As the pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal Church (FAME), Murray spearheaded FAME's efforts to end the theft and arson, and his parishioners served as human shields to protect others from violence. In the aftermath of the civil unrest, Murray inspired and mobilized politicians, religious leaders, entrepreneurs and policy experts to work together in order to redevelop and reinvigorate South Los Angeles.

An excerpt:

Twenty years ago, the Rodney King case exposed the institutionalized dimensions of racial profiling and police brutality, and challenged us to wrestle deeply with issues of civil rights, equal protection, and substantive justice. Twenty years later, our nation is struggling in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin's death. What does this say about racial equality and criminal justice in the U.S.?

We have not yet solved our problems with racial profiling and police brutality. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was accused of whistling at a white woman. Two nights later, he was shot, beaten, brutalized and drowned. In 2011, Kenneth Chamberlain, a 68-year-old former Marine and prison guard was at home when his health monitor alert device accidentally went off. The police came to his house, kicked in his door and shot him. And now the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a classic case of racial profiling by someone who was not even a police officer.

Look at Mother Liberty -- she has turned her back to the sea. Facing her children, who all share her DNA, she asks the question that all good mothers ask of recalcitrant children: "Aren't you getting a little old for this?" And after 400 years, we have to finally say yes.

Read the interview.

Several news stories about religion in the U.S. have caught my attention over the last couple of weeks, and they each highlight a different lens on what the future may hold for these and other groups, and how the public perceives religion as an enduring (or not) institution in society. First, and this has been a long time coming, the Crystal Cathedral has finally met its demise. After bankruptcy, the sale of the landmark sanctuary to the Orange County Roman Catholic Diocese and now the (somewhat ungraceful) exit of the entire Schuller family, the fate of the formerly iconic megachurch has been sealed. Whatever the future holds, the Crystal Cathedral will no longer enjoy its identity of the past 40 years—a cultural landmark melding Christianity, American consumerism and celebrity.

As the Crystal Cathedral story was making headlines, including on the “CBS This Morning” show (alas, my interview ended up on the digital cutting room floor!), just up the freeway from the Cathedral’s home in Garden Grove, the Los Angeles City Council was working on an important but complex redistricting plan. Buried two-thirds of the way into a recent Los Angeles Times story recounting the final approval of the plan were quotations from two of “several African American pastors” who were in attendance at the City Council meeting. These pastors spoke against the plan as it would, from their point of view, adversely impact the economic growth and development of large swaths of South Los Angeles. In contrast to the Schullers, these pastors were from medium-sized African American congregations and were acting as earnest advocates on behalf of their congregants and the surrounding communities. They are not famous, and the word “mega” does not figure into their modest stories—yet their actions and the cultural trends that they represent have enormous political implications citywide and beyond.

Within days of these two stories, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press reported that the Trinity Broadcasting Network, led by Paul and Jan Crouch (she of the ever changing hair color), is being accused by a former employee—and family member—of financial corruption intended to cover their use of company money to fund their lavish lifestyle. The lavish lifestyle isn’t the secret, but the corruption (if true) is the news item. Of course all accusations have been denied, but Crouch and company have had several similarly unsavory accusations leveled at them over the last several years, so we’ll have to wait for more revelations, or even a court case, to see what, if anything, is really going on.

Finally, the Dean of the Claremont School of Theology recently published an op-ed piece in the LA Times that argues for a re-thinking of how Americans approach religion and spirituality. He suggests that the “religious nones” are not necessarily rejecting a belief in God (no news there), and then suggests that “new” approaches like the “Emerging Church” present a “radically different solution” to the decline in affiliation with religious organizations. He suggests that the Emerging Church’s de-emphasis on doctrine and rigid organizational structures, and emphasis on being together, regardless of what one believes, so long as it involves a desire to engage with the teachings of Jesus, is the way forward for Christians and other religious groups—although presumably for non-Christian groups, the whole Jesus emphasis wouldn’t be the focal point.

For me, these four stories raise interesting questions about the current and future state of religion, in particular Christianity, in American culture. These questions include the following, although certainly there are many other important questions that could be asked.

First, what are we to make of the contrast between the consumerist ethos of Schuller and Crouch on the one hand, and the African American pastors fighting for their communities on the other? For me this raises two questions:

1) What is the role of the congregation in the larger community, and how can we make sense of it sociologically? For example, are important categories like race or social class a factor in the different roles that congregations take in relationship to the communities? Does theology play a role—that is, are some theologies more likely to encourage and support community engagement, while others are more inward looking and perhaps oriented toward individual spirituality?

2) What should the role of congregations be in regard to their surrounding communities? While this question is not something that social science allows us to ask, it is however an important question that church members and leaders can and should pursue, utilizing both the many theological and sociological resources available for them.

