The Gospel of Division in the Church by Frederick K.C. Price, D.D.

Though some might argue the point, Almighty God has walked with us every step of the way through Black history. He had done the same thing with Israel in its struggles in Egypt. In fact, the one biblical story that caught the African slaves' attention more than any other was the story of the Exodus. The slaves saw their own future in Israel's flight from the oppression of Egyptian rule. In Exodus they found hope in the midst of otherwise unbearable suffering. The message of Exodus contradicted the claims made by White ministers and other Christians that God intended Africans to be slaves. In fact, one of the biggest stumbling blocks the slaves had to face was the racism in the church.

While slavery's supporters held that slaves were inferior - deserving no better treatment than animals, in most cases - Blacks found their own identity in Israel, as a people favored by God. They fully expected that their American Pharaohs might somehow "get drowned" in the Red Sea, and they would be free to reach their own Promised Land of freedom. After the American Revolution they converted to Christianity in great numbers, and their faith in God helped them endure the hardships.

Fast forward to the 20th Century. Blacks had been manumitted, but racism and separatism remained strong. Blacks were caught in a desperate struggle with Jim Crow and an attendant wave of lynchings that swept across the land. Church leaders were up to their same old tricks. They continued to depict Blacks as animals and perpetuated the idea that blackness was a curse. The fear of interracial marriage formed the foundation for their separatist philosophy. In 1902, celebrated author Charles Carroll wrote the book The Negro a Beast to show that Blacks were really apes, the "beast of the field" discussed in the Bible. In 1917, Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, a highly influential Bible commentator, wrote in the notes of his Scofield Reference Bible: "A prophetic declaration is made that from Ham will descend an inferior and servile posterity."

Though those words and many like them by Bible teachers have no basis in Scripture, they were promulgated as truth. There is virtually no difference between Scofield's words and the utterances of a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The difference is that in Scofield's time he was one of the nation's most notable Bible teachers. His notes carried enormous impact - and credence - in the Christian community. If it was in the Bible notes, and if preachers taught it from the pulpits of the churches, then it must be true. Is it any wonder then that many Bible-believing Whites held to notion that Blacks were inferior?

As late as 1963 - just seven short years before the first issue of THE BLACK COLLEGIAN rolled off the presses - prominent theologian Finis Jennings Dake published a Bible with notes on "30 reason for the segregation of races." Dake, founder of the highly regarded Dake Annotated Reference Bible, was merely carrying on a white tradition born out of the early American church.

I personally have had my own run-ins with bigotry and racism. One such experience occurred shortly after I was saved at a tent revival meeting in 1953. When I asked the white man who led me to Christ why God allowed segregation in the church, he took his Bible and showed me in the Scriptures - interpreting them in his own way - that it was God's will for the races to be separated. As one new to the things of God, I accepted what he said as truth.

Later, after 20 years in ministry, I was forced to break fellowship with the white leaders of a large ministry when the evidence I saw and heard indicated that they were making a distinction between whites and Blacks in their church. The incident, which occurred about nine years ago, catalyzed me to begin teaching a series in 1997. I titled it Race, Religion & Racism and taught it for 76 weeks over my Ever Increasing Faith television broadcast, which appears nationally and in many countries around the world. I have also completed two of the three books based on my research for that series. In the first book, Race, Religion & Racism, Volume 1, I maintain that slavery could never have existed in America without the complicity of the church.

In Race, Religion & Racism, Volume 2, I prove based on Biblical Scripture that the Gospel in America was perverted to justify the subjugation of Black people. In fact, the white church in America has been the main perpetrator of racism. For some, that statement may be hard to accept, but it is undeniably true. Let's just take a look at the facts: The white church by and large turned its head when Africans were being dehumanized as chattel for almost two and a half centuries - from 1619 to 1865. Many church leaders gave their approval. Ministers openly taught that slavery was an institution sanctioned by God. They diligently twisted Scriptures to justify the enslavement of the Black man. They propagated the belief that Blackness was a curse.

Both the Baptist and the Methodist churches, which opposed slavery after the Revolutionary War, abandoned their stands in the face of the opposition of the members who favored it. The Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopalians took no stand at all. Leaders of the Mormon Church believed that Blacks were the "seed of Cain," and discouraged them from becoming Mormons by denying them the priesthood.

As I wrote in Race, Religion & Racism, Volume 2, the leaders in the white churches did not use the Scriptures to defend Black people. No, they falsified the Bible in order to speak against them. "They did this even though their actions were in direct opposition to the Word [of God] - Even though they should have known from the Bible that not taking a stand on behalf of those who were treated as the least of society was the same as not taking a stand for the Lord Jesus Christ Himself."

Here is what Jesus tells us in Matthew 25:45: "Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me."

"Every time the church did not protect a Black man from a lynch mob or make sure that a Black child was not barred entry to a white school, every time the church did not support Black Americans in being equal members of society, the church didn't just fail its responsibility to Black people, it failed its responsibility to itself and the Lord Jesus Christ."

Being a minister of the Gospel, it pains me to say it, but the church has failed our Savior and Leader, Jesus Christ, and the people that it is supposed to serve. There have been many well-meaning white Christians, but the church itself has failed to grab the reins of moral leadership in American society. I see little difference in the church of 1970, when THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Magazine was born, and the church today. The challenge we faced then is the same one we face today: a divided church.

In Volume 2, I wrote: "In 1906, God gave the Church the opportunity to unify itself, to bring all Christians of every ethnicity and color together as one to make a statement to the world. That year, He visited this planet in Los Angeles, at a place called Azusa Street, through a Black, one-eyed preacher named William J. Seymour. This coming of the Holy Spirit, which gave rise to the Pentecostal church, was called the 'Azusa Revival' or 'Awakening.' People came from all over the globe to experience it. God was moving in a mighty way. But how did white Christians react? Because a Black man, William Seymour, was the point man for this Awakening, instead of remaining together in esteem, respect, affection and friendship with African Americans, in a short time white Christians in essence said, 'We're not going to mix with Black people and have congregations and churches with them. We're going to have our own Pentecostal churches.' And that's exactly what they did."

It is civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer who is credited with saying that the most segregated place on earth is America on Sunday mornings. And how right she was, since Hamer's death in 1977 very little has changed.

For this reason, God gave me the assignment to teach Race, Religion & Racism. As I wrote in Volume 2, "If the church takes on its role as the salt of the earth and the light of the world so that all Christians cease to hold racist thoughts in their minds and practice racism in their lives, if all Christians everywhere condemn racism as the sin it is, the 'huge racial chasm' will finally close."

Then I believe that the Lord Jesus Christ can make His triumphal return.

Frederick K.C. Price, D.D., is the founder and pastor of Crenshaw Christian Center, Los Angeles, CA..