By Bob Allen
Interfaith Alliance head Welton Gaddy called on authorities to quickly investigate a Thanksgiving week arson that destroyed the Ferguson, Mo., church where the family of slain teenager Michael Brown has attended since July.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms investigators say the Nov. 24 blaze that gutted Flood Christian Church in St. Louis was intentionally set. The day before, Pastor Carlton Lee baptized Michael Brown Sr. in the baptistery at the Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated Calvary West Missionary Baptist Church about four miles away.
Lee, chapter president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, said he doesn’t believe the fire was set by the people who torched buildings the same night about a mile away in Ferguson following a grand jury’s non-indictment of the white police officer who shot the black teenager during an altercation in August.
Lee, who has built the 75-member congregation from scratch during the last year-and-a-half, compared his feelings to losing a child. Lee says he has received more than 71 hateful messages and death threats since he said at a press conference in September that he believed Wilson should be arrested, and he thinks white supremacists are to blame.
“People have told me on Facebook what they’re going to do and how they were going to do it,” Lee told NBC News. “Unfortunately it seems as though they acted on it and took my baby from me.”
Gaddy, an ordained Baptist minister who also serves as pastor for preaching and worship at Northminster Church in Monroe, La., said violence targeting religious communities “does more than terrorize one community; it jeopardizes the very core of the American promise and, indeed, threatens us all.”
“The specifics of this attack are particularly chilling because they recall some of the darkest moments in American history,” Gaddy said. “Throughout the 20th century black churches were burned and brutalized as a means of silencing the prophetic voice of African-American religious communities who demanded civil rights and equality.”
Gaddy, who retires this month after 16 years as president of the Interfaith Alliance — an organization created in 1994 by members of 75 faith traditions to challenge religious extremism — said today African-American religious communities aren’t the only ones being targeted for hate.
“In the 21st century all Americans must stand with those religious communities who are victimized for their beliefs and declare that we will not be silenced,” Gaddy said. “We dare not be divided or allow others to divide us into black churches or white churches, synagogues or mosques in this matter. Religious freedom is only safe if it protects us all.”
Lee, 31, is a lifelong Baptist. He grew up in Devotional Baptist Church in St. Louis before being mentored into ministry at Mount Gideon Missionary Baptist Church in University City, Mo. In 2011 he was installed as pastor of Central Baptist Church in Wentzville, Mo.
In March Lee purchased a cinder-block building that once housed an auto repair shop for $160,000 — using his life savings and all the money he had put away for his children — as a permanent home for his new storefront congregation.
Last Sunday Flood Church worshipped outdoors in a makeshift sanctuary in a parking lot beside the charred remains of their former sanctuary. The congregation plans to rebuild. Nearly 1,000 people donated just over $61,000 in five days after a GoFundMe account was established to help with fundraising.
According to a report of his baptism by the Daily Beast, Michael Brown Sr. had committed his life to Christ before but wasn’t baptized. He decided to take the step before his son’s death, and had hoped his children would be baptized along with him.
Instead he went under the water awaiting word of whether a grand jury would indict Officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting his son. The following day the grand jury decided not to charge Wilson with a crime, setting off protests nationwide and sparking a national debate over racial profiling by police.
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Black pastor says racial profiling exists in the SBC
CBF pastor hopes Darren Wilson decision will prompt dialogue
Thabiti Anyabwile says Ferguson grand jury gives marching orders for change
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