Rev. Eugene Rivers

Reverend Eugene F. Rivers, III is co-director of the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation and pastor of Boston's Azusa Christian Community, a Pentecostal Church affiliated with the Church of God in Christ, located in the Four Corners section of Dorchester, Massachusetts.

Rivers was born in Boston and reared in South Chicago and North Philadelphia. He was educated at Harvard University, and has worked on community development and various aspects of Christian activism for nearly thirty years. At the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, he is working to build new grassroots leadership in forty of America’s worst inner-city neighborhoods by 2006. He also serves as President of Azusa's social service arm, the Ella J. Baker House, which provides street intervention, education and mentoring for hundreds of youths in the Boston area each year.

Rivers has developed several programs and ministries including the Seymour Institute for Advanced Christian Studies and the Dorchester Uhuru Project. He is General Secretary of the Pan African Charismatic Evangelical Congress that organizes U.S. churches to assist in Africa in dealing with AIDS. His outreach work on the streets of Boston was recently featured in the film documentary, “God and the Inner City.”

Rev. Rivers also serves as a member of the Advisory Board of the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy and was a featured speaker at the Roundtable's 2002 Annual Research Conference.

Rev. Rivers:

It’s interesting because the joke is that it’s usually the right-wing fundamentalists who are the ideologues and the dogmatists. But what is amusing to me is the anti-religion sentiment is deep-seeded among certain sectors of the liberal elite -- the liberal anti-religionists who argue that they‘ve never seen anything that was faith-based they’ve liked and that there‘s rarely effective programs.

For example, there are people I would be in dialogue with and I’d say, “We’re in the neighborhoods, we’re serving people. You are not here. You’re not coming any time soon to these violent neighborhoods. Yet you argue prima facie that these faith-based institutions can’t do it. That’s crazy. I don’t mind you being opposed to them if you come down and looked at what’s done, and then said on the basis of your systematic research that the stuff is ineffective. But you don’t even have interest in this stuff to even do that.”

Then you’ve got the frothing-at-the-mouth fundamentalist guys who are simply the counterpart to the other guys. They’re the folks who say faith-based organizations do everything. The reaction on the other side is we should not make exaggerated claims about the effectiveness of faith-based organizations.

So you have these two extremes, both of which are equally erroneous. On both extremes, you have your fairly irrational forms of dogmatism, in terms of their ideological positions.

The Roundtable:

Are faith-based organizations more effective than secular programs?

Rev. Rivers:

Faith-based organizations, under certain conditions, can be very effective. Not necessarily the most effective. And so the argument isn’t that they are more effective, but that they can be under certain conditions. And we need to understand what those conditions are.

To the extent to which those conditions are replicable, we can expand their capacity to be even more effective. That seems to be a moderate proposal that’s eminently logical.

The Roundtable:

In our last interview, the Roundtable featured Omar McRoberts, author of a new book called “Streets of Glory.”

The book’s premise is that a majority of churches in the Four Corners neighborhood, where your church is located, do not reach out to directly help the people of the neighborhood. Your congregation, however, has an active outreach program working with the people of Four Corners. What is your reaction to the book?

Rev. Rivers:

It’s interesting he didn’t do extensive interviewing with any of the churches that did the most work. He looked at the number of churches doing or not doing work, but he didn’t look at the work being done by the few that were working with violent gangs in this neighborhood.

When you take the small slice of Four Corners, the argument becomes: Is the sample a representative sample?

One criticism of Omar’s work is that he takes an unrepresentative sample of the neighborhood and doesn’t do a comparative analysis. For example, are the black churches in Boston -- given the same socioeconomic profile -- going to function the same as black churches in Atlanta, Los Angeles or Detroit? So there’s a basic flaw in methodology.

How do we know that what he found in Four Corners -- which isn’t completely representative of the black neighborhoods of Boston -- is atypical or representative of faith-based organizations with the same socio-economic profile, unless we look at Baltimore or some other city with a similar profile, and say these were the consistent findings?

In Los Angeles, the churches are responding differently there to the challenge that you would have found in Four Corners or even Four Corners versus lower Roxberry. How do we know if this is comparative if we don’t have a comparative framework?

If you look at the high performing churches and find out what are the unique features of those churches that made the difference from the ones that were non-performers with the violent gangs -- What was unique, if anything, about both particular churches? Was it the leadership? Was it a charismatic personality? Did they have a different socio-economic profile? Were they better educated?

The Roundtable:

The Ten Point Leadership is about to launch a new effort in Los Angeles. Tell us about that.

Rev. Rivers:

We are mobilizing about 100 churches to work with Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton, targeting the most violent neighborhoods in south central Los Angeles. We will be ministering, mentoring, and monitoring kids that are on probation and repeat offenders, targeting the most impoverished zip codes in those areas.

The Roundtable:

Recently, a White House spokesman said that President Bush has held back his AIDS funding support of $3 billion for 2004 because of a concern that a system is not yet in place to use the money effectively. Can you tell us more about this?

Rev. Rivers:

I just got off the phone a while ago with the White House. There are two sides to this.

One argument is to give the money to these governments and take the "Close-Your-Eyes/Hail Mary" approach, which doesn’t guarantee there are any accountability structures in place for the money not to be wasted.

I was just in Nigeria, where there are real questions about whether the money will actually get to the people.

On the other side, the Bush people are saying, “We’d like to have some accountability structure in place so that this dough doesn’t get burned up.”

Corruption is a question that we traditionally have not had to ask about service organizations here, but it’s a real concern in these countries. Each of those arguments has an element of the truth.

The Roundtable:

Thank you for speaking with us.