by Steve | Jan 15, 2013 | Front Page News, Uncategorized
Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where he delivered his famous, “I Have a Dream,” speech during the Aug. 28, 1963, march on Washington, D.C. United States Marine Corp.
By Coretta Scott King (1927-2006)
Throughout the epic freedom struggle of African Americans, our great sustainer of hope has been the power of prayer. We prayed for deliverance in a dozen African languages, chained to the holds of slave ships, on the auction block, in the fields of oppression, and under the lash. We prayed when we “followed the drinking gourd” on the Underground Railroad. We prayed when our families were torn asunder by the slave traders. We prayed when our homes and churches were burned and bombed and when our people were lynched by racist mobs. So many times it seemed our prayer went unanswered, but we kept faith that one day our unearned suffering would prove to be redemptive.
As a young child growing up in Marion, Alabama, I remember my pastor at Mt. Tabor Church responding to the racial abuse of one of our congregation by saying, “God loves us all, and people will reap what they sow. So just keep on praying. Don’t worry. God will straighten things out.” I believed he was right then, and I believe it still.
My parents made sure that prayer would be a regular part of my life, and it has been to this very day. Prayer is how we open our hearts to God, how we make that vital connection that empowers us to overcome overwhelming obstacles and become instruments of God’s will. And despite the pain and suffering that I have experienced and that comes to all of our lives, I am more convinced than ever before that prayer gives us strength and hope, a sense of divine companionship, as we struggle for justice and righteousness.
Prayer was a wellspring of strength and inspiration during the Civil Rights Movement. Throughout the movement, we prayed for greater human understanding. We prayed for the safety of our compatriots in the freedom struggle. We prayed for victory in our nonviolent protests, for brotherhood and sisterhood among people of all races, for reconciliation and the fulfillment of the Beloved Community.
For my husband, Martin Luther King Jr., prayer was a daily source of courage and strength that gave him the ability to carry on in even the darkest hours of our struggle. I remember one very difficult day when he came home bone-weary from the stress that came with his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In the middle of that night, he was awakened by a threatening and abusive phone call, one of many we received throughout the movement. On this particular occasion, however, Martin had had enough.
After the call, he got up from bed and made himself some coffee. He began to worry about his family, and all of the burdens that came with our movement weighed heavily on his soul. With his head in his hands, Martin bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud to God: “Lord, I am taking a stand for what I believe is right. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I have nothing left. I have come to the point where I can’t face it alone.
Later he told me, “At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear a voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness; stand up for truth; and God will be at our side forever.'” When Martin stood up from the table, he was imbued with a new sense of confidence, and he was ready to face anything.
I believe that this prayer was a critical turning point for the African-American freedom struggle, because from that point forward, we had a leader who was divinely inspired and could not be turned back by threats or any form of violence. This kind of courage and conviction is truly contagious, and I know his example inspired me to carry on through the difficult days of my journey.
A few nights after Martin’s moment of truth, I had mine. I was sitting in my living room in Montgomery, chatting with a friend, while my new baby daughter, Yolanda, was asleep in the back room. Suddenly, we heard a loud thump on the front porch. Because of all the recent threats, I urged my friend to get up. “It sounds as if someone has hit the house. We’d better move to the back.”
As we moved toward the back, we felt a thunderous blast, followed by shattering glass and billowing smoke. I hurried to Yolanda’s room and thanked God that she was all right. I called the church where my husband was speaking, but he was addressing the audience at the time. He called me back shortly afterward as a large crowd gathered at our house, and then he rushed home.
The crowd was angry at what had happened, and there was a lot of tension between the police and those who had gathered, some of whom were armed with guns, rocks, and bottles. In the midst of all of the turmoil, I said a silent prayer for the protection of our family and the restoration of peace. Then Martin began to speak to the crowd from the front porch of our home. “My wife and baby are all right, ” he said. “I want you to go home and put down your weapons. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence.”
As Martin continued to speak, I was enveloped by a growing calm. “God is with us,” I thought. “God is truly with us.” The fear and anger around me began to melt like the receding snows of spring. Almost at that moment, Martin concluded his remarks to the crowd: “Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with this movement. Go home with this glowing faith and this radiant assurance.”
