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If you don’t know who Jeremiah Wright is by now, you’ve had to be living in a vacuum over the last couple of months. Video recordings of some of his more controversial statements have been playing endlessly over the news for weeks. This is especially so with his controversial critiques of the United States. To be fair to him, the selected comments that were aired didn’t always provide the broader context of what he was saying. But absent the context or not, they were still controversial and offended a lot of people, and still others thought he was right in what he said.Before I get to my main point, I do want to make a brief observation. Whereas there has been significant discomfort in much of the white community over Dr. Wright’s statements, there was not significant disagreement, for the most part, in the black community. This dichotomy of world-views is even more notable in the different ways Wright’s comments were viewed in predominantly black and white churches across the country.In my conversations, this difference in perspectives, not surprisingly, is even reflected within the Seventh-day Adventist church. We don’t see things alike living in the same country, and even belonging to the same church. That’s okay, because we don’t have to. But we do have to work at understanding each other across racial lines, even within our Adventist Church family. The main thing is acknowledging disagreement and seeking understanding, and then affirming strongly our complete agreement with the great Biblical and Prophetic teachings our church espouses, because as an Adventist people, we too will have some things to say in these final days to the religious and secular world that will not be received.
Whether you think Jeremiah Wright was right or wrong in his comments is something each person will need to decide on their own. But we as a church, at least from a religious liberty perspective, must support his right to say it, even if we disagree. Because there is coming a time in our churches prophetic understanding of things, when we will be singled out for speaking “truth” in such a way that brings us into disfavor with the masses. We may even be categorized as unpatriotic. I predict that the media will play it over and over again—whipping the masses up into such a furor, that it will usher in, along with other events, a time of trouble such as has never been seen before.
Again, we don’t need to agree with Wright, we can even think he is dead wrong, but we do need to defend his right even to be wrong.
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Pastor Fredrick A. Russell is the Senior Pastor of the Miracle Temple Seventh-day Adventist Church located in Baltimore, Maryland.
Originally from Port St. Lucie, FL, has been a member of Miracle Temple since 2001. She started authoring "Unplugged," the relationship advice column for Insight magazine, while studying at Johns Hopkins University. After graduating in 2005, Shayna continued her ministry with the magazine and has become a sought after speaker and adviser on Christian relationships and dating. This fall, Shayna's first joint book venture-the GODencounters devotional-will be released by Review and Herald Publishing. Shayna is delighted to be serving as the 2008 communication secretary for Miracle Temple.