Mr Hankins urges repentance, to a pointERIC HANKINS had been pastor of the First Baptist Church in Oxford, Mississippi, for seven years when he learned of a shaming episode in its past. Good-looking, charismatic and articulate, he is a spine-tingling preacher, combining biblical erudition with folksy humour, compassion with fierce devotion. He was already an ornament to First Baptist: Oxford’s oldest church in America’s biggest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptists, and so a flagship institution, boasting beautiful stained-glass windows and two thronged Sunday-morning services.
In the minutes of church meetings Mr Hankins found, as he puts it, that “a great wrong had been done” on April 21st 1968. Four years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act—and less than three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King—the members of the First Baptist Church voted to exclude black people from their congregation. They may have been concerned by the prospect of a “kneel-in”, as black protests in white churches were known. For a while, the church remained adamant: it also refused to let its bus be used to...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1QXjuOH
EmoticonEmoticon