A Tale of Two Conference Sites: Preserving Legitimacy and Equity at GC2021

WHAT NEW PASTORS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CHURCH FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

By Cynthia Gordon-Floyd, CPA

I’m blessed to frequently consult with newly assigned pastors and pastors who are planting new ministries. What I consistently find is a general lack of understanding regarding the best practices for organizing the financial operation of the church so that it meets the needs of the ministry.

First, the role of the financial secretary is pivotal and should be held by a person who meets the qualifications of being a steward. The financial secretary is not required to be a member of the Steward Board, but ideally, the pastor should ensure that they are a part of the critical discussions facing the church, including the negotiation of the pastor’s compensation package.

Second, the Commission on Stewardship & Finance should be comprised of members of the Steward Board, Trustee Board, and the Official Board. Ideally, the Commission should not contain a husband and wife team or siblings, if possible. The Commission is to be responsible for weekly or monthly financial reporting for leadership and Official Board meeting discussions, annual giving statements to members and visitors, ongoing stewardship ministry training and initiatives, and be closely involved in all financial decisions for the ministry.

Fourth, according to The Doctrine and Discipline of the AME Church (2016), the Official Board is the only body in the church to approve the disbursement of funds. Pastors should use the Official Board to their fullest extent. Convene frequent meetings to discuss any major financial decisions that need to be made for the church. Buy-in is critical, especially as the church relies on volunteer giving. Create an environment where members feel engaged so that the church is heading in a direction led by God, conveyed through the pastor, and carried out by the membership working together.

Fifth, pastors should avoid close interaction with the detailed financial operation. Pastors should not be present in the finance room during counting, write checks, or make deposits. The pastor may be the second signer on a check but should not write and sign checks. Ideally, the pastor should be able to review the results of these operations weekly through reports provided by the Commission on Stewardship & Finance. It can be exceedingly difficult for the pastor of a small church to avoid some of these tasks but it’s important to make every effort to do so. Otherwise, pastors can be in an unfortunate position where their good intentions can appear to be overreaching.

Cynthia Gordon-Floyd is a certified public accountant and founder of Willing Steward Ministries, LLC. Willing Steward Ministries (www. willingsteward.com) is a financial consulting and accounting firm for churches and other faith-based non-profits, specializing in Bible-focused financial practices, pastoral compensation issues, IRS compliance, and other financial needs specific to churches. Cynthia is a graduate of Lake Forest College and holds her MBA in Accounting from DePaul University. She is a steward and the financial secretary at the First AME Church of Manassas in Manassas, Virginia.

A TALE OF TWO CONFERENCE SITES: PRESERVING LEGITIMACY AND EQUITY AT GC2021

By Thabile Ngubeni, Willem Burger, Katurah York Cooper, and Dimpho Gaobepe

COVID-19 has impacted our approaches to worship and ministry in our local churches. Also, her tentacles have penetrated and changed the conduct of the General Conference (GC). Consequently, the oldest Black Denomination in the world is preparing to hold a Hybrid Virtual General Conference in real-time on the continents of North America and Africa in Cape Town South Africa, in less than 30 days. The AME Church is again at the doorstep of making progressive history.

Delegates are preparing to stake stock of the Church’s achievements, re-evaluate strategy, and elect the highest echelon of leadership of the AME Church. The main purpose is to develop the legacy of our forefathers and ensure the sustainability of this Zion for the benefit of generations to come. Undoubtedly, this Great Zion is on the right track.

To guarantee the integrity of this momentous occasion, delegate participation and candidates for elected office must prevail. Two established seats of the GC2021 enjoy equal access to the proceedings: the functionality of delegates’ committee duties and equal legitimacy of delegates exercise their voting right. Neither of the two GC sites or seats is more important or relevant than the other. Also, cognizance must be had that delegates in Africa are at great risk as the numbers rise in South Africa, the vaccine roll-out will not reach all delegates in a timely manner; and in some of the countries where other delegates reside, vaccines are not available.

