Peter Storey Preaches on Gay Rights, Trayvon Martin “racism”

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Alexander Griswold, Christianity, Foundry United Methodist Church, Gay rights, Peter Storey, racism, South Africa, Trayvon Martin, United Methodist, United States

Retired South African Methodist Bishop of Johannesburg and Soweto Peter Storey preached at Foundry United Methodist Church recently as part of the Washington, D.C. congregation’s distinguished speaker series. (Photo credit: hallmarkspiritclips.com)

By Alexander Griswold (@HashtagGriswold)

As part of its annual Outstanding Preacher series, the prominent Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. invited former Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church of South Africa Rev. Peter Storey to give a sermon on July 14. Foundry has a history of inviting liberal speakers for the series. Controversial Rev. Al Sharpton had been scheduled to preach this month but evidently cancelled. Sister Simone Campbell of “Nuns on the Bus” preaches on July 21. The church is a “reconciling” congregation that disagrees with United Methodism’s official disapproval of homosexual behavior.

The South African Methodist Church is autonomous and not tied to the United Methodist Church. South African Methodist officials are sometimes more liberal than Methodists elsewhere in Africa.

Before Storey spoke, Foundry’s Senior Pastor, the Rev. Dean Snyder, spoke briefly about the George Zimmerman trial in Florida after a “not guilty” verdict was handed down the previous night.  Snyder led the congregation in a prayer to “end racism… and to create a society that’s safe for all children.”  Snyder gave thanks to the Trayvon Martin Foundation, the NAACP, and the Urban League while also asking God to “help us learn to look beyond our own particular privileges.”

After a “Modified Traditional” version of the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Mother/Father, who art in heaven…”), it was Storey’s time to speak.  Storey is best known for his decades-long fight against the South African government’s racist policy of apartheid.  In recent years he has taught at United Methodism’s Duke Divinity School in North Carolina, often making politically liberal statements.   He has also praised Occupy Wall Street and criticized patriotism towards the United States. But gay rights and tearing down walls of division were the focus of his sermon at Foundry.  Discrimination against gays, the former South African church official claimed, was the “last respectable discrimination” in society.  He mourned that “[a]s the law of this country changes, the Church will be the last oppressor of LGBT people.”

If there was any question about which sort of “oppression” Storey was referring to, he specifically praised the recent pro-gay marriage U.S. Supreme Court rulings. “[T]he gay couples on Capitol Hill…they were enduring victims of a cruel prejudice… All the way to the Supreme Court, they said ‘We will be heard!’”

Storey did of course end up mentioning the Trayvon Martin case. “It’s a troubling thing…” he remarked, “It revealed the addiction to racism that still exists in this country’s bloodstream.” Once again, the notion that racism was the root cause of the tragic incident, a theory neither the prosecution nor federal investigators advanced, went unquestioned.

But George Zimmerman wasn’t the only person to be accused of racism in the sermon, or even the most well-known. That distinction went to the Apostle Peter and, by extension, many others in the early church.  Storey preached that Peter was forced to address his own “racism” after his encounter with the Roman centurion Cornelius.  As the story is recounted in Acts chapter 10, a divine revelation leads Peter to baptize the Roman, after an initial reluctance to baptizing uncircumcised Gentiles.  As more and more Gentiles were baptized, it led to a division in the early Church.  The spreading of Christianity to the Gentiles, Storey noted, was opposed at the Council of Jerusalem by “diehards in the Church” who “continue[d]to fight for exclusion.”

Just like gay marriage. Get it?

