Authentic Church, Inconsistent Dreams

For the church to be authentic in the 21st century we must stop confusing the American dream and the vocation of the church. We are not called to prosperity, we are called to be witnesses. We are not asked to revel in our blessings but have been called to share our blessings with the poor. Our affluence has been given to us not because we work hard or because we are more righteous than others but because we have been asked to give to those who are without.

Someday, God will hold us accountable for how we have spent our money. That is not to say how we invested it but how we lifted others out of the mire of social dehumanization and the oppression of poverty that our very wealth has created. That is why King says the country who spends more money on the military than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

When people move out of a neighborhood because black people are moving in, property values are decreasing and they feel threatened it is wrong. The black community is no more dangerous than the white community, as history has proven. In fact, when African Americans were marching peacefully during the civil rights movement it was the white neighbors and white police that started the violence. We threw the bricks. We threw the first punch and then denounced the African American for punching back.

Will we ever learn that the kingdom of God and the Kingdom of America are two wholly separate things, inconsistent in all its philosophies? Has our freedom to worship dulled our call to be prophets to a deaf world? We complain about the moral decline of the country around us and yet, when I look at how white people behaved across the country in the 60's toward our brothers with darker skin, we didn't have far to fall. We were never a righteous country. America's righteousness or presumed righteousness has always been a memory since the first day America was born. That is because America's righteousness is a delusion of grandeur, a mark of arrogance, and a misconception that we are the new promised land.

We have a country who stands justly accused of being unjust. How can we go to Iraq and start a new, just government there when we have yet to pay for our sins here? How is it that the people who beat Emmit Till can go free? How is it the people who killed five civil rights protestors in Greensboro North Carolina in broad daylight, caught on camera, living, moving proof of their treachery...how can they go free?

And it is not just the south. When King marched in Chicago, how is it that only one generation after WWII, the very children of the veterans, are holding up giant swaticas telling African Americans to get out?

We are not an innocent nation. America is not the chosen one. Our judgment will come unless we repent. The church is called to be a prophet to the nations and yet we have been paid off like the prophets who opposed Jeremiah. The American dream has swallowed our ability to be prophets. We are not shouting against the injustice of America; and there is injustice to shout against.

We talk about the honor in dying for our country but how long will we be afraid to die for the church?