The value and validity of a candidate must not be impacted by where that candidate is seated. Pre-COVID-19, all candidates would have been seated at one site. Though provisions have been made to accommodate candidates from outside North America to be seated at the Orlando, Florida site, no candidate should be perceived as less passionate, qualified, or unserious about their election because they cannot travel to Orlando.

Four candidates live and serve in Africa and have been certified by the CIO Office to campaign for election to serve our church. They are Advocate Thabile Ngubeni (MBA), lay a candidate for the Judicial Council from the 19th District; Presiding Elder Willem Burger, a candidate for bishop from the 15th District, South Africa; the Rev. Dr. Katurah York Cooper, a candidate for bishop from the 14th District, West Africa; and the Rev. Dimpho Gaobepe, a candidate for bishop from 19th District, South Africa. These candidates will be seated with their Episcopal district delegations in Cape Town. The remaining candidates will be seated in Orlando, along with the majority of the voting delegation. The church, through various candidate forums, has provided exposure to all candidates and with other virtual means has afforded extensive interaction between the candidates and voting delegation. However, there is a disparity in campaigning opportunities. Candidates in America may have up to 10 campaign team members on-site, whereas this privilege is not available to the African seating. This is due to COVID-19 restrictions but also due to venue decisions taken in a short period. In this regard, the playing fields are in no way level. We urge the delegates to spend time doing research on all the candidates, especially those that do not live or serve in Districts 1-13. Through prayer and wise introspection, vote for those they believe will serve our Zion well at this critical time in our history.

The candidates from Africa are grateful for the work done by the General Conference Commission, the CIO and CFO offices, and the Council of Bishops in an attempt to ensure that each delegate enjoys the right and privilege to fully participate in GC2021. There is still room for improvement.

We are also excited about the new era that our church is entering. There is no going back. Change is the product of our COVID-19 experience and we must be willing to accept this with a radical thought adjustment. We call on our brothers and sisters across the Connection to pivot in the direction of change, innovation, equity, inclusivity, transparency, fiscal integrity, progress, and growth. We are praying for safe travel and the protection of everyone as we journey to GC2021 in Orlando and Cape Town, some at more risk than others. God bless the AME Church. ❏ ❏ ❏

BARABBAS VS. CHRIST: CHALLENGING LOUD VOICES THAT MAKE INCORRECT CHOICES

Reverend Dr. Jason Curry, Columnist

Luke 23 gives an account of an interaction between four parties: Pilate, Jesus, the rulers and chief priests and Barabbas. The rulers and the chief priest made a public appeal to a Roman official named Pilate to have Jesus killed. Pilate informed the angry crowd, which included the rulers and chief priests, that, after questioning Jesus, he did not believe that Jesus committed a crime. Pilate was therefore inclined to release Jesus from custody. However, the crowd insisted that Barabbas, an accused murdered, be released from custody instead of Jesus. Jesus had not been convicted of any crime, yet the majority of the people present insisted that Jesus be killed. The unorthodox, unchristian, irresponsible, short-signed, illegal and immoral actions of the crowd raise the following questions for members of the Christian community: Are the thoughts and actions expressed by a vocal majority always representative of the “right thing to do?” If the actions expressed by a vocal majority do not square with Christian principles, what should Christians do?

Even though the scene between the aforementioned four parties occurred thousands of years ago, the phenomena of the “vocal majority,” which expresses thoughts that are antithetical to the teaching of Christ, is apparent today. A clear unwillingness to support an increase in the minimum wage, an inclination to challenge and dismiss protocols intended to keep others safe during an interanion pandemic and an unwillingness to see the humanity of others who are hurt or negatively impacted by flawed policies concerning policing and immigration represent a dismissal of the Christian mandate to “love thy neighbor as thyself (Matthew 26:39).” Depending on the context, these “voices” that ignore or challenge the teachings of Christ, are in the in the majority. In my opinion, these people necessarily represent “loud voices that are making incorrect choices.” The Apostle Paul provides us with a model to address these “loud voices.” In Ephesians 4:15, Paul encourages the body of Christ to engage in “speaking the truth in love….” When we speak the truth in love, not only do we challenge public lies, we also tell the “loud voices” that we embrace their personhood in spite of their ideas. Speaking the truth in love provides a both context and an opportunity for understating and healing to occur so that common ground may eventually be achieved. “Loud voices” may never cease; however, through love, they may eventually make “correct choices.” ❏ ❏ ❏

