“Martin Luther King, Jr. is my hero in terms of what he accomplished as a man of God,” said Pastor Fred Berry of Azusa St. Mission, who recently visited a local church. Berry, a child of the Civil Rights Movement, now ministers to the African American community in downtown LA.
“MLk, Jr.’s legacy as a pastor is about someone who was bold and courageous about the gospel, and who demonstrated it,” according to Berry. “We can judge the movements we’ve been seeing, such as BLM and Antifa, (and recently, the extremist invasion of our nation’s Capitol), by MLK, Jr. and his response to the same kind of repressive atmosphere we see now.” MLK, Jr. preached and practiced peaceful protest and conducted civil disobedience to the unjust laws.
“Their revolution is a Marxist—take by force—approach, which is dangerous to our country.” Berry continued, “MLK, Jr. would ‘roll over in his grave’ and say ‘that’s not what I preached.’ When you’re looting, threatening, and attacking, that’s another form of revolution—that’s socialism and anarchism. None of that is from God. We have to reject it.” Berry noted that Rev. Warnock, who just won a Georgia Senate seat and is the pastor of King’s former church, “is promoting all those things. … We’re seeing a blindness to the righteousness and holiness MLK, Jr. talked about.”
The African American community, Berry continues, “has been hijacked” by sexual-identity politics and socialism. “They’ve gone back to judging us by the color of our skin, not by the content of our character,” as MLK, Jr. spoke so eloquently against. Those movements are “essentially selling us out, like the people who sold us out of Africa to be slaves. Their leadership is being bought and paid for, and there’s a judgment coming on it.”
Berry expounded that “there’s a war against the African American community that was part of the plan behind the eugenics activism of Margaret Sanger [founder of Planned Parenthood] providing abortions in their communities.” “We’re seeing it happen: the disintegration of our families,” he says. “And African American men aren’t being promoted, even by the Democratic Party. Most of them are either incarcerated, or if they’re working, most aren’t part of the ideology of the Dem. party—they became Republicans.”
Berry’s call to the African American community today is to “awaken to the truth about the issue of abortion—designed to destroy us.” He continues, “Awaken to the ungodliness of the lifestyles they’re promoting in our schools and universities. Awaken to God, family, and freedom! We need to listen to people of wisdom, such as MLK Jr and others who came before him.”
In Berry’s opinion, the civil rights movement “failed” because it didn’t transfer the successes from that generation to the next. “It’s a cycle because people aren’t listening to reason. It’s lie upon lie, and now we’re being used as weapons” by the Marxist gender-rights movement. He contends, “They don’t care about us. We’re being used as cannon fodder.”
He credits this in large part to the suburban church, agreeing with MLK, Jr. that the “church is still the most segregated place on Sundays.” He contends they saw what was happening in the African American community, with abortion, drugs, unemployment, education, etc., but ignored it. Berry contends, “Now we have to fight—peacefully—together because we have a bigger enemy. We have a government that’s coming after us. If we don’t pull together and speak with one voice, we’ll lose the country and Christianity as we know it in the Western world.”
That Warnock is pastor of King’s former church is evidence that the church has not recognized the evil that has infiltrated it. “The church is not awake anymore,” said Berry. “That’s the danger: the church is being entertained, told everything will be okay.” “But,” he continues, “when the Rapture comes, some folks are not going to be there. We’ve lost the understanding of the holiness of leadership, and God holds us accountable.”
Love worketh no ill to his neighbor … [N]ow it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness … But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:10-14 KJV).
