Former KKK Leader now an ordained COGIC minister

Is THIS what's next? Stranger things have happened.

I have heard of the pot calling the kettle black, so what in the world does this newly ordained minister for a COGIC church call his followers?

Meet Johnny Lee Clary, a good ol’ boy from Oklahoma, proud white boy who is a minister for a black denomination… and oh yeah, a former imperial wizard for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

This should be good.

“Bishop [George] McKinney and I both felt like racial reconciliation was needed now more than ever,” said Clary, who befriended McKinney in the early 1990s when the two spoke during a Promise Keepers event. “We feel like it makes a huge statement that the former national imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan would join the Church of God in Christ and reach out with the Church of God in Christ to bring racial reconciliation to America.”

In case you haven’t read your bible recently, this is called f-o-r-g-i-v-e-n-e-s-s and r-e-p-e-n-t-a-n-c-e. WOW!

You know God truly had to yank the scales from Clary’s eye sockets for him to see the error of his ways and make good on a promise to God to be “all he could for Jesus Christ.”

The word “kyklos” is Greek for circle and in the reconstruction era of the 1860s, a “circle of friends” decided to cleanse the south and then the only circle they used was the noose placed around 1000s of necks. And yet, they use the Bible for the terrorism.

Bishop McKinney knows this… and still accepted Clary into the fold, with open arms. That’s God.

“I know the answer to racial reconciliation, and that’s Jesus Christ,” he said. “They all come to me, even secular people are saying, ‘What changed you?’ I tell them, ‘The only thing that changed me was the Word of God.’ Because when I accepted Christ … I had to get my mind renewed, and that was through God’s Word.”

It’s no secret racial reconciliation still needs to improve, but stories like this really help folk answer the Rodney King rally cry.

Why can’t black men and white men preach the red-stained words of Christ together? The fact that Clary dawned a hood and burned the same cross he professes now is the headline of this story, but the heart of it is a man with a vision [McKinney] who reached out to another man with some victory [Clary].

There is not one scripture in the Bible that says God chose one race over another. People get out of the Bible what they bring to it in the first place. You get a cowardly bigot – black, white or any other hue – reading the Word of God, somehow that filter will let some of that dirt through.

I know for a fact these two brothers-in-arms are reading this one:

Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other. (John 13:34-35 MSG).

There’s hope yet, people. And in the words of a dude who can’t decide if he wants to be a white politician or a black civil rights activist, “Keep hope alive!”