A shattered alliance

The breaking point came for the Rev. Jeffrey Brown at a meeting of black ministers at Peoples Baptist Church in Roxbury in summer 2004, when youth workers employed by the Rev. Eugene Rivers asked Brown to step outside.

One of Rivers's workers physically threatened him on orders from Rivers, Brown said in a recent interview. Brown reentered the meeting and told the Rev. Ray Hammond about the incident. Hammond said he, too, had been threatened and that others had been too.

''I walked over to Eugene and said, 'How dare you send this man to threaten me?' " Brown recalled.

Rivers told the Globe there were no threats, only ''misunderstandings," but the youth worker and Hammond both corroborated Brown's account.

It was a pivotal episode in what Brown calls ''Boston's clergy wars." A series of disputes and rivalries has shattered the alliance of the powerful black Boston ministers -- Hammond, Rivers, and the Rev. Bruce Wall -- who founded the Boston Ten Point Coalition in 1992 and took to the streets to combat, face-to-face, an unprecedented wave of youth homicides.

Back then, the coalition won national acclaim for helping to virtually eradicate youth violence in the city through partnerships with police, prosecutors, probation officers, and social workers. The ministers, who had, at most, local reputations for social activism in Boston, were featured on CNN and network television and in a host of major articles in national magazines.

Now, youth violence is surging, but the three ministers, all in their mid-50s, are alienated from one another and hardly speak. A younger generation of ministers is struggling to revive the coalition, in part because it has become a popular name that attracts cash in the political and foundation worlds.

Numerous conflicts revolve around the mercurial and unpredictable Rivers, a Boston-born, Philadelphia-reared firebrand who became the most widely known of the three.

Rivers's willingness to speak bluntly and critically of black society's internal problems, his early advocacy of faith-based initiatives, and his knack of attracting media attention frequently made him the face of the clergy's fight against crime.

That left many other pastors from the more than 40 churches that joined the original coalition hungering for money and recognition, according to politicians, clergy, and law-enforcement officials.

As a result, rivalry spread far beyond the top leaders.

In the beginning, ''we all were in it together," Wall said. Minister Don Muhammad of the Nation of Islam was in the leadership group, he pointed out.

''We had great collaboration," Wall said. ''We needed each other."

It began, Wall said, when he, Rivers, and Hammond met in the basement of his Hyde Park home in 1992, after gang violence disrupted the funeral of a Boston youth at Morning Star Baptist Church, and gave birth to the Ten Point program.

Rivers had been talking for days about 10 steps black churches could take to improve the situation, steps Rivers had worked out with a young Dorchester drug dealer who subsequently overdosed. But Rivers was not being specific.

''Eugene, you keep talking about these 10 points," the calm, deliberate Hammond finally said. ''Tell them to us, one at a time."

Hammond entered the points on Wall's computer, and the three pastors polished the language, which became an agenda for the Ten Point Coalition.

The centerpiece was collaboration with law enforcement and social services that offered help to troubled and violent youth and promised harsh punishment if they did not change their ways.

That became the central idea of Operation Ceasefire, which was credited locally and nationally with producing a dramatic reduction in youth violence. A principal goal of current efforts to reinvigorate the Boston Ten Point Coalition is to restore that carrot-and-stick approach.

When the approach began to bear fruit in the 1990s, Wall said in his office at Dorchester Temple Baptist Church, in Codman Square, ''all of a sudden people [outside the coalition] were saying, 'Something worked!' and a lot of attention, a lot of money came in. . . . When the money started to come in, when the media began choosing who to highlight, those relationships began to break."

Brown, who early on became a member of the leadership the Ten Point Coalition, said that the coalition's first efforts were done without any funding.

But as enthusiasm grew for faith-based programs in general and the Ten Point Coalition in particular, at least $5 million to $10 million came in from government agencies and private foundations.

''And I may be low-balling it," Brown said, adding that the coalition's budget is now $500,000 to $700,00 year.

Newsweek, the New Yorker, the New Republic, CNN, Bill Moyers, and many other media leaders reported on the program, more often than not featuring Rivers, the originator of the 10 points and, perhaps more important, a dynamic and photogenic interview.

Wall said he eventually came to the conclusion that ''Rivers is a great guy, he has great potential, but the hunger for position, the hunger to control the money and the resources -- there's a character thing here."

Wall said he went to Hammond and asked him to talk with Rivers about controlling his aggressive speech and ambition, but Hammond refused.

''Rev. Hammond said he had a very close relationship with Rev. Rivers, and he was going to keep it," Wall said.

But Hammond had repeated fallings out with Rivers in the late 1990s and broke with him more than two years ago over the threats Rivers's employees' made to Hammond and other people, Hammond said in a recent interview.

Wall, offended at Hammond's initial response to him, walked away from both of his former associates.

''I have always wanted Ray to come back to me and say that I was right, and if we had taught Gene to be more relational, we would not have this fragmentation of the black ministers." Wall said.

Rivers is dismissive of the clergy wars.

''At the end of the day, how comfortable middle-class black clergy relate to each other is irrelevant to the life chances of the very poor youth we are trying to help," he said. ''I again apologize for any inappropriate activities or statements, real or imagined, that are attributed to me."

Wall said Rivers has apologized previously. ''I still love him," Wall said. ''We are brothers in Christ. But does that mean I can lend him my name or walk down the street with him? No. There is no real trust."

The ministers all are well into their 50s -- Hammond is 54, Rivers 55, Wall 57 -- and pursuing separate agendas.

Hammond is still much involved with Bethel AME Church, which he founded in Jamaica Plain in the mid-1980s, but these days he has a major downtown agenda, as well. He chairs the Boston Foundation, a major grant-maker in the city, and advocates for black youth on several corporate boards. He is chairman of the Boston Ten Point Coalition, but takes a back seat to the organization's younger leaders, particularly Brown and executive director Chris Sumner.

Rivers has gone international. Azusa Christian Community, which he founded in the Four Corners section of Dorchester in the late '80s, still works with some of the toughest youth on the streets, but its leader, in his own words, spends ''more time than I care to think about" jetting to Jamaica, Toronto, and the West Coast to help other cities replicate the Ten Point Coalition model. Rivers runs the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, and, his assistant said, ''We are usually not invited" to Boston Ten Point Coalition meetings.

Wall has gone back to the neighborhoods where the Ten Point experiment began. Sharply at odds with both Rivers and with the Boston Police Department, with which the coalition is reinvigorating its partnership, he has quit the Ten Point organization and is concentrating on streets in a 10-block radius around his church in Codman Square.

The ministers are not able to work on youth violence now in the way they did in the 1990s, but each is still at it, and that is what counts, says the Rev. Charles Stith, former pastor of Union United Methodist Church in the South End.

''If the black ministers did what they did before, we'd get the same result as before, a five to 10 year break, and then we're back where we started," Stith said. ''If we're going to break the cycle, the question must be: What things did we not do, or did we not do enough of, the last time."

Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com.