by Dr. Lani Wilson

Good morning, prayer and fasting partners. 2016 has been eventful, to say the least and it is over. It seems that it went by unbelievably quickly. Let’s pray for the fullness of God in 2017 with 2016 in the rearview mirror.

Our word to consider this week is number. Interestingly, not numbers, but number. It’s a complex word; verb, noun, single and plural. In mathematics it represents a value: 0, 1, 2…and so on. We think of numbers as measurement, efficiency, accuracy, concreteness. But number? We could say that when we use the word “numbers,” we are thinking of a multitude of things in a general sense, a quantity of certain things. The word number in and of itself is a complex word in English definition and usage. It can be plural or singular, as in a count noun like book or books (Apple Online Dictionary). It can also be singular or lacking a plural, as in a mass noun: Luggage, china, happiness (Ibid). Yet, even with the complexity of its uses, number is commonly accepted as a simple concept: Counting and enumeration. It is supposedly culturally neutral and unbiased. Yet:

Mathematics, as with science, has a human history and as such is fallible. As Bishop (1994:16) suggests, a dominant view of mathematics education is that it is 'culture-blind' and universal. But it must be remembered that it is Western mathematics which developed the idea of universal applicability and the validity of this idea. It is part of a discourse which is used to dominate and to establish superiority. The project of science, of which which mathematics is a part, is to create 'knowledge' and 'truth' for dominant society while transforming the 'truth' of subjugated knowledges into myth and fiction. For example, early Nordic, Anglo-Saxon and Greco-Russian stories are 'history', while early Mayan, Inuit or Ibo stories are 'pre-history'; the North is said to have 'creation theories', the South has 'creation myths'. The disciplines of science create their knowledges out of marginalized cultures. Subjugated history becomes dominant anthropology, subjugated medicine becomes dominant 'herbal remedies', subjugated ways of understanding and naming the physical world become dominant science and technology. Science may neither be the ultimate creator or destroyer of knowledge or 'truth', it is only able to enhance, deprecate or ignore what has gone before. (Dei, 1999:21-22) Just as Dei (1999) suggests about subjugated knowledges in many disciplines, subjugated mathematical knowledge becomes dominant "folklore" or "practices." It is largely ignored or deprecated in Western mathematical discourses.
Ethnomathematics and Language in Decolonizing Mathematics, Iseke-Barnes, Judy M. Race, Gender & Class7.3 (Jul 31, 2000): 133.

Ethnomathematics is relatively unheard of in the West and we have been brain washed into thinking that the Greeks created mathematics and that therefore, any use of number is foreign to us as a people, maybe even genetically?

The oldest mathematical artifact, the Lebombo bone, dates back to more than 35,000 years ago. It was found in the Lebombo Mountains near Swaziland.
13 Interesting Facts About Math in Ancient Africa: Where the oldest mathematical games in the world originated and other fun facts, Calli Welsch, Mind Research Institute, September 15, 2015 blog.mindresearch.org

It appears that numbers were first manipulated and used by Africans.

4.1. ARITHMETICS AND SLAVERY E.W. Scripture wrote in 1891 [American Journal of Psychology, Vol. IV, p.2]: "Perhaps brought to the front or produced by the necessity of competing with English traders armed with pencil and paper, many of the old-time slave-dealers of Africa seemed to have been ready reckoners, and that, too, for a practical purpose...[citing T. Clarkson, An essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly in Africa, London, 1788] 'It is astonishing with what facility the African brokers reckon up the exchange of European goods for slaves. One of these brokers has perhaps ten slaves to sell, and for each of these he demands ten different articles. He reduces them immediately by head into bars, coppers, ounces, according to the medium of exchange that prevails in the part of the country in which he resides, and immediately strikes the balance'. The ship captains are said to have complained that it became more and more difficult to make good bargains with such sharp arithmeticians". Scripture describes one possible way in which the slave trade influenced arithmetical knowledge in Africa. It would be interesting to explore further this and other possible influences, such as the disappearance or undermining of traditional African mathematical education by the physical elimination or 'exportation' of the bearers of mathematical knowledge (editors). 4.2 THOMAS FULLER AND HIS AFRICAN MATHEMATICAL EDUCATION Item 33 in 'Have you read?' contains brief information on the calculating prodigy Thomas Fuller (1710-1790) , born in Africa and brought as a slave to the USA in 1724. John Fauvel (Open University, England) was so kind as to track the source of Rouse Ball's article (item 33): E.W. Scripture, Arithmetical prodigies, American Journal of Psychology, Vol. IV, 1891, pp.1-59. Scripture gives the following information (p.3): "Thomas Fuller, known as the Virginia Calculator, was stolen from his native Africa at the age of fourteen and sold to a planter. When he was about seventy years old, 'two gentlemen, natives of Pennsylvania, viz., William Hartshorne and Samuel Coates, men of probity and respectable characters, having heard, in travelling through the neighborhood in which the slave lived, of his extraordinary powers in arithmetic, sent for him and had their curiosity sufficiently gratified by the answers which he gave to the following questions: First, Upon being asked how many seconds there were in a year and a half, he answered in about two minutes, 47,304,000. Second: On being asked how many seconds a man has lived who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old, he answered in a minute and a half 2,210,500,800. One of the gentlemen who employed himself with his pen in making these calculations told him he was wrong, and the sum was not so great as he had said - upon which the old man hastily replied: stop, master, you forget the leap year. On adding the amount of the seconds of the leap years the amount of the whole in both their sums agreed exactly' [American Museum, Vol. V, 62, Phila., 1799]. Another question was asked and satisfactorily answered. Before two other gentlemen he gave the amount of nine figures multiplied by nine. ...In 1790 he died at the age of 80 years, having never learned to read or write, in spite of his extraordinary power of calculation." Fuller could find also the sum of geometrical progressions

