I am sitting in the Ziguinchor airport in the Casamance, southern Senegal. When we finally got back out of the Essing villages after 8 days, I read an exchange by the “Voices for a New Baptist Future” group.
We’ve fallen into our old patterns, haven’t we? When we elected Fred Luter as our president we slapped ourselves on the back because we’d put those bad ol’ days of racism in the past. Some of us who have continued to raise the issue have been chastised – why keep hammering on the issue when we have clearly made so much progress? Those days have passed. Why keep hammering on that? We didn’t do it. It was people from 30, 50, 80, 100 years ago. But now we have all white nominees again.
Play that funky music, white SBC.
Here’s the thing, the vast majority of SBC pastors have no desire to exclude minorities or keep people down. Theoretically, 99.9% of us (I just created that statistic) are for racial reconciliation and greater inclusion, but unless we are INTENTIONAL about the process we will continue to do nothing more than play some funky music and little will change.
We must:
*intentionally include other races in our daily fellowship and our personal friendships.
*intentionally include other ethnic groups in our power structures.
*intentionally remove any cultural hindrances from fellowship. Ask some Black, Asian, Hispanic, or Native American brothers what southern cultural detritus hinders their fellowship in your church, association, or convention. It might be eye-opening.
*intentionally apologize for past hurts, even those that were unknown and unintentional. It still hurt.
*intentionally NEVER STOP.
The process isn’t over. Our forefathers oppressed, dehumanized, and brutalized other races for 400 years, then sat in church and sang the praises of God. For 20 years we’ve been reaching out, but a convention apology in 1995 and the election of Fred Luter in 2012 is not an ending but a beginning.
I’m a child of the 70s and I liked that song. But it’s not one our convention should sing. Time to take Wild Cherry’s hit and send it back to 1976.
Let’s sing a different tune.
Why no just reach out to people because they need the Lord? Why not elect individuals to positions in Baptist life because they are qualified?
There are plenty of qualified people out there. The question is how are we recruiting those qualified people to run. This is a call to expand our circles of friendship so we’re aware of qualified people from many different backgrounds.
This isn’t rocket science.
Bert, it seems like when we take your advice we “Play that funky music, white boy.”
If we are not intentional, and just keep our leader ship a whites only club, that kinda says that we think the others are not qualified.
Count me as one who is VERY tired if that poor excuse for not pursuing racial reconciliation.
Entirely fitting considering the closing line of that song’s chorus:
“Lay down that boogie and play that funky music till you die”
When a serious percentage of our struggling and dying churches are in that condition because they never reached changing communities. They remained traditional, white, SBC churches in areas where that demographic was dwindling. Alan’s pointed out that one of the keys to stemming SBCs decline is seeing effective growth among non-white populations. We keep playing that funky music and we’re headed exactly where the song says.
What about “intentionally including “sisters”. Since theoretically at least 50% of all Southern Baptist are women!
I tried to understand this I thought that they were out of their minds How could I be so foolish (How could I) To not see I was the one behind So still I kept on fighting Well, losing every step of the way I said, I must go back there (I got to go back) And check to see if things still the same Yeah they was dancin’ and singin’ and movin’ to the groovin’ And just when it hit me somebody turned around and shouted Play that funky music white boy Play that funky music right Play that… Read more »
How many of you are singing this in your head now? lol
David 🙂
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm
Speaking of which…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qe1ScoePqVA
This is an excellent article, Dave. I could not agree more with everything written here.