Hard Truths

Remembering George Floyd:    It’s Fire This Time “ Can a man take fire in his bosom and not be burned?” (Proverbs 6:27) I grew up in church. Specifically, evangelical churches. I am a proud follower of Jesus. I am also at an age where I have the privilege of seeing “Then” vs “Now”. It’s a privilege that brings me pain: for what I thought the Christian gospel was (then); and because what I thought to be true has—certainly in the west—been hijacked and packaged as a twisted, racist, ineffectual parody of itself (now).             As the world-changing fallout from George Floyd’s murder has grown, so has my pain. I will share it with you in this series of 5 blogs. Let’s start with the too-little-too-late pronouncements now being made by some evangelical leaders using  their Big Microphones  to decry the killing of George Floyd. You know from previous blogs what I mean by Big Microphones. Its acc...

HARD TRUTHS   Remembering George Floyd: Where's the Social Gospel? “We cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life” . Pope Francis on the killing of George Floyd              I grew up during the 1970s in evangelical churches. We lived in the shadow of the turbulent 60s, a time when like the response to George Floyd’s death, former colonized peoples pushed against the knees of their oppressors on their necks. Angola. Jamaica. Zimbabwe. Cuba. Albania. Kenya. Many Latin American countries. Here in North America Watts and Harlem burned, triggering the by now familiar response to the revolutionary call of Black Power.                         Maybe it was the urgency of the times. Or maybe it was because evangelicals were ‘heavenly minded...