RIDGECREST, N.C. (BP) — The Black church is facing a cataclysmic problem of desertion amid an emphasis of creating a worship experience that looks like heaven, pastor Greg Perkins said July 22 on the opening night of the Black Church Leadership and Family Conference (BCLFC).

“The Black church as we know it is in decline,” Perkins, president of the National African American Fellowship (NAAF) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), said in advance of his sermon at Ridgecrest Conference Center.

Cataclysmic, Perkins said, is nearly half of young Blacks were seldom or never attending church in 2021, according to Pew Research. Author Jemar Tisby points out from the research that as many as a quarter are attending white or multiethnic churches, taking with them their gifts of talents and tithes — a shift not seen among white Christians.

“If the data continues to trend in this direction there will no longer be a need for this conference because there will no longer be a Black church,” Perkins said. “In our pursuit to create gathering spaces that look like heaven, many have missed the fact that we’re not in heaven, and we yet are dealing with fallen man.”

Perkins describes his pastorate, The View Church in Menifee, Calif., as multiethnic and affording a dominant Afro-centric worship experience.

Often, the image man creates of a heaven-centric image is white leadership with a diversity of ethnic participation in the congregation, he said.

“Well, that’s not what heaven looks like,” Perkins said. “It is interesting that Blacks pursue this heaven-centric hermeneutic that I subscribe does not exist. We don’t know what heaven will look like. We know every tribe and every nation, but we’ll be in our glorified state then.”

Perkins said he was neither “race-baiting” nor telling Blacks which church to attend, but was rather citing a false hermeneutic that is detrimental to the Black church in particular.

“I cannot prescribe to someone their faith journey,” he said. “What I’m saying is, as the president of the National African American Fellowship, there are inherent dangers to the ongoing relevance and presence of the predominantly African American worship spaces and that we do not see that in other ethnic groups.”

Black churches hold a particular and peculiar value within God’s body, said Perkins, who leads a fellowship of about 4,000 African American churches and missions within the SBC.

“I think the Lord gifted (His creation) with specific spaces of gathered worship because He understood that there needed to be micro-communities within the broader macro Christian community because of fallen man,” Perkins said. “I’m better because of the Black church. I’m better because of the Black pastor. I’m here today because of the Black church.

“The Black church understands my lived experience and embraces my whole self.”

He encouraged a both/and model based on the pursuit of Christlikeness, rather than a heaven-centric hermeneutic.

“I want to pursue a church that models Christlikeness,” Perkins said. “And whatever the ethnic composition of that church is, it doesn’t matter to me, because if we’re pursuing Christlikeness, He’ll be glorified.”

Churches that pursue a heaven-centric hermeneutic mean well, he said, but can lose spiritual richness and thereby miss the mark of the church.

“Often these gathering places whose origin is anchored in the God-centered, Christ-exalting aspirational goal of pursuing Christlikeness,” as he put it, “sadly devolve into gentrified spaces devoid of the rich, image-bearing distinctives that make the body of Christ so amazing.”

The BCLFC runs through July 26 with events designed to equip pastors and lay leaders within African American and urban churches, offering preaching, worship, teaching, training, fellowship and fun for individuals and families.

Mark Croston, Lifeway Christian Resources’ national director of Black church ministries, hosts the annual conference that incorporates talent from several SBC entities and numerous churches. This year’s theme is “Thrive,” based on Psalm 92:12-15.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.)