Chapter 1 - Recovering from church abuse
the book starts..'sometimes in a waiting room or on an airplane i strike up conversations with strangers,
during the course of which they learn that i write books on spiritual themes.
eyebrows arch, barriers spring up and often i hear yet another horror story about church.
my seatmates must expect me to defend the church, because they always act surprised when i respond,
'oh, it's even worse that that.
let me tell you my story'.
i have spent most of my life in recovery from the church.
one church i attended during formative years in georgia of the 1960s
presented a hermetically (airtight) sealed view of the world.
a sign out front proudly proclaimed our identity with words radiating from a many pointed star:
'New Testament, Blood bought, Born again, Premillenial, Dispensational, Fundamental...'
our little group of 200 people had a corner on the truth, God's truth
and everyone who disagreed with us was
surely teetering on the edge of hell...
..'a mystery: if the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it?'...if the gospel comes as a
eucastrophe, j.r.r. tolkien's word for a spectacularly good thing
happening to spectacularly bad people,
why do so few people perceive it as good news?
..i became a writer, i now believe, to sort out words used and misused by the church of my youth...
..i became a writer because of my own encounter with the power of words
and i gained hope that spoiled words, their original meaning wrung out, could be reclaimed.
..unavoidably and by instinct, i question and reevaluate my faith all the time. (II corinthians 13.5?)
..every writer has one main theme, a poor that he or she keeps sniffing around,
tracking, following to its source.
if i had to define my own theme, it would be that of a person who
absorbed some of the worst the church has to offer,
yet still landed in the loving arms of God.
yes, i went through a period of rejection of the church and God,
a conversion experience in reverse that felt like liberation for a time.
i ended up, however, not as an atheist, a refugee from the church,
but as one of its advocates.
what allowed me to ransom a personal faith from the damaging effects of religion?
the people profiled in this book go a long way toward answering that question.
..the glory of God is a person fully alive, said the second century theologian irenaeus.
sadly that description does not reflect the image many people have of modern christians.
rightly or wrongly, they see christians rather as restrained, uptight, repressed
-people less likely to celebrate vitality than to wag our fingers in disapproval.
..the thirteen people you will meet here have one thing in common:
their impact on me.
...i must say, writing these tributes has for me been an exercise of health and even joy.
i did not set out with an agenda,
to convert anyone, to defend the church ..
i merely want to introduce others to a roomful of exceptional people whom i cannot,
and have no wish to, get out of mind.
fred rogers in giving talks asks the audience to pause for a minute of silence
and think about all those who have helped them become who they are...
..i was born in atlanta, georgia, in 1949..
we lived in apartheid (policy of rigid segregation of people based on some criterion) conditions.
MARTIN LUTHER KING's ...appropriation of the christian gospel galled us (white church people) the most
he was, after all, an ordained minister,
and even my fundamentalist church had to acknowledge the integrity of his father, Daddy King,
respected pastor of ebeneezer baptist church.
we had our ways of resolving that cognitive dissonance, of course.
we said that the younger king was a card carrying communist,
a marxist agent who merely posed as a minister.
..george wallace cited FBI sources to accuse K of belonging to
more communist front organizations than any man in the united states.
during K's time, the FBI looked with suspicion on white people
who mixed easily with friends from a variety of races and economic groups.
these were potential communists...
..as for..accusations of K's sexual immorality reflect historical fact..
the FBI taped numerous episodes in K's hotel room,
and thanks to the freedom of information act historians can study the actual transcripts.
ralph abernathy has revealed that K carried on extramarital affairs up until the eve of his death.
one FBI agent (william sullivan)..sent K some of their recordings
along with a note urging him to commit suicide:
'you are done. there is but one way out for you.
you better take it before your filthy abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation'.
(also)..K has been accused of plagiarism as well.
he inserted into his graduate school thesis, his writings and sometimes his speeches,
long sections lifted without credit from other sources. .
frankly, i find it easier to understand K's sexual failings,
a sin in which he has much company, than his plagiarism.
a master of riveting prose, why did he feel the need to steal someone else's?
relentless pressures buffeted K from all sides.
he faced death threats from segregationists as well as the FBI.
a bomb went off in his home.
black churches were burning every week in the South.
his volunteers were being threatened, beaten and jailed and some of them were dying.
often his southern christian leadership conference had to skip payroll,
and his most effecive fund raiser was one of the advisers president kennedy had demanded that he fire.
newspapers from the atlanta journal to the new york times condemned his methods.
the NAACP criticized him for being too radical,
while SNCC (student nonviolent coordinating committee) accused him of timidity.
student demonstrators in a dozen cities pleaded with him to accompany them to jail;
volunteers in mississippi urged him to come risk his life with them.
should he concentrate on voting rights or on segregated restaurants?
what unjust laws should he violate?
what about defying court orders?
should he stick to civil rights or expand his focus to poverty?
what about the war in vietnam?
i better understand now the pressures that K faced his entire adult life,
pressures that surely contributed to his failures.
