Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church should be renamed The Miracles of a Black Pastor. The book is not an institutional analysis or a description of a religious organization so much as a celebration of one man's successes achieved through an institution. This is true biography. It details a life-its past, its present, and its possible future. Readers should not be surprised that the author, Samuel G. Freedman, has presented his data about a black church by focusing on that church's leader. The history of African American churches has often hinged on the skills, vision, and peculiarities of their pastors. The Saint Paul Community Church in East New York is no exception; its size, character, programs, and successes have all changed dramatically because of its leader, the Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood. Upon This Rock details what one black pastor in one blighted urban neighborhood has accomplished and how both church and community have been transformed.
Pie chart of religions of African Americans
A man lynched from a tree. Face partially conceale...
U.S. Census map indicating U.S. counties with fewe...Freedman spent one year researching the pastor, his congregants, the church's organization, and the surrounding community. He studied the Brooklyn neighborhood of the church, the church's efforts as it built schools and a playground, the organization's emphasis on redeeming black men, and the temptations of members to fall back into previous lifestyles of drug addiction, prostitution, and anomie. He details the difficulties of this organization as it fought bureaucratic structures of the City of New York, as it related to Korean American and other business owners in the immediate community, and as it erected more than two thousand housing units for impoverished people. Nevertheless, these revealing "slices of life" are very much a particular pastor's world. They are really researched as part of the attempt to show Youngblood's ennobling work.
Other books, some decades older, are even more poignant in evoking...