Enlarge Imam Khalil Akbar greets Dr. Al Cadenhead Jr. during the Feb. 2 Xchange Sermon.

Posted: February 3rd, 2010 Greg Lacour

Of all the combinations that the Xchange Sermons series is setting up, this may seem to some people an unlikely one: a Muslim Imam at a Baptist church.

On Feb. 2, a cold, rainy morning, Imam Khalil Akbar told Providence Baptist Church staffers that, as far as he’s concerned, they’re not terribly different.

“The Qur’an talks about one God,” said Akbar, the resident Imam, or prayer leader, at Masjid Ash-Shaheed Islamic Center in Charlotte. “Muhammad said you should want for your brother what you want for yourself. It’s the same Golden Rule.”

One of the Xchange Sermons series’ goals is to educate congregations with limited knowledge of the other's faith. Providence Baptist’s senior pastor, Dr. Al Cadenhead Jr., will speak to the faithful at Masjid Ash-Shaheed on Feb. 14.

Akbar didn’t go to Providence Baptist to deliver a sermon to the congregation; he engaged church staffers in a conversation during their monthly meeting.

But Akbar was a particularly good choice to speak to a group of Baptists. He once was one.

Akbar was born Vertis Brady in Culverton, Ga., into a churchgoing family. As a child, he told the group, he began asking uncomfortable questions, even to himself. “I knew Brady was an Irish name,” he said. “I had a little problem with that, because when I looked into the mirror, I could tell I wasn’t Irish.”

The family moved to Pennsylvania in 1961, from a segregated South to an integrated North. The Bradys never found a congregation there that suited them. Young Vertis drifted farther away from the religion of his childhood, and eventually, in 1968, to Islam.

“I guess you would call me an unconventional Baptist. I always asked questions and didn’t always get answers,” Akbar said in response to a question about what caused his conversion. Why was there such chaos when we’re all God’s children? What were black people before they came to America?

In Islam, he said, “I got answers I’d never gotten before … We are all the children of Adam.”

Which means, he said, that Islam honors and respects the other great Abrahamic, monotheistic religions – Judaism and Christianity. Not that all professed Muslims do. That’s been a problem for Muslims since Sept. 11, 2001. Akbar said he’s clear to his flock: Don’t ruin what we’ve built here in the United States. If you’re inclined to sympathize with extremists, take it out of here.

He asks for similar respect from members of other faiths.

“If you want to learn about a religion, talk to a practitioner of it,” he said, “as opposed to somebody who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Click here for more Xchange Sermons events.

Tweet

Previous Page