Quote:
Originally posted by Wolfman
There's a grain of truth in what you say:it isn't a "black church issue" b/c it's not being dealt with in a real pastoral way in many black churches, while beneath the surface all kinds of things are going on in churches. There's a real disconnect here in many places. People's lives and souls are at risk. There was a case in my area where one of the top African American pastors died of AIDS and he infected his wife who died, and a couple of mistresses. People just want to put their head in the sand and act if this someone else's problem, while this problem is spiraling out of control.
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The "white" church played no role in stemming aids in the community where it was most prevalent, which was white, gay males.
Even the most ardent anti-gay pastors have AIDS ministries in their churches. My current church does not condemn the sufferers, but they don't condone the behavior of how it was acquired, be it straight fornication, drug use, down low, or homosexuality. The Black Church cannot be repsonsible for everything beyond its original mission. That is why all of our black institutions suffer from. The responsibility to be everything to everybody for every issue. The original intent of the orginization loses focus, gets lost or watered down, or overwhelmed. The bigger a church gets, the less Gospel they preach and the more wayward the congregation. No others communities organizations get called on to do more beyond their original intent than Black organizations. All of this hyper-criticism obscures the facts of these problems and where there origins lie and how to effectively deal with them. we are no longer in the MLK era where information was meted out by the Church out of neccessity as the one resource that we all shared.