Thanks for the note, Phantom.
Those who are familiar with the Dutch Reformed world will understand a little bit about what it means to sit down with a young black father with a significant record of drug use or criminal convictions, give him a copy of the Heidelberg Catechism, and tell him that his only comfort in life and in death is not his needle and not his weed and not his buddies from the ’hood, but rather Jesus Christ who went to court and was convicted and sentenced to death for crimes he did not commit — our crimes.
The Catechism was written to teach German Christians in the Palatinate, often illiterate peasants who knew virtually nothing about the Bible, not only the basics of the Bible but how to apply the Lord's Prayer and Ten Commandments to their lives.
It works pretty well with people even if they don't have blond hair and blue eyes, as long as the know they're sinners who can do nothing to earn their own salvation.
Lack of discipleship is a major problem in the black church, but in fairness, that is rapidly becoming a huge problem in other evangelical churches. The Bible says a great deal about how to live our lives after we're saved, not just about how to be saved. That's what it means to build a Christian family and a Christian culture, and it's a huge gaping hole in the teaching of far too many American churches, whether white or black.
Obviously I'm a Calvinist, but I think the same focus on discipleship could be done with Luther's catechism, or the Baltimore Catechism for Roman Catholics, or a serious in-depth Sunday School curriculum for non-creedal evangelicals. There is simply no excuse for churches letting their members get blown around by every wind of false teaching without a solid foundation of discipleship based on what the church says the Bible teaches.
Singing “Shine, Jesus Shine” fifteen times with your hands in the air may make you feel good, but a focus on entertainment and emotion simply will not build a strong Christian faith, and the result will be the spiritual ignorance combined with grossly sinful behavior and broken families that has become common in the black church. Cheap grace is not grace at all — it atrophies Christian character, exposes families to collapse, and given time, destroys the culture.
White families are today in the same position that black families were a generation ago, and we're well down the road to destroying not only minority culture but all of America.