Christian Leaders Plan To Hold 'State-Of-The-Church' Talk On Integration
/LONG BEACH, Calif. — Pastors and leaders in the Christian-based education community plan to hold a “state-of-the-church” panel discussion on integration at Chosen Generation Church in Long Beach on Saturday (Jan 20) from 9 am to noon.NEWS RELEASEThe guest speakers are going to tackle the question of whether the church in America has advanced much past the declaration made by Martin Luther King Jr. 56 years ago that Sunday morning services were the most segregated time of the week.“In 2018, we are still wrestling with the fallout from that statement,” said Pastor Cedric Nelms, who will be hosting the event at his church. “This gathering is about starting a conversation dealing with answering the question: How have we advanced the dream?”Nelms, who is also World Impact’s city director for Los Angeles, described the event as “a meeting at the intersection of the Gospel, the Church, and Race/Culture.”“My hope is that this conversation will lead us to becoming conscious Christians,” he said.
Last summer, Nelms was one of four pastors participating in a TogetherLA pop-up panel to discuss both hope and brokenness in Los Angeles.To truly be an urban pastor planting an urban church one must first get to know the broken parts of the city, said Nelms during the discussion.“We have to get unified in understanding that yes, we can be a different color, we can be a different culture, we can be a different race, we can even have a different creed, but we also have to understand that there is only one gospel and one Lord,” he said.TogetherLA InvitationToday, ministry workers and church leaders all over Los Angeles work to glorify God and His Kingdom by advancing the myriad of social justice issues still in existence. TogetherLA seeks to catalyze this group by by joining forces, learning from each other, and sharing encouragement.TogetherLA is a movement of pastors, church leaders and people of faith who love LA. Those who intimately know our city know the depth of this dynamic city, its challenges, as well as its possibilities. The vision doesn’t come without hurdles, but it does come with a pressing reality of what God is already doing to transform communities in LA. Let’s talk about what God is doing through the Church and what still needs to be done…Let’s have a conversation!LOCATION: Chosen Generation Church, 5601 Orange Ave, Long Beach, CA 90805MORE INFO: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Gathering – How Have We Advanced the Dream?TogetherLA grants permission to anyone wanting to re-publish with proper attribution and link back to this post.Media contact: Alex Murashko, alex@togetherla.net … Promo video: https://youtu.be/nLvUGR8OAK0
“For Christians, we say that the common baseline is the cross,” he explained. “When we see injustice we look back to the cross and say that Jesus is the solution. When we see economic poverty issues [in] our city we look back at the cross and say that Jesus has an answer to that.”Whether someone is of a certain denomination or no denomination is not the issue when it comes to providing a solution, he said.“The common bond that we share as brothers and sisters in Christ is that we can look at the cross together and say Jesus did it all for me,” Pitre said. “When that humbles us, when that makes us soft, then we can look at our brother or sister who’s walking next to us, they might not look like us, act like us, dress like us, think like us and say I’ll walk with you.”He added, “That is the joy that I find in our city. That is the joy that I find in the folks who come into the city, the folks who have lived here for so long, the folks who have said, ‘This is my town, walk with me.’ It’s a very open, very encouraging place to be if you just embrace it and say, ‘This is mine, too.”