The church needs to regain its moral compass

Dear Editor,

Almost 40 years ago on 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated for standing up for Africans in the USA. In Guyana, we lost Ronald Waddell on 30 January 2006 because he was fighting for the dignity of Africans in Guyana.

The question today is “Where are our Martin Luther Kings in Guyana ? “Where are our men of grace, courage and integrity. Where are the men of courage in the religious community in Guyana?

There was Mohandas Gandhi in India, there was Desmond Tutu in South Africa. Guyana has a moral, social, racial, economic, political and human rights crisis and our men and women of cloth are missing in action.

Forty years after his assassination when he was aged 39 , Martin Luther King’s legacy stands bigger than before. The youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner ever, his legacy has brought Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, a Black Astronaut and countless other Africans into the American mainstream.

Martin Luther King was a man of extraordinary physical courage whose belief in non violence never swerved. From the time he assumed leadership of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955 to his murder 13 years later, he faced hundreds of death threats. His home in Montgomery was bombed, with his wife and young children inside.

He was hounded by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which bugged his telephone and hotel rooms, circulated salacious gossip about him and even tried to force him into committing suicide after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King travelled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles.

One of the great travesties of being African is that Martin Luther King will never get his just reward from a white dominated world. Three decades after King was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn., he is still regarded mainly as the black leader of a movement for black equality.

As one noted writer stated “That assessment, while accurate, is far too restrictive. For all King did to free blacks from the yoke of segregation, whites may owe him the greatest debt, for liberating them from the burden of America’s centuries-old hypocrisy about race.

It is only because of King and the movement that he led that the US can claim to be the leader of the “free world” without inviting smirks of disdain and disbelief. Had he and the blacks and whites who marched beside him failed, vast regions of the US would have remained morally indistinguishable from South Africa under apartheid, with terrible consequences for America’s standing among nations”.

In Guyana today, we need men and women of the cloth to take up the mantle of Martin Luther King. We are a country in moral and oral degeneracy, economic deprivation, poverty, crime, corruption, deep racism, discrimination all buttressed in a criminal economy and an ethnically predisposed totalitarian government.

Churches, mosques, temples are being robbed, priests are being killed and yet, the religious community has insulated itself from Guyana’s main problems ,as if believing things will change overnight not realising they have to be socially active. As Martin Luther King once said…. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The recent history of the religious community in Guyana has been appalling. Rather than doing things to save lives, they have been too busy saving souls.

Misplaced priorities, the unwillingness to stand for anything that truly impacts the lives of Guyanese on a daily and routine basis, the lack of courage, grace, heart and integrity….the church has become a thing “to do”…like breakfast on Sunday, an every Sunday going-to-school-like event… but not a thing that makes a difference.

Let me remind the religious community in general and the Christian church in particular what Martin Luther King said:

1. A right delayed is a right denied.

2. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

3. We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

4. The time is always right to do what is right.

In his “I’ve been to the mountain-top speech”, Martin Luther King spoke directly to ministers, stating: “because so often, preachers aren’t concerned about anything but themselves. And I’m always happy to see a relevant ministry. It’s all right to talk about “long white robes over yonder,” in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here! It’s all right to talk about “streets flowing with milk and honey,” but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day.

It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.”

The church in Guyana has to become a bedrock of peace, justice, equity and justice in Guyana. Instead of focusing only on religious law, the church needs to work within the confines of Natural Law and Human Rights Laws.

The church has a mixed but important heritage in Guyana. Once used to support slavery and hence avid racism it led the fight that led to the Abolition of the Trade in Captive Africans that ultimately influenced Emancipation. Its economic role as a land owner is still under-appreciated because of secrecy and greed. Its role in education in Guyana is second to none.

According to Robert Sam, “history shows that in almost every nation on earth, Christians laid the foundation and established public education. Previously, the rich hired private tutors to educate their children.”

The records of Guyana’s Ministry of Education show that when the Government took control of all schools in 1976, two hundred and eighteen primary schools had been built, owned and managed for many, many years by the church.

Ownership was as follows: Anglican- 79, Catholic- 55, Church of Scotland (Presbyterian)- 22, Lutheran- 18, Congregational- 14, Methodist- 14, Seventh Day Adventist- 6, Christian Catholic- 2, Moravian- 2, Brethren- 1, Pilgrim Holiness (Wesleyan)- 2, AME- 1. In addition, the government owned 170 and Hindus 3. The Moslems had none.

The total number of primary schools at the time was 391, therefore, the Christian total of 216 schools represented a massive 55%! At the secondary level, among the schools established by churches were Queen’s College, Bishops High, St Roses, St Joseph’s, St Stanislaus and St John’s Colleges. Most of these Christian public schools were probably built between 1830 and 1950. In the vision of our forefathers, every church had a school, even if it meant using the same building to do so.

They knew the newly emancipated slaves needed education and this represented very powerful opportunities for evangelism and discipleship.

Guyana today is plagued by illiteracy. Schools are in terrible shape. The mis-education of our children accelerates daily because the church has stepped back from the debate for excellence, equity and morality. The issue has become whether children should be whipped in school or not, when the real debate should be about how to educate our children. Morality has often been seen as the special “niche’ of the church. Now it is has become an accidental niche of schools.

The church needs to regain its moral compass. The religious community as an institution interacts with more Guyanese than any other institution on a weekly basis. Yet it has defaulted and become morally bankrupt in the most significant issue facing the nation today. The issue of governan
ce. Good governance and shared governance.

The church has a major role to play in changing the unjust Westminster model of governance in Guyana.

The church needs to get more involved socially, educationally, economically, morally and spiritually in Guyana’s morass of declining values and societal disintegration.

Participating in the fight for constitutional reform is a godly act of compassion, self love, grace and integrity. The church has so much to offer that is good. Guyana needs a socially conscious church.

The church was very active during the Burnham era.

Has it lost its “heart and soul” to commerce and self love?

Yours faithfully,

Eric Phillips