Dave Mallinak has served as pastor of Berean Baptist Church of Ogden, Utah since 2001. He has a beautiful wife and five kids, who are even now in the process of flying the coop.
I wrote this article about three years ago but never published it. I find it interesting that our Dear Leaders attempted to comfort us during the coronavirus shutdown by promoting the idea of being “alone together.” Of course, we were already “alone together” without the imposed isolation of the shutdown. We have been “alone together” in our virtual world of technology and social networking. That is the subject of this little essay.
Frost’s Tuft
Many consider Robert Frost to be America’s foremost poet. Though few could recite the lines to his famous poem “The Road Less Taken,” we have adopted the phrase as a popular expression of our desire to be maverick.Continue reading “Alone Together”→
Racial hostility didn’t begin in 1619, nor does America own the patent on it. Many long centuries before the founding of America, sin plunged the world into a pandemic of racial and ethnic hurt. In Genesis 10, God called the nations of the world to scatter, subduing the earth. In Genesis 11, mankind united against God under the leadership of Nimrod and built the Tower of Babel, “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” At the Tower of Babel, we find the launch pad of racism.
Genesis 11:1 tells us that “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech” – humanity united against their Creator God. God sent them to subdue the earth, but mankind refused to be scattered. They could not forget the absolute destruction caused by the flood, and they refused to believe God’s promise, symbolized in the rainbow, that He would never again destroy the earth with a flood. Rather than rest in His promise, men united to protect themselves and their offspring from such a tyrant God. They built a tower to the heavens in the vain delusion that if God again sent a flood, they would be able to escape it. As Matthew Henry explains,
God had told them indeed that he would not again drown the world; but they would trust to a tower of their own making, rather than to a promise of God’s making or an ark of his appointing.
Ethnic hostility is rooted in sinful man’s antagonism towards a holy God. When the nations refused to spread throughout the earth and subdue it for God’s glory, God introduced disunity between the different families of the earth:
He was a militant black activist. He followed Malcolm X and thought Martin Luther King, Jr. was too nice, compromised. He admired Nat Turner. But when he found the grace of God, he recognized the flaw in his resentment towards white people. In the first part of our discussion on race, Melvin Price shared his own experience with the race issue as a student leader at Weber State. Melvin explained what a difference it made in his thinking when he found forgiveness and pardon through the blood of Christ.
In this second discussion, Melvin offers his perspective on our current racial animosities and encourages us to talk to each other face-to-face. Above all else, Melvin and I had this discussion for two reasons: first, to share an experience from someone who lived it; second, to give an example of how to discuss these things with a desire to learn.
If you read through my recent series on healing our racial hurt, you know that I think we should take the time to listen to give our black brothers a hearing on these things. It is always good to hear someone else relate their experiences and perspectives, even more so when their experience differs from yours.
As I worked through these issues on my own, I relied heavily on the help I received from a handful of black friends. One of those friends is Melvin Price, a member of our church and a faithful follower of Jesus Christ. Melvin and I discussed the issue at length, and he added significantly to my perspective while I was preaching and writing about racial hurt. After one particular discussion, I thought that we should sit down and record our conversation so that others might benefit from it.
I apologize for the quality (or lack thereof) of this video. I recorded it on my phone. Visually, it is a nightmare, but you should be able to hear what we are saying. I divided the discussion into two parts, both about the same length (probably an hour and ten minutes altogether). I will post the second discussion in a few days.
May you all be blessed in the Lord!
The first part of a discussion on race between Melvin Price and myself
As you may know, our family had a 3-week Staycation with COVID-19. Many have said that we were the first they knew who caught this virus – we probably won’t be the last. We received many phone calls, texts, and well-wishes during our quarantine, and many were just plain curious about our experience. Since COVID is all the rage these days (other than some persistent rioting), I thought I would offer our perspective of this virus for your entertainment and enlightenment.
