This
is an excerpt from John Fountain’s forthcoming book:
“No Place For Me: Letters to the Church in
America"
 |
| John Fountain (Back row, third from left) is pictured here with his siblings and cousins and their grandparents, the Reverend George A. and Missionary Florence G. Hagler at their True Vine Church circa 1970s, |
By John W. Fountain
It
wasn’t that I disagreed with the whole idea of “separation of church and state.”
For it is difficult for the “political voice” and the “prophetic voice” to coexist.
Indeed I have long believed that speaking truth to power requires a certain
distance from the established social and political powers that be. That if a
preacher ever climbed into bed with politicians he was well soiled before he
climbed out. And that once you had been politically tainted you were likely to
develop social laryngitis because more than likely you had been bought with a
price.
In my
eyes, the affairs of faith--even if sometimes connected to the affairs of “the
state”--needed a degree of immunity from political corruption and the trappings
of politics: money, power, influence.
The “uncompromising
man of God,” that I perceived “Reverend Pastor” to be was what helped draw me temporarily
from the waters of religious brokenness to the shores of “Resurrection Church.”
"His words blew me away. It wasn’t his words alone but the sum of my experience with organized institutional Christianity."