only just underway and Pastor Al Williams, a compact, strongly built man in his early fifties, begins his preaching with a quick, flowing, impromptu prayer of thanks that God has given each of us the money to pay our bills this month, that the angel of death didn’t visit us this morning, that we’d woken up at all.
Soon his preaching gains a kind of emphatic force, a runaway truck momentum that I think he can’t possibly keep it up. But he doesn’t slow down until the organ strikes up again and he begins to sing his phrases and then the whole of this small congregation joins in as the sound of the organ swells and four songs in a row follow, including the minor Gospel masterpiece, “Wade in the Water”
Like so many of the storefronts in Richmond, PPPM is a Church of God in Christ (COGIC) assembly. It seems that the COGIC recognized early what many traditional denominations have only lately come around to: in America, storefront worship by small congregations is where salvation is at. According to “Faith Communities Today (released March, 2001),” the largest study ever done of American congregations, “...half the congregations in the United States have fewer than 100 regularly participating adults... Indeed, a full quarter of congregations has fewer than 50.”
While on earth 2000 years ago, the god this morning’s congregants worship preached in favor of private prayer, showed an occasional distaste for public displays of holiness. But there is not a trace of disingenuousness here. I don’t think Jesus would be displeased. Not even the fact that Pastor Williams, a gentle, soft spoken, sensible public transit authority janitor, is lunging down the aisle speaking in what sounds to me like meaningless gibberish, but is more likely what is called tongues, raises in me any doubt that this a kind of spiritual light has descended on this dank little church in the worst neighborhood in Richmond, California.
In just a three block radius in the rotting downtown section of this Bay Area city of 99,000 souls, I’ve counted no less than 10 churches of the storefront variety. All but one – Muhammad Mosque #72 – are Protestant. Five exist under the umbrella of the Memphis-based Church of God in Christ. Adherents.com reports that C.O.G.I.C. has nearly 6,000,000 members, many of whom worship in small churches in formerly commercial spaces in the moribund downtowns of cities that peaked decades ago.
Most are once thriving, now dying cities not unlike Richmond, home of the original Rosie the Riveter and the Kaiser Shipyards where WW II-era Liberty Ships were constructed and launched at the patriotic pace of six per week. Here the Great Migration found its terminus, as the number of African Americans multiplied twenty times in three years and tens of thousands of Americans of all races came west for reasons of patriotism and economics. In the years from 1940 to 1943 Richmond was transformed from a town of 23,000 into a thriving city of over 93,000.
Nearly all traces of the shipyards are gone now and several disparate yet interconnected worlds make up Richmond: tightly guarded hillside acres known as tank farms, where Chevron, the city’s primary employer, stores and refines oil (and where the occasional leakage of sulfur dioxide or sulfur trioxide set off emergency sirens and put nearby residents in a “shelter-in-place” alert); lovely coastal hills covered in sprawling ranch style homes with expansive bay views (here the Chevron executives live); waterfront gentility in cookie cutter condos (these have replaced the shipyards); busy, homely, strip-mall-strewn avenues (here are some of the storefront churches, including the one with the best name, God’s Supermarket of Faith); intensely Latino barrios that go on for blocks; quiet, middle class African American neighborhoods; a dying downtown of nail salons, wig and consignment shops, donut shops and distressed furniture stores (there’s a wig shop just up the street from Perfect Peace and Praise Ministry called Sullen Beauty Supply); everywhere a thriving gangland.
Richmond is a quintessential small American city, sub to no urb, prone to bursts of boosterism, of optimism and civic pride countered inevitably by killing sprees in which as many as six children are shot dead in a matter of months. Driving home on Holy Friday afternoon from a local Denny’s where I’d interviewed a fasting storefront pastor over many cups of coffee, I am forced into a detour by the Richmond police. They’ve cordoned off three blocks of Cutting Boulevard. One of the cops tells me a man has been shot in the head. Three days later the victim dies of his wounds. His murderer remains at large.
Experience of misery is a common thread among all the pastors and all the worshipers I encounter at the storefront churches of Richmond. Everybody’s got a serious past. Seems that just about everybody has been either a pimp or prostitute, a drug dealer or drug user, a thief, a fence, an inmate. Everybody’s hustled somebody. And everybody’s glad not to be hustling anymore. They have left or are leaving behind that life. And yet they come most Sundays into the belly of the beast, to one of several churches right across the street from a tattered and nameless SRO, just down the block from a bustling, free-market municipal park.
They come dressed in their Sunday finest to these churches with names that reflect the very things they crave: peace, power, deliverance. They come to this block where the denizens of its demimonde do not welcome them. Where overheard conversations at bus stops discuss the technicalities of parole or the inequities of social services. Where hoopdie after hoopdie chugs into the parking lot of Joe’s Market. Where one minute out and one block away from Sunday services you can be solicited by a prostitute.
Says Pastor Williams: “We’ve tried to reach out to the folks on the block. We’re here for a reason. But there’s a long history of distrust in the black community. It stretches all the way back to when slave owners used to promise freedom to slaves if they kept an eye on each other, told the owners about escapes and such. Also there’s been too much abuse by pastors: money, sex, everything.”
I lived in Richmond for three years, and only recently moved ten miles away to Oakland. This piece proposes a critical but open-minded examination -- through my experiences of the storefronts of Richmond, to which I have gained unfettered access -- of the American history and current state of worship in small, storefront churches, from their inception in the wake of the Great Migration, to their potential dominance as outlets of salvation today and their struggle with the big denominations for recognition. It will explore their conservative theology and social philosophies (which so many whites, liberal whites, treat with a condescension bordering on bigotry, which I will also explore), their intrepid faith in the face of a constant struggle to survive, and their 24/7 efforts to save souls, including mine. As the charismatic pastor of the Church of Deliverance, Sam Vann, said to me at the end of our first interview, “Jim O’Brien, you didn’t come here to write a story, you came here to be saved.”
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