Many call into question the President's Christianity, or even claim he is a Muslim (as though that would be evil). But President Obama is a Christian, and has made a commitment to Christ. And as far as I am concerned, reading this rough transcript, Barack Obama was doing the Lord’s even before he accepted Christ. This is from a church in Macon Georgia, Harvest Cathedral, in 2008. - Lance
Rough transcript:
I didn’t know a soul when I moved to Chicago. I was 25 years old. I moved there after college. I had been working Wall Street but I wasn’t content. I knew that I wanted to be part of something that was larger than myself. So I went to work as a community organizer with a group of Christian churches who had come together to deal with the devastation of steel plants that had closed on the south side of Chicago and thousands of people had been laid off. Communities had fallen into disrepair. There were young men hanging out on the streets, buildings were boarded up, people had lost hope.
And during these three years as an organizer it wasn’t easy. There were days when we got tired, days when the road ahead seemed too long or too hard to trek. But working with this community, ordinary people, who had discovered they could do extraordinary things when given the opportunity who never stopped believing in the Samaritans sense of justice. Month after month, year after year, we provided: job training for the jobless, hope for the hopeless, after school programs for working families and block by block we help to turn those neighborhoods around.
And this is were I want to give some personal testimony, if you don’t mind. Because I was meeting with lay leaders and lay people of these churches and I was trying to get them organized. We were busy with meetings and we were busy with plans. I recognized myself in them. I could recognize my hopes and my fear and my joys in their lives. I knew scripture and I knew that many of the values I held that had propelled me in my work were values that they shared. But I think they also noticed that there was a detachment to me. There was a part of me that was an observer when I was in church and slowly I came to realize that something was missing in my life.
Because you see I wasn’t raised in a particularly religious household. Some of you know my father was from Kenya in Africa and he was not a religious man. He left when I was two so I didn’t know him. I was raised by my mother and my grandparents.
My mother who was from Kansas was a deeply spiritual person but she wasn’t religious in the way most of us use the term. Partly because she had grown up in small town Kansas and she had seen that sometimes people who preach the gospel or went to church didn’t always act very church like. And so she had sensed that you can be in church without being of the church. You can call yourself a Christian but not act the way Jesus Christ would have us act. So she had rejected and rebelled from organized religion.
My mothers parents who had raised me throughout my childhood, they were Methodist and Baptist. But they had kinda fallen away from the church. So I didn’t have a particularly religious household. Partly because of this upbringing I had no real anchor for my beliefs. No commitment to a particular community of faith.
And so I’m going around these churches in Chicago, trying to organize these churches, some of these pastors, these pastors are slick, because they’d call me into their office and they’d say well you know Barak we think its wonderful work your doing, this job training work. And we like your ideas in terms of challenging the city to deliver services to communities that had been neglected. We want to help you but its hard getting our folks involved.
If you’re organizing churches, it might be helpful if you were a member of a church. Just a suggestion, no pressure, but it might be helpful if folks saw you in church once in a while. I had to admit they had a point.
So one Sunday I woke up at 6 AM and I brushed the lint off the only suit I had. I was getting paid 12,000 dollars a year plus car expenses. I had one suit and it was a little thread bare. And I went over to Trinity on 95th Street on the Southside and I heard a sermon about hope and faith and the love of Jesus Christ.
During the course of the sermon I was introduced to Jesus in a way that I had not been introduced before. And I learned my sins could be redeemed if I placed my trust in him. That he could set me on the path of eternal life. It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the isle one day and get baptized. I have to say, I didn’t fall out in church, it didn’t come as an epiphany. It was a gradual process, all the questions and the doubts and the pain that I sometimes felt didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath the cross I heard Gods spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will and I dedicated myself to discovering His truth and carrying out His works.
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