Thursday, October 22, 2015

Segregated Churches Should Go the Way of the Dodo

I just got out of a meeting.
The meeting was hosted by the department of transportation and it was filled with a lot of angry old black people from the United House of Prayer and other black churches. They were there to protect the diagonal parking they have grown accustomed to having. They apparently also sent a letter to DDOT to say that taking away the diagonal parking was infringing on their religious liberties.
Bull crap.
Religious liberty does not extend to crap you don't own. Like the street. Driving and parking is not a tenet of faith, but then again, UHOP believes in firehose baptisms maybe parking on public city streets is part of it too......I consider them as Christian as Mormons and 7th day Adventists.
But there were members from Baptist churches too, there to support the Afro-centric United House of Prayer. And I was reminded of one of the reasons why I left the black church. My G-d is not my culture and the black church sometimes gets into the business of worshiping Black history. In this case mistaking the privilege to park in front of their church building with following Christ.
There was a claim that black churches were being driven out of the neighborhood and someone mentioned 10 black churches that were in the neighborhood are no longer there. Well, one "church" on my street died out  because everyone was over the age of 90.  Another church around the corner, the screaming ladies church, they sold their building because their crowd of screamy ladies was getting smaller. I attend one of the few desegregated churches in the neighborhood. Right now the demographic of the 5:30 mass is well, gay, and evenly black and white with a few asians and latinos sprinkled in.
The Help's church is also desegregated. Yes predominately white, but there are Africans, from Africa there. There are also South Asians from IDK Pakistan/India. A buncha Chinese people go there too.
You know what is great about a desegregated church? A wonderful reminder of heaven and the diversity of the body of Christ. Also we worship a triune god, not our culture as some ethnic churches may stray and do.
So yes, there are fewer black churches. Good. Lets have Christian churches instead.

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