Thread by @AlsoACarpenter

Lest we be tempted to think otherwise, even conservative Calvinist African American ministers refused to limit the mission of the Church or the scope of its Gospel to Southern., "Spirituality of the Church," standards. Presbyterian minister Rev. Francis J. Grimke 1/

2/ ...(1857 – 1937), supplied the following rebuke from the floor of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1888; a speech quite contrary to Thornwell’s address in 1859:

"It is important, it seems to me, not only in dealing with race prejudice, but in dealing with

3/ "...every other evil, that Christian men and women should understand, that Christianity is not clay in the hands of the world-spirit to be moulded by it; but is itself to be the moulder of public sentiment and everything else. It isn’t the meal, but is the leaven put into the

4/ "...meal that is to leaven the whole lump. It is salt—not salt that has lost its savor, but the salt of the earth that is intended to arrest corruption, to put an end to the forces that mean moral decay, that tend to break down the tissues of the spiritual life, and to

5/ "...degenerate into festering sores of race prejudice and all the other brood of evils that grow out of it. The mission of the church, of Christian men and women is to mould, not be moulded by encircling influences of evil. To the shame of the millions of white Christians in

6/ "...this land, the brother in black is still a social and religious outcast." (The Works of Francis Grimke, p. 471)

A sound Gospel preacher as well as an ardent social agitator, Grimke called the Church to militancy against racial prejudice:

7/ "Where are the forty million professing Christians in this land? The so-called Christian Church, that ought to have the greatest influence in moulding public sentiment in the right direction; that ought to be the greatest militant force against evil (and what greater evil is

8/ "...there than race prejudice?) is resting on its arms, is doing nothing, or comparatively nothing to arrest the evil and to lift up the true standard of brotherhood." (p. 613)

"The fact that in Christian America, in this land that is rolling up its church members by the

9/ "...millions, race prejudice has gone on steadily increasing, is a standing indictment of the white Christianity of this land—an indictment that ought to bring the blush of shame to the faces of the men and women, who are responsible for it, whose silence, whose quiet

10/ "...acquiescence, whose cowardice, or worse whose active cooperation, have made it possible. The first thing for the church to do, I say, is to wake up to the fact that it can do something." (p. 464)

The fact is, the Southern conservative proponents of the Narrow

11/ Spirituality of the Church never did wake up to this fact; not in Grimke’s lifetime, nor in the Civil Rights era that would follow. And this same view of the Church continues to poison our own era. As another conservative African American and former Orthodox Presbyterian

12/ minister C. Herbert Oliver reported in 2011,

"I’ve also not seen any basic racial changes for the better in the church. I’m sorry to say that, but I ran into the same racism in the PCUSA church as I found in the OPC. When I graduated from seminary, there was no place for

13/ "...me to serve. There were plenty of churches that were vacant, but none of them would call me. It was understood by the higher-ups in the church that there was no future for me being called to a white church. That’s when the call came to me to serve in Maine, and I accepted

14/14 "... that and went there and served. But the racial divide in America is still as strong as it was in the 40’s and 50’s. Just more polite, but it is no less real, no less firm, and no less impregnable." (“Grace Through Hardship”)