2007: The Year to Repent. As Tidewater and America remembers the 400th Anniversary of our founding, it is time for the Church in Tidewater and the Church in America to publicly repent for the five major sins of our founding fathers in the 1607 Virginia Colony that started here 400 years ago and continues to influence our nation today. God is so eager to see repentance for those sins that he has had the Virginia government lead the way! It’s time for the Church to follow suit.
The Virginia General Assembly has just become the first state in America to finally apologize for slavery and to Native Americans for some of the worst human rights abuses against any people in any nation--- for over 250 years of slavery. The Virginia resolution says government-sanctioned slavery "ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation's history, and the abolition of slavery was followed by systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent that were rooted in racism, racial bias, and racial misunderstanding." Slavery of Blacks began Tidewater 1619 when about 20 Blacks were purchased by English farmers as indentured servants from a Dutch slave ship at Yorktown, VA. The government of Maryland and Georgia are now considering similar pronouncements.
Few Church leaders in Tidewater or in America have ever apologized for slavery or any of the other four major sins of our founding fathers: abuse of Native Americans, abuse of women, abuse of non-Anglican Christians and the love of money. The Church’s silence on these five sin patterns needs to be broken in 2007 if the Church wants to protect America from more of God’s increasing judgment and to qualify from more of His blessings in the great global revival to come.
This year’s National Day of Prayer regional meeting on May 3, 2007 will take place at First Baptist Church in Norfolk, VA. From 6:30 to 9:30 PM. During this annual prayer meeting for America, participants will be part of a repentance service for these five major sins of our founding fathers. Churches will be given resources to duplicate similar repentance services in their own worship settings. Doing this widely and deeply within the Church in Tidewater will greatly please God and allow Him to release greater blessings and protection on our region and nation. Read II Sam 21 again to see why.
To help churches prepare for this season of repentance for some of the foundational sins of America, Partners will provide an article on each of the five major colonial sins. Each of these articles are chapters from my book, Healing America’s DNA, which can be previewed and ordered at www.1607dna.com
The first article will be on the main sin of our founding fathers that was used to push them into most of the other sins: the love of money. This is Chapter Seven of my book which can be seen in either of two formats at the website above. To see just the text as a website, click here. and choose Chapter Seven. To see it this article with illustrations in PDF form, go to www.1607dna.com and choose Chapter Seven from the table toward the middle of that page length.