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ACCOUNTABILITY VERSUS JUSTICE

By Stephanie Pierson

On April 20, 2021, after a three-week trial and 10 hours of deliberation, a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of three criminal charges relating to the murder of George Floyd. After a 10-minute video capturing George Floyd’s final moments surfaced online almost a year earlier in May 2020, protests ignited throughout the United States and the world and lasted for months. Although many people celebrated the verdict and pointed to it as an example of how our criminal justice system still works, Chauvin’s guilty verdict is an act of accountability and not of true justice. True justice requires measures that prevent these atrocities and murders of Black individuals from ever happening.

Since 2015, at least 5,000 people have been shot and killed by the police, and almost 1,000 people have been killed by the police in the past year. In the same weeks as the Chauvin trial, police officers killed many other unarmed individuals, including Daunte Wright and Andrew Brown, Jr.

These are not isolated incidents; instead, they are an indictment of our current policing system, a system that disproportionately targets Black people and other people of color. Chauvin’s conviction represents only one officer being held accountable despite numerous instances of police brutality over the past decade. We lack historical examples of police accountability because few police officers are even charged when they kill an individual due to doctrines like qualified immunity. We should not expect one guilty verdict to stop the cycle of police brutality, ...continued on p21

THE SUPPRESSION OF VOTING RIGHTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY

By Quardricos B. Driskell, Columnist

Everyone except for Republicans seems to realize that Georgia’s recently passed voting overhaul, S.B. 202 is a racist attempt to suppress voting rights.

Even South Carolina’s U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, who gave the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress on April 29, included a robust defense of this insidious law. Sen. Scott defended the Georgia voting laws as “mainstream,” noting that he was “an African American who has voted in the South all my life” while claiming Democrats demagogued the issue for political advantage. Echoing Gov. Brian Kemp’s frequent refrain, Scott said Republicans support making it “easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

Yet, Gov. Kemp admonished progressive religious leaders for a boycott of Georgia-based company Home Depot in response to the company’s lack of opposition to the state’s controversial new voting laws. In April, Kemp addressed a coalition of faith leaders who announced the boycott, accusing them of not caring about Georgia workers.

“First, the left came for baseball, and now they are coming for Georgia jobs,” Kemp said, referring to MLB’s decision to move this year’s All-Star Game from Atlanta over the new laws. “This boycott of Home Depot - one of Georgia’s largest employers - puts partisan politics ahead of people’s paychecks.”

Like so many other issues, the simple truth is that the Republican Party and its leadership are a venal racket devoid of any core principles. They squawk about local control – which includes voting when it works for them and ruthlessly decimates the powers of cities to write their destinies when it suits them too.

Democrats need a winning strategy. But more importantly, African Americans need a winning strategy. According to Philanthropy News, dozens of foundation and nonprofit leaders have signed an open letter calling on asset managers to use their influence as corporate shareholders to change “business-as-usual practices” and help advance racial justice.

I wonder if nonprofits and faith leaders, including those within AME leadership, collaborate effectively and strategically and target companies in Georgia and throughout the country who suppress the right to vote. We know the AME church has joined a lawsuit along with other nonprofits against the law. There has also been a letter on behalf of the AME 90,000 parishioners in 534 churches across the state of Georgia calling for a boycott of Georgia institutions - the Coca-Cola Company, Chick-fil-A, and Delta Air Lines.