Martin’s speech on that day was yet another crucial turning point for our freedom struggle because it set the tone of nonviolence that gave our movement its unique credibility and enabled all of the victories we achieved under his leadership.
From that day on, I was fully prepared for my role as Martin’s wife and partner in the struggle. There would be many more days of difficulty and worry, and there would be many more prayers. But the unwavering belief that we were doing God’s work became a daily source of faith and courage that undergirded our freedom movement.
It is said that every prayer is heard and every prayer is answered in some way, and I believe this is true for people of all faiths. I still believe that the millions of prayers spoken by African Americans from the Middle Passage on down to today have been heard by a righteous and loving God.
Coretta Scott King (April 27, 1927 – January 30, 2006), the late widow of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was the Founder and former Chairman, President, and CEO of The King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia. Mrs. King was a human rights activist for more than 40 years.
This excerpt appeared in the March/April 2004 issue of Good News. Reprinted from “Standing in the Need of Prayer” from the Schomburg Center, with permission from The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster.
by Steve | Jan 15, 2013 | Front Page News, Jan-Feb 2013
By Kenneth J. Collins
A year after President John F. Kennedy called out the troops to quell the riots surrounding James Meredith – the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi – the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested on April 16, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama. Growing up in a Baptist church in which his father was a pastor, King learned early on that the Christian faith is a universal religion that transcends race, ethnicity, gender, social class, or cultural origin.
During the time he attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, King began to think deeply about social justice issues and became acquainted with the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), especially his Christianity and the Social Crisis. Though King found much to his liking in social gospel thought, he differed from Rauschenbusch and others whom he believed came “perilously close to identifying the kingdom of God with a particular social and economic system – a temptation which the church should never give into.”
While he was in prison, King penned a letter (”Letter from a Birmingham Jail”) that not only revealed why he and the civil rights movement could no longer wait (”justice too long delayed is justice denied”), but it also argued for an understanding of justice that was well-rooted in both moral philosophy and the Christian faith. Appealing to the writings of Augustine (354-430) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), King maintained that the laws of many southern states, such as Alabama and Mississippi, were invalid because they were out of harmony with the natural law and the eternal law that is above it. Put another way, such laws failed to accord to black Americans those benefits and prerogatives that pertain to them precisely as human beings. “An unjust law,” King wrote in this letter, “is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This difference is made legal.”
Having a theoretical basis for distinguishing an unjust law from a just one, King developed a sophisticated distinction between the legal and the moral, a distinction that several evangelicals at the time were reluctant to acknowledge. In this line of reasoning, some laws may be on the books, so to speak, but because they deny basic human rights to a sector of the population, such laws must be deemed immoral. Or as King himself put it, a law so construed is necessarily unjust for “it does not square with the law of God, so for that reason it is unjust and any law that degrades the human personality is an unjust law.”
So then, part of King’s strategy to further the civil rights of black Americans was to challenge such unjust laws through the use of non-violent civil disobedience, a tactic he had learned from Gandhi. Such civil disobedience always upset the law-and-order crowd, who argued in terms of respect for the law of the land above all, or at best they championed gradual, less disruptive forms of change. To this and similar objections, King replied, “And I submit that the individual who disobeys the law, whose conscience tells him it is unjust and who is willing to accept the penalty by staying in jail until that law is altered, is expressing at the moment the very highest respect for the law.”
Though the strategy employed by King invited criticism from evangelicals and others, there was a genius in his method of wedding a natural law critique of unjust state laws to non-violent civil disobedience. If King had promoted violence in a struggle to address injustices, then the inevitable police crackdown would have hardly evoked sympathy for the movement. “They got what they deserved,” would have been the quick, almost unthinking reply. But King did something very different. His goal, of course, was to demonstrate that the legal sometimes is immoral because the state has simply codified the all-too-common prejudices of the majority. In order, however, to get the average American to hear this plea of injustice, King had to break through the normal social filters such as a concern for law and order that would most often cut off any sympathetic response in its tracks. King, however, would eventually get the ear of the American people through a strategy of nonviolence coupled with his generous moral concern.