Finally, does the Emergent Church present such an unequivocal solution to the “religious nones” as the Dean of Claremont School of Theology would have it? My observations of the Emergent Church, included in Don Miller and my book, Finding Faith, suggest that while they may be onto what appears to be a new approach to Christianity and “doing church” (is anything really ever new?), they are rapidly becoming as institutionalized as the churches and denominations from which they are seeking to distance and distinguish themselves. In fact, I would argue that they are far from being an “emerging” or “emergent” church, rather, as measured by the amount of time they’ve been on the scene (at least 15 years), the number of institutions that claim some allegiance to being “emergent,” the books published by mainstream Christian presses (including book series on being Emergent), and leaders who are solely supported by their emergent religious activity (which is intended to build institutions sympathetic to the Emergent approach), they have established themselves as but one more option within the American religious ecology (Please note that I understand that this is a semi-global movement, in that it includes individuals and churches in the UK, Australia and other mostly English speaking countries.)

The group of people that so-called emergent churches are attracting are those who are looking for what we have framed in our work as an “expressive communalism” as related to religion. That is, people are looking for religious communities in which they are fulfilled spiritually, can express their faith (both in worship and in service to others), and where they actually form some sort of community of caring and belonging. This can probably be accomplished in many different types of organizational settings, whether megachurch, pub church, house church, or warehouse church, or, whether it insists on particular doctrines or not. Would orienting a church around the idea of “expressive communalism” solve the problem of “religious nones” or excessively consumerist religion? Who knows, after all, sociologists are notoriously bad at predicting the future, but then again, so is everybody else. So maybe the best way forward is to keep working at understanding the apparent contradictions of being a person of faith in a contradictory world.

At the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, we’ve been talking a lot lately about how different communities in the Los Angeles area have undergone significant demographic change, shifting in the last 20 years from predominantly African American to predominantly Latino communities. In fact, there remains only one predominantly African American community in south Los Angeles, while all the others now have majority Latino populations. This change presents many challenges and problems, not the least of which is the fact that there are now dozens—perhaps hundreds (and I’m not being dramatic in this)—of Black churches situated in those formerly African American neighborhoods. Which means that most of these congregations have been transformed from churches where most of their members lived in the surrounding neighborhoods and walked to church on Sunday (indeed many of these churches have very small, or no parking lots—in L.A.!), but who now live as far away as the Palmdale to the north, or Riverside and San Bernardino to the east.

The problem that these churches face is whether can they figure out a way to survive, let alone thrive, when their members are now in many cases former members, worshipping closer to where they currently live. Thus these churches are left with the dilemma of exactly who it is that they should serve, their few remaining long-time members, maybe attract a few more commuting members, or reach out to their Latino neighbors in their ministry and outreach programs. These churches have long ago paid off their mortgages, but they are now empty shells most days of the week, and on Sundays, most are barely one-quarter to one-half full. Several churches we have heard of have only a few remaining seniors, who are too old and lacking in resources to move out of the area, and are left to worship together as they, and perhaps their church, approach the inevitable end.

Yet this isn’t a new problem. Recently I had lunch with Paul Felix, a professor at a local evangelical seminary, and the president of the Los Angeles Bible Training School (LABTS). LABTS was founded over 50 years ago by African American leaders in the Christian community, with the same intent as that of most of the Bible schools founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Moody and Biola, to provide Bible training for lay people, free of charge. LABTS still doesn’t charge tuition, only minimal fees, and now their student body, again showing demographic changes, includes several Filipinos and a few Latinos, along with the larger number drawn from African American churches. At some point in our lunch conversation, I mentioned that right after graduating from college, I had taught elementary school in south Los Angeles, at a small school owned and operated by a medium sized African American church. In one of those crazy, “isn’t it a really small world” connections, it turns out that Paul Felix’s father had founded the church that operated the school, and Paul knew many of the people I had known during my time there.

As we continued to talk about the church, the school, and the neighborhoods, he deepened the story by telling me that his father had started that church as a church plant, and that it had formerly been a white church, but in an earlier demographic shift in the population of Los Angeles, with the area becoming predominantly African American, the church was sold in 1962 and became an African American Baptist church.

Will this sort of change happen again, only this time Black churches selling to Latinos? Or will the churches that remain in South Los Angeles figure out a way to adapt to the changing demographic landscape of their neighborhoods? There are a few examples of Black churches successfully expanding their ministry models to incorporate more residents of the neighborhoods where they’re located, but for most this remains an unresolved issue that in the end, will determine the ultimate fate of their churches. In the demographic changes of the mid-twentieth century, the solution for white congregations was to sell and relocate to, in their view, more hospitable locations in Long Beach and Orange County. But would that even be possible—assuming a church wanted to do that—in the current economic environment and with the cost of real estate in Los Angeles?

Only time will tell, but what I can say at this point is that we are in the process of organizing a project through which we can pursue some answers to the dilemmas facing African American churches in Los Angeles. My hunch is that this isn’t unique to L.A., although certain specific issues certainly are, so keep your ear to the ground—once we have this project up and running, we’ll at least have a better idea of the problems facing these churches, whether or not we have answers for them.