What’s lacking is a more precise picture vision, a strategic direction for efficiently boycotting these corporations that continue to do business and operate in states that suppress voting rights. These efforts seemed isolated, however. Are the AME Church, the NAACP, ACLU, and the other coalitions not working together to ensure a productive outcome for voting?

As a clergyman myself, I am less concerned that faith leaders lead the boycott, but I am more worried about the strategy going forward and ensuring that the law is repealed either via the legal system or through corporation pressure. While Georgia’s voting suppression law is perhaps the most draconian, and Flordia’s voting restriction law signed on May 6, a distant second; there are currently, as of March 24, Republican legislators who have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states fueled by the prevarication that the 2020 election was stolen. These Republicans continued to retaliate against the Democratic victories in November, especially Georgia Senators Jon Osoff and Raphael Warnock, which gave the Senate the 50-50 margin.

Because be clear – these are not individual state strategies – this is a national Republican strategy. Their approach is to win the White House again, the Congress, and stacked the federal judiciary with conservative activist judges.

So, what’s the national strategy? Without one, we will continue to boycott without the right to vote, and white supremacy wins.

HOW THE POLITICS OF RACE PLAYED OUT DURING THE 1793 YELLOW FEVER EPIDEMIC

By Alicia Ault

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM MARCH 3, 2021

It was 1793, and yellow fever was running rampant through Philadelphia. The city was the nation’s biggest at the time, the seat of the federal government and home to the largest population of free blacks in America.

Foreigners were to blame, said one political faction, charging that immigrants were bringing the contagion into the country and spreading it from person to person. Another political group argued that it arose locally and was not contagious. A fiercely divided medical community took opposing sides in the argument over where the contagion came from and disagreed on how best to treat the disease. Federal, state and local officials and those with resources fled the city, while a huge number of people of color—falsely believed to be immune— stepped up to care for the sick and to transport the dead, even as their own communities were disproportionately hit by the disease.

Scholars at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History recently revisited that 1793 outbreak in the online seminar, “Race and Place: Yellow Fever and the Free African Society in Philadelphia,” as part of the museum’s ongoing Pandemic Perspectives. The virtual seminars aim to put today’s Covid-19 global pandemic into context and to give participants a deeper dive and analysis of the museum’s collections.

How the Politics of Race Played Out During the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic

Free blacks cared for the sick even as their lives were imperiled. ❏ ❏ ❏

IN 1794, ANGERED BY THE INACCURATE REPORTING OF THE WORK BLACK PHILADELPHIANS HAD CONTRIBUTED, RICHARD ALLEN (ABOVE) AND ABSALOM JONES PUBLISHED “A REFUTATION,” DETAILING HOW THE COMMUNITY CARED FOR THE SICK. (NPG. U.S. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE)

By Alicia Ault

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM MARCH 3, 2021

It was 1793, and yellow fever was running rampant through Philadelphia. The city was the nation’s biggest at the time, the seat of the federal government and home to the largest population of free blacks in America.

Foreigners were to blame, said one political faction, charging that immigrants were bringing the contagion into the country and spreading it from person to person. Another political group argued that it arose locally and was not contagious. A fiercely divided medical community took opposing sides in the argument over where the contagion came from and disagreed on how best to treat the disease. Federal, state and local officials and those with resources fled the city, while a huge number of people of color—falsely believed to be immune— stepped up to care for the sick and to transport the dead, even as their own communities were disproportionately hit by the disease.

Scholars at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History recently revisited that 1793 outbreak in the online seminar, “Race and Place: Yellow Fever and the Free African Society in Philadelphia,” as part of the museum’s ongoing Pandemic Perspectives. The virtual seminars aim to put today’s Covid-19 global pandemic into context and to give participants a deeper dive and analysis of the museum’s collections.

Curator Alexandra Lord, who moderated a panel of medical professionals and historians, says that socioeconomic and racial disparities were on full display in 1793 as they are during the current pandemic. “Those who could flee tended to escape the disease,” she says. The political and financial elite picked up and left the city. An estimated 10,000 to 20,000 of Philadelphia’s 50,000 residents fled.

