Mitchell: South Carolina preacher should work to eradicate poverty before filling his pockets

Following a private funeral, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s simple wooden casket was placed on a wagon hitched to a pair of local donkeys and pulled through the streets of Atlanta to his final resting place.
When Jesus entered Jerusalem before the Last Supper and his impending crucifixion, he did so on the back of an ass.
There is a lesson in humility found in these moments that will live until the end of time that Rev. John Gray and his wife missed.

Gray, as you probably know by now, is the pastor of Relentless Church in Greenville, S.C. He has come under fire, mostly from the Black community, for giving — in an Instagram post that has since been taken down — his wife, Aventer, a $200,000 Lamborghini Urus.
Gray purchased the whip his wife will now tool around Greenville (where 21 percent of the children live in poverty) after seeing her “eyes light up” as she viewed the exotic SUV during a presentation in the hotel where they stayed during the NBA All-Star Game in Los Angeles.
Aventer Gray is more tone deaf than her husband. Showing no understanding of the difference between her 45-year-old megachurch pastor husband and without-a-care-in-the-world 20-something professional athletes, she took to social media and wrote, in uppercase lettering, “You don’t see anyone screaming about how basketball players drive what they do while you paying $$$ to see them play in arenas and on field.”
There’s no crime in what the pastor has done. He’s been called a “pulpit pimp” by people who have no proof of this. And he’s not poor. He’s the producer of a reality show (I don’t think King would have been interested in this) on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network, and he’s just signed a second book deal. So it’s reasonable to believe that Gray didn’t reach into the church coffers to purchase his wife’s whip.
But there are inescapable morality issues that come into conflict with being a pastor and living an opulent life in which one can spend $200,000 on an automobile that pastors, particularly African-American preachers, must be mindful of.
Money and wealth, or the lack of both, are amplified problems in the Black community. Like it or not, many of Gray’s parishioners are on their knees praying for the end of financial oppression and generational poverty that only God appears capable of ending. After all, they live in a country where the average Black family would require 228 years to make up the wealth gap that exists between Black and white families.
No, they aren’t just praying for their loved ones to have sickness removed from their bodies, for a wayward son stuck in the prison system, or for a daughter who can’t beat an addiction.

In Philadelphia, there are hundreds of thousands of Black folks who for decades have trusted effete Black politicians to fix their schools and help them stay in their old neighborhoods. What have they received in return? Failing schools incapable of preparing their children to compete moving forward and gentrifying neighborhoods that continue to swarm the old ones, leaving poor people of color with nothing.
This is not just a snapshot of Philadelphia. This, in all likelihood, is the reality of many who sit in the pews of Gray’s majority African-American house of worship Sunday after Sunday, struggling to make something out of nothing. How does he expect a message of holding on through the toughest of times to resonate with people wondering where their next meal is coming from while he is living a lifestyle that is more akin to that of Sean “Diddy” Combs than a man who has been ordained to feed God’s sheep?
Gray doesn’t appear to be Creflo Dollar asking his church to figure out a way to get him into a $70 million Gulfstream jet. But perception does indeed become reality, especially in the era of social media.
My advice to him, before he makes another outlandish purchase to “bless” someone in his inner circle, is to read up on King, who turned his attention to the eradication of poverty before his assassination.
I can promise you, there will be no mention of putting his wife, Coretta, in a Cadillac.