Posted on 12/01/2004 6:53:32 AM PST by ZGuy
MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Like other evangelical Christians, leaders of the Church of God in Christ want to limit abortion and bar same-sex marriage.
But that doesn’t mean the predominantly black Pentecostal denomination considers itself part of the “religious right” or supporters of the Republican Party.
“I’ve seen the tone of the religious right,” said G.E. Patterson, the church’s presiding bishop. “It seemingly was born out of the fact that African-Americans were making too many gains.”
Patterson’s church, often referred to simply as COGIC, reports having more than 6 million members across the United States and in 57 countries.
While COGIC agrees with white evangelicals that the Bible is the primary source of spiritual authority, its ideas on government social programs and protecting the rights of minorities differ, Patterson said.
“Every law that has anything to do with leveling the playing field for blacks, they are against it,” he said.
COGIC also disagreed with President Bush on the war in Iraq. The church’s top leaders wrote the president before the war started, urging him to resist sending in the military.
Bush won the support of 78 percent of white evangelicals, who were stirred in part by issues such as opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage.
One COGIC bishop, George McKinney of San Diego, even endorsed Bush for those reasons. But Patterson said those issues alone were not enough to bring COCIC into the Republican camp.
“There’s a lot more to morality than just those two points,” he said.
COGIC’s national headquarters is in Memphis, Tenn., where the church was founded in the early 1900s by Charles Harrison Mason, a son of slaves and a former Baptist preacher.
Today it’s America’s largest Pentecostal denomination, attracting new members with its foot-stomping, hand-clapping worship services.
“Many black churches that are experiencing numerical decline are often seen as either elitist or very rigid in their worship,” said Quinton Dixie, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
“Those that tend to be among the fastest-growing churches are those that lean to a more charismatic worship style.”
COGIC’s founder preached of a “spiritual baptism” in which believers were suddenly awash in a soul-shaking love for Jesus that left them praising him in a divinely inspired language, known as speaking in tongues.
COGIC also has a strong connection to the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, which gives it a different perspective from other born-again denominations.
“These are issues that touch them in ways that don’t touch other Pentecostal denominations,” said Edith Blumhofer, a Pentecostal historian at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.
Martin Luther King Jr., who was killed in Memphis in 1968 while helping lead a sanitation workers’ strike, delivered his last sermon, his famous “Mountain Top” address, at Mason Temple, COGIC’s mother church, the night before he was assassinated.
Pentecostal leaders from COGIC and several large white churches in Memphis met in 1994 to bridge the racial divide. While encouraging at first, the new bonds were strained by the 1996 elections, Patterson said, and the unification movement soon fizzled.
“The demands of politics still remained stronger than the demands of brotherhood,” he said.
COGIC’s primary business is praising Jesus, but the parent church also encourages individual congregations to set up community programs for helping the poor and bringing them to Christ.
“They recognize that part of what it means to live as a Christian witness to the world is to place oneself as an advocate for ‘the least of these,’ ”Dixie said. “Not only do you save souls, but you feed the hungry and clothe the naked.
“There aren’t national programs established by the denominational hierarchy.
“They allow the local communities to determine what are the needs in their communities.”
Upward of 60,000 church members attended this year’s convocation, which ended Wednesday. Patterson was chosen for a second four-year-term as presiding bishop, the denomination’s top administrator and spiritual leader.
At the convocation, COGIC members, who call themselves “saints,” renew old friendships, brainstorm on community programs and select the top leaders of the denomination.
For sisters Carrie Austin, 62, and Dorothy Jones, 64, of Omaha, Neb., the annual gathering of saints is a spiritual homecoming.
“It’s just like at home in our own churches. We go there to be blessed, blessed of God, to be saved and sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost,” Jones said.
Austin said she had no doubt the church will continue to grow and draw more worshippers.
“They know this world is in such turmoil and they’re looking for some truth, so they’re coming over,” she said.
“They know this is a church that’s based on the Bible.”
“The demands of politics still remained stronger than the demands of brotherhood,” he said.
Indeed. Let him who is without socialist covetousness cast the first stone.
I find it very difficult to trust someone and embrace them wholeheartedly as a "brother in Christ" when they are supporting a political party that makes no secret of the fact that it hates me, and would tax me out of existence if it could. Especially if that individual takes the attitude that I, just because I'm white, am somehow guilty of a crime I never did, and therefore "owe" him something. (How about a xerox copy of my great-grandfather's Union Army discharge papers?)
