Path to Zion: A Q&A with the Rev. Dr. Chauncey P. Harrison

While people were busy preparing for the celebration of the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan last month, the Rev. Dr. Chauncey Pierre Harrison talked about his life and his hopes for Zion with The Inquirer.

During the second year of my master’s in divinity program at Yale, I knew God was calling me to be a pastor. As I was working in the library one day, I sensed God was sending me to Philadelphia. I just discerned it within. I ended up googling Black Baptist churches in Philadelphia, and Zion was the first church to pop up. But they already had a pastor, so I thought what’s next? … I came across a sermon online by Pastor Waller, and I was mesmerized. I called him up and asked if I could shadow him one Sunday. And on the second Sunday in June, this would have been in 2014, I came down and shadowed him that Sunday morning, went to lunch with his family. He had a speaking engagement — in West Philly that afternoon — I went with him there

The third year, [at Yale] I visited [Waller’s] church again, in June of 2015. This was just after graduating. But this time, Pastor Waller asked me to preach the 6:45 a.m. service at the West Campus of Enon Tabernacle on Coulter Street. I went back to Chicago after that and stayed for three years, but I kept returning to Philadelphia to preach guest sermons at Enon.

» READ MORE: Zion Baptist just honored its iconic past. Now a dynamic young pastor wants to help it move forward.

Deacon Frank Richardson, here at Zion, saw one of my sermons [online] and contacted Pastor Waller, to ask about inviting me to be a guest preacher at Zion. From those guest sermons, during a time Zion was looking for a new pastor, I was hired.

I think people forget that Pastor Sullivan was 28 when he came here. The people God used were young: Jesus started his ministry at 12 and fulfilled his purpose at 33. King Josiah [of Judah] was 8 when he took the throne, and David was 15 when he fought Goliath.

Youthfulness brings creativity, innovation, new thought, new perspectives, and new ideas and vitality. Still, young men and women can fail because of a lack of counsel. That’s why It’s important to have older people who can give their wisdom and insight.

Zion is not in this situation alone. There are churches throughout the city and the country that have an older congregation that has not reached the millennial generation. The pandemic brought a sense of urgency about our churches. Many of our churches couldn’t survive the pandemic. The problem is: How do you reach those you already have, but who are staying home? And how do you reach the next generation and build a new, expanded membership online? You may have many church members who may never walk through the door.

You want to be able to create an environment and culture in your church that appeals to families, with programs for children and teens.

When I wrote my dissertation on revitalizing urban churches I found that if you are serious about revitalizing your historic church in the inner city, there are six areas you need to invest in: preaching and teaching; praise and worship — which is the music ministry; having a children, youth, and family ministry; Christian education; outreach, which is community outreach; and missions, both domestic and abroad.

I’ve studied churches throughout the country, and if it’s a growing church — whether they have 200, 2,000, or 20,000 members — those six areas, they heavily, heavily, heavily invested in.

You can’t be a Black Baptist church in the inner city of America when people come on a Sunday morning and they don’t’ hear some really good preaching. And the music has to be through the roof, on fire. So you have to invest in music ministry.

I think this area is poised for some new development along the Germantown Avenue corridor. Zion’s Called to Serve Community Development Corp. [CDC] led by our Associate Pastor Michael Major, is working on redeveloping the old Zion Annex across [Broad] Street. The CDC just got a $1 million grant from the William Penn Foundation to renovate the Annex building [once Trinity Reformed Church, which Zion bought in 1969] and convert it into the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan Community Impact Center. The CDC is also working with developers on a couple of vacant properties the church owns on Venango and on Lennox Streets.

One thing I noticed when I came here, there was trash everywhere. On the day of my installation, [July 1, 2018] the governor was here, the mayor was here, and City Council members were here. I remember City Councilwoman Cindy Bass, who represents this district, was here. But when I parked my car on Venango that day, I had to stretch my feet out over the trash in the street. But change starts in small steps.

There are some fancy garbage cans on the corners. We have five in the area. There’s one at Broad and Venango; one at Broad and Lennox, near the parking lot; one at Venango and Carlisle; and two at 15th Street, on the left and right corners at Venango.

Our janitor takes the bags out, and we now take 700 gallons of trash off the street every month. We also started a program called Clean Up the Block, where every first Saturday of each month, we pick up the trash on Venango for a few blocks.

[He has noted that some of the neighbors also clean their blocks now and have thanked him for cleaning the neighborhood.]

I’ve also put in 731 service requests to the city for between the 1400-to-2200 blocks of Venango — that’s from Broad at Venango, down to Hunting Park Avenue. There have been abandoned buildings that need to be boarded up, abandoned cars that needed to be towed, and we’ve reported fly dumping, bags of trash dumped on the street and on lawns.

My big area is public works and public safety. Broad and Venango should look as clean as Broad and Arch. We also have a good relationship with the 39th Police District, which has held some of their community forums here.

Chicago and Philly are cousins, it’s just that Chicago has one million more people. But the same promise and perils are in Chicago as in Philly. I was raised mostly by my grandparents and my mother in Englewood, one of the poorest neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago.

My parents weren’t together. But I grew up in the church. My grandfather was a preacher and my grandmother was a musician. During the three years I returned to Chicago after Yale, I worked as a youth pastor for a year, and also for a community organization called Teamwork Englewood, that dealt with public safety. We had a “Shots Fired” technology employed where devices were installed in neighborhoods that could detect when guns were fired before the residents had time to call 911.

Because of that technology, and our efforts to build relationships with the community, we led the city of Chicago in reductions of shootings and murders.

Yes, I had some difficulties. I went to an underfunded school where the teacher-student ratio was really bad. I had to repeat third grade twice. The second time I missed moving up by only one point on a standardized test. While I remember being embarrassed, I also had some really good teachers who helped us by focusing on improving our reading skills. They taught those of us who were held back in a mobile unit outside of the regular classrooms. The teacher-student ratio was much better. And we had some really good teachers, Ms. Canady and Ms. Lindsey.

We had two teachers who gave us that additional support. I was not reading on the level that I should have been reading on. They were very strict on us; they were teachers, but caring mother figures as well.

Historic churches like Zion have to have a future beyond that history. Rev. [Raphael] Warnock, pastor of Dr. Martin Luther King’s church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, is in the same position. We thank God for the ministry of an iconic pastor of the past. But he’s no longer here. I tell my members: I’m still excited about your future. I still believe that better is not behind you, but better is before you.