"Let Justice Roll Down"

 Unveiling of Four Little Girls Memorial

Four Spirits Memorial" has made the history of September 15, 1963 complete!

“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

16th Street Baptist Church

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

 John M. Perkins, Dream with Me: Race, Love, and the Struggle We Must Win

Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church,Selma,AL

Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church is a church at 410 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Selma, Alabama, United States. This church was a starting point for the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 and, as the meeting place and offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during the Selma Movement, played a major role in the events that led to the adoption of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The nation's reaction to Selma's  Bloody Sunday march is widely credited with making the passage of the Voting Rights Act politically viable in the United States Congress.

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. 

There Is A Power

by Rita Springer  (feat. Dante Bowe)

VERSE 1

There is a power

There is a presence 

Holding all heaven

Watching the earth

It can part troubled waters

Quench every thirst

Heal what is broken

And break every curse

VERSE 2

There is a power

So overwhelming

All of creation

Bows to its name

It came to save every captive

Cover every shame 

To keep every promise

And break every chain

CHORUS

There is power in this room

Any darkness has to move

For the light is breaking through

Everything that exalts

Itself must fall

Underneath the power of 

Our great God

VERSE 3

There is a power

Death cannot alter

There is a grave

Hell could not steal

It’s here to change every outcome

Lift every head

Win every battle

Raise up the dead

BRIDGE

In the name of Jesus there is power

In the name of Jesus there is healing

In the name of Jesus there is power

In the name, in the name

In the name of Jesus

Ephesians 1 : 19

and what the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to that working of the strength of his might

2nd Corinthians 12 : 9

And he hath said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for `my' power is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

“My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own. “

- Ta- Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.”

To his son-

“The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.”

- Ta- Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage. Enslavement was not nearly the antiseptic borrowing of labor – it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest....

There is no uplifting way to say this. I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spiritual’s. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are distructible – that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden....

It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, hand size, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who need to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.”

- Ta- Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me