Unfortunately, the coronavirus is more than just a virus. It is a political football. That complicates the issue and the way people view it. We have more than just a virus: we’re dealing with the fear caused by the virus, the panic inspired by the news media, and the anger and frustration of so many. Facebook is a magnifying glass for these things. Facebook is no place for the faint-of-heart, what with all the extreme opinions spouted there. As for myself, I have found the coronavirus rage very unhelpful. I think many would like to look at Facebook without being subjected to the daily badgering and rage-flash. COVID would be so much easier to deal with through good-sense measures if people didn’t feel the added pressure caused by adamant memes on Facebook.
Now that our racial hostilities have come to a fast boil – some might argue a volcanic eruption – I believe it is time we admit that our approach to the issue has been ineffective. I would describe my approach to racial tension throughout much of my life in terms of ignorance and apathy. I didn’t know, and I really didn’t care.
A little more than 20 years ago, God used a visiting evangelist to expose the racism in my own heart. It came through a discussion we were having after a chapel service in our Academy. I was an assistant pastor at the time. My evangelist friend had just preached a message to our teens about courtship and marriage. Our pastor had one objection, and he addressed it after the students were dismissed. His objection? “You didn’t say anything about interracial dating.”
Before I relate our evangelist’s answer, I should remind you that a traveling evangelist depends for his livelihood on the relationships he has with pastors and churches. It would be easy enough for an evangelist to be a little bit craven out of fear of losing meetings. Our evangelist friend was not. His answer stunned me, like an open-handed slap to my face. He did not hesitate: “I don’t have a problem with interracial dating or marriage.” He explained: “You can’t tell me that a black girl and a white boy who grow up in the same church and live a few miles apart shouldn’t marry because of the color of their skin. They were raised in the same environment, they have the same cultural experiences, there can be no Scriptural reason to forbid it.”
I interjected. “God separated the races at the tower of Babel. Interracial marriage blurs the lines between those races.” He looked at me and shook his head: first, nothing in the Bible commands that we maintain “racial integrity” through marriage standards. The idea that “God set the bounds of their habitations” came from Bob Jones, and (as my evangelist friend said it), “everyone knows that the old man was a racist.” Second, nobody could give a Scriptural breakdown of what constituted a different race, or which races were forbidden to marry one another. He pointed out that some pastors say there are three races, some say there are more – some as many as seventeen.
I respected this man for his answer, but at the time, I strongly disagreed with him. Since then, God has changed my heart. First, my friend was right – God has not put a restriction on marriages based on skin color. When Aaron and Miriam criticized Moses for his Ethiopian wife, God gave no credence to their criticism at all, though He did punish Aaron and Miriam for opposing Moses’ leadership. Second, God reversed Babel on the day of Pentecost, when the gospel was heard in the heart languages of – you guessed it – seventeen nationalities (Acts 2:8-11). Third, God has made of one blood all nations of men (Acts 17:26). And while it is true (as Bob Jones argued) that God has determined the bounds of their habitation, He has never restricted a nation to that boundary. Fourth, and I think most importantly, God has made us all of one blood. There can be no Scriptural grounds for forbidding marriage between blacks and whites.
On July 4th, at least two NBA players – Chris Paul and Donovan Mitchell – posted a meme on their social media accounts. The meme said, “Free-ish, since 1865.” Predictably, many white fans were outraged by this sentiment. After all, these men are NBA stars, millionaires. Hasn’t America been exceptionally good to them? When have their rights been deprived?
But they have a point. The road to freedom has been especially rocky for black people in our nation. As I highlighted in the first part of this series, even after slavery, America treated blacks as sub-human, an inferior race and culture. We degraded them, despitefully used them, and persecuted them. Though I was never personally involved in the segregation that characterized the first half of the 20th century – and neither were my parents or grandparents – I can assure you that my attitudes as a teenager would undoubtedly have supported such a thing. Had I lived in the days of segregation, I believe I would have been a fan of it.
