Unveiling of Four Little Girls Memorial
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Four Spirits Memorial" has made the history of September 15, 1963
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“I call them ‘My Girls.’ When people tell me they’re going to visit the memorial, I ask them to bring the girls flowers, and to put them in the shoe, in the bow or on the bench. They are a constant reminder that this should never, ever, ever happen. Sadly, it does happen — all over the world.” - sculpture Elizabeth MacQueen
On September 15, 1963, the congregation of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama greeted each other before the start of Sunday service. In the basement of the church, five young girls, two of them sisters, gathered in the ladies room in their best dresses, happily chatting about the first days of the new school year. It was Youth Day and excitement filled the air, they were going to take part in the Sunday adult service. Four Little Girls
Just before 11 o'clock, instead of rising to begin prayers the congregation was knocked to the ground. As a bomb exploded under the steps of the church, they sought safety under the pews and shielded each other from falling debris. In the basement, four little girls, 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and 11-year-old Cynthia Wesley, were killed. Addie's sister Susan survived, but was permanently blinded.
“The contribution of the civil rights movement to the black man’s struggle for justice and equality is one that is undeniably great. And this is so, because those who led the movement were committed men and women. They were committed to the cause. And to the struggle.
But how sad that so few individuals equally committed to Jesus Christ ever became a part of that movement. For what all that political activity needed- and lacked - was spiritual input. Even now, I do not understand why so many evangelicals find a sense of commitment to civil rights and Jesus Christ an “either - or” proposition.
One of the greatest tragedies of the civil rights movement is at evangelicals surrendered their leadership in the movement by default to those who with either a bankrupt theology or no theology at all, simply because the vast majority of Bible-believing Christians ignored a great and crucial opportunity in history for genuine ethical action. The evangelical church- whose basic theology is the same as mine – had not gone on to preach the whole gospel.”
John M. Perkins, Let Justice Roll Down Let Justice Roll Down
"Come dream with me. Dream of a fight for something bigger,
something more important and worthwhile.
We need to fight for justice and peace,
for the walls between us to come crashing down.” -Dr. John M. Perkins
Dream with Me: Race, Love, and the Struggle We Must Win
The church was built in 1908 to a design by A. J. Farley. Its congregation arose out of a combined African-American and white congregation of Methodists which separated by race in 1866. Its first sanctuary was built on this site in 1869.
“The reason we haven’t solved the race problem in America after hundreds of years is that people apart from God are trying to create unity, while people under God who already have unity are not living out the unity we possess. The result of both of these conditions is disastrous for America. Our failure to find cultural unity as a nation is directly related to the church’s failure to preserve our spiritual unity. The church has already been given unity because we’ve been made part of the same family. An interesting point to note about family is that you don’t have to get family to be family. A family already is a family. But sometimes you do have to get family to act like family. In the family of God, this is done through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. A perfect example of spiritual unity came on the Day of Pentecost when God’s people spoke with other tongues (Acts 2:4). When the Holy Spirit showed up, people spoke in languages they didn’t know so that people from a variety of backgrounds could unite under the cross of Jesus Christ. The people who heard the apostles speak on the Day of Pentecost were from all over the world, representing at least sixteen different geographical areas, racial categories, or ethnic groups (Acts 2:8–11). But in spite of the great diversity, they found true oneness in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual oneness always and only comes to those who are under God’s authority because in that reality He enables them with the power of His Spirit.”
John M. Perkins, One Blood: Parting Words to the Church on Race
One Blood: A Parting Word to the Church on Race
"Perhaps the strongest indictment against us as the Church is that we have settled for an Americanized version of the Church that mirrors whatever culture says, and there is no collective sense of loss, no sense of remorse. We have sinned deeply. The problem is that we haven’t got a taste of the sinfulness of racism... We don’t see the wickedness of profiling God’s people that He has created to be one and that He has created in His image (p. 75)."
John M. Perkins, One Blood: A Parting Word to the Church on Race
"In the midst of all the pain, oppression, and lack of meaning in life, the Church must proclaim the answer that is provided to us so clearly in Scripture. It is simple. We must be loving like Jesus in this fractured world."
John M. Perkins, One Blood: Parting Words to the Church on Race
"For too long, many in the Church have argued that unity in the body of Christ across ethnic and class lines is a separate issue from the gospel. There has been the suggestion that we can be reconciled to God without being reconciled to our brothers and sisters in Christ. Scripture doesn’t bear that out. We only need to examine what happened when the Church was birthed to see exactly how God intends for this issue of reconciliation within the body of Christ to fall out (p. 33)."
John M. Perkins, One Blood: A Parting Word to the Church on Race
A Biblical Critique of Secular Justice and Critical Theory By Timothy Keller
(a) Biblical justice is significantly more well-grounded. It is based on God’s character—a moral absolute—while the other theories are based on the changing winds of human culture. (b) Biblical justice is more penetrating in its analysis of the human condition, seeing injustice stemming from a more complex set of causes—social, individual, environmental, spiritual—than any other theory addresses. (c) Biblical justice provides a unique understanding of the character of wealth and ownership that does not fit into either modern categories of capitalism or socialism.
(a) Christianity does not claim to explain all reality. There is an enormous amount of mystery – things we are simply not told (Deuteronomy 29:29). We are not given any ‘theory of everything’ that can explain things in terms of evolutionary biology or social forces. Reality and people are complex and at bottom mysterious. (b) Christianity does not claim that if our agenda is followed most of our problems will be fixed. Meta-narratives have a “we are the Saviors” complex. Christians believe that we can fight for justice in the knowledge that eventually God will put all things right, but until then we can never expect to fully fix the world. Christianity is not utopian. (c) Finally, the storyline of the whole Bible is God’s repeated identification with the wretched, powerless, and marginalized. The central story of the Old Testament is liberation of slaves from captivity. Over and over in the Bible, God’s deliverers are usually racial and social outsiders, people seen to be weak and rejected in the eyes of the power elites of the world.