Storey’s injection of racism into the story of the early Church’s division over the outreach to Gentiles is a flawed interpretation.  At the Council of Jerusalem, no one claimed that Gentiles should not be allowed to join the Church at all. Instead, one faction of Jewish Christians claimed the “Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the Law of Moses (Acts 15:5).”  Their opposition wasn’t to Gentiles joining the faith, but to Gentiles not being required to follow what had traditionally been God’s law. Their concern wasn’t entirely without merit; while the Council decided not to require Gentiles to be circumcised or to follow most dietary restrictions, Gentiles were ordered to “abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. (Acts 15:20)”

Storey’s faulty interpretation of the Council is the perfect parallel for his flawed views on today’s issues. Just as Storey could not read about Peter’s reluctance to baptize an uncircumcised Gentile without inferring bigotry and animus, he cannot confront opponents of gay marriage without projecting intolerance and an “addiction to division.”  In both these cases, doctrinal differences arose because of legitimate differences in opinion about God’s law, but Storey writes off one side of the debate entirely. Likewise, he finds it impossible to examine a contentious criminal case like the Trayvon Martin case without presuming a racial motivation. Ironically, in a sermon dedicated to a spirit of hospitality and inclusion, Storey failed to extend that spirit to his ideological opponents.

A Grim Anniversary in Sudan

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Beja, Brad Phillips, Commander Abdelaziz Adam al Hilu, Darfur, ethnic cleansing, Faith J. H. McDonnell, genocide, Jihad, Kadugli, Khartoum, Nuba Mountains, Nuba people, Nubians, Obama Administration, Omar al-Bashir, Persecution Project, racism, South Sudan, SPLA-North, Sudan Government, U.S. State Department

Photo courtesy of Operation Broken Silence, taken in the Nuba Mountains, May 2013, during an End Nuba Genocide coalition relief operation.

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

“The students go to class, and when they hear the Antonovs coming they run to hide in the caves.”

This is how a teacher describes a typical school day for children in Acheron, a village in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan State. With the Nuba Mountains now entering a third year of genocidal jihad waged by the Sudanese National Congress Party (NCP) government in Khartoum, the young teacher says “war bombardment has become normal.” “Class” is gathering in the open air. School buildings have gone the same way as those in the first genocide in the 1990’s: bombed to smithereens by Khartoum. But the desire to learn remains alive, and so two volunteer teachers – barely out of secondary school themselves – are risking their own lives to ensure that Nuba children receive an education.

In May 2011 the Islamist regime stole South Kordofan’s gubernatorial election from Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) war hero Commander Abdelaziz Adam al Hilu and gave it to ICC-indicted war criminal Ahmed Haroun. Providing voter statistics showing a clear al Hilu victory, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) for South Kordofan wrote to the UN Security Council on May 20, 2011, saying, “We participated in these elections genuinely, but the NCP proved the lacking of the will to implement any agreement.” The SPLM warned, “The aim of the NCP is to bluff the world and use elections to gain fake legitimacy.”

June 5, 2013 marked the second anniversary of Khartoum’s second jihad against the black, African Nuba people. On June 5, 2011, Sudanese president ICC-indicted war criminal Omar al Bashir launched a genocidal jihad against the Nuba in the state capital of Kadugli. Khartoum’s security forces began house-to-house searches for Christians and other non-Muslims, ethnic black African Nuba, and members of or sympathizers with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) or other opposition parties.

Persecution Project Foundation (PPF) founder and president Brad Phillips told the US Congress that “more than 5,000 ethnic Nubans who sought refuge in the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) compound were dragged out by NCP security forces and slaughtered at the gate while Egyptian UNMIS forces watched and in some reports actually laughed.” Images provided by the Satellite Sentinel Project and internal UN reports reveal that the bodies of thousands of innocent Nuba men, women, and children lie in mass graves around Kadugli.

This was only the beginning. In the 1980’s-‘90’s the Khartoum regime attempted to eradicate the Nuba for aligning with the SPLA. Following the ethnic cleansing of Kadugli, the regime began a similar eradication campaign featuring aerial bombardment and a ground war by the Islamist militia Popular Defense Force (PDF) to burn homes, schools, churches, markets and crops. This scorched earth strategy is responsible for malnutrition and starvation that has affected tens of thousands. Nuba who have not fled to refugee camps in South Sudan or Kenya must flee to caves in the sides of the hills when the daily bombing takes place. Most have no food but leaves and insects, and little access to clean drinking water. The Sudanese government prevents international provision of aid to those in desperate need of food and medicine.

