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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

Conversations with Barry Black

Black, thank you so much for taking your time.

Hey, so let's start in the beginning for you.

And you can decide where the beginning is.

Take me back to, well, how did your life unfold?

And I'm looking to find a path to the Senate chaplaincy?

I won't give you the date because that's classified.

But I was in my mother's womb, and my mother was in an inner city tenement when someone placed a handbill in her mailbox, the title of the sermon, an evangelistic sermon, the day money will be thrown in the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, and no 1 will stop to pick it up.

My mother, who had migrated to Baltimore, the daughter of a South Carolina sharecropper, fourth grade education, said, I'm going to the meeting.

When will the money be thrown and where will it be thrown?

Once I have that information, I'm out of there.

She was drawn into the Adventist message.

And as she was baptized, she asked for the Holy spirit to place a special anointing on her unborn child.

And that, I believe, was the beginning of my journey.

So tell me something about your upbringing, what were the circumstances of your upbringing in Baltimore?

Well, I was very blessed because I had a cocoon, as did my eventually 7 siblings.

We were walking distance from the school on Madison Avenue and White Lock Street in Baltimore, Maryland, and from the church on Madison Avenue and Robert Street in Baltimore, Maryland.

And so, although my mother, who was a domestic, made $6 a day, but our church had a program where each child was expected to matriculate at the Christian schools.

And if the parents did not have the money, they had an education fund to subsidize the effort.

And so we matriculated through church school.

And of course, every time the church door opened, early morning prayer service, Sabbath school, divine worship.

And then we had something called MV, missionary volunteer, and people pulled out their sack lunches, and it was an all-day affair.

We went from church school to church, church school to church.

There was 1 dear lady, Sister Alberta Brown, who sort of adopted me.

And after school, I would go to her home.

She was essentially at least middle class, owned her own home, and I studied with her children.

And what a blessed, blessed difference that made in my life too.

So we were literally a village that again, provided that safety to develop.

You mentioned your mother, how about your father?

We were told he was a long-distance truck driver so he was gone most of the time and he was in and out.

He was very quiet and because he wasn't around very much, particularly during my adolescence, I became very angry.

I had a very abbreviated prodigal son experience.

Ran back to the church very, very quickly, but stopped praying for my father, I guess, in the 11th grade.

I went away to a boarding academy called Pine Forge Academy, wonderful, wonderful school, and just stopped praying for my father.

And then went off to Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama, still not praying for him, eventually deciding to pursue the ministry, but still not praying for him.

And 1 day I came home and the members of the church saw me.

They knew I was studying for the ministry.

I made an invitation to discipleship at the end of my message.

Had no idea that my father was even in the audience.

And who should respond along with others to that invitation to discipleship but my father, who died as a member of the Adventist church, and I'll see him again.

He's got some explaining when we get to heaven, but I'll see him again.

So he was not around as often as I would have liked to have.

But then Again, you know, he was a career war veteran and there were all kinds of factors that forced him to be away from home.

It was much easier for my mother as a domestic to get work than he.

We hear about the challenges confronting young people, young African-Americans, particularly growing up in the inner city.

And no matter your race or even your town, life throws a lot of challenges at you, but you came from the inner city.

How did you wind up studying in the ministry?

And when and how did you discover your calling?

I think that I always desired to be a preacher.

I really think I was called from my mother's womb.

I never desired to be anything else and yet, like Jonah, I ran from the calling because all of the preachers I knew were, let's just say, economically deprived.

And I had had enough of poverty and I was absolutely determined that that was not going to be my life.

And I used to tell God, I'm not going to be a poor preacher.

We used to have spring week of prayers and fall week of prayers at the academy that I went to.

And walking out under the stars after Dr.

Calvin Rock, an amazing preacher, had delivered a series of sermons, Our God is Able, which he later had published as a book.

And in the inner city, you don't see the stars like you do in the country.

And I stood before the majesty and infinitude of the universe.

And I was suddenly aware of how frail I was, how weak I was, how I was like a Lilliputian before Gulliver.

And I knew I had no explanation for where I'd come from or where I was going except what I had learned in scripture, prompted by my mother providing a monetary incentive, 5 cents a verse, then I'd memorized an awful lot of scripture.

And I think that was the formal recognition that even if it means poverty, I cannot run from this thing anymore.

And so I was a reluctant convert, as C.S.

Lewis says, but Francis Thompson's hound of heaven had caught me.

Tell me about your experience at Oakwood.

How did that in some special way set you up and prepare you for what was to follow?

Alabama had not yet begun to implement Brown v.

The Board of Education, so it was still segregated.

And to be on a campus where the president, the dean of men, looked like me, where the teachers had a passion, I mean, you almost tutored rather than taught.

Where they knew your strong areas and your weak areas, where they warned you regarding the environment that you were about to enter, where you, as they, may not be celebrated but tolerated.

And where they raised the bar for excellence.

In my Greek class, my Greek teacher saw that I was not taking notes.

I thought that my retentive memory, I didn't need to take notes, And he pulled me aside and he said, Darry, he says, he's still alive, he's like 102 now.

He says, if I don't see you taking notes, a C is the size you're going to get.

In that kind of environment, you could do that.

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Conversations with Barry Black

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