The stage was set the following month in May 1963, for a heroic contest between nonviolent civil rights protestors who had God’s moral law on their side and Bull Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama, who had his dogs and police. TV cameras caught the graphic violence of Conner’s directives. Black activists were smashed into storefronts by hoses, pummeled by the billy sticks of cops, and bitten by attack dogs as they patiently suffered for their cause.
Americans, indeed the world, looked on this spectacle in horror as the cameras rolled. Ironically enough, the law and order argument was being turned on its head and Conner’s lackeys now appeared to be shameful as new heroes were being born. Moreover, a fund of sympathy, wide and deep, was evoked that day for King’s cause. Such an identification, sustained by strong emotion, represented nothing less than the illuminating grace of God breaking through, a grace that darkness and hatred could by no means overcome.
And so while neo-evangelicals were positioning themselves between fundamentalism and liberalism, as they were preoccupied with fighting communism and developing a unified cultural voice, the actions of King demonstrated a much different kind of power. Not that of coercion and force, but one that, remarkably enough, refused to speak the language of Babylon.
Kenneth J. Collins is Professor of Historical Theology and Wesley Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. Taken from Power, Politics and the Fragmentation of Evangelicalism by Kenneth J. Collins. Copyright(c) 2012 by Kenneth J. Collins. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, PO Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com.
For this article, the quotes from Dr. King are found in The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
Photo of Dr. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-122982.
by Steve | Jan 15, 2013 | Front Page News, Jan-Feb 2013
By Maidstone Mulenga
Delegates at the 2012 General Conference of The United Methodist Church May 1 declared the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a modern-day martyr.
The historic vote was in keeping with a decision at the 2008 General Conference giving the German theologian the Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer the same distinction.
King, who gave his life for the betterment of all people, will be listed with Bonhoeffer in the Book of Resolutions to bear witness to all people of faith in printed and digital form.
“Dr. King gave of himself to bring a message of hope to the world. His martyrdom set him apart. His love and his sacrifice must be remembered in a significant way by the church for future generations,” the declaration reads.
A graduate of Boston Theological Seminary, a United Methodist-related institution, King is perhaps the most well-known leader of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech.
In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and discrimination. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn., and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977) and the Congressional Gold Medal (2004).
Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a national holiday in 1986.
Maidstone Mulenga is the director of communications for the Upper New York Annual Conference. Distributed by United Methodist News Service.
Photo of Dr. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-122982.
by Steve | Jan 14, 2013 | Front Page News, Uncategorized
On June 1, 2011, a civil unions law went into effect in Illinois that provided same-sex couples the same type of legal protections utilized by married couples. According to The New York Times, these rights included “emergency medical decision-making powers, inheritance rights, pension benefits, adoption and parental rights, and the ability to share a room in a nursing home.”
“In Illinois, a civil union is a legal relationship between two people – either of the same or different sex,” reports the American Civil Liberties Union, “providing all of the legal obligations, responsibilities, protections and benefits that the law of Illinois grants to married couples.”
More than 5,000 couples in Illinois are registered with the state for civil union benefits.
Although Illinois recognizes all the legal benefits of civil unions, Bishop Sally Dyck has issued a public statement of support for a same-sex marriage measure in Illinois. In a statement to members of the Northern Illinois Conference, she writes: “While the United Methodist Church holds that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching, it also holds the teaching and a long tradition (albeit a struggle every inch of the way) of civil rights. Marriage equality is a civil rights issue; it provides for all what is afforded to some. … Because I believe in marriage, it’s my belief it will be a benefit for this law to pass.”
You can read her full statement HERE.
The Rev. Rob Renfroe, president and publisher of Good News, issued the following statement in response to Bishop Dyck’s public campaigning for same-sex marriage.
“Good News is disappointed that Bishop Sally Dyck has chosen to advocate for the legislative approval of same-sex marriage in the state of Illinois. Since 2004, our church has said that we ‘support laws in civil society that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.’ Indeed, our definition of marriage as a covenant ‘between a man and a woman’ dates back to 1972. This position received a 77 percent vote at General Conference in 2004 and still represents the one issue among all the sexuality-related issues that garners the broadest support across the church.
