What’s So Amazing About Grace - Week 10 - The Power of Grace Over Racism

It’s funny how sometimes things happen to coincide. In my last post I told how two different groups were discussing very similar subjects at the same time. Also in the last week I learned that someone had a question on a subject that I had posted on that very day. Then I heard a question that concerned the relationship between our conscience and the Holy Spirit. I had just the night before read a chapter in a book on that very subject. (I will report on this soon.) Today I began to read our next chapter in What’s So Amazing About Grace. This chapter continues the discussion on forgiveness and reconciliation, but with a specific emphasis on racism. Then I read over next week’s Sunday School lesson. It also deals with racism.

Coincidences? Maybe, maybe not. These may be instances, like our conscience, where the Holy Spirit uses the world around us to make a point. This is the experience corner of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

Being a child of the deep South, I am aware that racism exists. There is no denying it. I have heard racial slurs my whole life. I heard one Saturday. I wish I had the strength and confidence to take a stand every time I hear someone speak poorly of another race.

I thank God that I was born in the generation that I was. I am of the generation of integration. Our local schools integrated the year I entered the second grade. I have from that time to the present had daily contact with the race that the prior generation had tried their best to beat down. We learned to read and write in the same classrooms. We played kickball and hide-and-seek and dodgeball on the same playgrounds. We grew up and graduated together. We entered the same workforce. The only difference is the shade of our skins and the histories of our ancestors.

Philip Yancey tells of his childhood church, which went so far as to make an action plan for the possibility of African-Americans attempting to worship with them. Their plan was to turn any “black troublemakers” away. From a card that was printed by his church and to be given to those “black troublemakers”:

“.......we cannot extend a welcome to you and respectfully request you to leave the premises quietly. Scripture does NOT teach ‘the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.’ He is the Creator of all, but only the Father of those who have been regenerated.”

His childhood church is no more, and I think I can understand why. I think his church was “regenerated”.

I am proud to say that, according to a member who grew up in Friendship UMC, that a similar meeting was held here but with a totally opposite result. According to my source, our church decided that if at any time anyone desired to worship with us that we would welcome them. We have been a “Welcoming Congregation” much longer than the title has existed.

Hey, maybe that’s another coincidence.