Bottom line: I don't really believe that such people are Christians, any more than I believe that the gay MCC'rs are Christians. So I can't really see a conflict between the "demands of brotherhood" and the "demands of politics" when I don't believe that a real brotherhood exists.
Yes, and whites, too, were often lynched. Someone like Scott Peterson would probably not have lived to stand trial. Of course, lynching is wrong, but it was not a wrong done exclusively to blacks. Any miscreant (or apparent miscreant) was liable to hang.
your name says it all... universal lynching? meaning a few random incidents that were played up by the mainstream media to look like every southerner condoned it? You are making false generalizations and spouting the same liberal rhetoric that all the other leftists spout...without any actually facts to back you up.
You make one of the fundamental errors so common these days. Forced charity is not true charity. Yes, the poor and downtrodden should be helped, but - and this is key - that is NOT a function of the government.
It is charity when you give of your substance of your own free will. It is not charity when the government seizes money from you, under threat of incarceration, and gives it to whomever they think needs it, regardless of your wishes.
Lynching was not the least degree a "color-blind" experience. Sassing a white person or looking at a white woman were lynching offenses for blacks.
A few random incidents that were scheduled like carnivals where refreshments were sold and people gathered from miles around with picnic baskets ?
NO Republicans say this. NONE. NEVER. What Republicans say, is that the handout should not come FROM THE GOVERNMENT. That's a very important distinction, here in the world's most charitable country.
Oh, yeah, and most of the single-mother situations in the black community are self inflicted as a result of fornication -- not widowhood. Another important distinction that is often glossed over. Demanding the charitable privileges of widowhood be extended to fornicators, amounts to forcing the good citizens to subsidize other peoples' sin.
[blacks] believe that even though republicans scream they are christians they are not doing one of the fundamental things that the bible says you should do, help the legitimately poor
Huge amounts are donated in this country to help the poor, and an awful lot of that money comes from religious conservatives. Once again, many members of the black community are confused about this because we (a) rightly oppose government intervention, believing that we should be charitable with our own money instead of money coercively extracted from others, and (b) because we normally don't sound a trumpet in front of ourselves when we give alms, as the liberal welfarists do. (Verily, they have their reward: votes.)
YOu are correct that it should not come from the government but this guy is talking not only of government but in general. He is saying that when republicans see blacks make an advance, they say they don't need any help- forced or not. I have been on these boards a long time and I read the posts that say, blacks don't need any help anymore look at Oprah, Condi Rice, or Michael Jordan that's proof enough. But what he's saying is this does not sound like a christian approach to helping the legitimately needy. There are still alot of needy people in the world black and white.
Nevertheless, plenty of whites got lynched.
See my post #36 for another aspect of this problem...
and seem to suffer from ADD
Hey, I have ADHD and I'm not like that!
What on earth ever put THIS idea in this man's head? I've never seen anything that could even HINT at this? Maybe because he sees all the pentacostal programming on TV that's largely white, but that doesn't mean they don't let black people in, it probably just means that those 'services' aren't Spirit filled enough for them.
So ,as the bible says, he without the first sin throw the stone. You may chose if you think this person is unworthy, but then that is the fundamental reason why the minister and many blacks are saying repubicans are racist and not christians.
You have statistically decided that most problems in the black community are a result of fornication and you should not pay. But my question was not about fornicating mothers but a fatherless child. Also remember that many of the mothers that currently have children by black men are not just black women. The black community is seeing a great many white women that have "fornicated" as well.
I agree that the money should not be forced from you by the government. But if you have the thought process that you just indicated, how will you know when you are helping a person justifiablly in need or helping pay for someones sins (which I have never read about in my bible). In other words, what's to stop people like you from saying, well there is too much fornication in the black community so I'm not giving anymore money to charities that help them?
Two different views of the world.
bump
"Blacks" don't need help, and as long as the Left and victocrats insist on equating skin color to neediness this form of racism won't die.
Some people do need help in this country, but it is not a function of their relative melanin level. If this Bishop is telling his flock that they are needy because of something unchangeable, like their skin, then he is doing them a grave disservice.
