Welcome to Apostolic Life in the 21st Century, a podcast dedicated to helping modern day believers live out the teachings of the First Century. This podcast is part of the teaching ministry of Dr. David K. Bernard.

Dr. Bernard is dedicated his life to studying the Bible and helping believers apply its message to their daily lives. In apostolic life

in the 21st century, Dr. Bernard answers your questions about what the Bible teaches and how

those teachings apply to everyday life. Thank you for joining us for this broadcast.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once said,

It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning.

Of course, King was noting the racial divide in the American church at large, but his observation

unfortunately seems to apply to onus Pentecostals also.

If all onus Pentecostals believe and preach the same message, why are our organizations split along racial lines? Well, first of all,

let me answer by saying, the Church of Jesus Christ must stand for racial inclusion and must stand

against racism.

Racism is a sin.

We must be very clear on that.

So any practice that promotes segregation of races or exclusion of people or putting people

on a secondary status, that is contrary to the scripture and what the church should be. In Revelation

chapter 5, verse 9, you have people of every language, every tribe, every nation, all worshiping

God in heaven together. So that's what the church should be like. Now, of course, America has a history of racism, from slavery to Jim Crow laws.

And thankfully, the civil rights movement of the 1960s brought great equity in a legal sense.

That doesn't mean everybody's hearts were changed.

And so there is still an ongoing battle to make sure

we implement and practice what our nation professes. We are founded as a nation on the premise that

all people are created equal. But it's been a slow process of making that turn into reality.

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