Thanks for sharing this. I preach for a racially diverse congregation with ethnic heritages that come from at least 3 different continents. I keep reminding them that we should never take this for granted because it only takes one generation forgetting to destroy God’s work of reconciliation. It takes a lifetime to grow a strong healthy tree and only five minutes with a chainsaw to chop it down. Let’s keep telling the truth!

Grace and Peace,

Rex

Rex,

Remind me again where you are? I want to learn from you. JG

Thanks…I’m just trying to learn too. I am in Dover/Randolph, New Jersey (about 30 miles west of NYC). I preach for the Randolph CoC. As I said, we are a racially/ethnically diverse congregation. The church has also been in decline for years but is dreaming of what it means to be on mission again as a people with a heritage in the CoC. One of our strengths is our racial/ethnic diverse congregation and that is important since we exist in a very diverse culture.

I am actually going to try and make it to the New England Church Growth Conference which I see you are speaking at, so perhaps we will meet in person there. If not, perhaps at the Pepperdine Lectures this year.

Grace and Peace,

Rex

Rex,

Can’t wait to see you in Connecticut. I’d love to connect with you. Perhaps I can get to Randolph at some point so I can finally take my wife to NYC! Ha. I’ve been 6 or 7 times but have never gone with my wife.

See you in a month!

Dude, watched your talk. It was great, and brave. Having grown up in the southeast, I’m glad that there are voices like yours speaking into it, reminding them of our past and keeping history alive. Thanks for your ministry brother…Looking forward to you being here next weekend!

JSTORM–Can’t wait to be with you next week. JG

To my Memphis friend who commented, I apologize your comment didn’t get posted. I’ve been having problems with first-time “commenters” If you could post again, I’ll respond. I believe you had questions regarding MLK’s private life (marriage, etc.). It’s an important conversation.

It’s true that MLK was unfaithful to his wife. And while I certainly don’t want to gloss over this, I’ve also been schooled in the men and women God uses in the Hebrew Scriptures (Abraham, Noah, David, Solomon, Rahab, etc) as well as NT (Peter, James and John, the Apostle Paul). If I dismiss MLK’s passion for God/justice what do I do with the chorus of broken witnesses in scripture?

Josh,

I shared the video with a friend and brother in Christ who happens to be African-American. I think he’ll appreciate it.

Also, one thing I have come to realize is how MLK didn’t just help the black community, he helped the white community as well. Hatred (as with all darkness) consumes people and enslaves them into a life (if you can even call it a “life”) that is void of the life God created us to live. MLK showed the white community just destructive and suffocating our hatred was, making us realize we had to change if we wanted to live ourselves.

Of course, this is one of the things we do when we follow Jesus as living witnesses of the Gospel. We expose the darkness for what it is by being light and help people to see the life God creates and redeems the us for so that we/they can be set free from the lies and destructiveness of the darkness.

Grace and Peace,

Rex

RC from Memphis wrote this about MLK–agree or disagree?

“Sometimes the comment is there sometimes not. I am going to post it one more time in part because I caught a few typos. If this doesn’t work I will assume that someone is telling me not to post.

Glad to hear back. I thought I might have offended you in some awful way. Said in jest. I will try to recreate my thoughts, but I already sense that it needs to be said in a different manner. I am 52 and was raised in Memphis. I was about 10 when Dr. King was assassinated. I remember it like it happened yesterday. My neighborhood went into panic mode. Except for my house, which had no guns all of the other men were loaded for bear fully expecting to be forced to protect their families. I would have hated to be an African-American in Memphis in 1968. I grew up hearing all of the hate speech directed to King and anyone associated with him. As I have grown older I have come to realize that he was a special man for a special moment, but I am also a lover of history, and there are some historical facts about Dr. King that have troubled me that I don’t think a comparison to certain Biblical characters will quite smooth over. King was not just a man who had a weakness for women. He was a serial adulterer who had his wife to the point of contemplating divorce right before his death. There is strong evidence that he slept with at least one woman not long before he died. This can be documented in his long time associate, Ralph Albernathy’s book. There is also a new book by the historian Hampton Sides who wrote the book, “Hellhound on His Trail,” which chronicles the killing of King by James Earl Ray and the subsequent manhunt for Ray. Although not a major part of the book, it is clear that Sides has done his homework. You are right that all people fall, but King seemed to take his adultery to the extreme. I wonder why Ted Haggard didn’t seem to be given the same amount of grace? The second issue, and in some ways this troubles me as much or more than the adultery. In your excellent talk you portray King as a scholar. There is no doubt that he was an intelligent man and a speaker of unmatched ability, but the level to which he plagiarized much of his academic work is nothing short of dishonest and deliberate. When you turn in your dissertation some day soon what would happen if your work contained page after page of word for word copies of the work of others and in many cases the plagiarism was of fellow students? You know exactly what would happen. You would not earn your doctorate. I fell sure that if you have ever seen the dissertation of Martin Luther King at Boston University you would notice the note of explanation attached to the document. I want to be clear that I admire much of the work of Dr. King, but to me he has gotten a free pass on public and serious moral failings. Too often when I hear especially young ministers speak of King it is always in the most glowing terms. I preach for a fully intergraded church. We have blacks that serve as elders as well as deacons. Although my wife might disagree, I am not a nut, but I do care when I feel that one person gets a pass and another is destroyed at the first evidence of a personal fall.”