K's moral weaknesses provide a convenient excuse for anyone who wants to avoid his message
and because of those weaknesses some christians still discount the genuineness of his faith.
(these christians might want to review the list of outstanding people of faith in hebrews 11,
a list which includes such moral deviants as noah, abraham, jacob, rahab, samson and david.
i certainly once dismissed him.
yet now i can hardly read a page from K's life, or a paragraph from his speeches,
without sensing the centrality of his christian conviction.
i won a collection of his sermon tapes, and every time i listen to them
i am swept up in the sheer power of his gospel based message,
delivered with an eloquence that has never been matched.
david garrow builds his book (bearing the cross) around the scene of K's supernatural call, early in his career
'it was the most important night of his life, writes G, the one he always would think back to in future years
when the pressures again seemed to be too great.
king had been thrust into civil rights leadership in montgomery, alabama,
after rosa parks had made her brave decision not to move to the back of the bus.
the black community formed a new organization to lead a bus boycott
and by default chose as a compromise candidate for its leadership the new minister in town, K,
who at age 26 looked 'more like a boy than a man'.
growing up in middle class surroundings, with a kind of inherited religion from his preacher father,
he hardly felt qualified to lead a great moral crusade.
as soon as K's leadership of the movement was announced,
the threats from the Klan began.
not only the klan-within days K was arrested for driving 30 mph in a 25 mph zone
and thrown in the montgomery city jail.
the following night K, shaken by his first jail experience,
sat up in his kitchen wondering if he could take it anymore.
should he resign?
it was around midnight.
he felt agitated and full of fear.
a few minutes before, the phone had rung.
'nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now.
and if you aren't out of this town in three days, we're going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.
K sat staring at an untouched cup of coffee and tried to think of a way out,
a way to quietly surrender leadership
and resume the serene life of scholarship he had planned.
in the next room lay his wife coretta, already asleep,
along with their newborn daughter yolanda.
here is how k remembers it in a sermon he preached:
'and i sat at that table thinking about that little girl
and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me any minute.
and i started thinking about a dedicated, devoted and loyal wife, who was over there asleep...
and i got to the point that i couldn't take it anymore.
i was weak..
and i discovered then that religion had to become real to me
and i had to know God for myself.
and i bowed down over that cup of coffee.
i never will forget it..and prayed a prayer,
and i prayed out loud that night,
i said,'Lord, i'm down here trying to do what's right.
i think i'm right.
i think the cause that we represent is right.
but Lord, i must confess that i'm weak now.
i'm faltering.
i'm losing my courage'.
...and it seemed at that moment that i could hear an inner voice saying to me,
'martin luther, stand up for righteousness.
stand up for justice.
stand up for truth.
and lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world'.
i heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on.
he promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.
no never alone. no never alone.
He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.
three night later, as promised, a bomb exploded on the front porch of K's home,
filling the house with smoke and broken glass but injuring no one.
K took it calmly: 'my religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it'.
..in the 1960s, as black students sought to integrate atlanta's churches,
our deacon board mobilized lookout squads who took turns
patrolling the entrances lest any black 'troublemaker'; appear.
i still have one of the cards the deacons printed up
to give to any civil rights demonstrators who might appear:
'believing the motives of your group to be ulterior and foreign to the teaching of God's word,
WE CANNOT EXTEND A WELCOME TO YOU
and respectfully request you to leave the premises quietly.
scripture dose NOT teach
'the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God'.
He is the creator of all, but only the father of those who have been regenerated.
if any one of you is here with a sincere desire to know Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord,
we shall be glad to deal individually with you from the Word of God',
(unanimous statement of pastor and deacons, august 1960)
..the next church i attended was smaller, more fundamentalist and more overtly racist
(the one whose 'burial' i recently attended.
there i learned the theological basis for racism.
the pastor taught that the hebrew word Ham meant 'burnt black',
making noah's son Ham the father of negro races,
and that in a curse noah had consigned him to, likely as a lowly servant (genesis 9).
that is when i hear my pastor explain why black people make such good waiters and household servants.
he acted out their moves on the platform, swiveling his hips..and we all laughed at his antics.
'the colored waiter is good at that job because that's the job
God destined him for in the curse of Ham..
no one bothered to point out that the curse was actually pronounced on noah's grandson canaan, not ham.
around that same time, mississippi's baptist record
published an article arguing that God meant for whites to rule over blacks
because 'a race whose mentality averages on borderline idiocy'
is obviously 'bereft of any divine blessing'.
if anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the trump card of
miscegenation, or mixing of the races,
which some speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in noah's day.
a single question, 'do you want your daughter bringing home a black boyfriend?
silenced all arguments about race.
