Black Church Growth.

The connection between African Americans and their churches remained a tie that bound, as they consistently led poll after poll as the most religious people in the United States. Ebony magazine estimated in 1984 that there were between 18 million to 20 million nominal black Christians in the United States, of whom approximately one-fourth were regular churchgoers. The largest single African American religious organization throughout the 1980s was the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., (NBCUSA), which boasted a membership of more than 7 million. The NBCUSA, long a conservative religious group in both its sermons and politics, entered the mainstream with the election of T. J. Jemison as its president in 1982. Jemison wanted to take this century-old organization into the mainstream to help combat some of the social ills that had inflicted the black community. NBCUSA actions, long overdue...