1976 – SHAME ON US

On 14 November 1976, the Plains Baptist Church, Georgia, USA, where then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was a member, votes to permit blacks to attend the Church services for the very first time. It is shameful that such a vote is required, when such discrimination is unlawful. Myra MacPherson of Washington Post, reports the same in their newspaper, on June 10, 1977 – “Carter’s Plains Church Splits.”

It is scandalous and shameful upon us, that even in, as late as 1976, about 40 plus years ago, we have discrimination based on race and colour. When the Church sanely votes to rectify this sin, the “aggrieved” and self-righteous members thought it is God honouring to split the church, because, the members voted to allow the “blacks” to sit along with “whites” in the house if God, and worship the Living God of all creation, as equals. What a tragedy! Yes, it is a tragedy…a shameful tragedy, at that.

The tragedy is not so much in the racial discrimination itself. It had been there, and it will always be there, as long as man is alive on this earth. The tragedy is in this, that the act of racial discrimination is actively supported and propagated by the ‘Church’ of the Living God, who created everyone equal. Shame on the Church, that instead of standing as a beacon of LIGHT, we have been, and are, a willing, and an active participant in such sinful and wicked practices.

Shame on us, that there are no voices preaching from the pulpit, that such an act is not only wrong, according to the law of the civilised world, but much more than that, it is a SIN, as seen by the LORD God Almighty, the ONE who created us all. Where are the voices?

Small wonder that Martin Luther King Jr. had to lament, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Sad that someone had to speak such words to the “friends,” who are supposed to stand up for the LORD, as His Ambassadors and as salt and light in the decaying world.