When Howard Thurman delivered the commencement address to the Interdenominational Theological Center’s Class of 1980, he raised his hand in a continuous thumping motion saying, “If you are not about putting everything that has breath back on it’s God given beat, then get out of God’s way and find you something else to do”.

Howard Thurman said to us as Seminarians chosen for his Educational Trust, “When you wake in the night with a vision in your mind get up and write it down because in the morning it will be gone.” 

I am now in my sixteenth year as a weekly columnist for the oldest black living newspaper in Nashville, the “Nashville Pride”.  Positioned with it’s Masthead is it’s Mission: “The Voice of a Proud Community”.

I have come to realize after 40+ years of preaching, even as an Isaac R. Clark Homiletics Scholar, that… ‘preaching is faulty’.  Many times I have listened to my own sermonic recordings and found error in my spoken homiletic.  My theological training gives me pause, more often than not, in wanting, no ‘needing’ to be in dialogue with ‘the preacher’ concerning his sermonic discourse.

I charge my Grandmother for this in hearing her one Sunday morning at the door greeting our Pastor, identifying something he had said which I was too young to even know, but, I understood her saying to him, “come to Sunday School and say that.”  Can’t even recall whose classroom at The I.T.C. that I found the knowledge that “Preaching is Monologue.  Teaching is Dialogue.”

But the “Written Word”… a deeply different beast when it comes to the transmission of The Word of God.  Just when “I think I am DONE” trying to get “my people” to move from the MUNDANE to TRUTH …that matters when it comes to ‘Kingdom of God Building’, I wake up, in the night, with renewed… Vision.  And so I get up, write it down…

The FACT that The Interdenominational Theological Center has just dodged a bullet… and God has granted another new life, my contemplation finds truth in the mind of Claud Anderson:

 “The social systems that locked Blacks, and only Blacks, onto the bottom social and economic rung were Slavery and Jim Crow segregation.  For a brief period after each system was abolished, lawmakers made a weak effort to correct the damage those systems had imposed on Blacks. The efforts were short lived and each time, focus quickly shifted from Blacks to amorphous and broad groups such as minorities, people of color, language groupings, diversity, multi-cultural and poor people.  Not only did Black civil rights leaders allow the hijackings and conceptual shifts, they themselves began to aggregate Blacks with broader groups, forever confusing the issues, social policy and Black people.  Once the shift occurred, Blacks could no longer see their own group self interest clearly.”

 “The 400 percent immigrant increase has produced rippling negative effects in Black America that neither civil rights leaders nor elected officials have acknowledged or addressed.  The income of Black Americans is reduced by three-tenths of one percent for every 10 percent increase in the immigrant population. (Center for Immigration Studies) That 400 percent increase entirely wiped out the 12 percent income gain that Blacks achieved between 1956 and 1966, as a result of the Black Civil Rights Movement.”

 “Affirmative Action programs were originally intended to be corrective action for Black Americans, but immigrants, to whom this country does not have a debt, have been defined as new minorities, therefore eligible for inclusion in Affirmative Action.  Knowledgeable of the law, immigrants set foot on American soil and demand preferential treatment.  The result: Asians receive approximately 80% of the federal government’s 8(a) set-a-sides.   According to recent statistics, in Southwestern states like Texas, White women receive 78% of the state contracts, Hispanics 21% and Black businessmen only 9/10ths of one percent.”

(Excerpts from Claud Anderson’s pen: The Harvest Institute Report – Summer 2006 THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE: Running Against the Clock).

In the urgency of Jesus, transmitted by The Gospel’s, I identify the thing that Claud Anderson further write’s in speaking to “Our Losses”:  “they have stolen our ability for SOCIAL COHESIVENESS”.

By email: myfathersmansionpress@gmail.com