c. 1998 Religion News Service

ATLANTA _ From his new seat as the head of the nation’s largest African-American seminary, the Rev. Robert Franklin has a good view of the religious landscape of the black church. He doesn’t always like what he sees.”Our challenge is clear,”said Franklin, who has just finished his first half-year as president of the Interdenominational Theological Center, the seminary sponsored by six denominations, including the predominantly black African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and the Church of God in Christ. It has 410 students. “Only 15 percent of African-American pastors have any seminary training at all,”Franklin said in a recent interview.”And many African-American megachurches now have become one-stop shops for total religious programs. “Some of these megachurches might have 75 or 100 ministers on staff,”he added.”Many of their members really do believe their pastor and church are giving them all they need to know about what the Bible teaches about everything essential. And many of these megachurch pastors have little or no theological training.” At the same time, Franklin is fearful many black churches are abandoning their historic role of being a social anchor in black communities, especially the struggling inner cities.

While such a situation makes him unhappy, it also has given the 44-year-old former Ford Foundation executive a mission _ to make his seminary students into what he calls”public theologians”who will be in the vanguard of religiously and economically transforming black America’s churches and communities.”In its 40th anniversary year, ITC sits poised at a critical juncture,”he said.”I came here with a firm belief that we can help to make ITC a global center for creativity and integrity and scholarship and imagination in helping African-American churches _ of many theological persuasions _ find the best ways to improve their members and their communities.” Franklin’s peers think he is just the person to do it.

The Rev. H. Beecher Hicks, pastor of the prestigious Metropolitan Baptist Church, said Franklin”is a powerful thinker and a real treasure”for the African-American church.

The Rev. Clarence Newsome, dean of the School of Divinity at Howard University _ the nation’s second largest predominantly black seminary _ and, like Franklin, committed to building bridges between theological education and public policy making, says Franklin is able to help people”see … the vital importance and relevancy of theological insights to public policy debates.” With his background, training and theology, Franklin said he believes he is in a prime position to help forge new alliances between”the sacred and the secular”for what he calls comprehensive community development with”prophetic and ministering”churches as the centerpieces.”There has been a wide chasm between churches and secular social service agencies,”he said.”Churches have tended to discount the vast independent sector when trying to meet complex community needs. The secular world has tended to downgrade what churches historically do for the economic, political and social fabric of cities and towns.”At ITC, we hope to gather data, pick brains, share ideas and train seminarians who can bridge these chasms between churches and the secular society.” Before heading the ITC, Franklin spent two and a half years at the Ford Foundation as director of the grant program for African-American congregations.

But, he said, his spiritual journey began much earlier when as a 14-year-old on the south side of Chicago he watched the televised events surrounding the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

As King’s funeral cortege moved along the three mile route from Ebenezer Baptist Church to Morehouse College _ King’s alma mater _ Franklin said he felt a feeling from God that Morehouse _ which meant so much to King _ would become special to him, too.

Three years later he entered Morehouse, and after graduation went on to graduate work at the University of Durham in England _ with study opportunities in the former Soviet Union, North Africa, France and Spain. He received his master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Along the way, Franklin was ordained in the Church of God in Christ and spent 11 years teaching.

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While King and other African-American leaders have inspired him, Franklin said his true spiritual hero as a boy was his grandmother, who was a deaconess in St. Paul Church in Chicago.

In his latest book,”Another Day’s Journey”(Fortress Press), Franklin writes that”Grandma’s house and her table were places where the community met, and where good religion was practiced and experienced. Grandma’s garden next door was a place of many treasures. … It is now clear to me that Grandma was resisting the dehumanizing effects of urban living. … Her garden represented defiance, self-empowerment, practical enrichment and hope for the larger community.” Those four phrases _”self-empowerment, practical enrichment, hope and larger community”_ are the vision Franklin has for the type of seminary training ITC plans to provide in the next millennium.

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He said he wants ITC to become”a national think tank, a research center, a clearing house for data on African-American churches”and he is encouraging ITC faculty to redirect their research and writings to focus more clearly on practical issues for laity and local churches.

While his vision is often global, it is rooted in the local.”We also have a fervent dream to provide a rich fount of services to our surrounding neighborhoods, to help them with the basic things they need for better living,”he said.”They need child care, elder care services, improved housing, ministry to AIDS sufferers and their families, among other things. “I sincerely believe we can model how to train spiritual leaders to help empower and bring hope to the larger community around our campus,”he said.”If we can teach them to do that while students here in Atlanta, I believe they can fan out across the world and empower needy people by the thousands.”… Our motto here will be, `You can’t save the whole world, but you can save this block’.”

DEA END HARWELL