“We respect Bishop Dyck and have worked well with her in the past in relating to the Unity Task Force of the Council of Bishops which she led. However, we believe that for Bishop Dyck to advocate a minority position that is at odds with the stated position of the church fosters disunity and deepens the sense of disconnect felt by many United Methodist members. In 2011, more than 14,000 United Methodists signed a letter to the Council of Bishops asking them to support the denomination’s position on same sex marriage. The Council issued a statement of support. Bishop Dyck’s advocacy flies in the face of the Council’s statement.
“We share Bishop Dyck’s commitment to ensure the protection of the civil rights of all persons. However, there are other ways to ensure the civil rights of gay and lesbian persons without redefining the bedrock institution of marriage. We see no reason why the church should allow a secular, anthropocentric, hyper-sexualized Western culture to tell us what marriage is, rather than looking to the Scriptures and, with real concern for the rights of all, maintaining what God has revealed.”
Good News has been an independent, evangelical voice within The United Methodist Church since 1967. As a renewal and reform movement, Good News urges the church to be faithful to the biblically-based principles of its historic Wesleyan heritage. In our desire to see The United Methodist Church centered on Jesus Christ, we want to see our church engaged in vital ministry, growing disciples of Jesus Christ, and transforming the world.
by Steve | Jan 14, 2013 | Front Page News, Uncategorized
By Paula Parker
Catastrophes move many to tears and they move others to action. In 2004, Hurricane Charley moved eight-year-old Zach Bonner to help. Using his beat-up toy wagon, he went throughout his Tampa, Florida, neighborhood to collect clothes, food, water, and miscellaneous items for those left homeless by the storm.
Releasing to DVD on January 8, is the inspired by true events, Phase 4 Film “Little Red Wagon” starring Chandler Canterbury, Anna Gunn, Daveigh Chase and Frances O’Connor. An initiative of The Philanthropy Project – an ambitious non-profit initiative funded by the John Templeton Foundation – the film is written by Patrick Sheane Duncan (“Mr. Holland’s Opus”) and directed by David Anspaugh (“Hoosiers,” “Rudy”).
Little red-headed Zach (Canterbury), living in Tampa with his realtor mother Laurie (Gunn) and his 16-year-old sister Kelley (Chase), was your average kid. Until 2004, when he felt moved to help those left homeless by Hurricane Charley. After printing and handing out flyers to his neighbors, he is surprised by the large amount of contributions. Emboldened by the response – and the interest of the local evening news – he was inspired to continue helping homeless children. After founding a non-profit organization, he solicited donations to put together “Zach Packs,” backpacks filled with food, toiletries, clothes and a toy.
Zach came up with the idea to raise awareness of homelessness by walking from Tampa to the state capital, Tallahassee. His mother was against it as is his sister, who feels increasingly resentful of the attention Zach was getting from their mother and from others. Zach plowed ahead and, when he received donations and the loan of an RV from the Lazydays Partners Foundation, Laurie gave in and agreed to support her son in this venture.
As a side story, the filmmakers wove in the inspired-by-real-life story of Margaret Craig (O’Connor) and her son, Jim (Dylan Matzke), who had been left financially devastated after the death of their husband/father. After Margaret’s employer closed down, the Craigs’ life spiraled out of control as they went from selling their home, to living in a cheap apartment, to living in their car and various homeless shelters.
The film looks and sounds good. The acting is natural and believable. The main characters are allowed to be human, with family flaws that punctuate the action. It is heartfelt and earnest, and perhaps that’s the problem. It’s just a little too earnest at times, as if it is trying too hard. The story is intriguing enough by itself, but the script just felt contrived. From the first, it’s obvious that “Little Red Wagon” is agenda-driven. The filmmakers are driving you to a response. While that response is admirable – to reach out to those less fortunate – I kept waiting for an altar call or an offering basket to be passed.
Paula K. Parker is a freelance writer living in a small town near Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband Mike, who is also a writer. Born with an insatiable curiosity, Paula writes articles, plays, reviews, books, and inspirational devotionals. Her reviews and features can be found at numerous media outlets such as Christian Examiner, Buddy Hollywood, and Hollywood Jesus.
Rated PG for, “thematic elements and some language,” “Little Red Wagon” is approved by the Dove Foundation and is the winner of the Heartland Award.