In his congressional testimony, Brad Phillips criticized the US and other governments’ inaction and surmised that if not for the protection of the SPLA-North, “led by their inspirational leader, Abdelaziz Adam Al Hilu, we would be witnessing another Rwandan-style genocide.” Instead, for two years, we have witnessed Sudanese style genocide – in which those committing genocide have seen no evidence that they need to fear meaningful outside intervention.

From Day One the evil intentions of the al Bashir regime were far clearer than those of either Egypt’s Mubarak or Libya’s Gadhafi. And the intensity of the regime’s attack against innocent Nuba civilians far surpassed the Mubarak and Gadhafi responses to Arab “Spring.” Nevertheless, today Mubarak is gone, thanks to President Obama’s intervention, and an Islamist supremacist Muslim Brotherhood controls Egypt without having had to fight for “freedom.” Gadhafi is dead, and thanks to US intervention, the “freedom fighters” that sodomized and murdered him and that attacked the American consulate in Benghazi, are free to impose Sharia on all of Libya. Likewise, the US is poised to provide weapons to yet more Islamists in Syria.

In contrast, over 750 days after the Khartoum regime announced its plan to eradicate the black, African Nuba, to “sweep out the trash” that the racist Arabist regime considers black-skinned African people to be, not only does the genocide continue, but the US State Department still insists that only a “diplomatic solution” will bring peace to Sudan. With such a response from the Obama Administration, it is not surprising that Khartoum has felt free to expand the genocide to Blue Nile State, starting in September 2011, and to ramp up the action against the innocent men, women, and children of Darfur once again.

The SPLA-North and its Darfuri allies fight as the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), winning almost all of the ground battles with the more well-armed regime. AFP reported on April 27, 2013 that the “rebels” had attacked five government-held areas in North and South Kordofan States. They quoted an anonymous regional political expert who said that the rebel action is aimed to demonstrate strength and is “very threatening for the government.” So threatening, in fact, that the regime went whining to the international community, and particularly to the US government, demanding condemnation of the attacks and sanctions on the rebel-controlled regions. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Obama Administration denounced the SRF’s actions, even though, in the words of Brad Phillips, “it is US coddling of Bashir that has ultimately forced the SPLM-N to action before their people are further ground down by famine and privation.”

The State Department has encouraged the SRF to become more “inclusive” of all so-called opposition groups, including those that share the regime’s dream of an Islamic Caliphate. But State has shown less concern for the inclusion of hundreds of thousands of Sudan’s other ethnic African people groups. In Sudan’s far north, home to more pyramids than exist in Egypt, the regime is building dams to drown the memory of the ancient Nubian kingdoms and to displace today’s Nubians, selling their land to Islamists from Egypt. In eastern Sudan, Khartoum has marginalized and oppressed the indigenous Beja people for decades, and is pushing them into the desert, allowing Rashaida Arabs to claim the region.

Recently, Brad Philllips wrote that the “US government and International Community (IC) have responded to all the death, all the torture, all the rape, all the indiscriminate bombings, all the cruelty, all the displacement, and all the persecution by continuing to endorse the very government committing these acts.” He acknowledges some international sanctions still in place against Khartoum, and that “there has been diplomatic wrist-slapping when Bashir’s behavior is simply too atrocious to be ignored.” But Bashir “has successfully convinced the US and IC that any alternative to his administration would plunge the nation into chaos and Sudan would become another Somalia.”

