A while back I read Stephen Mansfield's "The Faith of Barack Obama." I was struck by two sections of the book that I will post about, first here, and then in a secondary post. The first element that caught my attention was a quote from Martin Luther King. The quote is as follows:
"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. If the church does not participate actively in the struggle for peace and for economic and racial justice, it will forfeit the loyalty of millions and cause men everywhere to say that it has atrophied its will. But if the church will free itself from the shackles of a deadening status quo, and, recovering its great historic mission, will speak and act fearlessly and insistently in terms of justice and peace, it will enkindle the imagination of mankind and fire the souls of men, imbuing them with a glowing and ardent love for truth, justice, and peace."
Wow! I wonder how many of us are so blinded by our culture to realize that, in the vast majority of local churches, the church has forfeited its role as the conscience of the state?
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