Let's Build a Hate-proof Church

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.  --  Galatians 3:27-28

When I did a couple of posts last week about the faith and work of Clarence Jordan, I had no idea how timely those posts would be. Brother Clarence devoted his life to building a community of faith where those who were Red and Yellow, Black and White could come together and worship the one who believes we are all precious in his sight.  

In a sermon entitled, "The Substance of Faith," Jordan tells a story about a Baptist congregation in North Carolina that had really worked at being a "Hate-proof" Church. This and a number of other powerful sermons by Clarence Jordan can be found in a book entitled The Substance of Faith: and Other Cotton Patch Sermons.  Here's the story:

A number of years ago, I was invited by a Southern Baptist church in North Carolina to come and speak.  I looked the place up on the map and found that it was a little suburb of a big city in North Cqrolina and I figured that it was some swank, aristocratic, liberal church that wanted somebody to come to it and pat it on the back for its liberal views toward race.  So I figured that I'd get me up a sermon and I'd hold those folks over the brink and singe their eyebrows.  I wanted a chance to really preach to a Southern Baptist church because I hadn't had that chance since a Baptist church had turned me out five years previously.  There was just a little bit of revenge, I guess.

I went over there and instead of it being a big swank suburban church, it was a little mill-town church that was on the edge of the city and the city had grown up and engulfed it.  The church would seat about three hundred and I think they had about six hundred in it. The thing that amazed me was that these people were white and Negro just sitting anywhere they wanted to sit.  And back of me was a choir with about fifty voices in it and over half of them were Negroes.  Well, I had to change my subject.

When I got through, the pastor got up and said, "Now, we're going to have dinner on the grounds."  I really trembled then, because it's one thing for black and white folks to worship together; it's another thing for them to eat together.  Here the man was advocating social equality right there in the South.

The choir got up and sang, "Let us Break Bread Together on Our Knees," and we went out and I thought sure those folks would go out to the back yard of the church, but they went out on the front yard and spread their tables right out on the main street of this little town, and started eating together.  When they started eating together and talking together, I knew this wasn't an unusual thing.  I knew they had been doing this a long time.

I went over to the pastor, and I said, "You know, this is a rather amazing thing to me.  Were you integrated before the Supreme Court decision?"  He said, "What decision?"

He explained, "Well, back during the depression, I was a worker here in this little mill.  I didn't have any education.  I couldn't even read and write.  I got somebody to read the Bible to me, and I was moved and I gave my heart to the Lord, and later, I felt the call of the Lord to preach.  This little church here was too poor to have a preacher and I just volunteered. They accepted me and I started preaching. Someone read to me in there where God is no respecter of persons, and I preached that."

I said, "Yeah.  How did you get along?"

"Well," he said, "the deacons came around to me after that sermon and said, 'Now, brother pastor, we not only don't let a nigger spend the night in this town, we don't even let him pass through.  Now, we don't want that kind of preaching you're giving us.'"

I said, "What did you do?"

"Well," he said, "I fired them deacons."

"How come they didn't fire you?"

"Well," he said, "they never had hired me. I just volunteered."

"Did you have any more trouble with them?"

 "Yeah.  They came back at me again."

"What did you do with them that time?"

"I turned them out.  I told them anybody that didn't know any more about the gospel of Jesus than that not only shouldn't be an officer in the church, he shouldn't be a member of it.  I had to put them out."

I said, "Did you have to put anybody else out?"

"Well, I preached awfully hard, and I finally preached them down to two.  But," he said "those two were committed.  I made sure that any time after that, anybody who came into my church understood that they were giving their life to Jesus Christ and they were going to have to be serious about it.  What you see here is a result of that."

Isn't this the kind of church Jesus had in mind?  God is looking for those of us who are willing to become the answer to Jesus' prayer, "Father, may your kingdom come and your will be done; on earth as it is in heaven." 

Amen!