Monday, August 4th, 2008
by Justin
(CNN) — The Rev. Paul Earl Sheppard had recently become the senior pastor of a suburban church in California when a group of parishioners came to him with a disturbing personal question.
They were worried because the racial makeup of their small church was changing. They warned Sheppard that the church’s newest members would try to seize control because members of their race were inherently aggressive. What was he was going to do if more of “them” tried to join their church?
“One man asked me if I was prepared for a hostile takeover,” says Sheppard, pastor of Abundant Life Christian Fellowship in Mountain View, California.
The nervous parishioners were African-American, and the church’s newcomers were white. Sheppard says the experience demonstrated why racially integrated churches are difficult to create and even harder to sustain. Some blacks as well as whites prefer segregated Sundays, religious scholars and members of interracial churches say.
Americans may be poised to nominate a black man to run for president, but it’s segregation as usual in U.S. churches, according to the scholars. Only about 5 percent of the nation’s churches are racially integrated, and half of them are in the process of becoming all-black or all-white, says Curtiss Paul DeYoung, co-author of “United by Faith,” a book that examines interracial churches in the United States.
DeYoung’s numbers are backed by other scholars who’ve done similar research. They say integrated churches are rare because attending one is like tiptoeing through a racial minefield. Just like in society, racial tensions in the church can erupt over everything from sharing power to interracial dating.
DeYoung, who is also an ordained minister, once led an interracial congregation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that eventually went all-black. He defines an interracial church as one in which at least 20 percent its membership belongs to a racial group other than that church’s largest racial group.
“I left after five years,” DeYoung says. “I was worn out from the battles.”
The men and women who remain and lead interracial churches often operate like presidential candidates. They say they live with the constant anxiety of knowing that an innocuous comment or gesture can easily mushroom into a crisis that threatens their support. [more...]
Are you kidding me? Keep reading the rest of the article and post your thoughts.
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007
by Justin
The Des Moines Register ran an article on Jerry Falwell on May 16, 2007. In that article (pg. 4A), Al Mohler of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary states of Falwell, “[Falwell] deserves credit almost single-handedly bringing fundamentalism out of separation into political activity.”
Has fundamentalism come out of separation? Not in my tiny world of fundamentalism. But in my tiny world of fundamentalism, I see separation and political activity as two important issues within this movement. I say movement because fundamentalism is a movement. Even Ernest Pickering in his message at the 1969 GARBC Annual Conference in Fort Wayne, IN says this.
The remainder of this post is going to be attributed to this message. It has also been adapted and published in the February edition of the Baptist Bulletin. Click here to read this article.
I want to address an issue that I have seen and have heard comments preached from the pulpit at my bible college. A lot of times I hear terms that refer the fundamentalist churches to those who are comparable to Israel. As if the fundamentalist churches are just as important on a large scale as Israel. We are to “reach our own Jerusalem,” we compare our battles to that of Israel and it frustrates me to think that we can align ourselves with Israel as if we are apart of the same family. I don’t see this laid out in scripture. In fact there is a separation of us from Israel. We are not apart of the same family. We are not apart of the same promises. We are only apart of the same future; with Jesus forever.
So the message that Ernest Pickering preaches frustrates me. According to the printed version of this message, Pickering begins with comparing separatist fundamentalist generational struggle to that of Joshua’s concerns with “God’s chosen nation.” In fact the Old Testament book of Joshua is used through out this entire message to show that separation is in fact what God wants from the church (a New Testament term). Now I understand that we can gain principles from the Old Testament, however I struggle with gaining a methodological outlook on a New Testament principle from an Old Testament context.
He states…
The key note of Joshua’s address is found in the words, “Come not among these nations” (23:4, KJV). Israel was to have no spiritual fellowship with those who were walking in darkness and worshiping false deities. The command was specific and clear. God wanted His people to be separated.
However, God also wanted Israel to be physically and socially separated from the nations that lived around them. Now if the same principle is to be applied to the church, as I am sure Pickering is implying, then we in the church should be religiously, physically, and socially separated from the world around us. I struggle with this because I just don’t see this in New Testament Scriptures. “Being in the world” is halted if we can’t be “in” the world.
God gave Israel land. There wasn’t another world for them to even live in according to God. The land that they had possessed was theirs. Anybody that was not of them was to be driven out. That was to be their world that they could control. But Pickering tries to get “the church” to be “the true people of God” through this message. He uses this phrase twice saying that the “true people of God” are to “maintain the principle of complete separation from [interfaith worship] confusion” and that Joshua warned that idol worship will weaken the “true people of God.” It is white noise to my ears to consider myself the “true people of God” because I am in the family of God. I am an heir and I am not just a “person.” A “people” then is a nation or group of people that have first place. Israel are these people and they have first place in the eyes of God. Before I was saved, there was Israel and after I die, there will be Israel.
Now, Pickering goes on saying,
It is interesting to see that Joshua placed some emphasis upon the importance of the home in maintaining a strong stand for Jehovah God. He warned that Israelites were not to “make marriages with them,” that is, with the heathen peoples who lived around them. The strength of the nation was measured by the strength of its homes.
Now he says something that really irks me. He says, “If parents and children did not maintain a separation from the heathen, then the separated stand of the entire nation would be threatened. The same is true today.” But what nation is Pickering talking about? Israel? Yes! The church? NO! Joshua wasn’t talking about the church. He was talking about the survival of a people group amongst heathens that God has said to destroy. I don’t then understand the principle in which Pickering is trying to imply here. And how is this principle true today, as Pickering states? He says:
The stand of our churches will be only as strong as the stand of its homes. We cannot expect to have churches that are strong in their separated position if the homes that compromise those churches are weak and worldly. To this end we must guard against any deterioration of our position on personal separation from the world. A church whose homes are in fellowship with the world cannot maintain itself as a separated testimony from the world.
But how can this be done? What is he really talking about? Does he understand the implications for what he is saying? If I am understanding him correctly, the heathen are those who are not saved, “the true people of God” are Christians, and Christians are not have fellowship with any unsaved individuals. We are to live in our “Christian” worlds and have no contact with that which would cause “confusion” (whatever that is). Am I right?
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