The church is one of the pillars of the black community. Every Sunday, inside church walls around the nation and world, all walks of life are represented. In church, business professionals sit next to the graveyard shift worker, doctors share a pew with the convenience store clerk, and the saved can come to hear a sermon from a drug-pushing, hustling, pimp-daddy preacher. What?!
In Michele Andrea Bowen’s new novel
More Church Folk, she brings readers back behind the sanctuary of a fictionalized Gospel United Church. The year is 1986, just over twenty years since the brothel at a funeral scandal at one of the big Triennial General Conferences. A lot has changed in the life of Pastors Theophilus Simmons and Eddie Tate, and the church, but one thing that didn’t change was the presence of greedy crooks in high places throughout the denomination.
The time is fast approaching for the Triennial General Conference, where elections will be held to fill the empty bishop seats. Senior Bishop Percy Jennings sees this as an opportunity to clean house, so to speak, and place good-minded Christian men into these seats. Bishop Jennings believes in the good spirit of pastors such as Tate and Simmons, and he needs one of them to gain a bishop seat in order to combat the work of other bishops that embezzle church tithes and couldn’t care less about preaching the Bible.
When word hits Bishop Jennings’ ears that there is something serious happening in the Mozambique district, Jennings sends a young preacher under Eddie Tate’s mentorship, named Denzelle Flowers, over to the African country to investigate. What few knew about Pastor Denzelle Flowers is that he is not only an ordained minister but a gun-toting, badge-carrying FBI agent. Denzelle’s supervisor is glad to send Flowers over to Africa; the FBI wants to check out the activity of a smuggling operation some of the bishops and pastors in the African nation are rumored to be in cahoots with.
What Agent/Reverend Denzelle Flowers discovers in Mozambique is a plan to smuggle a powerful aphrodisiac and male enhancement powder, made from a special blend of watermelons, into the USA. The drug is to be used by Pastor Sonny Washington, chief bishop candidate of Jennings’ opposition, to “secure” votes from adulterous delegates at the upcoming Triennial General Conference, of all places. But things get quickly out of hand and bigger than anything Bishop Jennings, Sonny Washington, Denzelle Flowers, or the FBI could have imagined.
Written in a witty, flowing, conversational way,
More Church Folk is told in a down-home style reminiscent of listening to church gossip. There is a host of characters, with wildly entertaining personalities. Although the narration is at times redundant, it reinforces the sticky plot, and allows the reader to remember who’s who amongst the cast of characters. Bowen does a good job reminding readers that in the church, just like in life, there are good people and folks out to do you no good in order to feed their lusts and greed at your expense.
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