If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. (Romans 12:18)
Now that all the woke realtors have stopped using “master bedroom” and JPMorgan-Chase has dropped terms like “master” and “slave” from their internal tech code, I think we can all feel much better about our new and enlightened sensitivities. After all, I don’t want my computer to be in a slave relationship to me. I want my computer to master me like everyone else. I’m not going back to Master Muffler until they get woke either. Give me a better name, like Novice Muffler or Beginner Muffler.
Race relations is serious business, of course, and every Christian should be concerned about it. Those Christians have it right who find the solution for our racial hostilities in the gospel. But we should also recognize that many barriers have formed over time that make it hard for some in our society to hear the gospel preached. Every Christian should work doubly hard to see those barriers removed so that the gospel can bring forth abundant fruit.
Depending on who you talk to, my family and I have exposed ourselves as “socially irresponsible.” We have contracted COVID-19, the dreaded coronavirus. I’ll admit it: we weren’t wearing our masks in the car. We shared air with people – people not in our immediate family. We accepted handshakes from people, even when no recent use of hand-sanitizer was in evidence. As a result, we have been banished from society for a period not to exceed six months, given that we follow all protocols to allow for successful reentry into society. People in our circle of contacts must now face hard realities and reexamine their interactions with our family. They must determine whether they should invite space-suited medical professionals under white canopies to jam a q-tip up their nose and swab vigorously for 15 seconds.
While our family does penance for this egregious lapse of sound judgment and social consciousness, some assure us that the stigma of having contracted the coronavirus will not be too severe. Besides the fact that some refuse to attend our church right now, lest we infect them in our absence, they say that the primary fault for this breach falls to President Trump, Vice President Pence, and the fact that we live in a red state that “opened too early.” The shut-down was both prudent and necessary to crushing the curve and stopping the coronavirus, and if we had only stayed the course, we could right now be eating our furniture and scavenging our yards for mealworms like the people in New York. Employment? Who needs that? It would be better to starve to death than to contract COVID-19.
Let this be a lesson to all of you, lest you too contract this vile virus: social distance. Wear a mask. Stay home from church. Work from home. Unless you work on a road crew. Or a fast-food restaurant. Then, make sure you wear gloves when you take my money and pass my food and take the next guy’s money and pass his food.
And so, from the basement of my shelter-in-place safe-space, let me offer a few observations, only slightly less facetious than this introduction.
First, it is human nature to look for a scapegoat. My family and I traveled out of state the week before the onset of symptoms from the coronavirus. We flew to Baltimore, then two of my kids flew on to Indianapolis while three of us drove up to Pennsylvania. Our friends in Pennsylvania have solemnly assured us that our secret is safe with them. They promise not to tell anyone in PA that we have this disease. They don’t want people who don’t have the virus to know that we do, because those people might blame us when they get it. Never fear: if someone gets the coronavirus before you get it, they gave it to you.
Of course, we figure that we picked up the coronavirus either in the airport or on the airplane or in one of the nearly 100 different yard sales we visited in Pennsylvania (yard-selling being PA’s official team sport). But you can be assured that if anyone we know gets this disease between now and Christmas, it came from us. That goes for all the states we visited, including but not limited to Maryland, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Utah, and Wyoming. And maybe Nevada. It would be dangerous and irresponsible for people to visit our church at this time since we infected our entire church, and it is now only a matter of time before we all catch it. We trust that those who have been joining our services via live stream are taking appropriate precautions. Be sure you take your phone out of the case before applying the hand sanitizer.
Second, it is great entertainment to see people skid into a complete 180 on the significance of COVID-19 once they know someone who has it. During the months when our church limited attendance to 10 people, we were treated to a regular barrage of rants against the shut-down. When we asked everyone to wear masks, people greeted me at the door with mask factoids: the CDC says masks are unhealthy for healthy people; the WHO says masks are unhealthy for healthy people; Dr. Fauci says masks are essentially non-essential. This virus is silly, a scamdemic, ridiculous, pointless, absurd, just a little virus, you can’t stop it. Then, Pastor Mallinak contracted the virus, and lo-and-behold, we need to shut down immediately, we shouldn’t be bringing anyone to church, we shouldn’t be having church, we should all be wearing masks, we shouldn’t even look each other in the eye. Okay, I made that last one up.
