Forgiveness and Security

[KeithE]

[Dave Roberts]

Amen!

[Haruo]

Amen, amen.

[Neil Heath]

And a third Amen!

[Sandy]

We've seen a more excellent way. But I would suggest that if Roof had chosen a historical, African-American Baptist church, or a historical, Church of God in Christ, the outpouring of forgiveness would have been no less generous.

This may make some people angry, though that's not intended, and it is also not a racist comment, but I've found the spiritual maturity, and spiritual depth of African American churches in general, denomination aside, to go well beyond that of most predominantly Caucasian congregations. Perhaps its the history and the culture, or the role that African American churches have in the community, or experience, or a combination of all of those things. They seem to be missing a lot of the social baggage that Caucasian churches seem to have. There are times and places when I'll be deliberate in choosing an African American congregation to visit, just because I need some spiritual inspiration.

[Dave Roberts]

The approach of African-American congregations is different by culture because they are a church born of suffering. The last church I pastored had more than 100 slave members prior to the Civil War, and when the next church records took up in 1867, there were no African-American members. The founding pastor had been a major slaveholder in this area. I managed to establish a relationship with an African-American Baptist church about five blocks away. They had no written records of their beginnings, but they knew they were in existence by 1970. When they had their church anniversary, they invited a delegation to come sit in a place of honor at the service, but I never could get the white church to acknowledge publicly that this was their daughter congregation. I might have been invited to be on the program at a Black church's dedication, but they would not countenance having a pulpit exchange to hear the African-American pastor. There are so many sad chapters like this in our culture.

[Haruo]

What Sandy said about the maturity of black churches certainly rings true with regard to long-established large congregations of AME, NBC, CME, PNB, AMEZ affiliation, but frankly in this neck of the woods a large percentage of the COGIC and non-or-odd-denominational black churches are storefronts where a majority of the diaconate is blood relatives of the pastor or the First Lady.