Get Your Pretense On!

56 • Get Your Pretense On!

One of the songs our little church sang was a rousing chorus to welcome newly repented sinners into our fold, or to make pleas to those who were on the boundaries of salvation, anxiously deciding whether to join our happy few or not. The song was called Plenty Good Room , and the chorus said this: There’s plenty good room, plenty good room, plenty good room in my Father’s Kingdom, yes, there’s plenty good room, plenty good room – choose your seat, and sit down! These simple words were sung over and over and over again, while the preacher made his impassioned pleas to those in attendance to hear the voice of Jesus calling to them, quit fighting his invitation, and come into the fold of salvation and grace. He would beg, and exhort, and cheer, and call out, always ensuring the audience that the Kingdom of God was never full, that there was plenty good room for him or her in the church, and all they needed to do is to respond with faith to God’s call. They simply needed to “choose their seat, and sit down!” That little church was everything to us – our recreation center, our educational wing, our party place, and our spiritual retreat home. Filled with small people all of whom were black, it was an island of inspiration in a world of rejection, oppression, and injustice. None of them were able to vote or participate in the body politic, few of them had ever had access to higher education, nearly all of them raised their families with great difficulty economically, supported by low paying, manual labor jobs. Like Paul said to the Corinthians in his first epistle “For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth” (1 Cor. 1.26). They were porters, trash haulers, meat packers, painters, handymen and women, maids, cooks, barely scratching by at a time when it was difficult to be Black in America.