The Subculture of our Urban Communities Help to Breed Delinquent Youth
By Rev. Rodney E. Dailey, 1stEpiscopal District
Our urban communities are constantly engulfed with evil and immoral behavior by male and female youth and adults. These illegal and deadly activities surround our churches and are escalating.
Almost three generations of black and brown people who never received sound family values, discipline, or good decision-making skills make up this population. The subculture in our urban communities is comprised of drugs sellers and users, prostitution and human trafficking, murder and murderers, people getting shot and hurt, guns and gangs, ambulances carrying hurt people to the hospital or the morgue, funerals, and hundreds of street memorials.
Our churches are burying young and old at an alarming rate and we—as a people—are in crisis. It is a crisis similar to that which motivated our founder Bishop Richard Allen, and his colleagues, to create the Free African Society from which the AME Church was birthed. Freed slaves were being recaptured and put back into the same conditions from which they came; and without the help of the Free African Society, where would we be today.
The quick fix applied by the United States to this current crisis was to lock up the problem by using mandatory sentencing for longer jail terms to keep prison beds full. The investment of the 1994 Crime Bill at the tune of $33 billion increased the police by 100,000 nationally and built permanent prisons to the tune of $9.7 billion to house mostly black and brown people, living in economic underclass communities, identified and monitored by the US Census Bureau.
An additional $6.1 billion of the Crime Bill was for prevention programs designed and implemented by the police. This is an experiment on black and brown people just like slavery; and just like slavery, it is having a long-term effect. We must correct this experiment by designing programs that work for the betterment of black and brown people. No matter how many people go to jail, murder is still the number one cause of death for young black boys and they are murdered by young black boys. We have learned that gang violence is controllable. If it were not, it would be in every community.
Ministry is incarnational. It is part of our Christology. We believe that Christ actually became a person and walked the earth as opposed to theorizing about it. At its core, homicide is the antithesis of what the church seeks to spawn within a community. It is the church’s moral obligation to each individual it serves—as well as to the entire community—to make its top priority ministering to these victims of violence and eradicating violence within the community. In not taking such action, we risk the survival of the church as well as the global community.
The Rev. Rodney E. Dailey is an ordained local elder at St. Paul AME Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a coordinator for the Boston Hartford District Connectional Sons of Allen in the 1st Episcopal District.
