The New Slave Masters

Bishop George McKinney addresses the African-American community via a powerful and generative metaphor: just as literal slave masters once held his people in servitude in this country (the United States of America), so modern slave masters who look nothing like the ancient institution that counted human beings as property seek to reduce black Americans to a kind of bondage that is capable of just as much destructive force. (Full disclosure: this reviewer is privileged to be a friend of the author.) Yet it would be mistaken to infer that Bishop McKinney's contribution to the pastoral care of his people (and others) is all about rhetoric. To the contrary, he has served faithfully and productively as both pastor and bishop in, respectively, San Diego's St. Stephens Church of God in Christ and one of the largest predominantly African-American denominations in America. All this shows. Bishop McKinney is a master story-teller and is not stingy with his craft. His exploration of biblical models for individual reconstruction, redemptive family life, and community restoration is peppered with stories that emerge from a pastor's long-term care of his flock. The reader will quickly discern that satisfying the dictates of political correctness is not high on the author's list of priorities. Rather, with clarity that may well deserve the label 'prophetic', he recognizes the perils of abortion and the inherent deficiencies in single parenting, even as his language conveys that concern which is realistic without judgment and forward-looking without neglect of the concrete particularities of the African-American community's situation in our time. Bishop McKinney has no time for the subtext of victimization. Without for one moment flinching from the violence to which his people was subjugated--indeed many of his chapters begin with excerpts from the chronicles of slavery--the author resolutely prods his reader to embrace a future that no victim's tale will create. Courage. Resolution. Self-abnegation. These are the virtues to which the author believes Christian faith calls his people in a moment when history has dealt them a difficult hand to play. He writes--as he preaches--from within that great tradition of learned Black community leadership that finds its precedent in figures like Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet his gaze is most resolutely cast upon the Nazarene and the apostle Paul as on any other. That, and the profoundly needy San Diego that surrounds the property of St. Stephen's outward-focused headquarters. Karl Barth taught us to read the Bible with the newspaper in the other hand. George McKinney is one step closer to the trauma and the deliverance that form the shape of his people: he need only look out the window.