Reflections, Dr. Gardner C. Taylor

On the legacy of the Black church…

One of the great contributions of the Black church  was giving to our [Black] people a sense of significance and importance at a time when [White] society, by design, did almost everything it could to strip us of our humanity. But come Sunday morning, we could put on our dress clothes and became deacons, deaconesses and ushers, and hear the preacher say, "You are a child of God"—at a time when White society, by statute, custom and conversation, just called us "niggers." How would we have survived without a sense of God and the church telling [us] that we do matter? Where would we have been if there had been nowhere we could be told that we matter?

On the challenge to the Black church today…

We have to never forget that ultimately our individual lives must be shaped by the Gospel. We [pastors] became so committed to the matter of our civil liberties that we forgot our religious liberty in Jesus Christ. The responsibility of the [Black] church then and now, and in the future, is to bring those things together, so that the individual need, the social need, the individual religious conversion and social redemption are not separate things.

On the challenge to American Baptist churches…

The challenge is to remember our great history and legacy as founders of schools and colleges in the South that educated former slaves, and insist that the public schools today and the government do a better job at educating not only our Black children, but all children. Our educational system is in tatters, which is one of the reasons other countries are surpassing us. American Baptists need to take the lead by putting pressure on public schools to do a better job educating all children.

On the significance of the New Baptist Covenant…

It is the only hope we have going forward. We can do far more together than we can do separately. Sectarianism has its place, but it is not a solution. Why should we carry on the contentions, fissures and factions of another generation? Our Lord prayed that we would be one, and if the New Testament is true that must happen.

On the responsibility of the church in the face of human suffering…

There is something wrong in a country as rich as this [United States] that we have so many people who are put on a kind of dump heap and thrown away. Something wrong on the part of government, something wrong on the part of the churches, because we [the churches] have not put enough pressure on public institutions to do what ought to be done. The church has not exerted the influence of which we are capable. Many churches have food pantries and meals, and some have opened their doors to the homeless…but the response has not been nearly what it ought to be. What a vast difference the church could make if we worked together to solve some of these problems.