A Call to Black Pastors: Be Shepherds and Not Kings

In response to the request of several people wanting an explanation (religious, biblical or otherwise) on the video of the coronation of Bishop Eddie Long, we here at Rhetoric Race and Religion will collect responses and place them on our blog. If there are responses you find, please share them with us. Thanks

Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee
Politic365

This week, Bishop Eddie Long, the pastor of suburban Atlanta’s megachurch New Birth Baptist Missionary Church, apologized to the Anti-Defamation League for partaking in a religious ceremony where he was wrapped in the Torah scroll, and paraded around his congregation as a newly appointed king. The Torah scroll in which the Bishop was wrapped was recovered from a concentration camp during the Holocaust.

Bishop Long, however, is no stranger to controversy. Two years ago, he settled out of court for sexual impropriety with four young male accusers, and just recently his wife filed for divorced.

Taken by itself, the degradation of the biblical doctrine where only Jesus Christ is king is nothing less than blasphemous. And, if you are Jewish, the envelopment of a man in such a sacred text could be nothing short of offensive.

But the larger issue here is that men anointed by the church to these positions of power must realize that their public missteps have deeper implications that further impact the relevance of the black church. Upon reflection, how does this recent incident also suggest that the chains of a one’s ego have a much stronger will over the freeing power of humility?
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