[F.D. Mitchell, Mathematical prodigies, American Journal of Psychology, Vol. XVIII, 1907, p.62].
Excerpted from African Mathematics Union Commission on the History of Mathematics in Africa, AMUCHMA-NEWSLETTER-3, Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, Mozambique, 03.02.1989

As African-Americans in the New World, what kinds of biases do we have about a number or numbers when we speak of Jesus, of God? Does it matter? If the concept of number were not important, then why would Jesus use it in such a personal and profound way in the Bible?

He pays even greater attention to you, down to the last detail-even numbering the hairs on your head!
Mathew 10:30 (TMB)

The fourth book of the Torah in the Hebrew Bible is titled Numbers, not because it is full of statistics or lists but because of how the Ancients named their books.

The fourth book of the Torah, Numbers, recounts memorable events of the Israelite wanderings from Sinai, God’s mountain, to the plains of Moab, just opposite the promised land. Thus, Numbers continues the story begun in Exodus and continued in Leviticus of the escape from Egyptian servitude, the desert journey to Mount Sinai, the revelation at Sinai and giving of the law, and the building of the Tabernacle with instruction on its operation. The current Hebrew name of this book, Bemidbar, “in the wilderness [of Sinai],” taken from the fifth Hebrew word in ch [sic]1, reflects this theme. In contrast, the English name, Numbers, derives from the Greek translation, the LXX, which titled the book after the censuses mentioned in the first four chs. This name reflects an earlier Hebrew name for the book, hapikudim, “the fifth concerning the census,” well-attested in classical rabbinic sources, from a period when books of the Torah were named thematically rather than after one of their initial words.
Numbers, pg. 267 (Jewish Study Bible)

Apparently, words are also symbols for content and value, just like numbers: What we see or count is not what it seems or the most important. Number.

As we all know, the organized Christian church is experiencing a decline in America. A New Year’s Day SF Chronicle article on Black churches in Oakland highlights several problems, including the Media’s perspective and presentation itself.

The problem is pervasive among Oakland’s black churches, said Michelle Myles Chambers, the West Side pastor’s wife and program assistant for the San Francisco Foundation’s Faiths program, which connects religious organizations with support from nonprofits and foundations. Pastors say younger people aren’t nearly as interested in organized religion as their parents were, or don’t like the messages being conveyed in services. Older members have died. But the biggest problem, they say, is the flight of African Americans from Oakland.
Oakland’s black churches struggle as African Americans leave, SF Chronicle, Laura Newberry, January 1, 2017 Updated: January 1, 2017 4:56pm sfgate.com

This reporter focused on only one geographical part of Oakland, revealing either her lack of understanding about the entire city of Oakland (focusing only on West Oakland) and/or the need for the article to pin a specific kind of bullseye on news in Black Communities in order for this freelance reporter to get the article published. It’s a complicated issue, and although the article highlighted the loyalty and love parishioners feel for their churches, one is left with both an accurate and disarming portrait of the Black Church and Oakland. Allen Temple is not and has not been immune to these phenomena. I call the 1040 foot Caldecott Tunnel “The OTHT,” the over-the-hill tunnel. Economic and political forces congealed in the 1990s to begin the Black Oakland exodus and no community of Color is exempt.