Phillips continues that his response to the “it could be worse” argument is “stunned silence.” He says that all he can see in his mind “are 3 million corpses, thousands of children missing limbs, untold thousands of women raped, and a completely failed state being propped up by an International Community which fears something ‘worse’.”  But something worse is exactly what we have wrought in Egypt and Libya, and to which we seem headed in Syria. Something worse is when a country becomes more like Sudan.

This article originally appeared on Front Page Magazine and was reposted with permission.

Evangelical Methodists vs. Jim Crow

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Asbury Seminary, Born of Conviction, civil rights, Confessing Movement within the United Methodist Church, Institute on Religion and Democracy, John Lomperis, Maxie Dunnam, Medgar Evers, Methodist, Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church, Myrlie Evers, racism, United Methodist

In contrast to safe, retroactive endorsements of the civil rights movement, Mississippi residents who challenged segregation in 1963 faced real risks. (Photo credit: BlackPast.org)

On January 2, 1963, a group of white, largely evangelical ministers in what is now the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church released a famous public repudiation of racism in the midst of a very volatile environment. As others prepare a  ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the statement, we are honored to publish this guest post by one of the main organizers of this effort, the Rev. Dr. Maxie Dunnam. Dunnam is a longtime, prominent leader of evangelical renewal efforts in United Methodism who we have been privileged to know as a brother and a friend.  Later parts of his career included serving as president of Asbury Theological Seminary, world editor of “The Upper Room” devotionals, president of the World Methodist Council, and one of the most widely recognized leaders in the Confessing Movement within the United Methodist Church.

MISSISSIPPI METHODISTS REMEMBER

I was the organizing pastor of a Methodist church in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1963. James Meredith had been admitted as the first black student to the University of Mississippi. There were student protests and riots, and racial tension had risen to new heights.

Three minister friends joined me in writing a statement which we called BORN OF CONVICTION. We introduced it with these words:

“confronted with the grave crisis precipitated by racial discord within our state in recent months, and the genuine dilemma facing persons of Christian conscience, we are compelled to voice publicly our convictions. Indeed, as Christian ministers, and as native Mississippians, sharing the anguish of our people, we have a particular obligation to speak.”

We then spoke of the responsibility of the church to steward freedom of the pulpit and the call to pastoral/prophetic responsibility on the part of clergy.

We expressed our concern and opposition to racial segregation, stating clearly the Biblical and Church’s conviction that there must be no discrimination based on “race, color or creed.”

Our third concern was the undermining of public schools by the proliferation of private Christian schools to preserve segregaion.

In those days, the issues of race and communism were confused and folks committed to racial justice were accused of being communist. We closed our statement by expressing our opposition and the official position of the United Methodist Church in relation to communism.

Unfortunately, the annual conference was crippled by internal ecclesiastical politics, making it impossible for the conference to speak with one voice on any issue. To keep our statement out of that political arena, we four writers of the statement decided we would invite only younger clergy to join us in issuing the statement to the conference and the public. We wanted the issues to be kept clear. 24 others joined us in signing.

Reading the statement today, you might think there was nothing radical about it. But in Mississippi parlance, “all hell broke loose.” Most of the signers were compelled to leave Mississippi and serve in other areas.

That was fifty years ago. The Commission on Religion and Race of the Mississippi Conference has chosen to honor the 28 ministers who signed the Born of Conviction statement with an award established in honor of Emma Elzy who spent her life advocating reconciliation and better race relations.

The award will be presented by Myrlie Evers, wife of civil rights activist, Medgar Evers, who was assasinated June 13, 1963.

I’m going to be in Jackson, at the conference, on June 9. I’m looking forward to seeing the persons who signed the statement, some for the first time since 1963. I have no notion about whether we deserve to be honored, but it is good to know that memory sometimes serves us well.

I’m convinced racism is not as pronounced as it was in 1963, but it is still present all over our nation. I’m as concerned about that today as I was 50 years ago, but my passionate concern is this: I BELIEVE PUBLIC EDUCATION IS THE CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE OF THE 21st CENTURY.