Tell them they are poor and needy because of poor education, broken families, unparented children, and you leave them with hope; those things they can change. But, tell them they are poor and needy because they are Black, and you destroy their hope for better, absolve them of responsibility for their condition, and stoke divisive anger. Hardly Christian leadership.
This is not the same CoG. My ex and I attended a Church of God (Anderson,IN). The 'Church of God in Christ' has absolutely no connection with the CoG (Anderson). The last thing I would be considered is Pentacostal.
Haven't read the article, yet.
I didn't get the impression that he was telling his people this from the article. I got that from the various posts through out the years about blacks and their asking for a handout and this being the reason they will not vote republican. I, like you agree that there are many situations that blacks can cure themselves. What I read from his article was the lack of interest in helping the poor period and blaming it on blacks having made too many advancements. If this is the case, which I stated I have read on these posts, then my argument is this is not christian and regardless of whether the person is black or white there are still needy people in the world.
Many people have responded and put words in my mouth by saying that I believe the government should be a handout organization or that black people are the only ones that need help. I'm only viewing it from a christian perspective. We will always have the poor amoung us (regardless of the reason) and there are those we should legitimately help. If people are not willing to believe this, then my opinion is they are not following christian principles.
Really? Honestly, I had no idea that yours was a different denomination than the COGIC. Thanks for educating me as to my error.
You may chose if you think this person is unworthy, but then that is the fundamental reason why the minister and many blacks are saying repubicans are racist and not christians.
Racist? How? I don't advocate subsidizing white welfare fornicators either but the cold cruel undeniable truth is that it's a much bigger problem in the black community. And, more germane to this thread, black "ministers" use our unwillingness to subsidize sin, as a dishonest excuse to call us "anti-black".
You have statistically decided that most problems in the black community are a result of fornication
This is pretty well proven!!!!!!!!!!! ALL of the differences in social pathology (crime, addiction, educational failure, joblessness, promiscuity, homosexuality -- all much higher in the black commununity) are strongly influenced by whether there's a father in the home or not. Out-of-wedlock children of any race are much more likely to get caught up in these things. In fact, when statisticians control for the "father/no father" variable, there is NO difference between the black and white community. There's no invisible hand of continuing covert discrimination causing this, neither is it a legacy of of the oppressions of the past, nor is it genetic. It's an absence of fatherhood. So, yes, all of the black community's present-day social pathologies can be directly traced to the greater prevalence, in their community, of this one particular sin.
And as more and more whites stupidly follow the same path, they too will end up in the same mess -- God being no respecter of persons.
I would like nothing better than to see the black community achieve educational and economic parity with the rest of us but until they change their behavior that CANNOT happen, even if you tax us out of existence to try to raise enough welfare money to prevent it.
But my question was not about fornicating mothers but a fatherless child...what's to stop people like you from saying, well there is too much fornication in the black community so I'm not giving anymore money to charities that help them?
A widows is in an unchosen situation; she deserves our help. A fornicator's deprived children may also need help, BUT... one must be careful that one's assistance doesn't subsidize or encourage a continuance of the parent's behavior. This can only be done on an individually scrutinized basis, and if charity recipients were accountable to the giver for their behavior, the behavior would change in a hurry. That'll never happen in a government welfare system where the money a caseworker is disbursing isn't his own.
And yes, I've given plenty of money away (beyond my tithe) to various people in need, of various races. I have no problem supporting charities that help blacks or anyone else, provided that sin isn't subsidized.
I have to add: Welfare-state levels of taxation make it difficult for responsible parents to afford more than 1 or 2 children... yet the welfare mothers (fornicaters almost all) can crank out half a dozen or more and feed them at the responsible citizen's expense. What this amounts to is, that the "seed of the righteous", which in the Bible is supposed to be "blessed", instead ends up dwindling, while the wicked multiply at our expense. That just ain't right.
“Every law that has anything to do with leveling the playing field for blacks, they are against it,” he said.
If this is what the Bishop is telling the press, you can bet it's what he's telling his congregation. He looks at the world through the prism of race; it is the beam in his eye.
What I read from his article was the lack of interest in helping the poor period and blaming it on blacks having made too many advancements.
What I got was that he was equating helping the poor with helping Blacks, and that those bad, old Republicans weren't in favor of the government doing that. That is wrong at several levels, starting with his base assumption and going on to his supporting facts and ending with his erroneous conclusion.
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