The departures are part of a transformation of neighborhoods that were once nearly all-black. In 1980, Oakland’s African American population numbered 159,000, or 47 percent of the city’s total. Thirty years later, it had shrunk to 109,000 — 28 percent.
Ibid.

From the above chart (formatting and wording copied from www.bayareacensus.ca.gov), we can see that every ten years the reported Negro-Black-African American population percentage changed, sometimes dramatically. The numbers tell an embedded story about change in American society by looking at the bell weather Black Community that Oakland is for the nation: WWII (1940-1950 censuses), post-war Baby Boomer growth (1950-1960 censuses), radical change by radical means (1960-1980 censuses), major societal backlash (1980-2000 censuses), and finally, The Great Recession (2010 census). Within these numbers is the imprint of The Christ.

²⁷ A great number of the people followed him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. ²⁸ But Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. ²⁹ For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’ ³⁰ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ ³¹ For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
Luke 23:27-31 (NRSV)

Hear The Message Bible translation:

A huge crowd of people followed, along with women weeping and carrying on. At one point Jesus turned to the women and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, don’t cry for me. Cry for yourselves and for your children. The time is coming when they’ll say, ‘Lucky the women who never conceived! Lucky the wombs that never gave birth! Lucky the breasts that never gave milk!’ Then they’ll start calling to the mountains, ‘Fall down on us!’ calling to the hills, ‘Cover us up!’ If people do these things to a live, green tree, can you imagine what they’ll do with deadwood?”
Ibid. (TMB)

This was not the final word, the final decree on humankind from The Christ. But it was a clear warning: Who and/or what is the “deadwood” Jesus was talking about? Is it time for us to call to the hills to “cover us?” Is it time to start calling to the mountains to “fall down on us?” Or has it already happened? And if it did, why didn’t we notice?

Within organizations (and the church is not immune), we have a tendency to look to leaders to blame when things go awry and rightfully so. Whatever your definition of “leader” is, surely President Harry S. Truman’s famous desk sign must apply: “The buck stops here.” Is oft the case, we in the laity are more than comfortable with focusing on this side of the institutional coin. However, that is both cowardly and deadly.

On the other hand, a considerable number from the ranks of the leaders did believe. But because of the Pharisees, they didn’t come out in the open with it. They were afraid of getting kicked out of the meeting place. When push came to shove they cared more for human approval than for God’s glory.
John 12:42-43 (TMB)

As laity, as the greater number in any church, we have a responsibility as the corpus-central to be active and not reactive to leadership. Logically, we know that leaders are part of the church body, but the laity makes up the bulk of that body. If organizations are full of nothing but leaders, they’ve obviously lost their way because Christ came for all the individuals in the world. They’ve lost sight of their first directive which is to serve. It would be like having communion on first Sundays and the only people receiving and serving are ministers, deacons, and deaconess: Hysterical and scary.

It seems that on His way to the cross, James Cone’s “lynching tree,” Jesus was addressing the women who remained to accompany Him to that particular hell-on-earth. Except for John, the men - His men - had disappeared. He had already spent at least 24 hours prodding, provoking, and thus, revealing the essence of Jewish-Roman leadership of Palestine, all of whom by collective cultural rules, were men. It was left to the women to mourn, but Jesus tells them to cry for themselves, to weep for what is to come. Is that where we are post-11.8.16? Jesus’ attention to deadwood and “a live, green tree” is akin to Angela Y. Davis’ saying, “If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you at night.” African-Americans instinctively and historically know what she means by “come for you at night:” The Klan. In 2016 we are keenly aware of the structural issues our churches face: Gentrification, class division, inclusive versus exclusive church cultures, gender imbalances in leadership, non-denominationalism, service to the marginalized. These all contribute to the decline in church numbers. Some focus on one or two of these and relegate the blame to poor, misguided and/or asynchronous leadership. But I might add a couple of other stems to this bouquet.

• It is not blame we need to discuss but responsibility and subsequent accountability.
• It is not the leadership (including ministries like music departments that draw congregants) we need to look to for our congregational heartbeat.

It is us, the laity.

