We are the ambassadors of Jesus Christ in the world today. This is our mission field, this is our time and we cannot be silent. Some thoughts on the events of the last week and the Christian’s response to racism. Also Listen to The Reconnect’s Spotlight interview with Jemar Tisby: After Charlottesville, How will the White…
(By Kelsey Davis, Montgomery Advertiser; Alabama.) A black woman walked into First Presbyterian Church in the early 1970s, taking a seat midway up the pews. As soon as she sat down, a white woman stood up and left. “She was not going to sit through that service with a black person sitting in the church,” Dan…
(By Carla Hinton, NewsOK). A preacher isn’t sure what he’ll find when he opens the doors of his Oklahoma City church on Wednesday evening. That’s when the first “Racism & Racists Anonymous” meeting will take place at Trinity Presbyterian Church, in Oklahoma City, OK. How many people are going to be willing to admit in…
By J. Josh Smith, Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Last week, just a few days after two black men were killed by white police and a day after five white officers were killed by a black man who admittedly targeted white police, President Obama stood in front of the NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland, and…
By Viola Larson, Naming His Grace. Presbyterian Church (USA) Co-Moderator, T. Denise Anderson, in her article, “Confession time: How white supremacy hurts white people,” on the Presbyterian Outlook web-site, calls on individual white people to personally confess their individual racism. Anderson insists that all white people in the United States are involved in racism and…
By T. Denise Anderson, The Presbyterian Outlook. Last week after we’d learned about a second extrajudicial killing of an African-American man, I put the following plea on social media to white friends who were in lament and wanted to know how much longer we’d have to hear these stories: “White people, you have heard it…
Flags are flying at half-staff in America. Again. This past week, our country was again torn apart with acts of violence. America is existing in a fractured state. During times of grief and anger, it is easier to retreat into our own like-minded and homogenous-looking communities rather than risk reaching across divides. It is more…
By Paul Harvey, Religion Dispatches. Over the last 20 years, major American denominations, particularly those with southern origins (such as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Pentecostal Holiness Church), have been in the business of passing “racial reconciliation resolutions.” The Southern Baptists did so with a pretty strong statement in 1995; the Pentecostals experienced their “Memphis…
Editor’s note: This article as originally posted Nov. 7, 2015. It is re-posted today as J. Herbert Nelson was announced as the selection committee’s candidate for Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Community organizer, social justice advocate, African American preacher and head of the Office of Public Witness of…
Dylann Roof did not start a race war as he had planned, but he did start a number of conversations that were long overdue. When he walked into the Emmanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston, S.C. last Wednesday night with a heart filled with hate and a fanny-pack filled with ammunition, Roof had a plan and…