The Reformer, December 07, 1969

              V^HIST. & TRAVEL

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^LuccrIBKARY °F S0UTH BEND

122 WEST WAYNE STREET
SOUTH BEND, IND. 46601

NATIONAL BLACK CHURCHMEN

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THE REFORMER

Vol. 2, No. 37

Your Community-Conscience Newspaper 15?

December 7,1969

Oldest South Bend Black Christian
Community Has New Home

South Bend's oldest Black
Christian community will of-
ficially move into a new
church building on Sunday,
December 7th. The Olivet
African Methodist Episcopal
Church formerly located at
310 West Monroe Street has
purchased the former Lowell
Heights Methodist church
building and parsonage at
719 and 724 North Notre
Dame Avenue, respectively.

The first worship service
in the new building of the
Olivet Christian community
will be at 11:00 A.M. on
the same day. A Dedication
Service open to the public
will be at 4:00 P.M. Bish-
op Howard T. Primm of
the Fourth Episcopal Dis-
trict of the A.M.E. Church

will speak at both meetings.
Refreshments will be served
following the afternoon
event. As many notices as
possible have been mailed
to area religious leaders
inviting them to attend. In-
vitations have also been ex-
tended to A.M.E. Ministers
from throughout the State
of Indiana.

The Olivet A.M.E. Church
was organized in the Mon-
roe Street neighborhood in
1870 and chartered in 1871.
Its first minister was J.
Bundy and its first members
were Mrs. and Mrs. Farrow
PoweU, Mr. and Mrs. James
Jackson, Mr. and Mrs. Jesse
Bridgeman, James Hurst,
John B. Lott, and John
Powell. The Olivet Church

The Rev. Roderick S.
Johnson is pictured in front
of the new home of the Ol-

ivet A.M.E. Church at 719
North Notre Dame Ave.

building just vacated was
built on the Monroe Street
site in 1917.

The present Minister of
the church is the Reverend
Roderick S. Johnson who was
appointed the Pastor of Oli-
vet on October 1, 1967 by
the then Bishop of the Fourth
Episcopal District, the Re-
verend Jospeh Gomaz, at the
Illinois Annual Conference of
the A.M.E. Church.

Before coming to South
Bend, Rev. Johnson was As-
sistant Pastor of the First
A.M.E. Church in Gary, In-
diana.

Rev. Johnson, a native of
Syracuse, N.Y., is a grad-
uate of Judson College in
Elgin, 111. and has a B.D.
degree from Northern
Theological Seminary, Oak
Brook, 111. He and his wife,
Barbara, have three chil-

Ul Oil,

The Rev. Mr. Johnson has
served pastorates in Elgin,
111. and Gary, Ind. He has
served on the faculty of a
Bible Institute in Chicago,
111. and, while serving as
assistant pastor at First
AME in Gary, directed the
Head Start Program for
eighty pre-school children
at the Baber Youth Center.

Between October 1968 and
1969 Rev. Johnson served as
Associate Director of Social
Services of South Bend's
ACTION, Inc., the local anti-
poverty program.

The Lowell Heights Meth-
odist congregation left the
building when they merged

(Photo by Milton Herring) Qje Evangelical United

Nicky Cruz Here This Weekend

By Mary Lou Giloth

Nicky Cruz, who will be
in town this weekend at Cal-
vary Temple and at Notre
Dame's Stepan Center, led a
life which was full of vio-
lence and gang warfare until
he experienced a total con-
version to Jesus Christ.

Some will recognize
Nicky's name from thebest-
seUing book THE CROSS
AND THE SWITCH BLADE.
There now is a book in paper-
back which tells the entire
story of Cruz's life up to
his conversion as well as
after it. The name of this
book is RUN BABY RUN.

Fascinating and at first
depressing, Nicky's story
begins with his life as a
child in Puerto Rico. Feel-
ing unloved and rejected by
his parents, Nicky became
vicious and unmanageable.
At the age of 15, he was
put on a plane for New
York. His mother and father,
realizing they could not
handle him, sent him to his

brother, Frank.

However, Nicky refused
his brother's help and after
being expelled from school,
turned to the street. He be-
came the president of the
Mau Mau gang. This part
of the story is full of gang
warfare, drugs and degen-
eracy.

It takes David Wilker-
son, a Pentecostal Street
Preacher, to bring Nicky
the good news that someone
DOES love him HIS name
is Jesus. The story of
Nicky's conversion is a
beautiful one. At first,Nicky
runs from the Lord but when
he finaUy accepts Him, like

St. Paul, he turns his life
to Christ with the same ded-
ication that he formerly had
given to the devil.

Nicky, and his wife Gloria,
are now working for the
Lord in the outreach for
youth program which they
founded in Fresno, Cali-
fornia.

Cruz will be at Calvary
Temple , 3717 S. Michigan
Street on Friday at 7:30
pm and on Sunday night at
7:00 pm. There will be a
mass rally at Notre Dame's
Stepan Center on Saturday,
December 6 at 7:30 pm.
The public is invited to hear
Nicky tell his own story.

Soul Food To Be Served At
Hansel This Saturday

The Friendly Frater-
nlzers Homemakers Club
wUl serve "Soul Food Din-
ners" on Saturday, Decem-
ber 6 from 12:00 to 4:30 pm.
Individual servings will be

$1.25 - family style, four
people or more, will be $1.00
per seving.