Real simple: There is no church without the congregation, the laity. If it gets to the point where the only way we can pull a quorum for a meeting is to recruit and require all the officers and leaders of the ministries to attend, we may as well fold up our tent and declare ourselves a monastery or nunnery. A quorum is a number.

quorum |ˈkwôrəm| noun (plural quorums)
the minimum number of members of an assembly or society that must be present at any of its meetings to make the proceedings of that meeting valid.
Apple Online Dictionary

Ah, yes, I can hear it already:
1. “But we announce the meetings and they still won’t show.”
2. “People are just too tired and busy to come.”
3. “The decisions are all made ahead of time. What good would my vote do?”
4. “They don’t listen to us anyway.”
5. “I never get to join a committee; they’re always appointed by some leader.”
6. “It’s a closed-community and you have to be there for years before they’ll even consider my input.”
7. “Same old people just rotating positions.”
8. “People live too far away to come in for a church meeting.”
9. “I have a life outside of this church.
10. “There’s always some kind of snub or retaliation if anyone objects or brings up something new.”

And for each one of these, I have a retort:
1. An announcement may not be sufficient if the member-learning-curve hasn’t been reached.
2. Folks aren’t too tired if something is being given away for free.
3. Decisions can be changed.
4. They can’t hear you if you’re not there.
5. Churches aren’t democracies, but you can fight your way in, just as you do in the rest of your life.
6. There’s always at least one person in every group looking for a new face.
7. They have to rotate because no new people will tough it out and stick around long enough to challenge them with integrity.
8. They don’t live too far away to commute for that job God gave them.
9. You wouldn’t have a life if The Christ didn’t die to give you “this church.”
10. The Nazarene took on the entire Roman Empire and Jewish establishment - for you - and you’re worried about a snub or status retaliation?

Business meetings are just one avenue of activity for the laity, but it is not what The Christ had in mind for His church: Service is. Just like attending church every Sunday isn’t service; it’s worship. It is something completely different and critical to the definition of any Christian community. Is it possible that it isn’t so much the number of members but the Christ-content of the members in that number? Pastor E shared that he never looked for great numbers in the building up of Allen Temple but just a dedicated few willing to work. The laity is not absolved of service because leadership is askew, absent, detached or even incompetent. Allen Temple has not seriously suffered those indignities. What is clear is that the Black church may have fertilized and grown a passive laity who seek to be served rather than serve; who seek to be seen rather than struggle; who seek to be satisfied than saved. This is the crux of the leadership-laity dynamic: Have we become entitled congregants who expect to be served and at least entertained at the cost of a few dollars in a passing plate every Sunday? If this is only marginally true, then the words of the Christ resound.

If people do these things to a live, green tree, can you imagine what they’ll do with deadwood?
Luke 27:31 (TMB)

It is entirely possible that in the coming four years, a new generation of African Americans may not have to “imagine what they’ll do with deadwood.” In His own words, The Nazarene was the green tree. We must continue to ask ourselves, “Am I the deadwood?”

Ethnomathematics is concerned with traditional culture uses of mathematics outside of the pronounced Eurocentric focus. Just as this shift in the pedagogy of mathematics in the latter half of the 20th century is a revisit of what we have been taught to be historically true, there needs to be a shift in the 21st century of what we have taught ourselves to be historically true about our churches and who the church is. Numbers don’t lie; people lie with numbers. Are we looking for people or numbers?

When the attendant of the man of God rose early and went outside, he saw a force, with horses and chariots, surrounding the town. “Alas, master, what shall we do?” his servant asked him. “Have no fear,” he replied. “There are more on our side than on theirs.” Then Elisha prayed: “LORD, open his eyes and let him see.” And the LORD opened the servant’s eyes and he saw the hills all around Elisha covered with horses and chariots of fire. [The Arameans] came down against him, and Elisha prayed to the LORD: “Please strike this people with a blinding light.” And He struck them with a blinding light, as Elisha had asked.
II Kings 6:15-18 (JSB-Jewish Study Bible)

O LORD, grant us thy peace as we ride into the last years of the first generation of the 21st century on a wave of vitriol, ungodliness, and the worst aspects of human character. Help us not to cower or be blown off our feet by the potential cesspool of human character rising up. You lived in it; you were murdered by it; and you rose all the way to eternity above it. Help us keep that perspective. Teach us that even if numbers are manipulated, people don’t have to be. Make us remember that you came for EVERY person in the world, regardless of color, country, gender or class. Drop in our spirits the need for us to stand up to evil when we see it and call it out by its name. Keep our eyes turned to thee and our knees prostrate in prayer for the blinding light that strikes our enemies. Then bring us to our feet and realize in us the truth that we have nothing to lose but everything to gain. Open our eyes to the horses and chariots of fire that cover the hills around us.

Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
Psalm 23:6

Surely
Surely
Surely…

Amen.