The riotous fire of a burning police precinct might not be the Pentecostal flame many of us expected, and that itself is a failure of white Christians to listen to the suffering around us.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. If churches get this wrong, people will die. People we know and love, people we have never met, folks that count on the church to do the right thing. Yet pressures are mounting to open now.
“As a congregation and as a staff, the last thing we want is for someone to get sick and say it’s because they came to church.”
From my vantage point as a lawyer, judge and Baptist minister, I have reviewed carefully the matter of George Floyd’s death while in the custody of Minneapolis police officers and the stream of events in the wake of his death. The list of what went wrong is long and damning.
We have a systemic problem, one that our African American brothers and sisters have tried to warn us about year after year, decade after decade, only to be ignored.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a time of learning for churches as they adjust to virtual ministry, said Andy Jung, associate executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina.
Those of us who are white are asked by the cross to stand in solidarity with the crucified class to dismantle the structures of white supremacy that sustains itself through the use, abuse and destruction of black and brown bodies.
Now more than ever, we need that Breath in our bodies, that fire in our bones, that vision of an otherwise possibility that bespeaks sheer revolution and not a measured tinkering with a supposedly “broken system.”
The Holy Spirit is conceiving new life and needs a partner. The Church, the body of Christ, is called to be born again and again and again. May we be a body in the infancy of innovative growth, a body vulnerable and yet powerful as the Church enters an unknown future full of new possibilities.
Today I am trying my hardest to find solace in Jesus, another man who cried out to his mother, and to his father, when he was bleeding and suffocating on the lynching tree, being put to death by people who believed they had more power than he.