The dinner will be held
at the Hansel Center, 1045
W. Washington Street and

Rev. Roderick S. Johnson

Brethren Church on N. Iron-
wood Street to form
the Evangel Heights United
Methodist Church.

Local Council of
Churches Task
Force to Study
Black Manifesto

A local Council of Chur-
ches Task Force, under the
chairmanship of the Rever-
end James O. Banks, pas-
tor of Sunnyside Presbyter-
ian Church, South Bend, will
meet at that church on Tues-
day, December 9 at 7:21
pm. The purpose of the Task
Force is to consider the
broad implications of the
Manifesto concerning the
unity of the church, to eval-
uate the needs expressed
or implied by the Manifes-
to; and to explore the im-
plications for the religious
community of St. Joseph
County. Other members of
the Task Force include: Rev-
erend Benjamin Berry, Dr.
Eugene Balsley, Mr. Lu-
ther Dixon, Reverend James
Miller, Reverend Roderick
Johnson, Mrs. Phyllis Law-
rence, Mrs. Annabelle

TOGETHER"

Other Stories Pages 5 and 7
Editorial on Page 4

(Editor's note: What follows is the official statement
of the National Committee of Black Churchmen following
its national meeting at Oakland, California on November
14, 1969.)

WE came to Oakland as an act of faith.
We came seeking a deeper experience
of the mission of God in the contem-
porary world than has ever been pro-
vided by the denominations and lo-
cal congregations to which some of us belong, from
which some of us have fled in profound disillusion-
ment, qnd which some of us have observed, but only
with doubt and distrust.

In a time of increasing institutionalization and
bureaucratization of the Church, we do not come to
create a new institutional form of the Church. We are
not here to invent a new denomination. Our primary
and overreaching concern is to seek, through our com-
mon experience and consciousness of being black and
powerless in a part of the world dominated by white
racism and white power, a new religio-cultural, politi-
cal and economic vocation, which can relate to our
own deep alienation from a religious, cultural, politi-
cal and economic system. This system is not compat-
ible with our own instincts and sensibilities but has
been commended to us and imposed upon us by white,
bourgeois, European and American religious, political
and economic institutions interlocking and conspiring
with one another to whitenize and subordinate black
people.

This new vocation to which we are called is politi-
cal in the sense that it seeks radically to change, by
whatever means are necessary, the racist structures
which dominate our lives; cultural in the sense that it
seeks to identify, recreate, unify and authenticate
whatever traditions, values and styles of life are in-
digenous or distinctive to the black community; and
theological in the sense that we believe that it is God
—iiowcve* He ciiuoaes to reveal HiiliHu luuaj to op-
pressed peoples in America and in the Third World—
who has chosen black humanity as a vanguard to resist
the demonic powers of racism, capitalism and impe-
rialism, and to so reform the structures of this world
that they will more perfectly minister to the peace
and power of all people as children of One God and
brothers of one another.

WE black people are a religious people. From
earliest recorded time we have acknowledged a

! Supreme Being. With the fullness of our physi-
cal bodies and emotions we have unabashedly wor-
shipped Him with shouts of joy and in tears of pain
and anguish. We neither believe that God is dead,
white, nor captive to some highly rationalistic and
dogmatic formulations of the Christian faith which
relate Him exclusively to the canons of the Old and
New Testaments and accommodate Him to the reign-
ing spirits of a socio-technical age.

Rather, we affirm that God is Liberator in the
man Jesus Christ, that His message is Freedom, and
that today He calls all men to be what they are in
themselves, and among their own people, in the con-
text of a pluralistic world-society of dignity and self-
determination for all. We believe that, in a special
way, "God's favor rests today upon the poor and op-
pressed peoples of the world and that He calls them
to' be the ministering angels of His judgment and
grace as His Kingdom of Freedom and Peace breaks
in from the future upon a world shackled to ancient
sins and virtues and upon the present inequalities,
imperialistic wars, and ambitions of privileged na-
tions, classes and power groups.

(Continued on Page 7)

Thomas, Reverend Fred
Fiedler, Mr. Carl Ellison
and Mr. Odell Newburn. AU

persons interested in this
issue are invited to attend.

Model Neighborhood Issues Mid-Planning Report

The South Bend Model
Neighborhood Program re-
cently announced the com-
pletion of it's Mid-planning
Statement for the program's
planning year which began
March 15, 1969 and extends
to March 1970.

The Mid-Planning State-
ment, submit approximate-
ly mid-way through the plan-
ning year, contains a des-
cription of how the Pro-
gram's First Year Action
Plan is being formulated, a
summary of neighborhood

the proceeds will go to char-
ity.

problems and their causes,
and a listing of first year
objectives and the strategy
to be used in achieving them.

The strategy for the South
Bend Program emphasizes a
high degree of citizen in-
volvement of the private seo-
tor of the community, an in-
crease in the level of city
services and expenditures in
the neighborhood, and educa-
tion of the total community
about conditions within the
neighborhood, and the devel-
opment of a fully co-ordin-
ated planning process.

The 65 page working docu-

ment is presently being dis-
tributed to the appropriate
Federal, State, and Local
governmental agencies,
members of the Model
Neighborhood Planning A-
gency, Technical Advisory
Committee members, Inter-
University Committee mem-
bers,and other interested in-
dividuals for their review
and comments. Following the
review period, final approval
and formal submission of the
revised document will occur
in early 1970 as the first part
to the program's First Year
Action Plan.