Former NFL star Miles McPherson, senior pastor of Rock Church in San Diego, California, knows about racism. As a member of what he calls a “United Nations family” with a multiracial heritage, he’s faced it all his life. “I grew up in New York,” he said. “We lived in a Black neighborhood, and I went to school in a white neighborhood for the first eight years of my schooling. I was harassed in the white neighborhood because I wasn’t Black and was harassed in my Black neighborhood because I wasn’t Black enough … Martin Luther King was killed when I was 8. And I remember thinking, What can we do?”
But God used the 2020 murder of George Floyd to help him discover a biblical key to the problem of racism, McPherson told Dr. Steve Greene on an episode of Greenelines on the Charisma Podcast Network. “One of the many things that went through my mind was It was a statement of insignificant value that that police officer put on George,” he said.
Our culture only gives us two options, McPherson said: “We live in an ‘us versus them’ culture, where you have to choose either for the police or against the police, for immigrants or against, for Black lives or not.”
McPherson takes what he calls a “third option” straight from Scripture. “When Joshua was going to the promised land, he said to the commander of the Lord’s army in Joshua 5, ‘Are you for us or our adversaries?’ Those are the two options he gave the Lord. And the Lord said, ‘No, I’m not for either one of you. I am the battle.’ And that’s the third option, that we honor what God has deemed as important, which is His image in every person.” This perspective also moved McPherson to write his recent book, The Third Option.
He also shared his own definition of racism from a spiritual perspective: “Racism is when you deem God’s image of someone less important than yours, which we all know is sinful. And if we can come to agreement to understand the value of every person, then we can eradicate racism.”
For more from Miles McPherson on solving the issue of racism, click here to listen to the entire episode of Greenelines on the Charisma Podcast Network. And be sure to subscribe to Greenelines at this link for more inspiring, informative stories. {eoa}
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