JESUS AND THE GREAT DIVIDE (25 OF 56)
Scripture: Acts 10:24-48
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Jesus and the Great Divide (25 of 56)
Series: The Church in ACTSion
Wyman Richardson
Acts 10:24-48
Read Acts 10:24-48
I used to live near a very elderly man who was, to put it mildly, a colorful character. He was a member of another church in the town where I pastored but I would go by from time to time and talk with him. The rumor was that he had once killed a black man and gotten away with it. His manners did not do much to render that rumor unlikely, but I never asked him if that was so. What he did volunteer to me one day, however, has troubled me ever since. I was asking him about his church involvement and he shared with me that he was indeed a member of a local church and used to be quite involved. He then excitedly went on to tell me with great pride that he had spear-headed the effort to keep blacks from coming into the church and he had been most successful in his efforts. It struck me then as now as a chilling and pitiful thing to be proud of.
Not too far from where we lived at that time was Koinonia Farms, the experimental Christian community founded in the 1950's in South Georgia by Southern Baptist minister Clarence Jordan. You have perhaps heard of The Cotton Patch Gospel. Clarence Jordan wrote that retelling of the gospels, setting them in 1950's Georgia in an effort to show how the events of the gospel would play out in their own day and time. Koinonia was controversial at the time and, in truth, I met with some controversy and confusion about it even when I lived near it not too long ago. It was most controversial because of the way in which blacks were welcomed and treated as equals there. Jordan paid all the farmers the same, black or white. This led to boycotts in neighboring Americus, Georgia, as well as in the community being shot at and firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan.
One of the early residents there was Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity. Fuller once spoke of the early days of Koinonia and the trials they f ...
Series: The Church in ACTSion
Wyman Richardson
Acts 10:24-48
Read Acts 10:24-48
I used to live near a very elderly man who was, to put it mildly, a colorful character. He was a member of another church in the town where I pastored but I would go by from time to time and talk with him. The rumor was that he had once killed a black man and gotten away with it. His manners did not do much to render that rumor unlikely, but I never asked him if that was so. What he did volunteer to me one day, however, has troubled me ever since. I was asking him about his church involvement and he shared with me that he was indeed a member of a local church and used to be quite involved. He then excitedly went on to tell me with great pride that he had spear-headed the effort to keep blacks from coming into the church and he had been most successful in his efforts. It struck me then as now as a chilling and pitiful thing to be proud of.
Not too far from where we lived at that time was Koinonia Farms, the experimental Christian community founded in the 1950's in South Georgia by Southern Baptist minister Clarence Jordan. You have perhaps heard of The Cotton Patch Gospel. Clarence Jordan wrote that retelling of the gospels, setting them in 1950's Georgia in an effort to show how the events of the gospel would play out in their own day and time. Koinonia was controversial at the time and, in truth, I met with some controversy and confusion about it even when I lived near it not too long ago. It was most controversial because of the way in which blacks were welcomed and treated as equals there. Jordan paid all the farmers the same, black or white. This led to boycotts in neighboring Americus, Georgia, as well as in the community being shot at and firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan.
One of the early residents there was Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity. Fuller once spoke of the early days of Koinonia and the trials they f ...
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