(By Carla Hinton, NewsOK). A preacher isn’t sure what he’ll find when he opens the doors of his Oklahoma City church on Wednesday evening. That’s when the first “Racism & Racists Anonymous” meeting will take place at Trinity Presbyterian Church, in Oklahoma City, OK.
How many people are going to be willing to admit in front of a group of strangers that they are racist?
The Rev. Richard Mize, Trinity’s pastor, said he has no idea.
“I don’t know what to expect — maybe nobody will show or maybe there will be a crowd,” he said.
Mize said actually, the premise of the gatherings isn’t to get people to embarrass themselves or draw negative attention to their innermost thoughts.
He said that’s why he tweaked the local format so that it differs a bit from the small-group program called “Racists Anonymous” that it is patterned after.
“Racists Anonymous” was started by a black pastor in California. Mize, who is white, said he was intrigued when he talked to the Rev. Ron Buford about the program at Buford’s Congregational Community Church of Sunnyvale.
Trinity’s meetings will be based loosely on Buford’s program, but Mize said the Oklahoma City gatherings are not only for people who wish to examine the racism within themselves but also for individuals who wish to learn how to deal with other people’s racism.
He said each of the meetings will start with a speaker who will discuss his or her own personal challenges with racism and the challenges of living with and around racism and racists. Several people from the community-at-large have been invited to speak, including a law enforcement officer, small business owner and a doctor.
Mize said at some point, he plans to share his own testimony as a “former Confederate flag-waver” who gave up “embedded racist thinking because I couldn’t square it with the Gospel.”
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Post Ferguson and its embrace of all things BLM, the PCUSA has built its dialogue, or better put, one-sided lectures on race on the following premises. White “privilege” is a systemic nature of the American experience since Plymouth Rock, Christianity in American culture reflects such. Hence whites by and large are racist by definition and by culture. The key to such and the remedy involves some form of acceptance of guilt, followed by some confession of such, which usually involves the parroting of various social or political planks off a standard litany of acceptable responses provided by the PCUSA or its allies in the movements.
Given this it is no surprise that some elements would be quick to embrace a therapeutic/confessional/12-step modality as a means of racial discussion. “Hello I am Jim and I am a racist” “Hi Jim”. And again it fits into the rigid, doctrinaire, echo chamber nature of the PCUSA. You have villains and victimization narratives already in place. Its comfortable to the institution and does not tax them beyond their comfort zones how their conversations on race happens.
Racism, as in any sin, any abhorrent sets of behaviors, has only one remedy. The Blood of Jesus Christ on the Cross. C.S. Lewis in the “Problem of Pain” says that time or distance or talking to oneself or others does not heal sin, only Jesus Christ and confession of Him as Savior. And I think that is why in-spite of over 40 years of official PCUSA efforts to make the church more racially diverse, it remains a dying 98% liberal white entity, while various other groups, Assembly of God, New Evangelical groups, Pentecostals, are far, far more racially diverse in their makeups. The bridge, the only bridge, between people, black, white, red, green, whatever has and remains the Blood and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ. At the Cross all other differences and divisions fall away. The PCUSA never has and never will embrace such a narrative, so they go on making things up as they go along.