Nigerian church puts Texans' love for their neighbours to the test

[emad]

Evangelicals' arrival in former Ku Klux Klan haunt brings old prejudices but also new tolerance

Jamie Wilson in Floyd, Texas
Monday December 5, 2005
The Guardian


They say that God moves in mysterious ways, but perhaps never more so than when telling the leaders of Africa's largest evangelical church to build their North American headquarters in Floyd. Less than a generation ago this dusty railway stop on the prairie of north-east Texas was still a segregated community, the local philosophy summed up by a sign painted on a water tower in nearby Greenville that proudly proclaimed "Blackest Land, Whitest People".

The arrival of the Redeemed Christian Church of God - whose congregation is mostly black - has presented a challenge to the 100 or so inhabitants of Floyd, who are mostly white, that will ultimately reveal to both the locals and their new neighbours whether the community has been able to throw off the racist cloak of the past and embrace a multicultural future.

The Nigerian church, founded in Lagos in 1952, paid about $1m (£580,000) for 198 hectares (490 acres) of pasture, on which it is planning to build cottages, a 10,000-seat amphitheatre, an artificial lake and possibly a modest waterpark, leading some to dub it a Christian Disneyland. At the moment the only structure is a large conference centre that last month hosted a meeting of more than 1,000 ministers and volunteers.

So far the arrival of the church in Floyd has not been greeted with much in the way of Christian spirit. "A generation ago it wouldn't have been allowed to happen," said Luanne Moody, who has lived in the same trailer for 27 years on Mockingbird Estates, a collection of broken down bungalows and mobile homes on a few acres of scrubby land a mile or so from the church camp.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1657870,00.html

[Dufaeth]

1. I saw a documentary about this awhile ago.

They mentioned their plan to evangelize to the US and I've been waiting to see the fallout ever since. US citizens being missioned to by African Christians is bound to lead to all sorts of fun, especially in small town south!