RC:

Abraham tried to sell his wife (or trade or pawn). Noah got drunk in a tent and who knows what happened with his sons. David knocked out 7 of 10 commandments in one night. Tamar, a serial prostitute becomes a hero in the NT. I totally understand your larger point. We are just now at a point when MLK’s personal failures are being discussed. However, I just can’t believe that everything God did through him is negated (if that’s what you believe, perhaps I’m over reading) because of two personal failings.

If you are troubled that younger ministers talk to glowingly about MLK I’m troubled that most of your contemporaries don’t talk about him at all.

Written in love and with the hope of learning and being stretched.

Peace,

Josh

For what it’s worth, I believe that if we can’t show grace without judgment, we do not deserve to be shown grace without judgment.

I would like to hope that when I’m gone, my meager achievements will not be eclipsed by my enormous failures. I hope I will be judged by my survivors by what I stood for rather than what I fell from.

Heck, I would like to hope that anyone will remember me at all.

History deals with people who have larger-than-life ambitions, capabilities, influences, and – yes – faults. History doesn’t care a whit about grace. But history usually lets perspective show such people with balance. Greatness has only been associated with one perfect Person – and He was crucified for it. I think that one was enough. Does Martin Luther King’s stand for justice outweigh the sins with which he fell? Did he fall from God’s grace as well as yours, RC? Ultimately, history won’t decide that. God will.

I’m not in the business of second-guessing Him. I’m not in the business of judging, because I don’t want to be judged. I want mercy.

So I will do my best to show it.

Shakespeare warned us that when we die, our evil lies on while our good is interred with our bones. I remember reading that when I was 16 and hoping it wasn’t true — then or now.

I hesitate to write this for I fear being misunderstood but — I am glad I know of a few personal failings in King’s life. It gives me hope that God can use my broken, imperfect, frequently failing life to do something good in the Kingdom. I cannot judge King for, while his faults are not the same as mine, I can’t believe that I sin less than he did.

As you indicated earlier, Josh, the people God chooses to do His work tend to be sinful people who long for — who have “a heart after” — God. And God graciously uses them.

Which gives me hope.

Patrick

Josh and others, I am a fan of Dr. King. I make it a point to listen to his “I have a dream” speech at least once a year, usually on the anniversary of the speech, which I do believe is the greatest sermon I have ever heard, and I do not expect perfection from anyone, but what troubles me is that I often don’t see that level of grace given to others, especially if they lean a bit to the right in their theology, and yes we will all be judged by God. Thanks for your insights, and I especially appreciate that I was not personally attacked for raising some questions that have bothered me. Grace to us all.

RC–thanks for having the courage to say something difficult. I hope to meet you one day!

PMIDDY, Keith, et al — thanks for sharing your wisdom.

For what its worth, I think one of the reasons we tend to overlook the moral failures of MLK is due to a combination of his posthumous status and the good he did due. Our culture tends to forgive and forget people’s moral failures once they decease and focus on the good they accomplished (e.g., JFK, Babe Ruth). Second, while I certainly do not condemn adultery, when I speak of the good MLK did I am speaking about his work for human equality and not as a model for being good husband. Third, I don’t think we can make a clear comparison between MLK and Ted Haggard. MLK was advocating human equality, not condemning sexual immorality. On the other hand, Ted Haggard, one could argue, made it his personal crusade to condemn the very practice he was engaging in himself (that doesn’t excuse sexual immorality on any persons part nor does it mean Ted Haggard is beyonds God’s grace or ability for God to use in his mission).

I like what Patrick said. Knowing that MLK had some failures in his like and was still used by God for divine purposes gives me hope, for I know I am far from the image of Christ God is trying to transform me into.

This has been a great conversation!

Anyone else find it disturbing that Martin Luther, near the end of his life, was okay with Jews being killed for failure to convert?

Josh, you hit the nail on the head of my struggle. I am well aware of Luther’s antisemitism, and I am troubled by it. I think that some people because of what they stood for transcend their own mortal lives. All I am saying is that it troubles me, and Ted Haggard was probably not the best example to use, but on that point all I was trying to say is that we are often far less graceful to those for who we disagree than for those who speak to our souls. Buy the way, this little conversation seems so small to me when I think of what Josh and his family are facing today. You are still prayed for. I especially have a place in my heart for your dad. My daughter is the same age as Jenny was.