Bishop C.B. Peter Morgan (left) and son, Rev. Carrington Morgan share their thoughts during an interview with The Gleaner at their Water Lane offices in Kingston.
- Ricardo Makyn photo
Mark Dawes, Staff Reporter
AFTER TWO decades of being the senior pastor of the Covenant Community Church group, the Rev. Dr. C.B. Peter Morgan has left that denomination to form his own Christian ministry which has inner-city residents as its primary target audience.
To fulfil his vision of ministering to the poor, the Rev. Dr. Morgan, his wife, Dr. Pat Morgan, and his son, Rev. Carrington Morgan, have since June, moved their operations to 53 Water Lane in downtown Kingston.
The Rev. Dr. Morgan has formed, City Life Ministries, which is an organisation geared towards implementing projects to empower the lives of inner-city residents of Southside, in central Kingston. It is out of this engagement with the community, he explained, that they requested of him, the establishment of a church to facilitate the worship of God. In response, he has been convening worship services at the Jamaica Conference Centre, and so the
St. Andrew City Church has been birthed.
COVENANT WAS BORN
Bishop Morgan came to prominence in the church community during the 1970s as one of the leaders of the Charismatic Movement - also known as the Renewal Movement. Out of that movement Covenant Community Church was born and registered as a church in 1983. In 1991, the church, which then met at 97 Old Hope Road, St. Andrew, was hit by a lawsuit. The courts ruled that it was a breach of the covenantal use of the property for a church to be functioning there.
Accordingly, the church took a decision to divide themselves into seven smaller churches spread throughout the Corporate Area and Portmore.
Having left the Covenant Community Church group, Rev. Morgan explained, "I don't really have a financial base for my life and ministry. But when you are a faith-worker, you depend on the Lord and God has been faithful to us."
Bishop Morgan said he always had an interest in working with the poor and that in the past by partnering with other Christians in the Covenant Community Church group, significant progress had been achieved in that regard for Trench Town and Majesty Gardens.
Southside came on his radar years ago largely through the initiative of his wife. Years ago, she and friends were walking along the Kingston Harbour where they met some young men from Southside who they befriended. Indeed, the Morgan family, he explained, 'adopted' the boys. That friendship lasted for years and it became a foundation upon which City Life Ministries now engages the Southside community.
With his consecration as bishop last January, he resolved that he wanted to be a bishop to the poor. "So one of the things I felt that was crucial in doing that was to relocate the central operations of my office from uptown to downtown. I did not want the role of bishop to be identified with a status symbol that is middle-class. But I wanted it to count for the people who really needed what I have to give."
What specifically does he hope to do for the poor? "We think in terms of community transformation, community development-We developed a perspective we call it the I-61 Programme. I-61 comes from Isaiah 61. It is developed with a sociological frame of reference. It has a strong spiritual base to the operations. It engages the community in the empowerment of the young people, lifting their self-image and engaging them in their own efforts in transforming their community. Rev. Carrington Morgan, who is executive director of City Life Ministries, explained that there are a number of entities, some overseas-based, who are eager to invest in Southside's renewal, but he has been asking them to hold strain, until certain aspects of the I-61 Programme has matured. He further explained that the I-61 Programme is foundational to all other projects City Life Ministries hopes to implement and facilitate in Southside.
A hallmark of the Morgan family's way of doing ministry is to have regular walks through the community. As they did this, Bishop Morgan and Rev. Carrington Morgan explained, they spoke to the people, listened to the people, and played with the people. It is out of this listening to the people, they explained that the request came to them to start a church. Up to that time, the Morgans had only a vision of doing projects in the community.
VERY DIFFERENT
Inner-city dynamic, is very different from other kinds of communities, Bishop Morgan stressed. Sunday mornings, he said, is reserved for domestic chores. Southside residents find the afternoons a more convenient time to go to church. Hence Kingston City Church, which meets at the Jamaica Conference Centre, in Kingston, convenes at 2:30 p.m. That church has an attendance of about 70-80 adults and 40 children weekly. They represent a mix of uptowners and downtowners. After services every Sunday, the Morgans lead the church in going on a walk through Southside. This, Bishop Morgan, said has helped to reduce the cultural distance between uptowners and downtowners.
Asked if the Southside residents were getting saved, Bishop Morgan said: "Well, it depends on what you mean by 'saved'. These people are very religious. They call on God. Sometimes before they go out on their missions they call on God. Because they see life as being lived on the cutting edge and they live in a survival mode and they are always depending on God. When the hurricane ('Ivan') came, they were miraculously spared and as far as they are
concerned - it is God ( that spared them). We do not push and force them to make 'decisions' (to accept Christ as Saviour). They are aware that 'decision' making is very important. But for some of them - the ethical and moral frame of references that they have for living doesn't readily fit within the traditional Christian context especially with regards to family structures and their personal inter-relatedness and how they solve their problems.
"So what we are really doing is trying to acculturate them in Biblical principles and to engage them in what we are doing. We are trying to get the church to be built around their needs and their culture. It is not an uptown church coming downtown. It is a downtown church inviting people from uptown to share in it," Bishop Morgan said.
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