DALLAS (ABP) — Two esteemed institutions — the United States and the church –appear in danger of abandoning the high ideals of their founding documents, the president of the nation's largest African-American Baptist group said.
“A haunting shade hangs over both our country and the church,” said William Shaw, president of the National Baptist Convention USA, in his Sept. 7 message to the group's annual meeting in Dallas, which attracted 35,000 people.
Each seems captured by forces that “threaten to abandon its core defining and anchoring documents,” he continued. “For our country, it is the Constitution, and for our church, it is the Bible.”
Shaw, pastor of White Rock Baptist Church in Philadelphia, is in his 7th year as president of the denomination. It is one of three large, historically African-American Baptist denominations in the United States with “National Baptist” in their names.
How America responds to the racial and economic disparities brought to light by Hurricane Katrina and how it carries out its war on terrorism — particularly the conflict in Iraq — either will summon the nation back to the lofty ideals on which it was founded or will drive a wedge between its people, Shaw asserted.
“Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq both have within them the possibility of poisoning or purging,” he said.
Slow response to urgent needs in southern Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina revealed a distracted government with depleted manpower and dissipated resources — all due to the war in Iraq, Shaw asserted. “It showed we couldn't fight a war in Iraq and at the same time handle an emergency at home,” he said.
Shaw commended members of churches in the NBCUSA for contributing more than $1 million to Katrina relief through the denomination, as well as volunteering in rebuilding projects and giving to other relief organizations. “While much has been done, much remains to be done,” he said.
The storm revealed a deep division in New Orleans based on race and socio-economic status, he said.
“The spotlight turned to focus on the gap between the affluent and the poor,” he said. The city's mostly black, mostly poor Lower 9th Ward needs to be rebuilt with the same urgency — and funding — directed toward rebuilding the city's business and tourist districts, Shaw insisted.
“Rehabilitation must not become a tool for removal of the poor from New Orleans — an instrument to reduce the population and thus reduce the political power potential of the poor,” he said.
The war in Iraq was “initiated on false premises of imminent threat and the existence of weapons of mass destruction,” he insisted.
Both the conflict in Iraq and the larger war on terrorism have been waged in ways that violate the Constitution, Shaw asserted.
“We are less secure today, from without and from within,” he said. “We are in danger of giving up the freedoms we say others want to destroy and take away from us.”
Similarly, Shaw said, the church stands dangerously close to giving away its transformational power by abandoning biblical principles.
Churches risk losing their prophetic power when they become beholden to the government for funding programs, he said, referring to President Bush's push to fund social services directly through churches and other houses of worship. “If a source funds you, then the source can control you,” he said.
Shaw also warned against preaching a compromised gospel of promised prosperity rather than issuing a call to follow Christ in the self-sacrificial way of the cross.
“Material goods may satisfy, but they do not fulfill,” he said.
Shaw labeled as “blasphemy” sermons that entice Christians with “mammon” — material wealth and physical well-being — rather than preaching the crucified Christ as both the way of salvation and the example for righteous living.
“Calvary is the way of life to which God summons us,” he said.
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