Steve Wells, the senior pastor at South Main Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, called out white churches during his speech at George Floyd’s memorial on Tuesday.
“I’d like to say a word to white churches: We are better than we used to be, but we are not as good as we ought to be and that is not good enough,” Wells said.
He thanked the Floyd family for allowing him to speak at the memorial, noting that “everyone would have understood if you said: ‘We don’t need to hear from any white people today. You’ve been silent long enough, you can be silent one more day.'”
“But… you asked the whole community to come together,” he said, calling the family “a model for not just America, but for the whole world.”
“You have been asked to carry a burden that would have crushed most people, and you have borne it with grace and courage,” he said. “You’ve called those who disrupted protests with violence or looting to honor George’s life with love. You called on a president who sought to dominate to live in a peaceful world where we deliberate.”
Wells concluded by sharing that at his church, “it is easy to not talk about racism.”
“At my church, it is easy to dismiss as politics the economics of hundreds of years of systemic racism, but not talking and not acting is the path to destruction.”
He said of white people: “You have to take up the work of racial justice.”
“Racism did not start in our lifetimes, but racism can end in our lifetime. But only if you ask and I ask: ‘What are we going to do about it?'”
