Senior Pastor Dr. Kevin Crosby leads the congregation at St. Stephen Baptist Church, which is the largest “black church” in the state of Kentucky. Several months ago, while in a crazed state of wokeness, he preached a sermon called, “Slavery and the Bible.” During the sermon, Crosby seemingly lost his cool and started slamming the Apostle Paul, the greatest evangelist for the Christian faith who has ever lived and also wrote a good chunk of the New Testament, saying the saint could “go to hell.”
Commenters online were furious over Crosby’s sacrilege and immediately started expressing their thoughts about the sermon. They were not at all positive.
If you pay a visit to St. Stephen’s website, you will see that it claims to be the “largest private Black employer in the state.” It then goes on to say that ” over 98% of St. Stephen employees are from the Black Community.”
Further down the page, it states that Crosby “is one of our nation’s most influential leaders…At the request of Muhammad Ali, he served as one of the eulogists at his Funeral, and he was inducted into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Board of Preachers of Morehouse College.”
Good to see Crosby has mastered the biblical virtue of humility.
The pastor’s vile rant kicked off by him saying, “Let me say this: all the Bible is not on the same level. So when you say,’ The Bible says it, ‘well, that doesn’t mean that just because you quote a scripture from the Bible, that is a priority of the purpose of the Bible.”
Okay, so one thing we can say about Crosby for sure is that he has little to no grasp of basic grammar, which is odd for someone who makes a living by public speaking.
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“Just like you’ve got a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and a penny, which one of these four is money? All four is money, would you agree? They are all equally money..but are they all equal in value? No! And everything here in my hand is Bible, all equally Bible. But everything in my hand is not all equal in value,” he stated in the sermon. He controversially says that the point of the bible is not spiritual deliverance but earthly social justice.
“Salvation is not going to heaven. Salvation has to be deliverance from things that oppress people. Deliverance from hatred, deliverance from sexism, racism, the isms, that’s what salvation is,” said Dr. Kevin Cosby, essentially sacking the meaning of Christian salvation established since the beginning of the religion. “Heaven will take care of itself- God is concerned about how we treat each other. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”
“…And the question is, when you look at those Paul passages about slaves being obedient to their masters, that’s a penny,” he ranted, making a reference back to his earlier metaphor. “In fact, it’s such a penny and so contradictory to the themes of Jesus, I can say I don’t even look at them…I will say, “Go to hell, Paul.”
“And I can say, “go to hell” Paul, about those slave verses. And I can say it to John McArthur out there in California who said, ‘what’s wrong with slavery?’ And you got them Negro preachers out there believing that nonsense. I can say, “go to hell” by the authority of Christ, because it’s total out of alignment with Jesus,” he said, finally bringing his sacrilege to a close.
This man has clearly demonstrated his biblical ignorance by condemning Paul by assuming he was in support of slavery. First off, slavery in Paul’s day was not the same as it was in the early days of our nation and other nations around the world. In fact, it was more akin to indentured servitude. St. Paul told Philemon that if he could by legal means attain freedom he was to do so. If not, he was to work for the one over him as though he worked for God alone.
The “master” was instructed by St. Paul to treat Philemon as a brother in Christ, not as a slave. Not at all like the slavery of the 1800s. It’s important to note this kind of slavery was actually more akin to the modern-day version of working for another person, hence why so many commentaries apply the principles contained in these verses to workers and their bosses.
If Crosby were a real pastor, he would know that.