1.24.2004

MegaShepherd - Christianity Today Magazine
Although I struggle with much of the megachurch model and the title of this article turns me off, overall this is a very challenging article especially on social justice issues. Here's a quote that really got me:

"Meeks believes that besides learning how to improve their reading, the third- graders learned that the church cares about them, that the 'kingdom is relevant' in their lives. That's a lesson he believes students are not hearing from most white evangelicals.
'Evangelicals must be very careful not to be irrelevant,' he says. 'Evangelicals will grab … one issue—like abortion—and they think that because they take a tough stand on abortion then they have addressed a societal ill. I don't hear the same outcry from any evangelical pulpit about the unequal funding for education among the haves and the have-nots.'
'I don't hear from the evangelical pulpit about the disparity in the prison population between blacks and whites, between the test scores of African American kids and white kids.'
'If white kids couldn't read and black kids could,' he adds, 'the evangelical church would address it. If white kids were in jail and not going to college, the evangelical church would address it. So if you live in a society and you only address the things that face your ethnicity, you are not really concerned about social ills.'
'My invitation to evangelicals who love the Lord is to partner with other Bible-believing churches who can address some social ills.'
Meeks hopes to persuade African American and white evangelicals to work together. And he's willing to start small—say, by getting together for dinner.
'I want my children to see that,' Meeks says. 'Most black children grow up never having had dinner with white people. Most white people grow up never having had African Americans in their homes. So we view each other as 30-second sound bites on television.'
Meeks says he'd like any church, anywhere, to take Salem up on this offer. 'We can do it with ten [families], do it with five, do it with those that are willing. It has to get started somewhere. The world will never see how colorblind Jesus is until they see how colorblind the church is.'"

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