But two free black men, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, were relentless in their drive to bring humanity to those who had found their way to Philadelphia. Allen was born enslaved in the city in 1760 and later purchased his freedom. Jones also had been born into slavery in Delaware had obtained his freedom through manumission in 1784. The two joined forces in 1787 to form the Free African Society, a social welfare organization that provided financial support, sick relief and burial aid.

The Society also created The African Church, which later split, with Allen— who established the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church at Mother Bethel AME—and Jones establishing the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas.

Yellow fever was not entirely unknown at the time. It originated in Africa with colonizers and slave ships bringing it to the Americas in the 1600s. Most got the disease and survived. But a small percentage succumbed to its toxic form, which caused high fever and jaundice—a yellowing of the skin and eyes—hence its name. Other symptoms included dark urine, vomiting and sometimes bleeding from the mouth, nose, eyes or stomach. Half of those who developed this form died within a week to 10 days. Yellow fever arrived in the U.S. from the West Indies. In the 1890s Army doctor Walter Reed confirmed a Cuban physician’s hypothesis that mosquitos spread the disease. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the virus that caused the illness was discovered.

Before the epidemic had run its course in December 1793—mosquitos did not survive the cold—the Irish-born economist Mathew Carey, who had stayed in the city to help, decided to publish his observations in a pamphlet, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia.

Carey described in vivid detail how the epidemic came to Philadelphia, the symptoms and treatments, how the citizenry fled, and how those who stayed coped—some by constantly chewing garlic or carrying it on their person, smoking cigars (even small children were given cigars), and incessantly “purifying, scouring, and whitewashing their rooms.” People avoided barbers and hair dressers, they deserted their churches, and they closed libraries and coffee houses.

“Acquaintances and friends avoided each other in the streets, and only signified their regard by a cold nod,” wrote Carey. “The old custom of shaking hands, fell into such general disuse, that many shrunk back with affright at even the offer of the hand.”

“In 1793, there were two leading schools of thought within the medical community about yellow fever,” says David Barnes, a University of Pennsylvania medical historian, who participated in the seminar. Many American doctors—most of whom were centered in Philadelphia—believed it was imported from the West Indies and that it was contagious, spreading from person to person. Others believed it was not contagious and not imported, but that it originated in the city in accumulations of filth, says Barnes. The faction who believed in contagion advocated cold baths and quinine—proven against malaria—and imbibing alcohol, as it was believed to fortify the body.

Philadelphia’s leading physician, Benjamin Rush, was a non-contagion believer. He thought the 1793 outbreak “originated in a shipment of raw coffee beans that had been left to rot on the wharf near Arch Street,” and that it was the stench, or “miasma” that caused the illness, so he advocated for cleaning up the city instead of closing the port, as the contagion believers desired, says Barnes.

Physicians in the late 18th century weren’t anything like today’s medical professionals. There were no true medical schools and doctors were “often the subject of suspicion and even hostility,” says Simon Finger, a medical historian with The College of New Jersey.

Many of their cures did not work and they were seen as unethical—charging fees that were regarded as extortion—and their practice of digging up bodies in cemeteries for dissection and study didn’t lend them much credibility, either, says Finger, who participated in the talk.

To counteract the negative image and to advance knowledge, Rush and colleagues joined together in 1787 to form the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. “What’s happening in 1793 is a really delicate moment in which physicians are working really hard to establish the respectability of their profession at a time when the public is skeptical of them,” says Finger.

Rush aggressively treated yellow fever by opening veins with lancets and letting the patient bleed out a pint or more, and by purges, which caused copious diarrhea, says Barnes. The measures were aimed at bringing fever down and depleting the “excesses” that Rush believed accumulated from the disease.

He was rarely questioned, says Lord. But Rush’s training of volunteers from the Free African Society in how to administer his purported treatment went a step too far. It fractured the College of Physicians. Rush ...continued on p17