By Johnnie Green

Dr. Johnnie Green is Senior Pastor of The Mount Neboh Baptist Church, in Harlem, New York and a project lead on the Columbia World Project Confronting COVID-19 Loss in Harlem. The project aims to reduce COVID-19 related grief in Harlem’s Black community by partnering Columbia researchers with local faith leaders and other community leaders to address intense and pervasive grief that has emerged as a result of the pandemic.

Pastoring a predominantly black church in Harlem has been one of the highlights of my 43-year preaching career. Harlem, New York is often times referred to as the Mecca of Blackness in the United States. If you want to get the feel of Black culture and follow the history of Black achievement, come to Harlem. Home of the Harlem Renaissance, the world-famous Cotton Club, the iconic Apollo Theater, Sylvia’s soul food restaurant, Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the late Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. served as Senior Pastor, and the village which has more than 300 multi-denominational churches opening their doors each Sunday for the rich Black church worship experience.

Most recently, Harlem, New York made the news for being the epicenter of the COVID-19 Virus. Members of the Black Community in the Harlem—Morningside Heights area, for a number of reasons, were disproportionately impacted by this deadly novel coronavirus. It is my considered opinion that disparities in healthcare and a lack of access to health care for many of the black and brown community members, coupled with the failure on the part of elected officials to do more to address healthcare disparities is the culprit for the disproportionate number of Blacks who died in Harlem during the early periods of the pandemic.

In the Mount Neboh Baptist Church, where I serve as Senior Pastor, we lost 22 parish members during the early days of the virus. Coping with the deaths of our parishioners and dealing with the aftermath and fallout from these COVID-19-related deaths in our church overwhelmed the pastoral and ministerial staff. We had never dealt with death and grief at this level in the church’s history. Not being able to engage in pastoral care and counseling at the bedside of dying members, and unable to host traditional funerals for our members at the church made coping with grief extremely difficult for both church leaders and laity.

However, becoming a part of the Columbia University CWP Team, and collaborating with team members, under the leadership of Dr. Katherine Shear and Dr. Desmond Patton, not only has it helped me with coping with my own grief, but I think the deliverables of the project will yield new insights for dealing with long term grief in the Black and brown community for years to come. The webinar, the focus groups, the collaboration with the Center For Prolonged Grief, the SAFE Lab and MPAC-New York, have already yielded positive results and received high praise from members of the Black and brown community in its response to addressing and coping with COVID-19 deaths in Harlem.  I am sincerely thankful for the opportunity to be a part of this outstanding and fruitful project.