New Baptist Covenant & Dr. William Shaw

Dr. William Shaw, Pastor of White Rock Baptist Church in Philadelphia, PA and President of the National Baptist Conventi USA, Inc. delivered a powerful message entitled "The Bible Speaks About Peace With Justice."

Watch Shaw's message HERE.

But here are a few snippets:

"Because we're Baptists, we read the Bible"

"What Jesus was about was not just bringing relief to the poor, not just shades to the blind, but sight to the blind. And each of the instances that he concretizes his mission, he expresses the work of reversal not relief - even the issue of justice is tied up to Jesus' definition of his ministry because if you read in Isaiah where he read from the Book, he says because I LOVE JUSTICE and I HATE INEQUITY. So that justice itself is ooted in the raelity of the incarnation and is rooted in the reality of creation; for when God made mankind, he made us male and female in HIS image."

"To do injustice to anybody is to do injustice to the reality of God because we are in HIS image and HIS image is not to be demeaned. You really can't embrace the mission of Jesus and not be confronted with the reality of the claims of justice and that reality is deeply challenging because when Jesus came he came not with actions of charity, he came to change"

"One of the tragedies of injustice is that it dims people's idea and visions of what's possible"

"Peace is not just the absence of disturbance. Calm without justice is an allusion to peace. It is disguised oppression. One looks at Kenya now. One sees the breakout of warfare there and the warfare was not stimulated just by contested election results but grew out of inequities between the tribes and perpetrated in the democratic governmantal set up in the country. …it might have looked like Kenya was at peace but what they had was a simmering volcano because justice had not been done. one looks in the middle east and we look for calm there but calmness will not come and will not mean justice until justice is done for those who have been displaced and for those whose lives are threatened now because of the imbalance now." One looks at our own history in America. It has been calm but no justice in it. The native population has been displaced; they have been calm on the reservation but no peace, enslaved imported into this country and for a long time there was calm but not peace and in the days of segregations there is someone who has come in to disturb the peace ofour communities, it was the denial of dignity in the name of segregation and that finally exploded; there is no peace without justice...there is no morality without justice"

"If it is right that children who are conceived should be brought to birth (and it is); then it is also right that children born should have the right to life, and if there is no right to life and if there is no right to live and the right to be born becomes a tool of injustice."

"Because God loved us enough that he didn’t stay in heaven waiting for us to get to him, hecame to earth and subjected himself to the thigns of which he is exposed."

"Baptists are people of the Book and we are people who can read the word for itself and then there is nobody who can correct my individual belief because we are directly tied to God ourselves."