Posted on 11/11/2015 11:02:06 AM PST by wagglebee
ST. LOUIS, Missouri, November 11, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – The Church of God in Christ (COGIC) has launched a "Family Life Campaign" to adopt children who otherwise would have been aborted.
The denomination, one of the oldest Pentecostal groups in the world, held its annual convocation in St. Louis this week. At the gathering, songs and praise filled the air. And a unique call to lay down one's life for the "least of these" went out to challenge the faithful.
Citing statistics that black women have disproportionately high rates of abortion, members were challenged to save black babies' lives by adopting them.
"Some 3,446 African-Americans were lynched in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968," the church announced. "That number is surpassed in less than three days by abortion in the African-American community."
Bishop Vincent Mathews issued the call for at least ten percent of COGIC faithful – including retired couples – to adopt the child of a pregnant mother who otherwise would kill her baby or to adopt a child in the foster care system.
The 46-year-old missionary said that if the faithful would give their lives in this way, communities would be safer, and the world would see a genuinely strong, active faith in Christ.
The bishop said it will take reliance on the "supernatural power of God," but he concluded that with God, all things are possible.
"Do you really love God?" Mathews preached. "Do you really want to serve him? Well, it's not just about coming to a convention looking good. It's about going home, rolling up your sleeves, and taking care of a child who may have been born addicted to drugs."
"And now love that child," Mathews said. "Stay up all night. Love on that child until he's right. Now, now you are really serving God."
The COGIC Family Life Campaign has already inspired Christians outside the denomination. Rev. Dean Nelson, the national outreach director of Online for Life, told LifeSiteNews, "It is no surprise that COGIC has launched this initiative. They have not only remained consistent to biblical teaching on the issues of abortion but have been the most outspoken of any black denomination in this county."
Rev. Nelson continued his praise for "the fastest growing African-American denomination in the country": "They have also shown willingness to work with white Evangelicals and Catholics on a host of issues affecting the black family."
"It is my hope that other African-American church leaders will follow suit," Nelson concluded.
"The leadership of the Church of God in Christ should be commended for this new initiative," Rev. Brian Walker of Pro-Life Action Ministries told LifeSiteNews. "It addresses an important need to reduce abortion and provide women in the church and wider community a way to allow their child to live and be adopted into a loving Christian family."
"This should be seen as a victory for the black pro-life movement and its leaders who have worked for many years to awaken the 'sleeping giant' of the Church of God in Christ," Rev. Walker said.
"Practicing pure religion to care for orphans is a good thing, and a challenge to all of us," Walker concluded.
"COGIC bishops are smart and know the danger of the abortion agenda – black genocide," Dr. Johnny M. Hunter, national director of the Life Education and Resource Network, told LifeSiteNews.
Dr. Hunter continued, "Like the opening of the book of Exodus, first came slavery, then child killing. Abortionists have killed more children than all world wars combined. The enemy has a plot that runs deep fueled by apathy, but God has a plan that runs deeper – it is fueled by love. The COGIC has bold members with a full tank of love."
"It is wonderful to see, as an African-American Catholic, an African-American Christian denomination determined to take a stand against the evil of abortion," Richard Lane, a Catholic lay evangelist, commented to LifeSiteNews.
"We need to continue to help these families adopt and support their efforts," Lane, who travels the world preaching the Gospel, told LifeSiteNews. "I only hope the governmental entities will see and take note of some of the special circumstances that come with some (not all) African-American families, as compared to other families."
"It is wonderful to see how we can continue to learn from each other to continue to build up the Kingdom of God here on Earth," Lane concluded.
Bishop Mathews, a former principal from Detroit, will oversee the Family Life Campaign. He and his wife, who serve as missionaries in South Africa, have ten children.
Bishop Mathews leads the COGIC International Missions Department. He's been a missionary in Johannesburg for the past eleven years. An author of six books, the bishop says that a Christian's faith must be active to be real.
The Church of God in Christ is the fourth largest Protestant group in the U.S., with churches in 63 countries worldwide, 12,000 congregations, and a total membership of nearly 6.5 million.
And the African-American community is completely unaware of this.
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Nobody cares, unless there’s something to financially gain out of it. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
Call Hollywood. They’re always looking for black trophy babies.
There are Black churches in America (not of the Jeremiah Wright persuasion) that are amongst the last flickering hopes for our country.
Good for them! This is what it will take to reverse a culture that is destroying itself.
I applaud this and good on the person who spoke the truth.
Three times that amount are murdered by other blacks in any given year.
Nobody cares, unless there’s something to financially gain out of it. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
I care. This is something I can support 100%.
That may be true, but that isn't the point. Imagine the positive long-term effect of all these little ones being raised up in Christian households.
Exactly.
Black on black crime is almost completely due to the fact that black families have been nearly eliminated by the left through a combination of the welfare state and abortion.
How about encouraging women to keep their legs together until married to stable man?
This church has awakened.
Thank God
Thank God
Yet they'll still vote the straight Democrat ticket in every election.
Yeah, I suppose that’s true.
Still, they’ve made a pretty big step by trying to save the babies.
Still, they've made a pretty big step by trying to save the babies.
It certainly took them long enough.
Where the h--- have they been for the past sixty years? They embraced a "civil rights movement" that was aggressively secular in its philosophy and that blamed "religion" for slavery and jim crow (hence the same people who supported "civil rights" supported secularization as well); they've sat back while "their" religion was being ridiculed and lambasted and did nothing other than to fawn over the politicians who did so; they have stubbornly refused to get involve in any social issue allegedly common to all churches which doesn't connect directly to the racial narrative (evolution, abortion, "gay rights," Third World Communism, etc.); and they insist on living in a walled-off ethnic ghetto-church that is about as connected to chrstianity at large as the Armenian or Ethiopian churches--in fact, less so.
I am a descendant of Southern Unionist Republicans. I had always looked up to and admired Black Americans (especially Southern ones) with a kind of awe. I also used to trust them. Surely, I thought, one day the liberals will cross a line where the Black churches simply will refuse to follow.
I was wrong. I'm sorry that I was wrong, but I was. They simply don't care about anything apart from "social justice" issues. And if it's all the fault of an "out-of-touch leadership," then why is it that every single mainstream (ie, not "uncle tom") politician, no matter how Southern and rural, is an across-the-board screaming Red on every issue??? Don't these local Black politicians come out of these "conservative" Black churches? Don't they??? If they don't, then were do they come from? Why can't ONE conventional Black politician dissent from one issue, anywhere?
The Black American story is a tragedy. They were brought over here in great numbers specifically because their blackness "marked" them as a "slave race." They were treated as sub-human despite being one of the oldest and certainly least alien population groups in the country, and what is even more tragic, after a horrible Civil War that was supposed to solve all these problems they were basically enslaved all over again in all but name in a horrible arrangement known as "jim crow."
But instead of calling on G-d A-mighty they turned to secularism and Marxism and now post-Marxism. They joined the side of evil and will end their sojourn here being punished by A-mighty G-d for their role in bringing about the Leftist sewer that still celebrates them as their number one cause (without any protest from them).
Sorry, but I'm bitter and very disappointed.
Yet they’ll still vote the straight Democrat ticket in every election.
I would not as certain this time around. There is an uprising of anti-abortion rhetoric in the African-American church that gives me reason for hope and it’s gaining steam. Many are waking up to the fact that democrats use blacks, love homosexuality, and support a black holocaust in our nation.
Rush used to say years ago that one day there would be an awakening in the black community - this would be a good start!
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