Nobody should change their view of COVID-19 because Pastor Mallinak contracted it. We shouldn’t be saying, “Wow, this must be serious if he caught it.” I mean, yeah, I do have the special pastor force-shield that would, under normal circumstances, prevent my contracting the garden-variety diseases that afflict the common man. Unfortunately, I left it home with my mask when I hopped on that airplane.
Seriously folks, if you thought the disease was nothing before you knew someone who had it, don’t let little-ole-me change your mind. As in most cases of the coronavirus since the beginning of your life in those ultra-dangerous days when your mother dropped you off at the church nursery, unnecessarily exposing your feebly beating heart to a whole myriad of life-threatening respiratory diseases, COVID-19 is no fun. It has a high misery-factor. You won’t be lying in bed, thinking about how fun it is to be sick as you scroll through Facebook. It acts a lot like the A-strain flu. Which many, many people have had and passed around to others with whom they don’t share an address.
Third, we are so glad that our nation decided to “crush the curve” on this one. That way, we could catch the virus in the summer when things are back to “normal” instead of in the spring when things are shut down already. Because you know of course that the goal all along has been to “stop” the coronavirus in its tracks. The best way to fight a virus, as we all know, is to shut down the world around it so that it will only pass to one person at a time. The virus will magically run out of people to infect if we all live in isolation from each other, as you well know. Follow the data. If we just stay home until they develop a vaccine in a year and a half, we can avoid infecting people. And there won’t be any new virus in a year and a half. Besides, the government prints the money. Unemployment pays.
I recognize that the coronavirus affects different people in different ways, and some are especially vulnerable to this disease, especially while attending church. I certainly wouldn’t want someone to be careless about the lives of those around them. Please don’t stop by my house and ask me to cough on you. Please do your part to avoid this disease. I don’t want to see it spread through my church or anyone else’s church. And apparently, churches are far more contagious than protest riots or work environments.
At the same time, I hope I can encourage my friends and loved ones to keep things in perspective. More than once, I have had someone tell me that I am the first person they knew who contracted this virus. Please don’t let the fact that my family has it change your mind about this disease. It isn’t the end of the world, nor does it change a few basic facts about viruses – mainly that they will work themselves around at will, and we really can’t stop a virus. None of us are likely to die from it. If you happen to catch it, you will miss some work, you will be uncomfortable for a few days (maybe longer), and you won’t want anyone else to get it. Do your Christian duty – love your neighbor enough to be careful around them. Stay home if you are in one of those “high risk” categories. Look for people you can help, encourage, or share the good news of Christ with. Keep your spirits high. Stay in the Word. Be full of joy and gratitude. Trust the Lord. All will be well. God hasn’t lost control of anything.
The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad. (Psalm 126:3)
This past Sunday marked the end of a rollercoaster week for us, and I would like to take a few moments to praise the Lord for His goodness to us.
Like every other pastor in America, I have spent many sleepless nights over the past two months. We have been navigating uncharted waters, and it has seemed to me that every week has required a fresh decision about what we should be doing.
Before I tell our story, let me just say how much I respect my fellow pastors. I have known that God has filled His pulpits with men of conviction and quality, but this crisis has made it even more clear to me that we have some truly outstanding pastors around our county. Many decisions have had to be made, and the opinions and positions that have been taken seem to cover every extreme of the compass. Yet, in discussions with dozens of pastors, I have observed one certain truth – that every one of them has acted on what they believed to be right and have sought to bring God the honor that He deserves. I count myself blessed to serve as a contemporary with these men.
Our church decided early on that we should follow the health guidelines that were issued by our state. Though our Governor has been great in the fact that he has not used a heavy hand to control us, yet we believed that we should exercise caution in this thing. We added services in order to accommodate our people and give them the opportunity to be part of a service every week, and the majority of the church has had to suffer through online services for nearly two months now.
The Village Smithy 