Dwight McKissic repudiated Drake and said SBC leaders should do the same.
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ARLINGTON, Texas (ABP) — A prominent African-American pastor says Southern Baptist leaders should publicly repudiate comments by a former Southern Baptist Convention officer that he is praying for President Obama to die.
Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, said he had not heard an interview on Fox News Radio in which former SBC second vice president Wiley Drake said he is praying "imprecatory prayer" against Obama.
McKissic, who is asking the SBC this year to adopt a resolution celebrating the election of the nation's first African-American president, said if Drake was identified in the interview as a Southern Baptist, then his remarks should not go unchallenged.
McKissic, a former president of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention pastors conference and speaker at the group's evangelism conference, personally denounced Drake's comments and said he would ask SBC president Johnny Hunt to do the same.
"They need to be repudiated by Southern Baptist leaders," McKissic said.
McKissic said Drake's views "are in the same ballpark" as Rush Limbaugh saying he hopes that President Obama's administration will fail.
"Southern Baptists don't need to line up with the Rush Limbaughs and Wiley Drakes in attacking Barack Obama," he said.
A resolution that McKissic proposed to the SBC Resolutions Committee mentions the 1996 election of Fred Luter, an African American, as the convention's second vice president as evidence of "a renewed commitment to racial equality and justice" on the part of Southern Baptists.
Drake, a white man elected to the same office 10 years later, said June 2 on "The Alan Colmes Show" that unless Obama repents, he is praying that God will kill the president. Drake said he believes that is what happened to slain abortion provider George Tiller, who was shot to death while attending church in Wichita, Kan., on Sunday, May 31.
Wiley Drake said on Fox News Radio he is praying "imprecatory prayer" on President Obama.
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Describing the interview on "The Wiley Drake Show" on Crusade Radio June 3, Drake said Colmes invited him on the program because someone had asked him about his initial response to news that Tiller had died.
"I've been a Baptist pastor for a long time, been in the pro-life fight, been face-to-face with Tiller, told him about Jesus, and I've seen many, many others tell him about Jesus over and over and over again," Drake said. "And I've seen horrific things that go on in those death abortuaries — and that's what they are — and so my initial response to those people, they said, 'Well what was your response,' and I said, 'Well, in all honesty I have to just respond directly and say I am glad that he's dead.'"
In the Fox interview, Drake, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif., called Obama "a usurper" and claimed he is "not an American-born citizen." Challenged for referring to the president as "B. Hussein Obama," Drake denied calling him that because it makes him sound like a Muslim. "I call him that because it's his name," Drake insisted.
Accused of holding views on the fringe of American culture, Drake acknowledged: "It is a fringe point of view, and I take that as a badge of honor. I am on the fringe."
Drake said Southern Baptists have lost belief in "imprecatory prayer" — praying passages from the Psalms where the Psalmist is asking God to bring death and misfortune on his enemies — and need to regain the practice.
"It is in the Bible, and we are proud to say as Southern Baptists that we believe the Book," he said. "You've got to believe the whole Book, brother, or you don't believe any of it."
McKissic said members of his church voted both for and against Obama, and he doesn't have a problem with that, but to suggest members of his church who voted for Obama aren't Christians goes beyond the pale.
"I don't question people's Christianity based on how they vote," McKissic said. He said questioning Obama's profession of faith "is not playing by the same rules" that Southern Baptist leaders used with President Bush, who rejected the inerrancy of Scripture and was a member of, or regularly attended, several churches significantly to the left of most Southern Baptist congregations theologically and politically.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
Related ABP stories:
Drake, former SBC officer, says he's praying for Obama to die (6/4)
Pastor proposes SBC resolution celebrating Obama's election (6/4)