A taillight or a headlight?

I have been pondering this week about what would've happened if John Wesley and Martin Luther King, Jr. had met.

Granted, they lived in different centuries and different countries. But as I have been reading Rev. Dr. King this week after reading so much Wesley last week, I wonder if anyone has ever looked closely at their writings and work together. (If you are reading this and know of anything related, please let me know!)

Rev. Dr. King gives me that same feeling of heartburn that I blogged about last Friday. His words make me shake my head and respond out loud. I've had a tough time trying to pick small tidbits to share daily with my bible study group, because I feel like entire paragraphs and pages are necessary and soul shaking. And I've written about three blog drafts in the last week that I have then saved instead of posting, because I can't seem to express this feeling I have when I read Rev. Dr. King's work.

I think that my favorite document by Rev. Dr. King is the Letter from Birmingham City Jail. One reason I love it is because he speaks so explicitly to the church, to people who claim to follow Jesus Christ. It seems that the life of discipleship is the heart of much of King's work, but this letter writes it plainly, sharp and simple as an arrow.

This is the passage I highlighted today for my bible study group, and it is such a great text to have soaking in our heads on Sunday:

"In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, “Those are social issues with which the gospel has no real concern” and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular.

So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a taillight behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice."

-Letter from Birmingham City Jail

Have we learned anything since Rev. Dr. King wrote these painfully true words? Are we spouting the same old "pious irrelevancies" while people are struggling and dying in front of our eyes? Is the church today a taillight or a headlight?