By Rhoda Pickett
Correspondent, The Alabama Baptist
More than 1,600 ministers, church members, youth and senior citizens from around the Mobile area gathered in the Mobile Civic Center Theater on July 24 to hear messages stressing relationship and friendship as a way to combat racial strife.
As ushers dressed in gray t-shirts with “Shrink the Divide” written in white letters, handed out programs and directed visitors to seats, the atmosphere became more worship service than plenary session. A praise band shared several songs including one with the words, “There is power in the name of Jesus to break every chain.”
Shrink the Divide — a gathering for racial reconciliation — was sponsored by The Pledge Group, which is made up of Mobile area pastors “to unify the body of Christ and our communities across ethnic and denominational lines, realizing that racism is a heart/sin problem and only the gospel will bring about such unity.”
Ed Litton, pastor of Redemption Church, Saraland, was one of the event organizers. “We could not be more excited and satisfied with this event,” he told The Alabama Baptist. “Our response from those who want to join us in practical ways of shrinking the divide was overwhelming. It was in every measure a great success.”
Keynote speakers Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and John M. Perkins, a minister, civil rights activist, Bible teacher and author, focused on the gospel and authentic Christianity.
Russell Moore
Moore, who along with Perkins received a standing ovation when he entered the stage, told the crowd “that once you are in the family of God, you are a joint heir with Jesus Christ.”
“If you have really been brought in by this gospel, then that’s going to change the way you see things including the way you see yourself in relation to other people,” Moore said. “What we are dealing with are three questions that could not be more relevant in the kind of American society that we are in right now that is riddled with division, riddled with racism, riddled with injustice, riddled often with hatred for one another and often infected with a kind of racism and racial animosity that is more subtle than it would have been at other points in American history which means that it is even more dangerous.”
“What God has called you to do is going to take time,” Moore added.
John M. Perkins
Perkins described the situation as a crisis of belief and owning sin.
“Our crisis is in not understanding authentic Christianity,” he said. “Sin is a rebellion against God and all sin in the end becomes your own. That’s a problem. The problem is that we don’t own our sin. And so we don’t believe. We don’t own our sin and so we can’t forgive. And even now we use our sin as a weapon. I’m won’t commit to you because you hurt me so bad and you might hurt me again. The problem is a crisis of belief.
“The church must lead that call out the world into a relationship with Jesus Christ and each other,” Perkins said. “And the Christian life must be the outward (manifestation) of the image of Christ.”
During a press conference prior to the event, Perkins said Christians must learn to be intentional in their obedience and that “the wrap around in Scripture is friendship.”
“The sin unto death is the sin we don’t confess,” he said. “The thief on the cross got that. He wasn’t baptized. He wasn’t a Baptist. He wasn’t a Presbyterian. He wasn’t an usher. He got that. He got that because it was intentional.”
Mobile-area pastors
Rob Couch, senior pastor of Christ United Methodist Church, Mobile, agreed.
“I really believe that the key to all this is building friendships with people,” Couch told The Alabama Baptist. “I think that when we get to know one another we can realize how much we have in common, a lot of these barriers will start to come down.”
Litton, also speaking at the press conference, added that understanding the gospel is the solution.
“But the problem is we see a church that is more polarized than the unchurched and that the church holds certain doctrinal beliefs and we’re not questioning those, but it’s how we apply them,” he said. “We’ve got to return to the basics of seeing another person as made in the image of God, which means they have value and worth and that their skin color is in the beauty of what God made them to be and that we are accept that person and love that person and doesn’t matter if you vote like me, think like me or look like me, but that God placed you here and I honor you because God made you.”
Members of The Pledge Group have been working on relationships and getting to know one another for the past nearly four years.
“In the process we’ve learned what it is to love each other, what it is to become friends, what it is to carry one another’s burdens and wounds,” Litton noted. “And in that process we began to spread out to others.”
Jerry Jenkins, senior pastor of Moffett Road Assembly of God, told TAB that as a younger man, racial segregation caused him to leave Mobile but spiritual intervention compelled him to return.
The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led him and other pastors to discuss avoiding a similar incident in Mobile and ultimately his decision to join The Pledge Group.
“We are seeing the racial division come down in my church,” he said. “We are integrated.”
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The Pledge
“I pledge to love my neighbor and to reject my tendency to distance myself from those different from me.”
Carry Forward The Pledge
- In my daily context, I will recognize and engage with persons of other races, speaking a warm greeting to them as fellow travelers on the journey of life;
- In my prayers, I will pray regularly for racial unity and harmony and for spiritual revival in our shared local communities and in our nation;
- In my personal initiative, I will pro-actively foster and deepen relationships with persons across racial, socio-economic, ethnic and denominational lines.
For more information please go to www.shrinkthedivide.com
(Photography by D. Ladd Photography)
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