Simon Cox Blog: What We Can Learn From The Black Church When We Are Pushed To The Margins

Monday, 29 August 2016

What We Can Learn From The Black Church When We Are Pushed To The Margins

The powerful, painful history of the Black Church has much to teach us as our culture continues to push the church to the margins of society.

At dinner the other night, our family sat in earshot of a group of people discussing presidential politics. They were older, Caucasian, and rather conservative in their political leanings. It was clear that they, like many Americans, are uninspired and—in their words—disheartened by the current party presumptive nominees for this year’s election. Their reflections echoed aged sentiments of prestige, shared beliefs, and religious privilege once represented by the Oval Office.

I mentioned to my wife how nice it must have been for generations past, and cultures unlike ours, to enjoy a political system concerned about their values and attentive to their voices. Our forefathers experienced a rather different portrait of American presidents and politics, one that left them living not in the center, but on the margins of American culture.

This is no bitter slight to American history so much as it is an acknowledgement of the new disequilibrium so many American Evangelicals are feeling in the wake of a cultural shift.

More accurately, it is like an earthquake; the changing political and cultural landscapes of our nation are peaking to new levels on the American Evangelical Richter scale. A few weeks ago I had the privilege of preaching at the National Conference on Preaching in Washington, D.C. The theme of the conference was “Preaching and the Public Square.” One could sense the palpable concern that the American Evangelical pulpit is drifting closer to the margins of societal sway. It is losing political influence and moral capital.

The days of the supposed moral majority are well behind us, and the reality of the mushy middle is clearly upon us. We are learning that America is not that bastion of Christendom ...