Black Presbyterian Caucus hires fiery preacher-activist
John H. Adams, The Layman Online, June 10, 2003
The Rev. Curtis Jones, a pastor, union activist, fiery preacher and gadabout for the Presbyterian Church (USA), has become the first full-time, paid executive director of the National Black Presbyterian Caucus.
Jones has resigned as the pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in Baltimore and will move to Atlanta soon to work for the caucus at a salary of $60,000. Jones has previously served as the unpaid chairman of the independent group that includes an estimated 800 members. The organization is not funded by the PCUSA, but it does have a substantial influence in a denomination whose membership is less than 3 percent black.
Jones has been one of its high-profile preachers, having served as former chairman of the denomination’s Advocacy Committee on Racial Ethnic Concerns. He also has taken up causes that are not widely supported by black Presbyterians, including the ordination of practicing homosexuals as ministers, elders and deacons.
Last November, addressing the annual conference of the Covenant Network, Jones said gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Presbyterians are members that “the church has yet to stand with,” adding: “It’s interesting that our response to difference is fear. … God made us and said we were good. This is a God that doesn’t even make the snowflakes identical.”
He said homosexuality is part of God’s creative purpose.
“If someone has a problem with a gay person or a lesbian person,” he said, “your problem is not with them, because they can’t help who are they are. Your problem is with the God who made them.”
During that address, which was presented shortly after the congressional elections, Jones accused President George W. Bush of lying about his plans to invade Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein.
“George Bush, who couldn’t find oil in Texas, has his eye on someone else’s vineyard,” said Jones, in an allusion to the Old Testament story of the stoning of Naboth and the wicked Jezebel’s instruction to her husband, Ahab, to confiscate the victim’s vineyard.
He did not explain why Bush could not simply lift U.S. sanctions against purchasing oil from Iraq rather than go to war.
In the election that preceded his appearance before the Covenant Network, an organization devoted to ending the denomination’s ban on ordaining practicing homosexuals, Republicans regained control of the U.S. Senate. Jones expressed his disappointment over the Republican victories and the fact that a majority of the members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are Republicans.
When he was chairman of the Advisory Committee on Racial Ethnic Concerns, Jones was critical of a number of Presbyterian initiatives – including evangelism. In 2000, after the General Assembly identified evangelism and church growth as the denomination’s priorities, Jones labeled those priorities “inreach rather than outreach.”
He has said the denomination has given mere lip service to developing black churches, but he recently expressed support for the Mission Initiative Campaign. The goal in that campaign is $40 million and about half would go to racial-ethnic church development or redevelopment. As the executive director of the National Black Presbyterian Caucus, Jones could play a key role in helping to steer millions of dollars toward black church projects he favors.
He supported the Advocacy Committee for Racial Ethnic Concerns’ proposal to the 213th General Assembly to direct the General Assembly Council to create a task force to study the issue of reparations for groups subjected to vast injustices.
The task force works in consultation with the Advocacy Committee for Racial Ethnic Concerns, examining reparations for African Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives and Asian Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and others. The recommendation calls for the task force to report its findings and recommendations regarding how the church can foster dialogue and healing to the 216th General Assembly in 2004.
Jones says his road to Princeton Seminary and the Presbyterian ministry began in the basement of Roseville Presbyterian Church near Newark, N.J., where he led a strike against United Presbyterian Hospital in Newark. During the prolonged strike, hospital occupancy fell from about 900 to less than 300. The hospital gave workers what they demanded and fired the hospital director.
Jones acknowledges that his departure from his congregation in Baltimore was not regretted by all.
“I went there with a mandate to build a community-based, healthy congregation,” he told the Presbyterian News Service. “At the time, Madison was very traditional in many ways. We wanted to grow, reach out to the young people, get involved in community outreach. We accomplished all that, we got the membership up to about 270 … but it never really took off and grew the way we wanted it to.”
Jones said he encountered resistance in Baltimore when he tried to introduce an “African world view. I wanted to change the members’ consciousness and introduce a different world view – without romanticizing Africa.” He said his talk about the accomplishments of black nations, advances in math, science and medicine credited to Africans, the contributions to theology of the black desert fathers, pleased some members but alienated others.
By the time he left the church, he said, it had considerably “less traditional Presbyterian trappings.”
In 2001, according to denominational data, worship attendance was down to an average of 100 people. The Sunday school average was 33.