Nearly 45 years ago Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "It's appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning." Pastor John Adolph of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church says segregated Sundays is a secret sin of the church that sadly still holds true well into the new millennium and well after integration. However; Pastor Adolph says there is nostalgic reasoning for the separation. During the days of the Civil Rights Movement and Jim Crow, the "black church" was used for more than worship purposes. "The church became a place for action and change. Many of Dr. King's speeches came from churches in the south," Adolph says. Just recently Senator Barack Obama's former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright has come under fire for his radical messages. Some say his words are causing a rift in the effort to unite Christians of all races. "The most recent attack on the black church is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. It is an attack on the black church," Reverend Wright said recently to the National Press Club. Wright spoke at Pastor Adolph's seminary commencement years ago. And while he sees Wright as a mentor, he doesn't agree with everything he says. Rev. Wright's sermons prove that even today the pulpit of a "black church" serves as a sacred place for African Americans to voice their concerns, and seek solutions to problems that plague the black community. "Even in today's culture when something bad happens in the African American community our people don't run any where but to the church," Pastor Adolph adds. With more than 6,000 members at Antioch, Pastor Adolph says only 70 families are not African American, he hopes that number will increase greatly. He says, "we had one Euro American girl in our choir for youth Sunday. I said, 'Wow! Where are your mom and dad bring all your relatives.'" While just up Eastex Freeway Trinity Church seems to have already tackled that feet. "When people walk into church they need to be greeted by someone with a smile on their face not looking like, 'what are you doing in my church?'" Associate Pastor, Roosevelt Henry says when people go to his church, they do just that, they go to church. "When God is turning things upside down, you might have people jumping up and down and running around the church, rolling .. we don't care it's not going to stop service," Henry says. According to Rice University Sociologist, Michael Emerson, only 8% of all Christian congregations in the United States are racially mixed, and 20% of those are Catholic churches. So why do we choose to worship separately? Is it a matter of race, or where you fit in? Pastor Adolph uses the following analogy, "for me if you put hip-hop on, I have to get someone to define it for me. As opposed to music from the 70s. In church the setting is similar when it comes to the worship atmosphere." Pastor Adolph hopes to see more ethnicities worship together. And the Beaumont Area Pastor's Council, which both Adolph and Roosevelt are members, is acting as vehicle to bring more races together on Sunday morning. "Hopefully we can start the healing process through the churches of southeast Texas," Adolph says. Which he adds is the way God intended, "The portrait of the church that Christ painted in the New Testament is not a color but a kind... Not ethnicity but Christianity period."