Pastor Bell's Words To Live By

Each individual is placed in a location and given responsibility and restriction about what they can and cannot do. Above all, the Lord has called all us to watch and pray. When humanity was created, he was placed in a particular location and given specific instructions and prohibitions.  Over time, Adam forgot those prohibitions and did the unthinkable. He disobeyed the instructions from God. The ability to forget has its merits, however, the propensity to follow simply instructions has far greater rewards.

Like Adam, we are all located in a particular place in time, to fulfill the purposes for which God in his sovereignty has called and located us. Notwithstanding that we have been displaced from our original location, there is a master plan. So wherever you find yourself, find out from the creator what his original plan was for your life and the purpose for you being located in this particular place at this particular time.

Once we have the blueprint for our existence, we are then able to do exactly what were are called and designed to do. Adam was given social, ecological and theological responsibility to ensure that the created order was maintained and sustained. In our context, we also have these moral responsibilities and must challenge injustices, malpractices and actions and practices that are designed to destroy God original plan and purposes for humanity. Structural and systemic evil must be challenges and the wrongs of the past righted.

The domination of one people group by another damages the original plan of God. The words used to describe people who are not like you is also problematic, in that these terms are generally derogatory. By displacing someone and then referring to them as the ‘ethnic’ minority suggests that they are inferior to you. since the original translation of the word ‘ethnic or ethnikos in the Greek, means heathen. Did God create heathens or is this a man-made phenomenon?

Generations of displaced Africans are still searching for their true selves. There are many who have no concept of their ‘Blackness’ and have brought into the colonial ideology of ‘pigmentocracy’ that located people in society according to the shade of their skin or their skin tone.

Each and every one of us are the children of God and have been created in his image. That image is borne and displayed by Jesus Christ and is not physical but spiritual. It is his character. And so the image we must present is found in scripture and not in glossy magazines such as Time or Ebony. The image is depicted in Galatians 5.22. do read it and practice it as best you can.