Sandra Barnes Joins Faculty -- Joint Appointment with Divinity School

topics: Communities, Human and Organizational Development

Melanie Moran, Vanderbilt View

It was engineering - not human - systems that new human and organizational development and divinity professor Sandra Barnes set out to study when she earned her master's degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1989. After working several years, she found that her true calling, professionally and spiritually, was studying people.

"I have been an ordained minister for almost 20 years. I decided I wanted to merge my personal and professional interests," Barnes said of her decision to pursue a master's degree in religion and a Ph.D. in sociology, which she earned from Georgia State University in 1999. "Since I transitioned, most of my work is still quantitative, but now I just study people."

Barnes' dissertation and first book, The Cost of Being Poor, focused on skills people use to negotiate poor urban environments, research she said was driven by her experience growing up in Gary, Ind.
"Much of the research about poor and working-class people has focused on what they're not doing and blaming them," Barnes said. "I was very interested in finding proactive ways in which people were raising children and making decisions."

That early work led Barnes to examine the role of the black church in poor communities, and specifically black mega-churches, defined as congregations with at least 2,000 adults during weekend services. Barnes hypothesized that for all the differences that come with being "mega," much of the black church tradition would still be present, differentiating them from their white counterparts.

"The bottom line is the notion of self-help and empowerment, both collectively and individually. That is part of the black church tradition, but was manifested on a much larger scale in these mega-churches," she said. "The spiritual piece fortifies people to get out there and do the kind of hard work that it takes to experience mobility."

Of specific interest to Barnes is the way black mega-churches address some of the most critical issues facing black communities: HIV and poverty.

"The churches' size as well as human and economic resources are evidence of their success, hence there are very few things that such churches believe they cannot accomplish, and they are having significant impact in all of these areas," she said. "They are very comfortable appropriating not only spiritual symbols, but also secular symbols to meet their objectives."

Barnes comes to Vanderbilt as a full professor from Case Western Reserve University, where she was a member of the sociology department. She previously served as assistant as well as associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the African American Studies Research Center at Purdue University.