Ten Point Plan The National TenPoint Leadership Foundation, founded by the Rev. Eugene Rivers, enlists churches to confront violence. Key elements: Adopt-a-gang programs for troubled youth. Commission missionaries to advocate for juveniles in court.  Evangelists meet with drug dealers. Develop economic development projects. Establish links between core city and suburban churches. Begin and support neighborhood watch programs. Counsel families in crisis through relationships with health centers. Convene summits for minorities to find alternatives to gang life. Establish rape crisis centers.  Include struggles of women and the poor in curriculum. Contact information: Jacksonville Faith-Based Violent Crime Reduction Coalition Bishop Vaughn McLaughlin 5119 Normandy Blvd. Jacksonville, Florida 32205 Office:(904) 695-0181 Fax: (904) 695-2034

(The following editorial appeared in the Florida Times-Union on Feb. 6, 2008.)

Faith's special place

Mayor John Peyton's latest step in his Jacksonville Journey initiative against murder and violent crime offers a promising new direction.

Peyton wants to engage the faith community, particularly churches that are predominately black and serve neighborhoods in the city's highest-crime areas.

The mayor last week announced the creation of a Jacksonville Faith-Based Violence Reduction Coalition. Vaughn McLaughlin, bishop of the 5,000-member Potter's House Christian Fellowship on the Westside, agreed to play a lead role in organizing the group.

Plans are still being developed, but the challenges are evident. Maps of the highest-crime areas in the city indicate large numbers of churches also exist in those zones, many of them African-American.

Despite individual church efforts, coordination among those churches and others outside the area has been lacking to strike back at a state leading murder-rate and the social factors surrounding it.

Enter the Rev. Eugene Rivers.

A fresh perspective
The mayor brought in the Boston-based evangelist to provide a perspective on his 10-point program featuring black church leaders that has helped to reduce crime in Boston and elsewhere.

Rivers, an African-American Pentecostal street minister who is Harvard educated, said the core of the program is prevention, intervention and enforcement.

Churches team with the criminal justice system to provide youth with ministry, support and social services.

The plan includes seeking alternative or reduced sentences for youth deserving of a second chance, street patrols, mentoring youth and standing by them at probation hearings and helping them to find jobs.

Black churches, he said, must develop a no-tolerance stand on crime in their communities.

He also said ministers among African-American churches must "move beyond rhetoric, complaining, whining and nursing grievances."

Rather than emphasizing racial rhetoric, "the Civil War and the Confederacy," Rivers told Jacksonville ministers and others, they need to concentrate on finding solutions to poverty, hopelessness and despair.

Playing the race card and blaming white people is "like a 33-inch long-playing record. Dude, we're on iPods now. No one wants to hear that and there's no market for it. All you are going to do is frustrate people of good will who don't want to hear anything stupid. Or you can focus on getting violent crime on the table in a smart way. That's a win-win."

Accountability a must
Rivers said churches must be challenged both morally and ethically and be held accountable for what they do.

"What are you going to do to serve the poor?" he asked.

He said it's essential to explore the connection between high crime areas and the interaction with the churches that are part of those neighborhoods.

He said communities need a new movement of faith that is not ego driven, personality centered or based on money.
Churches have a powerful message of hope, but must revisit how to relate to their communities, he said.

"We have to begin an entirely new conversation about what we do with our young people," Rivers said. "What we knew 30 years ago, 40 years ago does not apply to what is going on in this city. The language and the age of youth are entirely different."

Humility is essential for churches in making inroads, Rivers said.

The minister said he got the message in 1988 when a young drug dealer adopted him as a role model and sat him down to explain how he lived.

"I didn't give him some stupid thing about I was a bad dude back in the day and give him a war story about long ago and far away when dinosaurs roamed the land ... because frankly he didn't want to hear it."

Rivers said the first thing the young man wanted to know from him was, "Preacher, are you intelligent enough to shut up and listen? The reality I live, preacher, is different from anything you have known,'" Rivers said. "If you're not smart enough to listen, you don't have legitimacy to speak ... then you don't have moral authority."

Jacksonville's promise
Rivers said Jacksonville is a decade ahead of Boston when he began to introduce his program there in the early 1990s.

That city was much more polarized with far greater racial issues to overcome in having African-American ministers and law enforcement work together, he said.

And Rivers said Jacksonville has a big edge in having attentive political leaders and good will from a private sector that seems willing to help.

"Now we need the people of God to be salt and light and in the process resurrect faith and hope for a generation of defenseless children for whom faith and hope has died," he said.

Jacksonville, he said, has a chance "to do something extraordinary."

Rivers could be right.

Perhaps this is a good time to remember that every 1,000-mile journey starts with a single step.