..the word Prophet comes to mind because K, like those old testament figures,
endeavoured to change an entire nation through a straightforward moral appeal.
the passion and intensity of the biblical prophets has long fascinated me,
for most of them faced an audience every bit as
stubborn, prejudiced and cantankerous as i was during my teenage years.
with what moral lever can one move a whole nation?
studying the prophets, i not that virtually all of them followed a two pronged approach.
first, they gave a short range view of what God requires now.
in the old testament, this usually consisted of an exhortation to simple acts of faithfulness.
rebuild the temple.
purify your marriages.
help the poor.
destroy idols and put God first.
the prophets never stopped there, however.
they also gave a long range view to respond to the people's deepest questions.
how can we believe that God loves us in the face of so much suffering?
how can we believe in a just God when the world seems ruled by a conspiracy of evil?
prophets answered such questions by reminding their audience of
who God is and by painting a glowing picture of a future kingdom of righteousness.
in true prophetic tradition, K used that same two pronged approach.
for him, the short range view called for one thing above all else: nonviolence.
(yancey does not mention his long range...a good guess might be:
every individual treat every other individual, no matter how different or evil by obeying Jesus' call to
LOVE YOUR ENEMIES
DO GOOD TO THOSE WHO HATE YOU
BLESS THOSE WHO CURSE YOU
PRAY FOR THOSE WHO SPITEFULLY ABUSE YOU
LAMENT AND REGRET THE MISFORTUNE AND DEATH OF THOSE WHO DON'T DO THIS
DO NOT JUDGE
DO NOT CONDEMN
PARDON
GIVE..GOOD MEASURE, PRESSED DOWN, SHAKEN TOGETHER, RUNNING OVER..
to every person in need..of food...of love..) luke 6.27-8;36-8
when K accepted the nobel peace prize in 1964,
K referred ..to the principles he had learned from the sermon on the mount:
'when the years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live,
men and women will know and children will be taught
that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization,
because these humble children of God WERE willing to 'suffer for righteousness sake'.
(note: sadly things get better only as long as we ARE continually obeying Jesus, to the degree this slips away
to that degree human hatred one for the other grows. basically it has nothing, primarily to do with skin color.
that is most 'unvarnished' and obvious. but continually this goes on at the heart level about which Jesus said:
'out of the heart of man comes..murders...)
...(speaking in the same chapter of spending time with john perkins the author writes..)
white mississippians did not mind the social services,
but the resented the steady influx of northerners,
especially when perkins began to lead a voter registration campaign.
at the time only 50 black voters were registered in simpson county,
though blacks comprised 40% of the population.
such a ratio was typical: only 7000 of mississippi's 450,000 blacks were registered,
due to the many legal barriers
...when i visited mendenhall in1974, a sign welcomed me to town:
'white people unite, defeat jew/communist race mixers'.
i asked john perkins to show me an example of racism in action.
'when i write our story, people are going to tell me everything has changed', i said.
'the civil rights bill was ten years ago. is there still overt discrimination?';
...perkins thought for a minute and suddenly his face brightened:
'i know-let's integrate the revolving table restaurant!' (yancey had his example as they were there.)
...the victories did not come easily and most did not come at all during K's lifetime.
roy wilkins of the NAACP, an uneasy rival of K, kidded him in 1963
that his methods had not achieved a single victory for integration in albany or birmingham,
'in fact, martin, if you have desegregated ANYTHING by your efforts, kindly enlighten me'.
'well, K replied, i guess about the only thing i've desegregated so far is a few human hearts'.
he knew that the ultimate victory must be won there.
laws could prevent white people from lynching blacks,
but no law could require races to forgive or love one another.
the human heart, not the courtroom, was his supreme battleground.
as one of those changed hearts, i would have to agree.
...in 1995 the southern baptist convention,
150 years after forming over the issue of slavery, formally repented of their long term support of racism...
..observers of the South sometimes speak of it as 'Christ haunted'.
perhaps they should speak of it as 'race haunted' as well.
all of us, white or black, who grew up in those days bear scars...
..a few years before his death, k was asked about mistakes he had made.
he replied, 'well, the most pervasive mistake i have made
was in believing that because our cause was just,
we could be sure that the white minsters of the South, once their christian consciences were challenged,
would rise to our aid.
i felt that white minsters would take our cause to the white power structures.
i ended up , or course, chastened and disillusioned.
as our movement unfolded and direct appeals were made to white ministers,
most folded their hands-and some even took stands against us.'
..(yancey speaks)..'only one thing haunts me more than the sins of my past:
what sins am i blind to today?'
RECOMMEND:
*the autobiographey of martin luther king, jr., an audiobook produced by time warner....
the tapes include actual sermons and speeches delivered by K himself in his stirring, inimitable style,
along with fine segues of gospel music.
*a testament of hope: the essential writings and speeches of martin luther king, jr.
*david garrow's 'bearing the cross' is best single volume biography of K
*taylor branch's exhaustive 'parting the waters +pillar of fire, expand the view to
encompass other events going on in the civil rights movement.
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