Tom Bloom, lead pastor of Community Vineyard Church, thought three weeks ago about the joyous moment when he could see his congregation instead of broadcasting into their homes.
But to the 85 people who shuffled into the Cuyahoga Falls chapel on Sunday, there would be no joyful preaching.
“I just thought it wouldn’t feel right if we did a lot of celebrating when our nation is on fire,” he said. “Our cities are burning with the protests of the wrongful killing of George Floyd — in such a horrible manner in which white police officers took the life of this unarmed black person.
“I share the anger and the outrage that ’s being displayed around the world,” he began in a sermon of reckoning and reconciliation.
With racial wounds reopening in America, Bloom sought a more authentic perspective than he could offer as a white man. But in the Falls, he said, there are no majority black churches.
So he saved the second half of his sermon for Marv Hodges, senior pastor at Bridging the Gap Ministries, which is 2 miles down the road in Akron’s North Hill neighborhood.
For his part, Bloom defined racism’s origin and definition then explored solutions, mainly faith in God. He used a power point presentation with biblical footnotes to steer the audience, which was about half its normal size due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Encouraged by his wife to speak the truth to what would be a mostly white crowd, Hodges took his half of the sermon to address the Holy Spirit in the Christian heart. For he who accepts Jesus Christ, Hodges said, is commanded by God to join “the ministry of reconciliation.”
“Now, if you haven’t figured it out,” Hodges told the casually dressed Sunday crowd, “I’m here today to provoke you.”
“My heart breaks for the madness that’s going on,” he said. “But my spirit is excited for the opportunity to be change agents.”
The pastors shared personal stories as youth struggling with racism. Chapter and verse after chapter and verse, they explained how man was made in God’s image, and therefore all man (and women) are equal.
Bloom said it must have been the Bible that inspired America’s founding documents or Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. “And yet,” he said, “America, like all other nations on Earth, has a racist past, a racist history. And we have not lived up to our ideals.”
It is Satan — the great deceiver cast down from the heavens — who imbues unbelievers with the pride of thinking themselves better than others or the arrogance of thinking others less than them. Bloom said this is the origin of racism, man’s original sin.
Christ’s death disarmed the devil by washing clean that sin. But Bloom and Hodges argue that while earthly education and surrounding oneself in diverse crowds may help, only the Holy Spirit can provide a truth great enough to overcome racism.
No one is born racist, they said. It’s handed down generation by generation.
Bloom learned it from his father and his father’s father in the hills of Pennsylvania. Though his family knew virtually no black people, Bloom’s grandfather said terrible things about them, “because that’s how he was raised. And he believed lies, and he taught them to me.”
Hodges personal anecdote took the audience back to 1967. As a member of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Akron (now known simply as the YMCA or Y), he had friends “with various levels of melanin” from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.
He attended South High School, which was derogatorily nicknamed “Congo Tech” at the time. He sat with his white Christian friends when their Firestone High School basketball team came to play South High.
South won, big. Hodges black classmates “jumped on” the Firestone cheerleaders and fans, he recalled. He grabbed his white friends by the hand and led them out of the melee. That night, he convinced his parents for a school transfer.
“That’s the first time I realized that something culturally was wrong,” he said.
As a pastor, Hodges has spent decades preaching on the 400 years of oppression “that brought us” time and time again to this moment of racial unrest.
“It is time to make a change,” he said, demanding that believers become active listeners and not skirt their God-given duty, bought with the blood of his only son, to be “ministers of reconciliation.”
Up the church aisles in the old Lowes State Theatre, Hodge pointed to parishioners in their teens and twenties. Spinning himself in circles, he exclaimed how they would be the ones to vanquish racism, “to put their knee on Satan’s neck,” he said, referencing the nearly 10 minutes a white Minneapolis police office knelt on Floyd’s neck before he died.
“I know that from here on out, until Jesus cracks the sky or takes me home, this is the battle,” the black pastor said.
Reach Beacon Journal reporter Doug Livingston at dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3792.
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Black and white pastors deliver joint sermon on original sin of racism - Akron Beacon Journal
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