From the Rev. Bill Owens, a spokesman for the Coalition of African-American Pastors: "We have requested a meeting with President Obama and until he meets with us, we are going to ask black Christians to withhold their support until he personally hears our concerns."
According to Rev. Owens, one of the Coalition's greatest concerns is Obama's recently professed support for gay marriage. There are other concerns as well--Obama's support for unfettered abortions and his expansion of government power that proposes to eliminate the proverbial wall of separation between secular government and religion. Owens continued: "More than anything, this is an issue of biblical principles and President Obama is carrying our nation down a dangerous road. Many African-Americans were once proud of our president but now many are ashamed of his actions."
Rev. Owens doesn't get much attention from the secular media because his message is starkly at odds with the prevailing message you usually hear today from African-American church leaders. Owens' message is the message that was preached by the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and it's a message that used to be the prevailing message preached in the pulpits of African-American churches until King was assassinated in 1968. That message was based upon the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ; that all men and women are created equal and loved by God regardless of race, creed or ethnic background, and that God sent His One and only Son Jesus Christ into the world to die for the sins of African-Americans and all human beings.
Dr. King preached that African-Americans were human beings created in the image of a Holy God and therefore deserved to be treated with the same dignity and respect as all other human beings and enjoy the same rights as all other human beings. Dr. King never demanded special rights for African-Americans nor reparations for the myriad of crimes committed against blacks during slavery or the oppressive years of Jim Crow segregation. Dr. King wanted the barriers of segregation and Jim Crow laws removed so that blacks could compete on a level playing field with everyone else in academics, politics, sports and business.
Unfortunately, after Dr. King was assassinated, some of his successors who took over the pulpits in black churches began preaching a social gospel with a heavy emphasis on grievance-mongering. Politics--particularly the kind promoted by the Democratic Party--became the conduit to government entitlement programs such as welfare that enslaved millions of blacks into generational dependency upon government and subsequently destroyed the very soul and spirit of a people that had flourished morally and spiritually under Jim Crow because they were solidly grounded by faith in biblical Christianity. One statistic speaks volumes: In the early 1960s when Dr. King and his message influenced African-Americans, only five percent of black babies were born out of wedlock; today nearly 79 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock.
And so, it isn't Barack Obama who needs to listen to Rev. Bill Owens and the Coalition of African-American Pastors, but rather the entire African-American community in the United States. Rev. Owens' message is Dr. King's message rather than the message of pseudo-Christian race-hustlers such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson or racist preachers such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. If African-Americans would start listening to Owens and study the historical message preached by Dr. King, they would reject the social gospel as the moral cancer that has murdered their souls and rotted their communities for nearly half a century. And they would put their faith, hope and trust in Jesus Christ as their true Messiah rather than in phony, man-made saviors such as Barack Obama.
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